Article on ships on club crests and links to slavery

[Cet Homme Charmant]

We're not mentioned in the article, but it's interesting nevertheless. I think in our case we can be sure there isn't any possible link to slavery as we only introduced the current one with the ship in the late 70s IIRC.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/apr/19/abandon-ship-does-this-symbol-of-slavery-shame-manchester-and-its-football-clubs

 

[capitanus]

10 hours ago, Cet Homme Charmant said:

We're not mentioned in the article, but it's interesting nevertheless. I think in our case we can be sure there isn't any possible link to slavery as we only introduced the current one with the ship in the late 70s IIRC.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/apr/19/abandon-ship-does-this-symbol-of-slavery-shame-manchester-and-its-football-clubs

 

Greenock & Port Glasgow have long associations with Shipping and Shipbuilding as you will undoubtedly know, and there will have been ships built in the town which were used in the slave trade, in the same respect there will have been ships constructed in Dumbarton, Leith, Aberdeen, Dundee and other places in Scotland involved in the industry.  Shipyards in the upper reaches of the Clyde (Govan, Renfrew, Scotstoun & Clydebank) were mostly founded in the second half of the 19th Century/early 20th Century after slavery was abolished.    This was mostly because the Clyde was not navigable to larger vessels beyond Renfrew due to the obstruction of the Elderslie Rock, a geological dyke which wasn't blasted until the late 1850s, However that is exactly what slavery was back then - an industry.  Enslaved humans were seen as cargo and commodities, a cruel and barbaric practice which was seen as legitimate trade in its day.  There is also hundreds of people in towns across Scotland involved in this industry and became rich as the result of enslavement of others.  Glasgow had many people who had became very wealthy as a result, and why many streets in the city centre are named after "The Tobacco Lords" - Buchanan, Ingram, Oswald, Glassford, Gordon, Robertson, Dundas and more.  It is also why there are street names like Virginia & Jamaica; and there are whole districts (even today) which have names like Plantation and Kingston.  Greenock will have similar instances of people who became rich as a result of the enslavement of others.

Anyway, as much as it isn't a pleasant subject matter nobody can deny it happened.  A lot of unpleasant things happened in the past and like it or not Scottish people were complicit in these actions.  

 

[TRVMP]

1 hour ago, capitanus said:

Greenock & Port Glasgow have long associations with Shipping and Shipbuilding as you will undoubtedly know, and there will have been ships built in the town which were used in the slave trade, in the same respect there will have been ships constructed in Dumbarton, Leith, Aberdeen, Dundee and other places in Scotland involved in the industry.  Shipyards in the upper reaches of the Clyde (Govan, Renfrew, Scotstoun & Clydebank) were mostly founded in the second half of the 19th Century/early 20th Century after slavery was abolished.    This was mostly because the Clyde was not navigable to larger vessels beyond Renfrew due to the obstruction of the Elderslie Rock, a geological dyke which wasn't blasted until the late 1850s, However that is exactly what slavery was back then - an industry.  Enslaved humans were seen as cargo and commodities, a cruel and barbaric practice which was seen as legitimate trade in its day.  There is also hundreds of people in towns across Scotland involved in this industry and became rich as the result of enslavement of others.  Glasgow had many people who had became very wealthy as a result, and why many streets in the city centre are named after "The Tobacco Lords" - Buchanan, Ingram, Oswald, Glassford, Gordon, Robertson, Dundas and more.  It is also why there are street names like Virginia & Jamaica; and there are whole districts (even today) which have names like Plantation and Kingston.  Greenock will have similar instances of people who became rich as a result of the enslavement of others.

Anyway, as much as it isn't a pleasant subject matter nobody can deny it happened.  A lot of unpleasant things happened in the past and like it or not Scottish people were complicit in these actions.  

 

Well said. Closer to home from Glasgow, it's not like the sugar industry wasn't absolutely full of slavery in the Caribbean. (In Brazil it lingered on much later.) Abram Lyle was born when British slavery was, while outlawed, still extant and not yet fully shut down. The sugar industry he acquired, that later became Tate & Lyle, had its roots in a company that existed during the British slave trade. The plantation workers in the Caribbean who provided for his refineries would be in some cases first generation freedmen. We're not as distant from it as we might like to think.

What I would say is that while we can't deny what our people did, we can also recognize that the UK was one of the few places to end slavery without needing to do so at the barrel of a gun. That doesn't make it alright, nor even within a million miles of alright - but what it does bring is perspective, that in the long course of human history slavery has happened all over the world and even continues to happen in places, and that very few slaver societies have ended the practice voluntarily.

To that end, I feel no particular need to self-flagellate over it, and while we can't deny that ships that came and went from the Clyde were for many years part of the slave trade, we can recognize that for much longer now they aren't, and for the entire time that Morton have existed and that this badge has existed, they haven't been.