Declaration of interest: Dr Stocker believes that he was the first person to use the phrase ‘Retain and explain’.
‘Another d-m’d thick book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Professor Hicks?’ The difference is that Dan Hicks is no Edward Gibbon. One of the better, if not quite redeeming, features of this book is the extensiveness of the notes and bibliography. The first and last sections, ‘The Rule of Names’ and ‘Culture Wars’, are certainly readable and provocative. They are my focus here. The core of the book, however, righteously holding forth on that extraordinary, eccentric though certainly far from lovable soldier, archaeologist, anthropologist and collector Lieutenant-General Augustus Lane Fox (later Pitt-Rivers) (1827–1900), can be safely skipped by most readers. The other ‘baddie’ in the book is Cecil Rhodes, and a bit-part is played by Augustus’s grandson, George Henry Lane-Fox-Pitt-Rivers (1890–1966), anthropologist, eugenicist and, as Hicks reminds us at every opportunity lest we are Oxford dullards, fascist. Politically, as you might have guessed, the author of the wittily-titled The Brutish Museums is uniquely placed to deliver a demolition job on all three rich, dead, white and proto-fascist and (just reminding you) fascist men. The book urgently, wordily and, I am afraid unconvincingly, attempts to link their Victorian excesses to how we should respond to museums and monuments today. The puffs on the dust-jacket from fellow academics who should know better (‘an astonishing tour de force’) must be taken with a pinch of salt.
Is there a conflict of interest in Hicks’s role as curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum, a position that goes with his more senior job as professor of Contemporary Archaeology, and the wellbeing of this extraordinary, haunting and powerful anthropological collection of the University of Oxford? A worrying answer is provided by Lawrence Goldman in his History Reclaimed article, ‘A Breach of Trust in Oxford. The Pitt Rivers Museum and the Destruction of the Past’. He writes: ‘… for three years or so, the Pitt Rivers’ aesthetic of wood and glass, has been invaded by noticeboards produced in garish colours, as if for a teenagers’ school textbook, with arrows, bubbles, and capitals to reinforce their message, a message quite as intrusive as their design. For these boards essentially disavow the collection: it is yet another example in Britain of curators seeming to hate the collections they curate.’ The noticeboards are emphatically – and rather crassly – Hicksian in tone, and while this author would be momentarily tempted to apply graffiti to them, he is mercifully living in New Zealand. In response to Goldman, Hicks, who does not name him (in retaliation, no doubt, for the callous un-naming of colonised peoples), triumphantly quotes Pitt-Rivers’ deed of gift, which states: ‘changes in details which may be made after the death of the said Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers shall be such only as shall be necessitated by the advance of knowledge’ and adds for good measure: ‘Ever felt you’ve been lied to?’ While they certainly think differently from their Victorian and Edwardian predecessors, what new knowledge do Hicks and his colleagues supply here? Even in his wildest nightmares, ‘the said Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers’ would never have envisaged the current guardianship of his museum and would surely protest: ‘Oh, anthropology, anthropology, what crimes have been committed in your name!’
In the statues war, Hicks – unsurprisingly – is a committed toppler and contemptuous of the ‘retain and explain’ case which, in this reviewer’s view, was actually one of the more reasoned and mature policies of the last Conservative government. Was Hicks one of the academics, I wonder, who threatened to boycott the supervision of Oriel College students as a reprisal for retaining Rhodes on the façade of his eponymous building on Oxford High Street? At one point, he calls this statue ‘hateful’, which the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle would certainly deem a ‘category-mistake’. It ascribes to an inanimate object (a piece of stone) the capacity to express emotions. Hicks obviously means that some people feel hatred when they see the representation of Rhodes in stone, but the language, like so much of this book, is emotive and irrational.
Despite many pages on Rhodes, Hicks overlooks one thing: the Rhodes building itself, a splendid essay in Jacobean revivalism by Basil Champneys, which dates from 1904-11, the zenith of British architectural sculpture. It was expressly designed to accommodate Henry Pegram’s statue of its benefactor, together with other worthies. The art historian Susan Beattie likens this practice to huge versions of the jewels adorning precious Renaissance caskets. Rhodes’s removal would be an act of iconoclasm (the word is never used in this book), and indeed vandalism. Hicks challenges the building’s protected status – it is listed Grade II* by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport – and argues that 26,000 applications were made in 2023 for consents to make changes to listed buildings. Lies, damned lies and statistics: the huge majority of these consents are about banal things like window frames, chipped bricks and heat pump installations. Hicks’s point clearly is that the past changes all the time, the Ashmolean Museum has recent funky inserts by Rick Mather for example, and so why can’t a statue change too? Well, it all depends on the building’s significance and the impact of the proposed changes on this. Most applications are granted because they negotiate their way around the issue and do not harm the fabric. But to remove a listed statue would be to annihilate this significance and Hicks fails to see this. I trust he is joking when he writes of the Rhodes statue being ‘finally taken down and donated to the Pitt Rivers Museum and put, let’s hope, not on display but wrapped in acid-free tissue in a cardboard box in some remote, forgotten storeroom’. Removal with no apparent explanation, then: unwittingly, he plays into the hands of those of us who believe that such arguments tidy away and even seek to erase history.
