Behind Thielen Manor's sculptural black slave washstand is a brutal history of the slave trade.
Thielen Manor has everything you can imagine for an English country house. It sits in steep hills seven miles north of Bath. Since 1311, residences and pigeon lofts have been built here. Deer Park was added here during the reign of Henry VIII. Today's Thielen Manor is a baroque building, and it was also the filming location for the film "The Long Mark".
The second floor of Thielen Manor has a balcony room with a view of the garden. The room is furnished with wooden floors and has delicate brass door locks. 17th-century Dutch Delft pottery hangs above the fireplace, and on the wall above the pottery hangs paintings of ornamental birds dedicated to William III by Dutch painters. Opposite the room are two black sculptures with collars on their knees. The two black men each held a shell, which may have once held rose water for guests to wash their hands.
The owner and principal builder of Thielen House, William Braithwaite, purchased both washstands before 1700. According to later records, Braithwaite was dull, efficient, and skilled in business. At one point he held several jobs: Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, and examiner of the trade accounts of the British Empire. From 1680 until his death 37 years later, Braithwaite helped manage the rapidly expanding sugar and tobacco trades in the Caribbean and American colonies that were inextricably linked to slavery.
Braithwaite amassed a huge fortune. His uncle Thomas Povey was instrumental in the British occupation of Jamaica in 1665 and was a member of the Royal African Company, which had a monopoly on the supply of slaves to the colony. With family connections and official positions, Braithwaite seized key business opportunities: the beaver trade in Massachusetts, the silver mines in South Carolina, people smuggling in the West India... While Braithwaite was renovating his country house, his overseas agents and Business partners rushed to send in rare woods, garden plants, deer from northern Germany, and even Italian Carrara marble for the coffins—“everything that matched the beauty of Thielen,” as one official noted.
Arty Bovey presents Braithwaite with these two washstands. The two negroes, apparently slaves, were dressed in rough clothes and had gilded chains around their right ankles. Washstands, Delft crockery and a Java coffee table in the center of the room all conspire to show Braithwaite's power.
In 1956, the British government bought Thielen Manor and handed it over to the National Trust for Monuments and Monuments. A few years later, Thielen Manor opened to tourists, but staff rarely mentioned the two washstands. In 2007, the Trust invited cultural studies scholar Sean Soberth and filmmaker Rob Mitchell to lead a multi-ethnic group on a tour of three monuments in south-west England to mark the 200th anniversary of Britain's abolition of the slave trade.
Soberth, who is black, grew up in Bath. Bath is not far from Thielen House, 11 miles inland from the port city of Bristol. In the early to mid-18th century, Bristol was the capital of the British slave trade. Between 1698 and 1807, some 2,100 voyages related to the slave trade departed from here - one every 19 days. For more than 250 years, British ships and merchants transported more than three million Africans to the colonies of the "New World". In this "black triangle trade", slave traders traded British-made products for West African slaves, and then sold the slaves to the colonies for cotton, sugar, tobacco and other products produced by the slaves. Soberth, a professor at the University of the West of England in Bristol, is well aware that some landmarks and country houses in the UK are inseparable from the slave trade and have historical stains.
This was Soberth's first visit to Thielen Manor. When they entered the balcony room, they were the two black slave washstands standing in front of them. They stood politely where they were and listened to the tour guide. "I just can't believe that the tour guide explained everything in the room for more than ten minutes without mentioning the two washstands once," Soberth said. Most areas of the balcony room are separated by ropes, so visitors can Can't enter, can only stand in the narrow aisle, facing the washstand. "The tour guide didn't even say, 'I don't know what that is,' and just pretended that the two washstands didn't even exist," Soberth said.
In September 2020, the National Trust for Places of Interest designated 93 historic homes, including Thielen Manor, as places of interest related to the history of British colonization and slavery, including British author Rudyard Kipling's East Bateman House, the former home of Sussex, and Chartwell House, the home of Winston Churchill in Kent. Scholars of British country houses since the 1990s have questioned the quiet history such mansions have traditionally represented, seeing them as a vehicle for their owners to demonstrate power and self-promotion.
