Keisha Thompson FRSA

Caitlin Morrissey

So I’ll begin with the first question then, which is to ask you what you see as the DNA of Manchester and where you see the DNA of Manchester in The Guardian newspaper itself?

Keisha Thompson

So I’m a very proud Mancunian. I always say that I was born in Manchester, raised in Manchester, never left Manchester because I love Manchester. And yeah, it’s really interesting considering, oh, ‘is there a unique thing about Manchester?’ And obviously, there is in the way that any place has that kind of identity. But I wouldn’t want to reduce it because we have a very strong brand which can be useful but then can be exclusive sometimes. So there’s stuff that I could really easily mention right now, but I’m being very deliberate about not doing that.

But one thing I’ll say is that I know that when I step outside of Manchester, whether that’s going to another city or another country, when I say ‘I’m from Manchester,’ people know where I mean. They’re like, you know, they’ll say ‘Manchester United!’ or they’ll make reference to our music or something like that or our politics. So that feels really beautiful, actually. Growing up as a young person, it gives you that sense of confidence. Even just looking at the weather forecast, for example, and Manchester being on there, you’re like, ‘yeah, we’re somewhere.’ So I’ve always had that sense of like, this is a significant place. There’s great history that’s happened here. And growing up in South Manchester in particular, it’s very multicultural, it’s very multi-faith. The industrial history isn’t hidden. So you know that it’s a working city, the worker bee. You get that sense of like, there’s stuff that happened here, there’s people that gathered and galvanised here, and there’s something to uphold and protect and for you to contribute to.

So that’s the feeling that you get growing up in this city, feeling that you can tap into a very strong cultural sector, sports, politics, knowing that Marxism has got a really strong link here, the suffragettes, the suffragists, even vegetarianism. Learning about Alan Turing. For me, what was really beautiful in the area that I grew up in, which is near Moss Side, Whalley Range, Chorlton, I was in an area that gave nod to people like Nello James and the Kath Locke, there’s a Kath Locke Centre, so there was a really great sense of acknowledging Black history in my area which felt very, that was very edifying for me and validating for me as a young Black girl growing up.

So I’d say there’s definitely a strong Manchester brand that you feel growing up here that you want to protect but that you also feel that you have to dismantle for people so that you don’t just get reduced down to the Haçienda, let’s say.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you so much for getting us started there, Keisha. We’ll pass over to Maya now, and then perhaps we’ll ask you to reflect upon where you see these values and these characteristics in the newspaper. So over to you, Maya.

Maya Wolfe-Robinson

Yeah, I guess I’d say that I didn’t grow up in Manchester. I’ve been here for about five years, and it’s embraced me, but I’m not a Mancunian. So I’ll talk more maybe about how we can see The Guardian-- Manchester in The Guardian’s DNA. And I think actually, they’re really inseparable.

In households like mine, we grew up with the paper being referred to as the Manchester Guardian, even though it’s been quite some time since it’s been that. It was started 200 years ago in the city as the Manchester Guardian, and now we’re this huge international news organisation with offices in Australia and the United States, as well as in the UK. And we still have our office in Manchester where me and Keisha are based and where we’re working today. Our headquarters in London, but it still feels like, you know, those are our roots.

And right back to the founding of the newspaper is so tightly wedded to Manchester history. It was founded just two years after the Peterloo Massacre, which is such a of a seminal moment in the city’s history.

Greg Clark

I think most people will know what happened, but I think making the link to why The Guardian was started two years after Peterloo, would be really, really helpful, Maya.

Maya Wolfe-Robinson

Yeah. So the Peterloo Massacre, as lots of people will know, it started off as a peaceful protest of working people who wanted the right to vote and ended up with the soldiers storming the crowd. 18 people were killed and hundreds were injured. And in the crowd that day was John Edward Taylor, who would go on to be our founding editor. And the reporter from the Times of London was arrested, and so John Edward Taylor was worried that there would be no reporter there to challenge the official version of the events, the events that the magistrates and the authorities were trying to say happened. And so, that was where this idea came out of. And he founded the paper with a group of fellow liberals. Many of them were part of a social circle. They were known as the Little Circle. They kind of believed in political liberalism and political reform. They wanted there to be better representation of Manchester and Greater Manchester in Parliament. And so, that was our sole foundational story for 200 years until a couple of years ago when some research made us realise that there was more to that story. The other thing that these liberal merchants had in common was that they were all involved with the cotton trade, as was most of the city. It was so huge. It was what turned Manchester into one of the world’s first industrial city. But that meant that they also had this intrinsic tie to transatlantic slavery, which is a story that hasn’t been told as much.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you so much. You mentioned there about John Edward Taylor and his backers who helped fund the newspaper and received their relationships to cotton and the transatlantic slave trade.

