So she came to live with us for a year or so, and when, finally, that too became impossible, my parents made the difficult, but inevitable, decision to find a home for her. Or rather, several homes – because she would repeatedly escape and, like a wounded animal, try to find her way back to the farmhouse, which she loved with a primal passion. My parents would receive calls from the police all over Essex and Suffolk, saying that my grandmother had been found, having walked twenty or thirty miles. That was one thing I could identity with, even as a young boy, the escaping and the walking – yes, that merited serious respect. She ended up in Severalls, a secure hospital on the edge of Colchester; by this time the Alzheimer’s had reached an advanced stage and when we visited she had little awareness of who any of us were. The last time I saw her, the poised, proud lady had been reduced to a shadow, more interested in the box of chocolates we’d brought than anything else. And as we left, I remember shuddering, watching the other inmates gathering around her to get the chocolates, like crows attacking a carcass.
In 1973 we moved into the farmhouse, which had to be virtually rebuilt. A happy, not very eventful nine years followed and I went to university. Only by leaving home did I really begin to develop a new relationship with this place. Perhaps by seeing it, as if for the first time, through others’ eyes – friends from university who couldn’t believe the beauty there. A kind of idyll that was only shattered by my father’s death, in the fields, in the fire of 1985. Since then my mother, with help from us, has planted over 5,000 trees in the fields, my sister and brother have established their own families here, and now a new generation of children play under the trees – my nieces and nephews. The cycle has come full circle for the third time.
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But what does this foray into the details of my family history have to do with perpetrators, victims or bystanders?
Some years ago I was helping my mother clear out an old sideboard and we came across a box of papers I had never seen before. Among them, I found this document:
The will of my grandmother’s mother – Lady Edith Florence Waterhouse, widow of Sir Herbert Waterhouse, dated 14 April 1931, which also listed all the stocks and shares held at the time of Sir Herbert’s death. I was amazed to see that she had left over £84,000 (equivalent to over £4 million today). What had happened to all of that money? Presumably a lot had gone on Vidi’s philanthropy – towards the rebuilding of the Catholic church in Hadleigh, perhaps. But some of that money had gone towards buying the farmhouse in Suffolk, not to mention our first house in Essex, that Vidi had also contributed towards.
But where had all this money originated? And where had it been invested? Very helpfully, together with the will, were lists of all the shareholdings of my great-grandparents, and, as I looked through them, I felt a sudden chill:
Anglo-Persian Oil Company
Buenos Aires & Pacific Railway
City of Bahia
Consolidated Goldfields of South Africa
Durban Roodepoort Deep Ltd
Indian Copper Corporation
Imperial Chemical Industries
Panama Corporation Ltd …
It was like reading an inventory of the British Empire and its associated partners. A roll call of the kind of globalised criminality that masqueraded as ‘free trade’ for hundreds of years. My hands started to shake as I turned the paper over, realising that our family had benefited from some of the vilest corporate activities imaginable. That our ‘progressive’ home had been built on the most rotten and compromised of foundations.
Later I started to research some of these companies. I found out that Durban Roodepoort Deep Ltd was a massive gold mine, still operating today as DRD Gold just outside Johannesburg. I discovered that it opened in 1897 and that ‘it thrived in an environment of repression and extreme human rights violations’. In the hundred years up to 1993 it produced 21 million ounces of gold, and billions in terms of profits for shareholders around the world, including my great-grandparents. The precise amount of gold mined from this land is known, but the numbers of deaths and casualties of miners over this period are not documented. The Indian Copper Corporation had been established as a British company in 1930, at Ghatsila in Jharkhand, north-eastern India, consolidating a number of different mines and plants in the Singhbhum copper belt. In 1972 the Indian government nationalised the company and it became part of Hindustan Copper Ltd, under which name some of the original mines still operate. I found out from their website that the mines at Rakha, Kendadih and Chapri have combined copper reserves of 123.54 million tons. But it’s hard to discover any information on the labour conditions or the history of the mining; I just find a reference that ‘mining in India is … infamous for human rights violations and environmental pollution’; so if that’s true today, I can only imagine what the situation would have been like in the early 1930s.
Years later, I’m still thinking about the relationship between my liberal, humanist family and this other story languishing unread for years on yellowing paper in a cupboard. The tranquillity of this corner of Suffolk, and the exploitation, the blood and the terror of the people who had worked in these mines, in these oilfields, eighty years ago. It’s like suddenly being able to see the skull beneath the skin.
Yet perhaps my family’s story in this regard is not so different from other upper-middle-class families. Any family that has wealth passed down from their ancestors would almost certainly have similar patterns of shareholding and investment, which provided the financial backbone for the British Empire. And if we were to cast the net more widely, almost everybody becomes complicit, albeit in less dramatic ways. Anyone who has a mortgage or a pension, anyone with anything invested, anyone on benefits – almost everyone, to some degree, is connected through international finance to such a story of profit and exploitation which underpins the smooth functioning of our societies. Two examples I came across when I was beginning this research show the realites of such interrelationships: I was looking through a report detailing the pension scheme of my impeccably liberal mother, the Universities Superannuation Scheme, and I discovered that the USS was heavily invested in two oil companies: British Petroleum (£373 million) and Shell Transport & Trading (£322 million). I wonder what retired academics think of a significant proportion of their pensions coming out of the ethically dubious oil industry.
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I’m sure many of us must have puzzled through these issues, feeling the questions nagging away, sometimes buried deep, but then returning periodically, with a clarity and persistence that disturbs. What is our comfort built upon? Didn’t Balzac once say that ‘The secret of great wealth is a forgotten crime’? We all now seem to be beneficiaries of a system of international finance, which often shades into criminality.3 And who are the casualties of this? The people who get destroyed when the zones of progress and the zones of sacrifice meet. They seem virtually invisible to us … And the greater our supposed ‘development’, the more these inner voices seem to build. As the current century dawned, the historian Eric Hobsbawm eloquently described the vast challenge involved in connecting to others in our world – and the paradox that lies behind that glib label of ‘globalisation’: