No Sacred Cows

Scepticism served medium rare

  • Kenneth William “Bill” Wedderburn – Part II

    # Postscript: Bill Wedderburn, Robert and the return to Inveresk

    There is a final part of Bill Wedderburn’s story that deserves to stand separately from the account of his remarkable legal and political career.

    When I met Bill at the House of Lords in 2001, he already knew of Robert Wedderburn as a historical figure. What he did not know – he had no inkling of it – was that Robert was his own direct ancestor.

    His initial response to my claim was somewhat cynical. It was an extraordinary story, and Bill was a lawyer accustomed to testing evidence rather than accepting an attractive family tradition at face value. As I took him through the detailed genealogical and documentary evidence, however, his scepticism rapidly gave way to excitement. Once convinced, he embraced the discovery wholeheartedly and began his own enthusiastic exploration of Robert and the wider family history.

    A later newspaper article rather compressed this sequence, suggesting that Bill had discovered the connection himself after reading about Robert. In fact, I first presented him with evidence of the direct family relationship at our meeting in 2001. It was only after these discussions that Bill arranged a follow-up meeting for us at the House of Lords with the Earl of Dundee, Lord Scrymgeour-Wedderburn – our more remote, but equally direct, “blue-blooded” cousin.

    It is easy to understand why Robert spoke to Bill so powerfully. Robert was born in Jamaica in 1762, the mixed-race son of Rosanna, an enslaved African woman, and James Wedderburn, a Scotsman whose family’s restored prosperity was built upon Jamaican slavery. Although Robert was legally free from birth, his freedom offered little protection from poverty, racial prejudice or paternal rejection. Robert later described the contradiction in his own characteristically defiant language:

    “I am the offspring of a slave, it is true; but I am a man of free thought and opinion … imprisonment has but confirmed me that I was right.”

    He eventually made his way to London, where he became a sailor, tailor, preacher, pamphleteer and radical. He opposed slavery, religious oppression and the exclusion of working people from political power. Most strikingly, he saw that the suffering of enslaved people in the colonies and the exploitation of the poor in Britain were not separate moral questions. Both arose when power was concentrated in the hands of people who could not easily be held to account.

    While imprisoned in Dorchester Gaol, Robert received a visit from William Wilberforce. In the dedication to The Horrors of Slavery, he recalled that Wilberforce had given him “advice” and “two books beautifully bound in calf”. Wilberforce appears to have hoped that Robert would redirect his considerable talents away from domestic radicalism and towards the parliamentary antislavery campaign.

    Robert subsequently devoted more of his writing to colonial slavery, but he did not accept the political boundary that Wilberforce’s intervention implied. For Robert, the oppression of enslaved Black people in the colonies and the misery of working people in Britain belonged to the same struggle. He consequently welcomed Henry Brougham’s declaration at a later antislavery meeting that it would be “grossly inconsistent” for abolitionists to “neglect the misery that was near their own door, while they were holding out a helping hand to the wretchedness that was beyond the Atlantic”. As the historian Ryan Hanley observes, this accorded with the vision of transatlantic solidarity that Robert had always cherished.

    Wilberforce hoped to redirect an unruly domestic radical into respectable abolitionism. He succeeded only partially. Robert brought his own experience of colonial slavery more fully into his writing, but he would not remove the British poor from his politics.

    Bill had spent his own life addressing that same imbalance in a very different world and by very different means. Robert spoke in radical chapels and published incendiary pamphlets; Bill taught, wrote, practised law and spoke in Parliament. The family discovery did not create Bill’s convictions. By 2001, those convictions had guided him for more than half a century. What the discovery gave him was an unexpected companion from the past.

    Robert became, in Bill’s words, a kind of moral test. Interviewed by Cassandra Jardine for The Daily Telegraph in 2007, Bill explained:

    “One constantly comes across appalling oppression. Knowing about his work, I ask myself: ‘What would Robert think about this?’”

    That is perhaps the most revealing thing he said about the relationship. Bill did not treat Robert as an interesting addition to the family tree or as a name through which to claim borrowed distinction. He treated him as a continuing challenge.