Through your research, did you find out anything more about the city itself that the newspaper was born into?

Maya Wolfe-Robinson

So I think the thing that the research made me realise is it made me walk around the city with new eyes. And so, lots of people know one of the symbols of Manchester, the bee – the worker bee that Keisha mentioned earlier – and understand what that means and its importance to the city of Manchester. Particularly after the awful terrorist attack a few years ago after an Ariana Grande concert and loads of people got bees tattooed on them. It really became this symbol that so many people associated with Manchester. But one thing that I started noticing after doing the research was all of these other symbols and one was a ship. There’s the ship on the crest of Manchester United and Manchester City, and that ship represents the cotton industry and that trade and how important it was to the city. And once you start to see those kind of things, you start to see ships all over the city. You start to look more at the road names and think, ‘okay, Brazil Street. I know that’s because there was these important trading links around cotton to Brazil.’ ‘Okay, I hadn’t quite realised that that fountain, which is a cotton bud, I now understand what that symbol means.’ And so, I think I saw, I understood the city in a different way and started to pay attention to more of those.

I think I also started to pay attention to the kind of physical geography, so the canal, and thought about what role that would have played in this industry. It made me think about a place where I go walking with my family all the time in Styal, which is Quarry Bank Mill, which is one of the-- it was one of the biggest mills in the UK. And it’s still a working mill, it’s run by the National Trust. It’s a great day out. It’s got some beautiful woods next to it. But I just felt completely different when I would walk around it because all of a sudden, I saw how it fitted into this bigger picture. In some ways, it’s like this quintessential English village, but it’s also actually part of this big global picture which is linked to Dominica because we know that the family that owned Quarry Bank Mill also had owned plantations in the Caribbean in Dominica. And so, I just understood it in a different way. I noticed that the pub that we go to all the time in the village, that I’d not noticed was called The Ship and I understood the significance of that more.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you for saying that. I am speaking from Blossom Street in Ancoats, so I know exactly what you mean in terms of this sort of revelation of the street names and indeed the mills themselves. And Keisha, may I ask you if there’s anything you would like to add there to what Maya has said?

Keisha Thompson

I guess the thing that I can add to that is I had quite a unique experience, which is probably why I’m now in this space, part of this team doing the work that I’m doing in that, as mentioned, I grew up in South Manchester, which is wonderfully diverse in so many ways. And I went to a fabulous primary school that really put cultural education at the centre. And as I was growing up, we had a Black History Club. So we would go to the library and learn about the slave trade. We’d learn about African mythology. We’d get a greater sense of our culture. So I had this understanding of Manchester in that context. But I’d go back into my classroom and because it was children from global majority backgrounds that would go to this, and I’d go back into our classroom, and I was like, ‘why? I don’t understand why we’re being separated. I don’t understand why this is important to me and not to my white counterparts’.

And then the next experience was going to high school and expecting to see a similar thing there and, you know, going to the library and saying, ‘where’s the Black history section?’ And they’re just looking at me with absolute blank faces, and I was like, ‘oh, right, okay. This isn’t a thing that is taught across the city. I’ve had a unique experience.’ So I already knew a lot of things that when I’ve now had conversations with friends growing up they had a different experience of it, which is unfortunate because it came with this kind of shock which is then, you know, you grapple with it, and you might feel anger or shame or upset and it’s just really unfortunate that that’s been so many experiences for people. Whereas I know that you could just give it to people at a young age, make it an educational piece, make it a conversation, and then you take it along with you as part of your identity in this conversation.

So I’ve felt very much protected by having that experience. So as an artist, I know that I was commissioned when we were coming up to commemorate the abolition of slavery, and there was a lot of stuff happening in the city. I remember going into like some galleries and being told, ‘look at these tapestries and look at these cotton things, and what do you think about that?’ And I was like, ‘well, it’s linked to the slave trade.’ And they were, like, really shocked that I was coming out with that. And I was just like, this is potentially triggering for me as well. I was like, ‘what’s going on?’ But yeah, I felt like I was ahead. I had to challenge high school teachers. I remember a high school teacher trying to tell us about Wilberforce, and I was like, ‘Sir, you’re not telling the full story.’ I was like, ‘You’re not talking about the Quakers. You’re not talking about this and that.’ And he was just like, ‘No, no, no, we can’t talk.’ I was like, I will not let this lesson continue if you don’t talk about those things.

