Students at a New Cross art college have lost their fight to take down statues of two of Britain’s historical maritime heroes, who also had links to the slave trade.
Goldsmiths students protested in front of Deptford Town Hall, which is owned by their university, in 2019, in a bid to get statues of Admiral Horatio Nelson and Sir Francis Drake taken down, as well as Admiral Robert Blake and an anonymous naval figure.
The university sent out a postal survey to 8,500 local residents asking for their views in response. Some 58 per cent disagreed or strongly disagreed with taking down the statues in that survey. That figure rose to 85 per cent in an online survey that anyone could take part in.
Goldsmiths bosses said that they will keep the statues up as a result, with nearby signs giving context. The university will also send information packs to local schools on the three named figures.
Professor Frances Corner, Warden of Goldsmiths said: “I would like to thank everyone who took the time to submit their views as part of our public consultation. We will continue to consult with local people as we develop our plans to address the complex legacy of the area’s maritime heritage embodied in the Deptford Town Hall statues.”
The student group that campaigned to get these statues removed said at the time that “Deptford Town Hall’s colonial history can be seen in the slave trader statues that still adorn this building, a history that is inherently tied to violence, displacement and exploitation of black bodies. These statues stand as a daily reminder of the racial violence that was inflicted on the ancestors of the local Afro-Caribbean residents.”
Sir Francis Drake, who lived in the sixteenth century and helped defeat the Spanish Armada, “was a slave trader”, according to the Golden Hinde museum in Borough. “Drake existed in and contributed to a violent colonial age. Like so many of his contemporary European mariners, he engaged in colonialism, slavery and piracy.”
Admiral Nelson’s legacy is more contested. The actions of the maritime hero, who defeated the French navy in the battle of Trafalgar, “in no way support the notion that Nelson was overtly or privately racist or pro-slavery,” according to a statement on the Nelson Society’s website. The society lists a series of anti-slavery actions Nelson undertook, including freeing slaves. He did write a letter to a plantation owner criticising abolitionist William Wilberforce, but the society said this has been taken out of context.
Admiral Blake was one of the first naval officers who established Britain’s dominance of the seas in the seventeenth century, as well as an MP. Attempts to get another statue of him removed from his constituency in Somerset in 2020 were met with arguments that he was “on the right side of history” because he freed slaves from pirates in North Africa.
Deptford Town Hall was built in the early twentieth century, and the statues depicting maritime figures were included because of the area’s links to shipbuilding and the sea. Goldsmiths bought the town hall in 2000. It is unclear if the university would even have been able to remove the statue’s given that the town hall is grade II-listed, and any planning application would likely have been called in by central government.