One job I had in the past was to work with others across government to look at the causes of homelessness and try to come up with solutions. For a while I think we had some success but some problems never really go away and the case of Peter Bishop illustrates that there is nothing new under the sun.[1]’The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.’ … Continue reading
I remember being surprised at the disproportionate number of ex-service people to be found among the homeless. We discussed the causes of that. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been shocked, making the transition from a job involving strict discipline with, possibly, periods of intense adrenaline rush, to a life with neither order nor excitement, is bound to be difficult. It isn’t just those who have served in the Forces who experience this, professional footballers, to cite just one example, face similar issues, but perhaps military service is an extreme case.
In the 19th century much of the support that might be available today to those leaving the Forces simply didn’t exist. True, if you were lucky, you might get a pension or even a place in the hospital at Greenwich (Navy) or Chelsea (Army) but not everyone was lucky. Peter Bishop, who served at the Battle of Waterloo, was one of the unlucky ones. Peter Bishop also happened to be Black in an overwhelmingly White society. You can read about him in John Ellis’ latest article for Historycal Roots:
While I’m here, I really should mention a lovely little update to another of John’s articles. It’s always great when a descendant spots a story on Historycal Roots about a relative and makes contact, sometimes they are able to add additional information. Since writing his article about Roy Van Twest, John has been in contact with Roy’s grandson and we have added an ‘afterword’ to the original piece:
’The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.’ Ecclesiastes, 1:9 (King James Bible version); even more appropriate, perhaps, is the New Living Version of the same passage ‘History merely repeats itself. It has all been done before. Nothing under the sun is truly new.’
On one of the Zoom events we attended during 2021 someone pointed out that, globally, white people are in a minority and that it is non-white people who form the global ethnic majority (GEM). We have got so used to (and become conditioned into) talking in terms of the ‘ethnic minority’ or, possibly, ‘black and minority ethnic’, that it is easy to forget the global context. We liked the idea and in this article we are going to unashamedly use ‘GEM’ as a reminder of this global reality.
GEMS in art
Awareness that there has been a black presence in Britain since at least Roman times has been growing gradually but, if we are challenged, what evidence can we produce?
Audrey Dewjee’s research into the early black presence in north Wales is documented in an article on this site [1]https://www.historycalroots.com/discovering-black-history-in-wales/, whilst for his many articles for us, John Ellis has drawn together records from a number of sources to identify the black presence in the Royal Navy and British Army in the 18th and 19th centuries.[2]If you type ‘ellis’ into this site’s ‘search’ box John’s articles will come up
Another way, of course, is to diligently trawl through parish records as people like Kathleen Chater have done [3]Untold Histories – Black people in England and Wales during the period of the British slave trade, c.1660-1807, Kathleen Chater, Manchester University Press, 2011. Kathleen is an outstanding example, there are numerous others who have adopted the same approach to identify examples of an early black presence in Britain.
The authors of this article have long been in the habit when going round museums and art galleries of looking for evidence of a black presence. It can be a dispiriting experience as, often, wall after wall is filled with portraits of white people or group scenes with no black representation at all. But there are examples to be spotted.
This article is about GEMS in art and offers just a few examples of black people being depicted in art. We are not art historians, our aim is simply to show that black people have been present in Britain for centuries and that, sometimes, that presence was captured in the art of the day.
Who? What? Where? When?
Having scoured the gallery and finally identified the portrayal of a black person, in many cases, there is an immediate sense of frustration because they are, often but not always, not the main character in the scene; they are in the shadows, at the edges of the frame and, hence, anonymous. So, we may not know who they are, we cannot (with some exceptions) talk about them as personalities, but their mere presence, the fact they are there at all, depicted in a painting, is evidence of a black presence in the society they inhabited.
We may not know their names but we can deduce something about what they did from the role they are depicted in. Many are very obviously servants, literally subservient and therefore reliant on the whim of their employer; but it is worth remembering that the life of a servant could be relatively secure compared to other working class people who might live their lives in, or on the brink of, destitution. But there are others in roles such as: groom, looking after horses, trumpeter in a grand pageant, or military personnel either in the Army or the Royal Navy. They are depicted in these roles because these are the roles performed by black people in society at large. We don’t need to simply assume this, it is something that we can confirm from documentary evidence.
