Campaigners hail Charles's statement that ‘slavery forever stains our history'

The Prince of Wales’s acknowledgment of the “appalling atrocity of slavery” that “forever stains our history” as Barbados became a republic was brave , historic and the start of a “grown-up conversation led by a future king”, equality campaigners have said.

- Caroline Davies

Uttering words his mother, the Queen, would be constitutionally constrained from saying, Prince Charles’s speech at the ceremony in Bridgetown to mark the replacement of the monarch as head of state in the island nation did not demur from reflecting on the “darkest days of our past” as he looked to a bright future for Barbadians.

Slavery is a tricky subject for the royal family, with recent calls for the Queen to apologise, and for the UK to make reparations for the huge wealth it reaped through the inhumanity of the Atlantic slave trade.

Successive monarchs supported or made money from it during the 17th and 18th centuries.

Simon Woolley , the founder and director of the campaign group Operation Black Vote , who attended yesterday’s ceremony as the only black Barbadian in the House of Lords and a descendant of an enslaved African, said of the speech: “It was a very brave statement.”