More Snippets of Welsh Black History – 1800 to 1899

by Audrey Dewjee (21^st September 2024)

My earlier article about Welsh Black History covered the years 1689 to 1799.^[1]https://www.historycalroots.com/discovering-black-history-in-wales/ From 1800 onwards the records of Black and Asian people are more numerous and probably better known. However, the following snippets are offered in the hope that they may include some information which is new or of interest.

Records for people of colour in Wales at the beginning of the 19^th century are of a similar type to those in earlier years – parish records still being the most important source of information. However, as the century progresses, other sources become available such as census returns, newspaper reports and photographs.

Parish and census records

Examples of early 19^th century parish records include the burial on 9^th December 1800 of 22-year-old Jane Robert ‘a Black woman’ at Holy Cross, Cowbridge, Glamorgan and the baptism of Castriot Scanderbeg ‘a negro born on the Gold Coast Africa’ at St. Woolas, Newport, Monmouthshire on 17^th June 1809. An Elizabeth Senegal, who died of smallpox aged 4, was buried at Clyro, Radnorshire on 30^th July 1811. Because of her surname, I suspect she may have had African ancestry. I hope someone will follow this up to find out.

Solomon, Ellen and Ruth Nutry

A family which appears in parish and census records was initially discovered via a ballad. According to the National Library of Wales, ‘Ballads played an important role in the dissemination of news throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, and they reflect many of the political, social and cultural issues of the day in Wales.’ These issues included slavery and its abolition. In its Special Collections and Archives, Cardiff University holds a copy of a ballad Hanes, cyffes, achwyniad, anerchiad, a dymuniad y Negroes (The History, Confession, Complaint, Greeting, and Desire of the Negroes) by Solomon Nutry. This ballad is available online for those who can read Welsh at https://archive.org/details/wg35-2-1235.  Solomon is variously described as a former slave or the son of a slave.

A second ballad entitled Cân Newydd yn gosod allan ddiolchgarwch y Negroes am eu gwaredigaeth oddi dan iau haearnaidd y Gaeth Fasnach (A New Song setting out the thanksgiving of the Negroes for their deliverance from the iron yoke of the Slave Trade) is attributed to ‘Elin’ writing on behalf of Solomon Nutry. For more information on this story, see ‘Welsh Ballads and American Slavery’, written in 2007, by Professor E. Wyn James.^[2]https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/special-collections/subject-guides/welsh-ballads/slavery  [accessed 28/11/2021]

Professor James gave some genealogical information about the Nutry family. In 1822 Solomon married Ellen Jones at Holyhead in Anglesey where they were listed as ‘both of this parish’. By 1831 the couple were living in Chester, where their daughter Ruth was baptised. Solomon’s occupation was noted in the baptism record as ‘engineer’. I don’t know exactly what his work would have involved, but it may have been concerned with ships’ engines. At the time of the census in 1841 the family had moved to Llanfwrog, on the outskirts of Rhuthun and Solomon was said to have been born in Denbighshire, whereas Ellen and Ruth were not born in the county.

In the 1851 census (where their surname is misspelled ‘Netrey’), their details are recorded as follows – Solomon, an engineer aged 62, born in Bristol, Gloucestershire; Ellen, aged 61, born in Anglesey; and Ruth, aged 19, born in Chester. The family had by this time moved to Liverpool where they lived with three other families at 31 Cherry Lane. Solomon died in 1854, and Ellen ten years later, both in Liverpool.

I have been unable to find anything more about Ruth, but the birth of a Margaret Ann Nutry was registered in Liverpool early in 1855. Given that the name Nutry is very uncommon, could this be Ruth’s daughter? And, if so, what happened to the child and her mother?

Asians in Wales

There is evidence of people of Asian ancestry passing through or living in Wales. Charles Williamson, baptised in the Parochial Chapel of Ystread Meiru, Cardiganshire on 1^st April 1804, had been sent there from Bengal for his education. He was the son of an East India merchant from London and an Indian lady. His father died and eventually one of Charles’s trustees brought him to Wales in 1802 when he was thought to be 12 years old. Part of his life story is told on the website of the University of York.^[3]https://www.york.ac.uk/borthwick/holdings/research-guides/race/charles-williamson/  [accessed 21/04/2022]

Eventually, Charles was ordained in the Church of England. After a spell as a curate in Yorkshire, he went to Turkey as a chaplain. He died in the (now Greek) island of Samos in his early thirties. He must have valued his time in Wales, because his obituary records bequests he made to his former school:

Died, in November last, in the island of Samos, the rev. Charles Williamson, chaplain to the British Factory, at Smyrna [now Izmir, Turkey]. Mr. Williamson received his education at Ystradmeirig school, Cardiganshire, and mindful of his Alma Mater he has bequeathed part of his property to the endowment of a scholarship, in St. John’s college, Cambridge, for a pupil of the above-named school. He has also bequeathed a collection of coins and marbles (antiques) for the use of the said school. Mr. Williamson was a young man well known to many in Wales.^[4]In The Christian Remembrancer or the Churchman’s Biblical, Ecclesiastical, and Literary Miscellany, Volume 3, January to December 1821.

