The descendants of former Prime Minister William Gladstone are facing calls to pay reparations to Jamaica for an ancestor’s role in slavery.
The Gladstone family apologised for its slaveholding past in Guyana and pledged to fund research into slavery and other projects at a ceremony on Friday.
But the family has been accused of failing to acknowledge the case for paying slavery reparations in Jamaica.
The family told the BBC: “At the moment we are solely focused on Guyana.”
“There is a huge amount to do here [in Guyana],” the Gladstones said.
John Gladstone – the father of William Gladstone, one of the UK’s most revered prime ministers – was one of the largest slave owners in the British West Indies.
The University of London’s (UCL) Legacies of British Slavery database shows John Gladstone owned or held mortgages over 2,508 enslaved Africans in Guyana and Jamaica in the 19th Century.
He was paid more than £100,000 in compensation after the British Parliament passed a law to abolish the slave trade in 1833, receiving £15,052 for 806 enslaved people in Jamaica.
Reading the family’s apology to Guyana, Charlie Gladstone, the great-great-grandson of William Gladstone, condemned slavery as “a crime against humanity” and acknowledged “slavery’s continuing impact on the daily lives of many”.
He said the family supported a 10-point reparations plan proposed by Caribbean nations.
But there was no mention of John Gladstone’s slave ownership in Jamaica at the ceremony in Guyana on Friday, nor in the family’s statement announcing their intention to apologise and make donations last week.
John Gladstone owned “significant properties” in Jamaica, said Verene Shepherd, director of the Centre for Reparation Research at the University of the West Indies.
She said the Gladstone family “must come to the scene of the crime and apologise to the people who live in those neighbourhoods”.
The Jamaican academic and professor of social history urged the Gladstone family to “commit to reparations, as they’re doing in Guyana”.
Reparations are broadly recognised as compensation given for something that was deemed wrong or unfair, and can take many forms.
Last week, the Gladstones said they would aim to donate £100,000 to the University of Guyana’s International Institute for Migration and Diaspora Studies, which was launched on Friday.
In Guyana, the family also pledged funding “to assist various projects in Guyana” and UCL’s Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery for five years.
Prof Shepherd said: “Now that we realise that we’ve been ignored, I think Jamaica should make an approach.”