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Painting of trader Elihu Yale One bright spring day in early April 2026, I visited Leeds Castle in Kent to see its dog collar museum. Of the 130 “rare and valuable collars” in the museum, about 60 had been collected by John Hunt, a historian and antiquarian, and later gifted to the castle by his wife Gertrude in 1977. A further 70 had been acquired by “purchase and donation”. According to the Leeds Castle website, its collection of historic collars, many dating back to the 17th and 18th centuries “was the largest of its kind on public display anywhere in the world”. Perhaps – if the exhibits were actually dog collars. But as an historian of slavery, my suspicion was that at least some of the items that I had seen on the website were not dog collars at all, but rather collars once worn by enslaved Black and Indian people in Britain as a mark of their servitude. Photographs of exhibits at the museum revealed large collars which match depictions of these slave collars in paintings dating to the late 17th and early 18th century, and I was keen to compare the two first-hand. But I was thwarted. Despite the website’s pronouncement that “Leeds Castle’s Dog Collar Museum is open daily,” the museum had been closed. It seems that at some point the curatorial team at Leeds Castle discovered that their exhibits were not all dog collars, and quietly shut the museum. So quietly they forgot to update the castle’s website. There were good intentions behind this, no doubt. But it was also an act of historical censorship, even if inadvertent – part of a pattern of rewriting Britain’s role in the slave trade, a tendency that has become more pronounced over the past few years. Between 1675 and 1807 Britain was the main importer of slaves to the New World from Africa. After 1807, when Parliament passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, Britain not only ended its involvement in the international slave trade but actively worked to combat it. Nevertheless, its participation in the slave trade is part of British history. How best to engage with this distasteful part of the story is a complex issue, one that British museums and National Trust sites have a duty to consider carefully. My suspicion was that at least some of the items that I had seen on the website were not dog collars at all As historians undertake deeper research into the topic, the extent of Britain’s investment in slavery, both cultural and material, is becoming evident. Suppressing artefacts, which provide evidence distorts history. Silver slave collars are crucial artefacts which speak to that difficult legacy. The Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut owns four portraits of Elihu Yale, dating to between 1710 and 1720. Yale, a wealthy merchant and British colonial administrator, was an early donor to the university now named after him. One of these, painted by the Briton James Worsdale and an imposing 2.3 metres tall, is described as Elihu Yale with his Servant. The portrait, clearly intended to depict Yale as a man of substance, shows him being attended to by a Black slave wearing a silver collar around his neck. Until 2007, it hung in the Yale Corporation Room in the university’s Woodbridge Hall, where the Yale Board of Trustees met to decide campus policy, until a student pointed out the incongruity of the painting on social media: not because it existed, but because of how it existed, benignly watching over meetings of the university’s trustees. John Marciari, a curator for the Yale Center for British Art at the time, acknowledged to the local newspaper, the Hartford Courant, that he knew of many other similar paintings, but that these were normally kept off display. Curators at some museums, he continued, “have since painted over the collars to make the art more palatable.” The paintings of Elihu Yale date to when he was part of the circle of courtiers surrounding Queen Anne. They can be viewed on the Center’s website, along with a discussion of the paintings’ historical provenance and context. Slave collars were a real thing at the time and archival evidence testifies to their ubiquity in England itself. Take, for example, an advertisement in popular newspaper The London Postman, from 17 September 1706: “Runaway from his Master about a fortnight since, a lusty Negro Boy about 18 years of age… Had about his neck a silver collar engraved Captain Thomas Mitchel’s Negro, Living Curators at some museums, he continued in Griffin Street in Shadwell.” An exhibit showing collars at Leeds Castle (Steve Vidler/Alamy) Leeds Castle, to be fair, is an unlikely location for a historical reckoning. On the Easter weekend of my visit to the “dog collar museum”, I was greeted on the path towards the castle by a carved wooden dragon, pretend mermaids and other magical creatures for children to discover. A day at the castle is clearly intended to be a fun day out for children and adults alike. Why force happy families to engage with such disturbing things? But this question underscores an important point: careful thought is a basic prerequisite for the display of such artefacts. For some time, the National Trust (NT) has been engulfed in controversy about the best way to display – or not – such artefacts forming part of the collections in many of its houses. The NT’s collection at Dyrham Park near Bristol, for example, includes a pair of stands that display Black men wearing gold collars holding scallops that serve as side tables. These were given to William Blathwayt in 1700 by his uncle, Thomas Povey. Both had been administrators for empire, with Blathwayt serving six kings and queens over almost 50 years. Leeds Castle, to be fair, is an unlikely location for a historical reckoning The curators at Dyrham Park have approached the issue thoughtfully. In a series of introductory exhibits that visitors encounter before entering the house, they frame Blathwayt’s involvement in empire and in slavery carefully, inviting the observer to acknowledge complicity in a deeply problematic and exploitative system. Then before entering the room with the side tables, visitors find a warning sign providing context for what awaits them. By way of contrast, the same stands also appear on the NT’s website along with the rest of the Dyrham Park collection. The item was once listed as “Nubian Slaves” and “Blackamoor Stands” and is now blandly described as “a pair of giltwood and polychrome stands”; here, there is no discussion of the wider context that the stools are a part of. Dyrham Park stands out for the willingness