News / Edward Colston
Amazing secrets revealed inside Colston’s statue
The statue of Edward Colston is hollow – as Bristol’s city poet Vanessa Kisuule so memorably said in her latest poem – and has revealed some remarkable secrets inside it.
After being taken out of the docks on Thursday morning, the statue has been looked after by staff from the city’s museum service.
“It was a privilege to be involved with this today,” said Frances Coles, conservation & documentation manager at Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives.
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“I got very wet and muddy doing a job I love.”
Coles and her team are also looking after the placards left around the statue from Sunday’s Black Lives Matter march that will also be put on display.
Despite only being in the water for a few days, mud had already filled the inside of the statue “and obscured the evidence of its journey into the harbour”, the M Shed tweeted.
The team spent Thursday morning removing mud from with a hose and extendable brush.
“The painted graffiti was particularly at risk from the cleaning so this was done very carefully to ensure it wasn’t washed off,” the team said.
“The symbolism of his graffitti’d body has been preserved and the significance it has for us will be an important story to tell.
“We ended up with two surprise additions. Firstly a bicycle tyre which emerged from the harbour with the statue, and then the discovery of a clue to the people who first installed it in Bristol: A 1895 magazine rolled up inside the coat tails.”
This magazine from 1895 was discovered within the statue’s coat tails – photo: Bristol Museums
After the magazine had been careful cleaned and dried, the team found someone had handwritten several peoples’ names and a date – October 26 1895 – on one of the pages.
It is thought that these people could have been workers at the foundry where the statue was made, and the date when it was finished ready to be sent to Bristol where it would stand for 125 years until it was pulled down by protesters on Sunday.
More secrets were unveiled inside the magazine – photo: Bristol Museums
It is not known when the statue will be put on display, but it is likely that it will be located within M Shed – just a few hundred yards from where it was dumped in the water and then retrieved.
The removal of the statue has sent shockwaves through Bristol and across the world, with other statues being pulled down and names of schools, a tower and cultural institutions set to remove their associations with the slave trader.
Main photo: Bristol Museums
Read more: Sign removed from top of Colston Tower before it is renamed
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