Talking statues: Project seeks to get Scots discussing issues behind those honoured

As the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement reignited across the United States and globally, following the racist police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020, many people in the UK began to question the statues in their own towns and cities. In Bristol, the statue of the hated 17th and 18th-century slaver Edward Colston was famously ripped from its plinth by anti-racist protesters and dumped into the harbour.

In Scotland, debate was reinvigorated regarding the Tory politician and lawyer Henry Dundas, aka the first Viscount Melville. Despite Dundas’s role in prolonging the British trade in African slaves by 15 years (by amending the abolition bill to propose that slavery be ended not immediately, but “gradually”), his statue still stands, on the massive column of the Melville Monument, overlooking St Andrew Square in Edinburgh.

For many, the arguments over Colston and Dundas have led to a wider debate about the purpose of statues in our society. In particular, those discussions have brought centre-stage a series of vexed and interesting questions about those who have been placed on pedestals and, equally importantly, those who have not.

One outcome of this national debate is the Talking Statues project, a series of storytelling initiatives led by the Scottish Storytelling Forum and the Scottish International Storytelling Festival (SISF). Through the project, people are encouraged to write and tell stories that deal with the terrible truths about many of the people who have been honoured with statues.

READ MORE: How has the Black Lives Matter movement changed Scotland?

More importantly, however, storytellers of all kinds are invited to focus positively on the too often unheard narratives of remarkable people, and even fictional and mythological characters who have never received the public recognition they deserve.

Some of these stories will be told at a live online event on October 27 as part of the SISF. The event, which will be led by storyteller Mara Menzies, will follow a free online storytelling workshop on October 20 and a social media discussion on October 26, which people can access using the hashtag #TalkingStatues.

The purpose of the project is, Menzies explains, “to enable people to consider the statues that exist and also to consider statues that could be imagined, and what kind of figures we want represented across Scotland.”

There are, Menzies contends, a multiplicity of stories that could be told around most of the subjects depicted in Scotland’s statues. For example, the Protestant reformer John Knox – who is represented in statuary at the Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland in Edinburgh and towering over the necropolis in Glasgow – is someone who suggests many narratives. He could, for example, be both persecuted religious heretic and outspoken and uncompromising misogynist.

That’s to say nothing of the great panoply of historical figures, recent and not-so-recent, who, arguably, deserve a statue, but are not depicted in metal or stone in Scotland’s public places. Menzies is keen that the Talking Statues project gives expression to “the diversity of different statues that people might be considering”.

That diversity might start with the female sex. There are, for instance, fewer statues of women and girls in Edinburgh than there are of animals.

Nor can our capital city, or, indeed, Scotland as a whole, lay claim to a proper representation in statuary of people of colour, working-class people, people from the LGBT+ communities, disabled people or members of other marginalised groups. As in society itself, the wealthy and powerful white male is over-represented on plinths throughout the country.

Which is not to say that there have not been efforts in recent times to redress such a patent imbalance. Even before the BLM movement and the toppling of Colston in Bristol brought this issue to a head, there were those in Scotland who were attempting to venerate with statues the kind of people who would have, hitherto, been overlooked.

In Dollar Park in Falkirk, for example, there is a sculpture depicting the celebrated Scottish trade unionist, housing campaigner and consumer rights activist Sheila McKechnie. At Govan Cross in Glasgow there stands a series of statues representing the great Red Clydeside leader Mary Barbour and her army of activists who fought against profiteering landlords during the First World War.

Nevertheless, there is no question that public debate around statues has increased exponentially as a consequence of the BLM movement. The pulling down of Colston was, says Menzies, “absolutely the driving force for the conversation” across Scotland.

“There was so much rage, anger and frustration,” she comments, not only about Colston, but about the veneration of slavers and those, such as Dundas, who played a despicable role in enabling and prolonging the transatlantic slave trade. That anger had, the storyteller continues, been “bubbling underneath the surface” for a long time.

“Until [that anger] comes to the fore, the conversation doesn’t happen,” she continues. “We do have to be thinking about whether these people are worthy of their position on a pedestal [and to ask] ‘what have they contributed to society?’

“In many cases, they built schools, hospitals and galleries, things from which we, as a society, benefit to this day. Yet, at the same time, there is this whole other side to the story that a lot of people might not necessarily be aware of.

“A lot of the time things that happened in Scotland were very different to things that were done outside of Scotland by those very same Scottish people.”

For Menzies, when a man venerated on a plinth could be described as a “philanthropist and slave owner”, it is absolutely essential that we have a conversation about how and whether they should be commemorated in Scotland’s public spaces.

In Scotland, since the BLM movement exploded back into the public consciousness last year, much of the debate has focused on Dundas. Some people, including the right-wing historian and columnist for The National Michael Fry and a number of of Dundas’s descendants, have sought to portray the Viscount Melville as a principled abolitionist.

This won’t wash, of course. None of Dundas’s apologists are remotely as knowledgeable about the transatlantic slave trade as CLR James, the great Trinidadian historian and author of The Black Jacobins, the seminal book about the slave revolution in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now known as Haiti) in the late 18th century.

James’s meticulous research shows that Dundas, who was then a senior member of the British Government, was far from being a supporter of the slave uprising. On the contrary, the Scotsman was energetic in his efforts to replace French power in the world’s most profitable slave colony with that of Britain.

Had he succeeded, James writes, “instead of being abolitionists”, Dundas and the British Government would have been “the most powerful practitioners and advocates of the slave-trade, on a scale excelling anything they had done before.” So, in addition to extending the British slave trade by 15 years (leading to the enslavement of, it is estimated, a further 630,000 African people), Dundas’s plan for Saint-Domingue would have led to the enslavement and re-enslavement of hundreds of thousands, possibly millions more.

Ultimately, the British Government’s efforts to take Saint-Domingue for itself were scuppered by the army of self-liberated slaves, led by their great commander Toussaint L’Ouverture, which forced the occupying British forces to withdraw in 1798. It seems fitting, therefore, that following the recommendations of the committee chaired by Scotland’s first black professor Sir Geoff Palmer, the Melville Monument is soon to be re-dedicated to those enslaved “as a consequence of Henry Dundas’s actions.”

It’s fitting, too, that a new walking tour, run by Edinburgh history specialists Mercat Tours as part of the Talking Statues project, should conclude at the Melville Monument. The tour I attended was led by the excellent guide, and Mercat’s creative development manager, Tania Dron.

READ MORE: Maggie Chapman: Obscure or not, Scotland’s links to the slave trade matter

Taking us through the Old Town and down to the New Town, she offered us superb insights into the lives of some of the good, and not-so-good, people who are depicted in the statuary of Scotland’s capital city. There was also a heart-warming stop at the statue in Princes Street Gardens of the famous military bear Wojtek.

Fascinatingly, Dron also proposed possible statues to figures whose likenesses have not yet been put on public pedestals. One, for instance, is Elsie Inglis, the great physician and pioneer in medical care for women and children, who is currently commemorated only by way of a small plaque on Edinburgh’s High Street.

Another is Joseph Knight, the African man who escaped his enslavement in the home of his Scottish “master” John Wedderburn. Knight subsequently won famous legal victories in the Scottish courts, preventing Wedderburn’s efforts to re-enslave him.

Highly professional, insightful and conveyed by means of a personal audio device (which enables us to hear our guide above the hubbub of the Edinburgh streets), the speaking tour is a brilliant addition to the very timely Talking Statues project.

For more information about Talking Statues events, visit sisf.org.uk