Bermuda's "conspiracy of silence'' on slavery has prompted a wealthy Englishman to set up a museum of slavery.

Mr. Peter Moores, whose father Sir John Moores owned the Elbow Beach Hotel for nearly 50 years, this week opened the Trans-Atlantic Slavery Gallery in Liverpool.

Mr. Moores said he wanted to build the slavery exhibition to stir dialogue among blacks and whites on the "taboo'' subject.

His experience working in Bermuda and on his Barbados holiday estate started him thinking about doing something that would get people to confront it.

"Bermuda was formative to the idea,'' he told The Royal Gazette yesterday.

Despite the Island's history of slavery and its legacy, "it struck me that it was something no one mentioned.'' School texts reduced it to a half-page "and that was it.'' He recalled having lunch with a Progressive Labour Party MP who said: "Twenty years ago, I wouldn't have been allowed to eat in this hotel.'' Mr. Moores said suppression of the history of slavery had been common in every place he travelled and worked in Europe and America over the past 40 years.

Slavery was just "something in the past.'' But Mr. Moores said confronting the reality of the past was necessary. "We can come to terms with our past only by accepting it, and in order to be able to accept it we need knowledge of what actually happened,'' he said.

"We need to make sense of our history. This barrier between historical events and our acceptance of their significance for ourselves must be removed.'' The Trans-Atlantic Slavery Gallery: Against Human Dignity, is housed in the Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool, the major European slaving port in the 18th century.

Its aim is to foster racial harmony through understanding, but it has led to much heart-searching in Liverpool where carved African heads on the town hall are testimony to its slave trading past.

The exhibition uses artefacts, documents, readings and reconstructions to show how Liverpool traders shipped guns, alcohol and textiles to Africa to buy slaves who were then taken to the Americas to work on plantations.

The display tries to reconstruct the appalling conditions on a slave ship on its crossing, including slave revolts and desperate suicides.

One section highlights the auction system of selling slaves in the Americas and the Caribbean, the brutality of the breaking-in process and daily life on plantations.

Mr. Moores', whose Peter Moores Foundation contributed 540,000 to the exhibition, said a visit to the museum was bound to disturb blacks and whites.

"But it is meant to bring the slave trade before us without mincing matters, to act as a catalyst which will spark off reflection, debate, understanding and further study.''