History is Unfair: Researching Memorials at Bath Abbey - PART TWO

History is unfair, and researching dead people for Bath Abbey (see part one of this article for more information) has proven that.

As part of an exhibition on Jane Austen in Bath Abbey, I researched a couple - William and Dorothy Tudor (the reasoning was that William lived next door to the Austens for 3 whole months (we think) - a very solid link). I began by researching William, and quickly found a wealth of information. William had a successful career as an army surgeon during the French Revolutionary Wars, being promoted all the way to Assistant Inspector of Hospitals to the Forces, before retiring to Bath where he practiced as a surgeon (as well as his role as Surgeon Extraordinary to the Princess of Wales and to Queen Charlotte!). In 1808 he was elected to the Corporation of Bath, and went on to hold many roles on the council including Justice of the Peace, Alderman and even Mayor in 1828. I traced his life all the way to the manor house he had built on the outskirts of Bath, where he spent the last ten years of his life with one of his daughters and his second wife Julia (who I first thought was another daughter I had missed considering she was 29 years younger than him. The 1800s were wild man). This abundance of information gave a fully rounded picture of William - of a man driven to help people however he could, whether through his great skills in surgery or through civic leadership.

Figure 1: William Tudor’s memorial - a glowing recital of his achievements

With Dorothy, I know she was born, she got married, she had three daughters and she died.

We know nothing of her personality, of her goals, of her interests - of her life outside of her husband. In many ways, she exists more as a ghost in her husband’s life than as a person in her own right, but even then, the man she was married to for fifteen years remarried a much younger woman just 4 years later (which speaks a lot to the character of William, the supposed great helper of man).

Figure 2: Dorothy Tudor’s memorial - even in death reduced to the men in her life

This story illustrates the two types of results you get when researching the long dead - either you get more information than you know what to do with, or you get barely any trace at all. Unfortunately, the latter happens far more often with women in history. There are exceptions, of course, but I can tell you that all but one of the men I have researched for this project have ended up like William, while all the women have ended up like Dorothy. I wonder if that’s representative of some larger societal issue, of an unfair system stacked against women. Hmm.

The lack of information available about some people (and like Every Woman Ever) is all the more frustrating when you find an abundance of information on someone who kinda, like, sucks.

While no records of his personality survive, there’s a decent chance that those who knew Joseph Julian Labalmondiere had good things to say about him. Living in Bath at the turn of the 19th century, he would have been in the midst of the blossoming city during its Georgian heyday. From his will, we can see that he gave generously to not just his immediate family but also to who appears to be the widow of a friend. I’ll even look past him being French.

What I can’t look past, however, is Labalmondiere’s numerous plantations in Guyana which enslaved hundreds of people each.

On one hand, researching a slaver can be easier than other individuals thanks to the amount of time and effort that has gone into making databases of such figures, raising awareness of the extent of the Slave Trade and bringing accountability to the people and families who prospered from it. Much of my research into Labalmondiere surrounding his plantations came from the UCL Centre for Study of Legacies of British Slavery, a comprehensive database of slavery and plantations across the British Caribbean - if you’re ever researching a figure who you believe may have been involved in slavery, or want to investigate the unclear heritage of a noble family or their estate, I highly recommend using the site, which can be found here.

Figure 3: The UCL Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery homepage

On the other hand, such research brings up a wealth of ethical and personal dilemmas and questions. How do you approach writing a short biography of an individual who did such terrible things? Do you maintain a neutral tone, or do you make your views on their actions clear? Is it right to be even writing such a biography in the first place, remembering a slaver while the thousands of enslaved people he owned will go forever unknown?

A lot of these questions map to wider questions facing the museum sector, especially in countries with an imperialistic legacy like the UK. A common response has been to elevate systematically suppressed and overlooked voices and histories - a great idea which really helps round out history and starts to address historical unbalances. However, this is not an option for the Abbey Memorial project, considering that its scope is limited to those commemorated in the Abbey (aka those who could afford such a monument - not the enslaved individuals, but the slavers).

Not wanting to simply give up and do nothing, the Bath Abbey Memorials project instead has decided to put a spotlight on the contentious history. They have identified over 300 memorials which are explicitly linked to empire and colonialism - most often through the transatlantic slave trade or the East India Company - and feature an article about these links prominently on their home page; furthermore, they have added a search filter for those with colonial links. Any research into someone flagged as linked to empire is handled with extra care - the researcher is provided with extra resources (that is, links to entries in the databases listed above), and the biography is proofread and edited to a greater degree than usual to ensure that the final product is accurate and clear, with the subject’s role in such unethical actions made obvious rather than hidden.

This is, in my opinion, the best approach that the project could take. They could have ignored the evil carried out by the memorialised; they could have whitewashed history by focusing only on people who lived virtuous lives. Rather than hiding away from their past and denying it, they put it on display - not proudly, but transparently.

Still, the truth of the matter is that while there is plenty of information available on Labalmondiere - of his family, his job, his houses - there is nothing remaining about the nearly four hundred enslaved individuals, whose only remaining trace is that they were recorded as property by Labalmondiere’s attorney. We may wish to know all that we can about the past, do justice to the lives of the billions who came before us, bring forgotten and suppressed stories into the light - but the harsh truth of the matter is that much has been lost, and will never be found again.

‘Groups hidden from history are hidden for three reasons. They are hidden because of prejudices against the group in the past; because of modern prejudices; and because of the absence of records’ - Anne Laurence, Women in England 1500-1760, p.3

I think again of the Tudors and the disparity of information between the two despite them being an upper class married couple. You could argue it is unfair to compare the two - William had a long, accomplished life in the public eye, while Dorothy died before she turned 40. But why should Dorothy go unknown because she had the misfortune of dying early - the misfortune of being alive in a time where women were expected to exist purely for her husband and her children? It reflects the lasting impact of discrimination and oppression - individuals are not just suppressed during their lifespan, but essentially erased from history.

And this is not just an issue with sexism but with racism, classism, homophobia - all forms of injustice erase part or all of an individual's lives. During a past assignment - the Designing for Creative Lives project proposal - I considered proposing a queer tour of the Bath Abbey memorials, focusing on LGBTQ+ lives of those within; I had to drop this when I realised that we do not know if any of those within the Abbey were queer, as such information was at best not recorded and at worst actively suppressed from history. What’s more, the vast majority of the time those memorialised in the Abbey are the upper classes, the wealthier - how many hundreds of thousands of poorer Bathonians throughout history lived full lives - loved, hated, laughed, cried - but will never be remembered, never be thought about again? And that’s to speak nothing of the countless enslaved individuals owned by absentee plantation owners, whose work funded the lavish lifestyles of many of the memorialised.

History is unfair.

But we are not helpless. While we cannot restore stories that have long been erased, we can point to their absence and the causes behind it. We can show that history did not consist of purely rich white men who were the only ones with full lives - we can show that the lives of a vast majority have simply been lost and suppressed, deemed too unimportant to record by those in power. Museums and heritage sites may not be able to fix the past, but we can show how it was unfair, and ensure that the future is perhaps a little brighter.

Maybe together we can ensure that no one else will be forgotten.

*Click here to see a timelapse of the Bath Abbey restoration project.

Ethan Cowie is a recent student on the 2025-2026 MA Museum Studies programme at the University of Leicester.