Paintings can also tell us about where black people lived and can give the lie to the common misconception that black people were only present in cities or large towns. There are pictures, for instance, of black grooms attending their master’s horses on the great country estates. Black men (it was usually men) who lived on a country estate would have played their part in the life of the local community, for instance by attending church, and possibly marrying a local woman and establishing a family.
Finally, the dates of paintings tell us when there was a black presence. The earliest example we will use in this article dates from the 16th century.
The sixteenth century
In her book, Black Tudors,[4]’Black Tudors – the untold story’, Miranda Kaufmann, Oneworld Publication, 2017 Miranda Kauffmann identifies dozens of people described as ‘moors’ or ‘blackamoors’ during Tudor times, she writes ‘In 1560, Sir John Young of Bristol had an African gardener, as did Sir Henry Bromley of Holt, Worcestershire, in 1607 … Grace Robinson, a blackamoor, worked as a laundress alongside John Morockoe, a blackamoor, in the kitchen and scullery for Richard Sackville, the third Earl of Dorset, at Knole in Kent between 1613 and 1624.’[5]ibid p.102 One of these ‘black Tudors’, John Blanke, is depicted in a painting.
Dating from 1511, this is part of a pictorial record that Henry VIII had made of a grand tournament to mark the birth of a male child who, as it turned out, only survived for a few weeks. Henry commissioned the Westminster Tournament Roll, a unique treasure held at the College of Arms in London.
It is a pictorial illuminated manuscript, a continuous roll approximately 60 feet long. It is a narrative of the beginning, middle and end of the tournament, which took place over two days.
British School Allegorical Painting of Two Ladies wearing Beauty Patches
This painting from about 1650 was in the news as we were writing this article. Described as ‘recently discovered’ it had been sold at auction to an overseas buyer. The British Government stepped in to temporarily delay its export in the hope that a British gallery would come forward and buy it because of the highly unusual subject matter.
‘Although not distinguished artistically’ it is described as ‘a great rarity in British art, as a mid-seventeenth-century work that depicts a black woman and a white woman with equal status.’[7]https://hyperallergic.com/699732/uk-bans-export-rare-painting-featuring-black-and-white-woman/ The presence of a black woman is intriguing, why would the anonymous artist have included her if women like her did not live around him? The figures do not look like caricatures to us, someone sat for the artist while he (or she) went about their work.
This illustration comes from a book about new methods of training horses by William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, first published in 1658. It shows a black groom working at Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire. We include this picture because it shows
something that is often forgotten: Black and Asian people lived in the countryside as well as in big towns. Over the years they were employed in all sorts of capacities – such as grooms, coachmen, gardeners, huntsmen and farm workers. For example, there was a newspaper report in 1768 which said that ‘on Saturday afternoon, a Negro servant who was harrowing with three horses in a field at Beckenham was killed by lightning, as were also two of the horses.’ For anyone who doesn’t know, harrowing is done after ploughing to break up and smooth the surface of the soil, prior to planting.
Most of our examples will show people apparently of ‘African’ or ‘African-Caribbean’ descent. However, we have included this painting from c1672[8]York Museums Trust by Sir Peter Lely (a very high profile painter) to illustrate the Asian/Indian presence, a presence that was a direct consequence of the East India Company’s growing ‘colonisation’ of the sub-Continent from 1600 onwards.
Lely painted many portraits for Charles II, often of his numerous mistresses. However, this is Charlotte Fitzroy, his daughter by Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland. It shows her with a young Indian pageboy who seems to be about the same age. Indian servants were not as common as African, but there were certainly a number of them around after 1600 when the East India Company was founded. Some rich people who wanted to be slightly different than the rest managed to acquire Chinese servants and you can occasionally come across pictures of them too.
(reproduced with permission of the National Portrait Gallery)
(detail)
Africans and Asians were employed indoors as well as out. They were considered a status symbol – ‘an index of rank and opulence supreme’ as one writer put it. They were dressed in expensive exotic costumes and were often painted alongside their wealthy owners – again as an indicator of wealth. For us today this is fortunate, as otherwise we would not be able to see their portraits.
