How time flies! We were reminded at the ceremony in central London to unveil a plaque commemorating Olaudah Equiano, that our research in 2018 contributed in a small way to identifying his final resting place. A ceremony at the American Church in Goodge Street, London, on 15th June 2024 was attended by many of the ‘great and good’ and somehow we snuck in too! Hosted by Reverend Jennifer Mills-Knutsen on behalf of the church and Arthur Torrington of the Equiano Society, there was poetry from Nairobi Thompson and readings from Equiano’s ‘Interesting Narrative’ by actor, Burt Caesar.
For us, the story began with a visit to the London Metropolitan Archives where we were able to examine the register of burials at the non-conformist chapel in Goodge Street for the years 1796-1808. The name Gustavus Vassa (as Equiano was known for most of his adult life) was there, showing his burial on 6th April 1797.
Ever since then, Arthur Torrington has been working with the church and Camden Local Authority to have a plaque put in place to commemorate the site of Equiano’s burial (the burial ground has long since been paved over and only a few traces of its original function survive).
Arthur Torrington speaking at the event
After the speeches we assembled outside for the blessing and unveiling.
‘Searcher of hearts, God of Providence, bless this memorial of your servant Olaudah Equiano, Gustavus Vassa, that this acknowledgement of his original resting place in death would inspire those who live today.’
The plaque is prominently placed, turn left out of Goodge Street station and you can’t miss it.
The plaque in Goodge Street
Six years is a long time but congratulations to Arthur and the Equiano Society for persevering and getting the job done!
New discoveries cause us to constantly revise our thoughts about history in general and Black British history in particular. More and more records are being digitised and made available online and these lead to new finds and deeper understanding.
Regular contributor, John D Ellis, recently stumbled across a set of data he had never seen before. Careful analysis of the Army attestation registers for Edinburgh, has enabled John to identify the names of over forty Black soldiers who enlisted in British Army regiments between 1792 and 1848 in the city of Edinburgh alone. John makes the point that if such a register was maintained in Edinburgh, similar registers must have been kept in other cities – where are they and what would they reveal about the Black presence in Britain?
We first became aware of John’s work when he spoke at an event we attended in Huddersfield in 2018, what he had to say about the presence of Black soldiers in the British Army in the late 18th and early 19th centuries opened our eyes to an area of black British history that we had been largely unaware of. Since then, our understanding of the Black presence, in terms of both numbers and geographical spread, has come on in leaps and bounds. Working on this site and becoming aware of the work of John, Audrey Dewjee, Ray Costello and many others has been an educational experience for us and, we hope, for you too.
This exhibition brings together several of our favourite paintings under one roof. As the mini guide says:
‘Entangled Pasts explores connections between art associated with the Royal Academy and Britain’s colonial histories.’
The mini guide handed to visitors and free audio guide draw out the associations and the full catalogue contains an excellent introductory essay. You can buy the catalogue from the RA shop, it is pricey (as these things always are) but it is beautifully illustrated and gives a real flavour of the exhibition:
To whet your appetite here are just a few of the paintings on display.
Ignatius Sancho is believed to have been the first Black man to vote in a British Parliamentary election and in 1768 Thomas Gainsborough painted this portrait of him.
Sancho was a man of letters, as was Ottobah Cugoano and a selection of his manuscripts was on display:
Better still, the exhibition also includes the only known image of Cugoano, an etching on paper (now attributed to Thomas Rowlandson) dating from c1784 or c1790. Cugoano was employed for a time as a servant by Richard and Maria Cosway and this depicts him in that role.
‘The Head of a Negro‘ by John Singleton Copley was painted in 1777/78 and the subject matter is extremely unusual, at this time biblical scenes or paintings of great battles were the general order of the day. Although Copley had been the owner of enslaved people, this man, whose name, regrettably, is not recorded, is painted with evident respect for his humanity:
These images were previously known to us but a lot of others were not, including this one, a detail taken from a painting by Zoffany, ‘Colonel Blair and his Family and an Indian Ayah’. The catalogue of the exhibition points out that the girl looks too young to be an Ayah (nanny) and is more likely to have been the daughter of an Ayah or an illegitimate daughter of Colonel Blair. We are grateful to Audrey Dewjee for pointing out that Zoffany was in India in 1786 when this was painted.
