old slaver statues: destroy or museumise?

Edward Colston (1636–1721) was born in a wealthy merchant family in Bristol. Later he went to school in London and established him­self as a successful trad­er in wool

Edward Colston's statue

Bristol

In 1680 he joined the Royal African Company/RAC company, formally head­ed by the Duke of York/later King James II, that had a mon­opoly on the west African slave trade. RAC branded all the slaves’ chests, even the children, with the RAC initials. Colston apparently sold c100,000 West Africans in the Car­ibbean and Americas bet­w­een 1672-89, and it was through this London Co that Colston became very rich.

Colston used the enormous slave profits to move into money lending and mercantile businesses. He must have known that slavery was an abomin­at­­ion, because he sold his company shares to William Prince of Or­ange in 1689, after the latter led the Glorious Revolution and took the throne.

Colston developed his fame as a philanthropist who donated to char­it­ab­le causes like schools and hospitals in Bristol and London. He even served as a Tory MP for Bristol. He died in 1721 and was respectfully bur­ied in All Saints Church Bristol.

To honour the great phil­an­th­ropist, Colston’s name permeated Bris­t­ol. Note independent Colst­on school, Cols­ton Conc­ert Hall, two Colston streets and the high-rise office block Colston Tow­er. And the 5.5-metre bronze Colston statue has stood as a memorial on Col­ston Ave since 1895.

But modern campaigners vigorously argued that the hideous slav­ery business mean his contribut­ion to Bris­tol had to be reassessed. They decided in 2018 to change the stat­ue’s plaque to describe his slave-trading, but a final wording was never agreed upon.

Bristol slave trader Edward Colston's statue in Bristol 

Dropped into docks, to cheers all around.

 In 2020 a petition with thousands of signatures said that whilst his­t­ory shouldn’t be forgotten, these people who benefited from the ensl­ave­ment of individuals do not deserve the honour of a statue. This should be reserved for those who bring about positive change and who fight for peace, equality and social unity. We hereby en­cour­age Brist­ol city council to remove the Edward Colston statue. Bristol Museum said Colston’s statue was remaining because he never traded in enslaved Afric­ans, on his own account.

Eventually, during Black Lives Matters protests, frustrated prot­es­ters toppled the statue of Edward Colston from its plinth, graff­it­ied it and threw it into the docks. Bristol Coun­cil quick­ly ret­riev­ed it, then asked conserv­at­ors to stab­ilise the statue’s condition.

Protesters across the US tore down and vandalised statues and mem­orials of Confederate soldiers and generals, following George Floyd's death in Minneapolis in 2020. As long the offensive stat­ues etc are removed to a museum and preserved for history, I would be perfectly happy not to see Colston. But no random vand­al­ism, please.

In 1768, when Capt James Cook (1728–79) set sail on the first of 3 voyages to the South Seas, he’d been ordered by the British Admiral­ty to seek a continent and take possession of it for the British King. Cook reached the southern coast of N.S.W in 1770 and sailed north, charting Australia’s coast and cl­aim­ing the land for Britain in 1770. Cook transformed the way Eu­r­op­eans view­ed the Pacific Ocean and its lands, dying for Britain in a Hawaiian Islands battle in 1779. His maps, journals, log books and paintings from Cook’s travels are preserved in NSW’s State Library.

A sculpture of Cook was erected in Catani Gardens in St Kilda, opposite the beach in Melbourne in 1914. And in 1973, a life-size bronze statue of Cook was sculpted and installed near Cook's Cottage, in beautiful Fitzroy Gardens.

Vandals poured paint on the Cook sculpture on Australia Day in 2018, scribb­ling the words No Pride beneath the feet, along with the Abor­ig­­inal flag. Then it was re-vandalised in 2019. That statue was cov­er­ed with graffiti in 2020 when the words Destroy White Sup­remacy were scrawled on the stone. Similarly a statue of Captain Cook in Sydney was defaced.

Captain Cook statue, Sydney
unveiled to the public, 1879.

It seemed that historical monu­m­ents around the world have been brok­en or dyed as Black Lives Matter protest­ers mar­ched through the streets. In Australia the protesters called out Cook over his links to colon­ial­ism in a nation built on Aboriginal genocide.