    By then, Bill had begun to identify himself publicly as “the descendant of a slave”. He used that inheritance to illuminate present questions: trafficking in women and children, female genital mutilation, corporate manslaughter and the erosion of human rights through anti-terror legislation. He chose to identify not with the prosperous white Wedderburns who had benefited from slavery, but with Rosanna and with the son whom that branch of the family had refused to acknowledge. Robert himself had proudly claimed precisely that maternal inheritance. Answering a relative who attributed Rosanna’s sale to her “violent temper,” he declared:

    “Yes, and I glory in her rebellious disposition, and which I have inherited from her.”

    There is something quietly radical in that choice. Robert, once the unwanted and supposedly disreputable member of the family, had become the ancestor in whom Bill took pride.

    Solidarity without reward

    One idea in particular mattered greatly to Bill when he reflected on the abolition of the slave trade. Ordinary working people in Britain had supported abolition even though they stood to receive no immediate material advantage from it.

    For Bill, that mattered because it demonstrated the possibility of solidarity across race, nationality and circumstance. People could recognise an injustice inflicted on others and demand that it end, although ending it offered them no direct personal profit.

    The history of slavery is necessarily a history of cruelty, exploitation and inherited privilege. But Bill found within the history of abolition a countercurrent: collective action undertaken for somebody else’s freedom.

    That fitted naturally with his understanding of trade unionism and democratic politics. Solidarity could never mean merely defending one’s own narrow interest. At its best, it meant standing against injustice even when another person was its immediate victim. Robert had expressed almost exactly this principle two centuries earlier:

    “I am a West Indian, a lover of liberty, and would dishonour human nature if I did not shew myself a friend to the liberty of others.”

    There is an important historical qualification. The Act that received royal assent on 25 March 1807 abolished the British slave trade; it did not free the people already enslaved in Britain’s colonies. Emancipation came only in the 1830s. The bicentenary was nevertheless an occasion to remember a great mobilisation of public conscience – and also to recognise how much remained unfinished after 1807.

    Walking in Robert’s footsteps

    The Telegraph article appeared on 22 March 2007, as Britain prepared to mark the two-hundredth anniversary of the Act. It described Bill and his wife, Frances, preparing to take part in a commemorative walk from Musselburgh to Inveresk. Around 300 people ultimately joined it.

    The route had a very particular meaning. In 1795, Robert had travelled to Scotland in search of his father. He walked from Musselburgh to Inveresk House, hoping that James Wedderburn would acknowledge him or offer him some assistance. James rejected him.

    Robert had crossed an ocean and come to his father’s country, only to be turned away. The white Scottish family had recovered its wealth and position through Jamaican slavery, yet had no place for the mixed-race son of an enslaved woman. More than two centuries later, Bill followed Robert’s route.

    The bicentenary walk from Musselburgh to Inveresk in March 2007, retracing Robert Wedderburn’s journey to seek recognition from his Scottish father.

    The symbolism is almost too perfect, but it was real. Bill stood where Robert had stood. Robert had arrived as an unacknowledged son and had been rejected in private. Bill returned publicly as Robert’s proud descendant – a distinguished lawyer, parliamentarian and defender of human rights – with his wife beside him and hundreds of people taking part in the act of remembrance.

    Bill and Frances Wedderburn were present at the 2007 commemoration, six years after Bill learned of his direct descent from Robert. Arrival at Inveresk Lodge

    Nothing done in 2007 could repair what happened to Robert in 1795. Nor could a commemorative walk settle the much greater historical account of slavery, exploitation and the wealth drawn from it. Its importance lay elsewhere. A journey once marked by abandonment was being made again in recognition and solidarity. Robert was no longer walking alone.

    At Inveresk, more than two centuries after Robert Wedderburn came seeking acknowledgement and was turned away. The rejected son had returned, symbolically, through a descendant who honoured him.

