Standing outside Dove Cottage in Grasmere in the drizzle, Prof Corinne Fowler seems a very unlikely looking fire starter. But that is exactly how anonymously apoplectic defenders of crown and country have tended to view her. Fowler was, in 2020, the co-author of a report into the colonial history of properties belonging to the National Trust. After which, as they say in the tabloids, all hell broke loose.
At the moment her report was published, culture war arguments about the country’s past were already primed. The statue of the slave-trading philanthropist Edward Colston had lately been toppled into Bristol harbour; Black Lives Matter marches had brought an end to lockdown; footballers were taking the knee. For some on the right, Fowler’s report became (yet another) lightning rod for their anger.
Most of the academic research in that report was already in the peer-reviewed public domain. Still, the professor was characterised in the Telegraph as being “at war with the past”. Nigel Farage accused her of “trashing” our nation (his own special subject). A group of 59 Conservative MPs and peers calling themselves, without any apparent irony, the “Common Sense Group” declared a “battle for Britain” against “subversives fuelled by ignorance and an arrogant determination to erase the past and rewrite the future”. Sir John Hayes, the group’s chair – and occupant of one of the safest Tory seats in England, South Holland and The Deepings in rural Lincolnshire – condemned Fowler’s report as “unpatriotic”. “History,” he wrote, “must neither be sanitised nor rewritten to suit ‘snowflake’ preoccupations.” (Preoccupations, I guess, such as recorded fact and evidential truth.)
The vitriol was only part of it. As a result of the report, two incendiary parliamentary debates were held about the purpose of the National Trust. A vocal pressure group with opaque funding, Restore Trust, was formed to attempt a takeover of the charity’s board in order to denounce “wokery” – in other words, any reference to the ways in which Downton Abbey fantasies may have been funded by violent colonial exploitation. Country house scones were monitored for signs of sedition – replacing English butter with continental margarine – and found wanting.
To begin with, Fowler admits, she was, understandably, somewhat unnerved by all this outrage. Particularly as the comments sections of national newspaper websites were populated with suggestions about how she should be harmed – the words “woman” and “professor” in the same sentence seemed a particular problem for many of her trolls. For a while she was unable to leave home unaccompanied and was in regular dialogue with the police about threats to her safety.
Eventually, however, and against most advice, she decided to do the most courageous thing: she started to answer her hate mail with courtesy, asking people exactly what upset or angered them and discussing in detail her own research and the historical evidence that supported her findings. Almost always, she says, these exchanges eventually ended cordially, with her correspondents wishing her well (one persistent offender even invited her and her son to visit his private wood in Norfolk). As a result, she came to the conclusion – much needed across all our public life – that “dialogue and openness are always the best antidotes to culture war”.
It was with this belief in mind that Fowler embarked on her follow-up to that report: a dozen walks in rural Britain that are intended to open up a deeper sense of the history that her National Trust project research explored – in particular, the fact that just about every big house and surrounding village in our green and pleasant land “speaks volumes about colonialism’s distinctive phases, dimensions and impacts”. As Salman Rushdie once observed: “The trouble with the English is that their history happened overseas, so they don’t know what it means.” Fowler’s terrific, thoughtful, conversational book based on her walks, Our Island Stories, brings a lot of that understanding back home. “British colonial history,” she says, “requires emotionally intelligent approaches. It triggers everything from ancestral trauma to actual denial… for this reason knowledge is not something to be weaponised, but to be shared.”
Her walks have taken her from the Hebridean whisky isles, Jura and Islay (unearthing the ways they were shaped by the historical links with the Jamaican sugar, tobacco and slave trades), down through the Cotswolds (a landscape that reveals close ties to the East India Company) to the forgotten histories of Cornwall’s tin mines and their relationship to west Africa and the West Indies.
I’m meeting Fowler at Grasmere to retrace the Lake District leg of her journey. She has bought a pack of gingerbread from the tiny shop beside St Oswald’s churchyard where the Wordsworths are buried. The gingerbread has been made and sold here to a “secret recipe” since 1854 – the rum for its butter and the ginger itself were shipped into Whitehaven port from Jamaica by Wordsworth’s patrons, the Lowther family, who had made a large part of their fortune in the slave trade. As we set off to walk around Grasmere and Rydal Water, between the houses in which the poet lived, Fowler cheerfully recounts relevant parts of that history.
I happen to know a fair bit about Wordsworth’s life – I wrote a university dissertation on his revolutionary ideas about rural poverty – so am therefore doubly fascinated to discover the full story of his associations with colonial trade, which hardly figures in any of the literary histories.