There are many, many more exhibits to enjoy but we will finish with, Dido Elizabeth Belle, who in many ways was the inspiration that led us to start this site in 2015/16. It was painted in 1779 by David Martin, the previous attribution to Zoffany is now believed to be wrong. To think we travelled to Scone Palace, Perth to see this painting! Our visit was in 2014, before its importance was fully recognised by its owners and we found it hung in a rather obscure corner of a guest bedroom.
The exhibition is on until 28th April and, if you are in London and can spare the time, we can thoroughly recommend it.
Audrey Dewjee’s latest contribution to Historycal Roots is of particular interest to us and we hope you will find it enlightening too. Audrey has chosen the title ‘Roots entwined’ for the article and in it she explores the history of inter-racial marriage in her home county of Yorkshire.
The earliest mixed marriage she mentions in the article took place in Deptford, London, in 1613, but, as she puts it, ‘Yorkshire eventually caught up.’ She goes on to mention the marriage of John Quashee and Rebecca Crosby at Thornton by Pocklington on 12s. November 1732.
St Michael’s church, Pocklington, the site of John and Rebecca’s wedding?
Audrey goes on to cite 18th, 19th and 20th century examples. One of her 19th century Yorkshire marriages features John Perry, a Black man born in Annapolis in Nova Scotia in about 1819, who married in Ripon in 1844 and ended his days in Sydney, Australia, having been transported to the penal colony. As an illustration of how ‘entwined’ these stories can become, John Perry has featured in an earlier Historycal Roots article by John Ellis which Audrey references.
Of course, similar stories can be found in virtually any part of the country and there must be people who are puzzled by the results they get back from a DNA test. As Audrey says ‘colour fades quickly if [mixed heritage] children and grandchildren have White partners … and gradually the memory of a Black ancestor fades,’ something my wife and I are only too aware of as we watch our grandson growing up.
I recently visited the ‘Unforgotten Lives’ exhibition at the London Metropolitan Archives in Clerkenwell. If you live in London or visit any time before 27th March 2024, the exhibition is well worth a look. Some of the stories may be relatively familiar (Olaudah Equiano, Ignatius Sancho, Dido Elizabeth Belle, etc) others will be new to just about everyone.
The story of John Satia was one I wasn’t familiar with. Born on Barbados in c1689, he was enslaved and brought to London when he was about two years old by Thomas Gerrard, a merchant.
Nothing is known of John’s early years in London but in 1725 he completed a seven year apprenticeship as a joiner and was admitted to the Worshipful Company of Joiners. In 1729 Thomas Gerrard died and left John an annuity of £10. On 7th September 1731 John’s application to become a Freeman of the City of London was considered by the Aldermen and was accepted, this allowed him to take on apprentices of his own and expand his business.
Just seven days later the Aldermen who considered the application (most of whom had links with the trade in enslaved people or with the East India Company) met again and decided that henceforth Black people were to be prohibited from obtaining Freedom of the City. This marked a new phase in the development of institutional racism. Although there is evidence that John was able to continue trading others were denied the opportunity to follow in his footsteps.
If you do visit the exhibition why not visit Spa Fields, scene of riots in 1816, directly across the road from the Archives. Now a pleasant public park, it is the ideal place for a sandwich on a sunny day, although it is hard to reconcile the neat and tidy park of today with its tumultuous past.
It’s nice when you can tell the whole story but sometimes it isn’t possible and all you have is a fragment, insignificant in its own right but, combined with other fragments, they can contribute in a small way to a bigger picture. We know next to nothing about William Heywood, George Dony or Johnson Freeman other than that two were servants and one was a former seaman – but research by John Ellis has identified all three as black men who were living in England at the time of their deaths in the 18th/19th century. In the case of Freeman Johnson our knowledge of him comes mainly from a rather graphic description of his sad death.
Fragments are frustrating but can sometimes develop into something more significant – John has written the fascinating story of a black nurse in Victorian England and we will be bringing that to you shortly.
