I’ve long been aware that the ship on the badges of both Manchester football clubs represents the city’s historic seafaring trade. I’ve also long known that cotton transported from slave plantations in the deep south formed a huge part of that trade.
As a lifelong fan of the club from the blue side of the city, it has been an embarrassment to wear the crest although, I admit, not enough to stop me buying and wearing replica shirts. My personal get-out clause has always been that Manchester’s connection with the slave trade is “complicated”.
Yes, the city grew rich from cotton picked by brutalised descendants of enslaved Africans, but Mancunians also presented a 2,000 signature petition to the House of Lords to end slavery in 1806. And during the American civil war, workers in the textile mills of what is now Greater Manchester refused to weave cotton that came from slave plantations, at great cost to themselves and their families. This tradition of social consciousness – which gave birth to trade unions, the Chartists, and the Guardian – proves that Manchester was never “anti-woke”.
Yet the presence of that ship on badges worn by City and United remains an embarrassment: they must be removed. We wouldn’t accept Aston Villa having an image of a child in a chimney as its emblem. Well, Black Lives Matter, and so it is time Manchester clubs reckoned with history and decommissioned their ships.
I tweeted about this and predictably got abuse from trolls. The furious reaction from the rightwing media to this debate has also been telling; it seems that some people in this country spontaneously combust if slavery is even mentioned, fighting to preserve the innocence of white history rather than questioning it.
But debate on Bluemoon, the online forum for Manchester City fans, was much more varied. There, they were not frothing at the mouth. Some accepted that the slavery link meant dropping the ship, others were ambivalent, and one rather disingenuously suggested it was only a problem for Salford and Trafford (ie Manchester United) as transatlantic ships docked there. This, of course, ignores the fact that many smaller canals transported cotton and related goods to mills around the region.
Some fans mistakenly claimed that the ships couldn’t be related to slavery because Britain abolished the transportation of enslaved people in 1807, and slavery itself in 1833, while the Manchester ship canal was only opened in 1894.
In reality, Manchester was handling slave cotton from 1781 and long after emancipation, during the Jim Crow era, plantations were still producing cotton under harsh indentured labour. If the Manchester clubs were to explain this to their fans, I’m confident there would be a majority for change, certainly from true Mancunians.
The right will scream woke revisionism, but history is always being reassessed. Few indulge in blackface, and nobody burns witches these days.
If King Charles and the Church of England can examine how they profited from slavery, then Manchester can grapple with the horrific crimes that brought the city wealth and power.
It’s only a matter of time before the ships are ditched. Let’s get it done with. Then I can finally kiss the badge!
Lester Holloway is editor of the Voice, Britain’s only Black national newspaper
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