For more than 200 years, the rise of the transatlantic slave trade has coincided with the rapid expansion of the British Empire around the world, especially in Asia. The poll found that 32% of adult British citizens are proud of the history of the British Empire. Olivette O'Taylor, professor of history at the University of Bristol, said: "When it comes to the history of British conquests in Asia, people may think of textiles, magnificent landscapes, exotic places, rare treasures, etc., but selectively ignore the ugly colonial actions. side."
Given the changing demographics and heavy colonial history of Britain, the facts of the past can no longer be avoided. The National Trust for Places of Interest had to bust the myth of its own making. But many Britons prefer to keep the myth alive rather than the fact. "Historical dramas, Churchills, country houses...that's what Britain's reputation is all about. So it's very frustrating to get those things out of the way," O'Taylor said.
At midnight on June 23, 1757, in the village of Plassey, about 100 miles north of Calcutta, England, a young lieutenant colonel of the East India Company, Robert Clive, escaped from the rain in a mango grove. About 3,000 soldiers under Kleiwu, two-thirds of them Indians, settled nearby for a tense night in the rain. In 1600, Elizabeth I granted the East India Company a monopoly on Indian trade and permission to "wage war" if necessary. Kleiwu came to Plassi this time to fight against the "Nawab" of Bengal (the title of the deputy king and governor of the provinces during the Mughal Empire in India) Siraj Oud Daula, who was in the former In the summer of one year, he sent troops to Calcutta, and his army was far larger than Kleiwu.
Clive had little chance of winning. One side of the mango forest is the Hooghly River, and the other side is the Nawab army of 50,000, including infantry, cavalry, artillery, elephant soldiers, etc. However, Kleiwu was a brave and resourceful soldier who led many night raids and raids. The next day, when a sudden downpour drowned out the artillery of the Nawab army, and the soldiers of Klevu, who kept their guns under tarps, fought their way out of the wet bank to take the victory.
In what is now London, Clive's statue stands between the HM Treasury and the Foreign Office, overlooking St James's Park. The bronze plate at the base of the statue reads "Clevus in the Mango Grove on the Eve of the Battle of Plassey". The battle started the British invasion of the Indian subcontinent. In 1758, Kleiwu became governor of Bengal, the richest region of the Mughal Empire and a major exporter of Indian textiles. In 1803, the East India Company took control of Delhi and had 200,000 soldiers. The adventurers and merchants who took part in the capture of India gained dazzling wealth. Diamonds, rubies, and gold bars were auctioned off, and soldiers received money corresponding to their rank. Back in the UK, Clive bought six country houses and rented a townhouse in Mayfair, an upscale London neighbourhood. Two tenures in India made him the wealthiest self-made successful man in Europe.
The extensive collection of Mughal art by Clevou and his family is now displayed in the Povis Castle Museum, one of the properties administered by the National Trust for Places of Interest. The exhibits are comparable to those in Istanbul's Topkapi Palace and the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. However, India does not have a similar museum.
In June 2020, I visited Povis Castle. The castle is 800 years old and has 9 feet of walls. Pass through the ballroom built in the 18th century and enter the Clevus Museum. Two leopard skins hang high on the wall. Among the thousands of collections, about three-quarters were plundered from India by Clive, and the rest were brought back to England from India by Clive's son Edward and Edward's wife Henrietta. A giant printed tent used by India's "Tiger of Mysore" Tipu Sultan was killed in 1799 and is now kept in a dark room in the museum. The tent was later featured on several occasions at the castle's garden parties. On the tip of the tent sits a golden tiger head set with diamonds, emeralds and rubies.
Britain acknowledged to some extent the history of the slave trade and the moral issues associated with it, but was evasive about the history of its conquest of Asia. East India Company historian William Dalrymple is a descendant of the company's executives. When writing "White Mughals," he had hoped to tell a positive story, but the economic data struck him: "The fact is that we go to a very rich country, through trade, business, looting, etc. means to transfer a large amount of wealth to our country.”
In 2003, British economist Angus Madison calculated that during the two and a half centuries it was colonized, India's share of global gross domestic product fell from 24.4 percent to 4.2 percent. In 1884, the total British government revenue was £203 million, more than half of which came from overseas colonies, including £74 million from India. Taxes from all over the world are used to develop London. "We're not talking about feelings, not opinions, not memories, but basic economic facts," said Gurmind Bambura, a professor of colonial global economics at the University of Sussex. There is not enough money in the world today to pay for the wealth that Britain looted from India over two centuries."
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