British Local History and the Black Atlantic

‘A surprising and brilliant volume that invites us to further engage with discussions about colonial empires and regional legacies through local communities, buildings, objects and arts.’

Olivette Otele, Distinguished Research Professor of the Legacies and Memories of Slavery, SOAS

The cover illustration and inside back cover are based on photographs of the ‘Blackamoor Garden’ at Guy’s Cliffe, Warwick, from Country Life VII/162 (10 February 1900). The garden was laid out by Bertie Greatheed around 1810. See chapters 2 and 4

Acknowledgements

The editor gratefully acknowledges the support of the Social History Society.

This book was commissioned to accompany an exhibition at Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum, ‘“Built with malice aforethought”: Leamington Spa and the Black Atlantic’. Both the book and the exhibition draw on previous research by Ben Richardson, Vicki Slade and others, uncovering Leamington’s links with British colonies in the Caribbean. The exhibition narrative was also underpinned by new research undertaken by Jessica Nyassa, whose dedication to the project has been extraordinary. A community advisory panel of local Black historians was appointed to act as critical friends during the development process: Angela Allison, Holly Cooper, Annabelle Gilmore, and Ciara Winston, whose perspectives shaped our approach to the project and encouraged us to ask important questions.

Thanks are due to graphic designer Natasha King, who worked on both the book and the exhibition. Abigael Flack, Giovanni Vinti and other colleagues at Warwick District Council have also contributed their expertise and practical support to this project.

Lily Crowther April 2024

Content notice: this book describes violent and distressing histories of enslavement and racism. As the book includes quotes from original sources, please be aware that some of the historical language is offensive.

Contributors

Lily Crowther is a History Curator at Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum, where she curated the exhibition ‘“Built with malice aforethought”: Leamington Spa and the Black Atlantic’ (25 May – 15 September 2024). She is also working on a DPhil at the University of Oxford and the V&A, researching the history and legacies of the Museum of Construction & Building Materials, which was part of the South Kensington Museum in the 1850s-80s. She is a trustee of the Brooking Museum of Architectural Detail.

Charlotte Hammond is a Lecturer in French Studies at Cardiff University. She is the author of Entangled Otherness: Cross-Gender Fabrications in the Francophone Caribbean (Liverpool University Press, 2018). Hammond is passionate about public engagement and with Coleg Menai collaborated on a creative heritage project that explored colonial histories of woollen production in Wales. This resulted in the publication of a bilingual free ebook, Woven Histories of Welsh Wool and Slavery / Hanesion Cysylltiedig Gwlân Cymru a Chaethwasiaeth (Common Threads Press, 2023). She is currently writing a new book titled Material Mawonaj: Haitian Women Workers, Secondhand Clothing Cultures and Creative Mobilities in the Caribbean

Annabelle Gilmore is a PhD researcher at the University of Birmingham on a Collaborative Doctoral Award with the National Trust, funded by AHRC Midlands4Cities. Her thesis explores the hidden histories of art objects with links to imperialism and slavery, where she merges material and social histories. Annabelle focuses on studying the relationship between Caribbean and British histories; particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is currently assisting on a project for bringing together Black British histories.

Tobias Gardner is a second year History PhD candidate. He is in the peculiar position of simultaneously being someone who grew up in Sheffield, studies at the University of Sheffield, and has become a historian of Sheffield. His PhD research focuses on Sheffield's broad connections to Atlantic Slavery between 1750-1888, both in terms of industry and commerce, but also society and politics. He is committed to engaging academic research with a wide audience, and through his work has collaborated with various public organisations, including Sheffield City Archives, Museums, and the General Cemetery.

Jessica Nyassa is a historian with a passion for uncovering untold stories from history. After completing her undergraduate degree in History at the University of Warwick, she is currently undertaking an MA at UCL in Medieval and Renaissance History. Her areas of particular interest range from the Mali empire in the 14th century and global interconnectivity in the medieval period to the effects of slavery and colonialism on local British communities.

Dorcas Taylor has over 30 years’ experience of working in the museums and the wider cultural and learning sectors. She is currently Head of Collections and Interpretation at Scarborough Museums and Galleries. She has a particular interest in Cultural Rights and has been an independent advisor for the UN Special Rapporteur for Cultural Rights. She begins a PhD in Human Rights, with a focus on Intangible Cultural Rights, at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, in October 2024.

Tré Ventour-Griffiths is an award-winning multiply neurodivergent creative, public historian, sociologist, and cultural critic, who speaks and writes on subjects broadly contained within Black British history, neurodiversity, intersectionality, cultural criticism, and insurgent politics. For more on him, see https://linktr.ee/treventoured.

Contents Introduction

Local Stories, Global Resonance – Lily Crowther

Chapter 1:

Weaving Stories of Wales, Textiles and Slavery through Art –Charlotte Hammond

Chapter 2:

Beyond Warwickshire’s Country Houses – Annabelle Gilmore

Chapter 3:

Plantation Tools and Bowie Knives: Rethinking Sheffield’s Local Connections to Atlantic Slavery in the Nineteenth Century – Tobias Gardner

Chapter 4:

The Town that Slavery Built: Leamington Spa and the Proceeds of Enslavement – Jessica Nyassa

Chapter 5:

Owning the Past: Addressing Colonial Legacies with Communities from the Congo and Scarborough –Dorcas Taylor

Chapter 6:

Black Lives in the Stix: Caribbean Northants and Decentring ‘Black London’ on Screen, 1948-85 – Tré Ventour-Griffiths 6-10 11-20 21-26 27-35 36-42 43-52 53-63

Introduction: Local Stories, Global Resonance

Lily Crowther

This book ranges widely across time and place, from the valleys of north Wales in the eighteenth century, via the country estates and fashionable villas of Warwickshire and the steel mills of Victorian Sheffield, to the Edwardian seaside town of Scarborough and living memories of rural Northamptonshire. The contributors use a variety of research methods and sources, including archives and museum collections, community collaboration, oral history and autoethnography. This eclecticism exemplifies how histories of empire and colonialism are relevant to every aspect of British local history. Whilst the stories of Britain’s major ports and their connections to the transatlantic slave trade have become part of mainstream public discussion, many people remain unaware of the pervasive legacies of empire in their own cities, towns, and villages. Since the 1970s, historians have taken inspiration from Sven Lindqvist’s exhortation to ‘dig where you stand’,1 urging the importance of public participation in local history as a tool for social transformation. Whether we are working in museums, schools, universities or community groups, we can deepen our connections to global history by focusing on the local details.

This project began in 2018 with a proposal for an exhibition at Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum exploring the town’s links with slavery. Following the hiatus of COVID-19, this became ‘Leamington Spa and the Black Atlantic’ (25 May – 15 September 2024), an exhibition with a broader scope covering the multiplicity of connections between the town and the Americas, the Caribbean and West Africa from the late 18th to the early 20th century. The term ‘Black Atlantic’ was coined by writers Robert Farris Thompson and Paul Gilroy to describe the cultures shared among people of the African diaspora as they confronted enslavement, empire and their after-effects.2 In this exhibition, the term is used to encompass the wide variety of personal, political, economic and cultural connections spanning the Atlantic as a result of enslavement and empire. The exhibition narrative was refined in collaboration with a small group of advisors who shared their academic and personal expertise: Angela Allison, Annabelle Gilmore, Holly Cooper, Jessica Nyassa, and Ciara Winston. As well as integrating new research by Jessica Nyassa on the enslavers who made Leamington their home (see Chapter 4), the project also drew on existing work by Vicki Slade and Ben Richardson on Leamington’s links to the Caribbean.3

As research progressed, it became clear that there was not one single chronological story of Leamington and the Atlantic world, but many interrelated stories. These include the town’s links with the Confederacy during the American Civil War, its popularity among Victorian retirees from the tropics, and the origins of the African collections at the Art Gallery & Museum, as well as the local investments made by sugar producers, cotton magnates, gun manufacturers, and their heirs. These stories are specific to Leamington, but similarly complex webs of connections link everywhere in Britain to places throughout the British empire and beyond.4 Using the overlapping narratives of the exhibition as a starting point, this book aims to provide inspiration to anyone exploring Black history or histories of colonialism in their own local area.

1Lindqvist, Sven, Dig Where You Stand, (London: Watkins Media, 2023 [1978]).

2Farris Thompson, Robert, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy, (New York: Random House, 1983); Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, (London: Verso, 1993).

3Slade, Vicki, and Richardson, Ben, ‘The Greatheeds: from Sugar Cane to Spa Water’, Richardson, Ben, ‘John Gladstone: Colonial Wealth Comes to Leamington’, Richardson, Ben, ‘Owen and Elizabeth Mary Pell: Leamington’s Antigua Sugar Planters’, Richardson, Ben, ‘Andrew Low II’, and Richardson, Ben, ‘Charles Dickens Dombey & Son’, in Chapter 2, ‘Colonial Linkages’, Global Leamington, (Leamington Spa: Shay Books for Leamington History Group, 2022).

1. Mosianna Ruth Delegal and her husband, Tom Milledge, c.1880

Conspicuous luxury, concealed exploitation

The exhibition opens with an exploration of the luxury goods which defined the lifestyles of Leamington’s wealthy residents and visitors in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Many such products, from sugar and mahogany to tortoiseshell, silver, and ivory, were produced by enslaved and exploited workers in British colonies and in the wider commercial empire. Objects such as tea services and miniature paintings are familiar tokens of the material world of the English upper classes, featuring regularly in museum displays and in the interior landscapes of stately homes. In contrast, the lives and experiences of enslaved people are almost invisible in Leamington’s museum collections, as they are in many heritage settings. This dichotomy is explored in the exhibition through the story of an extraordinary African-American woman, Mosianna Ruth Delegal (Figure 1). Delegal was enslaved in the household of cotton merchant Andrew Low, who moved back and forth between Georgia and Leamington. Delegal later worked for Low’s son as a cook, travelling with the family to Warwickshire in the 1880s. Here, she prepared their favourite Southern specialities and taught her recipes to their white British scullery-maid, Rosa Lewis. Lewis went on to become one of the most famous cooks in the country; she owned the Cavendish Hotel in London, where her signature Southern dishes were popular with the aristocracy, and their origins in Black Atlantic culture were erased.

Chapters 1 and 2 reflect this contrast between the moneyed lifestyles of the white upper classes, which are regularly rehearsed in popular historical narratives, and the stories of working people, which are often more difficult to uncover. In the opening chapter, Charlotte Hammond introduces a creative heritage engagement project exploring the historic manufacture of Welsh

4Other British museums have recently explored similar topics in relation to their local areas; for example, ‘Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance’ at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 2022, and ‘Legacies of Slavery: Transatlantic Slavery and Aberdeen’ at Aberdeen University Museum, 2023 (available online at https://exhibitions.abdn.ac.uk/university-collections/exhibits/show/los/intro).

Figure

woollen textiles for use in clothing enslaved people in the Caribbean. This project involved collaboration between academics, community researchers, and art students. By bringing together deep understandings of the Welsh landscape and creative visual methods, the participants made hidden stories more tangible. Hammond discusses how this kind of approach can lead researchers to ‘embrace embodied and place-based ways of knowing.’ Meanwhile, Annabelle Gilmore reads between the lines of traditional archival sources to infer the presence and experience of Black people in the creation of the English country house. By reconsidering the materiality of stately homes and their contents in a wider context, she reinterprets these symbols of Englishness as the products and tools of empire. The layered histories which Gilmore reveals ‘are not at first obvious but become physically embodied in the houses and furnishings.’ Hammond and Gilmore thus both suggest ways in which creative engagement with place can recover stories which are otherwise at risk of being forgotten or erased.

Extraction, export, and investment

The central stories in the exhibition reflect the changing townscape of Leamington in the nineteenth century and the varied relationships of local residents to the Atlantic world during this period. As a fashionable Regency spa town, Leamington grew rapidly from the 1810s onwards. Local landmarks such as the Royal Pump Rooms and Regent Hotel were built with fortunes made in the sugar trade and the supply of guns to West Africa. Many local residents received compensation when slavery was abolished in the British empire in 1838. During and after the American Civil War (1861-5), Leamington became a popular retreat for supporters of the Confederacy; visitors included Varina Davis, the wife of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and the crew of the CSS Shenandoah, who had fired the last shot of the war before surrendering in Liverpool (Figure 2). Leamington had a large population of Protestant nonconformists, providing a strong local support base for abolition, but there were still eager audiences for minstrel shows and other exploitative and racist forms of entertainment. Later in the nineteenth century, as the town became less fashionable and its grand villas grew more affordable, it was a popular retirement destination for those who had served in the military, the Foreign and Colonial Service, and as missionaries in the tropics.

Chapters 3 and 4 suggest how we can complicate and enrich our understanding of British towns and cities by examining the variety of ways in which they benefited from the vast wealth of empire. Tobias Gardner focuses on Sheffield, reflecting on the relative neglect of Britain’s great inland industrial cities in histories of colonialism, in favour of stories about trading centres such as Liverpool, Bristol and London. Whilst Sheffield has a proud and well-publicised history of abolitionism, Gardner uncovers its key role in the manufacture of tools for use by enslaved plantation labourers, and later the production of Bowie knives which were totemic of the pro-slavery American South. These economic ties led to widespread support for the Confederacy in the city; as in Leamington, these connections have largely been erased from public memory. Gardner points out that bringing such stories back into the popular narrative can ‘intervene within, and complicate, the prevailing view of post-abolition Britain as an empire that refashioned itself around antislavery ideals’. In her investigation of Leamington’s dependence on investments from the transatlantic slave economy, Jessica Nyassa also exposes a less familiar story – one which has been hidden behind more celebratory narratives which centre the town’s beauty and architectural heritage. Moving beyond a discussion of the landmark public buildings and grand houses built in Leamington using fortunes made in the Caribbean, Nyassa considers the ongoing local legacy of investment stemming from the compensation given to enslavers and their heirs after abolition. She also reflects on the enslaved people themselves, whose labour was stolen to enable all of this development, yet who ‘were listed in inventories and government records as nameless objects’. A full understanding of the impact of slavery and its persistence through the generations can support informed discussions of reparations in the present day.

Figure 2. Confederate naval officers from the CSS Shenandoah in Leamington, 1865: Assistant Surgeon Edwin G. Booth (seated), and (standing, L-R) Sailing Master Irvine S. Bulloch, Passed Assistant Surgeon Bennett W. Green, First Lieutenant William H. Murdaugh, and Surgeon Charles E. Lining

Collections, communities, memories

The final section of the exhibition focuses on Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum’s collections of objects from West Africa, and their routes into the museum. New research has shed more light on three key donors: James Fenn Clark, Edward Carrington Holland, and Mary Ann Davies, all of whose stories illustrate the intricate webs of connections which brought artefacts from across the empire into British institutional collections. Fenn Clark was born in Calcutta (Kolkata) in 1823, where his father was a surgeon working for the East India Company. Educated in Leamington, he also grew up to become a doctor, and travelled extensively throughout his life. He was active with various Christian missionary organisations and was a keen collector. Like many of his contemporaries, Fenn Clark probably saw a link between these pursuits: he lent several objects to a Missionary Loan Exhibition in Birmingham where they would have served to illustrate theories of racial difference and to encourage public support for colonialism. Carrington Holland was likewise a child of empire, born in Haldummulla, Sri Lanka, in 1881, where his father was a civil servant. He spent part of his childhood in Leamington, near the home of his maternal uncle Edward Carrington. Carrington Holland collected extensively in West Africa around 1910, sending his collections back to his uncle for donation to the museum in Leamington. He went on to serve in the Australian Imperial Force during the First World War, and spent the rest of his life in Australia. Mary Ann Davies (née Parkes), by contrast, was born in Wolverhampton in 1848; she married her second husband, Rev. John H. Davies, in 1893, and accompanied him on a posting to Accra, Ghana. Following his death in 1911, Mrs Davies retired to Leamington, bringing with her an extraordinary variety of African objects (Figure 3). Although collectors’ motives are often impossible to establish, donating to civic museums was a way to assert social status as well as perpetuating certain views of empire and racial hierarchies.

