The Fifth Biannual Report of the Archbishops’ Commission for Racial Justice (ACRJ) of the Church of England landed on my desk a few weeks ago. Published in the Summer of 2024, it oozes oleaginous virtue-signals from almost every page. The “Message from the Chair” (wording which always suggests to me an improbably voluble piece of furniture on which one sits) weaselly expresses “real concern … at the evidence … found of active resistance to the work necessary to ensure that the Church … lives out the Gospel in both its teaching and practice”. It goes on to complain of “foot-dragging”, emphasises “the need to embed racial justice in the Governance of the Church of England”, finds “the good, the bad and the downright ugly … in the Parishes Dioceses and Cathedrals”, and nauseatingly laments how  “bad people” are “emboldened to continue down the Godforsaken paths they have chosen”. We read of the need for “openness and transparency”, of course, and are assaulted by cringe-making horrors such as “the data is” (also widely adopted by the BBC, which also believes the media are singular), “concerted action in the course of culture change”, and many other drearily predictable Newspeak clichés. Other delights (written by a Bishop, God help us!) include “the person … asked where they would like to serve”, and the “ordinand was later asked where they would like to serve”. If that were the sort of stuff issuing from a pulpit in my hearing I would not bother to waste any more time there.

Then we come to the ACRJ’s “investment” of “considerable effort” to visit the Parish of King Charles the Martyr in Falmouth, Cornwall, where the “local mission of the church has been considerably impaired by the presence within its main worship area of a lavish monument to a locally notorious slave trader”. The Commission supports the PCC in “planning towards re-siting the memorial elsewhere within the church so it could be a focus for education rather than a distraction from worship”. So what could be this dreadful “impairment” to the “local mission” to attract such opprobrium?

In fact, the monument is a very prettily composed piece, the inscription on an elliptical panel held within a wreath and set on a rectangular slab supported on a shelf carried on putti heads: above the rectangle is an achievement of arms, nicely coloured. The Latin inscription informs us that the monument is sacred to the memory of Thomas Corker, who died on 10 September 1700 in his 31st year. There is not one word on this monument (nor indeed is there any part of it) to which a reasonable person could object: there is no mention of slavery at all. It does not seem to occur to those who go along with the notions of weeding out memorials to persons of whom they disapprove, that a decorative monument, with pretty colouring and detail, and an inscription in Latin which does not refer in any way to slavery, could hardly cause discomfort to anybody without deliberate inquisitorial probings by those actually wanting to discover artefacts about which they could take exception. As most people nowadays, thanks to ever-narrowing and dumbed-down “education”, cannot read Latin, it is extremely doubtful if anyone would have connected the Falmouth memorial with anything at all until its associations had been deliberately sought out by those determined to find something “offensive”.

So who was Thomas Corker? Born in Falmouth, c.1669, he was the younger of two sons of Thomas Corker, a ship’s surgeon, who hailed from County Meath in Ireland, although the family seems to have previously lived in Lancashire in or near Manchester. The father died young, and aged 14 young Thomas, like many others,  entered the Royal African Company as an apprentice, assigned to the coast of Guinea, eventually becoming chief agent on York Island, Sherbro, Sierra Leone, a slave-trading centre on the Sherbro River. While stationed there, he married the daughter of a Sherbro Chieftain whose realm was the shore of Yawri Bay: known as Señora (or Seniora) Doll, she was a Princess or Duchess of the House of Ya Kumba, and died in 1722. The couple had two sons: Stephen (born 1685) and Robin (also known as Skinner, born 1687), who eventually inherited their mother’s Chiefdom, and used their English ancestry to acquire influence with other traders in the region, establishing the family’s status and wealth well into the 19th century, by which time Corkers had become Caulkers, a major slave-trading Afro-European clan, descendants of which survive to this day. The Royal African Company transferred Thomas Corker to The Gambia in 1699, and he left his family behind. It is not known if his return to Falmouth was intended as permanent, or if, in fact, he had abandoned his family, but he was certainly very well-off by 1700, and had not Death intervened, he may have wished either to return to Africa or settle down in England to enjoy his good fortune.

