Page 10 - Phonebox Magazine February 2010

Recycled views and information by Geoff Bacchus
We are none of us perfectly informed about any of the things we most care for; we build our views from experience, from direct observation and from published sources. If we are truly alive, therefore, we must stand ready to modify our own views from time to time and such has been the case with my perception of John Newton.
I had never heard of him until shortly after coming to interest myself in Olney and so to finding the museum. I also learned of the very worthy work of the Olney-Newton committee and undertook to help in any way I might. In the event I travelled out to Newton via Freetown, Sierra Leone in February 2002 to assist with banking arrangements for money transfers from Olney to Newton. En route I read Hugh Thomas’s excellent history of the slave trade – excellent indeed, it is a shocker.
In Freetown I had
several happy hours in
conversation with
Modupe Taylor-Pearce
in his pleasant home.
As surely as many he
had learned his history
at Forah Bay College in
Freetown. This
excellent establishment
owed much of its
founding principles to
Edinburgh University
along with textbook
material including the
nineteenth century
British version of
Wilberforce’s role in the abolition of slavery and the foundation of Freetown. I found this most agreeable at that time for I had learned from the same text books.
In Newton itself I was made most welcome for I bore a few useful gifts and in return they gave me a suit of local bright material which I have been proud to wear hereabouts on
several occasions. They
were lovely people with a
host of problems and it
has been just wonderful
to watch the
improvements which
have come about
through their own efforts
and with aid from our
end besides certain
government grants
originating from
overseas. Yes, I’ve been
back a few times whilst
visiting many other parts
of Sierra Leone. To-day
the people of Newton are
far better off than can be said of a thousand places out there. They know they are and they are happy to credit the people of Olney for much of their advantage.
Returning to Olney that February I felt the need to get along to the museum book shop and learn something of the man John Newton. I read several ‘life of’ of books, the tale they told was so sickly sweet that I became quite suspicious – they were almost all written by evangelical nutters.
Later – much later I was drawn to read Adam Hochschild’s deeply researched history of the British struggle to abolish slavery first published in
found time in Liverpool to study records of that city’s slave ship owners, their Captains and their profits. There is nothing exaggerated in Hochschilds’s account.*
I make no claim to being an historian, rather I’m an observer and much the same may be said of several who have lately leapt into print here in the Phonebox. I sincerely suggest those people may care to read the work of Adam Hochschild wheron they may suffer the same shock as I did. The deception from which we have suffered owes most to the prejudice of the nineteenth century establishment who could not bring themselves to give due credit to Thomas Clarkson who had turned his back on the C of E, nor to the predominantly Quaker membership of the committee who contributed the lion’s share of work to the abolition cause.
I believe there are more truly Christian souls in the Peter and Paul parish to-day than at any time during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, I hope their efforts for the people of Newton and the Koya rural district continue to bear fruit.
*That book: Bury The Chains. Adam Hochschild. Publ. Macmillan ISBN 0 333 90491 5
Geoff Bacchus
Modupe Taylor-Pearce
2005. I found it very disturbing for it blew wide open the manner in which my heroic and saintly picture of Wilberforce had been invented by the nineteenth century establishment, Hochschild also cuts John Newton down to size and leaves a dwarf. Hochschild’s sources are many and he acknowledges them all. A friend of mine
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