The legacies of colonial collecting are addressed by Dorcas Taylor in Chapter 5, which describes a project to reevaluate the Congolese collections held by Scarborough Museums and Galleries. Like many museums across Britain, Scarborough is beginning to grapple with the issues of decolonising in a sector fundamentally based on colonial structures. Their ambitious ‘Local to Global’ project aimed to use research into colonial history to ‘better understand the present and help us to avoid repeating mistakes of the past, not only benefitting museum practices, but also contributing to improvements within wider society’. Taylor describes how this process began with collaboration and conversation, both with the Congolese community in Yorkshire and with local ‘citizen researchers’ in Scarborough. Museums often present themselves as voices of authority, but by encouraging meaningful participation and granting agency to local communities in telling their own histories, they can open up other ways of knowing – an approach which Taylor explains is ‘both challenging and liberating.’ The importance of understanding and deploying local history to support a sense of belonging also underpins Tré Ventour-Griffiths’ argument in Chapter 6. This chapter questions why the regional diversity of the Black British experience is not reflected in the media, where a monolithic portrayal of inner-city life crowds out other viewpoints. Black people from the countryside or small towns do not see themselves, their heritage or their memories represented on screen, and the wider public is oblivious to their stories. VentourGriffiths points out the impact of sharing his work: ‘To see the place you call home written and talked about with same enthusiasm that broadcasters give Black London has brought belonging – both to white and Black people.’ Far from being divisive, a richer understanding of local history and of the experiences and memories of local people has the potential to bring communities together in genuinely collaborative ways.

Figure 3. Balafon, Sierra Leone, late 19th century. Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum; given by Mary Ann Davies, 1915

Chapter 1

Weaving Stories of Wales, Textiles and Slavery through Art

Charlotte Hammond

In recent years there has been increased scholarly research into the intimate ways Atlantic slavery and the slave trade is woven into Britain’s material culture and industrial heritage.1 Textiles, including woollens, cottons and linens, produced in Britain were important trade commodities in the system of Atlantic slavery and its plantation economies of the Americas. By the late seventeenth century, textiles accounted for half of all British exports to the Caribbean and nearly two-thirds of all goods exported to North America and Africa.2 This included mass exports of Britain’s staple woollens throughout the eighteenth century. In his vastly influential Capitalism and Slavery, Eric Williams writes that the cargo of a slavetrading ship was ‘incomplete without some woolen manufactures – serges, says, perpetuanos, arrangoes and bays’.3 Some of these woollen textiles, as Williams indicates, were named after the place where they were produced. ‘Welsh Plains’, a durable woollen cloth that was woven in mid- and north Wales between 1650-1850 competed for the colonial market alongside Yorkshire ‘Penistones’ and ‘Kendal Cottons.’ Until the abolition of slavery in the British colonies in 1833 and the development of the cotton industry during the Industrial Revolution, wool remained the most important of Britain’s textile industries. Despite the centrality of the Atlantic market for the woollen industry, the colonial history of Britain’s woollen goods has remained underexplored. There is a lack of public knowledge of how local histories of woollen production in Britain are deeply embedded in broader global histories of Atlantic slavery, racial violence and empire.

This essay reflects on a recent creative heritage public engagement project titled Hanesion Cysylltiedig Gwlân Cymru a Chaethwasiaeth / Woven Histories of Welsh Wool and Slavery. A partnership between Cardiff University, community researchers of Black Heritage Walks Network, Learning Links International, and Art and Design students at Coleg Menai, the project culminated in a bilingual Welsh/English open-access multimedia ebook (with interviews, essays and original artwork) of the same name published in June 2023 by Common Threads Press (Figure 1.1).4 The book, translated into Welsh by Elin Meek, provides an introduction to the local histories of woollen production in Wales and their connections to Britain’s transatlantic slave trade and empire. In this chapter I consider how the unique context in Wales, in particular its commitment and action plan to achieve an anti-racist Wales by 2030, has shaped the project design and delivery. I will reflect on what I have learnt from nonacademic partners during this project and how transgenerational collaboration between universities, community researchers and young artists challenges the oft-held assumption that local communities are opposed to addressing difficult colonial histories. I will also reflect on the creative process itself and how visual language (including illustration, zine-making and collage) can speak the unspeakable traumatic history of Britain’s transatlantic slave trade and contribute to alternative knowledge production.

1Evans, Chris, Slave Wales: The Welsh and Atlantic Slavery 1660-1850, (University of Wales Press, 2010); Riello, Giorgio, Cotton: the Fabric that Made the Modern World, (Cambridge University Press, 2013); Duplessis, Robert S., The Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce, and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650, (Cambridge University Press, 2016); Petley Christer and Stephan Lenik (eds.), Material Cultures of Slavery and Abolition in the British Caribbean, (London: Routledge, 2017).

2Berg, Maxine and Pat Hudson, Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, (London: Polity Press, 2023), p.141.

3Williams, Eric, Capitalism and Slavery, (Penguin Classics, 2022 [1944]), p.60.

4Hanesion Cysylltiedig Gwlân Cymru a Chaethwasiaeth / Woven Histories of Welsh Wool and Slavery, (Common Threads Press, 2023) https://www.commonthreadspress.co.uk/products/woven-histories-of-welsh-wool-and-slavery

Figure 1.1. The cover of the ebook Hanesion Cysylltiedig Gwlân Cymru a Chaethwasiaeth / Woven Histories of Welsh Wool and Slavery, Common Threads Press, 2023.

Figure 1.2 Illustration by Chloe Buckless

Hanesion Cysylltiedig/ Woven Histories aimed to improve public knowledge of the colonial history of woollen production in Wales. Having made initial contact with Miranda Meilleur, course leader of the Foundation Degree programme in Graphic Design and Illustration at Coleg Menai, in the Spring of 2022, Marcia Dunkley of Black Heritage Walks Network and I began this taith/journey with an initial knowledge exchange day in Bangor. The participating students were a group of culturally, racially, and neuro diverse women artists. Together we explored historical sources, existing scholarship and the group’s evolving artistic practice. Through visual creative research methods, the students explored traces of a historical narrative that links the exploitation of weavers in rural Wales with the racial injustices of Atlantic slavery, and its reliance on the circulation of Welsh-made textiles (Figure 1.2).

Assembling the Fragments

A poor-quality woven cloth, which was known collectively as “Negro” or “Slave cloth” in the eighteenth century, has in recent years provoked some interest from textile historians and researchers. In relation to Welsh plains, in particular, work by Chris Evans and Marian Gwyn has been instrumental in advancing knowledge within academic contexts.5 Beyond academia, since 2018, Grwp yr Aran, a group of community archivists and researchers based in Dolgellau in midWales, led by retired town archivist Mervyn Wyn Tomos and local mayor Ywain Myfyr, has been researching and preserving the history of the town’s woollen industry.6 Dolgellau, at the southern end of Eryri/Snowdonia National Park, became a centre for wool production, particularly in the late eighteenth century. Grwp yr Aran has focused on how Welsh plains were produced in the local pandai that line the Aran river in the town. The pandai were fulling mills where the woven cloth would be finished to clean, tighten and thicken the fibres. In 2019, community researcher, Liz Millman, led the 2019 National Lottery Heritage-funded project ‘From Sheep to Sugar’ which aimed to understand the whole process of how the cloth was made, how it was used in the transatlantic slave trade and on plantations in the Americas.7 The ‘Sheep to Sugar’ project worked with the spinners’, weavers’, and dyers’ guilds who attempted to recreate Welsh plains drawing on their accrued knowledge of the historical techniques of its manufacture, including the fulling process. As weaver Jill David explained, this was an early experiment to see if they could produce a cloth using methods and equipment as close to that available to Welsh hill farmers at that time. David points out that the variety of fleece used in their recreation was Clun Forest, a sheep bred for spinners and thus kept in less harsh conditions, producing a softer wool. This accounts for the result, which was a lighter woven fabric than the heavier denser textures described in historical sources and rare samples.

5Evans, Chris, Slave Wales: The Welsh and Atlantic Slavery 1660-1850, (University of Wales Press, 2010); Gwyn, Marian, ‘Merioneth Wool and the Atlantic Slave Trade’, Journal of the Merioneth Historical and Record Society, 18:3 (2020), 284-298.

6Tomos, Mervyn Wyn, Dolgellau: Diwydiant a Masnach/Industry and Commerce, (Nereus, 2018).

7‘From Sheep to Sugar’ (2019), see http://www.welshplains.cymru/

This community-based work led the group to trace a small sample of Penistone woollen cloth, handwoven on the Pennine moors. The swatch had been sent to British planter, William Fitzherbert, who went on to purchase 410 yards of the material to clothe enslaved people held at Turner’s Hall plantation in Barbados. Hand weaver Jo Andrews, who records the Haptic and Hue podcast, travelled to Derbyshire Public Record Office to examine the sample. The small swatch is dyed in indigo, which could have been grown in the Caribbean, where the French trade in particular dominated in the eighteenth century, and exported via Jamaica or Barbados. The tiny disintegrating fragment of blue cloth masks the violent process of its production and the humiliating conditions of its use on plantations in the Americas. In October 2023 the cloth was displayed as part of the British Textile Biennial at Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery. The installation and light projection by Illuminos and Made by Mason allowed exhibition visitors to read the label on the reverse of the sample:

‘Penistone sent for Negro Clothing 1783 which for substance strength and unchangeable colour, is best adapted to that purpose.’

This inscription reveals how woollen cloth spun and woven in rural cottages and outhouses of Yorkshire tells the story of Britain’s economic, geopolitical and racial domination in its former Caribbean colonies. It is a tiny sample, a taster, woven out of threads that when unravelled, reveal how Britain’s regional woollen industries in Yorkshire, but also Cumbria and Wales, were bound up in systems of oppression and racial capitalism in the Americas.

Woven Histories of Welsh Wool and Slavery in ‘Woke Wales’

In a recent article in The Telegraph, Wales has been described as the ‘wokest country in Europe’.8 This is due to the development of its inclusive new school curriculum and its commitment to achieving an anti-racist Wales by 2030. In the wake of the Windrush scandal, Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd and a Covid pandemic disproportionately affecting the health of individuals from racialised minorities, compounded by pre-existing racial and socio-economic disparities, the Welsh Government acknowledged an urgent need for action. In March 2021 the Welsh Government and Race Council Cymru published their Race Equality Action Plan for Wales based on eight months of evidence collecting. This was the first time there had been an acknowledgement of institutional racism in any part of the UK. In the same month, the UK government published the highly controversial ‘Sewell report’ which investigated racial and ethnic disparities in the UK. The UK report rejected the idea of institutional racism in the opening pages and demonstrated a commitment to changing the narrative of race in British discourse away from victimhood and towards a celebration of progress. In contrast to Boris Johnson’s pro-Brexit conservative government in England, the Welsh Labour-led government in Wales, has been relatively proactive in recent debates over contested heritage, and calls for change in how Britain remembers its colonial past. In July 2020, following a month of BLM action, the then First Minister of Wales, Mark Drakeford, acknowledged that:

The Black Lives Matter movement has brought to the fore a number of important issues we need to address as a country. One is the need for Wales to reflect on the visible reminders of the country’s past. This is especially true when we look at the horrors of the slave trade.

8Harris, Tom, ‘Labour has made Wales the Wokest Country in Europe’, The Telegraph, 17 March 2023. Researchers at Swansea University organised a conference on this theme, From and For Wales, in January 2024.

In July 2020, the Welsh Government launched a task and finish group, chaired by advocate for racialised communities Gaynor Legall, to undertake a review of public monuments, street and building names in Wales associated with the slave trade and the British empire. The group’s findings were published as ‘The Slave Trade and the British Empire: an Audit of Commemoration in Wales.’9 The report, however, does not document any sites or key figures related to Wales’ woollen industry. While the Coleg Menai students used these reports and scholarship in this area as a starting point for their research,10 through their visits to key sites and ruins, the students moved away from knowledge stored in this way to embrace embodied and place-based ways of knowing.

Stories of the Land, Stories of the Sea

Over the summer of 2022, Coleg Menai students began researching local stories of wool production. They organised site visits, walks, museum trips and began drawing visual cues to Wales’ colonial history of woollen manufacture. Their work visualises and assembles fragments: from the ruins of pandai fulling mills in Dolgellau, Meirionnydd, which became an important centre of wool production, particularly in the late eighteenth century, via the packhorse trails that transported Welsh Plains cloth to England. There, it was dyed and finished in Shrewsbury, then sent to London and Liverpool to be traded and then exported to the Americas (Aiken 1797).11 The students follow the cloth’s colonial connections to the Caribbean and southern states of the US. In their embodied research, walking, drawing and unfolding the hidden textures of this past within the local landscape, these artists have speculated and imagined meeting points between these different worlds, between the rural Welsh weaver exploited by English landlords and merchants and the oppression of plantation fieldworkers clothed in imported Welsh cloth, who themselves were reduced to disposable merchandise in a capitalist slave system.

The students sketched local natural elements: from individual teasel stems (llysiau’r cribwr in Welsh which translates literally as ‘the carder’s vegetable’), traditionally used for hand carding and combing the surface of the wool (Figure 1.3), to the rivers and mountain streams that provided the water power for the pandai, where the woven cloth was washed, pounded and strengthened. They documented different breeds of sheep, the process of cneifio or sheepshearing and the raw material itself, wool. They drew man-made artefacts and sites connected to Welsh industrial heritage, including fulling mill channels, Shrewsbury Old Market Hall, where the Drapers Company sold on the wool to the London market, tenter frames, used to stretch out the wool in the fields, and old maps of Dolgellau. Using their historical research, they depicted instruments of violent oppression fabricated on colonial plantations: shackles, chains, branding irons, but also enslaved fieldworkers themselves who experienced these brutally harsh and dehumanising conditions. The students imagined the captives’ daily lives, acts of resistance, and the clothing enslaved people were forced to wear, made of Welsh plains.

9The Slave Trade and the British Empire: an Audit of Commemoration in Wales https://www.gov.wales/slave-trade-and-british-empire-audit-commemoration-wales 10Chetty, Darren, Greg Muse, Hannan Issa, Iestyn Tyne, Welsh [Plural]: Essays on the Future of Wales. (London: Repeater, 2022); Evans, Chris, Slave Wales: The Welsh and Atlantic Slavery 1660-1850, (University of Wales Press, 2010). 11Aiken, Arthur, Journal of a tour through North Wales and part of Shropshire, (London, 1797).

Figure 1.3 Illustration by Seren Haf Williams-Davies

Figure 1.4 Illustration by Elin Roberts

Figure 1.5 Illustration by Elin Angharad

Transgenerational Knowledge Exchange

In-depth discussions with friends, families and project partners enabled a transgenerational and transcultural approach to learning about this history. For example, the technical insight of Liz Millman, and the Brethyn Research network, many of whom are makers themselves, filled a knowledge gap through the work they were doing on the ground to understand the cloth’s process of production. Listening and learning from community group Grwp yr Aran and their ongoing work with Eryri National Park in Dolgellau to preserve the local industrial heritage of the town inspired place-based ways of knowing and highlighted the significance of the landscape and the memories that it holds. During our collaboration to deliver woolthemed workshops for local school Ysgol Bro Idris in July 2022, the group spoke about the centrality of the river Aran, memories of playing in the river, and the seeming insignificance of the pandai ruins, often thought to be just a pile of stones.

