Black Lives in Georgian London

Michael Bundock explores the remarkable story of black men and women in eighteenth-century London and describes the challenges he faced as a biographer in bringing individuals to life.

On 18 February 1764, alongside the reports of a fire at a mast-maker’s yard and an escape from the King’s Bench Prison in Southwark, the London Chronicle reported a social event: ‘Among the sundry fashionable routs or clubs that are held in town, that of the Blacks or Negro servants is not the least. On Wednesday night last no less than fiftyseven of them, men and women, supped, drank and entertained themselves with dancing and music, consisting of violins, French horns, and other instruments, at a public-house in Fleet Street, till four in the morning. No Whites were allowed to be present, for all the performers were Blacks. ’ It is a striking account, an occasion when a group of exclusively black men and women came together in the heart of London for an evening of food, drink, music and dancing. The gathering was obviously considered newsworthy, but the report suggests that it was not a one-off event.

This news item provides a snapshot of the London black community in the mid-eighteenth century. There are other reports of similar entertainments: John Baker, Solicitor-General for St Kitts, recorded in his diary an occasion when, returning to his London home late at night, he found that his black servant Jack Beef was not there, having ‘gone out to a ball of blacks’.

Not all such gatherings were for social purposes, at least if their critics are to be believed: in a diatribe against the black population the pro-slavery writer Philip Thicknesse complained in 1778 that ‘London abounds with an incredible number of these black men, who have clubs to support those who are out of place’ . Some saw such meetings as being more political than charitable – in 1768 the magistrate Sir John Fielding expressed his concern at the number of slaves being brought from the colonies who ‘enter into societies and make it their business to corrupt and dissatisfy the mind of every black servant that comes to England’ .

There are many visual reminders of black Londoners of the time, in the form of paintings, sketches and caricatures. In John Collet’s May Morning (c.1760), the group of Londoners celebrating May Day includes a milkmaid, a soldier, a hurdygurdy player and a black servant, dressed in his livery and clutching a broom. William Hogarth, in Captain Lord George Graham in his Cabin (c.1745), shows Graham attended at his table by two servants, a white cabin boy bearing a tray of food and a black musician with a fife and drum, accompanying a singer.

Joshua Reynolds included black figures in a number of his paintings. In most cases this is an anonymous black man – a servant at the side of the picture, a groom holding a horse – providing a contrast to the named subject. He did, however, paint a striking portrait of a black man, A Young Black (c.1770). The sitter cannot be identified with certainty, but the most likely candidates are Reynolds’ servant (whom he painted on several occasions) or Francis Barber, Samuel Johnson’s manservant, whose story I tell in The Fortunes of Francis Barber: The True Story of the Jamaican Slave Who Became Samuel Johnson’s Heir (2015). The original of this portrait is now in The Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, but a copy can be seen in Dr Johnson’s House in London’s Gough Square.

There had been black Britons long before this time, but the growth of slavery in the colonies from the late seventeenth century onwards resulted in a significant increase in the size of the black population in Britain, especially in London. Many of those who lived and worked in the West Indies or America became accustomed to being served by house slaves, and it was natural to bring one or two back when they finally returned to England. This was in part just for convenience – it was useful to be attended by a familiar servant on the voyage home and afterwards, and of course a slave cost only board and lodging. But it was also a matter of display: white servants were commonplace, but a black servant dressed in an exotic costume sent a conspicuous signal of financial success.

There are a number of contemporary estimates of the size of the black population at this time, ranging from 1,400 to 20,000, but they are of doubtful value as they are usually derived from polemical literature generated by the slavery debates in the late eighteenth century. In any event, there was no objective source for such information, so any figures were mere guesswork. The work of historians such as Norma Myers in Reconstructing the Black Past (1996), and Kathleen Chater in Untold Histories (2009), suggests that there were a few thousand black people in London in the early 1770s. (The population of London is thought to have been about 675,000 in 1750, rising to about 959,000 in 1801.)

Thanks to such writers as Myers and Chater we know a lot about aspects of the black community in eighteenthcentury Britain, and issues that affected its members: historians have explored patterns of work and residence, and the legal status of slavery in Britain. But what has proved much more difficult is to bring to life individual black men and women of the time.

The reasons for that difficulty are not hard to identify. Biographies require sources, and inevitably these are richer and more plentiful for the lives of those who have attained a degree of celebrity, which very few black men or women did. A further problem is caused by the fact that most had been slaves. The records of slavery are those of slave-owners, not of their chattels. Slavery was destructive of anything resembling stable family life – partners might be in separate ownership, and parent and child could be separated by sale. Naming patterns resulted in slaves having a single name which gave no indication of their parentage, making the tracing of origins near impossible. When Michael Craton set out to record the oral histories of numerous Jamaicans, in order to learn more about slavery and plantation life, he found the results to be so meagre that he titled the resulting book Searching for the Invisible Man (1978).

