Our Island Stories

Author: Corinne Fowler

When Ann Morgan and other Friends in the Lancaster area began to go public about the discovery of Quakers who enslaved people, I found myself intrigued and alienated at the same time. I followed one of the available threads with interest, then stopped. I realised that I didn’t want to find out any more. I’m only a reader, after all, I say to myself; I’m not an expert; there’s no duty on me to follow this – or indeed, any other – thread.

One side issue stayed with me, though. It was that people of colour feel themselves unwelcome when they visit the UK’s national parks or National Trust properties. It’s as though these landscapes are somehow sacred to a certain era, and to the power structure of that era. Call it ‘Darcy-land’, if you like. It’s about bonnets and weddings, and is profoundly white. 

Then I saw this book reviewed. Corinne Fowler is a professor of Colonialism and Heritage at the University of Leicester. Her book is described by David Olusoga as ‘a powerful book that brings the history of the Empire home – literally’. I ordered it from our local independent bookshop, and promptly forgot about it. Not long afterwards I caught a flu bug. Some areas of my brain managed to escape the flu, and I read Our Island Stories from cover to cover, then read it all over again. I had found the tool I needed to help me stay with the extreme discomfort of the subject of chattel slavery and the slave trade. 

How does Corinne Fowler invite me into this difficult subject, and manage to keep me there? She has found a way of telling stories that I think is unique: she takes an area of historical importance in the landscape of Great Britain, then plots out a walk through that territory in the company of an expert in the field. The two of them ask questions of each other, and of the landscape they encounter; they use their imaginations and allow themselves to see significances and connections. This means that questions can hang in the air and wait for an answer, or simply sit in among the other material until they’re ready to be absorbed or connected.

The riches that this book offers are immense. I can’t give it a proper review – I’m no historian, I’m simply a reader who wants to encourage other readers to follow in her path. 

I’d like to focus on two chapters which relate to landscapes that I’m especially familiar with. One is the Lake District, and the other is the area of north Wales around Dolgellau. My parents had a lifelong passion for the southern Lakes; and Dolgellau is the corner of Wales where I’ve had some of the happiest holidays of my life. Coincidentally, both landscapes have links with Friends: Grasmere is the home of the Quaker guesthouse, Glenthorne, and Dolgellau has a museum telling the story of one of the early Welsh Quaker settlements in North America.

Grasmere. Wordsworth’s Grasmere. How many of us have heard the daffodil lines: ‘For oft, when on my couch I lie, in vacant or in pensive mood, they flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude’ and longed for that essential privacy? Yet how few of us, at a guess, have wondered who paid the rent at Dove Cottage, Grasmere, to enable the prophet-poet to write his unforgettable lines?

Corinne Fowler, together with her walking companion photographer Ingrid Pollard, have looked into poetry’s relationship to Wordsworth and money. He and his family lived simply, but they accommodated numerous friends and colleagues and new offspring. Most significantly, they gave hospitality to Wordsworth’s brother, John, to which at a later date John felt a responsibility to respond. He trained as a sailor, went into the East India Company, and eventually become a captain. He knew that if he was successful in this career, he could come back with treasures that would serve his brother William and his family well. He even delved into the world of opium.

 But tragedy struck: John lost his life in a shipwreck. The Wordsworth family was gravely affected, economically as well as emotionally. William had to beg the local aristocracy for financial support, so that he could continue to write and, eventually, become Poet Laureate.

John Wordsworth’s opium-trading efforts were small-scale. But, had he lived, he would have realised the enormous sums that could be made that way. Ironically, he would also have been confronted with the agony of Wordsworth’s close friend Coleridge. Coleridge was addicted to laudanum, an opium derivative. 

My second example: Dolgellau, North Wales. Between the mountains and the sea. Sheep, grazing peacefully.

For this walk, Fowler chose as her companion Charlotte Williams, author of the memoir Sugar and Slate. Charlotte told Corinne about the huge numbers of enslaved people who were given, for their daily clothing, textiles that were made in north Wales, especially the variety called ‘Welsh Plains’. 

Why was this variety of textile so popular? Because, over the far side of the Atlantic, enslaved people needed clothing of some sort, but it must be plain, it must be cheap, it must be hard-wearing. ‘Welsh Plains’ had all those qualities. 

What sort of quantities are we talking about? Enormous. By the early eighteenth century, the Royal African Company was a major buyer of cloth, which it used as barter for enslaved people. In 1718, one merchant ordered over five miles’ worth of ‘Welsh Plains’ for this purpose in a single month.

I found it very difficult to connect the peaceful picture of sheep grazing on the mountainside with the heat and the fear of a sugar plantation, where human beings wore only a scratchy woollen garment that was made to last and to be decent rather than to be comfortable. But, for the Welsh-speaking, hard-working people of Dolgellau – men, women and children – this was an income-stream of extraordinary economic importance. Sheep-shearers, wool-carders, spinners and weavers – all of these depended on it. ‘Not,’ remarks Corinne, ‘that these people were made rich by slavery: on the contrary, their lives were often harsh.’ The big money was made by people far higher up the economic ladder: the wool-merchants, the slave-traders and their backers and, of course, the owners of the land where the sheep grazed. The ‘Darcys’.

There was, Charlotte added, something disturbingly intimate about woollen cloth. ‘Welsh Plains’ were worn against the skin: it was often the only clothing that the enslaved workers would ever wear. People were transported to the plantations from diverse communities across West Africa. But, on the plantations, dressed in ‘Welsh Plains’, they were reduced to enslaved uniformity. 

Here’s a closing reflection. Is it not strange that our history education system omits British colonialism almost entirely? School children study history in separate blobs: Normans, Tudors, the English civil war, then fast-forwards to world war one. This tidies the slave plantations away into a shadow corner. Does this enable – support, in fact – the feeling of white superiority, of privilege, of us vs them? As one of Corinne Fowler’s co-walkers says: ‘Four hundred years of telling yourself how important you are. Takes some uprooting, doesn’t it?’

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