It was inevitable that some would insist that ripping the statue of slave trader Edward Colston from its plinth and disposing of it in a harbour in Bristol was an act of historical revisionism; that others would argue that its removal was long overdue, and that the act itself was history in the making. After more statues were removed across the United States and Europe, Boris Johnson weighed in, arguing that “to tear [these statues] down would be to lie about our history”.
But lying about our history – and particularly about our late-colonial history – has been a habit of the British state for decades.
In 2013 I discovered that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office had been unlawfully concealing 1.2m historical files at a highly secure government compound at Hanslope Park, north of London.
Those files contained millions upon millions of pages of records stretching back to 1662, spanning the slave trade, the Boer wars, two world wars, the cold war and the UK’s entry into the European Common Market. More than 20,000 files concerned the withdrawal from empire.
There were so many of them that they took up 15 miles of floor-to-ceiling shelving at a specially built repository that a Foreign Office minister had opened in a private ceremony in 1992. Their retention was in breach of the Public Records Acts, and they had effectively been held beyond the reach of the Freedom of Information Act.
The FCO was not alone: at two warehouses in the English midlands, the UK’s Ministry of Defence was at the same time unlawfully hoarding 66,000 historical files, including many about the conflict in Northern Ireland.
When the files concerned with the withdrawal from empire began to be transferred to the UK’s National Archives – where they should have been for years, and where historians and members of the public could finally examine them – it became clear that enormous amounts of documentation had been destroyed during the process of decolonisation.
Helpfully perhaps, colonial officials had completed “destruction certificates”, in which they declared that they had disposed of sensitive papers, and many of these certificates had survived within the secret archive.
Beginning in India in 1947, government officials had incinerated material that would in any way embarrass Her Majesty’s government, her armed forces, or her colonial civil servants. At the end of that year, an Observer correspondent noted large palls of smoke appearing over government offices in Jerusalem.
As decolonisation gathered pace, British officials developed a series of parallel file registries in the colonies: one that was to be handed over to post-independence governments, and one that contained papers that were to be steadily destroyed or flown back to London.
As a consequence, newly independent governments found themselves attempting to administer their territories on the basis of an incomplete record of what had happened before.
In Uganda in March 1961, colonial officials gave this process a new name: Operation Legacy. Before long the term spread to neighbouring colonies, where only “British subjects of European descent” were to be involved in the weeding and destruction of documents, a process that was overseen by police special branch officers. A new security classification, the “W” or “Watch series”, was introduced, and sensitive papers were stamped with a red letter W.
Subsequently, there was the “Guard series” of papers stamped with a letter “G”. These could be shared with officials from Australia, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand, but whenever this happened “the information should be accompanied by an oral warning that it must not be communicated to the Americans”. The Americans, it seems to have been assumed, were likely to be less forgiving of the sins of empire.
In May that year the colonial secretary, Iain Macleod, issued instructions that the documents to be destroyed or smuggled back to London should include anything that might embarrass HMG; embarrass her military, police or public servants; that might compromise sources of intelligence; or which could be used “unethically” by post-independence governments.
By “unethically”, Macleod appears to mean that he did not wish to see the governments of newly independent nations expose, or threaten to expose, some of the more challenging aspects of the end of empire. There was certainly plenty to hide: the torture and murder of rebels in Kenya; the brutal suppression of insurgencies in Cyprus and later Aden; massacres in Malaya; the toppling of a democratically elected government in British Guiana.
Instructions were also issued on the means by which papers should be destroyed: when they were burned, “the waste should be reduced to ash and the ashes broken up”. In Kenya, officials were informed that “it is permissible, as an alternative to destruction by fire, for documents to packed in weighed crates and dumped in very deep and current-free waters at maximum practicable distance from the coast”.
Operation Legacy was, as one colonial official admitted, “an orgy of destruction”, and it was carried out across the globe between the late 1940s and the early 70s.
The operation – and its attempts to conceal and manipulate history in an attempt to sculpt an official narrative – speaks of a certain jitteriness on the part of the British state, as if it feared that interpretations of the past that were based upon its own records would find it difficult to celebrate the “greatness” of British history.
It seems likely that uncertainty about the imperial mission also played a part in the commissioning of Colston’s statue. It was erected in 1895, a full 174 years after his death, at a time when the British were anxious about their rapidly expanded empire. The first Boer war had ended badly for them, exposing the physical weakness of soldiers recruited from urban slums; the United States was emerging as an industrial force; and Germany appeared to be challenging the Royal Navy’s maritime dominance.
The answer, it seems, was the erection of statues, up and down the United Kingdom, of early “heroes” of empire – even slave traders – as an inspiring example to the adventurers and imperialists to come.
Now that’s an act of historical revisionism.
Ian Cobain, a former senior reporter for The Guardian, is the author of The History Thieves: Secrets, Lies and the Shaping of a Modern Nation