William Heywood
From the Leeds Intelligencer, 7th March 1780:
Saturday died at Liverpool, in the 79th years of his age, Thomas Crowder, Esq; formerly a Jamaica merchant, where he acquired a large fortune; and on Tuesday last died, his faithful Black Servant, who had served him upwards of twenty years.
William Heywood “a black servant to Thomas Crowder, Esq. deceased, (of) Water Street” died on the 29th of February and was buried at St Nicholas Church, Liverpool on the 2nd of March 1790. (‘Our Lady and St Nicholas’ in the parish of Liverpool). The church is one in which a number of baptismal, marriage and burial records belonging to the Black population of Liverpool have been identified, including George Wise a Nova Scotian veteran of the Peninsula Campaign.
Thomas Crowder of Liverpool (1701-1780) was one of the founder members of the ‘African Company of Merchants’ in 1752. As such he was involved in the trade in enslaved people. He died on the 26th of February and was buried at the Church of St Nicholas, Liverpool on the 1st of March 1780.[1]Sources: For William Heywood see: Leeds Intelligencer, 7th March 1780. findmypast.co.uk Bishop’s Transcripts. Dr/2/59. Liverpool, Lancashire. Lancashire Archives. ancestry.co.uk For Thomas … Continue reading
On Monday, at Cashiobury-House (Cassiobury House, Watford), the seat of the Earl of Essex, George Donney, a black servant belonging to his Lordship, who had lived in the family upward of 4 years.
George Edward Doney was buried at St Mary’s Church, Watford on the 8th of September 1809. He was described as a “Widower, Negro Servant to the Earl of Essex”. A search of both ancestry.co.uk and findmypast.co.uk has failed to find further reference to George Edward Doney or any relatives.
George Capel-Coningsbury (1757-1839) was the 5th Earl of Essex (1799-1839). His first wife, Sarah Thompson (nee’ Bazett, 1759-1838), had been born on St Helena, which may provide some clue as to the origins of George Edward Doney but his gravestone tells a different story.
George Edward Doney c1758 – 1809 worked as a servant for 44 years at Cassiobury House. The inscription on his gravestone reveals that he was captured from Gambia as a child and sold into slavery
Poor Edward blest the pirate bark that bore His captive infancy from Gambia’s shore To where in willing servitude he won Those blest rewards for every duty done.
Kindness and praise, the wages of the heart, none else to him could joy or pride impart, And gave him, born a pagan and a slave, a freeman’s charter, and a Christian’s grave.
Freeman Johnson, a Black Merchant Seaman, 1825-1848
From the South Eastern Gazette, 25th April 1848:
CORONER’S INQUEST.- On Saturday last an inquest was held at the Lunatic Asylum, Barming-heath, before F.F. Dally, Esq., on the body of Freeman Johnson, a man of colour, aged 23, who had been an inmate of the Asylum since the 11th inst., having been sent from the Greenwich union house. It appeared that the deceased was in a very weak state, when admitted, and was found by Robert Jones, a keeper, at about nine o’clock on the evening on the 13 th , quite dead, with his face hanging over the side of the bedstead, and blood oozing from the mouth and nose. He was last seen alive by George Baker, a keeper, at about half-past six on the same evening, when he refused his supper, but said he was in no pain. Dr Huxley, who had made a post-mortem examination, deposed that the deceased was suffocated by the flow of blood arising from a rupture of one (of) the vessels of the lungs, which were much diseased. Verdict accordingly.
Freeman Johnson was born at Nassau in the Bahamas in 1825. He
registered as a British Merchant Seaman either in 1845 or sometime
shortly after. Freeman Johnson was interred at All Saints Church,
Maidstone on the 18th of April 1848.[4]Sources: TNA BT114/12. findmypast.co.uk South Eastern Gazette, 25th April 1848. findmypast.co.uk Burial: Maidstone All Saints burials, 1838-1907. Kent Burials. findmypast.co.uk
Sources: TNA BT114/12. findmypast.co.uk South Eastern Gazette, 25th April 1848. findmypast.co.uk Burial: Maidstone All Saints burials, 1838-1907. Kent Burials. findmypast.co.uk
My wife and I recently took a day off from black history (or so we thought) to attend a talk at Croydon Parish church about the history of the building. Although we have lived in Croydon for a combined total of over 110 years we had, somewhat shamefully, never actually visited the Minster.