Newspaper reports

Articles in newspapers involving Black and Asian people can be problematic. People who are quietly going about their business and getting on with their lives are rarely mentioned in newspapers: reports usually focus on scandals, disasters, and crimes. This is liable to give the impression that people of colour are disproportionally involved in criminal activities. However, if press reports of court cases are closely examined it becomes apparent that rather than always being the accused, Black people are frequently in attendance as witnesses or victims. Despite the disadvantages, newspaper reports can be a valuable source of information about people who may not otherwise be identified. Such leads can then be followed up to discover more about the individuals and families involved.

Newspaper articles reveal that sometimes local Whites took the trouble to try and help their Black neighbours and that at times Black people were sympathetically treated in the courts. Other reports reveal the racist attitudes that persisted in the press and in the community. The following are examples.

Under a headline, ‘A Black Sailor Rejected at the Cardiff Sailors’ Home’, a letter to the editor of the South Wales Daily News flagged up a colour-bar problem:

SIR, I wish to make known to the public through the medium of your valuable paper the rules and principles of the Cardiff Sailors’ Home. On the arrival of the barque Peerless in dock we were boarded by the Sailors’ Home agent, and on the crew being finished with they were conveyed to the Sailors’ Home, all except one man, he being neglected, being a man of colour. I wish to know, Mr Editor, if such conduct on the part of the Sailors Home authorities is in any way in accordance with the British constitution? I myself, think it is more like South American, the man in question being a British subject of St. Vincent, West Indies. The Board of Trade have had a deal to say about crimping of late, but I think they had better bring the old rule up again, for crimps would seize hold of any man, black or white, and give him a home of some sort. The man is now forced to remain on board the ship. I can speak for him being as good a seaman as will be found at the present day, and as clean as any white man.—I am, &c.,
C. BARTON, Chief Mate. Cardiff, March 1st, 1875.

A much more sinister happening was reported in the Western Mail of 14^th June 1899:

NEGRO HUNT IN NORTH WALES

Two negroes and three half-castes were at Llanidloes Police-court on Tuesday committed to the assizes on two charges of burglary. It is alleged that the prisoners, who were tramping to Cardiff, broke into a boot shop at three o’clock on Tuesday morning, and stole eleven odd ladies’ boots and shoes. They also smashed the window of a grocery establishment, and took sixteen tins of salmon and a quantity of confectionery. The occupiers were aroused by the noise, and alarmed the whole neighbourhood, and nearly one hundred young men and women, armed with guns, pokers, broomsticks, and tongs, pursued the negroes, who, alarmed at the formidable array, surrendered themselves. Prisoners, in extenuation, pleaded hunger.

It is likely the men were mariners unable to find work at their last port of call and en route to South Wales to see if they could find employment there.

A third example comes from a report in the Wellington Journal (Shropshire) of 31^st March 1900:

At [the Glamorgan Assizes] the other day…a negro sailor, named [Albert] Martin, was charged with doing grievous bodily harm to a woman named Frazer, and one of the witnesses for the accused—the lady superintendent of a local religious mission [Mrs. Mary Martin]—was called witness for the defence, and her evidence tended strongly to exculpate the sailor. So the prosecuting counsel asked her, somewhat flippantly, whether it was not true that she was married to a black man herself? The lady demurred to the term ‘black man,’ but admitted that he was coloured, whereupon the learned judge indignantly exclaimed ‘Gracious heavens! I do most strongly protest against this. Why can’t a woman marry a black man if she chooses? If it is suggested that because this witness is married to a black man she has come here to commit perjury, I must stop such a line of procedure.’ Nobody seemed disposed to attempt a solution of the problem, and so Mr. Justice Bucknill’s query remained—as we are afraid it must continue to remain—unanswered. But probably it had some effect upon the jury, for they found Martin not guilty, a verdict with which the judge said [he] fully agreed.