Caitlin Morrissey

It’s really helpful for you to say that because it does link to the question we have about what does the investigation into the history of The Guardian and its relationships to transatlantic slavery tell us about Manchester more broadly?

I was listening to the final episode of Cotton Capital just this week, and you were saying – and I thought it was really helpful for you to say this – that The Guardian is one of the first institutions to actually acknowledge its history. And we’re in a city where museums and infrastructures have been funded by the very same trade, but there’s this lack of acknowledgement, let alone apology. And so, through this work, through the work that you’re both doing now, what have you learned about Manchester as a city and its relationship to slavery?

And I know that you’ve already mentioned, Maya, that these links are everywhere. But is there anything that you didn’t know or is there anything else that you’d like to add in terms of what you learned about the city itself through this study from the vantage point of The Guardian?

Maya Wolfe-Robinson

So I guess I’ll say that I learned, and I think it still holds true today, and sometimes it’s wonderful and sometimes it’s baffling, but I think that Manchester’s really a city of contradictions. And we saw that reflected in The Guardian’s founders in that you would have in the same circles, abolitionists and people who were pro-slavery, people who thought that slavery was immoral and terrible and yet also profited from it. You had these liberal thinkers who really wanted to start this news organisation to further those ideas and who had a really quite firm line on what they thought about slavery in the British colonies, but were kind of more relaxed about it happening in America because that was linked to cotton and that was where they all had a financial in. And so, you know, it’s these complexities and I think that that’s really true today that Manchester, you know, is rightly so proud of its radicalism and its radical past and those radical people, but they don’t really like to talk about some of those kind of more contradictory ideas and I think that’s really interesting to navigate.

Caitlin Morrissey

And does that resonate with you, Keisha?

Keisha Thompson

Yeah, I think the thing that I’ve learned is that the approach that we’ve taken so far is not successful. So as I was saying, there’s always been this kind of hint at our history. And like Maya was saying, it’s contradictory and it’s not actually helped us to make the progress that we think that we are making. So I feel very inspired by the approach that The Guardian’s taken because I think it’s a very clear model of this is what restorative justice looks like and can look like and this is what we need to do.

So yeah, I’ve appreciated the bits of knowledge that I didn’t know, such as the ship. I remember reading about that and thinking about that in connection to the work bee, and I was like, ‘oh yeah, that’s really interesting.’ But I’d say, yeah, like I was saying, I’m in quite a unique space where I’ve been given the opportunity to interrogate and know a lot of the history in a way that other people haven’t. I did a wonderful commission with the Royal Exchange and had to look at their history and write a poem about that and the way that that hall was used and how instrumental that hall was in the trade. But again, I’ve got so many friends who are artists and actors who didn’t know that history and then went into that space and were just completely mortified by it.

So I think for me, it just gave me that sense when I saw the research and the action that The Guardian took off the back of that. I was like, yeah, we’ve got work to do, like, it’s not enough these little plaques that we’ve got and these little flurries of activity that we do every now and again in the way that we call ourselves, Cottonopolis, but we’re not actually confronting the history and there’s all these educational resources out there, but they’re not being joined up or updated or reviewed or like, yeah, so I’m just like there’s work to be done here and so that’s what I learned.

Maya Wolfe-Robinson

I suppose I want to add that what I realised is how super connected so much of the city was. So the people that were involved in setting up The Guardian were also involved in politics, they were also involved in the university, you know all of these institutions that were all around and started around that time. There was quite a small circle of them that would be in the same circles and who were all connected to this trade. And so, I suppose that was a kind of realisation and an understanding of, you know, it wasn’t like The Guardian was a bad apple, if you want to say that, it was part of this much wider global system. And, you know, that doesn’t make it okay, It just means that we have to understand it like that, and therefore it’s on all of us in the city to have a think about that and have a think about how wide that goes rather than it just being something that we have to confront.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you very much. We’re coming on to the penultimate question that we have about where we see the legacies of this participation today, locally and globally. But first, perhaps we can ask you, Keisha, about the restorative justice projects that you’re doing in Manchester and in southeastern America and Jamaica as well, and what the nature of those projects are. Because I understand that there are a variety of different ways that you may be approaching this.

Keisha Thompson

Yeah, for sure. So my role is very new. I’m in my eighth week. What’s really lovely is I’ve been able to step into a wonderful team that’s done some great foundational work and there’s a strategy there ready to go and there’s that strong commitment there and the support from the Scott Trust for us to make some really great impact around restorative justice.

So my remit is to understand what that means specifically in Manchester and Greater Manchester. That’s the thing that I’ve been saying quite repetitively because I think it’s important for us to acknowledge that we’re part of ten boroughs, which the expansion of is very much linked to the cotton trade. So for me, I think it’s about raising consciousness, joining up the dots of what’s already happening because we know that there are some key partners in the city who are doing great work, but it’s not orchestrated, or they’re not feeling confident to shout about it, or they don’t know how to shout about it. So because we have a very clear model of how we’ve enacted restorative justice so far and what that can mean and what it can look like, there’s something that I can refer to very clearly when I’m speaking to partners so that they understand it for themselves.

So for me, it’s about going around supporting people on a very bespoke level but then bringing it all together so it feeds into the wider conversation of what the city is doing and can do and then acknowledging things like the 80-year anniversary of the Pan-African Congress taking place in Manchester that’s next year. That would be a missed opportunity to not use that as a great demonstration of what it means to convene and to be at the forefront of civic engagement and how that then allows for really significant political activity to happen subsequent to that. So those things are not known, they’re a part of our Manchester history, so that’s what I’m feeling excited by for next year that I know that I can tap into and there’ll be a very strong educational strand to that.

But as we know, there’s already resources out there, there’s already people doing that amazing work. There are people like Kerry Pimblott who are working with emerging scholars, young researchers in the universities who are already looking into, at great length, a lot of this history from a very case study point of view. So for me, it’s just about platforming that and just seeing how we can make it palpable and tap into the other strategies that are already in place in the city so that it feels pervasive in a progressive way. Because as Maya was saying earlier this history was pervasive in the city in a way that makes us feel uncomfortable, so how can we now take that story, take the ethics, take the learning, take the fact that we’re a devolved city, and then go, ‘okay, how do we want to work differently?’ How can we do something so that when people look back and read the full story of what happened here, that it doesn’t make them uncomfortable, that they don’t have to go through another process of detoxing and going, what on earth? What’s going on there? Yeah, so that’s what I feel my remit is within this role of fleshing out the story in the name of restorative justice and letting it have direct impact on people from global majorities in this city.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you so much, Keisha. Maya, is there anything you would like to add onto that question about the sort of restorative justice work that The Guardian is doing, obviously, through Keisha’s work here in Manchester, but perhaps more broadly as well?

Maya Wolfe-Robinson

Well, I would say, I suppose, Keisha’s brilliant work fits into this 10-year programme which we’ve launched which has lots of different strands. There’s a kind of an ongoing research strand. There’s the restorative justice work with descendant communities in Jamaica and the United States. There’s also the kind of raising awareness aspect, particularly in Manchester, that Keisha talked about. But we want to kind of strengthen roots into journalism and increase our reporting of these issues. So we’ll continue with our journalism on these subjects, which is the Cotton Capital series. We’ve launched a new product just today, actually, which is a weekly newsletter on Black diaspora which is about kind of connecting, trying to make some of those links. So when we were doing the work, it was so interesting that when you talk to people in Manchester, they would say, ‘oh, yeah, we never really thought about where the cotton was coming from.’ And then in the Sea Islands region of the US, they said, ‘oh right, yeah, we never really thought about where the cotton was going.’ And people in the Caribbean, in Brazil, have said that what they really liked actually and appreciated was remaking those links and forging those connections and talking about the shared histories and putting it all into one story, rather than everyone just having their own kind of siloed version of the story and not really talking about how it all links together and working those narratives into each different place. And in a way, that is why we’re sort of seeing that as a form of repair when we think about how can we as a media organisation seek to atone for this history, and you think, well, what’s this history? It’s the scattering of Africans around the globe against their will. But one sort of small way that we’re trying to do that is kind of repair that by bringing people together through our journalism.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you. Then on to our final question, which is to ask you how all of this work that you’ve been doing has shaped in any way your understanding of the relationship between newspaper and city?

Maya Wolfe-Robinson

I think it’s an ongoing process of understanding how this history shapes the newspaper and the city that we are today. And so, for example, our first ever edition was an exclusive, if you will, about poverty rates in children in Manchester. We had a whistleblower who showed that the official statistics showed that the levels of poverty were actually much lower than they really were. And so, we still do that kind of reporting at The Guardian. I think that some of the things that I talked about earlier about it being a city of contradictions, I think that in some ways we like to express that through pluralism, which is a really important part of our journalism, that we will platform different voices and approaches within a kind of progressive lens.

