'Like many people now, I live with an undertow of dread about the world we are handing on to our descendants, if indeed we will even have a world to hand on.' Photo: Penrhyn Castle by Bs0u10e01, Wikimedia Commons
Faulty tower: Lucy Pollard visits Penrhyn Castle
‘“He had money and I had history. His money bought my history.”’
I recently visited Penrhyn Castle, a National Trust property in North Wales. The castle, designed by Thomas Hopper, was built over the years 1820-37 by the Douglas-Pennant family. They made their money in the sugar plantations of Jamaica, from enslaved people, and in the slate mines of their native country, from maltreated employees. After slavery officially came to an end in the early nineteenth century, the family received huge financial benefits from compensation payments.
The house, architecturally as well as historically, presents a forbidding, threatening face to the visitor. From the outside it looks like a prison, a place giving the message that outsiders are not welcome. Inside, it is enormously opulent: ‘Look how rich we are’ is what it seems to say. It has carved stone, carved wood, stained glass, ceilings with elaborate plasterwork, rich textiles, and many costly works of art on display. Guests of the right sort came to stay and to be suitably impressed; in 1859 Queen Victoria was one of these.
If an old and privileged white woman was so struck by the evil on which the wealth of Penrhyn Castle and the Douglas-Pennant family was built, what might it feel like for a child of different heritage – with enslaved ancestors, say, or a descendant of slate miners – to enter that forbidding place?
The National Trust, to its credit, has made huge efforts – not universally approved of by its members – to educate visitors about the history of the houses it cares for, and to be transparent about wealth built on slavery. When I visited I saw an exhibition entitled ‘What a world’, a display of writing by a group of primary school children. The children had been learning and thinking about colonialism and the connection of the house to slavery. The result highlighted not only the children’s own creativity, but also the high quality of the input they had received. Their writing was a joy to read.
Each child had chosen one object from the collection and had written something in the voice of that object. For example, there was a glass dome with tiny stuffed birds suspended under it: Alice (aged ten) reflected on the life of the dead, imprisoned birds inside it, asking herself whether she was evil for keeping them there: ‘Each bird doesn’t like being trapped in here. They want to be free. I can hear them. Their souls wanting to be free. What can I do? I’m just a glass dome.’ But the words that went straight to my heart and have stayed with me were those of Fatimah (eleven) who had chosen a statuette of Osiris, the oldest object in the house. She had written: ‘He had money and I had history. His money bought my history.’
Like many people now, I live with an undertow of dread about the world we are handing on to our descendants, if indeed we will even have a world to hand on. In July our Area Meeting will look at faith, hope and anger; these children’s insights remind me how much we need all three.