Now there is no doubt that the British became major players in the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans, although they did not start it, and they were never the only participants, but they derived significant wealth from their involvement in what was clearly a cruel, odious business. Both the Sugar and Cotton Plantations hugely benefited Britons: even as late as 1860 textiles produced in British mills were made of cotton from the slave plantations of the United States of America, long after the Slave Trade as such had been abolished in these islands. However, it should be remembered that the Trade could not have existed unless the African Chiefs sold their people to Arab middle-men, who then passed on the “merchandise” to European shippers for export to the Caribbean and the American Colonies. Those facts, of course, are very much played down in contemporary discourse.  

There has been much talk of “reparations” for the undoubted wrongs of the slave-trade, but where would such payments end up? With the descendants of the Chieftains who originally sold their people into Slavery? With the descendants of the Arab Traders for Loss of Income? These are serious questions: I do not detect any movement from the successor-states of the Ottoman Empire to make “reparations” to the families deprived of their young men and women abducted by Barbary pirates from round the shores of the British Isles (or Atlantic Archipelago, to give them their more p-c label): blonde girls were in especial demand (no need to wonder why). The Romans, too, prized German and English slaves, but there does not appear to be much enthusiasm among Italian politicians to make huge “reparations” to Berlin or London. Dublin had once one of the largest slave-markets in Western Europe: as far as I know, the Dáil Éireann is not pursuing any “reparations” agenda in respect of any nation or group today. It should be recalled that Patricius, later Apostle of Ireland (c.387-465, or, possibly, c.420-90), was Romano-British by birth (though some authorities claim he was from Gaul), but was captured by Irish pirates and spent six years as a slave in Ireland until he escaped and left the country, to return later as a missionary. Slaves were a huge part of Viking economy, yet there seems to be little of no activity in Scandinavian countries to pay “reparations” to Ireland, England, or anywhere else. It is an historical fact that slavery was usual among a great many societies and cultures, and was regarded as perfectly normal in the past. It has certainly continued today in several parts of the world. 

Another monument to cause “offence” was that to Tobias Rustat (1608-94), who, after the Restoration of the Monarchy, became a Director of the Royal African Company, but that was only one of his many financial interests. Being unmarried, with very few household responsibilities, he made generous donations to charity: these included the enormous sum of £10,000 to Leicestershire churches, St Paul’s Cathedral, Chelsea Hospital, St John’s Hospital in Bath, St John’s Colleges in Oxford and Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, and Jesus College Cambridge. He also endowed eight scholarships for the sons of deceased Anglican clergymen, and was the largest single benefactor to the building of the Royal Hospital at Chelsea. After his death he was entombed in the chapel of Jesus College Cambridge, where he was commemorated by a fine funerary monument of c.1686, almost certainly from the studio of Grinling Gibbons (1648-1721): described in as “excellent” in Bradley & Pevsner’s Cambridgeshire in The Buildings of England Series (2014), with “the courtier’s portrait in an oval medallion, two asymmetrically posed putti holding up draperies, and garlands below the description”, it is a fine Baroque piece.

It is my contention that monuments to individuals involved in the slave-trade (and its spin-offs) should definitely not be removed. They offer an opportunity to educate people about the trade. Non-removal with display-notices explaining the facts would be infinitely cheaper than the costs of removal and storage (storage where, anyway?). I note that while this turgid document mentions costs, it is very vague about them, and makes no provision, as far as I can see, for any help whatsoever to already impoverished parishes who are ordered to remove “offensive” monuments or monuments to persons deemed offensive. One presumes the parishes are expected to fork out the funds or close their ancient churches (which, presumably, is what the Archbishops really want: one can almost hear dark mutterings of “redundant plant” or some such nonsense). This offensive document displays nothing but prejudice, notably concerning rural churches, and there is not a squeak about beauty, artistic quality, æsthetics or anything like that: presumably such concerns are dismissed as “élitist” or even as “bourgeois”. It does, however, accord any “person of colour” the accolade of being “Black”, but Causasians are relegated to lower-case “white”. Presumably the parishioners of St Charles the Martyr in Falmouth will have to foot the bill to remove a pretty monument which probably caused very few problems, least of all “impairment” of anything, until some snooper drew attention to a link with slavery. 

