Transcription of audio file:
I'd always imagined the cat o' nine tails to be quite big and made of very thick leather. When I saw the cat o' nine tails it was smaller, it was string that was knotted. And then I saw quite near it a slave whip, and that was quite frightening, because I realised that the whip was actually metal. It was a wooden handle with a metal strip that was coiled. And that was quite frightening because I realised that a cat o' nine tails was used on grown men, sailors, to get them to comply with rules, and the slave whip could be used on a child.

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What I'd imagined about the eighteenth century was that it was quite a cruel century and that punishing the slaves was part of a culture of quite harsh punishment. But even then they had made a distinction between a slave and a non-slave.

I thought about the technology that went into making that, because obviously somebody made both objects. I felt that whoever made the cat o' nine tails would have been familiar with that object and what it was for, and it was part of the culture. But what was going through the mind of the person who was asked to make that slave whip? Was it someone in England? Or was it someone in the colonies? Would there have been a difference in the attitude of the person making it?

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I'm not really quite sure what I think each person who made the whip would have thought, but it was the technology that was used to get the slave trade to work. So it was part of the technology of slavery. You had the technology of making sugar or growing rice or cotton, and you had the technology to make sure that the workers who produced those complied.

I remember looking at the cat o' nine tails and looking at the whip and thinking, I could make myself brave enough to be hit with the cat o' nine tails for something I believed in, but I don't think I would be brave enough to do something knowing I'd be hit with steel.

So when I saw that I thought, you'd really have to feel that you were prepared to die to do something knowing that you'd be punished with a steel whip. It has a psychological effect - that if you know that's what you'll be hit with, whether you're a child or an adult, you're more likely to comply.

Obviously I knew that there were ways of making people comply, but when you actually see it in real life, then you realise how a very small minority of people can control a very large group of people. It's much easier to understand when you actually see it.

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