Bottles in the Basement

ABC. This podcast contains audio advertising. To hear it without ads, head to the ABC Listen app now. This podcast is a co-production of ABC Australia and CBC Podcasts. Tell me what the sellers look like. Okay, the sellers are basically a kind of a labyrinth really of small vaulted rooms, which are quite cold and damp, which kind of are underneath the sort of the basement level of the house. Hairwood House is one of the grandest country homes in Britain. It is wrapped in the green Yorkshire hills and this palatial building that is several stories high is surrounded by perfectly manicured gardens. It has a china room, a state dining room. Actually, there's a lot of rooms and all of them are adorned with breathtaking art. Basically, it's got very big down-to-nabby energy. But the most interesting room, at least to me, is its basement sellers. Back in 2011, two men were poking around in this very cellar. And there came across a couple of shelves right in the farthest end of the cellars, labeled bin 9 and bin 12, which was basically filled with mysterious bottles smothered in like this thick black layer of cobwebs and moulds, really kind of quite toxic looking. They were quite kind of fearful of actually touching these without gloves on. Yeah, I think she's underselling it. These bottles in bin 9 and 12 had like, postulous boils and tumours of mould, just looking at it would make you want to get a tetanus shot. But not these men. What did they do? They did touch the bottles and they actually did quite a cautious test. And they had kind of a hunch that the bottles actually contend, rum. Rum. Now why would these men go down into the basement, but 250-year-old mansion with strong two very strong Disney castle vibes? To unearth ancient bottles of rum. Well, we now know it was officially the kind of the oldest known rum in the world. The world's oldest rum. Yes, when those men popped those bottles, they were uncaulking a history that reaches right into the birth of the global British Empire. What is represented in those bottles is a spirit. It's the spirit of our people. You just still concentrate it into its essence and that's what that spirit is. How did that money buy and shake the estate? We always have to come back to where the money came from. I mean that money went almost everywhere into building the modern British economy. So you've got pirates upon pirates, slavery upon slavery as a tourist attraction. What passbar betas got to do with Hollywood house? If you really want to find out what Britain's done, really want to find out you have to funnel the money. The money trail is where everything is. My name is Mark Finell and in the days of the British Empire, things were taken. They usually ended up in museums and galleries, but sometimes they ended up in the basement. This is Stuff, the British Stole. This entire shelf is barbedo, right here is all barbedo's room. So I have dozens of them. How many bottles do you have back there? So in terms of wrong, there's probably around 350. And if you go up and you can't see up in the shelves up there, but I have hundreds of smaller little sample bottles. So if you said how many examples of unique rumours do you have? I say probably five between five and six hundred different types of rum. I'm a firm believer that everyone has at least one thing that they are a massive nerd about. You know, Star Trek or CrossFit or Irish Fitness Influencers on TikTok. I don't know, you do you? Well, prepare to be inducted into the global "Nerdum of Rum." My name is Matt Petrick. I'm a former software engineer who caught the bug for rum. It's such a point where I decided to give up my career of 30 years of software development to focus entirely on researching, writing about cocktails and rum in particular. We have a modest house here in New Orleans, but when we moved here, my wife said like you can keep all the rum collection, but you have to keep it all in your office. So my mom was just very good. It is wall to wall in Matt's Louisiana Home Office. He's got rum labels here from pretty much everywhere in the world. To the point that it's kind of easy to forget that rum itself is actually quite a simple spirit. Rum is sugar cane. If you take the sugar cane plant, you take the juice without sugar cane plant, you ferment it and you would get something called a cane wine, you distill it, you concentrate it into its essence, and that's what that spirit is. Rum is the distilled essence of sugar cane. So Matt is part of this very exclusive group, a sort of international cabal of extreme rum connoisseurs. They're not a very big group. Everyone seems to know each other. And I can tell that because one day in 2018, they all got an invitation to something mysteriously dubbed the rum tasting of the century. And I was at the top, I guess the penthouse floor suite of a very prestigious hotel in London, overlooking the Thames River. So this was sort of like a big deal for the rum community. It was sort of beautifully set up. This rum tasting event in the Ritzie as part of Britain. This promised to be a rum tasting unlike anyone that they'd been to before. So we're all friends, even though we live at different points around the globe. Normally, I would say of all the spirits categories out there, the rum people are the most sort of casual. You can see it. You shouldn't viewers can necessarily see me, but I'm wearing, you know, I'm sort of dressed up in a tropical shirt. That was a nice tropical shirt. But for this event, it's a good cry. It's a good tropical shirt. I like it. That's a good one. Yeah. It's sort of like my uniform. But yeah, the record, Matt is a very dapper rum drinker. Thank you. I appreciate that. But it was very surprising to see these very casual people now in suits for the one and only time I've seen them in a suit. This surprise suited rum