There is one important point which seems to have escaped the keen advocates for the banishment of memorials: the monuments do NOT belong to the churches in which they are placed. In fact, they are owned by the descendants of the families who erected them. Have the descendants of Corker and Rustat been consulted? I very much doubt it. I know if anyone attempted to remove the monuments of my ancestors they would have to contend with me and my family.

What is deeply troubling is the thin-lipped iconoclastic zealotry that demands the destruction of anything at all which might incur the displeasure, suspicion, and hatred of self-appointed wreckers, always seeking to be offended by the smallest thing. They are disturbingly reminiscent of the East Anglian iconoclast William Dowsing (c.1596-1668) and his like, who did immense damage in their time. Such destroyers took exception to the most innocent decorations, seeing witchcraft in the piscinæ, devils in the sedilia, and heretics lurking behind every pier, every statue, every lovely screen: they expressed their loathing, their hatred of beauty, in violent destruction. They are all alike, those fanatics, intent on ripping out screens, pews, and anything else they hate, throwing them and statuary on to bonfires; hacking faces off sculpture; desecrating shrines; slapping whitewash over wall-paintings; and having monuments to the dead roughly cast aside (such artefacts are rarely preserved: their removal is just an excuse for their obliteration). Wallowing in the depths of solipsistic obsessions, such creatures are for ever ready to burn books or people, always armed with their cheery hellfire while mouthing their gnomic slogans, those giveaways of the religious cheap-jack, the supposedly “caring” impostor, the dweller in twilit realms of abstraction and obfuscation where there is not a chance for clean, clear thinking about anything. Reading a document such as this, stuffed with vaporous musings, a healthy-minded adult can only come to the conclusion that he or she has nothing to learn from it, except to take serious warnings from its turbid posturings and fatuous humbuggery. 

The tone of the document is very much reminiscent of the effusions of self-appointed and self-identified “Elect” during the 17th century, those puritans who threw out of churches almost everything of which they disapproved, leaving them naked, vandalised, and with parts of the fabric often ruined. Again and again one reads of a very narrow definition of what a church is for, omitting the connection between the living and the dead (a hugely important aspect of religious observance in the past, the loss of which has contributed to the catastrophic decline of any meaning a church might have for those living near it), discarding ritual, the Sacraments, the numinous, beauty, ceremony, dignity, music, glorious furnishings, and just about everything else. The only thing that appears to matter these days is “culture change”, involving the “reframing of theology”, the elimination of anything in a church likely to cause “emotional harm”, and the “re-ordering of churches” to ensure a “confident ‘Jesus-shaped’ church of the future can be built”. One might be excused for speculating what exactly that might mean, given our lack of reliable knowledge concerning the Redeemer’s physiognomy, but one can be certain it will involve huge sums of money for “impact investment, research, and engagement” to counter “the ongoing resistance” and “reactionary voices” within the “Church of England to efforts by the Church to acknowledge and atone for its ideological complicity with … the international chattel slavery trade”. 

Given such pusillanimous attitudes, tendencies to censorship, prissy attempts to spare punters from any “emotional harm”, one can imagine notices placed by the doors of every church and cathedral in England. These would contain warnings that visitors might find some things inside “upsetting”, thereby occasioning “emotional harm”: Dooms above chancel arches, perhaps; statues of the Crucified Christ, with blood pouring from His Five Wounds; effigies of long-dead individuals on tombs; skulls, bones, gisant cadavers to show the realities of death and decay, a feature of many funerary monuments intended as admonitions; and frightful depictions of Hell and devils, as in the late-mediæval stained-glass in the great west window of the nave of St Mary’s church, Fairford, Gloucestershire. Sculpted cadavers, painted Dooms, and colourful Hells in windows were intended to be warnings of what could befall sinners, and so were deliberately scary. 