Hicks is quiet over the Colston trial verdict, which is probably a relief, but is shrill in his condemnation of the Consistory Court’s findings on the Tobias Rustat memorial in the chapel of Jesus College, Cambridge. To call Rustat a ‘slave trader’ is a distortion of the fact: the historian the late Trevor Burnard once told this reviewer that just about every Englishman of substance in the late seventeenth century had financial interests in slavery. The claim that he was an ‘Assistant’ to the Royal African Company meant that he attended (in the French, ‘assister à’) some of its meetings, probably saying very little as he was supposedly not particularly bright. Surprisingly, perhaps, I had some potential sympathy with Rustat’s removal to a purpose-built college ‘treasury’ gallery which Hicks advocates, even though this would have denuded the chapel of a feature of note, and thus been contrary to the heritage approach of the Church of England. It might, however, have constituted a constructive alternative solution, something that the Left has so conspicuously lacked in history. Yet seeing the architectural plans for its installation and the woefully inadequate stud height, I instantly echoed the incredulous tennis-playing philosopher John McEnroe: ‘You cannot be serious!’ I would also have sympathised with relocation had there been any objections to Rustat’s position in the chapel from devout worshippers, especially, yes, students of colour. But there were none. In a desperate moment, the anonymous confidante of the internal dialogue irritatingly running through Hicks’s book claims that Rustat’s retainers, ‘cultural filibusters’, made arguments which ‘had something in common with the backlash that Trump’s neo-fascist supporters unleashed when they stormed the Capitol building’. If so, then Hicks’ much-admired Stuart Hall must have had something in common with Sean Diddy Combs. Following the verdict, I wrote to the Master of Jesus, Sonita Alleyne, to congratulate her for not launching an appeal, and hoped that the money saved on legal fees would instead assist Jesus undergraduates of all colours and modest means.
I really want Hicks to be better. I stand with him in my loathing of racism, and believe that the colonisation of my adopted country, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the treatment meted out to its indigenous Māori people, is a frequently ugly and tragic story, even if it was less brutal than most. I also want him to provide better arguments than merely appealing to democracy and our changing times and values when he advocates toppling. What will future generations make of Rhodes’s putative removal and Hicks’s advocacy thereof? Isn’t he casting stones against stone? He says a lot about why we shouldn’t ‘retain’ controversial statuary but remarkably little, and disappointingly for an academic, about any need to explain it, using not just noticeboards but QR codes articulating a range of opinions and accessible on a smartphone. In personal correspondence with the Oxford-based African politics academic Simukai Chigudu over the Rhodes statue, I rapidly concluded that though he was a toppler and I a retainer, we were both passionately committed to explanation and there was some common ground. As for ‘democracy’, poll after poll has shown overwhelming public opposition to the removal of statuary, with the greatest advocacy coming, surprise, surprise, not from people of colour but from better-off, educated young Whites, very likely Hicks’s majority constituency at Oxford. I wouldn’t envy any archaeology student who was politically opposed to him, given his manifest intolerance of stances other than his own.
Factual errors litter this long book. Blue plaques are never ‘screwed’ on to historic buildings, as this would damage them. History Reclaimed readers will be intrigued to learn that Robert Tombs is a retired Cambridge professor of Mediterranean history, though perhaps his research has touched on Provence. The huge nude Achilles statue in Hyde Park does not remotely portray the body or face of the middle-aged Duke of Wellington but is a symbolic monument honouring his victories in the Napoleonic Wars. Railway buffs will point out that the undercarriage of an 1847 train, in which the young Augustus Lane Fox was a passenger, was not made of steel a decade before the cost-effective Bessemer process saw extensive application. Sir Edgar Boehm did not design just the 1887 gold sovereign but all gold and silver denominations from the £5 down to the threepence, and the same sculptor’s bust of Pitt-Rivers is not a statue. The book, weirdly, contains no illustrations, and yet its subject matter, from the statuary to a skull cap presented to Worcester College, Oxford (by the fascist Grandson, to use Hicks’s terminology) is so very visual. Clearly, Hicks nix pics.
Near the end of this interminable book, Hicks bad-mouths the ‘self-styled “anti-woke” campaign group History Reclaimed’ and its ‘fellow travellers’; I am clearly one such ‘deplorable’. The anonymous interlocutor indignantly asks him: ‘Didn’t I read somewhere that [History Reclaimed is] funded by Tufton Street’? Unlike Hicks (or his good friend), I fact-checked this and can happily inform them that History Reclaimed is wholly funded by individual supporters and has no connection whatsoever with this strange entity. Furthermore, History Reclaimed’s budget is certainly ‘small bickies’ when we learn from his proud webpage proclamation that ‘Dan has received over £6m in external research grants over the years, including most recently grants from AHRC, the DFG (Germany), Open Society Foundations, Art Fund, Arts Council England, and Volkswagen Stiftung’. Motes and beams, anyone?