Only the very rich could afford to have their portraits painted, so most servants have left no visual record of their existence. This portrait from 1682 by Pierre Mignard is of Louise de Kérouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth, one of Charles II’s many mistresses. According to the National Portrait Gallery, the little girl ‘is shown presenting precious coral, pearls and shell to the duchess to emphasise her wealth and position. The child’s dark skin also emphasises the whiteness of the duchess’s complexion.’[9]https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp03623/louise-de-keroualle-duchess-of-portsmouth
The eighteenth century
This is one of a series of paintings done for Goodwood House[10]https://www.goodwood.com/visit-eat-stay/goodwood-house/the-collection/painting-collection/ by George Stubbs, again one of the most sought after (and expensive) painters of his day. He was best known for his paintings of horses. Dating from 1759 and titled ‘Shooting at Goodwood’, it includes a black groom working on a country estate, a perfect illustration of a black presence away from urban settings.
Goodwood was already famous for horse racing at the time this picture was created and the scene shows that at least one of the grooms employed at Goodwood was of African descent. According to the Goodwood website, the black servant holding the Arab horse, may either be Thomas Robinson, who came to Goodwood in the 1740s and was named after the Governor of Barbados, or a footman named Jean Baptiste, who came from one of the French colonies.
The black servant is believed to be Ottobah Cugoano
This is a 1784 engraving of a painting by Richard Cosway.[11]Reproduced with permission of The National Portrait Gallery We have included it because the black servant is believed to be Ottobah Cugoano. Along with Olaudah Equiano, Cugoano was one of the black men who campaigned vigorously against slavery. Too often the agency of blacks in achieving their own freedom is downplayed or overlooked completely.
Cugoano actually went further than Equiano in arguing for the complete abolition of slavery, by his reckoning ‘every man in Great Britain [is] responsible in some degree, for the shocking and inhuman murders and oppressions of Africans.’[12] ‘Thoughts and sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species’ , published in 1787
We make no apologies for featuring this painting of Dido Elizabeth Belle with her cousin, Lady Elizabeth Murray.[13]The painting, now attributed to David Martin, hangs at Scone Palace in Perthshire, the ancestral home of the descendants of Lord Mansfield Dido lived with her great uncle, the Lord Chief Justice of England, Lord Mansfield, on his Hampstead estate at Kenwood. Mansfield’s rulings, particularly in the case of the Zong massacre, helped to undermine the trade in enslaved people.
Much of the history we were taught in school was about white men, generally white men of a particular class (people like Lord Mansfield). Dido stands out because she was a black woman whose mother had been enslaved, thus in this painting she defies the three things that rendered so many people like her invisible, race, class and gender.
Some black women left their mark by writing about their lives, people like Mary Prince. Dido didn’t leave us a written legacy, instead we have this portrait of her dating from 1779 and, thanks to the brilliant work of a number of researchers, we know quite a lot about her life (helping us answer the ‘who?’ question). There are a number of articles about Dido on this site but if you want to learn about her you really should visit the All Things Georgian website.[14]The latest in a series of articles about Dido on All Things Georgian can be found here:https://georgianera.wordpress.com/2022/01/03/dido-elizabeth-belle-ranelagh-street-pimlico/
In art as in life, someone’s status as a GEM will not always be readily apparent. This painting, dating from 1798, depicts Nancy Graham.
Louvre, Paris
Perhaps she doesn’t look like a GEM but we picked up her story from David Alston’s excellent book ‘Slaves and Highlanders’[15]’Slaves and Highlanders’, David Alston, Edinburgh University Press, 2021 ‘Nancy was the illegitimate daughter of Francis Graham and Miss Jackson, a ‘free coloured’ woman in Jamaica …. Nancy arrived in Scotland as a young girl and had her portrait painted by the fashionable society artist, Henry Raeburn.’[16]https://www.wikiart.org/en/henry-raeburn/little-girl-holding-flowers-portrait-of-nancy-graham So, the girl in the painting may not look like a GEM but there is clear documentary proof that she had one black grandparent.
The nineteenth century
Thanks to the work of John Ellis we now have a much better understanding of the black presence in the British Army and Navy in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. That black soldiers and sailors were present at the Battles of Waterloo and Trafalgar, key moments in British history, has been proven beyond doubt by his research into service and pension records of the time.
As you can see above, their presence at Trafalgar was reflected in the art of the day, a black sailor is shown at the thick of the action in this painting depicting the death of Nelson.[17]The Death of Nelson, painting by Samuel Drummond, Oil on canvas. H 133 X W 160 cm. The Nelson Museum, Yarmouth.https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/the-death-of-nelson-351
In this painting of 1829 we see a black woman in a different context, at work as a flower seller in London’s Hungerford Market (which stood on the site of what is now Charing Cross station) Sitting on her upturned basket, it looks as if she has completed her work for the day and is feeling rather pleased with herself. It looks as if her white companion still has a long day’s work ahead of her!