In rebellion against Australia Day, called Invasion Day by the prot­est­ers, a group doused the Catani monument dep­ict­ing Captain Cook in red paint. The statue was defaced and its base was papered with fly­ers pro­posing the abolition of Australia Day celebrations. The vand­alism att­racted curious locals, before the paint was hosed off by council work­ers.

Captain Cook's statue, in Melbourne

covered in red paint.
 
But the authorities were unhappy. Port Phillip’s mayor said they had had “a very beaut­iful, fit­ting and respectful service with our trad­it­ional land­owners this morn­ing”. Minister for Multicultural Affairs said “Vandals are trashing our national heritage and should be pros­ecuted. Australia Day should be a great unifying day for our country, as it has been for decades."  But then why didn't the protesters send a petition from every citizen in Port Phillip area? Or negotiate through the local Council?

Gertrude Stein & friends: life in art.

Gertrude Stein at her salon, 1920

Invaluable

Baby Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) and the family moved to Vienna and Paris, so Gertrude spoke German, French and English well. Her father moved them back to USA in 1879 but died in 1891, so older brother Michael supported them. Brother Leo moved back to Europe, immersing himself in art and in 1903 Gertrude also returned to Paris, sharing a left bank art studio. Michael sent money each month, making their bohemian life-style sustainable.

Thus Rue de Fleurus became the first permanent home for the Steins, with Gertrude remaining there for 40 years. They provided the informal focal point for contemporary art in Paris, inspiring, supporting and buying art. Their home became a salon, where art works by Picasso, Renoir, Gauguin and Cezanne shone. Saturday evenings enabled young, impoverished artists to examine the family’s notable art collection in their salon.

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas

 1923 

How did Leo & Gertrude become so learned about art? Art scholar Bernard Berenson introduced Leo to Paul Cézanne and helped Leo buy a work from Ambroise Vollard's gallery. In 1904 Berenson welcomed and taught the Steins in Florence. In 1905 the siblings saw the Manet Retrospective in Paris and bought Portrait of a Woman with a Hat by Henri Matisse. This purchase encouraged Matisse, just when avant-garde artists were being criticised by the press.

In 1905 Pablo Picasso met the Steins at Clovis Sagot’s informal art gallery. The first Picasso oil paintings that Leo bought was Nude on a Red Background! Then they bought some Renoirs, 2 Gauguins, a Daumier, a Delacroix, an El Greco and Cézanne water colours. The friendship with Matisse cooled only when Gertrude developed a greater interest in Picasso. Fortunately Michael Stein continued to collect Matisse.

Etta and Claribel Cone were wealthy, elegant, educated Baltimoreans who inherited vast wealth in their 20s. The Steins and Cones travelled to Florence in 1905 where Berenson introduced the Cones to Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck’s art. The Steins took Etta to Picasso’s studio while he was doing Gertrude's portrait, and she urged Etta to buy Picasso drawings.

The Steins were introducing artist to artist, patron to artist, patron to patron. In 1905-6, Leo and Gertrude invited Picasso and Matisse to their studio to meet each for the first time. In Jan 1906, Michael and Sarah Stein took Etta and Claribel to meet Matisse at his Seine flat, and both sisters bought as many works as they could. Gertrude also sold the Cones some of her prized pictures including Delacroix, Cézanne and a Stein salon group portrait by Marie Laurencin.

In the US, Harriet Lane Levy (1867–1950) had been a popular journalist in San Francisco. She’d already visited Paris before, the first being with her friends Michael and Sarah Stein. But this time she sailed to Paris with friend Alice B Toklas. They arrived in Paris in 1907, living together until Toklas met Gertrude Stein.

Toklas was invited to a weekend party at Steins’. She was besotted, soon becoming a regular visitor and going to the galleries with Gertrude. In 1910 Alice moved into rue de Fleurus home and became Gertrude's right hand woman, reader, critic, typist and publication handler! She was Stein’s lover & assistant for ever!

