Here are four facts pertaining to Sir Richard Drax MP, the Drax Hall Plantation, and the Government and people of Barbados that all people of good conscience need to grapple with :-
- There are numerous black working-class Barbadians – some of them being descendants of enslaved Africans who were oppressed and exploited on the Drax Hall plantation of Barbados – who are desperately in need of proper housing;
- The 617 acre Drax Hall plantation of Barbados was a central location of the genocidal oppression and exploitation of multiple generations of enslaved black Barbadians and was the principal generator of wealth for the Drax family of the United Kingdom (UK) over a period of hundreds of years;
- Many Reparations activists in Barbados and the U.K. have persistently called upon Sir Richard Drax M.P. – the current owner of the Drax Hall Plantation and heir to much of the Drax family fortune – to repair a modicum of the damage done to the black people of Barbados by transferring ownership of Drax Hall plantation to the Government and people of Barbados as a Reparations gesture; and
- Sir Richard Drax has responded to such calls by maintaining that he “can’t be held responsible for something that happened 300 or 400 years ago”, and by resolutely neglecting or refusing to transfer ownership of the plantation to the Government and people of Barbados.
This complex of facts has now resulted in the Government of Barbados “compulsorily acquiring” some 52 acres of the lands of Drax Hall plantation to be used by the Government to construct houses for working class residents of the Drax Hall district who are sorely in need of enhanced housing accommodation.
And, of course, the Law of Barbados stipulates that whenever Government “compulsorily acquires” property it is under a duty to compensate the landowner by paying him the fair market value of the land that is being appropriated.
Thus, Sir Richard Drax M.P. – a man who is reputed to be the richest member of the British House of Commons – is set to receive some £3 Million of the national revenue of the predominantly black nation and people of Barbados as “compensation” for 52 acres of land that are literally soaked in the blood, sweat and tears of no less than 30,000 enslaved black Barbadians who were worked to death on Drax Hall plantation !
The fundamental injustice of this situation is made all the more glaring and hurtful by the fact that Drax Hall plantation is not simply one of the hundreds of slave plantations that scarred the landscape of Barbados during the Slavery era, but is “the” quintessential Barbadian slave plantation – the plantation (and plantation family) that is at the very heart of the story of slavery in Barbados.
You see, Sir James Drax, the direct ancestor of Sir Richard Drax, migrated to Barbados in 1627 as a member of the very first English settlement party that took colonial control of Barbados, and was one of the first Englishmen to establish a plantation in Barbados.
James Drax was also the single most important pioneer in the establishment of the slavery-based sugar plantation system in Barbados, and he did so on his famous Drax Hall plantation (circa 1640s). Indeed, it was he who insisted that he did not want white indentured labour on his plantation, and opted instead for a laser-like focus on importing enslaved Africans to make up the Drax Hall work-force.
James Drax’s son – Henry Drax – also entered the annals of Barbados’ ignoble slavery history as being the slave-master who worked out and wrote down the classic formula for establishing and maintaining a plantation-based slave work force. Indeed, Harry Drax’s infamous “Instructions” (composed in the 1680s) were handed down from slave-master generation to generation in Barbados as the veritable “bible” of slavery!
And then, of course, there is the wealth that James and Henry Drax – and indeed the rest of the Drax family – wrung out of the emaciated bodies of their enslaved Barbadian work-force and siphoned off to the U.K.
By the late 1640s, James Drax was boasting that from the profits of his Barbados plantation he had purchased an estate in England worth £10,000 a year. And a few years later he was constructing his famous and opulent Drax Hall “great house” in Barbados – currently the oldest surviving Jacobean mansion in the entire hemisphere of the Americas.
Having become fabulously wealthy from the proceeds of his Drax Hall slave plantation and from other investments in the slave trade, James Drax emigrated back home to England in 1654, leaving Drax Hall to be run by his attorneys and eventually by his son and other descendants up to today – an uninterrupted period of close to 400 years!
In England, James Drax and his descendants proceeded to acquire numerous opulent British properties and extensive land-holdings from the profits generated by their slavery-based enterprise in Barbados – a manor home near Boston in Lincolnshire; properties in Coventry and Kent; Ellerton Priory in Swaledale; a residence in Hackney, London; a town house in Bloomsbury Square; and the list goes on.
It is also noteworthy that in 1719 the then “pater familias” of the Drax family – one Henry Drax – was able to use the Drax fortune and influence to become Member of Parliament for Lyme Regis and Wareham, thereby beginning a tradition of Drax membership of the House of Commons.
Yet another Drax family milestone was achieved in 1755 when the then “pater familias” – Thomas Drax – inherited three fortunes on the death of his father : namely Drax, Ernle and Erle, part of which included the massive Charborough estate in Dorset.
Today, Sir Richard Drax, Member of Parliament for South Dorset, is reputed to be the richest member of the British House of Common. Drax lives in his family’s ancestral seat, Charborough House, a Grade 1 listed manor house in rural Dorset. He owns some 125 Dorset properties personally or through family trusts, and holds the lordship of the manor of Longburton, thereby making him the largest individual landowner in Dorset!
Needless to say, at the very foundation of this entire fabulous family fortune is the Drax Hall slave plantation of Barbados and the horrendous systematic enslavement, victimization and plundering of numerous generations of black Barbadians in what eminent Caribbean historian, Sir Hilary Beckles, has termed the “killing fields of Drax Hall ”.
And now, the said Sir Richard Drax not only says that he does not owe anything to the descendants of the people that his ancestors enslaved and exploited in order to build up the Drax family fortune, but he is also willing to sit back and receive payment from the predominantly black Government and people of Barbados for a portion of the said “killing field”!
Somebody, somewhere, needs to reach this supposed representative of the people of Britain and of the honour of the British nation and get him to appreciate the profound “unrighteousness” of the position he has adopted.