    For me, that is the most moving image in the whole story. The morally important Wedderburn was no longer the wealthy plantation owner who had rejected his son. It was Robert: the son of Rosanna, the outsider, the religious dissenter and troublesome radical who insisted that slavery abroad and oppression at home belonged to the same struggle. Bill’s presence at Inveresk reversed the old rejection – not legally or literally, but publicly and morally.

    The connection between the two men should not be made mystical. Political principles are not carried automatically in the blood, and Bill had formed his long before he knew that Robert was his ancestor. That is precisely what makes the discovery so remarkable. Bill was not imitating Robert after learning of their relationship. He recognised, late in life, that another member of his family had confronted many of the same fundamental questions two centuries before him.

    What is freedom worth when a person has no power to exercise it? What obligations do we have towards people whose suffering brings us no personal loss? What should be done when established institutions protect privilege rather than justice?

    Robert answered as a radical preacher and pamphleteer. Bill answered as a lawyer, scholar and parliamentarian. Their language and circumstances were very different, but the argument running through both lives was recognisably the same.

    The Telegraph called its article “Still fighting for freedom”. It is an apt title because it applies equally to the ancestor and the descendant. Robert’s fight concerned slavery, poverty, political exclusion and religious authority. Bill’s concerned workers’ rights, collective organisation, equality, freedom of belief and the protection of people exposed to institutional power.

    And so the signed copy of Cases and Materials on Labour Law has a significance beyond its academic contents. Bill signed it for me at the House of Lords in 2001, when I showed him the evidence connecting us to Robert. It marks the moment when a great labour lawyer discovered that the family’s most compelling ancestor was himself an early advocate of solidarity between enslaved people and the British working class.

    Six years afterwards, Bill went to Inveresk and stood where Robert had once stood. Robert had gone there asking to be recognised by his family. Bill returned to recognise him.

  • Protected: Kenneth William “Bill” Wedderburn – Part I

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  • Protected: Professor Lucy Rachel Wedderburn

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  • We Are The Tide

    What the sea remembers, the land forgets.

    The first people to walk this green and pleasant land came from Africa.
    Not recently – but in the long dawn of our species, when the only borders were rivers and mountain ranges, and the only language was survival.

    They carried no papers or flags. They followed herds, water, warmth.
    They crossed what was once land, and what would one day become sea, and left only stone tools, footprints, and genes in their wake.

    They were not white – and whiteness had not yet been invented.
    That came later, gradually and imperfectly, through ice and pigment, adaptation and isolation.

    Evolution, not entitlement.

    And still, they moved. Across rivers and seas, over ridges, through forests, to the islands.
    Long before there was a Britain to be British about, there were people here – wandering, settling, moving again.

    The earliest settlers brought fire and language. They carried no passports.

    Then came others, in waves, over centuries.
    They brought bronze, iron, farming, burial rites, new gods and ghosts, memories and myths.
    They came from the west, the east, the near continent –
    from what we now call Europe, Asia, the Middle East.

    They came because people always have – in search of food, space, safety.
    More clement skies. More peaceful and accepting neighbours.

    The Celts – only a beginning because the fog of time obscures what came before – were just one ripple in the sediment time left behind.

    The Romans followed, with roads and walls and underfloor heating.
    Then the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Norsemen.
    Vikings who came to plunder and stayed to trade.
    The Normans came latest of the conquerors, but left their mark in law, language, and stone.

    This island has never been still.
    Never pure.
    Only porous.

    And yet somehow, in our painful and lingering post-imperial insularity, we convince ourselves we are the finished product.
    Native. Defined. Entitled.

    Some scowl at the boats now battling the waves across the Channel –
    forgetting that boats carried all of us, if not in our lifetimes, then in the long-forgotten memories of our ancestors.

    Some of my own forebears came in chains. Others wielded the whips.
    One branch fled Jamaica. Another claimed a Scottish coat of arms.
    That is not contradiction. That is Britain.

    Every family tree, if traced without blinkers, eventually runs aground on a foreign shore.
    Refugee. Coloniser. Indentured labourer. Chancer. Survivor.

    We are not a race.
    We are a journey.

    It is not migration that is new – it is the outrage.
    The myth of purity.
    The delusion that history and culture start and end at Dover, and that identity can be ring-fenced by fear.

