Should Nelson Come off his Pedestal?

You know, I don’t see my mother and stepfather more than a couple of times a year, They live in Worthing and with the best will in the world their days of long drives or train rides and staying in hotels are a thing of the past. So to use a phrase, Mohammed must go to the mountain. When I do, I have this mischievous streak that makes me introduce the topic of removing Edward Hodges Baily’s statue of Admiral Nelson from the top of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square in London.

This is partly because I rather enjoy their reaction to it. The argument in favour goes – Horatio Nelson may not have owned saves, in fact he didn’t, but he was certainly in favour of continuing the slave trade and wrote in letters that he was considering speaking out against William Wilberforce in the House of Lords. Well, Trafalgar put paid to that and we’ll never know for sure if he would or not. But Nelson’s connections with the slave trade were brought into discussion in the furore following the pulling down of the statue of slave trader Edward Colson in Bristol in 2020 and there were articles in several of the dailies with people arguing for and against pulling Nelson off his pedestal.

My mum’s and step-dad’s reactions? To paraphrase – this is nonsense, it all happened over 200 years ago – you can’t change the past. Well, I certainly don’t agree that’s it’s ridiculous, but okay, it was over 200 years ago and you cannot change the past (although when I invent my time machine, watch this space). But it isn’t about that. It’s about changing your relationship with the past, if anything. It’s about asking the questions whether, with all we know now, we feel that this is an individual we should still regard as a national hero? And engaging in debate. Surely, if Nelson was as worthy of the honour as they thought he was in the 1840s when the column was erected, then a bit of honest discussion isn’t going to change that. But if he wasn’t, well, then burying our collective heads in the sand and ignoring it because it was more than 200 years ago surely is not morally justifiable.

Despite the way that I present my opinions to Mum and Tony, I do try to keep an open mind. If you can prove to me that Nelson is a good symbol of qualities that I value and respect, then I promise I’d be one of the protestors standing in front of the column to guard it from the bulldozers. But then, that would involve being prepared to have a discussion about it in the first place. And that probably ain’t happening any time soon.