The names of the people in the painting are known as they are noted around the frame. The black man is John Dayman or Deman. He was born on St. Kitts in about 1784 and served with Nelson in the West Indies. He wasn’t actually at the Battle of Trafalgar but we know the identity of black sailors who were. Dayman spent his last years at the Greenwich Naval hospital where he died on 3rd December 1847.[18]The United Service, National Maritime Museum, Greenwish
Isabella Paula, 1834
Some paintings are more mysterious than others. Nothing is known about Isabella Paula, other than her name and that she was in York in 1834 where her portrait was painted by a famous local artist, Mary Ellen Best. It was captioned, “Isabella Paula, a Portuguese Hindoo, 1834”. It is thought that perhaps she may have been connected with a circus or travelling fair.
What does the term “Portuguese Hindoo” refer to? Perhaps Isabella came from Goa – which was a Portuguese “overseas territory” until 1961. Maybe she was of mixed Indian and Portuguese ancestry. The Portuguese had settled and traded in India long before the British arrived and, just like the early British settlers, they intermarried with local women and created a large Eurasian population.
Note the beautiful patterns on Isabella Paula’s clothes. Indian motifs like these were copied by British textile firms, especially those on the edge of her shawl and on her skirt. This design eventually became known as “Paisley Pattern,” after the town in Scotland that mass produced it. Shawls originated in India and were introduced to Britain in the 1760s. Initially shawls were only worn by the upper classes, as they were imported from India and very expensive. However, from about 1800 to 1870 they were in daily use all over Britain. Some were patterned, some were plain but every woman wore them, rich and poor.
[19]This photograph is available from The National Portrait Gallery although we first saw it at the local studies room of Croydon library
[20]Reproduced with permission of the National Portrait Gallery
As the nineteenth century progressed photography developed to the extent that photographs also become a valuable source for recording the black presence. Apart from including young Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s school photo (he is seated, far right), we won’t deal with photographs here. In this case our view is that the photograph is more informative about the circumstances of young Samuel’s life than the painting.
We will finish with this painting of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor as a boy in 1881. Samuel went on to become one of the best known and most popular composers of classical music in the closing years of the nineteenth century and earliest decades on the twentieth.
Conclusion
The people in these paintings are not made up from artists’ imaginations. In a number of cases they are portrayals of named individuals and, where that is not the case, it is clear that they are based on black people that the artists would have seen around them, their features are individualised not mere ‘caricatures’. These are just examples, chosen to illustrate our point that paintings are a valuable source of social history in general terms but, more specifically, can be used to illustrate the centuries-long black presence in Britain. We hope that you will seek out such representations when you next visit a museum or gallery and would love to hear about your ‘discoveries’.
Untold Histories – Black people in England and Wales during the period of the British slave trade, c.1660-1807, Kathleen Chater, Manchester University Press, 2011
We bring a very productive year to a close (34 new pages by my reckoning) with two new pages on very different subjects. Before introducing them, I must thank our contributors for their efforts. John Ellis is responsible for a lot of this year’s new content. John’s remarkable work is casting new light on the black presence in the British Army and Royal Navy in the 19th century and also in the trenches during World War One. But others, Audrey Dewjee and Bill Hern, have played their part too. Audrey can take particular pride in her work on the story of Bertie Robinson, the black servant at Harewood House who featured in a major exhibition there. Bill and I helped with an exhibition too, it celebrated some of the London Borough of Newham’s pioneering black footballers – it’s surprising how much black history you can work into a talk about football!