The handful of lives of black Britons that have been written are of people who, for one reason or another, came to public notice. The most significant figure is Olaudah Equiano, famous in his lifetime as the author of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789). In his Narrative he recounts the story of his upbringing in Africa, his capture and enslavement, and his voyage on a slave ship to America. These stories, together with his subsequent experiences of slavery and freedom in America and England, of seeing action in the British Navy, of his Christian conversion and his anti-slavery convictions, combine to make this a work of enormous power and significance.

Even so, Equiano became almost a forgotten figure in both the UK and the US in the nineteenth century. His book was out of print for over a hundred years, and he only emerged from obscurity on its republication in the 1960s, at a time of growing interest in black and African history. Today the Narrative is available in many editions, including a Penguin Classic. But it was not until 1998 that a detailed account of Equiano was published, with James Walvin’s An African’s Life: The Life and Times of Olaudah Equiano, 1745–1797, the first full-length biography of a black figure of the eighteenth century. This was followed in 2005 by Vincent Carretta’s Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man. The titles indicate something of the difference in approach: Carretta’s discovery of records which indicated that Equiano may have been born, not in Africa, but in South Carolina, changed our understanding of the nature of Equiano’s work, though not the appreciation of his achievement.

Engraving of Olaudah Equiano, from The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789), 1794 edition, courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

One remarkable life story that has yet to be told in full is that of Ignatius Sancho. Born to a slave on board a slaveship bound for the West Indies in around 1729, he stayed there for only two years before being taken to England. There he was given to three sisters who lived in Greenwich, but his time with them was so wretched that he fled, and was taken in by Mary, Duchess of Montagu. She employed him as her butler – somewhat surprisingly, as it was a sought-after position. When she died in 1751, she left him an annuity. Clearly Sancho had made a favourable impression with the Montagu family, as the Duchess’s son-inlaw, the next Duke, employed him as his valet, and later arranged for Sancho to be painted by Thomas Gainsborough.

After eight years in the Duke’s service, Sancho, by now married, set up a grocery shop at 19 Charles Street, Westminster. He also composed music, and became a prolific letter-writer, much influenced by the style of Laurence Sterne, with whom he corresponded. After his death in 1780, his letters were published in two volumes, and more than 1,200 people subscribed. His correspondence is by turns affecting, humorous and revealing about the daily lives of black men, women and children: after a visit with his daughters to Vauxhall Gardens he recorded that they were ‘gazed at – followed … but not much abused’ .

Francis Barber was not so well known in his lifetime as Equiano or Sancho, but he did attain a degree of celebrity through his association with Johnson. It was this connection that made possible my account of his life. Barber was born a slave in Jamaica, and brought to London in 1750 when he was about eight years old, becoming Johnson’s servant two years later. Many of Barber’s subsequent experiences – domestic service, a period in the Navy during the Seven Years’ War, and marriage to a white woman – were shared by other black men, but their lives have been forgotten. Barber is different: because he lived within the orbit of the best-known man of letters of the time he appears not only in the many accounts of Johnson, but also in letters, diaries and other sources that have been preserved principally because of the general interest in the writer.

Engraving by Francesco Bartolozzi of Ignatius Sancho, 1802, after Thomas Gainsborough’s painting Sancho of 1768, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1917, www.metmuseum.org.

Such sources are invaluable for a biographer, not least for what they reveal about attitudes towards Barber, his wife and their children. Contrasting examples are provided by two of Johnson’s biographers. James Boswell’s account of Barber is brief but friendly in tone, and he maintained a supportive relationship with Barber after Johnson’s death, corresponding with him and lending him money. But Johnson’s action in making a black man – and a former slave at that – his heir was not universally welcomed. John Hawkins, Johnson’s first major biographer, added to his Life of Samuel Johnson (1787) a seven-page postscript devoted to denigrating Barber, ‘an exceedingly worthless fellow’ .

Barber himself became a minor celebrity and his name often appeared in the papers, especially once the fact of his inheritance became public knowledge. His fame was great enough to make others want to cash in: a spoof life of Johnson was published by one ‘Francis, Barber’ . (The writer solemnly assured his readers that he was in fact a hairdresser, and that the crucial comma would prevent any confusion of identity.) After Barber died in 1801, some of his fame was passed on to his children. This has helped me to trace seven generations of Barbers, down to the present day.

William Hogarth, Captain Lord George Graham in his Cabin, c.1745. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

Was Barber one of those present at the night of revelry reported by the London Chronicle in 1764? It would hardly be surprising, as he was then living in Johnson’s household in Inner Temple Lane, just a few steps from Fleet Street. But we do not know: the account tells us nothing about the identity of the 57 black servants who ate, drank and danced into the small hours. The contrast could hardly be greater between the obscurity of these lives and the wealth of information available about the famous London figures of the period – Johnson, Boswell, Burke, Reynolds and others. But two hundred and fifty years later, the life stories of black Londoners of the time are gradually being rediscovered, and a new perspective of Georgian London revealed.