How Nottingham University's trying to cancel two founders who donated millions over their links to slavery... even though it was abolished before they were born: ROBERT HARDMAN
Walk around this handsome, bustling campus – home to nearly 40,000 students – and the names of two men stand out.
One was born to great wealth, a duke related to the Royal Family and heir to a stately home so vast it had a railway from the kitchen to the dining room.
The other grew up in poverty, scouring hedgerows in search of berries for his father’s home-made potions. Between them, though, they would donate the money, the land and the prestige to this institution – making it one of Britain’s great seats of learning.
Hence the fact that the University of Nottingham’s two principal buildings bear these benefactors’ names – for now, at least.
The headquarters and centrepiece of the main campus is the palatial Grade II-listed Trent Building, with its famous bell-tower. It is named after the 1st Lord Trent, Jesse Boot, the locally-born founder of Britain’s best-known chemist.
The equally grand Portland Building, now home to the student union, might be covered in the finest Portland stone but is actually named after its former long-serving Chancellor, William Cavendish-Bentinck, 7th Duke of Portland.
The ghosts of both these great benefactors, however, may now be wondering why on earth they bothered.
For these two philanthropists now find themselves singled out for their ‘historic links to the transatlantic slave economy’ by the institution they so generously endowed as it embarks on a ‘multilateral reparatory justice process’.
Robert Hardman standing outside the Portland Building at Nottingham University
This might have a familiar ring to it. Similar investigations are also underway to explore the links between slavery and the Church of England, the monarchy and, indeed, the UK as a whole. Hence that demand by a consortium of Caribbean nations for as much as £19trillion of ‘reparation’ payments.
However, one aspect of this particular case seems especially baffling. Neither the University of Nottingham nor these two benefactors even existed until long after Britain had abolished both the abominable trade in human beings and slavery itself.
Surely this rather elementary thought would have occurred to the governing body of a distinguished Russell Group university – which has produced two Nobel prize winners, the inventor of Ibuprofen, a former head of MI6 and the writer, DH Lawrence.
But, in these enlightened times, it is best not to argue with those controlling the moral high ground. Imagine the gnawing terror of being ‘cancelled’ for criticising an attempt to implicate 20th-Century figures in the cruelty of the Jane Austen era! No less than 24 academics – including seven professors – have put their names to this new 137-page document entitled Nottingham’s Universities and Historical Slavery.
The report tracks the journey of University College Nottingham (founded 1881) to full university status (1948) along with the evolution of Nottingham and District Technical College (1945) into Trent Polytechnic (1970) and, latterly, Nottingham Trent University (1992). It then singles out the eight most prominent benefactors who played a key part in this process and proceeds to link them to the slave trade. No matter that some of the evidence is flimsy or even hypothetical.
It almost feels as if these academics are craving some sort of guilt by association. As Professor Katherine Linehan, the university’s Pro-Vice-Chancellor for People and Culture, puts it: ‘The publication of this report is the first step and will act as a catalyst to an open dialogue... with respect to reparative justice.’
But is it fair? The families of some of those named in the report think not. ‘Absurd and sad,’ reflects one of Jesse Boot’s great-grandchildren. Relations of the 7th Duke of Portland say that, despite repeated requests to contribute to the report, they were denied the opportunity and fear the university is trying ‘reverse-engineer history’.
And you don’t have to spend long here in Nottingham to understand their feelings.
The Jesse Boot bust at Nottingham University. The 1st Lord Trent was the locally-born founder of Britain’s best-known chemist, and has now found himself singled out for his 'historic links to the transatlantic slave economy'
William Cavendish-Bentinck, 7th Duke of Portland, after whom the Portland Building at Nottingham University is named
Approach the university from the city centre and you will be greeted at the gates by the bronze bust of a man with flowing locks and bristling moustache.
‘Our Great Citizen – Jesse Boot, Lord Trent’ it reads above a stirring inscription: ‘Before him lies a monument to his industry. Behind an everlasting monument to his benevolence.’
