Prof. Corinne Fowler speaks to the Telegraph about her report on National Trust properties, colonialism and slavery

In April, Prof. Corinne Fowler spoke to the Telegraph about the criticism she received after working on the Interim Report for the National Trust. She said, ‘ This trouble began after I wrote a report for the National Trust about the colonial histories of properties in its care. Its findings weren’t new or controversial to experts in the field, but the report made the information available to a much wider audience. To many, what it revealed came as an unwelcome surprise.’ The surprise experienced by many may have been not so much at the content of the report as its bias and selectivity. Prof. Fowler also underestimated the public’s knowledge and understanding when she said elsewhere about the National Trust’s historic houses, ‘These places are, and were always intended to be, a veneer, an idyllic facade. And we have fallen for it.’

Prof. Fowler continued, ‘ The main cause of offence was that Chartwell, a house which belonged to Sir Winston Churchill, was in the report. It was decided to make a factual allusion to Churchill’s role as colonial secretary, because colonial governance was one of the themes of the report.’ Even colonial themes need to be discussed within their wider context. The widespread objection to the treatment of Chartwell in the report was that it referred to Churchill’s actions in such a way as to imply that he was in some sense culpable for the famine in Bengal in 1943 while making no mention of the part he played in defeating fascism. In fact, many factors contributed both to cause the famine and make it extremely difficult to alleviate, not least the Japanese advance into Burma, but the report does not acknowledge these circumstances.

Two responses to this interview appeared in the press. In the Spectator Giles Udy took issue with the implication that the Cornish copper mining industry was to be considered tarnished by links to the slave trade. He wrote,

Fowler mentions in the piece that she has written a book of Walks Through Colonial Britain. The book ends in Cornwall, where:

‘Copper mines once employed a third of the local population, but I learned that a significant amount of that copper was used to sheath slave ships so that they lasted longer in tropical waters.’

This, I’m afraid, is a bit like saying that pens from a British factory were exported to Germany where they were used by bookkeepers in Auschwitz, making Britain complicit in the Holocaust.

To be clear, the copper sheathing of ships was developed by the Royal Navy in the 18th Century, and was used on all types of ships, not just those involved in the slave trade. Incidentally, this is the same Royal Navy that spent 60 years from 1808 patrolling the waters off West Africa to stop the slave trade, at vast cost in money and lives.

Fowler claims that the copper sheathing was developed so that ships ‘lasted longer in tropical waters.’ This is partially correct, but a distortion. The purpose of copper sheathing on ships was to prevent the growth of barnacles and weed – which slowed down all ships. Barnacles grow on ships’ hulls everywhere in the world, not just in the waters of the Caribbean and West Africa. If Fowler had driven a few miles from where she found out this supposedly awful truth about Cornish copper mining, she would have found them growing on Cornish rocks as well.

Now let’s move on to Cornish copper, of which she writes: ‘a significant amount was used to sheath slave ships.’ ‘Significant’ is a rather vague term. Significant annual production or significant in the context of Cornish production overall? If so over what period? I’m dubious of this claim. The only figures I can find begin at 1771, but they show that production of Cornish copper significantly increased after the abolition of slavery, with annual production rising between two and four times that of the years before abolition.

This copper was not just used to sheath ships, of course. Significant amounts were used in coin production and in the production of brass which, together with copper in its raw state, was used in great quantities in the Industrial Revolution.

All of this may seem like a small complaint, but it just goes to show the ways history can be distorted and shoehorned to fit a preconceived point of view. If this reflects the rest of Fowler’s research, it’s no wonder her National Trust report was so controversial.

Prof Lawrence Goldman responded in the Telegraph, Writing in this paper, Professor Corinne Fowler provided evidence of the abuse and intimidation she has suffered since publishing reports and books on the links between colonialism and properties owned by the National Trust. She’s entirely justified to complain about such treatment which no author writing in good faith should receive.

But her remarks suggest that she may not fully understand why reasonable people objected in 2020 to her report for the Trust, and will probably also criticise her forthcoming edited volume entitled Colonial Countryside to be published next month. 

And he continued, But history written in this way, that is by starting from moralistic assumptions like ‘colonialism is bad’ and looking for its victims – will never be more than ‘a dreary record of wickedness’, a phrase used in 1887 in a famous exchange between two great Victorian historians, Mandell Creighton and Lord Acton. Exploration, navigation, trade, cultural and technological exchange, medical advances, the spread of Christianity and the English language? There’s more to the history of empire than the history of victims.’