Sometimes the stars seem to align and a subject for a page on Historycal Roots comes looking for us. Olaudah Equiano is a case in point.
When we attended the Sam King Memorial event at St Margaret’s, Westminster, Arthur Torrington pointed out a plaque commemorating Equiano (Equiano was baptised there).
Then Bill Hern remembered a plaque he saw in Barbados that included a quote from Equiano:
Equiano hardly counts as ‘hidden’ or ‘forgotten’ history, the broad thrust of the narrative of his life is well-known, not least because he wrote about it in: ‘The Interesting Narrative Of The Life Of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African, Written By Himself’ (not the snappiest of titles it must be said!). Born in about 1745, a free man in part of present day Nigeria, at the age of about eleven, Equiano was captured and enslaved. His ownership changed hands several times until one of his owners allowed him to buy his freedom in 1766. He subsequently travelled widely before settling in London where he became one of the leading lights of the campaign to end slavery. Equiano was a shrewd businessman and his ‘Interesting Narrative’ was also a major success (it went through nine editions in his lifetime alone) and, when he died in 1797, he left a sum equivalent to about £80,000 at today’s prices to his surviving daughter (his will can be viewed at The National Archives in Kew). At Historycal Roots we have ‘The Interesting Narrative’ in its Penguin Classics edition but there are many other sources if you want to find out more about Equiano’s fascinating life.
None of this particularly merits a page on Historycal Roots, the story is too well known. But that changed when Arthur Torrington drew our attention to an article online speculating on whether Equiano was, in terms of his religion, a Non-Conformist at the time of his death:
http://www.edintone.com/olaudah-equiano/
What is particularly interesting about this is that it identifies Equiano’s final resting place, ‘until recently unknown’ but the article says that ‘recent research has revealed that following Equiano’s death on 31 March 1797 he was buried at Whitefield’s Methodist chapel on 6 April 1797.’ A trip to the London Metropolitan Archive (LMA) and a quick look at the burial register covering the chapel in Tottenham Court Road:
… confirmed that an entry does indeed appear. Only when I got home did I realise that the record is available on Ancestry.co.uk:
Both the first name and surname are slightly misspelt but this is certainly our man. So Equiano had been ‘hiding in plain sight’, it was just a case of knowing where to look.
It would be nice to think that a quick trip to the church in Tottenham Court Road would finally locate Equiano’s grave, sadly things are never that easy. Whitefields chapel was destroyed by a German V2 missile on Palm Sunday, 1945, and, even before then, the site had been the subject of several redevelopments (e.g. following a major fire in 1857 and again in 1889 when the foundations of the new church began to give way). The church that now stands next to Goodge Street station therefore bears little resemblance to the church where Equiano was laid to rest. Much of the ground where the old church stood has been paved over and is now an area where office workers sit and eat lunch or chat to colleagues. A solitary grave acts as a reminder that this was once a burial ground:
The name John Proctor can barely be made out (a tablet commemorating Robert and Esther Procter is nearby).
The history of Whitefields Chapel contains one further intriguing twist. In 1897 a number of coffins from the crypt were re-interred at Chingford Mount cemetery. Could Equiano’s have been one of these? Contacting the cemetery yielded the information that only two of those re-interred in April 1897 were named (Vassa was not one of them). The burial register for the cemetery showed:
You won’t be able to read this but it says ‘Unknown, 11 cases of human remains removed from Whitefields Tabernacle’. In theory Equiano might be one of these ‘unknown human remains’ but it seems unlikely. Thousands of people had been buried at Tottenham Court Road by 1897, the odds are very heavily against Augustus Vassa being one of those reburied at Chingford.
All the evidence suggests that Olaudah Equiano, known as Gustavus Vassa, lies somewhere in the vicinity of what is now the American International church, 79a Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4TD, probably under the public space now known as Whitfield Gardens.
Before we leave Equiano, the LMA archives contain another document of interest, whilst it isn’t of major significance, it does give us an insight into the man’s character.
The document ‘releases’ Ann Berry from a debt that her husband, Arthur Berry, owed to Gustavus Vassa. The ‘release’ is dated 6th March 1789.
In the document, Arthur Berry is described as ‘late of the parish of St James, Westminster’. This almost certainly means that Arthur had died owing Vassa money (although it could conceivably mean that Berry had simply left the parish and could not be traced). Berry is described as a ‘victualer’. There is no explanation of how the debt arose, possibly Vassa had made a loan to help Berry sustain his business – but this is pure speculation. The amount of the debt was 14 shillings, equal to about £60 in today’s terms, not a huge sum but quite possibly a very significant amount for a recently widowed woman to have to find.
