No, this isn’t a story about how junior assistants (yes, I think they still do have them) are made to work 27 hours a day at this top tier City law firm, but rather that, a long time ago, Mr Freshfield had some clients who had links to the slave trade.
The FT today reveals that Freshfield
>and his sons had several slave-owner clients, mostly based in the Caribbean. The lawyers acted as trustees of the owners’ estates and in one case tried to claim unpaid legal fees for the firm through the government scheme set up to compensate owners after abolition.
Given the then-pervasive nature of the slave trade in British society, this seems to me not un-akin to marvelling nowadays that a lawyer has clients with links to the haulage industry. That is not remotely to excuse the practice of slavery, which must, in any culture at any time, be abhorrent. But to indulge in hand-wringing now seems to me questionable. To paraphrase from William Monahan’s generally good script in Kingdom of Heaven, “those who gave offence are not now alive; nor those who were offended”.
Mind you, it’s topical because I was lunching with a friend the other day who noted that his business card did not bear the full address of the company for fear of ramifications, given that the company has a large presence in the US. The offending part of the address? “Plantation Place”. I guess it plays differently in the States, where the ghastly realities of slavery were much closer to home.
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