A gravestone for Sarah Bonetta Forbes-Davies

Bill Hern writes: Just over 12 months ago we gave an update on Sarah Bonetta Forbes-Davies, the African Princess who was treated as a goddaughter by Queen Victoria and is buried in the British Cemetery in Funchal, Madeira.

We won’t repeat Sarah’s amazing story again here, you can read it elsewhere on the site (just use the ‘search’ function) but we do have welcome and exciting news to convey.

One hundred and thirty nine years after her death, Sarah finally has a gravestone!

Much of the thanks for this great news is due to a lady called Taiwo Olaiya who raised almost £1,000 in sponsorship when she completed the Hackney half-marathon in 2017. The rest of the cost was met by the people of Madeira via The Diocese in Europe (Church of England).

After learning of this most welcome and overdue development I went to see the caretaker of the Cemetery and asked if I could see Sarah’s burial record. He took me to the interior of the Chapel and unlocked the door of a huge safe. Taking a ledger from the safe we leafed through the records until we came to August 1880. There we saw the entry for Sarah. She is shown as the wife of I P L Davies of Lagos, West Africa. She died on 15 August aged 37 and was buried on the following day as was normal in those days. This of course meant that she almost certainly had no friends or members of her family at her funeral. We know for certain that her eldest daughter, Victoria, was not there as Queen Victoria noted in her diary: ‘saw poor Victoria Davies, my black godchild who learnt this morning of the death of her dear mother.’

After 139 years visitors to the British Cemetery will now be able to see that what was previously shown simply as Plot 206 is the resting place of a Princess – and not before time! Well done to Taiwo and the people of Madeira.