By 1909, photographer/gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz was introduced to the Steins. By then Stieglitz knew the works of Matisse, Picasso and Cezanne well, and began to negotiate with Leo and Gertrude to exhibit their huge collection. Other young modernist painters joined in eg Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia, Robert Delaunay and Guillaume Apollinaire.

New Eastern Europe Jewish artists arrived in Paris from 1904 on. Starving in their Paris garrets, Steins’ salons filled with food-drink were much appreciated. The Americans were all secularist Jews, but they wanted to help the Jewish artists, especially Max Weber, sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, Chaim Soutine, Sonia Delauney and Italian Amedeo Modigliani. The fact that the Steins, Cone sisters, Alfred Stieglitz, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Alice B Toklas spoke Yiddish or German from home must have helped the lads integrate.

Levy returned to the US in 1910, at 43, and lived her life collecting and art philanthropy. We know which artists Harriet patronised in Paris and which paintings she bought in the USA, because she became a very important benefactor at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. See Derain’s Paysage du midi 1906; Matisse’s Corsican Landscape 1899 and La Table au café c1899; and Pablo Picasso’s Scène de rue 1900.

Readers will love Paris Portraits: Stories of Picasso, Matisse, Gertrude Stein and Their Circle by Harriet Lane Levy, 2011.

Gertrude understood the radical implications of Cubism and was keen to link her status with it. Spanish cubist Juan Gris visited in 1910s, finding Stein accepted the more radical art styles that others quickly rejected. But a family rupture followed. Leo was a dedicated Matisse patron, not a Cubist fan. Gertrude and Alice visited Picasso’s studio where he was at work on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the work that marked the end of Leo's support for Picasso. In 1912 Leo took the Renoirs and many of the Cézannes to Italy, permanently! NB the Steins had established the first Museum of Modern Art at rue de Fleurus but the salon wound down with Leo leaving and war breaking out in 1914.

On her return to Baltimore in 1921, Claribel Cone rented a large flat in Etta’s building and arranged it as a private museum for their growing collection. This excellent Cone collection entered the Baltimore Museum of Art when Claribel died in 1929.

27 Rue de Fleurus, Paris

Note the plaque, next to the door

Leo Stein died in 1947, Gertrude Stein died in 1946 and Alice B Toklas in 1967. Gertrude and Alice B Toklas were both buried in Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

The Stein collection had been constantly divided among relatives, friends, dealers and collectors, making it difficult to track. American collectors John Quinn and Albert Barnes both had access to the Stein collection and acquired significant paintings from them. In 1913, Gertrude traded large, early Picassos to dealer Kahnweiler in exchange for other paintings she wanted. Thus I’m sure the Steins were hugely successful as salonieres and patrons, more so than collectors. The 2012 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's exhibition brought together important paintings for the first time since pre-WW1 Paris.

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade, 2025. Wade wanted to uncover the woman behind the celebrity, as cultivated by Stein herself. But it was this very celebrity that eclipse her work. Wade found new archive material to shed more light on Stein’s relationship with Alice B. Toklas, and on the origins of her undeniably radical writing.

Wade examined the creation of the Stein myth eg posing for Picasso's portrait; central to Bohemian Parisian life hosting people eg Matisse & Hemingway; racing through the French countryside with Alice Toklas; dazzling American crowds on her sell-out tour for her sensational Autobiography. But admirers called her a genius, sceptics a charlatan.

Yet Stein hoped to be remembered not for her personality but for her work. From her deathbed, she begged Toklas to secure her place in literary history. Using unseen material, Wade uncovered the origins of Stein's radical writing, the real Gertrude Stein as she was when alone.

Alone in Berlin: Hans Fal­lada's great book

Born in Greifswald in NE Germany, Rudolf Ditzen (1893–1947) was the son of a law­yer and a very educated moth­er. In 1909 the family rel­ocat­ed south to Leipzig, following dad's app­ointment to the Imp­erial Supreme Court. A road accident and typhoid led to a life of pain-killing medications. At 18 the lad killed his boyfriend in a mutual-suicide duel, and spent years in psych­iatric hospit­als and drug clinics, or in prison for robberies. In bet­ween, the re-named Hans Fal­lada worked on the land, wrote a few nov­els and did jobs on newspapers.

