Born on Jamaica in about 1780, a ‘Black man’, John Fitzhenry, had seen service in the British Army in Spain and in ‘the War of 1812’ in America before the 1841 census found him living at Hampton Court Palace with his wife and three children. John was working there as a servant.
Interesting enough, but John D Ellis’s latest article for Historycal Roots about John Fitzhenry’s life has two postscripts.
The first, identifies some other ‘men of colour’ who served with John Fitzhenry’s regiment (the 14th Dragoons). It includes an instructive detour to Australia where a former officer of the regiment came to an inglorious end whilst hunting down members of the Nyungar tribe, whose ancestors had lived on the land for countless centuries before the arrival of British colonists, in Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania).
The second postscript traces the exploits of John Fitzhenry’s son who competed as an athlete in Yorkshire in the 1840s and subsequently moved to Liverpool.
You can read John’s wide-ranging article here: