Elgin Marbles Poll

[Crispvs]

Byron,

Whilst it is true that I do not currently work as a historian, that is certainly what my university experience trained me for. My degree is in history and included papers on historical methodology. Now this is hardly unique, but I think it does qualify me to point out what I feel is a major hole in your argument, which Robert has so far been polite enough to steer clear of. That is that whilst stories passed down from previous generations can illuminate the past, just as often they obscure the past either by making them fit an ideal of what a later generation felt should have happened or by the addition of extra material from other sources. Any historian is aware of numerous examples of this but there are plenty around for anyone to see and check up on. Amongst most of my in-laws and their friends there is an almost universal chip on the shoulder over slavery and they are most forthright about how it was for their forebears, the stories having been handed down to them. The only problem with this is that virtually all of the characteristics of the slavery they describe are those of slavery as practiced in America, not as practiced in Jamaica, where their forebears underwent their enslavement. Slavery in America was one of the most brutal forms slavery has taken, whereas slavery in Jamaica, to judge from a wealth of contemporary documentary evidence, some of it written by former slaves, although far from pleasant, was far more benign than in America, with slaves often being permitted to work for their own profit outside their normal work hours, slaves being permitted to buy their freedom as a normal commercial activity (described in contemporary sale documents as being 'sold to themselves') and areas of the island being reserved for settlement by any freed slaves who wanted to leave the society which had enslaved them and live in the company of other former slaves, to name but three aspects which differed from American slavery. However, confronting someone with some evidence of the reality of their ancestors' enslavement tends to elicit an outright dismissal of the contemporary evidence in favour of the American version which has somehow crept into their collective consciousness to replace the genuine memory of their ancestors. It also tends to elicit racist comments which boil down to the effect that I have no business telling a black person about 'black history' or that I am part of the 'problem'. The lesson to be learned would seem to be: never let conclusive evidence get in the way of something told to someone by their parents.

My own forebears have furnished me with numerous tales and anecdotes and for most of them there is no way to check them out, but when the evidence CAN be found, again accuracy of the inherited tradition is distinctly hit and miss. To give two examples: firstly, my mother often told me and my brothers of her great grandfather's sister, who had fallen from the family dog cart and cracked her head open, dying in the process (this story was normally trotted out to encourage us to do up our seat belts). However a check of her death certificate and the obituries to be found in two local newspapers clearly show that far from dying suddenly of head injuries after a fall, she died in bed of a liver complaint after a short illness in 1852.
Secondly, I was often told of an ancestor who had been one of the Pilgrim Fathers but who had returned after a year. This turned out to (almost) be true: the man in question had indeed been a religious dissenter who had gone to the New World in the early 1630s and who had returned a little over a year later to claim his inheritance after the death of his father.
This means that somehow family memory kept one story close to accuracy over a three hundred and fifty year period, but managed to warp another out of easy recognition in only one hundred and thirty years.

"I will not go into the vauge memories of stories related to me by my grandmother, who has been dead now some 33 years, but I do recall the resentment against Turkish occupation, even after they were independent, and still felt right into this century."

I know exactly what side my grandfather's family fought on in the English Civil War and what it cost them (we still have considerably more than Tess of the D'Urbaville's spoon to prove the memory), but I cannot be sure of the actual sentiments of any of my ancestors prior to what I know from living memory. I have pictures of most of my forebears on my maternal grandmother's side for the last two centuries, but only three personal letters and no diaries to tell me what any of them actually thought about things. There is every chance that what they themselves thought differed from the opinions of later generations which may have been retrospectively ascribed to them.

On the other matter under discussion - that of the justification for Greece to demand the return to Greece of the Elgin marbles, by much the same sort of justification, I could lay claim to Trellisick House and gardens in Cornwall, the Manor and estates of Curworthy and large tracts of land in Devon centring on Okehampton, not to mention certain portraits and documents presently in the collections of the Royal Cornwall Museum and Art Gallery and the Norwich museum. Do you think I should start pouring money I haven't got into the pockets of lawyers or do think it might be better to just accept that sometimes in the Bad Old Days thinks happened which we may as well accept and not try to interfere with now.

Incidentally, I admit to knowing little or nothing about health and safety on oil rigs. :wink:

Crispvs