Acceptable Exploitation

During our visit to Beaumaris last weekend we thought we'd take in Penrhyn Castle but, having been there before, we instead went to Penmon Point.

However, Penrhyn Castle was created in the usual way great Victorian fortunes were created. Money first, morality later, if at all.

The Pennant family did not conjure wealth out of thin air. It came from Caribbean sugar plantations worked by enslaved people, followed by compensation paid to slave owners when abolition finally arrived. The enslaved got nothing. The owners were paid handsomely by the British state. That capital was then folded into land ownership, slate quarries, and eventually a castle designed to look ancient while being entirely modern in its purpose. Power made visible.

Later came the slate. The Penrhyn quarries became industrial behemoths. The men who worked them were not enslaved, but they were ruthlessly exploited. Low pay, dangerous conditions, and when they organised, a lockout so long and bitter it shattered communities. The castle sat above it all, a stone receipt for who benefited and who paid.

That story is not contested. It is settled history.

What is contested is which bits of it are allowed to be emphasised.

The National Trust, to its credit, tried to tell the whole story. In 2020 it published research linking properties, including Penrhyn, to colonialism and slavery. It did not invent anything. It cited records. Compensation registers. Account books. Basic facts.

That was enough to trigger outrage from the Conservative benches. Sir John Hayes talked about “cultural vandalism”. The ineptly named Common Sense Group, with figures like Sir Edward Leigh and Brendan Clarke-Smith, accused the Trust of politicising heritage. Newspapers took up the cry. The Charity Commission was leaned on. All because a footnote connected a castle to slavery.

Notice what they were not objecting to. No Conservative MP demanded that the Penrhyn quarrymen’s story be toned down. No one accused the Trust of class warfare for discussing the 1900-1903 lockout. That exploitation was apparently acceptable. That suffering could stay.

Because it is safely in the past, safely white, safely domestic.

Slavery, they say, was also in the past. And of course it was. But it is not the timing that bothers them. It is the implication. Slavery exposes the origin of wealth. It shows that abolition did not mean restitution. It reveals that estates like Penrhyn are not just products of industry but of empire, violence and inherited privilege.

The Conservative Party’s position, whether it admits it or not, is that history should be curated to flatter the national story. Industrial exploitation can be acknowledged because it fits a narrative of progress and reform. Slavery must be backgrounded because it punctures the myth that Britain’s greatness was earned cleanly and then magnanimously surrendered.

The National Trust did not invent this history. It did not impose modern values on the past. It simply joined the dots.

Penrhyn Castle was built with money extracted from people who had no meaningful choice. First enslaved Africans. Then Welsh quarrymen. One was worse. Both were real. Both are in the stonework.

Calling that “woke” is not an argument. It is an attempt to control which truths are permitted to survive. And that tells you far more about the modern Conservatives than it ever does about the past.