    It is not the boats that shame us.
    It is how we greet them.

  • Diplomacy – still a work in progress

    Natthaya, 2014. She had grasped the principles of repentance, but not yet the importance of separating it from the funding application. The opening was strong. The closing demand may have weakened her case.

  • Shangri-La Syndrome: Grass, Gravel, and the Mirage of Provence (Pre-Brexit)

    Early 2000s: Over a couple of decades living and working around France, I came across a fair few Brits who – to all appearances back home – no doubt seemed rational and pragmatic people, comfortably settled in their professional and domestic lives. Yet on holiday across the Channel, quiet plans took shape. They yearned for something more. Not just a break. A better lifestyle. The dream was semi-retirement in sun-soaked simplicity, à la française, whether or not they spoke more than a smattering of French or had grasped the true costs of running gîtes in rural isolation.

    Provence was particularly magnetic for these wide-eyed hopefuls. Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence (1989) had created a whole new mythology: rustic bliss, village fêtes, lavender fields, cicadas. That book did for Provence what Eat Pray Love did for yoga retreats. You could almost hear the sound of estate agents rubbing their hands in glee. It’s no coincidence that Sotheby’s planted a branch in Gordes around that time – the hills of Provence had become a brand.

    I would occasionally find myself – reluctantly – chatting to would-be expats over a drink. Certain triggers – “we’re thinking of opening a B&B”, “we’ve enrolled in an intensive French course” – set off alarms. I offered a few well-meaning caveats. A few listened. Others didn’t.

    They sold up their three-bed semis back home, racing ahead with an impulse ‘bargain’ purchase of a vast if crumbling edifice, frequently in the middle of nowhere.  Their Gallic Shangri-La. Yet the grass, it turned out, could be less than a luxuriant shade of green. A brittle, sun-frazzled beige in need of constant watering and care.

    One case sticks vividly in my mind. It was 2003. Not far from our place, down in the Ouvèze valley, stood a large, dilapidated farmhouse that had been on the market for years, at a greatly inflated price. It was, in estate agent parlance, “full of potential”. Translation: structurally unsound, inconveniently located, and uninhabitable without a massive injection of cash. Yet one bright March morning, for a retired British couple – she a school inspector, he a headteacher – it was love at first sight. They signed on the dotted line.

    They hadn’t done any homework. Hadn’t spoken to anyone local – like us, just a few hundred metres up the hill – who could have told them exactly why the place had been on the market for so long. Natural British reserve, perhaps. Or more likely that habitual self-assurance, the quiet assumption that they knew better than the natives.

    The valley looks idyllic in spring. Crisp air, birdsong, the quiet gurgle of the river. But what they hadn’t noticed was the road. A surprisingly busy departmental route, just fifty metres from the house. Come summer, it would become a thundering corridor of tourist traffic. Cars and caravans roared through, bouncing noise off the steep valley sides like a natural amphitheatre. The windows shook.

    It didn’t take long. Within days, they were already thinking of selling. I dropped by and offered support and local contacts, but was swiftly dismissed – “Our son is a lawyer in Geneva”. I bit my lip; their son could have been senior partner at Kirkland & Ellis for all the difference that would make in our Provençal backwater.

    But they didn’t give up. They overcame their misgivings, and with true British grit and determination, brought in a stream of architects, engineers, and landscapers. Massive earthworks were undertaken to build a noise-deflecting wall. Huge expense was incurred. Views sacrificed. And still, during certain hours, you had to raise your voice to be heard indoors.

    Then came the first of their legal battles. They tried to block an ancient droit de passage – a right of way that passed near the house. I warned them not to waste their time. They of course ignored the advice and cordoned off the passage with chains. Local farmers bulldozed the barriers, promptly and without ceremony. In this part of the world, you don’t overturn centuries-old rights of access because your brunch is being disturbed.

    Next – the coup de grâce.

    On a visit home from an extended stay in Savoie, the house was gone. Completely. Apparently, they’d given up on the renovation and, on a whim – following some dodgy advice – had bulldozed it to rubble. They’d been told that knocking it down and starting completely from scratch would be simpler.

