Should Wetherspoons be Renamed?
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I had a feeling this would be coming up – Calls to rename Wetherspoons because of Elihu Yale’s links to slavery.
Now I’m not sure why the petition is aimed at Wrexham Council rather than Wetherspoons itself? As surely the Council don’t have a say in the naming.
Personally I’m on the fence on this one, I mean Yale did have important links to this town – he’s buried in St Giles are people going to demand he is exhumed? Would be a bit extreme. How far do we go to get rid of a name some people feel uncomfortable about?
Judge Jeffries wasn’t a very nice man by all accounts but from history, do we erase all connections between him and the Acton area?
It’s a difficult one. Ultimately most people in town just call top Wetherspoons – Spoons anyway and if you said “Do you want to meet in the Elihu Yale for a drink?” most people wouldn’t know what you were talking about.
So renaming the pub wouldn’t be too problematic from that point – Old Man Spoons would actually be more fitting to what it’s referred to.
You could rename it ‘Uncle Jack’s,’ after the Father Ted character. That’s who the owner reminds me of.
And therin we have a problem.How far back do we go in history,are us Welsh going to insist that most castles in Wales are demolished,and check out the Forbes stats for modern day slavery,over 18 million in India and 3 million in China,not good is it.
It’s not good, but it shows that if we tolerate it and cling to it, it is normalised and repeated.
Buildings can be treated as reminders not to repeat these mistakes, but statutes holding up oppressors should go. They preserve Nazi death camps for this reason, while tearing down statues of cruel dictators.
How many people have bought things online during lockdown on Amazon, Wish or one of the other sites that sell cheap – where did most products come from China or India- every time you buy cheap clothes remember they were probably made by ‘slave’ labour doing 12 hours plus a day.
Deal with current slavery issues by boycotting these suppliers Today instead of trying to deal with history that cannot be changed.Many families in Wrexham will nor have to look far back into their family history to find their ancestors were either ’employers’ of slave labour in the form of housekeepers, parlours maids, wet nurses or family members who had to work 12hours or more a day for 6 days a week for scrapes off the table.
Guilt does not just lie at the door of the big slave traders but those that kept people in slavery within our own community.
And herein we widely return back to the basic tenets of socialism which the likes of myself and Tim have been harping on about for the past – seems like forever. Equality and fairness and access to a decent life for the 99% of the world and not just the top 1%.
Welcome new converts.
I don’t know too much about slave traders apart from what I learned at school. It seems to me, that at that time that it was considered quite normal & thought wrong only in the modern world. But then I read that many of those same slave traders founded schools & universities where quite rightly, descendants of those slaves have benefited & gone on to be world leaders.
We can’t undo the past, only learn from it in a positive way. Re-fighting old battles just brings up bitterness against others who weren’t even born at that time.
As JaneJ says slavery is taking place today. We remember the cockle pickers who died in this country. These are the wrongs we should be fighting, not something that is in the past. The purpose of history is to ensure that we learn from the past not re-enact it.
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