LIKE GENERATIONS before them, the grey-haired men of the Colston Society processed into a church in Bristol in 2017 for their annual service in memory of Edward Colston, 296 years after he died. Prayers were said, hymns sung, "Colston buns" gobbled down. But, as the Bristol Post reported at the time, the service wasn't advertised on the church's website. An opaque reference by the vicar helped explain why. Colston was, he said, a man who "like all of us, with the benefit of hindsight, may have done things differently". On June 7th Colston drew a crowd again. These particular Bristolians, though, had less need of such understatement. They knew that the man long venerated as "one of the most virtuous and wise sons" of the city gave huge sums of money to charity. They also knew that he made much of it by trading slaves. As part of the global protests against racism triggered by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25th, they toppled the city's statue of Colston and dumped it in the harbour.
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