brigade, gradually filing. And that is when they saw it. If I remember correctly, it was just sitting sort of protected on a table there. And very simple hand-blown bottles. I mean, nice, but still hand-blown bottles. Very sort of inconspicuous, like you wouldn't have thought anything was special in them. But there was something special inside those bottles. This is what people came for. The Harewood House rum, I mean, in 1780, was certainly the thing that got most of the attention. And it came time to open this rum. There was a heck of a time trying to open this rum and wax just did not want to come off. And it became more and more tense and everybody sort of crowding around and with their cell phones held out like, I'm going to record this and get something that's, you know, just seriously wrong. We've at least got it unfilled. And eventually, so what does two-century old rum actually taste like? It was unusual. It was not quite what I imagined. I don't know remember what I was imagining, but it's still struck me as like, this is different than I pictured it maybe tasting like. A little almost like acidic and they don't mean it was vinegar, but sort of slightly sharper than I might have imagined. But even tasting it, Matt and the others knew that the power of what was inside these bottles wasn't the liquid. It was the story they told. It's, I would consider that one of the high points of my career and rum is being amongst a very small group of people in this setting who's been able to experience something like this. I can't think of any bottle out or any set of bottles out there that are older for just brief few minutes like we're in a time machine and we get to experience what rum was made, how rum was made 250 years ago. It's an amazing time machine and, you know, it's very fortunate to be able to be part of that. Which brings us to the question of exactly how is it? This rum came to exist here in the UK in the first place. Who made it? Where did it come from? I don't believe there was much recording about that. I believe that the young people who owned and lived at Harman State Also, in the state or several states in Barbados, which would have made rum, so it's entirely likely that that rum would have come over to the UK. From their state of Barbados, shipped into the UK and maybe bottled somewhere in the UK. Barbados. All right, here we go. I've lived in Barbados my entire life. If you are on a physical map and you see a spec on the map somewhere near the Caribbean Islands, you go to flick it off and it doesn't move. That is probably Barbados that you'll see it. Right now you are tracing through the very loud streets of the capital of Barbados. This is Bridgetown. My name is Deborah Grant and I am the Master Chatter at Chatter House Auditors and we are a tour operating company that focuses on heritage and culture right here in the beautiful Aime of Barbados. Does it surprise you at all that allegedly the oldest bottles of rum can be tracked back to Barbados? Oh no, definitely not. I wouldn't expect it surprised me if it was made anywhere else. Too many times I say to people for a business is a home of rum and they go, oh I didn't know that. That should not be the case. They should know real rum originated from. They should know the oldest rum and they should know the best rum is all from right here in Barbados. So at its peak the British Empire commanded something in the vicinity of quarter of the world's population and land massive but in a sense it all starts here. Barbados was one of the first places colonised by the English abroad. We're talking back in the 1600s here and the legacy of that. It still lingers here. There is this term for Barbados. They called it little England. Yes. Why do they call it that? Pretty much because we were very British and some people were saying we were still quite British. Everything from our tea or our food, everything would have been influenced very much by the monarchy but we also would have been leading in terms of contributing in sugar and rum to the economy of England. Do you think most people in Britain know about the relationship between Barbados and them? No. I don't think that right now they're both those in England, no as small as the vacation spot rather than how much we've actually contributed to them. And many of my guests who come from England and I share that story with them then that's when they realise just how much of an impact Barbados has been to the British in terms of their wealth. But the part many tourists and rum drinkers may not fully realise it's exactly who was making this rum. Deborah arrives at the water's edge to point out a place crucial to understanding Barbados. So we know in the part of the board what where we have been told that vassals would have come in to bring in those of African descent so there would have all been here right here on this board what we're walking on now is where those libraries would have been offloaded and they would have been taken across the street and then sold to the highest bidder. In other words this is where thousands of enslaved African people first caught their glimpse of Barbados and right here on the boardwalk and this is where the rum would have been kept in the boroughs before it headed off to England. How likely is it that the rum inside those bottles was distilled by slaves? Well I think it's 100% likely that they were distilled by slaves. Really and truly the machinery of rum production so the people, the labour that was involved in sugar and rum production was almost exclusively especially by the 18th century done by enslaved Africans. My name is Dr Tara Innis. I'm a lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy at the University of the West Indies Cape Hill campus which is in Barbados. Barbados in the 17th and 18th century is a mixture of African labour and enslaved from