    A bigger mistake they could not have made.

    What they hadn’t realised was that, under French planning law, once a building on agricultural land is demolished, its residential rights vanish with it – a far more rigid system than Britain’s looser patchwork of green-belt and rural zoning rules. Meaning it’s not a house anymore. It’s a field. You can’t rebuild on a field. Not a house. Not a shed. Nothing.

    They tried everything to claw something back – including one particularly ambitious application to turn the land into a 25-room hotel with a sulphurous spa, using a spring that happened to rise on my neighbouring property. The local mayor was not amused. Or fooled. They pled their case to the departmental préfet, and finally went to judicial appeal – all in vain.

    The DDE (Direction Départementale de l’Équipement) ruled promptly and decisively. The dream was dead. All that remained was a large hole in the ground, a few sad trenches with rusting rebar, and two deeply embarrassed and extremely angry retirees.

    By 2011, the whole site – piles of stone, weed-covered foundation trenches, two hectares of farmland – was quietly put up for sale. Asking price €10,000 – the full stop to an adventure that had already cost them many hundreds of thousands, and rather more in blood, sweat and tears. 

    Last wall standing

    Two neighbours, armed with the required farmer status giving them priority over other offers, had their eyes on converting a couple of ruined outbuildings into holiday gîtes. One asked me to provide a letter supporting her bid. I was aware that the original tip-off enabling the authorities to miraculously turn up in the few hours between the last wall coming down and the new one going up came from an all-too-local source. But in the final analysis, it was hubris that brought about the Brits’ downfall – not unscrupulous French neighbours.

    What happened to our overconfident, naïve and unprepared dreamers? They had no choice but to abandon one of the most expensive fields in Provence. And leave behind a story the locals still recount, with a mixture of pity, schadenfreude, and a Gallic shrug.

    Work site – hard hat compulsory

    Greenness, after all, isn’t just about the hue of the grass on the other side of the fence.

    The field – 2011

    Postscript 2025: The New Reality

    With Brexit long behind us and nationalism again on the rise across Europe and the United States, attitudes have hardened. Borders too. The easy mobility of the 1990s and early 2000s now feels like another age.

    After the Maastricht Treaty created EU citizenship in 1993, Brits enjoyed the freedom to live and work anywhere in the EU – a privilege that quietly rewrote thousands of midlife plans and retirement dreams. A Brit could pack up, drive south, and settle anywhere in France with little more than a ferry ticket, an address, and the conviction that they’d “made the leap”. Bureaucracy existed, but it was mostly local and surmountable.

    Today, it’s different. Since Brexit, British citizens are classed as third-country nationals – legally no different from Colombians or Belarusians when it comes to settling in France. Anyone wishing to move permanently must first obtain a long-stay visa before entering France, then apply for a residence permit. For those retiring or living on private means, the rules are tighter: proof of accommodation, comprehensive health insurance, and sufficient income – typically assessed around the net minimum wage  (≈ €1,400 per person per month) or equivalent savings.

    The easy cross-Channel drift for Brits post-1993 has vanished. Dreaming of Provence remains free; living there now comes with an administrative price tag. For many would-be émigrés, the grass may still look greener, but these days you need to prove you can afford to water it.

  • Global Travel on the Cheap? Tales from the HelpX Underground

    Take your pick – CouchSurfing, HelpX, WWOOFing. Different acronyms, same broad principle: a kind of barter network for the twenty-first century wanderer. Travellers exchange their labour, skills, or mere enthusiasm for food, lodging, and a taste of local life. No money changes hands – just goodwill, elbow grease, and a pinch of cultural curiosity.

    CouchSurfing always sounded vaguely disreputable, conjuring images of scruffy backpackers slumped in smoky lounges. In reality, it’s more often a polite, Airbnb-lite experience. Mostly urban. Mostly brief. And nowadays, largely sanitised.