Ongoing conversations between the students and Marcia Dunkley on the incompleteness of localised Black history and how it relates to broader questions of racial injustice, British industry and empire inspired a critical enquiry and curiosity to question silences in the current education system. Our project was guided by what sociologist Alison Phipps calls ‘the experts by experience, where experience is often carried through generations, [and who] have much that is stored in the scars and the skin’.12 For Phipps, these ways of knowing mean taking a journey away from books and firewall-protected double-blind peerreviewed articles in top-ranked journals. As Haitian historian and anthropologist, MichelRolph Trouillot writes in Silencing the Past: ‘We are all amateur historians . . . Universities and university presses are not the only loci of production of the historical narrative.’13 This journey was not intended as extractive data collection, but instead sought to enable multidirectional learning. From the art students, I learnt about innovative ways of presenting this narrative and how it could be rendered more accessible to audiences. These ranged from DIY zines with the potential to infiltrate unexpected spaces and reach unwitting hands to the connections the artists drew via these visual histories, situating Welsh Plains in the context of wider Black histories in Wales. For example, Elin Roberts connected a long history of migration into Wales and Caribbean elders now known as the Windrush Generation Cymru, to the social and racial inequalities of a global textile industry controlled by European slavery. These arts-based responses and connections begin to theorise history in new, engaging and more inclusive ways, which raises questions about the role of the artist in narrating history (Figures 1.4, 1.5).

12Phipps, Alison, Decolonising Multilingualism: Struggles to Decreate, (Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2019).

13Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).

Zine-making, Creative Reassembly and the Artist

In the current era of global reckoning with colonial histories of enslavement, racial violence and oppression, how do we make space for collective remembering of the central role of slavery in Britain and Wales’ history? How do communities make spaces not only for education but also for healing? During this project, visual art offered a way of working through and walking with traumatic histories which are so often sidelined and remain unspoken. Beyond official archives, these place-based visual and graphic responses are a means of animating existing historical analysis and enhancing understanding of this history. Perhaps more powerful is their ability to offer a space for creative imaginary: to see, create and imagine other worlds.

Given that many of the historical sources are written from the heavily biased perspective of the white oppressor14 and that very few samples of woollen fabric from this period have survived, the students’ speculative visions of life in Wales and the Atlantic world offer new narratives of archival material. The craft of speculation – a visual term deployed in the creative non-fiction of remarkable thinkers such as Hazel Carby and Saidiya Hartman – is for Carby a tool of unachieved emancipation.15 In British history today where the role of slavery in building the wealth and industry of the nation has been concealed, and the focus on celebrating white abolitionism has erased Britain’s collusion in slavery, the capacity of the artist to imagine a complex history of slavery’s entanglements, a people’s history that fills in the gaps through drawing and making, becomes even more important.

As Anne Butler, an artist involved in the project, reflected:

It was fascinating to find out the connection between these old forgotten mills, many of which are now being reclaimed by nature, and their part in the production of wool that was used to clothe enslaved people across the Atlantic. I think it is important to shed light on this history. The project brought up some strong feelings which could be channelled into our art.

Zine-making lends itself to telling these counter-stories as a creative and inclusive form of alternative media. Zines are low-fi handmade booklets that offer perspective on a specific topic or theme. As part of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Festival of Social Sciences and in collaboration with Elin Angharad of Zine Cymru we organised a zine-making workshop as part of the Woven Histories project. The zine as an alternative pedagogical form offered a blank canvas to cut, collage and reassemble stories that connect the history of Welsh woollens to transatlantic slavery. The zines produced by participants reclaimed diverse printed material from the archives to reframe the dominant narrative of mill or plantation scenes authored by European travellers (Figures 1.6, 1.7, 1.8).

14Aiken, Journal of a tour through North Wales and part of Shropshire; Pennant, Thomas, A Tour in Wales, vol.I., (London: printed for Benjamin White, 1784).

15Carby, Hazel V., public lecture: “Imperial Sexual Economies: Enslaved and Free Women of Color on a Jamaican Coffee Plantation, 1800-1834” (University of Warwick, 4 Feb 2021).

Figure 1.6 Zines. Photo by Elin Angharad

Figure 1.7 Zine by Cushla Luxton

Figure 1.8 Zine by Deio Williams

As a starting point to the workshop we used the theme of marronage. From very early on, when African captives were transported to the Americas, they began escaping their European captors. Some joined Indigenous people, others set up their own communities in woods, forests, or mountainous areas to establish their settlements. By framing the workshop from the perspective of enslaved people escaping the constraints of the plantation and forming alternative communities on the margins, we were able to integrate ideas of freedom, reflect on creativity at the periphery of the plantation and foreground the humanity of enslaved men, women and children. Artistic methodologies such as zine-making offer a form of alternative media with the potential to intervene in educational spaces that have traditionally constrained certain forms of knowledge and bodies.16 Using the concept of zine-making as a modern-day form of reassembly or marronage – a collective effort to revise and enable a more comprehensive public understanding of the history of the transatlantic slave trade – the students used creative research methods, drawing, cutting, collaging image, text and textile to assemble new narratives.

Conclusion

Looking ahead, an important next step will be to investigate Welsh Plains from a Caribbean perspective and reorient this global history away from a uniquely Euro-American perspective. In Wales, further work with Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales is needed to include these global colonial narratives of woollen production and use within Welsh history. For example, the history of Welsh plains has remained largely neglected within Amgueddfa Wlân Cymru –National Wool Museum in Carmarthenshire, as well as some of Wales’ smaller regional museums including Newtown Textile Museum, Amgueddfa Llangollen or Amgueddfa Corwen that already tell local stories of wool production in these areas.17

To conclude this short essay, I want to reflect on a question I was asked recently following a presentation on this project at Swansea University. A researcher in the audience asked whether the participating students saw the project as a form of protest. By default I wanted to answer yes and feebly gave some of the ways the students have gone on to develop their research, yet this question made me pause. One example I could invoke is that during the zine-making workshop I had attempted to provoke discussion around the use of language and in particular the use of ‘slave’ vs. some preferred options including ‘enslaved person’, ‘enslaved African’ or ‘captive.’ One of the students shared that they outright refused to use any of these terms. This for me was a sudden moment of protest. In their justification the student seemed to be rejecting the terminology of categorisation systems associated with the colonial archive, many of which remain with us today. It challenged me as an educator to rethink my binary approach to teaching this and was a helpful reminder that there is not one singular narrative or one singular academic who knows everything.

The book Hanesion Cysylltiedig Gwlân Cymru a Chaethwasiaeth / Woven Histories of Welsh Wool and Slavery (2023) can be downloaded for free from Common Threads Press: https://www.commonthreadspress.co.uk/products/woven-histories-of-welsh-wool-and-slavery

16BARC Collective, ‘Zine-making for Anti-Racist Learning and Action’, in Suhraiya Jivraj and Dave Thomas (eds.) Towards Decolonising the University (Oxford: Counterpress, 2020).

17Cardiff-based artist Lucille Junkere has been commissioned to work with Amgueddfa Wlân Cymru – National Wool Museum in 2024 to create work that addresses the colonial connections of Welsh woollen production.

Chapter 2

Beyond Warwickshire’s Country Houses

Annabelle Gilmore

The country house has for a long time been seen as a symbol of Britishness, particularly Englishness. They have been features dotting the green landscape of the countryside since the medieval era of manor houses which were often relatively humble places for the lord of the estate, without the large scale of rooms and opulence thought of today.1 However, country houses did not remain as simply places for the lord of the manor to reside. The land ownership that was afforded to these lords saw the development of country houses as seats of power with money raised from the tenants and rents of the land. The properties became symbols for the owners; as ‘an image-maker, which projected an aura of glamour, mystery or success’.2 These buildings grew to encapsulate wealth and artistry, expectations and ambitions of the upper reaches of British society. Until the nineteenth century, landowners were the leading figures of the country. The people with money and ambitions made sure to invest in country estates.3 Land ownership was one of the few investments available before the development of industry in the nineteenth century. Except, many of these country houses have histories that go beyond the borders of the British Isles.

A great many houses have connections to the Atlantic world - the Americas, the Caribbean, and Africa - established through mercantilism, and governance. One of these methods of investment came in the form of overseas trading, which secured enormous profits, including the capture and transportation of African people. With these cash profits, aristocrats, gentry and merchants were able to invest and purchase lands in the English provinces.4 The country house may be a symbol of Britishness but it also carries legacies of enslavement of Black people. This essay considers some of these legacies in Warwickshire and beyond to connect these histories to the Black Atlantic, to think about the many Black people who are connected to these houses, and to open up ideas that country houses are more than the buildings and the land they sit on.5

Institutions such as English Heritage and the National Trust have already shown some of these histories and legacies for the properties they manage.6 They have highlighted the pervasive way that slavery can feature in the history of country houses. One example is Coughton Court (Figure 2.1), a property near Alcester in South Warwickshire managed by the National Trust. The Trust lists a connection between the house and plantation slavery through the marriage of Robert Throckmorton, 4th Baronet, and Lucy Heywood.7 Lucy’s father held the Heywood Hall Estate in St Mary, Jamaica, which enslaved over two hundred people. In his will dated 1738, Lucy’s father left her £3000 upon reaching twenty-one and Lucy’s mother an annuity of £700 to be paid for from the money from the Jamaican estates.8 In her mother’s will, dated 1755, Lucy was left a further £1000 upon reaching the age of twenty-one or upon her marriage.9

1Bailey, Mark, ‘The composition and origins of the manor’, in The English manor c.1200–c.1500, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), p.3.

2Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and architectural history, introduced by Simon Jenkins (London: Folio Society, 2019), p.4.

3Girouard, Life in the English Country House, p.4.

4Imtiaz Habib, Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677, (London and New York: Routledge, 2020), p.194.

5For further information on the Black Atlantic see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993).

6Madge Dresser and Andrew Hann, Slavery and the British Country House, (Swindon: English Heritage, 2013); Sally-Anne Huxtable et. al (eds.), Interim Report on the Connections between Colonialism and Properties now in the Care of the National Trust, Including Links with Historic Slavery, (Swindon: National Trust, 2020).

7Huxtable et. al. Interim Report, p.82.

8Will of John Heywood PROB 11/693/15.

9Will of Mary Heywood PROB 11/814/214.

Figure 2.1. Coughton Court © National Trust Images/Abi Chandler

Figure 2.2. ‘Guy’s Cliff’, published by J. Beck, 18491876. Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum

Lucy, in her mid to late twenties, married Robert eight years after her mother’s death. It is possible that some of this money from the Heywood family plantations may have financially assisted Robert in building Buckland House in Oxfordshire and the renovation of the west front of Coughton Court. Lucy’s marriage settlement, dated 1764, shows that Lucy was to receive an annual payment of £400. In exchange, Robert Throckmorton received a lump sum of £3000.10 The settlement was orchestrated between Robert and Lucy’s brother, James Modyford Heywood, who had inherited the Jamaican estates and the enslaved people who worked the land. It is quite likely that the settlement money would have been arranged from the profits of sugar from these estates. It was necessary for a country house, as a symbol for taste and wealth, to be maintained in the latest fashions. Through marriage, Robert Throckmorton may have readily accepted the lump sum of money originating from plantation slavery, to maintain the symbol of his station. It is these kinds of legacies that can lie under the surface of country house histories, connections which are not at first obvious but become physically embodied in the houses and furnishings.

A country house is a compound of elements that involves the owner and residents, the wealth that built and maintains it, and the features displayed within it, whether this is architectural and interior design, or art objects. Nationally the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw numerous connections between Caribbean plantations and British country houses across all of these dimensions. The historian Stephanie Barczewski identified 211 estates that were acquired by West Indian planters between 1700 and 1850.11 Significantly, planters returning from the Caribbean believed that a country estate would be a method to establish their place within the upper realms of society. For example, William Beckford (1709-1770) was born in Jamaica; his family had been established on the island as plantation owners and enslavers two generations before. Beckford was educated in England and Europe before returning to Jamaica in 1736 upon his father’s death the year before. The inheritance that Beckford and his brothers received was said to be valued at £300,000.12 Beckford added eight more properties to the nine estates that he either owned outright, co-owned, or mortgaged to an extensive seventeen plantations, all worked by Black enslaved labourers.13

Beckford had political ambition and established himself in the Jamaican House of Assembly before campaigning in British politics. From London he would be able to influence politics that directly affected the interests of enslavers and plantation owners who were resident in the Caribbean and those who remained in Britain. Such a manoeuvre saw Beckford permanently move back to England in 1744. With the money from his plantations, and the drive from political ambition, Beckford needed the symbol that would show his position amongst British society: a country estate. In 1745 Beckford purchased Fonthill estate in Wiltshire for £32,000. As an outsider who retained his Jamaican accent, Fonthill was a way for Beckford to fit in with the other social elite in Britain; it was a way that he could establish himself as a country gentleman ‘in a land where the gentry remained the social and political backbone of the state.’14 The estate was intricately connected to Beckford’s affairs The estate was intricately connected to Beckford’s affairs in Jamaica, as it had actually been necessary to take out a mortgage to pay for the property. Perry Gauci suggests that, during a trip back to Jamaica in 1749 he sold two plantation estates to pay off these mortgage debts. At the same time, he oversaw the purchase of newly arrived captured enslaved people aiming to improve the productivity of his remaining plantations.15

10Warwickshire Record Office CR1998/J/Box75 ‘Settlement to the marriage of Sir Robert Throckmorton and Lucy Heywood’.

11Stephanie Barczewski, Country Houses and the British Empire, 1700-1930, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), p.71.

12Amy Frost, ‘The Beckford Era’ in Caroline Dakers (ed.) Fonthill Recovered: A Cultural History, (London: UCL Press, 2018), p.60.

13Perry Gauci, William Beckford: First Prime Minister of the London Empire, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013), p.148.

14Gauci, William Beckford, p.52.

15Gauci, William Beckford, p.58

The wealth from plantations in Jamaica went to improve Fonthill House which had a historical pedigree to aid Beckford’s climb in society. He changed the grounds of the estate, including moving a public road and adding an external archway.16 The internal work done to the house was said to have cost £5000 a year and employed people from all the neighbouring parishes.17 However, this building work led to a fire in February 1755, destroying much of the property, though servants managed to remove the furniture. The damage was extensive, estimated at £30,000. Yet alongside his fortune, Beckford’s reputation had been cemented, as Horace Walpole wrote in a letter in reference to Beckford and the fire ‘He says “Oh! I have an odd fifty thousand pounds in a drawer: I will build it up again”’.18 Walpole’s letter highlights how significant Beckford had become through his plantation wealth to the extent that rebuilding a country house worthy of his political and social status, would appear trivial. Significantly, an unnamed Black person lost their life in unknown circumstances before the fire took place.19 Who this person was is unknown but their presence in the house may suggest that they were brought from Jamaica to Fonthill to act as a servant in the house, another method for Beckford to indicate his imperial connections and status among the political and social elite. The mysterious circumstances of this Black person’s life and death highlight that whilst it is possible to see how plantations in Jamaica benefitted Beckford’s social status through a obtaining a country house, the individual Black people are lost within this shadow.

Although the £50,000 in a drawer was likely an exaggeration by Walpole, Beckford did spend money on building an entirely new house, Fonthill Splendens. In its Palladian style, Splendens served as Beckford’s country residence, as a symbol of his status within a society that ordered social position based upon taste and aesthetics. With money from plantations and enslaved labour, Beckford was able to buy his way into these reaches of society.

Beckford serves as an extreme figure to represent the processes of turning Black enslaved labour in the Caribbean to social success through acquiring a country seat. Warwickshire has its own story in the form of Samuel Greatheed who followed a similar path to Beckford. Greatheed was born in Saint Christopher, now St. Kitts, in 1710. His father had already been established on the island with a plantation, which Greatheed inherited after his father’s death, valued at £3000. Like Beckford, he was educated in England, where he attended the University of Cambridge and became MP for Coventry in 1747. As Beckford did, Greatheed similarly acquired a country estate, Guy’s Cliffe, first leasing the estate in 1747 before he bought it in 1750 (Figure 2.2). The estate was home to the legend of Guy, Earl of Warwick, where it was said that he returned from a military campaign and lived as a hermit in a cave that was on the estate. Guy’s Cliffe sits just outside Leamington, which, at the time of Greatheed’s purchase, was not developed into the popular spa town it would become. Now in his possession, Greatheed set about improving the house. He added a new wing in a neo-Palladian style, made from Warwick sandstone, adding an ionic porch and pediments. The interior of the entrance hall was decorated in a rococo plasterwork, whilst another room off the entrance hall had a gothic fireplace.20 With a country estate, and the money to renovate, Greatheed would have been able to fit within the upper reaches of society, able to entertain at a large scale, enabled by the proceeds from enslaved labour.

