Dan Snow's History Hit - Statues, History and How We Use The Past

Episode Date: July 6, 2020

I was joinded by Dr Charlotte Riley, a feminist historian of 20th century Britain. Whilst lecturing on the Labour Party, decolonization, and overseas aid and development programmes, Charlotte has been an important voice in the debate surrounding the role of public statues. How do statues enhance or subvert our understanding of the past? Can we ever produce statues which don't jar with some ideas? In short, are they more trouble than they're worth? Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I'm standing inside a Lancaster bomber, one of the few surviving Lancasters from the Second World War. We just recently had John Nicholls on the podcast talking about the Lancaster bomber. That was a fantastic episode. Please go back and have a listen to that, the history of the plane and the people who flew it and built it. This Lancaster, I mean, actually belongs to the Lincolnshire Aviation Heritage Centre. It's a wonderful bomber command museum based on an old Second World War airfield. And he's Kirby in Lincolnshire, bomber country. Just Jane is the name of this wonderful Lancaster. I'm staring up now. I'm by the rear hatch.

And I'm looking all the way up through to the control panel at the cockpit. It's quite a squeeze. I'm going to head up there now and do some filming. This podcast has got absolutely nothing to do with Lancasteraster bombers this is a chat with the brilliant historian dr charlotte riley she's someone that's been at the forefront of thinking about the response to the campaign for racial justice in britain but around the world she's always insightful and thought-provoking on social media and her articles regarding other places she's a lecturer in 20th century british history at the University of Southampton.

I was very lucky to get her on the podcast. We talked about the moment that we're in, statues, reckoning with our imperial past here in the UK, and how the Black Lives Matter movement has forced historians and the rest of us to think differently about our past and what we're going through at the moment. If you want to watch our new history channel,

it's called History Hit TV, please go to historyhit.tv, become a subscriber. It's like Netflix for history. Hundreds of history documentaries on there, including a big long interview with Johnny Johnson, who was actually a dam buster who flew on a Lancaster that fateful night in 1943.

So if you want to watch those documentaries or listen to wonderful podcasts, please go to History Hit TV. It would be amazing to have you as a subscriber. You just use the code POD1, P-O-D-1, and you get a month for free in your second month. Just one pound, euro or dollar. Thanks for doing that. In the meantime, everyone, here is Dr. Charlotte Riley.

Thank you so much, Charlotte, for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. I'm very excited. I'm more excited than you because you wrote such a brilliant article, a rallying cry for history and historians. Let's start by saying we're recording this when statues are being pulled down in Britain, elsewhere in the world, in America, in Belgium. And people are saying you're erasing history by pulling down statues.

Does pulling down a statue represent a threat to how we remember or interrogate the past? I don't think it does at all, for a lot of reasons, basically. I think, firstly, you know, the statues fundamentally aren't history, and that sounds like a silly thing to say, but they are relics or remnants of the past. They're things that are old, essentially, is what they are. And historians and history is not necessarily about just cataloguing and

chronologically everything that happened, like this kind of huge mass of events and people and things. So I think firstly, you know, the idea that we can't change anything, otherwise we're somehow threatening or damaging history is a really weird reading of what history is. We change things all the time, right? We tear down buildings all the time. We cut down 200-year-old trees, which you can't just re-erect or put into a museum, all the time. And we don't worry about kind of destroying history then or erasing history. And we don't think that those things fundamentally are part of history or historical. So I don't think statues exist in the space that they would have to, kind of conceptually, for that to be true. And also, presumably, those statues weren't put up with the intention of providing some sort of historical narrative, right?

That those statues are monuments to, usually, men by a group of their own fans. Yeah, statues fundamentally are celebratory. I mean, I was going to say pretty much always, but I actually can't think of a single example of a statue that's been erected to kind of criticise someone. I think they're always celebratory. They're put up in their own historical moment. The Colston statue in particular, the one that was pulled down,

you know, Colston had been dead for a long time when his statue was erected. The statue's put up in 1895. So they're part of a particular moment. They're not necessarily supposed to last forever, anyway, but they're certainly not supposed to give a lesson from history or give any kind of factual information at all, really. As you say, they're fan items, they're celebratory. And then let's come on to your central point which

