Hannah Bradbury was so distressed to learn that Dartmouth has past links to slavery that she created an exhibition to help us challenge our prejudices and injustices – Show looks at links to slavery, Friday August 18. That is an excellent concept but I am bitterly disappointed that she has chosen to display just one side of this horrific story.

Had she dug deeper into the subject she would have understood that the oldest local settlements in the South Hams were built a distance inland because of the ever-present danger of invasion, piracy and slavery coming from the sea. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the British lived in constant terror of being kidnapped by pirates and sold into slavery in North Africa.

Pirates from the Barbary coast were authorised by their governments to attack the shipping of Christian countries. Admiralty records show 466 vessels were taken plus all their crew between 1609-1616 and 27 more from around Plymouth in 1625. By 1638 ship owners in the south west, including Dartmouth, got together to complain to the king that they had lost a further 87 vessels to piracy and 1,160 English seamen to slavery.

Some 1,250,000 men, women and children were captured by Barbary Corsairs during their raids on the coasts of Europe. But while Britain and other European countries railed against this human trafficking from their own shores, these same countries were establishing slavery in the New World, the latter being the focus of Hannah’s exhibition. Slavery was endemic and practised by many nations. That is what would have made a fascinating museum exhibition.

We owe a great deal to people such as Wilberforce and Buxton who strove to abolish the slave trade.

Only recently slavery hit the headlines across the Atlantic.

Confederate patriots organised a march in Charlottesville to protest against the planned removal of statues of two of the greatest military officers of US history, Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson.

However, the BBC’s and C4’s coverage portrayed the issue as pro-Nazi sympathisers defending slavery of blacks using violence. Having selected that news angle our news channels made no mention of the fact that only five per cent of Southern whites were slave owners or that 20 per cent of the free blacks were slave owners, including white slaves.

Here is another example of selective reporting. The EU has opened a House of European History. European Parliament President Antonio Tajani says: “...by studying the past we can have a better future”.

I am shocked that the Second World War is described as “the European Civil War” in that £47m EU vanity project.

Are we going to see our war memorials ‘corrected’ to the EU’s vision of our history?

Is this what our children are being taught in history classes at school?

How can we learn lessons if airbrushing and rewriting of selected facts is the order of the day?

Ceri Jayes

Lower Warren Road

Kingsbridge