Re: Arthur's voice


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Posted by Peter Hyland on June 06, 2014 at 13:17:09 user Peter_H.

In Reply to: Re: Arthur's voice posted by Peter Ceresole on June 06, 2014 at 12:00:08:

"My wife is Swiss"

That is interesting, and it is a reminder to me to return to Peter Ceresole's comment about Liverpool and the slave trade. There is no doubt that many merchants in Liverpool profited from the slave trade, but many opposed it and the Abolitionist Movement was strong there. Among the families which vehemently opposed the trade were the Rathbones and the Holts, who were Unitarian in religion. The Melly family were descended from a Swiss immigrant, André Melly, who arrived in Liverpool some time after the slave trade had been abolished in 1807. Descendants of the Holts and Mellys owned or rented properties at Coniston, including Lanehead, so the money to purchase Lanehead was not in any way derived from the slave trade. W. G. Collingwood’s father settled in Liverpool in 1839, having married a Swiss woman. W. G. Collingwood was therefore half Swiss and his mother was therefore “outside the English class system”.

I write all this to show that casual assumptions about the slave trade, class and “cut glass accents” are not good enough when we are attempting to piece together the history of AR’s social life. Life is a lot more complicated than that. A certain amount of joined-up guesswork is OK, but we owe it to AR to try and get details right when we can. He always did.



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