It reminds me of the tribute (in Latin) to Sir Christopher Wren engraved beneath the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral: ‘If you seek his monument, look around you.’
For the benevolence of Jesse Boot was, indeed, spectacular. In total, he and his family gave University College Nottingham more than £142million in today’s money, enabling it to move from the city centre to today’s huge campus and seek university status. It was one of the many ways in which he expressed his thanks to the city where he turned a tiny herbal remedy shop on Goose Gate into a national institution. By the time of his death in 1931, there were nearly a thousand branches of Boot’s in Britain. When the Trent Building was completed in 1928, King George V and Queen Mary no less came to open it.
His was a fortune built on improving the lot of his fellow man, too. ‘My great-grandfather was driven by a burning desire to better the lot of the poor,’ his descendant, Emma Houston, tells me. ‘My goodness me, he did that more than most people have ever done.’
A staunch Methodist, he slashed the prices of his medicines compared to those of other dispensaries, opening up basic healthcare to the poor. I visit the site of his first shop in Nottingham – the first, incidentally, to install a ladies loo.
So why was Jesse Boot (born 1850, son of a former farm labourer) linked to slavery (abolished in 1833) in this report? Over seven pages, the academics lay out the charges. The first ‘link’ came about in the 1880s when Mr Boot wanted to move to larger premises a few doors down. To do this, he borrowed £2,000 from the Nottingham Joint Stock Bank (NJSB). This was founded in 1865, long after abolition, but its founders included one Thomas Adams who, in the 1830s, had been one of Nottingham’s leading lace manufacturers.
‘Foundational to his (Adams’s) success, though not the only source, was the increasing amount of raw cotton imported into Britain,’ the report notes. ‘The majority of this was sourced from the United States where it was cultivated by enslaved African people.’
Students Kitty Sheppard, 18, and Freya Haynes, 19, aren't in favour of renaming buildings at Nottingham University in light of the new report
As the authors of the report note gravely: ‘It was their capital which helped to float and develop the bank, eventually permitting it to extend capital to local clients such as Jesse Boot.’
But that’s not all. The second ‘link’ is that, by 1892, Jesse Boot had opened more branches in cities such as Sheffield and Lincoln. He needed a factory to produce his cut-price medical products and rented an empty site previously occupied by the Elliott family, producers of hosiery.
‘It is highly probable that the [Elliott] family used at least some enslaved picked cotton,’ says the report. ‘Jesse Boot would, therefore, have used part of Nottingham’s built environment that was financed by cotton and slavery.’
There’s more. In 1912, Mr Boot took over another factory site once occupied by another hosier called Jonathan Hine.
As the report notes: ‘Hine’s use of cotton thread to produce hosiery implicated him in the transatlantic slave economy.’
The final charge is that Mr Boot secured another loan from the National Provincial Bank (NPB), soon after its acquisition of the Union of London & Smiths Bank in 1918. Back in the 1830s, two Smiths partners had owned slave plantations. ‘Smiths appear to have used the transatlantic slave economy to assist their development into a prosperous bank that NPB benefited from when it took over in 1918, helping to explain its capacity to increase the limit of Jesse Boot’s overdraft to £600,000 in 1920.’
So there we have it. Jesse Boot used premises whose previous occupants had a ‘highly probable’ connection to slavery while borrowing money from a bank which bought another bank linked to slavery. At which point, I can only throw up my hands and declare my own ‘link to slavery’. For NJSB became Midland Bank which became HSBC and I have had a mortgage with them, too. We are all guilty.
The Boot family sold the business long ago. It has since changed hands many times and is now owned by a US conglomerate which has dutifully co-operated fully with the report, saying ‘we are committed to drawing lessons from our history’. It would be interesting to know just what lessons these might be. Don’t borrow money, maybe, or don’t buy property from anyone else?
It is the family of Mr Boot who are now seeking to defend his honour. They have not sought to inflame a row but remain deeply loyal and proud of what Jesse did for Nottingham – and also for his wife’s birthplace, Jersey.