England but also other spaces as well. Really and truly what we know of rum today so what you know of rum when you walk into your liquor store and choose a bottle of rum off the shelf that craft was really developed in Barbados and in fact it could be traded not only for goods and land but people it was used as ration a ration in the royal navy so it becomes such an important global product. Really and truly you know enslaved people are the backbone of the sugar and rum industry during this period. It is an uncomfortable fact that this modern state of Barbados is a nation built on legacy of enslavement and in fact it was on this nation that the global slave trade would build it to rules with something called the Barbados slave code. In 1661 the Barbados slave code is about developing this idea that the African body becomes a chattel slave so it is really the most important legislation and some scholars argue the foundational legislation that is taken to many other English colonies and reproduced that equates the African slave and the black body with being movable property. I don't think there's one single Barbadian who's had this history as part of their own ancestry. I don't think that they can deny that this is a part of their reality. This is the reason why they are here in Barbados. This is truly a part of your DNA. You can't really dissect or again divorce this history from where we are today but I don't think people are conscious of it on a daily basis. And yet those rum bottles that were found in the basement of a grand country house all the way over in the UK, according to Tara, they could offer a peak into the lives of generations of enslaved people. The sugar plantation is a 24 hour enterprise. You walk up very early in the morning before dawn, went out to the fields, worked, had probably very little to eat, worked in a very hot sun, whaling, can, dunging, can, so all of the preparation that goes into sugar cane production, that is what your daily life was like. And those profits went into so that money went almost everywhere into building the modern British economy. Everywhere in the British economy. You know, sometimes I think you actually just have to see it to really recognise that the hard work of these enslaved Africans in Barbados, it did transform the wealth of Great Britain. The streets are still paved with the legacy of the chance of that the slave-chafers, the city of London is the base. If you know what you're looking for, then you will easily find residue left. Welcome to the slave-trade money trial of London. And your guide is Darrell Blake, historian, researcher and above all. A lover of all things that Britain has stolen. Today we will be walking the streets. He's still good, it's still good, that line is still good. So we will be walking the streets of London just taking in that nice British fresh air of my knee mornings. And while you are inhaling all that Monday has to offer, Darrell points out, now he gesticulates at all of the buildings, these old beautiful wealthy buildings that were required on the backs of people stolen from their homeland. And for Darrell, this is personal. So my mother's from Barbados and my father's from Jamaica. So I grew up in South London, in a place called Brixton. I spent most of my other listen years there. Growing up in school, how much did you learn about the British Empire's connection to slavery? So when we learned about slavery, it was in the context of slaves were used for labour force to produce commodities to finance Britain's wealth. That's what we learnt about. And then it was however due to the grace of people like William Wilberforce, Britain became the first nation to or recognise nation to abolish the transatlantic slave trade. So that is literally the narrative that labour force was used to finance the commodities for Britain. However, Britain did do a great job of abolishing this slave trade. So they don't talk about individual key components to the British Empire who started it, why it started the actual amount or the wealth that was gained, the landmarks, the monuments still around today. None of that gets discussed. It's literally that's what slavery was. For Darrell, what's actually missing from the way we talk about slaves and life history? It's actually really simple. It's humans. They're human stories. Literal human beings did this to literal human beings. You know, it was a mindset, a wicked and evil mindset where people who are descendants of that time in British history, we've had to just navigate and make it through and hopefully, hopefully our stories don't drive us in the same. One of the biggest challenges that Darrell faces is, well, it's essentially shock. As he goes around pointing out the relics of slavery in London, there's an instinct that many people have to essentially want to play it down. It's hard for me to even go into certain spaces in certain rooms until the truth because every now. Okay, was it really that bad though? Are you sure? And you know, no one actually owns slaves today and, you know, yes, we are descendants of that time, but slavery's, you know, it's finished. It's gone. It's, you know, we've moved on since then and now we're, because more of a, like cosmopolitan city, you know, London, it's quite diverse, you know, and you know, my favorite cab driver, he's definitely from Somalia, you know, it's, it's, it's, we're moving forward now, you know, it's really important that we look forward. That's the sort of narrative that gets brushed over conversations that we're having today. One of my mentors said to me, if you really want to find out what Britain has done, really, want to find out, you have to fund it on money. And so, where does the money trail of those bottles leave us? Well, on balance, everyone, pretty much seems to agree that that rum given what was going on in Barbados at