16Frost, ‘The Beckford Era’, p.61.

17Leeds Intelligencer and Yorkshire General Advertiser, 25 February 1755.

18Horace Walpole to Richard Bentley, 23 February 1755, in The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, W. S. Lewis and Warren Hunting Smith (eds.), (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937 and 1984), p.211. Quoted in Frost, ‘The Beckford Era’, p.63.

19Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 22 February 1755.

20Geoffrey Tyack, Warwickshire Country Houses, (West Sussex: Phillimore & Co Ltd, 1994), p.102.

It is through Greatheed’s son, Bertie that more is known about the plantations in St Kitts. After Samuel’s death in 1765, the plantation was managed on behalf of Bertie by his uncles, who received £200 a year as salary, until he reached twenty-one. Letters from a cousin to Bertie’s mother show concern in November 1773 of rain that may affect the last crop to be cut and in February 1774 for the dry weather and how this may affect the crop yield. Financial value is the common theme found in the archives that hold material on plantations worked by enslaved people.21 The letters from Bertie Greatheed’s cousin provide information on concern for crop yield and his own career opportunities but little else about the people who were enslaved to the land. Some of Bertie’s accounts hint at the conditions experienced by the enslaved people.35 There were 152 enslaved people registered to the plantation in 1781 and 146 in 1786. The accounts note medical care provided and a midwife, Kitty Payne, who tended to the delivery of eight women. Kitty herself may have been an enslaved woman, as this may have been one avenue that she could have earned money outside the system of slavery. However, this same document also notes payment for three neck collars and payment for the capture of runaway people. Bertie is said to have been an abolitionist, the conditions of enslavement may have been eased by doctors and payments to people like Kitty, yet it was enslaved labour that had paid for Guy’s Cliffe in Warwickshire where Bertie lived. As an absentee enslaver, the conditions were so distant from the house of Guy’s Cliffe. The Greatheed legacy in Warwickshire began with Samuel Greatheed’s purchase of Guy’s Cliffe and continued through this established social authority through Bertie. With the acclaim that a country residence provided, when the sugar market slumped Bertie was able to sell land for the development of Leamington Spa.22

The legacy of slavery further continues in Warwickshire through the Beckford-Fonthill line as well. William Beckford’s son, also named William, inherited the plantations and labour of enslaved people in 1770. With the wealth accrued he was able to travel Europe and build an immense art collection, all to be housed in the spectacle of Fonthill Abbey, which to complete, he demolished Fonthill Splendens. The dip in sugar prices, amongst other reasons, led Beckford to sell his estate and art collection in 1822 for £300,000.23 The buyer, John Farquhar, sold the collection at auction the following year. It is here that George Hammond Lucy, the recent inheritor of Charlecote Park, with an eager anticipation to furnish his home with beautiful art objects, purchased sixty-four items from the Fonthill sale. Charlecote Park near Stratford-on-Avon, originally a Tudor house with some eighteenth-century renovations, becomes the home for these objects and their associations with enslavement.

The Lucys of Charlecote have no direct connection to plantation slavery, but the family are representative of the wider effects of the slavery system which affected much of Britain. People like Beckford act as nodes which connect places like Charlecote Park to enslaved labour. These objects were only available to George Hammond Lucy because they were curated by William Beckford. Although these pieces have a history of their own, Beckford was only able to afford them because of his wealth derived from enslaved labour. The famous pietra dura table sits in the great hall of Charlecote Park, it is made up of a mosaic of hardstones including jasper and onyx, on an oak base which was made for Beckford; the

21Warwickshire Record Office CR1707/30.

22See Noel Deere, The History of Sugar, vol. 2. (London: Chapman and Hall Ltd., 1950) for sugar prices; Geary, F. Keith, ‘’An Eligible Spot for Building’: The Suburban Development of Greatheed Land in New Milverton, 1824 – c. 1900’, Warwickshire History, vol. XV, No. 5, (2013), pp. 218-219.

23Bodleian Library MS Beckford b.8 f.19-20.

Figure 2.3. The Great Hall, Charlecote Park, with the pietra dura table in the centre © National Trust Images/Andreas von Einsiedel

table was said to be from the Borghese Palace in Rome (Figure 2.3).24 At the auction, George Lucy bid against the Prince Regent for the table, paying 1800 guineas, nearly half of his total spend at the auction.25 The table is one of the most impressive pieces at Charlecote, the Prince Filippo Andrea Doria-Pamphili Landi, XI of Italy, visited Charlecote in 1838 and was said to have been ‘in raptures’ with it.26 From the early nineteenth century, the table and other objects from the sale, including porcelains and furniture, were part of the interior landscape of Charlecote Park, displayed throughout the house as a show of wealth and taste for a gentry family. Yet, their arrival at Charlecote was facilitated by Beckford’s wealth from enslaved labour.

To conclude, country houses acted as methods to indicate wealth and a way to support social acclaim. Wealth from enslaved labour was the avenue taken by the Greatheeds in Warwickshire with much success. It allowed Samuel Greatheed to settle in the county, establish a career and begin a legacy still present today. Similarly, Coughton Court highlights how connections can be made for financial gain to further bolster the acclaim of a country seat. Furthermore, the Beckford objects at Charlecote Park show the covert methods that connections to slavery can manifest. In an effort to create a worthy collection within a country house, George Hammond Lucy inserted Charlecote Park into a history of enslavement through objects with a generational legacy of enslavement. Little, if any, information about the lives of the enslaved Black people who worked the plantations belonging to the Heywoods, Beckfords and Greatheeds is known. The outcome of their efforts are instead shown in the form of grand buildings, collections, and histories of others. These houses and their contents may perhaps be considered Black Atlantic histories.

24William Beckford, A catalogue of the costly and interesting effects of Fonthill Abbey, (London, 1823).

25Mary Elizabeth Lucy, Biography of the Lucy Family at Charlecote Park in the County of Warwickshire. (London: privately printed by Emily Faithful & Co, 1862), p.127.

26Alice Fairfax-Lucy, Mistress of Charlecote: The Memoirs of Mary Elizabeth Lucy, (London: Orion, 2002).

Chapter 3

Plantation Tools and Bowie Knives: Rethinking Sheffield’s Local Connections to Atlantic Slavery in the Nineteenth Century

Tobias Gardner

In 1827, the Sheffield Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, led by the well-known social reformer Mary Anne Rawson, became the first organisation to advocate for ‘immediate, and total abolition’ of slavery within British plantation colonies.1 Although this was a ground-breaking moment, it was just one step on the long journey of antislavery activism within the city of Sheffield. During the campaign to end the British slave trade (c.1787-1807), freemen of the Company of Cutlers in Hallamshire sent abolitionist petitions to parliament, and female activists in the Steel City organised boycotts of sugar produced by enslaved people in the West Indies. Relatedly, Sheffield was a regular haunt for touring antislavery celebrities from across the Atlantic world, such as William Wilberforce and William Lloyd Garrison and the Black abolitionists, Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglass. Accordingly, for those interested in Britain’s historic relationship to Atlantic slavery, both in historiography and popular memory, Sheffield’s abolitionist politics has offered an encouraging counter-narrative. In contrast with port towns like Liverpool and Bristol or merchant centres such as London and Glasgow, Sheffield’s economy did not obviously benefit from the enslavement of Africans in the Americas. However, this primary focus on the Steel City’s antislavery movement has obfuscated the commercial connections between industrial Sheffield and plantation economies in the wider Atlantic world.2

This chapter introduces two material case studies to unearth a more complicated picture of Sheffield’s relationship to Atlantic slavery. Firstly, it examines how Sheffield manufacturers were trailblazers in the production of plantation tools used by enslaved Africans across the Americas right up to Brazilian abolition and the end of Atlantic slavery in 1888. Various Sheffield firms specialised in manufacturing edge-tools such as hoes, scythes, adzes, and axes, that were crucial to the production of Atlantic commodities such as sugarcane, cotton, tobacco, and rice. Plantation tools were uninspiring and mass-produced, yet they became essential to the fabric of enslaved people’s lives symbolising their arduous labour, and even being used as weapons in resistance. Thus, analysing these tools not only reveals Sheffield’s economic connection to slavery, but provides some insight into the lives of enslaved people. Secondly, this chapter explores Sheffield’s monopoly on the production of Bowie knives for US markets, especially in the Southern States. Bowie knives were folkloric and often deluxe products favoured by US enslavers, and therefore Sheffield cutlers were known to inscribe them with mottos such as ‘Death to Abolition.’ The production of these knives created social controversy amongst abolitionists across the Atlantic and studying them helps to reveal the extent to which Sheffield’s cutlery firms were commercially tied to the US South in the nineteenth century. Indeed, as will be seen, these economic connections became essential during the American Civil War, and motivated a strong pro-Confederate movement in Sheffield, which undermined the city’s antislavery history.

1Sheffield Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, Annual Report, (Sheffield, 1827), p. 6.

2For more in-depth information on this subject, consult: Michael D. Bennett and R.J. Knight, ‘Report on Sheffield, Slavery and Its Legacies’, (Sheffield, 2021): pp. 1-43. https://sheffieldandslavery.wordpress.com/report/

Of course, Sheffield’s economic development was not defined by Atlantic slavery and a more global story can be told. Sheffield manufacturing relied upon iron ore imports from Scandinavia, and many of the city’s exports were not associated with the Atlantic, instead going to Asia, Europe, and elsewhere in Britain. As such, there is no suggestion made here that Sheffield’s industrial connections place it into a similar category to the cities with more dependence on Atlantic slavery. The evidence does not justify making such a claim. Rather, the aim of this chapter is to demonstrate how an original focus on specific industries can shed new light on seemingly well-established accounts in Britain’s social and economic history. These material case studies can begin to expose how Britain’s manufacturing heartlands were also tied to slavery, and how this was debated in socio-political life. Narrowing in upon Sheffield’s local history, therefore, serves a threefold function. Firstly, it disrupts prevailing celebratory assumptions that Britain’s industrial inland cities were somehow typified by unwavering abolitionist sentiment, and isolated from the Atlantic slavery system. Secondly, it represents a call to move beyond coastal cities and merchant centres as the sole geographic regions through which to understand Atlantic and global economic history. Thirdly, then, demonstrating how Britain’s industrial centres maintained commercial connections to slavery economies beyond British abolition in 1838, complicates the view that British imperialism from the mid-nineteenth century was legitimised through antislavery ideals.3

Plantation Tools

As summer drew to a close in late August 1790, Britain’s leading formerly enslaved activist, Olaudah Equiano, stopped off within the hills of Hallamshire on his nationwide antislavery lecturing tour. Whilst there, Equiano addressed over seven hundred South Yorkshire abolitionist sympathisers, and promoted his new book, an autobiography that provided a powerful personal testimony on the horrors of the middle-passage and enslavement within the Americas.4 As noted, this much about Sheffield’s abolitionist culture is well known, however it is interesting to ponder how some Sheffielders, especially in the manufacturing industry, may have reacted when they read certain passages of Equiano’s work. Indeed, Equiano recounted observing the inhumane conditions on plantations, such as on the island of Montserrat in the Caribbean, where ‘wretched field slaves [toiled] all day for an unfeeling owner who [gave] them but little victuals.’5 The plantation tools used by these enslaved peoples during this arduous forced labour might easily have been imported from manufacturers within the Steel city.

The development of Sheffield’s tool making industry from the seventeenth century to the twentieth century has been a source of pride amongst local historians and heritage enthusiasts for many decades.6 There is no denying the expertise and skill of Sheffield manufacturers behind the tools trade, and the efforts of merchants to export these articles across the world. Yet as the global impact of these industrial developments are studied further, certain uncomfortable legacies are steadily being excavated. Along with cities like Birmingham, Sheffield was a key site for the manufacture and export of tools used by enslaved people across plantations in the Americas, from the 1600s right up to the eventual abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888. Throughout the nineteenth century Sheffield tools were also important to the development of new oppressive ‘free-labour’ regimes within Britain’s expanding imperial territories, especially in Oceania and Asia. However, the experience of trade with slavery states around the Atlantic Ocean was crucial in shaping Sheffield’s global manufacturing culture. As James McHenry, one of America’s slaveowning founding fathers, argued in a Virginia newspaper in 1805, ‘Sheffield wares [including] a variety of edge tools, hardware, and ironmongery’ were key British imports to America, particularly the plantation economy, and added to the prosperity of both nations.7

3See: Richard Huzzey, Freedom Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain, (Ithaca, 2012).

4The Sheffield Register, 20th August 1790, p. 2.

5Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African, Fourth Edition, (Dublin, 1791), p. 140.

Figure 3.1. Joseph Smith, Explanation or Key, to the Various Manufactories of Sheffield, with Engravings of Each Article (1816).

Courtesy of Sheffield Local Studies Library

The most prominent of these tools, and the one that has received the most attention from historians, was the plantation hoe (Figure 3.1). The hoe in many ways became a synecdoche for Atlantic slavery. It was an article almost uniquely designed for the cultivation of those crops –sugarcane, cotton, rice, and tobacco – that fuelled European colonisation of the Americas.8 As Figure 3.1 depicts, Sheffield plantation hoes were adapted and innovated to be exported across the vast colonial markets in the Americas, to be used on plantations in locations as far flung as Brazil, Virginia, and the West Indies. Yet despite this regional variation and market adaptability, the evidence suggests that hoes were not particularly high-quality and instead designed for mass-production. In a telling revelation of 1831, the Sheffield poet, John Holland, explained that plantation hoes were cheaply made as they were ‘used by persons [enslaved people] whose time and labour are accounted of no great value, and whose comfort is rated still lower.’9 As historians have affirmed, hoes were central to the ‘backbreaking grind of labour’ on plantations, and were designed not as implements of expertise, but instead to maximise profits and ultimately the exploitation of the enslaved labour force.10 Within British abolitionist literature, the hoe was subject to severe criticism as a brutal, premodern form of agricultural technology, and often figured as a metaphor for enslavement itself. For Josiah Conder, the ‘primitive hoe’ was inefficient and formidable and thus was a ‘badge of slavery.’11 Also, given that many enslaved field workers were female, some writers focused on the gendered nature of the hoe, as it challenged nineteenth-century British ideals of feminine sensibility and domesticity. Whilst residing on a Georgia plantation, the female actor and abolitionist, Fanny Kemble, lamented how enslaved women were separated from their children and duties as ‘housewives’, and instead ‘condemned to field labour’ which reduced them to ‘human hoeing machines.’12

6Research into Sheffield tool making would be impossible without the life’s work of Ken Hawley, and the volunteers at the Hawley Tool Collection in Kelham Island Museum, Sheffield. See also the industrious work of Geoffrey Tweedale in Directory of Sheffield Tool Manufacturers 1740-2018, (Sheffield, 2020).

7The Enquirer, (Richmond, Virginia), 6th December 1805, p. 4. 8Chris Evans, ‘The Plantation Hoe: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Commodity, 1650–1850.’ The William and Mary Quarterly 69.1 (2012): pp. 71–100.

9John Holland, The Cabinet Cyclopaedia. Conducted by the Rev. Dionysius Lardner. A Treatise of the Progressive Improvement and Present State of the Manufactures in Metal. Vol. I. Iron and Steel, (London, 1831), p. 143.

10Justin Roberts, ‘The Whip and the Hoe: Violence, Work and Productivity on Anglo-American Plantations.’ Journal of Global Slavery 6.1 (2021), p. 109. 11Josiah Conder, Wages or the Whip: An Essay on the Comparative Cost and Productiveness of Free and Slave Labour, (London, 1833), pp. 18-57.

12Fanny Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839, (New York, 1863), p. 121.