Lord Wellington and family

Lord Wellington is a good example of someone who appeared in the newspapers in court cases, sometimes as the victim of crimes and sometimes as the defendant. Putting these newspaper entries together with parish and workhouse records, a skeleton story of his life can be created.

Born in Barbados about 1852, his name appears on a workhouse register in Liverpool in 1889. He went to South Wales where he met Ellen Whitchurch, who was 12 years his senior, a widow with a number of grown-up children. Lord and Ellen married in Cardiff in the early months of 1892. According to the census taken the year before, Ellen was living in Cadoxton Juxta Barry, and was the Head of her household. Living with her was a male servant, a male lodger, three of her children aged 26, 17 and 15, and a 2-year-old grandson.

Lord and Ellen’s marriage may have been more of a business arrangement than a romantic one. Perhaps they got together because Lord needed a home and an occupation and Ellen needed help or protection for her business. Whatever the case, by 1894 Lord was described as a boarding master (i.e. keeper of a boarding-house), in a newspaper report headed ‘Shebeening at Barry Dock’. As always, the fact that he was a ‘coloured man’ was mentioned by the reporter. Two police constables had raided the boarding-house at 2 Barry Street and ‘seized two 4½-gallon casks of beer, one full, the other on tap, with a quantity of the usual paraphernalia of a shebeen.’

In September 1895, the South Wales Daily News reported that Lord was one of two men awarded licences to operate a boarding house. While the other man was named simply as Walter Joyce, Lord Wellington’s name appeared in inverted commas!

The next time he appeared in court, in 1896, was as the victim of an attack by a Mrs. Ellen Lloyd. Lord had gone to her house ‘looking for his wife’ and been repulsed at the door by Mrs. Lloyd who floored him with a poker. He was in a pretty sorry state as he gave evidence ‘with his cranium enveloped in bandages’. His assailant was sentenced to two months in prison with hard labour. No explanation was given in the newspapers as to why Lord needed to go looking for his wife, nor why Mrs. Lloyd thought it necessary to attack him as she did. Perhaps the magistrates didn’t think this needed exploring. At that time, once married, men had immense power and control over their wives.

At a later court hearing, Lord said he had lived ‘uncomfortably’ with his wife and complained that he had ‘had the misfortune of marrying a woman with seven or eight grown-up children who lived on me’. Before the Divorce Reform Act of 1969 became effective, obtaining a divorce was not only difficult, but impossibly expensive for all but the super-rich. Whatever the reasons for their marital discord, Lord started a serious second relationship with a Mary Jane Butcher who was eight or ten years his junior. Their first child, Charles Wellington, was born in 1897.

In January 1899, the South Wales Daily News reported that ‘A coloured boarding-house keeper at Barry, who delights in the name of “Lord Wellington” which he claimed as his registered name’ had appeared in court again, this time the victim of a robbery. A lodger had stolen an overcoat worth 30 shillings (£1.50), which would have been an enormous amount of money in those days. Clothes were a very expensive item on a family budget, and thirty shillings represented almost two weeks’ wages. The thief was jailed for 14 days with hard labour.

Lord’s family with Mary grew. Sophia (Cissie) was baptised in April 1899. In March 1899, Lord left his wife Ellen and on 22^nd July he was in court again, this time as the accused, charged by his wife with desertion. Lord maintained she had told him to go and that she didn’t want him – and the case was dismissed.

Lord wasn’t so lucky when he appeared in court again in April 1900, on application from the Board of Guardians who had had to provide Ellen with relief amounting to £3. He was charged with failing to maintain his wife. Again, the South Wales Daily News adopted a mocking tone in its report:

When the case was reached and the stentorian tones of the court usher summoned ‘his Lordship’ from the cells, the magistrates and the promiscuous company foregathered on the gallery appeared to share a common hope that the initial stage of another peerage romance was to open. The hope was crushed by the announcement of the Magistrates’ Clerk that the defendant appeared in answer to the extremely ungallant charge of neglecting to maintain his wife. Lord Wellington is a man of colour, with 52 years to his credit…

This time, Lord was found guilty and, as he only earned 18 shillings a week and stated that he had no chance of raising such a large sum as £3, he was sentenced to one month in prison.^[5]£3 in 1900 would be worth about £450 today.

Newspapers in different parts of the country also reported on the case. The fact that his first name was ‘Lord’ was considered amusing by reporters and editors, no doubt especially because of the colour of his skin. They were clearly unaware that Lord was quite a common first name in the West Indies.