There are two strands to Fowler’s telling of it. The first involves Wordsworth’s younger brother John, who was a ship’s captain for the East India Company, with frequent lucrative voyages to China and the subcontinent, which helped to fund William’s early vocation (and supply drugs for friends including Coleridge and De Quincey). In 1805 John Wordsworth set sail for India and China, intending to secure his fortune by illicitly trading opium, on the company’s largest ship, the Abergavenny. But just off the coast of Weymouth, in a storm, the ship foundered on rocks and John and most of his crew drowned. The news came as a huge blow to William, not least because he was left with diminished means to support his sister, Dorothy, and his growing family. The poet replaced the funds he had hoped to receive from John’s colonial adventures with patronage from Sir William Lowther, a former Tory MP and major landowner, whose fortune also relied on colonial trade. The political compromises Wordsworth was required to make – to support life at the bigger house at Rydal Mount – not only in espousing the increasingly conservative views of his patron, but also, as Fowler reveals, trying to secure “Mississippi bonds” in cotton plantations for his daughter, fatally damaged his reputation as a radical (“Just for a handful of silver he left us,” Browning wrote in his poem The Lost Leader, “just for a riband to stick in his coat…”).
Walking through John’s Grove, where William and Dorothy used to lie in the shade and look out over the lake to mourn their brother, Fowler reflects on the ways that in scholarly English departments “the writer’s precarious relationship to money is too often overlooked”. And if you follow that money in the 18th and 19th centuries, as she has done (not only for Wordsworth, but also – pearl-clutchers look away – for Jane Austen), it invariably leads back to the great engine of British capital from the 17th century on, the trade in tobacco and cotton and sugar – and in enslaved people.
For her original walks Fowler chose companions with ancestral connections to empire, who helped her to see the villages, hills and fields in a new light. Her companion in the Lakes was the photographer and artist Ingrid Pollard. Back in the 1980s Pollard, a lover of the Lakes, had became increasingly frustrated at the absence of faces like hers in any of the postcards or depictions of the region. She created Pastoral Interlude, a photographic sequence featuring people of colour in the countryside. “I wandered lonely as a Black face in a sea of white”, one image is captioned.
Pollard and Fowler became friends when they worked together on Fowler’s Colonial Countryside initiative, which brought kids from inner-city schools to country houses and asked them to examine their own biographies in relation to what they found there. “I loved,” Fowler says, “how Ingrid never walks in a straight line. She is always stopping to look at something in a hedge or by the side of the road. She’s a true photographer; she sees everything.”
Colonial Countryside, funded by the Arts Council and the National Lottery, ran from 2018 until 2020. “For me, there is nothing better than hearing a range of British kids talking about what history means to them,” Fowler says. “All these different perspectives, and real hearts and minds stuff.”
She remembers a trip to the Eastern Museum at Kedleston Hall, the collection of treasures that George Curzon, the former viceroy of India, had brought back from his travels. A young girl on her project from Derby walked in and immediately pointed to one of these objects and said “that’s lapis lazuli”. Fowler asked her how she knew. She said: “Well my grandma is from Afghanistan and she brought some pieces with her.”
As part of Colonial Countryside, Fowler invited some of the children’s parents to the National Trust properties. “One or two, of south Asian heritage, cried when they saw some of the items and read what was written about them,” she says. “Several of the volunteers at the properties, who had been there for decades, said to me afterwards: ‘It made me realise for the first time that what we have here is actually more relevant to these people’s history than to ours.’”
The Colonial Countryside work led directly to Fowler being commissioned to do a full audit of the history of National Trust houses. Of course, some of the truths she uncovered were not welcomed by some of the current beneficiaries of those estates. One or two got in touch demanding changes. One woman asked her to remove a whole section about her ancestral pile. Fowler laughs. “It was a strange argument. She did not dispute the fact that her family had indeed invested in a company which traded in enslaved people – by buying South Sea Company shares – but the fact was, the woman said, they had ended up losing out on that investment, so it wasn’t fair to say they had profited from slavery.”
Fowler had to tell the woman that the aim of the report was not to inflict reputational damage on inherited fortunes, but to present a deeper understanding of the facts. As the historian David Olusoga pointed out, “History doesn’t care very much about our feelings… country houses are not a soft play area.”
Walking through the landscape, she says, rather than sitting in an archive describing it, is a good way of bringing these stories to full life. It also offers the kind of built-in natural therapy that Wordsworth would have recognised. “Some of what I have been writing about is quite hard to think about – but the context should make it a gentle book,” she says, “though I suppose I know in practice it will upset some people.”
* * *
Fowler has been a rambler since childhood. She grew up in Birmingham, where she still lives – she’s a professor at Leicester University – and both of her parents were keen walkers. Her mother, like her, started out as a teacher, before going on to train courtroom interpreters. Her father was a legal aid lawyer in criminal practice. She has a twin sister who is a campaigning podcaster for the Tax Justice Network. They used to walk as a family in town and on trips to Shropshire and Wales. As a student Fowler walked from Land’s End to John o’Groats. On our circumnavigation of the lakes, she sets a fair pace. “Since I turned 50,” she says, “I’ve made more effort to be fit.” I wish, as our walk proceeds, I could say the same. She’s run a few 10ks and is working up to a half marathon.