It was a chaotic life. At the same time as his youngest broth­er was killed in WW1, Hans was struggling with morph­ine add­ict­­­ion. His alcohol-fuelled crimes and sub­sequent gaol sentences only ended when Fallada married in 1929

His 1932 novel, Kleiner Mann, did well at home and overseas, and was made into a film. Under Nazi censorship, Fallada wrote and pub­lished a series of tough novels that Germans called neue Sachlichkeit i.e New Objectivity.

Fallada planned to leave Germany. His British publisher had arranged to send a private boat to get the family out of Germ­any in late 1938. But Fallada stayed, fearing he could ne­v­­­er write in another lang­uage, nor live elsewhere.

Fallada's book cover

this edition was published in French

In late 1943, the author lost his long-term German pub­lisher who escaped overseas. So Hans again turned to alcohol and random sex, to deal with his collapsing marriage. In 1944 he shot at his (first) wife in anger and was again certified.

Fallada remained deeply depressed by the impossible task of er­adic­ating Fascism that was so deeply ingrained in German society. He resumed his old morphine habit with his second wife, and both ended up in hospital.

Yet at the end of the war, Fallada was welcomed by the new East German literary authorit­ies. In 1947 he published Alone in Berl­in with Aufbau-Verlag, the first novel by a German author to consider local resistance to the National Soc­ialists. How am­azing that Hans wrote his best no­v­el during Sept-Nov 1946, just months before dying from a morphine over­dose in Feb 1947. No wonder he became one of the best-known German writers of the early-mid C20th.

The 1946 book: Alone in Berlin
The characters Otto and Anna Quangel were based on the real working family of Otto and Elise Hampel. It was 1940, France had surrend­ered, Nazism seemed unassailable and citizens was endangered. Diss­ent brought arrest and prison. Be­lin was filled with fear.

The novel’s main characters lived in 55 Jablonski Strasse, a house divided into grimy flats. Residents tried to live under Nazi rule in their dif­ferent ways: the Persickes were nasty Hitler loyal­ists; the very decent retired Judge Fromm was preparing a shelter to protect eld­erly Jewish Frau Ros­enthal; Eva Kluge, the kind post­­woman, resigned from work and The Party, and left her thuggish husband.

In the same block of flats the Quangel couple was plodding, tight with money, unsociable and not hostile to Nat­ional Social­ist propag­anda. So how did this unlikely family de­cide to defy tyr­ann­ic­al Nazi rule? In 1940 their be­loved only son Ottochen was kill­ed while fight­­ing in France. Horrified out of their normally comp­liant ex­ist­ence, the couple began a silent campaign of defiance.

Otto, a nearly illiterate foreman making furniture, chang­ed. He wrote anon­ym­ous and diss­ident postcards against the reg­ime, dropping them in building stairwells around their suburb, Berlin-Wedding. His first card said: "Moth­ers, Hitler Will Kill Your Son Too". Then “Work as slowly as you can!” And “Put sand in the mach­ines!” 276 postcards and 8 letters were deposited by the Quangels in 1.5 years.

Despite Otto’s fears, his quiet wife Anna insisted in join­ing Otto’s anti-Nazi campaign. For years the couple's marriage had become lonely. But being unable to console each other for their son’s death, it was suggested that their shared risky project brought them back closer, perhaps in love again.

A scary game developed bet­ween the Quangels and the pol­ice. Ges­tapo Inspector Escherich was the policeman resp­on­sible for sourcing the postcards, out of professional duty rather than Nazi ideol­ogy. During his meticulous search­ for clues about the mysterious post­card writer, Escherich devel­oped a sneaky respect for his criminal.

The postcards irritated the authorities. Failure to solve the case compromised Escherich’s career, the Inspector who was beat­en up by his impatient SS bosses. Clearly the Quangels could never ultimately escape the relentless savagery of the regime; a betrayal would eventually en­sn­are them.

Otto Quangel was caught when post­cards falling out of his pock­et, betrayed by a workmate. The two of them were arrested in Oct 1942, but Otto remained calm about his inevitable ex­ecution. And he did everything to save Anna. But they were both sentenced to death by the People's Court. Did Otto and Anna at least had some moment of moral triumph during the court case?

