TWO stained glass windows have been created as a lasting tribute
to a forgotten hero of West Kirby. Edmund Dene Morel, who lived
in the town in the early 1900s, was a shipping clerk turned
journalist and socialist politician who led a campaign against
slavery in the Congo. While living in Wirral he took up the
cause for people he had never met in a country he had never been
to. Before his death in 1924 he launched a newspaper dedicated
to exposing atrocities in the Congo and spearheaded the Congo
Reform Association, regarded as the first human rights movement
of this century. More than 50 people including the Bishop of
Birkenhead and Morel’s granddaughter and great-grandson attended
the installation last week of two stained glass windows
dedicated to his memory at West Kirby Library. They depict a map
of Africa and glass hands and feet, representing the severing of
limbs from those Congolese who failed to gather enough rubber
for their ruler, King Leopold II of Belgium. The memorial was
funded by a Your Wirra