However, the role plantation tools played in the lives of enslaved people is understood best through the recollections in the ‘Slave Narrative Collection’ compiled by the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project from 1936 to 1938. These interviews with formerly enslaved African Americans regularly mentioned the damaging effects of labouring with plantation hoes. Sarah Gudger, for instance, who was enslaved in Buncombe County, North Carolina, reflected on the oppressive working conditions where she was forced to ‘wok all de time f’om mawnin’ till late at night... Wok in de field, chop wood, hoe cawn, till sometime I feels lak mah back sholy break.’13 Additionally, these interviews have revealed that plantation hoes were often refashioned by enslaved people as powerful tools of resistance to their oppression. Rebecca Baker reflected how she witnessed a woman in Florida use ‘her hoe and chop [an overseer] right across his head’ after he had brutally whipped her for ‘being slow.’14

Evidently, the hoe became both denotative for the horrors of Atlantic slavery and useful in its resistance, yet it is important to remember it was not the only plantation tool Sheffield manufacturers produced. Throughout the nineteenth century Sheffield continued to advertise and produce tools like axes, adzes, machetes, scythes, and sickles that were designed and adapted for a wider range of labour tasks in plantation economies throughout the Americas beyond hoeing and tilling the land.15 In fact, according to John Holland, the West Midlands had taken the lead in mass-producing the low-quality hoe by the 1830s, whereas Sheffield focused on producing a wider set of implements used within the Atlantic slavery system.16 However, unearthing the specific firms behind the manufacture of these plantation tools, and especially the quantities of the exports, is not easy. Sheffield manufacturers and merchants were not always specific on the types of goods they produced or sold in local directories, opting for generic descriptions like ‘hardware’, ‘steel’ or ‘edge-tools.’ In an 1828 directory, for instance, Mitchell Brothers & Co. were loosely described as ‘manufacturers of steel… and edge tools.’ Yet a rare copy of the firm’s own catalogue of 1827 reveals they specialised in ‘patent cast steel scythes’, plantation hoes, adzes and axes for Virginia, Carolina, Brazil, and the West Indies.17 For other firms, plantation tool production was simply an ancillary trade. For example, Marsh Brothers & Co. (initially Marsh & Shepherd), were mainly concerned with the production of cutlery in the early nineteenth century. Yet in 1838, the firm acquired James Cam’s tool business, and began to also produce items for the plantation economy, especially hoes, axes, and sugarcane bills.18 Admittedly, some firms were initially very clear about their business; for example, William and Samuel Butcher were openly described as manufacturers of ‘West India and Brazil plantation tools’ in an 1825 directory. Yet later directories were vaguer about the commercial activities of the Butcher brothers, reverting to the description of simply ‘merchants and manufacturers’ of steel and tools in 1849. However, the fact Butcher’s edge-tools were ‘celebrated’ in advertisements in the 1850s by planters’ hardware stores in Virginia, suggests they were still catering to the plantation slavery economy.19 The main evidence Sheffielders continued to produce Atlantic slavery plantation tools long into the nineteenth century largely comes from the regular illustrated tool catalogues produced by the merchant Edward Brookes. The fourth edition of The Illustrated Sheffield List in 1857 includes articles as different as ‘Brazil adzes’, ‘American Scythes’, and ‘Sugarcane choppers’ or ‘hatchets.’ By the fourteenth edition, published in 1885, little had changed, and Brookes was still advertising a complex array of Brazilian and Cuban plantation hoes, axes, and sugar bills that would have likely still have been used by enslaved people.20 Of course, as Brookes was a merchant, not a manufacturer, the firms that were actually producing slavery tools at this late date is unclear.

13 Sarah Gudger in Federal Writers’ Project, Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Vol. XI, North Carolina, (Washington, 1941), p. 353.

14Rebecca Baker in Slave Narratives, Vol. III, Florida, p. 185.

15Adzes and axes are woodworking tools used in carpentry, but also felling and clearing arable land. Machetes, scythes, and sickles are involved in harvesting the commodities.

16Holland, Cabinet Cyclopædia, pp. 142-3.

17The Sheffield Directory and Guide, (Sheffield, 1828), p. 64; Mitchell Brothers and Company: Steel, Edge Tools, Heavy Tools, Files and Rasps, Sheffield 1827 (SCA/Marsh/1/13/1).

18Stamped James Cam, Or Marshes & Shepherd, Price list, (Sheffield, c.1840) in Joseph Smith, Explantation or Key to the various Manufactories of Sheffield (1816), The Early American Industries Association, Edited by John S. Kebabian (South Burlington, 1975), p. 4.

19General & Commercial Directory of Sheffield, (Manchester, 1825), p. 25; General Directory of Sheffield, (Sheffield, 1849), p. 74; Staunton Spectator (Staunton, Virginia), 31st March 1852, p. 3.

Nevertheless, this vagueness was not necessarily a signal that Sheffield firms were ashamed of their manufacture of plantation tools. It is more likely that Sheffield manufacturers viewed the production of plantation tools as just one part of their activities and the vast metallurgical output of the Steel City. Indeed, some Sheffielders were perfectly open about their plantation tool manufacturing if it suited their agendas in public economic debates. During the late-1830s Corn Laws debates, the steel manufacturer and free-trade advocate William Vickers lamented how protectionist policies had bolstered foreign competitors in West Indian plantation tools. Manufacturers in Belgium and Germany were known for making the tools more cheaply, but also forging British marks onto the goods to then smuggle and sell them at the protected high prices. Vickers claimed he sought ‘no protection’ on his goods, which he believed encouraged this foreign counterfeiting. Instead, only the ‘blessings of free trade’ would benefit Sheffield’s plantation tool industry.21 Equally, as new markets opened up for tools in ‘free labour’ British colonial projects throughout the nineteenth century, some Sheffield manufacturers were able to divert their businesses outside of the Atlantic world and connections to slavery. These included firms like Robert Sorby & Sons, who operated out of ‘Kangaroo Works’ and focused their exports of scythes, saws, and other edge-tools to British territories in Australia from the 1850s.22

This local history of plantation tools holds multi-faceted significance. A rich human story can be excavated, not only from the role tools played in antislavery rhetoric, but more crucially from the perspectives of the enslaved who were forced to use them, and occasionally wielded them in pursuit of freedom. Moreover, Sheffield’s production of these tools, though often difficult to identify and almost impossible to economically quantify, tied the city to Atlantic slavery long beyond British abolition. This raises the question of how debates over ‘free trade,’ ‘free labour’ and the British empire evolved after 1838, which the next section on the history of the Bowie knife helps to illuminate.

Bowie Knives

Despite Britain finally abolishing slavery in the empire in 1838, one of the aims of the 1840 World Antislavery Convention held at Exeter Hall, London, was to scrutinise how Britain, which was ‘not entirely clear of the guilt’, continued to indirectly profit from Atlantic slavery. A sub-committee was formed to examine the various ways British manufacturers, especially in cities like Birmingham, were still benefiting from the manufacture of manacles used on enslaved people, firearms and gunpowder sold to West African slave traders, and clothes made from slaveryproduced cotton. Interestingly, the universal abolitionists at the convention did not mention plantation tools in their resolution to try and ‘root out’ all remaining British participation in the slavery system. However, in the subsequent discussions, James Canning Fuller of Skaneateles, New York, added that ‘the inquiry ought not to be limited to Birmingham [but also include the] district of Sheffield’ which produces ‘Bowie knives’ for the USA, with the inscription ‘Death to abolitionists.’23

20Edward Brookes, The Illustrated Sheffield List, fourth edition, (Sheffield, 1857); The Illustrated Sheffield List, fourteenth edition, (Sheffield, 1885).

21Sheffield Independent, 9th February 1839, p. 8.

22Tweedale, Sheffield Tool Manufacturers, pp. 461-4.

23British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, Proceedings of the General Anti-Slavery Convention, Volume 1, (London, 1841), pp. 265-6.

Figure 3.2. Frontispiece to The Slave’s Friend. vol. 3, no. 2, whole no. 26 (1836-7). Courtesy of the Charles L. Blockson Afro- American Collection, Temple University Libraries

The material history of the Bowie knife, made famous by the Texan folk hero, James Bowie, at the Sandbar fight and the Battle of Alamo, is essential in understanding the development of white Frontier culture in the US South. Sheffield’s role in this history cannot be overstated. Indeed, J.R. Edmundson has estimated that over ‘seventy-five percent of all Bowies carried on the American frontier were manufactured in Sheffield factories.’24 The largest and most famous cutlery houses in the Steel City such as Joseph Rodgers & Sons and George Wostenholm & Son led the way in the export of these knives, so much so that William B. Worthen argues no firm in the US ‘came close to rivalling’ the manufacturers of Sheffield.25 Additionally, Sheffield’s American Merchants were able to adapt their business to suit the various needs of the US plantation system. Whilst the garish Bowie knife seems a very different article to the modest plantation hoe, some firms such as William and Samuel Butcher produced (or at least stamped their mark upon) both products, typifying the eclectic output of Sheffield’s light manufacturers.26

Although the World Antislavery Convention was the moment Sheffield’s production of antiabolitionist Bowie knives reached national – arguably international – recognition, it was not the first time antislavery activists had expressed their disgust at the industry at the local level. At a public meeting in Sheffield in October 1837 to organise a universal abolitionist society, the local cleric, Reverend Thomas Best addressed the presiding master cutler, John Greaves, claiming that the production of ‘Death to Abolition’ knives was a ‘disgrace to Sheffield.’ Charles Congreve, a Bowie knife manufacturer, spoke at the meeting in defence of Sheffield’s cutlers, reassuring abolitionists that a ‘very small quantity had borne that motto’, and were not an act of proslavery support, but rather made to ‘special order’ for clients in the US south.27

24J.R. Edmondson, Alamo Story: From Early History to Current Conflicts, (Lanham, 2000), p. 122

25William B. Worthen, ‘Arkansas and the Toothpick State Image.’ The Arkansas Historical Quarterly 53.2 (1994): p. 186

26Richard Washer, The Sheffield Bowie & Pocket-Knife Makers 1825-1925, (Nottingham, 1974), p. 29.

27Sheffield Independent, 14th October 1837, p. 3.

Congreve clearly aimed to gloss over the significance of these Sheffield products, yet there is no denying they goaded abolitionists in Britain and over the Atlantic. Henry Sparkes of Exeter alleged at a similar public meeting in December 1837 that he had seen a ‘Death to Abolition’ knife in London, and rhetorically warned his audience that he feared ‘planters in America’ hoped to use these knives on his transatlantic abolitionist comrades.28 Furthermore, prior to this an illustration of a ‘Death to Abolition’ Bowie appeared in the American children’s antislavery magazine, The Slave’s Friend (Figure 3.2), with the assertion that these knives were sold in New York.29 The Vermont Telegraph confirmed this in June 1837, claiming the ‘monster retailers’ that sold these ‘anti-abolition weapons’ were D. Young & Co. based on Broadway.30

By the mid-nineteenth century, the place of these knives in American culture, and Sheffield’s role in producing them, became the subject of increasing criticism. For example, the English writer, Francis Wyse, described the knives as a ‘repugnant’ aspect of American culture in his 1846 work on the US, but reflected that they were ‘generally of the best Sheffield manufacture’ and constituted ‘an extensive and important article of British hardware export.’31 However, from the 1830s, there is evidence that Sheffield makers of Bowie knives inscribed a range of less controversial slogans on the blades to appeal to their market in the US South, such as ‘Arkansas Toothpick’, ‘Celebrated American Hunting Knife’, and ‘A Real Mississippian.’32 So, despite arousing horror amongst abolitionists, the manufacture of ‘Death to Abolition’ knives was primarily a marketing scheme rather than proof of vehement support for slavery within Sheffield.

Nevertheless, the fact Charles Congreve disclosed that Bowie knives were made to ‘special order’ amongst close personal contacts hints that Sheffield’s relationship with the US did hold a wider significance. In fact, the key reason that this unique trade in Bowie knives is worth studying is that it helps to unearth the much broader commercial and cultural links that existed between Sheffield manufacturing and the US South in the nineteenth century. It was not just Bowie knife production where Sheffielders dominated US markets. Geoffrey Tweedale’s rigorous research has been essential to expose this relationship. Tweedale has shown that between 1800-1850 around a third of Sheffielders worked in the ‘American trade’, with the United States purchasing ‘a third of the town’s manufactured goods’ such as tools, hardware, cutlery, and crucible steel. Although the Northern States progressively developed domestic production to compete with Sheffield, just before the outbreak of the Civil War ‘Sheffield still accounted for about ninety percent of total US cutlery imports.’ This commercial relationship to America shaped many of the firms involved in the trade, and thereby influenced Sheffield’s architectural and infrastructural development. For instance, George Wostenholm, who supposedly visited the US over thirty times, modelled his residence and the wider Sheffield suburb Nether Edge on a village in New York State, and entitled his factory ‘Washington works.’ This was common practice amongst manufacturers, and Sheffield became awash with factories such as ‘Atlantic works’, ‘America works’, and William and Samuel Butcher’s ‘Philadelphia works.’33

28Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, 16th December 1837, p. 4.

29The Slave’s Friend. Vol. 3 No. 2 Whole No. 15 (c. 1836-1837) https://digital.library.temple.edu/digital/collection/p16002coll5/id/4710 (Date Accessed 20/11/2023).

30Vermont Telegraph, 21st June 1837, p. 3.

31Francis Wyse, America, Its Realities and Resources, Volume I, (London, 1846), p. 215.

32Worthen, ‘Arkansas and the Toothpick’, p. 186.

33Geoffrey Tweedale, Sheffield Steel and America: A Century of Commercial and Technological Interdependence 1830-1930, (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 4-8; p. 128.

Whilst Tweedale has demonstrated the economic impact of this relationship, his work does not discuss any political outcomes. Most notably, Sheffield’s nineteenth-century American trade was central to the city’s prominent pro-Confederate posture during the American Civil War. Given the agrarian nature of the Southern economy and its reliance on free trade, especially on imported manufactured goods, many of Britain’s merchant and manufacturing centres held strong connections to the South before the outbreak of war. With the Morrill Tariff of 1861, which sought to protect the developing industry of the Northern States, and the subsequent blockade of Southern ports the same year, Sheffield’s American trade was immediately damaged. The total value of Sheffield’s American exports dropped from £1,504,951 in 1860 to £885,591 in 1861, just over a 40% decline. In consequence, as businesses failed, the demand for poor relief increased by over 50% between 1860-1862.34 Although some larger firms, Like Wostenholm and Rodgers, were able to continue exporting to the US for many decades following the Civil War, the first shot at Fort Sumter signalled the end of Sheffield’s dominance in metal goods. By 1875, the Sheffield Independent declared that the Steel City had ‘lost the American trade’, and it was the Civil War that ‘first arrested the trade, then crippled it, and then… finally snuffed it out.’35

Therefore, although public memory and much of the historiography has preserved Sheffield’s proud abolitionist legacy, few have mentioned how this economic downturn influenced certain Sheffielders to support the South in this conflict over slavery. It is worth mentioning that proConfederate support was not necessarily open advocacy for enslavement, as this was widely considered a taboo position by the 1860s in post-abolition Imperial Britain. Indeed, many in the pro-Confederate movement professed that an independent South would somehow be the best course for American abolition. Nonetheless, the fact that leading political figures and commercial interests in Sheffield were so vocal in favour of the slave-holding South undoubtedly complicates the existing narrative among historians and in popular knowledge.

John Arthur Roebuck, Sheffield’s MP, proposed a recognition motion for the independence of the Confederacy in the Commons. He also promoted Southern recognition in public meetings in the city, most notably in front of a baying crowd of around eight thousand Sheffielders in Paradise Square, which voted ‘three to one’ in favour of the Confederates.36 Furthermore, Edward Montagu-Stuart-Wortley-Mackenzie, Lord Wharncliffe, a local nobleman from the South Yorkshire region, was a central figure in the British extra-parliamentary pro-Confederate lobby, heading up the Southern Independence Association (SIA) as president. Wharncliffe held strong ties with Sheffield’s metallurgical community, and as a result a disproportionate number of Sheffield’s SIA officials were merchants and manufacturers in local metal industries (five of seventeen members), whereas the vast majority of members across Britain were gentlemen, doctors, lawyers or clergymen.37

34These figures are calculated from the trade summaries provided in the Sheffield Independent, 31st December 1861, p. 5; 1st January 1863, p. 2.