The Minster sits beside a couple of busy main roads. They say the camera doesn’t lie but with careful choice of angles it can certainly be encouraged to fib a bit!
What a charming rural vision – hopefully you can’t see the gigantic crane artfully concealed behind the tree and you certainly won’t be able to hear the traffic thundering by!
The talk by David Morgan was extremely informative and even people attending who already knew a great deal about the church learnt new things, we certainly did! It was at the end of the visit that we were unexpectedly ambushed by a little piece of black history.
David had left out some pictures that provided context to his talk. One of them featured a painting by John Singleton Copley, who is buried at the Minster and who David had spoken about during his talk. You should be able to see why this caught our attention.
‘Watson and the shark’ by John Singleton Copley, 1778
Although the ‘subject’ of the painting is Brook Watson, the youth flailing in the water, and, yes, ‘the shark’, a black man is given a very prominent position and the eye is immediately drawn to him. The National Gallery of Art (Washington) comments that his ‘prominent position in the picture and sympathetic rendering were extraordinary for the time.'[1]https://www.nga.gov/collection/highlights/copley-watson-and-the-shark.html
We felt prompted into some research with the following questions in mind:
who was Brook Watson?
Who was John Singleton Copley?
Who is the black figure given such a prominent place in the painting?
Brook Watson
The painting depicts an actual event in the life of Brook Watson. Born in Plymouth, Devon, in 1735, he was orphaned at the age of six and sent to live with an uncle and aunt in Boston, Massachusetts. Later he became a crewman on one of his uncle’s ships and, at the age of 14, he took the unwise decision to go for a dip in the harbour at Havana, Cuba. He was attacked by a shark which on its second attack took off his right foot, it was coming back to finish the job when a group of Brook’s shipmates combined to fend off the shark and rescue young Brook.
Watson survived the attack and, although his right leg had to be amputated below the knee, after three months convalescing in Havana he was able to carry on with, what turned out to be, a very successful, if not altogether blameless, life.
He clearly must have had a good head for business as by the age of 15 he had a role in supplying provisions to the British Army at Fort Lawrence in Nova Scoria and he quickly advanced to become a commissary, a key role in the supply chain that he fulfilled for General Wolfe at the Siege of Louisbourg. In 1758 he returned to London to carry on his career as a merchant, something he did with great success.
On her visit to London in 1773 the acclaimed black American poet, Phillis Wheatley, was introduced to Watson and he gave her an edition of ‘Paradise Lost’ by John Milton. On her return to America Phillis was granted her freedom and she suggests that her ‘friends in England’ played a part in this:
was presented with a Folio Edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost, printed on a Silver Type, so call’d from its elegance, (I suppose) By Mr.Brook Watson Mercht. whose Coat of Arms is prefix’d. — Since my return to America my Master, has at the desire of my friends in England given me my freedom. The Instrument is drawn, so as to secure me and my property from the hands of the Executrs. adminstrators, &c. of my master, & secure whatsoever should be given me as my Own. [2]https://www.masshist.org/database/viewer.php?item_id=771&img_step=1&mode=transcript#page1
In spite of his small gesture, which he could well afford, we gain a rather different insight into Watson’s character from an American businessman and politician, Ethan Allen, who accompanied him on a voyage to England in 1775. Allen wrote that he:
“was put under the power of an English Merchant from London, whose name was Brook Watson: a man of malicious and cruel disposition, and who was probably excited, in the exercise of his malevolence, by a junto of tories, who sailed with him to England …”[3]Allen, Ethan (1838). A Narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen’s Captivity, Written by Himself, 3rd. ed., Burlington, Vermont.