At the time of the 1901 census, he was living at Rogerstone, Monmouthshire, a bricklayer’s labourer, along with his ‘wife’ Mary and their two children. Very shortly after the census, their third child Florance Miriam was born. The 1901 census also recorded that Ellen Wellington was a lodging house keeper in Travis Street, Barry, Glamorgan, living with her married daughter, three grandchildren and three lodgers.

The couple were again in court in 1902. The Western Mail thought the case worth reporting, though they didn’t think it worth recording the verdict.

‘Is your name Lord Wellington?’ asked the clerk of the Cardiff Police-court at the last sitting. Everyone looked up startled and wonderingly. The question was addressed to a tall negro, with hair just turning grey. His wife, however, was an elderly lady of a totally different colour, and as she was plain Mrs. Wellington the element of romance immediately vanished.^[6]Western Mail, Monday 19 May 1902, p.4.

Lord and Mary’s family continued to grow. Two more births were registered, Louisa Wellington in 1904 and John Wellington in early 1907, both at Newbridge, Monmouthshire. However, in 1908 in Newport, Mary Jane Butcher married a William Neil, who was 15 years her junior. In the 1911 census, William, occupation ‘stoker labourer colliery’ was living in Rogerstone, Monmouthshire with Mary his wife, his five stepchildren, and his and Mary’s son, Robert William Neil, aged 2.

What had happened to Lord? Information supplied by John Ellis shows that he was admitted to Newport workhouse on 12^th September 1906, as temporarily disabled, and discharged on 29^th October. He was readmitted on 19^th July 1907, but this time his admittance was permanent. According to workhouse records, he died on 20^th April 1909, aged 56.

With Lord sick and no longer able to support his family, Mary was left with five children to look after and little or no income. Like almost everyone in a similar situation, finding a new partner offered the best way of coping with such difficulties. Even though Lord was still alive, Mary wasn’t legally married to him so she was free to marry William. Anyone who researches family history will realise that, when men and women with children were widowed before state help became available, they almost always remarried within a very short period of time after their partner’s death.

Even in death, the Western Mail thought Lord’s name worthy of a paragraph in the main body of the paper. It said an inmate, who went by the name of Lord Wellington, had just died in Newport Workhouse.^[7]Western Mail, 23 April 1909 – information contributed by Bill Hern.

A shipping tragedy

As in earlier years, Black people were involved in disasters of all kinds which were reported in the press. Before modern ships and navigation equipment became the norm, shipwrecks continued to happen around the coast of Wales and passengers and sailors continued to lose their lives. When the paddle steamer the Rothsay Castle ran aground on Dutchman Bank at the eastern end of the Menai Strait near Beaumaris, in August 1831, the body of a black boy belonging to the vessel was found upon the paddles. According to a list of those involved, compiled by Jean Hood, the boy’s name was Joseph and he was 14 years old.^[8]http://www.jeanhood.co.uk/id10.html  [accessed 21/04/2022] He was one of the reported 130 people who lost their lives in the disaster, though the exact number of victims of this tragedy was never established as no record was made of the number of passengers who boarded the ill-fated ship. Only 23 people (and a dog) survived. A book written about the wreck from testimonies of the survivors is available to read online.^[9]A circumstantial narrative of the wreck of the Rothsay Castle steam packet : on her passage from Liverpool to Beaumaris, August 17, 1831….  … Continue reading

One of those fortunate to survive the wreck was John A. Tinne, a member of the notorious firm of ‘West India Merchants’ (i.e. slave traders and plantation owners) Sandbach Tinne & Co, of Liverpool who owned a string of plantations in what is now Guyana, one of which was named ‘Wales’. The Tinne family acquired enormous wealth through the labour and suffering of hundreds of enslaved workers, and then received a further incredible amount of compensation when slavery was finally ended.

A recent exhibition at the Walker Gallery in Liverpool, An English Lady’s Wardrobe, illustrated how one member of the Tinne family frittered her share of this fortune away. Reprehensibly, the Walker Gallery makes no mention on its website of where the money came from to purchase this very extensive and expensive collection of clothes, some of which are available to view online in pictures and on video: https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/whatson/walker-art-gallery/exhibition/english-ladys-wardrobe

Incidentally, Samuel Sandbach, a partner in Sandbach Tinne, bought the Hafodunos estate in Denbighshire in 1830.^[10]https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/8083  [accessed 21/04/2022] In 1863, his son demolished the old manor house and built Hafodunos Hall which was designed by one of the most eminent architects of the Victorian era, Sir George Gilbert Scott. This is said to be his most important work in Wales.

The full extent of the compensation received by the Sandbach and Tinne families and their associates can be discovered on the Legacies of British Slavery website by putting these two surnames into the ‘search’ box on the home page: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/.

