Letter: Join protest over slaver Robert Geffrye statue at Museum of the Home

Sasha Simic, HSUTR, West Bank, Stamford Hill, writes:

Over the last year there has been a campaign to remove the statue of the C17th slaver Robert Geffrye from its plinth over The Museum of the Home in Hoxton.

The statue glorifies a man who made money from the North Atlantic Slave Trade.
Geffrye had shares in the Royal African Company and part-owned the slave ship China Merchant.

A public consultation was held by the museum last June over the future of the statue and 71 per cent of those who took part wanted it taken down.

The reason why the statue still stands over the museum, a year after that public consultation, is because various members of Boris Johnson’s government have stepped in to defend the Geffrye statue and all monuments to slavers.

They have done so under the cover that they are defending British heritage and culture from, what communities secretary Robert Jenrick has described, as “baying mobs” of “woke worthies”.

Culture secretary Oliver Dowden has instructed museum directors that they “must defend our culture and history from the noisy minority of activists constantly trying to do Britain down”.

Home secretary Priti Patel has included a clause in her draconian Police and Crime Bill which would mean a prison sentence of up to 10 years for anyone caught trying to overturn a statue to a slaver.

But neither Dowden nor Jenrick nor Patel have the slightest interest in heritage or culture and prefer Tory myths to authentic history.

Campaigners want the statue of slaver Robert Geffrye put inside the museum (Image: Holly Chant)

For while Dowden has intervened to ensure that the statue Geffrey remains over The Museum of the Home, he didn’t lift a finger to stop the 450-year-old Whitechapel Bell Foundry nearby – a workplace which cast the Liberty Bell and Big Ben – from being converted into a luxury hotel.

Now comes an even more blatant example of Tory contempt for heritage and culture.
Highways England, the government-owned company charged with maintaining motorways and major roads, has insisted it will go ahead with its £1.7bn scheme to dig an underground tunnel near Stonehenge despite the ruling by the High Court at the end of July that the scheme was unlawful and that transport secretary Grant Shapp’s “acted irrationally and unlawfully” when he approved it.

This proves two things.

The first is that Boris Johnson’s government has nothing but contempt for the law.
Secondly, it exposes that lie that the government are fighting a “culture war” in defence of the UK’s heritage.

Stonehenge is the best-known prehistoric monument in Europe and an unparalleled human achievement.

Yet the government puts such little value on it that it is proceeding with a discredited tunnel which can’t help but impact on one of the wonders of the world.

It’s not “baying mobs” of “woke worthies” who threaten the Stonehenge site.
It is the government of Boris Johnson.

The government’s defence of the statue of Robert Geffrye and other slavers has nothing to do with preserving heritage and everything to do with defending the British establishment which is founded on the grotesque exploitation and oppression of the North Atlantic slave trade.

Hackney Stand Up to Racism has called a protest at the Museum of the Home, 136 Kingsland Road, E2 8EA at 12.00 noon on Saturday, August 21. We are marking UNESCO’s Slavery Remembrance Day 2021 by calling on the trustees of the museum to defy the government and take the statue down from its plinth and put it in the museum with the full story of how Geffrye made money made transparent. That’s what museums are supposed to do - deal in facts and the truth.

We urge everyone who can to stand with us on August 21 and tell the trustees that #GeffryeMustFall.