is so funny is that people are worried about rewriting history when that's literally what you historians do for a living that's the whole point of research and writing exactly the alternative reality where we don't rewrite history is a kind of history based on some enormous shared spreadsheet where we each tick off the topic that we have finished. History is a kind of collective project of chronicling and once it's done it's done and you kind of move on to the next topic and even thinking about it for like a moment shows that that's not the case and the fact that there can be hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books about the reformation or hundreds and hundreds of books about the labour party which is

the topic that I write about a lot obviously it's all about reinterpretation right this is what we do all the time we're always rewriting history. It strikes me that even when you can be fairly sure that you know about a chronology of an event you know you read Hansard you can work out who spoke at when in the House of Commons you're able to say with some accuracy we're pretty sure this is kind of what happened on that afternoon in the House of Commons, you're able to say with some accuracy, we're pretty sure this is kind of what happened on that afternoon in the House of Commons. Even then, historians constantly evaluating the import of what was said in there, or how, as a changed society, we interact with that information, because we might think of that debate 100 years ago very differently to how it was seen by people

in the 60s or even contemporaries. Yeah, absolutely. I think Hansard's a really good example, actually, because when you think about a parliamentary debate, it often, although it's on a particular topic, it will range, you know, you'll have kind of contributors from lots of different political positions, you'll have lots of different figures speaking, they'll obviously take different positions in the debate. It's often quite meandering,

it often kind of goes off down different tangents. And so different historians might look at a transcription of something like that and pick out totally different things as being interesting i've done a lot of work in the past on barbara castle and sometimes i read hansard transcriptions by literally skimming down until i see her name right what i want to see is what she said what's her idea i find her infinitely fascinating i can read every contribution she made in the house of commons but she was never prime minister so it's not like a lot of people might look at those debates and totally jump over what she's argued, or might interpret things totally differently, or fundamentally might

disagree on how valid their point is, or how convincing an argument is, or whatever. Sometimes history writing is about discoveries, right? Like sometimes you like find out something new that happened that people didn't know about you find out about an exciting plot or an event of some sort but most of the time it is about looking at things that people have looked at before and re-evaluating it and doing so from your perspective as a historian which is shaped by your worldview and your identity but also the particular approach you take to history, the sorts of sources you use and all of the rest of it. The other point you made, which I think is really interesting about statues,

is in fact, rather than illuminating our past, they often perform the role of, in fact, sort of disguising it, covering it up. So if anyone's whitewashing the past, it's the builders of statues. Exactly. Again, to go back to Colston, because he's the kind of practical example, you know, Colston was being celebrated on two levels. So he was being theoretically

celebrated as a philanthropist. That was the thing that he was, you know, supposedly fated for. He's also being celebrated by people in the late Victorian period, because it's a period of imperial expansion. And it's a moment when the British really care a lot about their empire and really want to kind of imbue these imperial sentiments at home and Causton is a good figure like a good imperial figure to kind of put a statue up to so it sort of tells one big story and there's a story underpinning it as to why they're doing it right then but it totally omits the story about who he was who we might think he was now that The fact that he was someone who transported 89,000 slaves from Africa to the Caribbean, nearly 20,000 of whom died.

He was a man who made money from enslaving other people. His philanthropy is cast in a very different light when you think about where his money came from. It's not really illuminating. It hides a lot of stories, and it's kind of a full stop on the conversation in a way the statue of colston being up i think sometimes makes it hard to talk critically or to re-evaluate him having the statue of these figures it's sort of a way of their fans of trying to win the argument

because you put someone on a pedestal quite literally it's quite hard then for their critics to get equal weight in a way you carve someone out of granite or metal and you smash them down and elevate the position in the centre of the public square. Statues are amazing. Let's talk about statues for a second. I mean, why do we have them at all? I always think today,

and there was the Millicent Fawcett campaign to build a statue, I was like, I find statues really weird. They're really strange as well because they're embodied, you have statues I guess that are other things or pieces of public art which show things that aren't people but statues of people it's a really strange thing it's also like you said in your introduction they're mostly men and they're mostly white men in Britain when we talk about the great man theory of history and the way that you write history as a series of great men who did a series of great things, like it's that. But in public life, in public spaces that people have to kind of see every day, it's an odd concept. So not just actually, what about heroes? Should we have heroes? Barbara Castle, is she your hero?