The film version of Alone in Berlin, 2016

They were executed in Plötzensee prison. After the executions, Gestapo Inspector Escherich was alone in his off­ice. He gath­ered up all of the hund­reds of subversive postcards, scatt­er­ed them out of the police headquarters windows and shot himself dead.

The ten­sion that the author maintained, despite the foregone conclusion, was unnerving. And like daily life in Berlin, the language was harsh and full of misery. Some readers found Alone in Berlin to be morally powerful, while others were just plain exhaust­ed. I liked the reviewer who said that resist­ance to evil was rarely straightforward, mostly futile and generally doomed.

The book did very well and was fil­med for television in both East and West Germany, and then again for the cinema in the west in 1975 with Hildegard Knef and Carl Raddatz.

The 2016 film: Alone in Berlin The 2016 war drama film, based on Hans Fallada’s 1947 book, was directed by Vincent Pér­ez and starred Emma Thompson, Bren­dan Gleeson and Daniel Brühl. It was made in Ber­lin and shown at Berlin’s International Film Festival. The film ended with the image of the postcards swirling in the wind, falling down on the Berlin streets and picked up by pas­sers by. It gave the film's characters an understated posthumous moral victory.

Brilliant Dr Alice Hamilton, USA

Alice Hamilton (1869-1970) grew up in a cult­ured family on a large Fort Wayne Ind. estate. Her fath­er wanted home-schooling for his daughters, but eventually Alice decided to become a doc­tor anyhow. She studied phys­ics and chemistry with a local teach­er, took biol­ogy and anatomy courses, ov­ercame her father’s objections and enrolled in the top class Uni of Michigan Med­ical Sch­ool in 1892. There were c4,500 fe­male doc­tors in the US then, mostly trained at women’s medical colleges.

Dr Hamilton, first-ever woman lecturer at Har­v­ard
Smithsonian

After graduating from Michigan, Dr Hamilton interned at N.W Hosp­ital for Women and Children, Minneapolis and then at the New England Hospital for Women & Children Bos­ton. Hamilton had already decided on a career in research rather than clinical med­ic­ine, but she wanted some clinical exper­ience. In 1893, Hamilt­on accepted a path­ol­ogy re­sear­ch position at Johns Hopkins Medical School. Then she taught path­ology at Women's Med­ic­al School of N.W Uni Ch­icago and was soon was appointed Pathology Prof there.

She lived for years at Hull-House Chicago, a settlement staff­ed by university graduates who helped immig­r­ants and the poor, via social research and reform. Hull-House people investigat­ed family in­come, school truancy, sanitation, TB and issues affecting community health and safety. And they helped organise Lab­our unions when many wealthy Americans opp­os­ed workers’ rights. And she later work­ed as a bact­er­iol­og­ist at Chicago’s Memorial Institute for Infect­ious Diseas­es.

Hull-House, Chicago

In the 1902 summer holidays, Dr Hamilton found Chicago in a severe typhoid fever epidemic. So she needed to explain typhoid, ident­ifying the in­eff­ec­tive sewage dis­­posal in 19th Ward, outdoor toilets, broken plumb­ing, standing water and flies. Tests on flies captured near filthy toi­l­ets ind­ic­at­ed the presence of the typhoid bacillus. But blame properly fell on broken wat­ermains that spewed sewage into water pipes, despite Chicago Board of Health denials.

That same year, when the Women’s Medical School of N.W University closed, Al­ice became a bact­er­iologist at Chicago’s new­ly opened Memorial Institute for Infect­ious Diseas­es. The U.S saw rapid industrialisation and by 1900 had become the world’s most industrialised nat­ion. The growth occur­red in mining, manufact­ur­ing, transport and commerce, enabled by cheap energy, better technol­ogy, grow­ing transport­, investment capital and cheap labour. But it al­so pro­duced low wages, job insec­urity, poor working con­ditions, ind­ust­rial accid­ents & disease.