The Bible, too, will probably have to have printed warnings about “emotional upset” on the very first page, as it is stuffed full violence, sex, death, destruction, plagues, much gnashing of teeth, considerable “smitings”, and whole peoples taken into slavery. The Song of Songs is a celebration of physical love, and none the worse for that. But there are also some very unpleasant episodes, such as that reported in Genesis 34:14-31 when the sons of Jacob, having made an arrangement for co-existence with the Hivite Prince Hamor and his son, Shechem, involving circumcision of all the males in the realm, slew those males “when they were sore”, which always struck me as rather unsporting, and unlikely to endear the Jacobeans to other tribes or groups in the vicinity, or to encourage trust in them. 

This document actually has a passage questioning the campaign against the Mahdi (1843-85) in the Sudan: there is no mention of the slave-trade that was part and parcel of the culture there, which the British suppressed. Presumably, therefore, slavery is acceptable to the authors of this dismal document, provided it was not British. We read of “Diverse People Inhabiting Praise” (how do people, diverse or otherwise, inhabit Praise, one ponders?), and of English rural churches as “traditionalist settings where whiteness is normative” and those of “United Kingdom Minorities Ethnic [UKME]/Global Majority Heritage [GMH] are seen straight-forwardly as ‘foreign’”, so English rural churches are deeply suspect to the concocters of this horrible piece of work. Is it any wonder that the rural parishes, often served by one incumbent, feel under threat, not least because of financial demands, and that churches have dwindling congregations leading to redundancy? One might suggest that an unfortunate Anglican incumbent, obliged to act as priest for six or more rural parishes in England, has an impossible task. Such clergy, while not literally slaves, are being worked to death in return for a pittance, and with a lack of consideration from diocesan apparatchiks, which amounts to abuse and cruelty.  

[The] authors might have the humility to ask themselves why the churches are emptying, and why so many have just had enough

I know many demoralised clerics, and parishioners, who are deeply distressed by what is happening. A senior, educated clergyman of my acquaintance, the kind of individual who used to be called a gentleman, who shares my great sorrow concerning the widespread damage being inflicted, told me about what a devoted Anglican had recently said to him: “my beloved Church has been taken from me, and nobody has lifted a finger to save it”. That bereaved person has been received into the Roman Catholic Church: others, feeling sickened and betrayed, have just given up, and many more will do just that.  

The Church of England’s life today, the document tells us, is dominated by fears of a decline into irrelevance. Its authors might have the humility to ask themselves why the churches are emptying, and why so many have just had enough. When everything of real value is being jettisoned and replaced by political and racial posturings, larded with grotesquely insulting references to persons with skin colours not deemed worth the courtesy of capital letters given to those of more acceptable skin hues, one might query the wisdom of producing stuff of such dismal quality. Neo-Puritanism is wrecking the Church, sundering any sense of Communion with the Saints and Fellowship with the whole Company of Heaven. Why bother going to an empty shell of  Church, its buildings stripped of anything of beauty or meaning, their lovely old pews replaced with plastic chairs, their chancels abandoned, their altars forgotten, replaced by flimsy tables plonked in what remains of naves, their walls denuded of memorials to the dead, their fonts forgotten in favour of plastic bowls, the mellifluous language of the Prayer Book superseded by the banalities of the latest linguistic horror inflicted by ignorant barbarians, the settings for “worship” so vandalised that they resemble the unappetising waiting-rooms of labour exchanges or “advice-centres”?  One might be forgiven the wry thought that such settings might not appeal to the Deity: certainly, any sense of holiness, mystery, peace, and stillness has been expunged forever from such dismal places.

The authors assure us that they hope to:

… further enhance the development of anti-racist and culturally responsible mentorship. A “toolkit” is also “in the works” to ensure participants are well-equipped to support UKME/GMH clergy, consider racial trauma and racial battle fatigue, and prioritise their own health and wellbeing. 

If the “toolkit” is as damaging as this awful piece of work, then God help the Anglican Church, for if this sort of thing goes on there will be little left to save at all.