Building Bridges of Friendship | Bits of the Penrhyn Story

Bits of the Penrhyn Story

Fatima’s poem’ was a contribution to Colonial Countryside, a child-led writing and history project (and now a book) commissioned by the National Trust working with a team of historians led by Corinne Fowler. Like many British institutions, the National Trust has in recent years begun to discuss and investigate its connections to the British Empire and the Atlantic slave trade. ‘Fatima’s Poem’ is addressed to Richard Pennant, 1st Baron Penrhyn (1737-1808), and was inspired by a visit to Penrhyn Castle, one of eleven National Trust houses involved in the project. Pennant’s family owned four sugar plantations in Jamaica and he used some of the profits to develop the Penrhyn slate quarry. After his death, the estate passed to his second cousin, George Hay Dawkins Pennant, a fierce opponent of abolition. After the Slavery Abolition Act passed in 1833, Dawkins Pennant was awarded compensation of £14,683 for the 764 enslaved men and women that the law no longer recognised as his property. The freed men and women received nothing and were initially compelled to work as ‘apprentices’. Dawkins Pennant put some of this money into building Penrhyn Castle as a neo-Norman fantasia, but though a large sum at the time, it paled in comparison to the riches he and his forebears had accumulated during their decades of slave ownership. His fortune at his death in 1840 was an estimated £600,000. By the end of the 19th century, the Penrhyn quarry led the world in slate production, employing some three thousand people. It became the site of the longest industrial strike in British history, from 1900 to 1903. For hundreds of years, the Pennant family used advantages of race and class to grow and consolidate their wealth and power. There is still a Baron Penrhyn, but Penrhyn Castle was transferred to the National Trust in 1951 in lieu of death duties and now receives more than a hundred thousand visitors a year. In 2011 the North Wales Jamaica Society was established to trace links such as these, to establish shared histories and offer modest material redress in the hope of repairing some of the harm done.

Colonial Countryside made use of the Legacies of British Slave Ownership (LBS) database, established between 2009 and 2016 and hosted by UCL, which records the slaveowners who received compensation after 1833. It includes biographical work on those with addresses in Britain, revealing something of the scale of the wealth that plantation slavery created for families such as the Pennants. By considering the different work undertaken by Colonial Countryside (education and engagement), the LBS project (research and collation) and the North Wales Jamaica Society (communication and reparation), we can begin to imagine what a reckoning with Britain’s legacy of slavery and colonial exploitation might look like.