Mary Wakefield, writing this week’s Diary column for the magazine (remember: subscribe!), deplores the Art Fund’s appeal for public subscribers to help purchase Yinka Shonibare’s Victory in a bottle so it may be displayed at Greenwich:
To each their own; Shonibare’s work seems playful and even fun to me. But does it really have anything to say about the “triumph of ethnic diversity over pallid, monocultural imperial Britain”? Perhaps it does. Consulting (where else?) the Guardian for illumination on this point, I discovered that some folk do view the bottle ship in this fashion. Apparently it is an “ironical corrective” to “Rule Britannia patriotism“. Well, maybe.Every day, except when it’s raining, I cycle to work through Trafalgar Square and pause to gaze at the ship in a big plastic bottle on the fourth plinth. What makes it so horrid? The ship is a scale model of Nelson’s Victory with sails made of an African print and I’m told it symbolises the triumph of ethnic diversity over pallid, monocultural imperial Britain. But that doesn’t make it pretty.
My own reaction is rather different since were you to ask me (and as this is my blog, you are asking me) what association might be made between the Royal Navy and Africa then I would point to the Senior Service’s role in suppressing the slave trade. True, this post-dates Trafalgar but the Royal Navy’s efforts were a vital component of the anti-slavery effort.
Furthermore, though the Navy was not “multicultural” (it being a distinct culture of its own) it was certainly a multinational enterprise. As tends to be the case in maritime affairs, NAM Rodger, the supreme naval historian of our time, is our guide. He cautions that though there have been relatively few “large-scale analyses of ships’ muster-books” those that exist demonstrate that only a minority of those afloat and serving in the Napoleonic era were actually English: a “sample” of 4,474 men “from ships commissioning at Plymouth in 1804-5 shows 47 per cent English, 29 per cent Irish, 8 per cent Scots, 3 per cent Welsh, 1 per cent from the Isle of Man and the Channel Isles, 5 per cent from the Americas and 6 per cent from the rest of the world.”
This survey, then, suggests that more than one in ten sailors was born outwith the British Isles. Coincidentally, this is a figure broadly in line with the present make-up of the British labour force as a whole. I make no large point here, at least not in terms of contemporary political debate on immigration or the labour force, except to wonder (idly) if, had it been around in Nelson’s time, the Daily Mail would have been outraged by the scourge of foreign-sailors in British ships in this, admittedly specialist and highly-skilled, part of the workforce? This has been an open island for a long time, you know.
In any case, and despite Mary’s disapproval, I quite like Mr Shonibare’s Victory bottle and think it rather more appropriate for the vacant plinth in Trafalgar Square than many of the works that have preceded it and, I suspect, many of those that will follow it too.
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