John Ellis’s latest discovery is the story of a black Royal Navy sailor called John Johnson. His marriage certificate, dating from 1846, cites his father’s occupation or profession as ‘negro slave’ – a very unusual entry on an English certificate. The marriage ended in tragic circumstances. John doesn’t speculate as to the underlying cause of the argument that led to the death of Mary Johnson but I can’t help but wonder whether racism played a part. Read the article and make up your own mind:
The second new page features Horace Halliburton, a man of the Windrush generation (although, in fact, he arrived on these shores before the Windrush). Horace played a leading role in the Causeway Green riots of 1949, as a peacemaker. You may not know about the Causeway Green riots and it’s very unlikely you will have heard of Horace. I started researching him hoping to discover an unsung hero and, to an extent, I did, but his life story turned out to be much more complicated than I expected. You can read about Horace here:
When I first met Audrey Dewjee I remember being puzzled that she described herself as a ‘researcher’ rather than as a ‘historian’. I had never really given much thought to the distinction between the two and it isn’t my intention to indulge in a debate here. But what I will say is that Audrey’s latest article for Historycal Roots illustrates the work of a ‘researcher’ who is diligent and dogged, following leads and sticking at it for many years to uncover previously untold stories. You can find the fruits of Audrey’s painstaking work here: https://www.historycalroots.com/discovering-black-history-in-wales/
For me, this is ‘history’ but, regardless of what we call it, it is a fascinating glimpse into a black presence in North Wales that dates back to the latter years of the seventeenth century.
If history consists of facts, then the role of historians is to present the facts. But there are so many facts that historians must choose which ones to present (or omit) and, in making their choice, they create a narrative. The nature of the story they tell is of necessity influenced by their interests.
The question in the title of this post is prompted by John Ellis’s latest contribution to Historycal Roots where he comments that he is playing his part in ‘showing that the presence of such men [of colour] was more widespread than critics of attempts to recognise their contribution would have people believe.’ John is one of a number of historians (he cites Stephen Bourne and Ray Costello as two examples) who are seeking to redress the balance by researching hitherto untold stories of the black contribution to British history.
There is little doubt, as John suggests, that not everyone is happy with this approach and the epithet ‘woke’ would be tossed in their direction as a criticism. I don’t doubt that ‘woke’ can be defined in a variety of ways. One definition I have seen is that woke is ‘a concept that symbolises awareness of social issues and movement against injustice, inequality and prejudice.’ Personally, if I was ‘accused’ of peddling ‘woke history’, I would be happy to accept the ‘charge’.
I recently had the pleasure of eavesdropping on a presentation that David Olusoga gave to a group of black educators (he was on zoom and I happened to be in the room when a legitimate participant was listening – these things happen!). I am always impressed when I hear David speak and I was intrigued by his discussion of the abuse he is subjected to on social media. Clearly this must be an unpleasant experience but he said he regards it as a sign of success – people are hearing a different version of history to the one they are used to and they don’t like it. The message that British history is not and never has been exclusively white is getting across. David said he was confident that the arguments would be won and that, in the future, people would wonder what the fuss had been about.
This reminded me of a short film I saw at the BFI (British Film Institute) on London’s Southbank when I popped in for an hour or two to shelter from the rain. The film, dating from 1958, featured interviews with a range of people discussing the then vexed topic of mixed marriage. Some of the views expressed were predictably repulsive but the last contributor, Lord Stanhope, opined that in fifty years’ time people would wonder what all the fuss had been about and that mixed marriages would be seen as entirely normal. Perhaps I am unduly influenced by living in London, but my perception is that Lord Stanhope has been proved correct while the repugnant views (extreme even by the standards of the time) expressed in the film by James Wentworth-Day, have pretty much returned to the primeval sludge where they belong. Although the film can be viewed free if you visit the BFI it seems you have to pay to view it online:
I should also draw your attention to another recent article by John tracing the naval career of John Addoo from Africa to his final resting place in Brockhurst, Hampshire. A career that encompassed the transition from sail to steam: https://www.historycalroots.com/from-sail-to-steam-john-addoo-1795-1855-an-african-in-the-royal-navy/ . It was remiss of me not to mention this article at the time of its publication.
I hope you enjoy reading both of John’s new contributions.
Those who enjoy John Ellis’s articles on the historical black presence in the British military will be delighted that he has turned his attention to another regiment. This time he has identified a number of black men who served in the 3rd King’s Own Dragoons.
All too often when we see black figures depicted in paintings they are anonymous or on the periphery in an obviously subservient role, not so Henry McGilchrist. You can read about Henry (and see what he looked like) and some of those who also served in the 3rd King’s Own Dragoons here:
This post alerts you to two new pages, both articles by John Ellis, that have been added to our site recently. These two articles illustrate the rich diversity of the black contribution to British history (as does virtually all the content on the site!).
My initial reason for visiting Harewood House was to see the exhibition about the life of Bertie Robinson that I have written about elsewhere, but I was lucky enough to get a ticket for a black history walk around the house and grounds.
