Canaries were once the harbinger of death by suffocation down the mine.
As I sit in the cool, air-conned, surprisingly shabby surroundings of Grind,
I can see a huge, glittering screen, singing the praises of BP.
On the screen, the grass is green.
But there’s no green grass that I have seen during this visit to London.
Net zero operations, screams the screen.
Canary Wharf, where the flowers are real,
So polished and perfect I thought they were plastic.
Towering buildings housing catalyst companies of death,
Polished, sanitised, made palatable,
Reflected in the surrounding stagnant water.
Canaries could foretell the potential end of life down the mine.
Little did I know, on investigating why Canary Wharf is named so, that it would take me down a connection chute leading directly to atrocities in the Congo, perpetrated by the forces of King Leopold II of Belgium in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
Canaries were used by miners to test for gas. Alfred Lewis Jones, born in Carmarthenshire in 1848, owned several collieries in Wales. He founded the Canary coal mining company in 1886. Jones imported coal from his mines in Wales to Gran Canaria.
Gran Canaria was a strategic stopping-off point for steamships crossing the Atlantic – the last refuelling point before the Americas. Having dropped off their coal, the returning ships were filled with locally grown bananas and tomatoes. This cargo would then land at the south quay import dock in London, which subsequently became known as Canary Wharf because of the sheer volume of ships docking there.
So unbeknownst to me, the mining link goes straight from canaries used down the mine to coal being shipped to the Canaries to the naming of Canary Wharf.
Jones was involved in the horrors perpetrated in the so-called Congo Free State (CFS) between 1885 and 1908. His shipping company, Elder Dempster Lines, had an exclusive contract with King Leopold II and handled all shipping between Belgium and the Congo.
At this time, the territory was a forced labour state, wherein the Indigenous population were brutally forced to produce rubber for the Belgian king. Amputations, murder and atrocities were inflicted on the population. It’s estimated that over half the population were annihilated by the Force Publique, the Belgian-run army in the Congo.
In the rest of Europe and Britain, questions were being asked, and newspapers began to publish accounts of the atrocities. In 1891, Jones received a request directly from Leopold to help quell the criticism of the Belgian dealings in the Congo.
Jones used his money and reputation to protect the King, promoting favourable propaganda from hand-picked journalists and Christian missionaries who were rewarded handsomely for their biased reports.
In Jones’s shipping office, there was a shipping clerk who supplemented his income with journalism, Edmund Dene Morel. He realised that, despite vast quantities of rubber being imported, all that was being sent back was ammunition, weapons and chains. This was evidence of extraction, and of the fact that the CFS was a slave-labour state.
Jones offered Morel a lucrative promotion not to publish, but Morel refused. He went on to found the Congo Reform Association with diplomat Roger Casement. Eventually, the Belgian parliament made Leopold give up his private colony.
This story has no happy ending. From 1908 to today, the exploitation of the Congolese people continues, where men, women and children toil in cobalt mines digging with their bare hands.
The legacy of colonialism and capitalism continues unabated. Canaries, coal, Canary Islands, Congo – hideous colonial history, tentacles far-reaching from the past and into the future.
Scratch the surface of UK place names, and don’t be surprised by the colonial cancer lying beneath.