of its curators to confront this difficult past. Elsewhere, censorship by omission is far more commonplace. Indeed, sometimes this is done in the name of anti-racial history. Some Dutch museums, for instance, seem uncomfortable with any racially descriptive words such as “negro”. In 2015, a painting on the website of the RKD Nederlands Institute for Art History by Herman van der Mijn was entitled Portrait of a Lady with a Negro Servant; now it is just Portrait of an Unknown Woman, with a Servant. Dated about 1720, the Black “servant” was wearing a silver collar, marking him as a slave. Like painting over the silver collars in other works, the renaming of this painting to exclude racial signifiers, which makes it more difficult to be found and to be seen, is again a way of censoring an uncomfortable past. Rather than conceal the existence of these silver collars, museums and other repositories of history have a duty to reckon with the past in meaningful ways. We must see the evidence in order to fully understand the battles fought and costs paid to get rid of such a system. To comprehend how the past continues to shape the present – not only for the descendants of those enslaved in Britain’s empire but for all of us – we cannot and should not censor these historical memories. Museums need to explain to the visitor why it is necessary to engage with such material and why it still disturbs. Perhaps it all comes down to the purpose of museums. Are they supposed to be places that are just a fun day out for families, warming the blood with patriotic ardour? Or can they also be places that help us learn and make us think, that educate us about the past in order for us to make better decisions about the future? Here in the USA, as recently as 30 years ago one could go to Charleston in South Carolina and have little idea that slavery was once pervasive there. The one place that did promise some evidence, the site of the former slave market, was closed to the public. While there and elsewhere across the US, prominent museums have opened to address this history, their interpretations are now directly threatened by the Trump administration. These silver collars and their history, are a part of British history too. Morgan Godwyn, an English minister who had served in Virginia and Barbados wrote in 1682 that “Tho but a few were concerned in this horrid Fact” of slavery in Barbados “yet our whole Nation are guilty”. Perhaps he put it too strongly. But slavery did not just stay safely in the colonies. The NT’s 2020 interim report, Connections between Colonialism and Properties, now in the Care of the National Trust, stating that slavery needs to be more carefully acknowledged at Britain’s historic sites, was exactly right. These silver collars and their history, are a part of British history In response to an email query I sent after my visit, Jo Wiltcher, heritage and engagement director at Leeds Castle, confirmed that the dog collar exhibits were completely closed “following a leak in one of the rooms” in December 2022. When the exhibition was partially reopened, the new display only included a few of the collars. In response to my specific query stating that, “I’ve been working on slave collars for more than a decade (part of a much bigger book) and the online pictures indicated to me that some of the collars might actually have once been used for that purpose,” Wiltcher said: “We are aware of, and are actively working on, [a presentation strategy] behind the scenes.” She further stated that researchers could access the collars by special permission. I suspect that their awareness about the problematic provenance of the collars was sparked by the Guardian’s 2021 coverage of an exhibit at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. As Valika Smeulders, the curator for an exhibit in 2021 put it, with regard to a Dutch silver collar dated 1689: “For the longest time people have not wanted to come to terms with the meaning of those collars … they were always described as being dog collars, but if you look at the paintings, the ones wearing those collars are never the dogs, they are the men.” My best guess is that when Leeds Castle realised what they actually possessed, their solution was to quietly, without fanfare, close the dog collar museum, leaving only a dozen collars behind in two small glass display cases in an otherwise empty room. Ironically, this work of erasure is incomplete. Leeds Castle’s website still has a page dedicated to the dog collar museum, enthusiastically describing its collection of “130 rare and valuable collars … which date from the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries”. Affording researchers access is welcome. But it does not fully address the larger issue of setting out the context that led to the existence of these disturbing collars. If Leeds Castle choose not to display them, they should loan them to another museum. Honest curation is certainly possible to do: to frame these artefacts around the complex issues at stake, to show the real bonds and chains, and the structural legal and social system that was racial slavery. Censoring history is not the answer. More generally, the fact that a dog collar museum was open for 50 years with artefacts that were in many cases likely not meant for dogs – that, in fact, likely intended for humans – raises profound questions about how censorship can work as much by omission as by commission. Because of this omission, a difficult history has been hiding all this time in plain sight. READ MORE

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Thursday, October 8
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Brickbat: Bumper to Bumper

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Brickbat: Bumper to Bumper

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In Texas, the Galveston County Sheriff’s Office fired Deputy Carlos Ramos after a video showed him tailgating a driver without using his emergency lights or siren, and swerving to prevent other vehicles from passing. Ramos followed the driver for an extended period, although officials have not said why. The driver was eventually pulled over but received no ticket or citation, and the sheriff’s office later apologized to her. Sheriff Jimmy Fullen called the deputy’s behavior “inappropriate, unacceptable, and inconsistent with the department’s standards.” Ramos is not facing criminal or traffic charges, but the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement will review his peace officer license.

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