    WWOOFers, meanwhile, tend to head for the hills – or at least for the nearest compost toilet. In return for shared meals and fresh air, they plough the permaculture furrow, dig ditches by moonlight, and discuss lunar planting cycles with soft-spoken eco-hosts and their dogs. Always dogs.

    HelpX falls somewhere in between. It casts a wider net – no requirement to know your nitrogen from your phosphorous, or to ferment your own vegan kimchi. If you’re willing to paint a wall, prune a vine, or just not leave toothpaste streaks in the bathroom, you’ll probably do fine.

    When I stumbled back home to France after one of my extended spells in Thailand, I started hosting. Sceptically, at first. But a year in, I had to admit – it worked. Mostly.

    There were hiccups. One Brit arrived oozing menace, told us he kept a gun in his lorry cab, and allegedly pulled a knife on his previous host over dinner. His stay here ended with Kathryn, a wonderful Yorkshire lass who returned for multiple stays, being thrown against a wall. After he left, he rang late at night to threaten us all. The usual pleasantries.

    Kathryn Barker, she fought to the end. RIP May 2022.

    Then came John – a wide-eyed Englishman with a time perception problem. You could send him to weed a remote patch of garden and find him an hour later in the same spot, mid-stare, seemingly locked in existential awe at two coupling gendarme beetles. Then cannabis plant began popping up instead of courgettes. Nina, our 90 kilo English Mastiff – who would sample anything remotely edible amongst the veg – ambled erratically poolside early evening, and fell in. It was a full moon, and she apparently discovered her inner lupus and began howling at the moon. John wrote later, asking if he could return. We declined.

    Another helper, a sweet but baffled French girl, was asked to turn over a flower bed. Half an hour later she returned, garden fork in hand, looking forlorn. “It doesn’t work,” she said. She hadn’t realised you needed to use your foot to push the fork into the earth. To her credit, she later became an expert at adorning the sunloungers.

    But there were gems. Retired Canadians who could tile a roof without complaint. Hungarians who cooked like angels and fixed broken water pumps. Germans who repointed walls with frightening efficiency. A couple of Irish lads who drank most of the pastis but rewired the entire barn. An entire New Zealand farming family who had taken a year off to tour Europe in a camper van, and stripped the brambles from steep slopes with hand-held scythes at speeds a Stihl brush cutter would struggle to match. And countless others, from early-twenties backpackers to seasoned nomads in their sixties, who left behind more laughter than mess.

    At the dinner table, stories were swapped about hosts. There was the swinger couple in the Dordogne, who preferred jacuzzi-based bonding to house renovation. The Dutch château owner who believed aliens lived at the Earth’s core and fed his helpers little more than lukewarm lentil soup. One HelpXer escaped on foot to the nearest village, with the host following in his car, accusing the poor guy of “ingratitude” through the open window.

    Of course, the system has its flaws. A minority of hosts exploit cheap labour; a minority of travellers exploit generous hosts. There are the overstayers, the under-washers, and the pathologically oblivious. But the same could be said of any extended family.

    What struck me most, though, was the sheer global sprawl of it all. There were host listings in Moldova, Fiji, El Salvador, even Jordan (spelled with an extra “n” on the site last I checked). South-East Asia was catching on too – Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, even parts of China.

    Would I recommend it? Without hesitation. If you’ve got a spare room, some half-finished projects, and an appetite for strangeness – yes. If you’re twenty and restless, and you don’t mind weeding courgettes in exchange for clean sheets and dinner – absolutely.

    It’s not Shangri-La. But it’s real. Human. Messy. And occasionally magnificent.

  • The Art of Meandering: Reflections on Life and Scepticism

    Welcome! Or at least: you’ve clicked.

    This blog doesn’t promise answers. It doesn’t promise recipes, travel hacks, or 10 ways to boost your productivity using only yoghurt and positive thinking. It certainly doesn’t promise consistency. What it does offer is a kind of meander through memory, place, and thought – sometimes personal, sometimes political, occasionally photo-heavy, and often coloured by scepticism and a nagging sense of impending global collapse.

    Doubt may be an uncomfortable state. But certainty is ridiculous.

    Voltaire