LANCASTER LIKE LIVERPOOL TRIES TO MINIMISE ITS SLAVE TRADE LINKS

Last week I went to the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool. Although worthy of a visit, despite its minimisation of the Middle Passage and its desperate attempts to show that because Nelson Mandela became President of South Africa and James Brown was a successful musician that we should forget it and move on, we must ask why there is a whole warehouse on the Albert Docks and more across the city dedicated to The Fab Four, the Beatles, when a museum of the Transatlantic Slave Trade is quietly tucked away on the 3rd floor above a floor dedicated to The Titanic and a few other ships.

The Transatlantic Slave Trade, not The Beatles, made Liverpool. The Transatlantic Slave Trade made Liverpool the major port of Great Britain. Not Bristol. Not London. Liverpool dominated the slave trade. Yet this gruesome, repugnant, repulsive, detestable, sickening history of Liverpool is hidden by The Fab Four.

But behind Liverpool and Bristol there was a very surprising Northern town that was boosted by the Transatlantic Slave Trade to become the fourth most influential port in England : Lancaster.

Today I went to the Lancaster Maritime Museum on St Georges Quay. I paid a fee of £3 for the privilege of wandering two small floors revealing a maritime history of Lancaster, Morecambe and even Poulton. But despite several brief but explicit admissions that The Transatlantic Slave Trade transformed Lancaster from a small market town to the fourth most influential port in England, guess how much of the museum was dedicated to the Transatlantic Slave Trade? One small room, tucked quietly away on the first floor. There was more space dedicated to shrimping in Morecambe Bay than to the most disgusting stain on humanity that made Lancaster.

And to put the icing on the cake, one small area of the small room on slavery covered the story of 'Sambo', an African slave boy of some kind, but nobody knows, who is buried at Sunderland Point. Several tales exist about the story of this boy, but one really takes the limeade : he died of a broken heart after his master abandoned him!!

So first Liverpool. Now Lancaster. Acknowledging their roles in the Transatlantic Slave Trade but minimising it, through The Beatles and shrimps.