As part of her research, Fowler felt duty bound, with the help of a cousin, to look into her own family’s history. Her mother’s family is French. She was shocked to discover that her ancestors on that side included enslavers on the Caribbean island of Haiti. “One of them, it turned out, was actually the governor of Haiti just before the slave rebellion led by Toussaint L’Ouverture [strangely the subject of a Wordsworth poem].” She had no idea. “Perhaps,” she says, with a smile, “I had some unconscious need to work all this history out.” She balances out that knowledge with the fact that her son, through his Venezuelan father, “is descended from Africans who were transported from Benin and the Congo by European slave traders”. The stories prove her point that our island history involves, because of the nature of 300 years of empire, all of the world’s histories, for better and worse.
As we circle past Rydal Mount, and down to the shoreline of Rydal Water, the clouds reflecting in the surface of the lake, we talk about the effect of all the hate mail that Fowler was subjected to. “The lucky thing in a way,” she says, “was that it was lockdown, so they couldn’t easily physically get to me,” though the threats felt real enough.
“It all seems a long way off now – but I do think I will probably get a bit more of it with this book. The thing is, though, I’m not afraid of anybody now. When that many powerful people are that angry with you, after a while you start to think: this can’t be about me personally, it’s about what I represent to them. That knowledge cured me of previous worries. And that’s amazing, because I now feel I can say what I want to say.”
She doesn’t dwell too much on the psychology or politics of those who would rather she kept quiet about some of the more disturbing realities of the history she is uncovering. “It doesn’t need to be a threat to them. It is just adding a layer of information and knowledge. And you have to remember it’s one thing for those people to say that I am spoiling their enjoyment of the past or whatever. What about people of colour having to look at paintings of enslaved people in chains, of which there are more than 300 in British country houses?”
Her research opens up questions of what to do with such artworks and sculptures, the debates currently going on in museums and galleries up and down the land. Where does she stand, I wonder, on the question of whether the statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford, should come down?
“To be honest,” she says. “I’m not sure. Removing statues and putting them somewhere else can be very powerful. But I don’t think it is for me to decide. We should be listening more carefully to the people who were most affected by that history. One idea I heard was to leave him up but face him to the wall.”
The revisionist history is only beginning, she believes, and rightly so. It’s not a phase or a fad. “The younger generation are far less precious about British history,” she says. “They are instinctively inclusive; they have to be.”
One of Fowler’s heroes is the classical historian Mary Beard, whom she recently heard give a lecture, “Who Owns the Past?” at the Royal Society. “It was very funny. She started off talking about an Alan Bennett play [People], a spoof of the National Trust in which a character finds these 18th-century chamber pots with 18th-century urine still in them – and there is a debate about whether it should be preserved.”
Beard insisted that far from being a recent fracture, the institutional history of the National Trust had always had an enormous amount of internal conflict. Beard’s own campaign would be to see fewer red ropes and thistles on chairs; let the houses live. Her lecture referred to a National Trust visit at which she insisted on sitting with her hosts around an “off-limits” dining table to chat, pointing out to them: “That is what these places should be: a starting point for conversations.”
That is very much Fowler’s perspective. “I wrote this current book partly in response to those people who said: ‘Rather than empire, why don’t you write about the working class in this country, the labourers and servants, why not concentrate on them?’”
She makes the argument that the lives of those ordinary British people were inevitably as intertwined with the subjects of empire, and its commercial imperatives and greed, as those of the big landowners. “The deeper I went into the countryside, the more I found,” she says. One of the telling themes of her book is the way that the practice of land-grabs and subjugation of people abroad was mirrored at home. The big plantation owners abroad were also the plutocrats who walled off common land, under successive acts of enclosure, and shaped the countryside we know today. “It’s funny,” Fowler says, as we approach Wordsworth’s home at Allan Bank, “The other day I was in Suffolk, working with Suffolk museums on some of that history. All the archivist did was put “Jamaica” into the search engine and she wheeled out a huge trolley of documents, amazing stories about the buying and selling of plantations, all belonging to the families from the big local houses.”
As her book shows, the Tories were not known as the landed interest for nothing, and you find their heirs, politically and in some cases physically, in the louder voices of the Common Sense Group and Restore Trust. As Fowler’s work implies, whenever anyone gets irrationally irate about which history is remembered and which forgotten, it’s always worth following the money and seeing who might benefit from the selective amnesia.
“Once you start looking,” she says, “you see these stories everywhere. I could easily do another book with 10 or 20 walks.”
By now, on this particular walk, we are back near where we began, happy to have beaten a forecast storm. I leave Fowler to catch a bus to Windermere and have a wander among the daffodils in St Oswald’s churchyard. The Wordsworth grave plot is where I remember it, but I examine the memorials for William and Dorothy and John with a new layer of complicated understanding. That is the power of history; it is, despite what the “patriots” might argue, never set in stone.
Our Island Stories by Corinne Fowler is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