You know, I don't think she's my hero hero I think I kind of wish she were my friend which is a different thing the more I work on her the more I study her the real thing isn't there of like reading someone's papers so seeing someone's handwriting and their letters and that kind of thing like that kind of personal relationship with a historical figure is quite seductive sometimes I think and it builds connections between you and them. But I think the thing is, the more time I spend on her, the more complicated it becomes apparent that she was. I think she was probably more of a hero at the beginning of me thinking about her. You know, this kind of slightly terrifying Labour Party, always incredibly well put together, snappy, funny, sharp Labour politician. I think

she was a hero at the beginning and I don't think she is anymore, which is probably healthy. And surely impossible to learn more and more and more about somebody and delve even further into their writing and still emerge at the end of that going, they're a total hero on every level. Yeah, exactly. There's definitely things that she's not a hero to me for. Also, very annoyingly, she, as a journalist, she learned shorthand. So the moment that I realised that about half of her most juicy letters and things were all in shorthand in the archive, that was a moment when she became slightly less of a hero. When I realised I couldn't read half of what she was writing. Land a Viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the

poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. What should be in Trafalgar Square or place of public gathering? Is it a kind of laudable idea to have monuments, to have public art,

to have things that can try and bring out the best in our responses, our behaviours? I think it's really a question of asking what they're doing. So I think public art, I think, yeah, there's always going to be artworks and things that people do and don't like, but I think that's a good thing. I think public space fundamentally is a good thing, and keeping public space nice and people having access to public space is really important. And an idea of the commons,

having space that people can kind of be in and interact with other people, not in kind of a private setting, is really important. And monuments and commemoration is a different thing. So with the Colston thing, again, a lot of people highlighted that we have the Colston statue and many other problematic statues, but there isn't a memorial to victims of the slave trade in London, for example. So memorials are another thing I think statues of people increasingly I don't feel particularly are things we need to feel that

we have to hold on to in a way I said that in such a careful way because I'm trying to avoid saying just pull down all of the statues but I don't know that it would be the worst idea in the world actually that's the thing it's probably easier to go, we just shouldn't have any statues, rather than try and go, Nelson, he wrote an inappropriate letter about his slate. Captain Cook, that commission that's evaluating all the statues, nightmare, who'd want to be on that?

It sounds horrific. There's a really good recent example, which is the statue of Nancy Astor that they've put up in Plymouth. The first British female MP to take her seat, right? So she takes over her husband put up in Plymouth. The first British female MP to take her seat, right, so she takes over her husband's seat in Plymouth when he's elevated to the Lords, Constance Markiewicz, elected the year before but doesn't take up her seat. And on the face of it, that is someone worthy of commemorating, right? A lot of feminists thought there are very few women as statues in public life that are not queens. It's a really good idea to get behind the statue of Nancy Astor.

And then everyone sort of started thinking she was also extremely anti-Semitic. She was extremely politically conservative in all sorts of ways that now her values do not really align with modern values and indeed probably don't align very much with the values of the people who were initially thinking it was a great idea to commemorate her because she had particular political opinions and I think putting a statue up is more fraught right you have to justify it more in a way the debate about whether it's okay to have a statue to her even though she had problematic political views is kind of a bigger debate around putting that statue up than there would be if there were

a statue and we were talking about whether to bring it down and I think that that kind of weighing it up is really interesting as well because it becomes for some people it immediately becomes quite offensive like the idea that you could look at someone and think well you know on the plus side he was a philanthropist on the negative side he was a slave trader it's not really something you want to be there is no plus and minus column when someone is so morally repugnant so in a way pulling out all of them down would be better than having to have a process where those sorts of things were weighed against one another you know you're so brilliant on twitter and commentator what do you think the role of a historian is at the moment has it changed for you both because of

your ability to access platforms that give you a potentially enormous audience? And has it changed as a result of the times in which we live? Things feel a bit more turbulent at the moment. We've got pandemic disease. We've got superpower rivalry. We've got actual great power conflict in the Himalayas at the moment. We've got climate crisis. And we've got campaigns for racial injustice in parts of the world as well. So what's the role of the historian at the moment?

I think it's important to point out that everything has a past. Although something I shout on Twitter a lot is that there are no lessons from history. And I don't mean that people shouldn't listen to historians, obviously, because I don't want to do myself out of a job. But I think it's really important. One thing historians can do is stop people from making facile comparisons with the past. historians can do is stop people from making facile comparisons with the past or stop people trying to use the past as a kind of flow diagram as to what's going to happen next right historians don't like making predictions and they should try to resist mapping past events onto things that are happening now and saying well you know this happened time, so this is what we should do this time.