35Sheffield Independent, 17th June 1875, p. 5.

36Sheffield Independent, 30th May 1863, p. 11.

37Southern Independence Association, List Containing Name of President, Vice-Presidents and General Committee Members, (Manchester, 1864), pp 1-4.

Nevertheless, the most remarkable of Sheffield’s pro-Confederate movement was William Carson Corsan, who was a merchant of Sheffield metal goods, including Bowie knives. In late 1862, after suffering the effects of the tariff and blockade, Corsan managed to travel to the US South to revitalise his business, a trip he recorded in a pro-Confederate travel book, Two Months in the Confederate States Including a Visit to New Orleans Under the Domination of General Butler (1863). For Corsan, the solution to the war was clear: it was simply ‘hopeless’ to subject the ‘freedom-seeking’ Southern States who had ‘resolved on liberty or death!’ Therefore, supporting an independent South was the rational decision according to Corsan, especially given the ‘blessings’ of free trade opportunities it would offer cities like Sheffield. Although Corsan never explicitly advocated slavery, he rehearsed in detail the false notion that American slavery was a gentle system which benefited African-Americans who were ‘jolly’, ‘naturally docile’ and ‘attached to their… masters.’39 Also, Corsan subtly brought Sheffield’s commercial interests into alignment with a potential future proslavery South which would only buy from Europe ‘and never trade with the North again!’40 For this outcome, Corsan argued the South would need to remain ‘united and resolved, still [be able] to feed, clothe, and arm herself, [and] rely on the obedience and aid of the negroes.’41

Ultimately, of course, Sheffield’s pro-Confederate movement was an ill-fated one, given Union victory in 1865. Also, despite the evident racism in Corsan’s work it remained socially and politically taboo to actively support the slavery system in Britain. However, the movement, motivated by the Steel City’s American trade and typified by the production of ‘Death to Abolition’ Bowie knives, provides a useful counter history of Britain’s industrial core in the mid-nineteenth century. Unearthing this uncomfortable political history and placing it in its commercial context helps to disrupt celebratory narratives of unwavering antislavery politics in post-abolition, and to reveal the complex attitudes to economic and political liberty in the face of the moral question of human liberty and racial justice.

Conclusion

At the broadest level, this chapter has championed the use of local history to raise new questions of Atlantic and global historical narratives. The intertwined material and economic histories of plantation tools and the Bowie knife helps one to understand the complex changing landscape of British imperialism in the mid to late nineteenth century, and the social and political debates attached to this. These material case studies both intervene within, and complicate, the prevailing view of post-abolition Britain as an empire that refashioned itself around antislavery ideals to legitimise new forms of oppressive imperial expansion.42 Admittedly, after 1838, many Sheffielders transformed their businesses, especially with tools, to cater to the British empire’s novel ‘free labour’ regimes in colonial territories in Asia, Oceania, and Africa. Nevertheless, as discussed, it was the Atlantic slavery system that set Sheffield’s America trade in motion, and certain Sheffielders continued to benefit from their production of goods for the US South until the Civil War, with some others producing tools used by enslaved people in Latin America right up to 1888. It is through highlighting this local complexity that we can better understand the persistence of this oppressive global system.

38William Carson Corsan, Two Months in the Confederate States Including a Visit to New Orleans Under the Domination of General Butler, (London, 1863), pp. 286-88.

39Ibid., p. 138; p. 292.

40Ibid., p. 134.

41Ibid., p. 297.

Chapter 4

The Town that Slavery Built: Leamington and the Proceeds of Enslavement

Jessica Nyassa

This work intends to detail the findings of a research project that examined Leamington’s links to the British slave trade, looking particularly at individual residents of the town. This idyllic portion of the Midlands benefited greatly from and was affected considerably by the wealth that former enslavers brought with them to the area. Central to this study is the fact that enslavement generated other streams of income, besides the proceeds from plantations worked by enslaved people. The former enslavers of Leamington, some of whom had once been resident in the Caribbean and others who had never themselves been on a plantation, received considerable sums of money as compensation from the government once slavery had been abolished. At around the same time that Leamington became a ‘royal’ town in 1838 following a visit from Queen Victoria, the British Empire’s former enslavers had gained an infusion of cash. Following the abolition of slavery in 1833 the government paid out twenty million pounds, the modern equivalent of a little under two billion pounds. This was compensation to enslavers for what was seen as their loss of property. Almost all the payments were made between 1834 and 1836. A portion of that inevitably found its way to Leamington. Just as Leamington was at its peak as a fashionable spa resort, this influx of funds contributed to its growth and left an indelible mark on the town. Former enslavers invested in local industries, gave generously to charitable causes, built luxurious homes and communal structures including some of the town’s landmarks, several of which still stand. They were able to separate themselves from the source of much of, and in some cases all of their wealth and embark on new lives in Leamington. Although all holders of enslaved people, they appear at least to have had differing attitudes to the institution of enslavement. Whilst some proclaimed to detest it, others publicly strived hard to keep it in place. In fact, Leamington became home to some figures who had been instrumental in securing reparations for enslavers.

With the focus of this project being Leamington’s enslavers and their wealth, attention had to be paid to those who generated that wealth, the enslaved people. In life they were listed in inventories and government records as nameless objects, distinguished only by the number of them held by the enslaver in question. In death their given names lay in undisturbed colonial records and any true names they may have been given by their loved ones were lost to history. What precious little records that do remain for these people still reveals much; for example, factors such as age and ethnicity tended to be similar across the different plantations in Britain’s various Caribbean colonies.

Despite all the information that has been compiled within this project, it is likely that more remains undiscovered. The lack of and the probable loss of records means that some enslavers who lived in and contributed to Leamington are as of yet unknown to us. And although this project concerned residents of Leamington it also uncovered several notable individuals who had gained from enslavement and had spent time in the town. As Leamington became a popular social destination it attracted wealthy, regular visitors who spent large amounts on everything from entertainment to healthcare.

This project would have been far more difficult to create if it had not been for the slavery reparations database created by University College London.1 This database created a straightforward way to identify slaveholders who had at some point resided in the Leamington area. The records collated in this database convey clearly who claimed compensation for freed enslaved people, whose claim was successful, how much they were paid and how many enslaved individuals their payment was for.

Using this information, 11 individuals from the Leamington area were identified as being slave holders and having claimed compensation. They were Owen Pell, George Goodin Barrett, Bertie Bertie Greatheed, Christopher Barrow, Elizabeth Mary Hewitt, Louisa Burke, Robert Glasgow, Peter Deshon, Robert Sympson, Frederick Manning, and Elizabeth Virgo Scarlett. A further 16 people were listed as executors or trustees of slavery compensation claims. Many other slaveholders were found to have visited or had extended stays in the area. There were different types of slaveholders; the most significant categories are resident and absentee. Some absentee enslavers like Greatheed did not set foot in the Caribbean, despite being well travelled. In contrast, George Goodin Barrett had only left Jamaica a decade before emancipation to begin a new life in Leamington. His family had held estates and enslaved people in the Caribbean since land had been granted to them in the 1660s by King Charles II. Similarly, Peter Deshon was born in St Vincent yet the 1851 census found him living on Warwick Street in Leamington. This followed his compensation award for a jointly owned sugar plantation in Trinidad which held 39 enslaved people.

A question that persisted was why did these people choose to settle in Leamington? The town appears to have been attractive to former colonialists, even those who had few original ties to the area. In fact, the town was a popular destination for retirees from the military and from the Foreign and Colonial Service. This was due in part to the availability of high-quality housing at relatively low prices when compared to London. Also, people wanted to join existing communities of like-minded former colonialists.

Leamington’s Enslavers

Owen Pell sat between the two categories of absentee and resident enslavers. Originally from Northamptonshire, he went to the Caribbean in his twenties to seek his fortune. He married Elizabeth Mary, who was from an established slave holding family and had recently inherited both land and enslaved people. Pell then settled into the planter class, amassing a large collection of sugar plantations on the island of Antigua. He was awarded 17 separate reparation claims, one for each of his enslaved operated plantations. The largest of these was a payment equivalent to approximately £180,000 in today’s money. Upon return to the United Kingdom, Pell embedded himself in local affairs much as he had done in Antigua. He was appointed as a Magistrate in 1847 and by 1858 he became Sheriff of Warwickshire. In the 20 years following her husband’s death, Mary Pell became active in society and engaged in a range of charitable endeavours. She donated winter clothing to the town’s street sweepers yearly, a tradition she had started with her husband. Her 1887 obituary in the Leamington Spa Courier stated that ‘Mrs Pell was known for many deeds of charity, and her loss will be severely felt by many of the deserving poor’.2 Her wealth at the time of her death was £131,756 which is over £14 million in today’s money.

1 https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/

2Leamington Spa Courier, 5 November 1887.

Awarded the modern equivalent of almost one and a half million pounds in reparations, Robert Glasgow, an absentee owner, had inherited two estates in St Vincent from his fatherin-law. Despite being born in Scotland and having both studied and practiced medicine there, Glasgow was listed as residing with his family in Leamington within five years of receiving his compensation. He lived on fashionable Holly Walk along with some of the town’s wealthiest inhabitants. Glasgow’s neighbours on Holly Walk included fellow former enslavers, Christopher Barrow and Frederick Manning. This further suggests that Leamington Spa was an appealing place for former slaveholders and colonialists to settle.

A lot of the money generated from slavery and compensation stayed in Leamington not just by investments but via the daily expenditure of those former enslavers who chose to live there. These funds were inevitably also disseminated through inheritance in later years. For example, in 1848 Robert Sympson left £2000, almost £200,000 in today’s money, to each of his sons, Charles John Sympson and George Frederick Sympson.

The locations associated with many of Leamington’s former enslavers are tangible representations of the new lives these individuals were able to fashion for themselves in the town after their colonial careers. Some like Major Deshon were able to rent on Warwick Street which was then and is still near the picturesque heart of the town. For some of the other subjects, the details of their exact locations in Leamington have been lost. For others little to no trace remains of their original dwellings, as is the case for Owen and Mary Pell who lived at Quarry Field where the Vue Cinema is now located. Elizabeth Mary Hewitt’s sizable Norfolk Villa is also no longer standing. Likewise, a block of offices built in the 1960’s named Imperial House at the north end of Holly Walk sits on the site of what was once Byron Lodge. This was the home of Frederick Manning, local philanthropist who had received compensation for over 1000 enslaved people on 14 different plantations in St Kitts. He lived at Byron Lodge until he died in 1880 leaving behind £80,000, just over £7,900,000 in today’s money. By contrast, Comyn Villa, the large mansion on Holly Walk that belonged to Christopher Barrow is still standing, although dilapidated. Barrow was recorded as living in the house with his family in the 1841 census, six years after it was built by renowned architect, William Thomas.

Several local streets are named for the Greatheed/Percy clan, including Greatheed Road, Percy Terrace and Bertie Terrace in Leamington, and Bertie Road in nearby Kenilworth. The Greatheed family were not only able to acquire and remodel an extensive estate for themselves at Guy’s Cliffe, on the edge of Leamington; Bertie Greatheed also invested significantly in the Regent Hotel (Figure 4.1) and the Royal Pump Rooms (Figure 4.2). He also owned multiple lands and properties across Leamington as well as in nearby Milverton, and Warwick. Greatheed had inherited vast wealth from his father in the form of land in St Kitts and the enslaved people who worked on it.3 He appeared to have abhorred slavery, supported the abolitionist movement and described his plantations as ‘that odious property’.4 His accounts indicated that he was more concerned than other enslavers for the people he held in captivity. There were bills for ‘care and attendance of your negroes’ as well as records of midwifery care and medicine. This may, however, be more of an indication of pragmatism rather than concern for the wellbeing of the enslaved. It would have likely been more cost effective to keep the enslaved people in good health. This would have been especially true once it became evident that acquiring new ones would become more difficult due to changes in the law. Also, he did not free all or even some of the over 150 enslaved people bound to his plantation. Despite his stated objections, Greatheed continued to collect and spend the profits from their forced and unpaid labour.5

3 See Chapter 2.

4Bury, J. P. T. and Barry, J. C. (eds.), An Englishman In Paris: 1803, The Journal of Bertie Greatheed, (London, Geoffry Bles, 1953).

5CR1707/30, Warwickshire County Record Office. (Annual accounts of the sugar plantation belonging to Bertie Greatheed)

Figure 4.1. ‘South and West Views of the Regent Hotel’, printed by Day & Son, 1849-67. The Regent Hotel opened on the Parade in 1817. One of its main investors was Samuel Galton, a Birmingham banker who had made his fortune as a gunmaker shipping muskets to West Africa. Bertie Greatheed probably also invested in the hotel, and was the guest of honour at its opening dinner. Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum

Figure 4.2. The Royal Pump Rooms, J. Brandard, 1838-63. This building, which is now home to the Art Gallery & Museum, was built in 1811-14 on land belonging to Bertie Greatheed. Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum

In his will Bertie Greatheed provided trusts for the future descendants of relatives and left gifts to friends and local associates. These included £200 to a Rev George Innes of Warwick and £50 to William Squires of Milverton. £20,000, the modern equivalent to a little over £1,500,500, passed to his granddaughter Ann Caroline and her husband Charles. Their 1826 marriage was recorded in Burke’s Dictionary of the Peerage and Charles later took the last name Greatheed Bertie Percy as instructed by Bertie’s will. The couple also inherited and added to their list of residences the sprawling manor house and extensive grounds of Guy’s Cliffe, built by Bertie’s father and extended by him. Charles was able to invest £2000 in the Warwickshire and London railway among other ventures. Charles was also awarded the £1,223 6s 7d compensation claim for the 84 enslaved people on Bertie’s St Kitts plantation. Yet it should be noted that although they are referred to amongst the lists of Bertie’s property, the enslaved people he held did not benefit from his will nor were any provisions made for their welfare.

Figure 4.3. View from Union Road, with Milverton Terrace to the right, c.1850-1900. George Goodin Barrett developed several properties on Bertie Greatheed’s land in Milverton, including Comber House, 2 Union Road. Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum

A portion of the Greatheeds’ lands, Stamford Gardens, was later bought from Bertie’s heir, Charles Percy Greatheed, in 1827 by George Goodin Barrett. Barrett had originally planned to build three blocks of tenements in this space, to be named Garden, Stamford and Barrett Places. For several years he lived in a large residence, Strathearn House, on the site of Stamford Gardens. Meanwhile, he attempted to raise funds by mortgaging houses built on his land, including Bertie Villa and Milverton Lodge as well as Strathearn House. He was unable to keep up with the payments, however, and the houses were sold and then demolished to make way for new housing developments. Today, blocks of flats named Stamford Gardens are situated in this location, now on Rugby Rd. One of the many other homes built by George Goodin Barrett still stands although it has undergone multiple renovations. Comber House was built on Union Road in 1824 funded by two mortgages for a total of £2,500 (Figure 4.3). Barrett sold the house to Thomas Comber in 1827 for £6,000. After being repurposed multiple times since the midnineteenth century, the house (now known as 2 Union Road) was split into two separate houses which are now flats. Barrett returned to Jamaica where he died in impoverished circumstances in 1854. Despite his financial failings, George Goodin Barrett’s property development across Leamington helped to shape the then blossoming town.

Christopher Barrow, born in Barbados and a resident plantation owner and holder of enslaved people, openly declared enthusiastic support for the abolition of slavery. In a publication from the Anti-slavery Society in 1838 it was stated that ‘he had always desired emancipation and had prepared himself for it’ and ‘it had proved a greater blessing than he had expected’.6 The piece also claimed that his newly emancipated ‘apprentices’ worked harder than before and did so without the whip while also understanding and following the authority of law. He stated that the cost of freed labourers was equivalent to maintenance of the enslaved. Furthermore, he suggested that enslaved people did not require apprenticeships in preparation for freedom. This opinion was in opposition to the views of other enslavers across the British Caribbean who felt formerly enslaved people would be reluctant to work and would turn towards delinquency once free.