My tour guides were none other than Pablo Fanque and his charming wife Susannah. This was quite something as Pablo died in 1871 and Susannah pre-deceased him in 1848. Pablo (actually Joe Williams, founder of Heritage Corner) and Susannah (Vanessa Mudd) took us on a whirlwind tour of black history that encompassed Egypt, the three west African trading empires of Ghana, Songhai and Mali and much more besides, before returning us to York and Harewood.
When I was working I used to feel that if I learnt one thing on any course I attended it had not been a complete waste of time. This walk certainly passed the ‘one thing’ test with plenty of room to spare.
I will focus here on one story that was new to me (apologies to those who are familiar with it). It concerns ‘ivory bangle lady‘. whose remains were discovered during an excavation in York in 1901. She gains her name from one of the bangles she was wearing. One of her bangles was made of jet, a stone that can be found in Yorkshire, but the bangle fashioned from ivory clearly had a more exotic origin.
It was evident that she was a wealthy woman from the jewelry and other items buried with her. It also seems likely that when she died (in her twenties) in the second half of the 4th century AD she was a Christian as a message carved in bone was found in her grave: “Hail, sister, may you live in God”.
A reconstruction of the face of ‘ivory bangle lady’
Scientific advances since 1901 mean that far more is now known about her. She has been identified as of mixed heritage with at least one parent from north Africa. Applying the same scientific techniques to the remains of others in the same burial ground suggests that maybe 10% of the population of Roman York were of similar heritage. Perhaps you were aware of that but, for me, it was a revelation.
Returning to Pablo Fanque (real name William Darby), I had heard his story before but it was good to hear again about his remarkable life. The fact that he was born in Norwich in 1810 surprised me when I first heard about it but since then I have become more and more aware that the black presence was not restricted to major cities like London, Liverpool and Bristol but could be found in the countryside too. The evidence for this wider black presence can be seen not just in references in newspapers but in paintings and illustrations that date at least as far back as 1658 and may feature in a future post.
Pablo Fanque was a circus impresario and the walk took its name from a great storm that engulfed Pablo’s circus during a show at Harewood. The dramatic description of the storm reminded me of an event I attended recently where we were caught in a flimsy gazebo during a downpour of epic proportions.
Sadly, Susannah died when she was hit by falling beams when a gallery collapsed in the building where the circus was performing but Pablo soldiered on.
My one disappointment?Anyone familiar with the Beatles song Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite might reasonably have expected to see a bear, sadly no bears were in evidence! Apart from that, top marks to Joe and Vanessa for an entertaining and informative walk.
If you are in the Leeds area it would be well worth going on a future Heritage Corner walk and you can find out more here: https://heritagecornerleeds.com/
If you visit Harewood House without the advantage of a car, be warned, it is a fifteen minute walk from the main entrance on the A61 Leeds to Harrogate road before you reach the house itself – that gives you an inkling of the scale of the estate. As I approached, I found myself wondering how many enslaved people you would have had to own to be able to afford to build a house like this?
The house was completed in 1771 when the family moved in.
At the time of emancipation in 1833, the 2nd Earl of Harewood claimed compensation for 1,277 enslaved people and received over £3 million at today’s prices. That Harewood House owes its very existence to profits from the trade in enslaved human beings is beyond question.
Not all the owners of country estates are willing to be open about the roots of their family fortune but the present Earl does not shy away from his family’s history:
“I believe very strongly that we can change things in the present, but for better or for worse there is nothing that any of us can do about history and the past.”
David Lascelles, Earl of Harewood
In ‘the present’, the Harewood House Trust supports a wide range of educational projects and it was one of those projects that prompted my visit.
If you are a regular follower of Historycal Roots you will be aware of Bertie Robinson, the black footman at Harewood House. Until the 22nd October an exhibition about Bertie will be on display at the house.
The digital guide doesn’t include any images of ‘downstairs’ at Harewood, an area of the house that Bertie would have been very familiar with.
The kitchen range
The downstairs dining room
The exhibition was researched by members of the Diasporian Stories Research Group based in Leeds. The principal researchers were Audrey Dewjee and Allison Edwards with support from David Hamilton. Members of staff at Harewood threw themselves enthusiastically into the research, finding all sorts of things in Harewood’s own archives that enhanced Bertie’s story (‘they throw nothing away here’ as one of the volunteers on duty when I visited said). A former Harewood House Trust Director, Terry Suthers, helped too. It was a real collective effort which has paid handsome dividends.