The Fisk Jubilee Singers

Black entertainers toured Wales from time to time and newspapers recorded their progress. One of the most important groups to visit in the 1870s was the renowned Fisk Jubilee Singers, most of whom were recently emancipated slaves. The group made three tours of Britain to raise funds for Fisk University in Tennessee, which had been set up after the end of the Civil War in order to educate the ex-enslaved. On their tours they visited Newport, Cardiff, Merthyr Tydfil, Swansea and other parts of Wales.

In July 1875, the Jubilees performed at the Builth Wells eisteddfod. Andrew Ward gives information about their visit in his book Dark Midnight When I Rise.^[11]Andrew Ward, Dark Midnight When I Rise: The Story of the Jubilee Singers who introduced the world to the music of Black America, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 2000. Torrential rain drenched members of their audience as they stood under a temporary shelter, nevertheless they remained until the concert was over.

Travelling the length and breadth of Britain by train and occasionally by ship, the Jubilees kept up a punishing schedule on their tours, sometimes performing two concerts in different towns on the same day. However, after their performance in the eisteddfod, they were allowed a twelve-day holiday which they spent in Builth. America Robinson, writing to the fiancée she had left behind at Fisk, gave a lively description of how they spent their time.^[12]America Robinson, a contralto, interrupted her studies (in Greek, moral philosophy, and English Literature) when she joined the Fisk Jubilee Singers for their third tour. This took them to Great … Continue reading

She described how she ventured out into the countryside, visiting the town’s salt and sulphur baths, ‘rusticating to [her] heart’s content.’ She and the other female members of the troupe were invited to the lodge of a Mr. Maitland, where they ‘went rowing on the pond and played croquet on the lawn’ and ‘partook of a splendid luncheon,’ though she dismissed the ice cream in Builth as ‘nothing but frozen water.’

One day, when she and fellow-Jubilee, Maggie Porter, were out for a walk, and had become stranded by a rainstorm, she accepted a ride back to their hotel on the back of an elderly farmer’s horse. ‘I had to put my arms around the old man to keep from falling off, he went so swiftly,’ she wrote. ‘The old man hurrahed to every one he met and the people around set up a loud shout. Every one came running to their doors to see what was the excitement. I never laughed so much in all my life.’

When the Jubilee Singers finally left Builth, ‘almost the entire population came out to see them off.’ America reported that the young men of the troupe had ‘left some very sad ladies behind’. One of these young men was Thomas Rutling, a tenor, who appears to have been attractive and fun-loving, as well as an exceptionally gifted singer. America reported that Thomas had become ‘enamoured with the Belle of Builth,’ who seemed particularly sad when he left town.^[13]Dark Midnight When I Rise, pp.294-5.

In early December 1875, they were the guests of ex-prime minister Gladstone at his Hawarden Castle estate in Flintshire. William Ewart Gladstone and his wife had been among the Jubilee Singers’ earliest supporters when they arrived in Britain, inviting them to breakfast while he was still Prime Minister. I wonder if the Jubilees realised how much of Gladstone’s wealth was derived from the profits of slavery – inherited from his father John Gladstone.^[14] https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/8961/#relationships

The Jubilee Singers performed in Wrexham on 31^st March, 1876, when it was reported in the local paper that 1,300 people attended their concert, ‘probably the largest “house” ever commanded in Wrexham by a “one night” entertainment’.^[15]Wrexham Advertiser, Saturday 8 April, 1876. The Mayor, Dr. Eyton-Jones, who introduced the Singers, personally paid the cost of hiring the Public Hall, so that all the takings could go for the benefit of Fisk University. The newspaper reported the programme in detail as well as the speech of thanks that Thomas Rutling gave at the end of the concert.

Photographs

Intriguing photographs can turn up in unexpected places, far from where they were taken.

At the end of a talk I gave in a small Yorkshire village, a member of the audience showed me the photograph at the head of this article and asked if I knew how she could find out who this beautiful young lady was. She had discovered the image in an album inherited after the death of a distant relation, and she had no idea who this young woman might be or how she may have been connected to the family. It was taken in ‘Newtown, North Wales’ (now in Powys) by a photographer named John Owen, I imagine somewhere around 1890. Could local research discover who she is and more about her life?

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The theme of Black History Month 2024 is ‘Reclaiming Narratives’ and people are encouraged to shine a spotlight on the untold stories, the unsung heroes, and everyday individuals who have contributed to British Black History. I hope this article stimulates further research, and I trust it makes a small contribution to the history of Wales.