Gloria Daniel has spent years tracing the connections between the UK’s built environment and its colonial trade in humans. An exhibition at Ashton Court and a new memorial in Bristol Cathedral are pushing back on hidden injustice.
Gloria Daniel at Ashton Court (credit: Stefano Ferrarin)
“When you’re a child of immigrants, you understand what they’ve brought, what they’ve given, what they’ve sacrificed”, says Gloria Daniel.
She’s talking about her passion for history, particularly as it relates to the legacy of colonialism and enslavement and how this has impacted her own family.
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I’m speaking to Daniel in a large hall in Ashton Court, where she’s putting the final touches to her exhibition 50 Plaques and Places, which features handmade ceramic plaques and other artworks by her and other artists.
The exhibition, which runs until 5 October, is designed to highlight the fact that Ashton Court – like many other historical buildings – is intimately linked to fortunes gained from the transatlantic trade in enslaved people.
A few days after it concludes, on 9 October, Daniel will unveil a memorial in another of those buildings – Bristol Cathedral – in a further move to correct deep historical injustice.
Compensating slave owners
From the minute I step into the hall, Daniel emits passion and energy. Before we even start our interview, she’s given me a 30-minute tour of her exhibition and a summary of her work.
Dressed in a dark blue shirt and jeans patched up with strips of kente cloth, she recites details from an encyclopaedic knowledge of Bristol’s slave-owning families, gleaned from years of meticulous archival research.
Daniel is the founder of TTEACH (Transatlantic Trafficked Enslaved African Corrective Historical) Plaques, an initiative designed to highlight the links between slavery and Britain’s built environment. It’s also designed to name and research plantation owners and slave merchants, and commemorate the enslaved people whose misery they profited from.
Much of Daniel’s drive stems from the fact that the 1833 Act for the Abolition of Slavery, which outlawed slavery in Britain’s colonies, contained a provision for the compensation of “Persons hitherto entitled to the Services of such Slaves”.
Bristol Cathedral has over 200 memorials to enslavers in it – it is our right, it is our agency, to demand the right to put up something to our ancestors
Gloria Daniel
This meant merchants and plantation owners were compensated for the loss of their “property”, which at the time amounted to 780,000 enslaved people across the Caribbean. Much of this compensation, which was paid for by a loan taken out by the British government, ended up financing notable buildings, including churches and cathedrals, across the UK.
Before founding TTEACH, Daniel had already lived a varied and interesting life. “I grew up in Ladbroke Grove, Notting Hill, home to world-famous Portobello Market. So I grew up around antiques,” she says, explaining her interest in historical artefacts. She then went on to found a ceramics business in Stoke-on-Trent and also spent stints living in New Zealand and New Orleans.
She grew up in a creative family. “My sister’s an artist. My brother-in-law is an artist. [Her cousin] Johnny was a graphic designer. My niece [musician Nilüfer Yanya] is a singer.”
But Daniel’s work began to take on a more political edge in between the revelations of the Windrush scandal in 2017 and the mass Black Lives Matter protests that erupted in 2020.
‘Important to respond to Black Lives Matter’
She explains that her dad, who arrived in the UK from Barbados in 1957, was a member of the Windrush Generation. He was recruited to work in the UK by a representative of the London Transport Executive, which preceded Transport for London.
“They employed 400 young men to come to work for London transport,” Daniel says. “So my dad came to work as a bus driver.”
The family of Thomas Daniel, on whose plantations Gloria Daniel’s ancestors were enslaved, claimed compensation for 4,424 people after abolition (credit: Stefano Ferrarin)
But it was outrage at the wave of racist murders in the US – including of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in 2020 – that prompted her to dig deeper into her own family’s history.
“Everybody was transfixed at what was happening around the world with Black Lives Matter,” Daniel explains. “And I think it was really important to respond to what was going on.”
One of her starting points was a database, founded by the Centre for the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London, which collated all the names of British slave owners who were compensated through the Abolition of Slavery Act. Daniel was able to trace her ancestry back to a man named John Isaac Daniel.