And I think kind of very facile comparisons between people are often unhelpful because comparisons flatten difference. On one hand, you get lots of comparisons between Trump and fascist leaders, for example. And in some ways that can be quite helpful in getting people to think about language or imagery or whatever. But on the other hand, it can be very unhelpful in kind of flattening the differences and getting rid of context and stripping events and people and topics of context. And I think historians really believe in context, they really believe actually that things are shaped by the particular moment in which they exist. So in some ways, it's quite important to sort of stop people from trying to just point at things from the past and say this definitely shows what's going to happen in terms of like everything's different I think Twitter has connected a lot of historians to one

another first of all which has been a really interesting thing I think previously you know historians knew other historians in their department and they knew historians in their field and maybe people working in kind of museums and things but there's much more chat between I don't know medieval historians in Scotland and modern historians on the south coast of England or in America or in Germany or in South Africa or whatever you can connect to people better and there's definitely a way that it highlights maybe people who wouldn't have previously been particularly loud voices in the historical profession I guess it's a kind of

equalising thing in a way. If you have a Twitter account, it doesn't matter if you're a professor or a first year PhD student, you have the same kind of space to talk about history. And it shows people what we do in a way that's quite interesting. Historians can kind of pop up. A while ago where the Marshall Plan kept coming up in politics, my PhD was about the Marshall Plan so every so often someone mentioned the Marshall Plan and I'd kind of pop up and go actually it's quite complicated and would try and give some kind of context or whatever so you end up being kind of historian on call you kind of jump in and go it didn't really work like that or maybe I feel like historians just spend a lot of time going it's actually kind of a bit more complicated than that actually that's our like motto as a profession completely agree the

only point I guess lessons from history is it does strike me that when Trump began on his real aggressive mission to delegitimize the press or in the opening stage of the pandemic it was historians that were often going yeah it's not like time. I'm not saying it's like last time, but just so you know, we've sort of seen this kind of thing before, and it's pretty bad to do that. So that's a role that you and your colleagues can perform? I think so. And I think it's very useful to have historians saying, like, just so you know, this hasn't always gone well in the past. There was a good example when the Daily Mail headline that we talked about,

like enemies of the people around Brexit, and it had the past. There was a good example when the Daily Mail headline that we talked about that enemies of the people around Brexit and it had the judges and a lot of historians at that point was like we've actually heard this language before and it's not great this is fascist this is a fascist trope it's very important that we name it for what it is and I think that's definitely true. And I also think historians can be quite voice of hope as well you don't always have to be the kind of incredibly depressing person who turns up and says, actually, this didn't go well in the past. I saw some stuff about kind of protest movements and how long protest movements have taken in the past to affect change.

The fact that the Montgomery bus boycott had gone for a really long time before that led to change, that, you know, lots of kind of independence campaigns decolonization efforts or like nationalist campaigns to gain independence it takes a while right it takes a long time and so historians were kind of coming and talking about the black lives matter movement and saying like don't get discouraged if this doesn't happen straight away like history shows us sometimes you need to be doing this stuff for a long time and it can be exhausting but that's what works often so i think you can sometimes be a message of kind of hope.

Yeah, I think so. And also I always think that around technology, right? Which is if we're going to science our way out of climate crisis, the fact that in the space of nine years, they work out how to go to the moon and put people on the moon and get them back safely when they didn't know that at the start of that process. I mean, that's hopeful, right?

That makes you think that if we have political will and money and listen to scientists, then we can achieve remarkable things. I think sometimes as well, political science has the tendency to be quite gloomy about human nature. And I think historians can sometimes say, actually, sometimes people are good. People sometimes surprise you. Historically, people have done good things. They pull together in times of crisis. It's a bit wishy-washy and it sometimes feels a bit, you know, not everyone acts in bad faith throughout history. People have made good decisions. People have helped one another. That is a good thing to think. I saw a tweet from a historian at the start of the COVID crisis. People were panic buying food and buying assault rifles

in the US. And this historian said, no, I've actually studied these things and on the whole altruism tends to be the dominant it gave me enormous comfort like it absolutely changed my life a few months ago I was getting a bit prepper up in here I gotta say thank you so much for coming on the podcast tell everyone how to follow you on Twitter because I'm sure they want to join your army of fans not Lydia my Twitter account please go and check that out and good luck teaching and everything next year. Thank you so much. Hi everyone, it's me Dan Snow. Just a quick request. It's so

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I understand if you don't want to buy my calendar, but this is free. Come on, do me a favour. Thanks.