Industrial poisoning was problematic since it could take years to emerge. Most employees & employers were ign­or­ant of the dang­ers from chemicals, and few factories emp­loyed doc­tors to mon­itor wor­k­er health. In any case, which workers would complain, risking their jobs?

Ill­inois' governor app­ointed Dr Hamilton to the Illinois Commission on Occupat­ional Dis­eases (1908-10). Indus­trial tox­icol­ogy was little und­erstood, so the commiss­ioners asked her to study diseases where high mor­tality rates were found: in painting trades, lead and en­am­el­ware industries, rub­ber production, explosives and munit­ions. The most widely used poisons were lead, arsenic, zinc and carbon mon­oxide.

From 1911-20, she became a special investigator for the U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics, examining the manufacture of white lead and lead ox­ide in paint pigments. The team visited factories, read hospital rec­ords and interviewed unionists to uncover lead poison­ing cases. She discovered 70+ dangerous processes that caused high lead poisoning. During this time, Hamilton became a noted expert in industrial medic­ine. Harvard Uni quickly placed her on fac­ulty in the School of Public Health in In­dustrial Medicine, making her the first-ever woman lecturer at Har­v­ard. This made Dr Hamilton a famous expert in industrial medic­ine.

The Illinois report on industrial disease led to state legisl­at­ion, Oc­c­upational Disease Law (1911), requiring employers to: end work­ers’ ex­posure to risky chemicals, offer monthly medical exams for work­ers in dangerous trades, & report diseases to the Dept of Fact­ory Inspection. Soon Charles Neill, Comm. of Labour in Dept of Comm­erce asked her to do nationally what she’d done in the state, first in the lead trades, then in other poisonous trades.

Workers trimming and binding the felt hats
leading to mercury poisoning
Connecticuthistory

In WWI she also investigat­ed the pois­onous effects of man­­ufacturing expl­os­ives on workers, as requ­ested by National Research Council. Factories had sprung up to produce TNT, picric acid and merc­ury fulminate. Her rep­or­ts on the dan­gers in war-industries led to the adoption of many safety proced­ures. After the war, Hamilton discussed mercury poisoning in the felt-hat industry, the mercury causing wild jerk­ing of limbs, and mental ill­ness. And workers who made matches were subject to an industrial dis­ease that result­ed from fumes of white or yellow phosphorous which pierced the jaw bone.

Hamilton’s impressive work was soon recognised abroad. From 1924 she ser­ved a 6-year term on the Health Committee of the League of Nations. She was invited by the Soviet Public Health Ser­vice, and toured a Moscow hospital that was the first-ever facility devoted to occup­at­ional disease. Appropriately she wrote Indus­trial Poisons in U.S (1925). And she pub­lish­ed Ind­ustrial Toxicology (1934), studying anil­ine dye, carbon mono­xide, mercury, benzene and other toxic chemicals for the Dept of Lab­our. Over the years, her many reports for the Federal gov­ernment dram­at­ised the high mortality rates for industrial workers, bringing major legislative changes.

Alice Hamilton wrote Industrial Toxicology re workplace safety, in 1934.
Radcliffe Institute

Dr Hamilton first encountered carbon disulfide years earlier when she had stud­ied rubber making. Then in 1935, Hamilton conduct­ed a study of vis­c­ose rayon manufacture. This new ind­ustry used two dan­g­erous chem­icals: 1] carbon di­sul­fide, which poisoned the central nervous system, leading to mental disease, blindness and paral­ysis. And 2] hydrogen sulfide, a pow­er­ful asphyxiating toxin. Car­bon disulfide received lit­tle Amer­ican attention until Hamilton examined serious illness­es am­ong U.S viscose rayon workers. The Dept of Labour appointed her Ch­ief Med­ical Consultant, with her results pub­lished in Occ­upational Pois­oning in the Viscose Rayon Industry 1940. What an amazing career.

Finally she retired to write her autobiog­raphy, Expl­oring the Dangerous Trad­es (1943). Hamilton celebrated her 100th birthday in 1970, then passed away. Congress immediately passed the Occupational Safety and Health Act.

The guest writer Dr Joe, recomnends reading Alice Hamilton & Development of Occupational Medic­ine, 2002.