Britain's forgotten slave owners: Part two
Witness History
BBC
4.4 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 16 February 2021
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How one man used research by historians at University College London into Britain's forgotten slave-owners to track down the descendants of the family who'd owned his ancestors two centuries earlier. Dr James Dawkins tells Louise Hidalgo how his quest led him to the famous evolutionary biologist, Professor Richard Dawkins, author of the Selfish Gene, with whom he shares a name and a past.
Picture: slaves unloaded from slave ship at their destination; from Amelia Opie The Black Man's Lament: or How to Make Sugar, London, 1826 (Credit: Universal History Archive/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:35.4 | Sounds. |
| 0:36.4 | Hello and of a week of programs on events in black history, we return to the story of Britain's forgotten slave |
| 0:55.7 | owners and the people they enslaved. |
| 0:58.3 | Yesterday we heard how researchers at University College London for the first time made publicly available |
| 1:04.0 | the names of the thousands of British slave owners who were given compensation |
| 1:08.1 | when Britain abolished slavery in 1834. Today we hear from a descendant of those slaves who used the UCL research |
| 1:16.5 | to track down the descendants of the family who'd owned his ancestors two centuries earlier. |
| 1:22.0 | His name is James Dawkins. |
| 1:24.0 | It was in |
| 1:27.0 | Sweet Sanigo |
| 1:28.0 | that night |
| 1:31.0 | I give talks public lectures on this and as soon as I start talking about meeting the great |
| 1:37.8 | great great grandchildren slave owners most people their drills are on the floor, they're like, really? |
| 1:44.0 | And then of course when they find out who it is, then they're just like, no way, |
| 1:48.0 | oh, this could be a film, you have to write a book. |
| 1:51.0 | So, yeah, but it's been a journey. |
... |
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