Nothing can quite beat seeing an exhibition ‘in the flesh’ so to speak and there is plenty more to see and do at Harewood. Although I resisted (just) the temptation of a cream tea on the terrace overlooking the grounds designed by Capability Brown, there is no reason why you should!
This post owes its existence to a talk given by Pat Candlin at a ‘Guyana Speaks’ event. The monthly events regularly feature interesting presentations which, as the title of the sessions indicates, focus mainly on Guyana. Pat’s talk was about his book (co-authored with Cassandra Pybus) ‘Enterprising Women – Gender, Race and Power in the Revolutionary Atlantic’.
The gap between buying a book and actually reading it can be quite long but, having recently got round to it, this one is very thought provoking for a number of reasons.
How often do we bemoan the absence from the history books of stories about strong, successful and independent women of colour? This book has many such stories.
However, a health warning is necessary. The women featured in the pages of the book were all operating in the southern Caribbean at a time of great political turmoil under conditions that bear comparison with what we know as ‘the wild west.’ This was frontier territory, with islands like Grenada and Trinidad changing hands following tussles between the competing colonial powers of Britain, France and Spain. British Guiana came into existence after Britain seized Demerara, Essequibo and Berbice from the Dutch in 1796. The problematic feature of these women’s stories is that they all owned slaves, in some cases many of them. Having been enslaved themselves, or being the daughters of women who were, their route to riches involved the enslavement of others.
British writers of the time were quick to stereotype women of colour, perhaps some things haven’t changed as much as they should have done over the past two hundred years.
Betsey Goodwin was the woman who ‘shared the bed’ of George Ricketts after he became Governor of Barbados in 1794. An early historian of Barbados, John Poyer, writing in 1808, suggested Betsey’s position encouraged other members of the free coloured community who had ‘assumed a rank in the graduated scale of colonial society to which they had hitherto been strangers.’ He also suggested that, because Betsey was believed to have encouraged the Governor to allow prisoners to go free, other free coloured people had ‘boasted of the impunity which they could obtain through the influence of Betsey Goodwin.’ Betsey was described as ‘sly and insidious’ and this became a familiar stereotype. Enslaved black women and women of colour had much to gain from associating with a powerful white man, if they played their cards right they could gain their own freedom and that of their children. It suited contemporary writers to portray them in a very negative light.
Another common stereotype was that of the black (or mixed heritage) brothel keeper. Rachael Pringle Polgreen is one such person and we have a supposed likeness of her.
Rchel Pringle Polgreen – 1796 lithograph by Thomas Rowlandson
Whether this unflattering image or ‘likeness’ is an accurate portrayal is very much up for debate. It is a lithograph by Thomas Rowlandson dating from 1796. Rowlandson could have met Rachel on the one visit he made to the Caribbean but the lithograph was created when he was back in London (five years after Rachel’s death) and based on a drawing by another, un-named, artist. It is a caricature that fits well with the stereotype that the British were happy to perpetuate. As the authors of the book say, the caricature ‘played to the powerful cliches that had enveloped Caribbean women by the end of the eighteenth century.’ For example, writing in 1806, Dr.George Pinckard wrote that the typical tavern keeper in Barbados was a ‘mulatto woman … who now indulges in indolence and the good things in life, grows fat and feels herself to be of importance to society.’
The few known facts about Rachel’s life give a far more nuanced picture. There were white men at various stages of her life but it is clear that she had a strong entrepreneurial spirit and was a shrewd businesswoman. The (long) list of her belongings at the time of her death was, Candlin and Pybus assert, ‘just the kind of inventory one would expect of a wealthy white person in Barbadian society at the time.’ This list included her main property which was valued at £1,000 (£154,000 at today’s prices) and 38 enslaved people, six of whom she chose to grant their freedom.
The story of the Philip clan starts in provincial France where, some time in the 1750s, a baker, Honore Philip, decided to seek new opportunities in the Caribbean. With his two brothers he settled on the small French colony of La Grenade. Two of the brothers chose to settle on the tiny outlying island of Petite Martinique while the third settled on the main island of Grenada. Why they located here is not known but they were soon thriving producing cotton and indigo.
By 1760, Honore had married ‘Jeanette, a free negro woman.’ The authors speculate that his relationship with her started while she was enslaved and that he gave her her freedom at the time he married her. This sort of behaviour was sanctioned by the Code Noire, the ‘rules’ that governed how French colonisers were expected to treat the local black poulation.
