Kirsty Parsons and Jennifer Adam
Since our exhibition Slavery & the Bank closed we, along with colleagues in the Bank’s Archive team, have been continuing work on recording the Bank’s links to transatlantic slavery and the slave trade. We’ve also been considering the legacy of this exhibition and how we can better represent this part of the Bank’s history in the Museum displays and our collection.
Two recent additions to our collection help tell an important part of this story.
Transatlantic Trafficked Enslaved African Corrective Historical (TTEACH) plaques is an initiative founded by Gloria Daniel to campaign for plaques as reparative interventions, highlighting institutions and individuals who received compensation as part of the abolition of transatlantic slavery in 1833. The plaques identify plantation owners, merchants and institutions with these links and number how many enslaved African people they were compensated for.
Under the initiative, the Bank of England has been identified with two plaques, the first of which is already in our collection.
TTEACH plaque 14. Bank of England Museum: 2022/053
The plaque memorialises approximately 760,000 enslaved African men, women and children that the British government paid out compensation for after the abolition of transatlantic slavery.
To secure abolition across the British Empire, the British Government agreed to pay compensation to slave owners for the loss of their ‘property’ – the enslaved workers who had been forced to work on plantations producing sugar, tobacco and other ‘plantation’ products.
The Bank of England was nominated to receive this plaque by TTEACH to represent its involvement in the compensation process. The Bank, acting as the government’s banker, was responsible for distributing payments to those who claimed compensation for the loss of their enslaved workforce. There was also a system of agents who collected payments on behalf of multiple slave owners, primarily those living outside of London and even the UK. One of these agents was John Rae Reid, a Director of the Bank of England at the time.
While former slave owners were compensated, the formerly enslaved received nothing. Around £20 million was paid in compensation, a sum that was added to the national debt. The last repayment of that debt was made in 2015. This means that, over the centuries, descendants of the enslaved contributed to paying off the debt that had been created to compensate their enslavers.
The Slavery and the Bank exhibition, that was at the Bank of England Museum until early 2024
We will soon be receiving a second plaque from TTEACH, referencing a specific individual: Sir Gilbert Heathcote. He was a member of the Court of Directors of the Bank of England from its founding in 1694 until his death in 1733.
Heathcote was also a London merchant trading across the world, including in North America, India and Russia. His most important trade links were with the Caribbean and he acted as an agent on behalf of Jamaica in London, becoming London’s leading importer from Jamaica by the 1690s.
He was also involved in the slave trade. Heathcote sold enslaved African people to the Spanish colonies and he was strongly opposed to the monopoly the Royal African Company had over this trade. So much so, that he regularly lobbied Parliament in support of British colonial interests over the Royal African Company’s. The Bank of England is given this plaque to record and highlight these associations.
In the near future, we will be planning changes to our displays that mean these plaques can be put on display for the public, within existing displays about the Bank’s connections to transatlantic slavery in the Museum. In the meantime, they will be included on our online platforms so that this story can be shared beyond the walls of the Threadneedle Street building.