A BBC news story this week about members of the Gladstone family visiting Guyana to apologise for their ancestral links to slavery in the Caribbean has all the historical errors and elisions we have become used to in reports and investigations on the subject of slavery. The authors do not appear to know the difference between parliament’s abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and its emancipation of slaves in the British empire in 1833, and they have William Gladstone giving his first Commons speech in 1831 when he was still an undergraduate in Oxford.
Gladstone is collateral damage, guilty by association, and held responsible for decisions and investments he did not make
They join the National Portrait Gallery in their confusions. A new label beside Millais’s portrait of the Grand Old Man tells us that Gladstone was ‘initially opposed to abolishing the transatlantic slave trade’, which may have been difficult for him because abolition occurred two years before he was born.
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