Watson was one of the founding members of Lloyds (and later became its chairman), a banking and insurance company. The company directly profited from the slave trade as it insured the ships that transported enslaved people across the Atlantic. Furthermore, Watson wrote in 1789 that he supported the slave trade and that it needed to remain in place for the benefit of the economies of the colonies.[4]https://philliswheatleyldn.wixsite.com/philliswheatleylondo/post/sir-brook-watson
Watson was appointed to be the Director of the Bank of England in 1784, he was a Member of Parliament from 1784 to 1793, became Lord Mayor of London in 1796 and was granted the title of Baronet in 1803.
A stellar career but of course it was built on rotten foundations. Perhaps he did not personally own slaves (his personal and business papers have not survived so we do not know) but Watson is described repeatedly as a ‘merchant’ and there really can be little doubt that, either directly through personal investment in the voyages of slave ships, or indirectly, through his role as one of the founders of Lloyds, he owed his wealth and position to the trade in enslaved people or in the goods their labour produced.
John Singleton Copley
Copley was born in Boston, Massachusetts in either 1737 or 1738. His father died when John was young and it was probably his stepfather, an engraver and painter, who taught him the rudiments of his art. Young John quickly excelled and even while still a teenager became a sought after painter of portraits in the Boston area and beyond.
But these were dangerous times in Boston, were you a Loyalist (on the side of the British colonial authorities), or a supporter of independence? Copley’s family were mostly in the Loyalist camp (his father-in-law was one of the merchants who had a consignment of his tea dumped into Boston harbour during the so called Boston Tea Party) and Copley himself was threatened by a mob who suspected him of sheltering a Loyalist. Copley himself had some sympathy with the cause of independence but generally kept his head down.
Knowledge of Copley’s ability spread and he was urged to move to England which he eventually did in 1774. He had immediate success and ‘Watson and the Shark’ was just one of many impressive paintings he made in these early years in London. In 1783 he was elected as a full member of the Royal Academy and members of the royal family were among those who sat for him.
In later years his powers declined and he increasingly relied on loans from friends to maintain his home in London’s fashionable Hanover Square. He died on 9th September 1815 and was buried in Croydon Minster.
The black sailor
As is usually the case in situations like this we are not going to be able to identify this black sailor.
But was he painted from ‘life’, in other words did an actual black man have his image painted by the artist, or is he simply a generic ‘black man’ who existed only in the artist’s imagination? In the absence of documentary evidence we can only go by the look and feel of the image. To our eyes this is not a cartoon caricature (unlike the shark – Copley had never seen an actual shark and it shows!). Copley, based in Boston, Massachusetts for many years would certainly have seen black men (and, following his marriage, he had enslaved people in his own household in Boston), and of course there was a significant black population in London too.
The outcome of the American War resulted in the establishment of a large American loyalist community, both white and black.[5]https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Population-history-of-london.jsp#a1760-1815 The best estimate of London’s black population at this time is around 5,000 to 10,000 out of a total population that was probably still a little under a million. Edward Long, a leading pro-slavery campaigner, suggested a figure of 45,000, a deliberately inflated number designed to frighten the English into believing they could be swamped by idle blacks freed from enslavement.
The case that Copley knew a black man and used him as the basis for this painting is strengthened by another painting of his.
‘Head of a Negro’ , 1777 or 1778, John Singleton Copley
This is a very lifelike representation of the face of a black man and must surely have been based on a living person known to Copley. His art was commended for his ‘startling likenesses of persons and things’ and this is a fine example.
Whether a black sailor was involved in the actual rescue of Watson is unknown, this is after all an artefact, a painting created many years after the event, not a photograph. Various sources state that infra red analysis of the painting shows that the black man in the shark painting was originally painted as having blond hair and fair skin. We cannot know what prompted Copley to paint out the original white sailor and replace him with the black man we see in the finished picture but it is true to say that everything that appears in a painting is there because the artist wanted it to be there, the presence of this black man was the result of a very conscious decision.[6]https://artincontext.org/watson-and-the-shark/ It has been suggested that Copley was making a point in favour of the abolition of slavery, after all, it is the black sailor who is holding the rope that could, literally, be Watson’s lifeline.
