Portraits in porcelain preserving secrets and pouring history in London

‘The keeper of all the secrets’ is now displayed in the Queen’s House at the Royal Museums Greenwich. This place is oozing with history, art, and artifacts collected from all over the world. Well, Shashi Tharoor might have preferred the expression ‘looted from the colonies’ but then many of those displayed here are created by celebrated artists and not just a cache of unethical plunder.

Most tourists come to see the Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I that commemorates the most famous conflict of the Tudor monarch’s reign – the failed invasion of England by the Spanish Armada in the summer of 1588. There is also the famous Tulip staircase, the iconic, self-supporting spiral staircase is a marvel of architectural engineering that Inigo Jones’s designs have gifted this world. Inigo Jones was heavily influenced by Italian Renaissance architecture and the Palladian style, created by Andrea Palladio, as pointed out by the website on Royal museums in Greenwich.

However, what impressed us (Specky and I) much more than the Armada portrait and the Tulip staircase is the story behind a tea service displayed. Most tourists simply walk by it. I did the same. Luckily though, Specky paused and read the information placard there. She tip-toed towards me and whispered, ‘Come with me. There is one secret here that not everyone stops to read or think about.’

Jamaican-born artist Jacqueline Bishop’s ‘The keeper of all the secrets’ is a charming 13-piece ceramic tea service crafted from bone China. Bishop collaborated with Stoke-on-Trent-based ceramist Emma Price to bring this intricate work to life. This tea set reimagines a traditional British tea set, intertwining it with collages of Caribbean market women and botanicals to explore themes of women’s agency and the legacies of empire and enslavement. What one sees inside the glass case isn’t just a tea set but vessels of grief, resistance, and unspoken strength. The set is a whisper turned into porcelain.

The caption under the display specifies that ‘the market woman had to be secretive in what she was doing because, during the period of slavery, the children that enslaved women carried did not belong to them. Rather they belonged to the people who “owned” them, and it was punishable by death for an enslaved women to seek to destroy their owner’s property. The market woman thus became ‘the keeper of all the secrets’. She had to be secretive enough to protect herself as well as the girls and women she was helping. Even today abortion remains contested around the world and on the island of Jamaica it is still illegal.‘ This is why this tea set that outlines this story of slavery in gold, is interesting.

The women on the vessels are not celebrities but sellers of herbs, whispered cures (desi illaj, as we call the concept in Hindi), and shared secrets in marketplaces. These women are carriers of botanical wisdom, protectors of bodies, and guardians of autonomy who sometimes offered enslaved women abortive herbs when there was no other option left open. These narratives challenge those stories of empire told only through conquest and glory. Even members of the Royal Family have begun acknowledging these complexities. In a historic statement during a 2022 tour of the Caribbean, Prince William said, ‘I want to express my profound sorrow. Slavery was abhorrent. And it should never have happened.’ Queen Elizabeth II herself, decades earlier, remarked: ‘The Commonwealth bears the weight of history… and we must face it with honesty.’ Their words, while cautious, underscore a shift—an opening in the long-shuttered doors of British memory. This tea service is thus a mirror as well as a megaphone because it is a voice of silenced history fighting to be heard. What is impressive is that this country is not attempting to silence any voice that offers to add anything to any chapter of history that has already been written. And London is where this is taking place. London is forever ready to correct inaccuracies in history or to fill any blanks that the world thought never existed.

This tea service is a symbol of resistance and resilience. ‘The Keeper of All Secrets’ does not scream. It does not accuse. It waits. With dignity. With pain. With the presence of all those Caribbean women who were never granted a voice in the halls of power, but whose strength built Empires, nonetheless.

It is not just an artifact.
It is a witness.
And now, finally, it is seen.
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Arvind Passey
Uploaded on 18 April 2025
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