the time was almost definitely made by enslaved people. We also know that the bottles were found in the basement of a placial UK country house, not far outside of Leeds. So, what is the thing that links Barbados and the basement? Well, it's this, the family that owned that building. Herod House is the property of the La Cells family and the La Cells family used to own a number of plantations in Barbados. A whopping eight plantations, in fact. Of course, there's the connection with the royal family as well. The current Lord Herod, I think, would be a cousin to Queen Elizabeth and her children. So, the La Cells family is integral to the development of Barbados as an English colony in the 17th century. They come to Barbados to participate in the growing field of sugar production. And it made them stunningly rich. Sugar, grown by slaves. You know that basement and did that whole beautiful house? It's all there because of the people of Barbados. The wealth that is on display when you walk inside, I mean it's just tremendous and you walk outside and there's these lovely gardens. Is it possible to quantify how much of their wealth is linked to slavery? Is that something that could even be identified? It is a challenging to quantify. Even though families might have been involved in the slave trade and slavery and some of their wealth was from those investments. As time passed, a lot of that money was either reinvested into other ventures and enterprises. So then it becomes very muddy as to where the real wealth was accumulated. But certainly for this family, this is, and this is one of the individual families that you could really look at. Their investments in the Caribbean helped to solidify their place in what is now the aristocracy of England. They've sort of become entwined, don't they? Yeah, I mean I don't think you can divorce this history from this particular site. In other words, it's not the bottles that were stolen. It was the basement and the building it sits within all of it bought and paid for on the backs of stolen people. That's the theft. And somehow knowing that it completely changes the way you look at this beautiful building and its manicured gardens. It's designed to impress and it's very hard to kind of not feel kind of awe and wonder when you when you look look at hair wood, it's designed to intimidate I guess as well, you know, it was designed to show off. Rebecca Burton is a curator who works here at Hairwood House and you heard her earlier describing the bottles and the basement. Not a word of what you've heard so far, but the history of this place, not a single word, is news to Rebecca. Nothing can ever make up for the atrocities that that happened, you know, not just in Hairwood's past, but in, you know, Britain's past as well, you know, it goes far beyond just just hair would itself. We can't do anything to make up for our past. And actually that's something that, you know, the current Earl says quite often, you know, we can't change the past, but what we do have the power to do, you know, is change the future. If you go to the Hairwood House website today, you'll see that they're pretty upfront about the history of slavery that underpins this building. It's been that way ever since the crest of the Black Lives Matter movement. No one should be able to come to Hairwood without understanding that the house and the grounds and everything in it essentially was funded by the labour of enslaved individuals and the exploitation of, you know, the systematic exploitation of enslaved individuals. So that always has to be our starting point, but I think, you know, we always have to come back to where the money came from because it's impossible to understand this place without that knowledge. Except for some people in the UK, that knowledge is a very dangerous thing. You see, a couple of years ago, they commissioned some research to see just how many of these beautiful, stately homes that dot the rolling green fields of England, just how many of them could link back to histories as dark as the one here at Hairwood House. I think the fact that that slavery wealth is hidden is a problem in terms of memory and remembering it. How do you remember it when you've got no plantation houses like you've got in St Louis, you've got no huts where enslaved people were living? You've got no physical evidence of it. The only thing you have is money which has been repatriated and converted into fine and beautiful things, houses and lovely objects. Professor Karin Fowler is an expert on country houses and colonial history. And a couple of years ago, there was this very big report examining just how many of these beautiful country houses have history that's perhaps not as polite as what they put on the block. A third of all national trust properties, so nearly a hundred, were connected to various kinds of colonial activity. Sugar wealth was really important to Britain on many, many levels. This slavery system meant that huge profits could be made. Yes, there were individuals becoming wealthy and those individuals often bought up land, railways, roads, factories, schools, hospitals, charitable institutions. There are many ways in which that money found expression. Interestingly, when this report came out, the reaction from the media shock jocks was, well, a lot. There was a lot of hostile media coverage of the report. I think it's a sensitive history for a population which wasn't that familiar with the history of British slavery, found that in Congress, you know, how can these lovely places have anything to do with something so horrible as slavery and some aspects of British colonial activity? That reaction she's talking about there. And also the reaction that Darrell gets when he talks about slavery. Both of them are symptoms of what happens when there are these huge chunks of history that are sort of