She discovered that John Isaac Daniel – a painting of whom hangs prominently in the exhibition – had been born in 1828 and was five years old when slavery was abolished in the Caribbean.
“I know his grandson, who’s my grandfather, was able to run a bakery. He didn’t own the property, but he did own the bakery. And I think that’s a mark of the work that they were able to do,” she says, explaining what she learned of her other ancestors.
“People had always worked so hard,” Daniel adds. “You would expect this to continue once people were free.”
John Isaac Daniel had been born into slavery in Barbados on a plantation owned by the family of Thomas Daniel, a prominent sugar merchant, money lender and alderman in Bristol, whose fortunes were deeply enmeshed in the trade of enslaved people.
Thomas Daniel was born in Barbados but returned to the UK to settle in Bristol. As well as financing plantations across the Caribbean, he also owned sugar plantations on islands including Barbados, Jamaica, Antigua and Montserrat. After the abolition of slavery, he received one of the largest amounts of compensation from the British government, allowing his companies Thomas Daniel & Co. and Thomas Daniel & Sons to expand their UK operations.
“We know these Daniels were responsible for claiming compensation on 4,424 people… many of [them] are in Guyana, but quite a lot in Barbados,” says Daniel.
Cathedral’s ‘memorials to enslavers’
Part of the reason Daniel chose Ashton Court for her new exhibition – which she gained access to via Bristol charity Artspace Lifespace – was because one of its previous owners, Emily Smyth, had also been a descendant of Thomas Daniel.
She discovered that the legacy of the Daniel family was inscribed in some of Bristol’s most iconic buildings – including its cathedral.
The huge rose window at one end of Bristol Cathedral is dedicated to the son of Thomas Daniel senior, who continued to expand the Daniel family’s influence in Bristol. The family is also commemorated in a stone engraving on the cathedral wall.
“Bristol Cathedral has over 200 memorials to enslavers in it”, says Daniel. “So one memorial was to Thomas Daniel senior and his wife.
“What really set me off was, I read it and it said ‘sacred to the memory of…’ and I think the word ‘sacred’ pissed me off,” she goes on. “And I was just like, ‘Words are important’. This is just outrageous.”
Daniel set out to correct the injustice by creating a memorial of her own.
“What I was determined to do, and what I really stuck my neck out for was – these are individual stories, by individual families,” she says. “These are our ancestors, and it is our right, it is our agency, to demand the right to put up something to them.”
On 9 October, Daniel and her family will unveil their own stone memorial at Bristol Cathedral.
“It’s six foot. It is hand carved by an artist called Marcia Bennett-Male, and she is of African Caribbean descent herself. We’re delighted that she was able to do it for us”, she says.
“It’s in memory to John Isaac, but also to the 4424 people that the Daniel family received compensation for.”
‘If you have victims, you must have repair’
Given Bristol’s history, and the deep ties many of its institutions and historical buildings have with transatlantic slavery, I ask Daniel what she thinks needs to change in terms of how slavery is taught and talked about.
Daniel’s plaques have been exhibited in London and are now on display in Bristol (credit: Stefano Ferrarin)
“Well, if you have victims, you must have repair”, she says. “If you have benefited, if you stole something from me, you have to give it back – even if you go to prison, you have to give it back. So of course there must be financial reparations, but that is only the beginning.”
By the end of our interview, we’re back on our feet and Daniel points me towards a banner bearing her family’s motto – ‘By our names we will know you’, written in both Latin and English.
“The ‘know’ means that we will recognise you,” she says. “And that’s what I’m here about: let’s get people to understand what their names were, what our name actually means to the wider history, and what we can do to challenge this country, Europe, America, where we live.
“There’s a price to be paid. And they have not paid for the largest crime against humanity ever committed.”
50 Plaques and Places is at Ashton Court Mansions until Saturday 5 October.
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Publish date : 2024-10-03 00:06:00
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