‘This is all so tenuous,’ says great-grandson, Michael Holman (whose second name is Jesse).
‘It feels like they are hunting for impropriety. This is guilt by association.’
His cousin, Emma Houston, agrees: ‘I am absolutely not going to be drawn into anything that might seek to drag him down. Any attempt to associate Jesse with something that he would have found abhorrent is ridiculous.’
The family of the late Duke of Portland are unhappy for different reasons. As they are the first to acknowledge, the 1st Duke of Portland ended up as governor of Jamaica (where he died) and did, indeed, own slaves. Also, the 3rd Duke, as prime minister, made no attempt to curtail the slave trade.
However, the report claims that the family derived wealth and what it calls ‘social capital’ as a result of slavery and that this, eventually, put the 7th Duke – who died in 1977 – in a position to be a benefactor to the university.
The report lists other members of the family who made donations to the university with a combined value, in today’s terms, of around £2million. ‘Ultimately, the Cavendish-Bentincks benefitted from the slavery business in terms of reputational, cultural and social capital,’ say the authors.
The family had issued no public response until contacted by a newspaper which suggested they were somehow seeking to amend the report. ‘That is simply not true,’ says a source close to the family. ‘We have no problem with the historic research. We have simply tried to request that the report makes clear that the 7th Duke was not personally involved in slavery and derived no inherited financial, social, or reputational capital from it either.’
The family long ago donated its papers to the university and these show that the 1st Duke only went to Jamaica to avoid financial disasters at home, dying of tropical disease (‘the black vomit’) deeply in debt.
The family’s wealth, though very great, came from other family members and other means, not least coal mining and marriage, while any ‘social capital’ (what others might call poshness) came from aristocratic connections, not slave labour.
The King’s great-great-grandfather, for example, was a Cavendish-Bentinck who had nothing to do with slavery – or coal for that matter. He was a vicar.
A university spokesperson tells me: ‘We are unaware of anyone having been excluded from the consultation exercise.’
Lawyers for the family, however, have a detailed list of more than 15 failed attempts to speak or correspond with the university.
Perhaps stung by this week’s media coverage, the university has now finally set a date for a meeting next week. Until then, the family say that they do not wish to stir things up.
I drive up to Welbeck Abbey, the ancestral seat an hour north of Nottingham. The last Duke of Portland died in 1990 when the male line ran out but there is still a (distantly-related) Earl of Portland who works as an actor, best-known as David Archer in Radio 4’s The Archers.
The ducal estate has passed down to the 7th Duke’s grandson, former film critic William Parente, and his family.
Back in Nottingham, the university will now decide how to progress with its ‘reparatory justice’. This may include renaming the Trent and Portland Buildings, both here and at the university’s overseas outposts in Malaysia and China, which have buildings of the same names.
The university insists that no decisions have been taken, though the report warns that some students may suffer ‘harm, distress and offence’ from the ‘symbolic honouring of individuals/families with exploitative connections to the slavery business’.
It adds: ‘The naming of immovable structures after patrons has also served to immortalise their characterisation as respectable philanthropists. The enslavement of African people, which played an important role in the enrichment of (university) sponsors, are just as important to acknowledge as their philanthropic efforts.’
A source close to the Portland clan says that they would have no problem with a change of name, though some of Jesse Boot’s descendants say it would be very sad to see him ‘cancelled’.
So what do the students think? The funny thing is that I cannot find a single one in favour of a change. ‘I don’t see what the fuss is about, if he had nothing to do with slavery,’ says chemistry student Kitty Sheppard, 18, walking past Jesse Boot’s bust. ‘Leave things as they are,’ says Freya Haynes, 19. ‘Of course they should do the research into slavery,’ says Freddie Sullivan, 21, ‘but I don’t think you should stop celebrating people who did great things for this place and weren’t even born at the time.’
There is one thing missing from the report, however. I see no mention of ‘links’ to modern slavery.
Perhaps the university might want to explore the use of forced labour in, er, China? After all, it has a campus there. Then again, perhaps not.