submerged from the public consciousness. But in a sense, it makes those bottles of rum an opportunity. Those bottles are a brilliant starting point for understanding the connection between sugar. The byproduct of sugar which was rum, what has Barbados got to do with Howard House? How did that money go buy and shape these states? How did that affect the local people around these state? All these questions are opened up by a very rare example in some ways or of the physical evidence of a connection between a Barbadian probably at plantation and the rum that came from it all the way across the ocean to Harvard. So it is a brilliant item, an object, to show people and to start having those conversations. Which brings us back to that rum tasting of the century back in 2018. You see, they didn't just do a tasting. The decision was made ultimately to sell the rum. They went up for auction and sold for lots of money. The last as family, you know, were sure that they couldn't possibly benefit from the proceeds of the sales given the fact that it had been made through the stolen labour of enslaved individuals. And so the money was actually donated to a local charity, which kind of aims to bring young people together through arts and culture and, you know, that money could be used to actually go back into local communities, particularly the Caribbean communities. I think, you know, by talking about a hair was passed and, you know, it can be a little bit kind of uncomfortable and challenging at times. But equally, you know, there's a lot of goods that can come of it. For Matt, our mega rum connoisseur from the beginning who attended that tasting of the century, knowing this history, drinking this history, it does present some complications. Does it change how you look at bottles like the hairwood house bottles when you can evaluate it on its taste and its flavour and then there's that other component to it's like, oh, this was sort of made by slaves and slave to people. Does that ever change how you think about the rum when you're drinking it? You know, it's a challenging question. I can't escape it. I know it's there. Rum seems to get particularly like tagged and slave people and the same goes for tobacco, same goes for indigo. It was rum was just one of many commodities that came out of colonialism and slavery. And so, you know, if we, you know, what a past particular judgment on rum, we have to pass it on to whole, just many other things that we still, you know, consume every day and we don't think about it. I guess the difference is it's rare to have a definite article that we know was made by enslaved people. Like, the legacy of sugar, the legacy of those things, like, absolutely, but it's rare to have an opportunity to literally taste a thing that was made by enslaved people. I think that's the distinction, maybe. Yeah, I mean, I mean, in our regard, yeah, you're correct. We could call it the rum being a spirit, but beyond that, it's the spirit of our people as well. So the spirit of our identity, who we see as our, as of ourselves, that is really the essence of what has been stolen from us, the pride in ourselves. Barbados' motto is, you know, pride and industry. Rum is part of our pride and industry. When we can't touch and feel our own history, when we don't see it reflected back on us, when we see that we have to go elsewhere to retrieve it, that is a loss, that is a theft, a very purposeful theft to our, of our being, of our identity, of our ability to go back into ourselves and say, look, we produce this. This is something that we should have pride in. This is something that our ancestors died for. In 1966, Barbados declared independence. And in 2021, the nation became a republic, the now King Charles, even came and gave a speech. But we're still talking about a land that had 200 years of slavery. What do you do with that legacy? Back in Bridgetown, till God Debra Grant, she walks up to a fairly unremarkable cow park. And this lovely car park, concrete and grit car park, what the discovery for this car park was actually, it was the barrier ground for those of us who did not make it to this land alive. Standing next to this car park, the towers over a hidden legacy of slavery. Debra pulls out, a small bottle of rum. So every time I'm here, I do remember them. I would come and do a libation here and pay tribute to my ancestors are here. It's an African tribute to the ancestors. You pretty much stand usually without shoes on because you're at one with the ground and you use a spirited liquid. In my case, I would use rum because I think rum is the most appropriate liquid to use. There's a sense of, I don't know, at one with the spirits and it just feels different. I said earlier that Barbados was a nation built on a legacy of slavery. And whilst that is an uncomfortable truth, for Debra, it doesn't necessarily have to infuse the future. I see it as something that happens to a people and a people that can change their journey because they want to know who they are then they can become the people that they want's were. Again, we're not slaves, we're African descendants. We're Africans that were taken and taken to other parts of the world but that doesn't make us slaves a part of our DNA. That's not it. We need to believe in ourselves that we can run our countries without having to be tied to the colonizers. Staff the British stall is produced by Leah Simone Bowen, Eunice Kim and Zoe Ferguson. It is written, edited and hosted by me, I'm Mark Fannille. The sound mixing that you're listening to right now was Martin Peralta and the executive producer is Amruth Asleeve for ABC R.N. and Cecil Fernandez at CBC Podcasts. Very special thank you to Scott Weatherhead, Russell Newlove, Bracila Ann Barrow and Daniel Pereira. Staff the British stall is a production of ABC R.N. in partnership with CBC Podcasts. [MUSIC]