Copley was living in London at the time and would have seen black people as he went about his business either as servants in the houses he visited whilst doing his social rounds or destitute on the streets of the city. The ‘black poor’ in London reached the ‘something must be done’ stage in 1785 just a few years after this painting was made and in 1786 several hundred ‘volunteers’ were sent to establish a colony in what is now Sierra Leone, an ill-considered venture which led to almost all of the settlers dying within the first two years of reaching Africa. The names of those who were candidates for the venture can be seen on lists that are held at the National Archives in Kew.
Although we are stepping beyond the bounds of ‘history’ here and into the territory of ‘speculation’, it is certainly possible that the man who served as the model for Copley’s black sailor was among those on these lists.
The ‘Head of a Negro’ wasn’t the only painting in which Copley placed a black man at the centre of the action. In ‘The Death of Major Peirson’ (1783) a black servant of the Major is seen firing a rifle at those who have killed his master. The black servant of auctioneer James Christie (founder of Christie’s auction house) was the model for the figure in the painting.[7]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Major_Peirson,_6_January_1781
The Death of Major Peirson (detail), John Singleton Copley, 1783
Conclusion
Portraying black men in such prominent roles really was exceptionally unusual at the time these paintings were made and we can’t help but believe that ‘The head of a Negro’ painting brings us face to face with one of the black men who lived in London in the 1770s and 1780s.
The article in the link below isn’t written by regular contributor John Ellis but he has clearly made a big contribution to the research that informs it.
The story starts with the birth of Henry Tite in Waterford, Ireland, in around 1804. When Henry enlisted in the British Army in 1825 the records identify him as a black man. This raises the intriguing question of how a black man came to be born in that place at that time.
A letter recently discovered in the archives at Chatsworth House raises the possibility that Henry was descended from a young crew member of a ship that docked at Waterford in 1756. It was a French ship and, as Britain was at war with France at the time, the ship and its cargo were impounded by the British. The letter recently discovered in the archives at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire is from Lord Frederick Cavendish, stationed in Ireland at the time with troops of the 29th Worcestershire Foot Regiment, to his brother. In it he mentions ‘three little Black boys’. The boys are mentioned in the same sentence as the cargo which implies that whether they were technically ‘free’ or enslaved was a moot point as far as Lord Cavendish was concerned. In the letter he makes it clear he regards them as ‘his’ to dispose of as he chooses.
John Ellis has identified a soldier with the 29th Worcestershire Foot Regiment, Joseph Provance, who could very possibly have been one of the ‘black boys’ mentioned in the letter, the speculation is that Henry Tite may have been descended from another.
You can find out more by following the link. Before you do I would add the point that if we take literally the description of Henry Tite as ‘black’ then that suggests he had a black mother as well as a black father. That raises the even more interesting question – who was she? In fact, the balance of probability is that Henry’s mother was white and he was of mixed heritage but, as nothing is known about either of Henry’s parents that question is likely to remain unanswered.
If you read the article by Roxanne Gleave and Audrey Dewjee about GEMS in art you will be familiar with a number of images of black people in paintings. Roxanne and Audrey focussed in particular on the paintings as evidence of the black presence in Britain at various times (16th to 19th centuries), various locations (town/country) and in various roles (servant/groom/sailor/worker). They sought to answer the questions ‘who/what/where/when?’ If you missed their article you can see it here:
We must thank Liz Millman for drawing our attention to a recent article with a similar theme. Liz runs Black History Conversations[1]Series 5 of Black History Conversations has just concluded but series 6 will start shortly http://www.blackhistoryconversations.com/index.asp?pageid=717246 and is very good at finding material that we would otherwise have missed. During a recent conversation she mentioned an article she had seen ‘The visible invisibility of black people in aristocratic portraiture.’ Naturally we were intrigued. It contains more examples of GEMS in art. The article by Marjorie H Morgan, cites paintings found in stately homes across the country, including a number of National Trust properties. You can read it here:
Roxanne and Audrey concluded their article by saying ‘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’.’ Marjorie’s article has introduced some more examples, there are many more out there, feel free to tell us about them.
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
Although we are stepping beyond the bounds of ‘history’ here and into the territory of ‘speculation’, it is certainly possible that the man who served as the model for Copley’s black sailor was among those on these lists.