Caitlin Morrissey

And Keisha, we’ll ask you the same question.

Keisha Thompson

Yeah, I’ve got two points. I’ll try and be succinct because I feel like I’ve not been so far. One thing that feels like a really good opportunity for us to do is to really repair this misunderstanding that people have of The Guardian in the city that I didn’t realise because I’m very much Team Guardian, I’m a fan. But when I’ve been proudly going out and saying to people, ‘oh, yeah, I’m working for The Guardian’ a lot of people didn’t realise, they think that I’ve moved to London. They’re like, ‘so you’re moving to London?’ I’m like, ‘no, the office is here, it was founded here, it’s got strong links here.’ And I kind of assumed that a lot of people knew that, but there’s this weird misunderstanding of what our link is to Manchester. So I feel like it’s a really good opportunity to reinstate that and go, no, we’re here. We are literally physically here, and we’re proud to be here. We were founded in Manchester. We used to be called the Manchester Guardian, like, just really telling that story. I’m really enjoying being able to take up that space.

And then the second thing is I’m really enjoying understanding what it means to have a non-journalistic role within this organisation because, rightly so, a lot of people, as well as thinking that I’ve moved to London, think that I’m now a journalist because I do have a writing background. But I’m like, ‘no, no, I’m doing project management. I’m doing this, I’m convening, I’m going to commission this and whatever else.’ So it’s knowing that, okay, yeah, we’re a newspaper, but what does that mean? It’s not you put stuff out there into the ether, you have a platform, but there’s responsibility with that, and you can be pragmatic with that. You can be a convener, you can invite people to come together and have conversation. So it doesn’t just end with creating wonderful articles and then just putting it out there and there’d be no kind of accountability or follow up to that. So that’s what I’m really enjoying, exploring just the way that we can make the work that we’re doing as tangible and palpable for people as possible.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you both so much.

Greg Clark

I just want to reiterate the thank you and say I really salute what you’re doing, and I think what I’ve learned today is that you can actually use the soft power of an amazing newspaper to address the hard story of its own origin. And I think you’ve given us that like in bucketfuls and I’m really, really grateful, and I’m quite humbled by the whole story actually, and I’m very grateful to you both. So thank you.

I’m just inclined to say this as a result of what you’ve both been saying, I sort of feel that the project that you’re doing is not just about renewing Manchester’s sense of itself, but it’s also about renewing The Guardian’s kind of licence to operate, The Guardian doing what it does. And there is a bit of a sense that even the way you’re doing the Cotton Capital project is a very Mancunian way of doing it, which is to reveal the truth and use it to renew and to remake the bond of trust between the city and its history and between the newspaper and its readers. And there is something about that that I think smells very Manchester to use it in a kind of metaphorical way.

Maya Wolfe-Robinson

Yeah, actually, I think you’re right, that there’s something about how we’ve really leaned into it, owned it, you know. Really, we’re not going to shy away from it, but we’re doing it with a real sort of Manchester swagger, saying it with our whole chests. I think is actually, it is very Manc.

Greg Clark

Isn’t it, right? And I think the project that you’re doing is not just a project of repair, but it’s a project of renewal. And that’s how I feel from what you’ve said.

Maya Wolfe-Robinson

Yeah, I think that’s really interesting. And I think it’s really interesting to think about, you know, as a newspaper, you have to constantly renew yourself. Like we’re a newspaper, but we’re also we do podcasts and videos and live blogs. And now we have a sort of in-house NGO, as Keisha was saying, you know, we are constantly renewing what it is that we do but we have the same values and the same aims. And so, this has been part of this kind of, yeah, another renewal. I think we were just really, we really wanted to make sure to people that we weren’t sort of cancelling anything or like, you know, trying to pretend that something didn’t happen anymore or saying, we’re ripping up our history. We’re not that. We’re adding another chapter to it. We’re telling another story, and that’s what we do. And we tell lots of stories, you know.

Before we decided to call it Cotton Capital, we played around with lots of different names. But one of the ones that we talked about was, you know, if you go off this expression, which is a bit of a cliché about journalism being the first draft of history, this is like a second draft or a third draft, you know, because it’s exactly, I think that’s to your point, it’s that sense of renewal or retelling.

Greg Clark

And I think you’ve just said it, Maya, so thank you.

Maya Wolfe-Robinson

That’s a clever way of getting me to say it. Well, yeah, I really enjoyed this conversation, so thank you for asking us.