Being Written Out of History: Erased, 'obliterated' and crushed

The author on Dolley's TGWU podium, the Pier Head, Liverpool. 1975

We talk a good deal in academic parlance about erasure: the deletion or at best marginalization of narratives and people(s) from history. Many, most in fact, are simply absent. They've never existed in the narrative and so there's no need for actual erasure. The histories, fiction, plays and films we try to write about colonized and enslaved peoples are more often than not attempts to compensate for such absence. My book The Eighth Chinese Merchant and the Disappeared Chinese Seamen was just such an attempt. There were no written testimonies and almost no oral recollections from the side of the seafarer victims, and naturally no discussion between a seven-year old boy and his eighty-year old grandfather, the Chinese merchant of the title. A few families had recollections of their seafaring husbands or fathers being deported in 1946-1947. However, by and large the story of the thousands of Chinese who were illegally expelled from the United Kingdom by the government, police and Blue Funnel shipping company acting in concert, had been buried for half a century. Only a semi-fictional approach could even pretend to give them voice.
But, then there are also texts and objects that did once commemorate and celebrate, but then later were erased, or "obliterated" to use a term from the lexicon of the US President. In a previous blogpost,  I wrote about long-standing libraries in Palestine and attempts to remove them, but there are many such examples of cultural and politically iconic spaces that have been demolished, erased, deleted. I lived in China during a decade of change, the 1980s, and saw at first hand the disappearance not just of famed buildings and monuments, but also of vernacular architecture, the fabric within which daily life took place. Much of old Beijing was demolished ahead of the 2008 Olympic Games, but so have many other old city centres throughout China. Those of you who follow my Photographic Archive will have seen pictures of old market streets in cities that were just coming back to life after the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution. They are now all but gone; their absence aggravated by the conservation of the occasional isolated building surrounded by high-rise concrete and steel. 
When I was researching The Eighth Chinese Merchant, I returned to Anfield Cemetery to revisit the gravestones of members of the First World War British Army Chinese Labour Corps. I was surprised to find that the original stones had been replaced with bright white, newly engraved ones. What had been special about the original headstones were the Chinese characters that local Liverpool stone masons had attempted to carve into them. They were often ham-fisted and poorly executed, but although clumsy they held a special significance, they had a certain aura. They represented an effort to recall these men for posterity in their own language. I contacted the war graves authorities and several e-mails were exchanged. I simply wanted to know where the old stones had been stored; I'd hoped they could be exhibited in a local museum. Eventually the official in charge told me flatly that my quest was futile since the war graves commission policy was to destroy all old headstones as soon as they were replaced. The men's names are now carved into new stones, but the visual immediacy of how they had been remembered for some eighty years has been crushed out of existence.
I came across a photograph the other day that dates from the mid-1970s. It's a black and white shot of me posing on a podium erected by the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU) at Mann Island at the far end of Liverpool's famed Pier Head. The metal structure was sculpted by the – then – celebrated former Camell Laird shipyard welder turned sculptor Arthur Dooley (1929-1994). Dooley was an unconventional, gutsy character with a colourful past. In 1945, he'd served in the Irish Guards in Mandatory Palestine. He disagreed with the way the British were treating the Palestinians and deserted from the army. There is even a story about his having stolen and handed over a tank to the Arab resistance.   
 
Having served jail time for desertion, Dooley turned to studying art in London. He eventually returned to Liverpool to establish his sculptor's studio and initially supported himself by working at the Dunlop rubber factory in Speke. Years later, in 1973, when he was at the height of his career, he was commissioned together with the architect Jim Hunter to create the TGWU podium for the Pier Head. In 1971, the first big international strike saw Dunlop and Pirelli workers stage joint work stoppages in Britain and Italy to protest against layoffs, and the TGWU wanted to celebrate this landmark decision of Italian and British workers to strike in unison.  Returning to Liverpool in the 1990s I found the podium had disappeared. It had been removed when the Albert Dock area was developed into a tourist attraction. Labour disputes and their commemoration don't attract tourists. After Dooley's death in 1994, the local newspaper, The Liverpool Echo, discovered the broken-up structure rusting in a council depot.

I suppose the lesson is that remembrance, especially of the underdogs in history, is never a given, is never acquired for ever. Remembrance needs constant and continuous vigilance. The moral for writers and academics: just because you've told the story it won't be carved in stone. And even when carved in stone, as we've seen, there is no guarantee of its survival.

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The now destroyed headstones of members of the British Army Chinese Labour Corps, Anfield Cemetery, Liverpool.

The rusting remnants of Dooley's TGWU podium found by the Liverpool Echo in 1994.