At some point in 1770s Honore died and Jeanette became the sole proprietor of his extensive estates. In 1778 a visitor wrote that all the land of Petite Martinique – some 477 acres – was ‘jointly owned by Jeanette Philip and a number of her mixed race children.’ Contrary to the stereotype, Jeanette did not succumb to ‘indolence’ but continued to expand her property empire with vigour. When she died in 1788 the estate was divided among her children, among them a daughter, Judith. There are many twists and turns to the story of Judith Philip, including ten years living at a fashionable address in London, which cannot be covered here, suffice to say that she lived until 1848 and died a very wealthy women.
The book gives some information about the extent of the Philip family’s ownership of enslaved people. But the details are all to be found on the Legacy of British Slavery database https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/search
Looking at the records for Judith Philip alone shows her ownership of enslaved people on three estates on Grenada.
Number enslaved
Compensation
Petit Ance Estate
64
£1,499 18 shillings 6 pence
Susanna Estate
68
£1,558 8 shillings 5 pence
Grand Ance Estate
143
£3,456 17 shillings 5 pence
Judith Philip’s slave holdings on Grenada
The total compensation claimed by Judith Philip was £6,515 4 shillings 2 pence, about £866,000 at today’s prices according to the Bank of England inflation calculator.
As an aside, I couldn’t resist putting ‘Gleave’ into the database search box. I know there was a Gleave on Barbados in the 1860s but he was a Methodist minister at a time when Methodists were still extremely unpopular with the plantocracy because they gave the until recently enslaved people ideas above their station. It is a relief to know that the name Gleave does not appear in the ‘Legacy’ database and that John Rowland Gleave was on the side of the good guys. You can read about him here https://www.historycalroots.com/john-rowland-gleave/
The book is full of surprising stories, none more so that that of Susannah Ostrehan who owned her own mother, Priscilla. Strange as this sounds, owning family members was the best, indeed the only, way of keeping them relatively safe.
In 1809 Susannah realised she was dying and she went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that her mother became a free woman once her owner died. The British colonial authorities put all sorts of obstacles in the way of those seeking to manumit slaves. Just a few years earlier in 1801, the Governor had become so concerned at the number of enslaved people being freed that he increased the cost of issuing a manumission certificate from £50 to £300 and even if the money was raised, officialdom could not be relied upon to issue the appropriate papers. It was cheaper and more reliable to entrust a friendly ship’s captain bound for London with the requisite papers and rely on him to secure the enslaved person’s freedom through the appropriate authorities there (where the cost was still only £50).
Susannah entrusted a Captain Welch with the mission to secure her mother’s freedom. This was clearly a lengthy process as, having made the voyage to London, a ship would have to complete a return journey with the precious papers. Susannah died before the ship returned but she had prepared for that eventuality in her will by bequeathing her mother to a friend, Christian Blackman. The story has a happy ending as, although her daughter did not live to see it, the papers arrived from London and Priscilla was freed.
Finally, if we learn anything about the abolition of slavery in schools it is likely that the names of William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson will feature prominently. What we hear less about is the agency of enslaved people themselves in bringing the whole trade to an end. There is plenty of evidence of this in the book, one of Judith Philip’s own brothers, Joachim, turned against the system. He was eventually hanged in the market square in St Georges for his part in the 1796 uprising in Grenada led by Julien Fedon. Hopefully we will learn more about how enslaved people fought against their oppression thanks to projects like this one https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/18/secrets-of-rebel-slaves-in-barbados-will-finally-be-revealed
As I suggested at the outset, it is very hard to pretend that people like Judith Philip were exemplars of enlightened behaviour – they were not. As the authors say of Judith Philip, ‘she owned people on a large scale almost all of her life. Her wealth was built from plantation slavery and when the horror of slavery was over, her powerful attorneys made sure she was substantially compensated for her loss. But should we only see women like Judith Philip through the prism of slavery?’ They conclude ‘her singular success marks her as a remarkably enterprising women, worthy of our attention in a world so profoundly shaped by white men.’ More generally they conclude ‘one does not have to valorize self-emancipated slaves who became slave owners and helped perpetuate the system that held them in bondage – or even admire them. However, we would argue it is important to know such women existed in all their complexity and contradictions.’
An uncomfortable read, but I certainly found it a thought provoking book.