This contrasts with Owen Pell who was desperate to keep slavery in the Caribbean just as it was. So much so, he joined a coalition of other enslavers from across the British Caribbean who lobbied parliament fervently to prevent its abolition. When that proved fruitless, and it became clear that abolition was inevitable, he and his associates rechannelled their energies into securing compensation for slave holders across the British Empire. Later, in 1840, when addressing the Parliamentary Select Committee on East India Produce, Pell voiced his concern at the steady rise in wages being paid to the formerly enslaved. He expressly told the committee that this was due to a shortage of labour caused by emancipation.7

6Thome, James A. and Kimball, Joseph H., Emancipation in the West Indies: A six months’ tour in Antigua, Barbadoes, and Jamaica in the year 1837 (New York, American Anti-slavery Society, 1838), pp. 258-259.

7‘Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the Affairs of the East-India Company, 16th August 1832’, pp.399-400.

Tracing The Enslaved

Identifying the Leamington residents who had held enslaved people along with their earnings and property was indeed central to this project. Yet as the task continued, the need to address those who had been enslaved and were thus at the heart of this study became more apparent. Of course, the nature of their enslavement afforded them little to no means to leave their mark on the historical record. They had no property of their own, left no surviving writings or documents and did not appear in any local publications save if they had absconded. If names were to be found, it would be impossible to know if that was in fact a name that they and those close to them would have used. Indeed, the actual names of any older enslaved people who had been taken from West Africa would be certainly lost to history. Nevertheless, the given names of these individuals were found, not recorded as people but as property. Following the outlawing of the slave trade in 1807, slave holders across British colonies were required to give regular accounts of the people over whom they claimed ownership. Each inventory was accompanied by a signed declaration that the keeper of the enslaved did not knowingly acquire them by any illegal means.

These accounts were compiled into large books which found their way into the National Archives collection. Given the humanity in death that they were denied in life, each name of an enslaved person in the surviving slave inventories are now kept alongside the national archive’s census records. The precious little information given in these documents revealed much. For one, the enslaved were given quintessentially British names like ‘Hugo’, ‘Margaret’, ‘Alice’ and ‘Charles’. Given the young ages of the vast majority of individuals listed, it was unlikely that they had been transported from Africa, with just a handful of exceptions. It should be noted nonetheless that as the transatlantic trade was illegal at the time these records were being compiled, evidence of enslaved people being taken from Africa would have been concealed. As a number of documents have been lost, there are more records for some plantations than there are for others. In cases where yearly records for a plantation remain, the lifespans of its enslaved people are easily traceable.

Most of the people documented were under the age of 30, and many were much younger. There may well be a variety of reasons for this, the first being that working and living conditions for the enslaved were not conducive to high life expectancy. Much research has already been done which suggests this to be true, particularly in the case of Jamaica. Furthermore, a number of inventories listed individuals as being deceased at young ages. The evidence also showed that multiple children were being born to enslaved women. It should be noted that a large proportion of the children are described as being ‘creole’ or ‘mulatto’ under the race section of the inventories, indicating that they were of mixed heritage. With so little detail in the source material, there is much that cannot be fully confirmed. The nature of the relationships which yielded these mixed-heritage children cannot be definitively known. What is known is that the mothers had no agency and, as property, they had no rights over their bodies. In these vast seas of instances of abuse there may have been a few exceptions of somewhat consensual interactions. Nevertheless, large numbers of children claimed as the property of Leamington residents would have been conceived through violence, coercion, and rape. It should also be noted that following the ban on the slave trade, reproduction was one of the few ways to acquire new enslaved people outside of inheritance or transfers of property. These children helped to replenish the work force and create more profits that later poured into Leamington. Indeed, the men in the family of George Goodin Barrett had a generations-long ‘tradition’ of selecting an enslaved woman and fathering multiple children by them. Furthermore, enslaved children at the time that reparations were being arranged may not yet have been able to work, nevertheless their existence increased the compensation amount while they themselves received nothing.

After abolition: legacies in Leamington

The individuals found to have lived in Leamington at some point after they had enslaved people were predominantly identified using census records. These records confirmed their residence in the area, but censuses are only taken once a decade. Therefore, there may well have been several previous enslavers who arrived in Leamington just after, or left or died just before, a census was taken. Also, if they occupied multiple properties, as a number of former enslavers did, they would not have appeared in the Leamington census if they were resident elsewhere when the record was taken. This would make their financial, material and social contributions to Leamington far harder to identify. Name changes, particularly due to marriage, also help to conceal such connections.

Other former enslavers, who as non-residents were not a focus of this study, visited regularly and spent time as well as money in Leamington. Isaac Scott Hodgson, who had been awarded compensation for 25 enslaved people in Jamaica, visited in 1851 and stayed at Sherbourne Place on Clarendon Street. Regular visitor to Leamington Phineas Riall was the Governor of Grenada from 1816 to 1823 and received compensation for 53 enslaved people in Jamaica. Riall was buried in the town after his death in 1850. After receiving £3540 for 123 enslaved people held on two plantations in Mauritius, Francis Hunt also spent time in Leamington. John Gladstone was one of Leamington’s better known enslaver visitors. He received over £100,000 from the government for 2,508 enslaved people on his plantations in British Guiana and Jamaica. Like Owen Pell, he too had lobbied parliament to provide compensation for what he saw as a loss of property. He and his family lived in Liverpool, but they regularly stayed in Leamington. Gladstone’s wife and daughter often received treatment from celebrated local physician, Dr Henry Jephson. His son William Gladstone went on to become Prime Minister. The family spent lavishly while in Leamington and imbedded themselves into local society. In 1833 the Leamington Spa Courier proclaimed Gladstone as a ‘steady friend to Leamington’.8

Trying to locate all the ways that wealth has filtered into a community can at times be akin to trying to trace raindrops once they have fallen into a puddle. Yet this project has found enough to show how the proceeds of enslavement helped to shape Leamington. Former enslavers were able to come from across the British colonial territories in the Caribbean and settle into Leamington. They lived alongside absentee enslavers and both groups used the funds gained from enslaving others and from compensation to transform the landscape of the town. Through building, investing in local projects, and charitable endeavours, this group of people were able to weave themselves into the fabric of Leamington society. By stark contrast, the enslaved people who made all this possible were all but forgotten and did not share in any of this vast wealth. Most were children and the rest not much older. Yet they endured violence, forced labour and sexual exploitation among other things. Some of Leamington’s enslavers expressed contempt for this situation whilst continuing to perpetuate it, while others fought to protect the institution of slavery. Regardless, all were able to live prosperous lives in the spa town of Leamington, washing themselves clean of the stain of enslavement.

8Leamington Spa Courier, 2 February 1833.

Chapter 5

Owning the Past: Addressing Colonial Legacies with Communities from the Congo and Scarborough

Dorcas Taylor

Introduction

This chapter discusses how Scarborough Museums and Galleries, a museum service on the Yorkshire Coast, began a decolonising journey that addressed global legacies of colonialism from a hyper local context through a project called From Local to Global 1 There were many strands to this project. However, I have chosen to focus on the importance of community relations to decentre the museum as the holder of knowledge and how such relations can be developed to diversify knowledge building and sharing.

Britain’s museums and heritage sites have historically benefitted from collections that were acquired through colonial violence and exploitation.2 Racist attitudes helped to legitimise colonial rule by promoting the superiority of white British people over colonised peoples, and British public institutions, including museums, were complicit in this messaging. Maintaining this colonial mindset, they have positioned themselves as the holders of knowledge. This view has ignored the existence of non-Western knowledge systems and contributed to their loss, when cultural artefacts have been relocated from their places of origin or owners to museums in Britain or other Western countries, without considering the impact on Indigenous cultures. Today, museums continue to benefit from artefacts that came from formerly colonised people.

Since the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 and the growth in awareness of racial injustices through the increased profile of the Black Lives Matter movement, pressure on public institutions to confront racism and discrimination has intensified. Museums have become ‘highly contested cultural spaces,’3 while artefacts like the Benin Bronzes, looted from the Benin Kingdom by British troops in 1897, and statues such as that of transatlantic slave trader Edward Colston, in Bristol, have become highly charged touchstones in debates about how the UK holds itself to account for its colonial past.

From Local to Global centred on a collection of objects that came from the area we now know as the Democratic Republic of Congo. However, at the time, for the people from whom these artefacts were taken (or ‘acquired’, in more ‘acceptable’ museum speak), they would not have identified as Congolese; geographical boundaries were imposed on them by their colonial rulers to determine sovereignty.4 They have made their way to Scarborough Museums through space and time because of the activities of one Colonel James Harrison (1857-1923; Figure 5.1). A wealthy landowner and big game hunter, Harrison resided at Brandesburton Hall, about 30 miles south of Scarborough, and spent his extensive leisure time travelling the British Empire

1www.fromlocaltoglobal.co.uk

2See, for example, Hicks, D., The Brutish Museums: the Benin Bronzes, colonial violence and cultural restitution, (London: Pluto Press, 2020); Huxtable, S., Fowler, C., Kefalas, C. and Slocombe, E., Interim Report on the Connections between Colonialism and Properties now in the Care of the National Trust, Including Links with Historic Slavery, (National Trust, 2020), available at: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/who-we-are/research/addressingour-histories-of-colonialism-and-historic-slavery [accessed 30 Dec. 2023]; Phillips, B., LOOT : Britain and the Benin Bronzes, (London: Oneworld Publications, 2021); Younge, G., ‘Why Every Single Statue Should Come Down’, (The Guardian, 2021). Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/jun/01/gary-younge-why-every-single-statue-should-come-down-rhodes-colston [Accessed 30 Dec. 2023].

3 Francis, E., ‘Beyond our system of objects: Heritage collecting, hoarding and ephemeral objects’, in S.L.T. Ashley and D. Stone, eds., Whose Heritage? Challenging race and identity in Stuart Hall’s post-nation Britain, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2023), p.69.

4During this period, this region of Central Africa was called the Congo Free State (1885-1908) and was privately owned by King Leopold II of Belgium. It became a Belgian colony, under the authority of the Government, in 1908, at which point it was re-named the Belgian Congo. It remained under Belgian control until independence in 1960.

and beyond, hunting and killing animals for pleasure and to fund his lifestyle. His hunt for the elusive okapi, known as the forest giraffe, led to frequent visits to the Ituri Forest in the Congo Free State. His encounters with Indigenous groups – the Bambuti (or Mbuti) – were recorded in his diaries and in photographs. Over the course of several visits in the early twentieth century, Harrison found ways to exploit these forest-dwellers. Objects passed into his hands, as gifts or trades, from bows and arrows to ceremonial knives and copper jewellery.5 Six Indigenous members of the Bambuti were brought to England by Harrison where they toured theatres across Britain and Europe, much to Harrison’s financial benefit.6 Animals were hunted for fun and for profit; the sale of ivory from elephants he shot in Congo contributed much towards the cost of his travels. His activities in Congo demonstrate that the impact of British colonialism extended beyond the British Empire.

Harrison died peacefully in 1923. His widow was keen to see his extensive collection of animal trophies, cultural artefacts, photographs, diaries and other ephemera stay together and be permanently displayed in a museum in commemoration of her late husband. Two museums turned her down. However, her third attempt met with a positive response from what was then Scarborough Corporation. In June 1930, Scarborough opened its first public library with the ‘Harrison Collection’ housed on the first floor.7

In 1951, the collection moved to the new Woodend Natural History Museum and was absorbed within the museum’s collection where, for years, it largely disappeared from view. Many of the animal trophies that were donated by Harrison’s widow were left in a moribund state in the museum store and little or no attention was paid to the Congolese cultural objects or associated ephemera. Some animal trophies reappeared briefly around 2008 when redevelopment of Woodend revealed a number of taxidermied heads hidden behind a bricked-up door, presumably because of insect infestation, with bags of asbestos dumped on top of them. They ignominiously ended up in a skip.

Recognising the need to reflect on the complex history of this collection and Scarborough’s complicity in Britain’s colonial activities, Scarborough Museums decided in 2021 to reappraise this material, to help find answers to questions, such as: What do we need to learn? How can we make this collection useful?

5Whether as gifts or obtained through trade, these exchanges took place within a colonial context which may have made it difficult for Indigenous elders to refuse.

6For more information, see www.fromlocaltoglobal.co.uk.

7Since 1930, this collection of artefacts and ephemera has been known as the Harrison Collection. Calling it this reinforces colonial ideas of the supremacy of white British colonisers, as it is the individual collector who is remembered, rather than the people or cultures the objects have come from.

Figure 5.1. Colonel James Harrison, © Scarborough Museums and Galleries.

Why ‘useful’?

We took the position that researching Britain’s colonial history through this collection could help us better understand the present and help us to avoid repeating mistakes of the past, not only benefitting museum practices, but also contributing to improvements within wider society.

There is still a very real human cost attached to the legacies of British colonialism. Systemic racial discrimination remains widespread,8 and minoritised9 people from the global majority continue to experience ‘strikingly high levels of exposure to racist assault and racial discrimination’.10 So-called ‘culture wars’ are polarising public opinion on racial justice, Britain’s colonial past and identity politics.11 Alongside this, recent UK Government legislation is threatening to shrink civic space (CIVICUS 2022),12 reducing opportunities to publicly address social injustices. As public spaces, this makes museums more important than ever, putting our collections to good use to protect and promote core freedoms and challenge attitudes that negate them.

Scarborough’s colonial past… and present

In September 1873, King Leopold II of Belgium made an unofficial visit to Scarborough, staying on his yacht, The Prince Baudouin. He visited the Spa grounds, Castle and the ‘north side’, having dinner with the Mayor at the Crown Hotel. One newspaper of the time report that he was ‘mobbed and lionised’ with more than the usual enthusiasm as one who enjoyed ‘the good opinion of the public.’13

Scarborough does not have any historic links to Congo apart from the objects in the museum’s collection. This visit by the King to Scarborough is a fleeting moment where the people of Scarborough crossed paths with the monarch who would, 12 years later, be awarded private ownership of the Congo Free State by the heads of Europe at the Berlin Conference (1884-85).

A large, much-loved seaside resort on the Yorkshire coast, Scarborough has historically attracted millions of visitors each year. Originally a spa town, frequented by aristocrats and the well-to-do, by the 19th century it was attracting the wealthy middle classes who were seeking entertainment as well as taking the waters. The arrival of the railway in 1845 meant working-class families from across Yorkshire arrived in their droves to holiday in the town, eager to explore the increasingly cheaper forms of seaside entertainment on offer (Figure 5.2). These trips took place during ‘Wakes Weeks’, week-long unpaid breaks during which factories, collieries and other industries closed for maintenance in the summer.

Through its popular entertainment scene, Scarborough played its part in shaping and reinforcing attitudes towards race that positioned white British people as superior to other races through exotic offerings that were based on racial stereotypes and caricatures.

8Finney, N., Nazroo, J., Bécares, L., Kapadia, D. and Shlomo, N. eds., Racism and Ethnic Inequality in a Time of Crisis: Findings from the Evidence for Equality National Survey, (London: Polity Press, 2023). Out of 14,221 minoritised ethnic participants surveyed for this report, over one third had experienced one or more racist assaults (verbal, physical or damage to property); one third reported experiencing racial discrimination in education and in employment; and 19% when looking for housing. Racial discrimination experienced from the police was particularly high for people identifying as Black Caribbean (42.7%) or as ‘any other Black’ (42%).

9The term minoritised is used to acknowledge that individuals and groups have been minoritised through social processes based on power relationships. It recognises that groups may be minorities in the UK but are majorities elsewhere in the world.

10Finney, N. et. al, Racism and Ethnic Inequality in a Time of Crisis, p.200.

11Duffy, B., Hewlett, K., Murkin, G., Benson, R., Hesketh, R., Page, B., Skinner, G. and Gottfried, G., The ‘Fault Lines’ in the UK’s Culture Wars, (London: The Policy Institute, King’s College London and Ipsos, 2021). One impact of this could be the increase in hate crimes. March 2021-22 saw a 26% increase with 155,841 recorded incidents, of which 109,843 (70%) were racially motivated, an increase of 19% on the previous year (Home Office 2022).

12The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act (2022) and the Public Order Act (2023). See CIVICUS, People power under attack 2022, (monitor.civicus. org, 2022). Available at: https://civicus.contentfiles.net/media/assets/file/2022GlobalFindingsEmbargoed16March.pdf [Accessed 30 Dec. 2023].

13Leeds Mercury, 9 September 1873.

Figure 5.2. Edwardian visitors to Scarborough, © Scarborough Museums and Galleries.

On 21 July 1905, the Times and Express describes the multitude of visitors from the manufacturing centres of West Yorkshire, alongside spectators from Sheffield, York, Hull, Newcastle, Durham and London, paying sixpence to enter the popular People’s Palace and Aquarium. Here, they encountered an ‘Indian Theatre’ hosting performers from countries across the British Empire, described in newspaper advertisements and reviews in language that today we recognise as racial slurs, alongside white performers in ‘black face’. Indeed, television’s popular ‘Black and White Minstrel Show’ was an annual live summer event in Scarborough up until the 1990s. Through comedy and ridicule, these performances reduced Africans and other colonised people to figures of fun and visitors were exposed to entertainment that perpetuated the colonial mindset.

Equally, people from the town engaged in and benefitted from the British Empire. With its long maritime history, Scarborough saw many local people travelling the world as part of the Royal Navy or engaged in trade linked to the colonies. Ships built in Scarborough shipyards were part of Britain’s colonial trading network. These colonial connections brought profit to the town and the people of Scarborough. At least two ships built in Scarborough are known to have been refitted to transport enslaved people as part of the transatlantic slave economy.14

Scarborough is still very dependent on the tourism industry, although, like other seaside resorts, it has suffered significant economic decline. Coastal towns experience higher degrees of social deprivation than non-coastal towns,15 and under-resourcing leaves communities experiencing high levels of poverty, low educational attainment and feeling isolated from decision-making that affects their lives. This can create social unrest and provide fertile ground for racially-motivated hate crime. With 97% of Scarborough’s residents identifying as ‘White’ in the 2021 Census, and communities living with significant economic hardship and feeling neglected by a political system that appears to favour the wealthier South, far-right groups such as the English Defence League or Yorkshire Patriots target Scarborough to point the blame at immigrants, asylum seekers or refugees, creating more precarity for minoritised communities.16

14www.slavevoyages.org. See voyages nos. 78036; 78085; 81527.

15Office for National Statistics, Coastal towns in England and Wales, October 2020 https://www.ons.gov.uk/businessindustryandtrade/tourismindustry/articles/coastaltownsinenglandandwales/2020-10-06/pdf [Accessed 30 Dec. 2023].

16Over half of hate crimes recorded by North Yorkshire Police in 2022/3 were racially motivated. Hate crime, England and Wales, 2022 to 2023 second edition - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

Figure 5.3. Congolese artefacts in the museum, photo © Tony Bartholomew.

From Local to Global

From this context, Scarborough Museums began a project to examine past and present attitudes towards Africa and impacts of colonialism on today’s society. Funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, From Local to Global used the collection of material donated by Harrison’s widow as a means through which to learn about where we as a museum service sit within bigger narratives (Figure 5.3). Acknowledging the need to challenge racist attitudes, the project sought to understand where the museum’s power and privilege has come from and to take actions to redistribute some of it to those who have been historically excluded, marginalised or misrepresented. Recognising that this was the start of a longer journey, we sought to broaden our understanding of the interconnected nature of our colonial past and how this relates to Scarborough by building relationships with community members from what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo and residents of Scarborough.

Voices from Congo

It is important to begin this section by reflecting that the learning shared in this chapter may reinforce the marginalisation of voices from minoritised communities because its author identifies as a white British woman. It is right to challenge the fact that the insights communicated here use minoritised voices to support findings that will benefit other museum institutions. In the relative absence of literature which centres minoritised worldviews within these debates, once more you, as readers, are confronted with writing about minoritised communities, rather than where they have shared their own narratives. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith states:

From the vantage point of the colonized…the term ‘research’ is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism. The word itself, ‘research’, is probably one of the dirtiest words in the Indigenous world’s vocabulary… It appals us that the West can desire, extract and claim ownership of our ways of knowing, our imagery, the things we create and produce, and then simultaneously reject the people who created and developed those ideas and seek to deny them further opportunities to be creators of their own culture and own nations.17

17Tuhiwai Smith, L., Decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples (3rd ed.), (London: Zed Books, 1999), p.1.

Figure 5.4. Congolese community members visiting the museum.

There is no Congolese community in Scarborough; ethnic diversity is limited. To create a project that sought to authentically address colonial injustices, we recognised the need to engage people of Congolese heritage in the project, inviting members of the Congolese community living in Bradford to join us as collaborators.18 We recognised that they should be made aware of the artefacts held in the collection as they were part of their heritage. We acknowledged that this might come across as homogenising the identities and lived experiences of Congolese people in the UK, but, on reflection, we felt it was important to talk to them directly about this so that they could decide whether or not they wished to become part of the Collection’s story (Figure 5.4).

Participatory opportunities are often regarded as a way of ‘empowering’ communities: ‘In the journey to democratisation, participation and empowerment are seen as closely intertwined’.19 However, it can be argued that there still exists a relational power dynamic within this statement, as to be ‘empowered’ requires the power holder to agree to share or bestow decisionmaking power onto others which forms a ‘dependence relationship which, by definition, is disempowering’.20 The lack of understanding around what power sharing looks like, can result in ‘empowerment-lite’21 projects that align with Richard Sandell’s description of participatory activities that silo decolonising practices.22 This can end up reinforcing racialised power hierarchies, by becoming separated from the ‘normal’ workings of the museum and, thus, these projects are ‘contained’ or sit on the margins. Without a solution to overturn the structural conditions that keep these power dynamics in place, we remained sensitive to the pitfalls and acknowledged that we could not do this on our own. We began the process of collaboration with the Congolese community, because we knew we had to start somewhere. As one community elder said, “Actually, oftentimes, we don’t even get invited to be part of conversations. So that, in itself, is a big step that museums can take…”.23

17Tuhiwai Smith, L., Decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples (3rd ed.), (London: Zed Books, 1999), p.1.

18With particular thanks to Ben, Kongosi and Furaha Mussanzi.

19Gouriévidis, L., ‘Representing Migration in Museums: History, diversity and the politics of memory’, in L. Gouriévidis, ed., Museums and Migration: History, Memory and Politics, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), p.11.

20Hardy, C. and Leiba-O’Sullivan, S., ‘The Power Behind Empowerment: Implications for Research and Practice’, Human Relations, 51(4), 1998, 451–483, p.469.

21Cornwall (2008), in Lynch, B., ‘Collaboration, contestation, and creative conflict: On the efficacy of museum/community partnerships’, in J. Marstine, ed., The Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), p.150.

22Sandell, R., ‘On ethics, activism and human rights’, in: Marstine, ed., The Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics.

23From discussions with community members and the author, June 2023.

We were grateful that this community, a community which has experienced forced migration and collective and personal trauma, was prepared to trust and give their time to a museum service that was, up until then, completely unknown to them. Encouraging those we had invited in to challenge decision making and for the museum to respond by making appropriate adjustments to language, object information and displays was one straightforward way to redistribute power. This acknowledged them as the authorities on these objects and enabled a more fundamental shift in perception, with collaborators being seen as ‘actors rather than as beneficiaries’.24 This also meant ensuring the knowledge gathering process was reciprocal to avoid extractive practices that could be viewed as another form of colonisation.25 We shared with them what we knew, and they offered their knowledge in return, without being pressured into doing so. We respected their knowledge and recognised it was given to us as a gift.

This does not mean, however, that knowledge sharing was a seamless process that excused past injustices.

“Culture is the soul. By culture I mean arts, food, language, religion, outfits. So, when your ancestors, like Harrison, stole our objects, they stole our souls.” (Community elder)

Community elders were not afraid to ask difficult questions about the objects being held by museums that were acquired by colonialists. “What is the purpose of museums holding onto these things? And what’s the end goal?... [D]oes this mean that those objects will just continue to remain in the same place? Or are they going to Africa? Is it never going to leave the museum?” There were also powerful responses to the suggestion that people need to see themselves ‘reflected back’ in museum displays, to ensure museums are relevant and responsive to their communities. “It’s hard for us to see it because it’s like your inner being has been stolen from you.”

It is important that museums acknowledge past wrongs openly and put in the work to ensure such wrongs are not perpetuated. However, even when museums try to correct past mistakes, such as repatriating objects acquired through colonial violence, no response from a museum will give back what has been lost. Recognising this has helped us on our decolonising journey. Tuck and Yang argue for the ‘ethics of incommensurability’, which acknowledges that there will always be ‘portions of… projects that simply cannot speak to one another, cannot be aligned or allied.’26 Decolonising projects ‘can only ever be strategic and contingent collaborations’ that recognise ‘what is distinct, what is sovereign’.27 The message to museums is, perhaps, acknowledge the discomfort, but do not stop this important work.

24Lynch, ‘Collaboration, contestation, and creative conflict’, p.159.

25Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing methodologies.

26Tuck, E. and Wayne Yang, K., ‘Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 2012, 1–40, p.28. 27Ibid.

Citizen Researchers

Whilst it was important that the project provided the museum with an opportunity to develop its thinking around decoloniality and anti-racist practices, we realised also that it was important for local Scarborough residents to join us on this journey, so the learning could go beyond the walls of the museum and into the community. Early on, we invited members of the public to become part of the research team, as ‘citizen researchers’. This role went beyond that of traditional volunteers. They were collaborators, understanding their activities were to support the greater good, attending sessions to learn about social justice and anti-racist practices with invited experts and sharing this knowledge through their personal networks, be they informal conversations with friends or family, or through the way they approached their written contributions to the website to reach the wider world. They recognised the social value attached to their role as citizen researchers and explored its meaning, supported through conversations with our evaluator (Figure 5.5).28

The citizen researchers applied their own specialist knowledge and interests to Harrison’s archive, helping us by digitising Harrison’s diaries; writing articles for the website; creating databases that catalogued Harrison’s vast photographic archive; and recruiting more researchers to the project. The many directions their research took demonstrate the ways in which a collection can offer multiple entry points for different communities, drawing them in through their existing interests, but, when managed sensitively and in the spirit of collaboration, transforming their approaches to embrace new research practices and critical methods that stretch their thinking. This approach was both challenging and liberating. It required a balancing act to shift control away from the museum by inviting our communities to help crowd-source knowledge, but also ensure accountability still rested with the museum.

Our citizen researchers were predominantly from Scarborough’s majority population, that is, white British people, many of whom were retired.29 This meant that for most of them they were confronting concepts and histories with which they were unfamiliar or at different stages in their learning about decoloniality. This was also true of the museum team, so it was important that reliable expertise outside the museum was sourced to help us create a credible set of principles that would support the establishment of concrete decolonising practices and the development of critical thinking around historic injustices linked to Britain’s colonial past and its effect on

28With thanks to the external evaluator, Sheila MacGregor. 2927.5% of Scarborough’s population is over 65, compared to 18.6% across England and Wales, according to the 2021 Census.

Figure 5.5. Word cloud for ‘researcher’ and ‘citizen’.

Figure 5.6. Letter (extract) and drawing from Jean Glover, April 2022.

contemporary social attitudes. For the museum, it meant being open to criticism, acknowledging mistakes and testing decisions before agreeing to them, to ensure they complied with our principles. It also meant the team having to learn how to articulate our evolving rationale to the citizen researchers in ways that did not patronise or criticise, but scaffolded their learning so that they could feel confident expressing their own thoughts and be open to critique. That the museum was honest about its own mistakes during this process gave encouragement to the citizen researchers. Being prepared to reveal our own insecurities around ‘not knowing’ created a supportive, nonjudgemental environment that brought our community of citizen researchers along with us, enabling them to share their voices authentically, rather than become voices of the museum. Attempting to dissolve power dynamics between citizen researchers and museum staff has influenced the way the museum now interacts with volunteers, giving them greater agency in their activities and encouraging them to participate in decision-making.

This letter (Figure 5.6) is from our oldest researcher who is 90. A former textile conservator, she set up the Textile Conservation Studio at the North West Museums Service in 1968 and was involved in conservation until the early 1990s, before retiring to Scarborough. Her research focused on the Western clothing worn by the Bambuti people when they were brought to England in 1905.

Conclusion

When Scarborough Museums embarked on this project, we began with good intentions and considerable naïveté. Two years on, we understand that decolonising museums with roots in Britain’s colonial past is a slow and complex process with no obvious end point and that museums, including ours, will make mistakes. Sometimes decisions have unintended consequences, but, as an organisation, we are willing to own our mistakes and use them as opportunities to learn how to make our practices better. Unpacking power relationships and redistributing power requires sensitivity and the acknowledgement that museums do not have the answers. One of the most important decisions we made was to proactively seek out communities of people to whom our collection was relevant. These were Congolese artefacts, so it was the Congolese community we sought out to consult. Being honest about where the power lies, identifying allies who can advise on decolonising processes (and be paid for their time) and being open to feedback are good ways to start. There are many excellent organisations and individuals who can support museums on their journeys.30 It is more important to do something, however small, to start this important work, than do nothing at all. Actions speak louder than words.

30With thanks to Sam Allen of Creative Arts Social Consulting Ltd., Ranmalie Jayawardana and Errol Francis of Culture&.

Chapter 6

Black Lives in the Stix: Caribbean Northants and Decentring ‘Black London’ On Screen, 1948-85

Tré Ventour-Griffiths

Introduction

When I tell people my family have been in Northampton since 1962, many are perplexed! Towns like Northampton and Wellingborough have had Black Caribbean people since the earliest days of the 1950s – concurrent to big cities as points of settlement in England – but this is not well-known. Likewise, smaller numbers arrived in Kettering from the 60s. These ‘new’ arrivals also mixed with locally stationed Black Americans. In Wellingborough for example, Black GIs were living at Palk Road Congregational Church during the war (becoming the Victoria Centre in the 70s).

Yet, the GIs (and Black airmen in Northampton), reportedly mixed with Caribbean and white British women. Nationally, a result of mixing were children – an estimated 1700-2000 born from the unions of GIs and white women.1 In the 50s and 60s, the airmen could be found in brawls with Northampton police allegedly outside The Criterion, a pub once on Bradshaw Street. Much like the cities, Northants has its own postwar Caribbean experience, simply most of the county is rural. Maybe due to this ‘provincial-ness’, relationships with the police in those days differed to those in London – at least as far as what I was told during interviews, juxtaposed not only to the brutality of The Met but also policing Black London on film and television.

Whilst Northamptonshire isn’t without racist policing, there was a culture of community policing that differs from mainstream discourses of Brixton and Handsworth. For example, during the 1970s Persuaders Youth Club on Claire Street (where Northamptonshire Music & Performing Arts Trust now is) used to field a youth cricket team that played local police officers. Originally, an officer called Mick acquired cricket kit for the young people as an act of kindness, which then helped foster relationships between some Black youth and local police. It helped break down many barriers.

My Creative Writing PhD uses 100+ oral history testimonies, and limited available secondary resources, including local news media, to produce a creative nonfiction thesis about the Caribbean presence in Northants 1948-85. And whilst the experiences of Caribbean people of Indian and Chinese descent are outside the scope of this thesis, it is important to acknowledge they came to Britain too and have largely been ignored by the mainstream.2 This body of research has many stories, telling a history-ish of my home county, Northants, where my family have lived since 1962.

1Bland, L., Britain’s Brown Babies, (Manchester: University Press, 2019), p.49. 2Goffe, T., ‘Scratching the Surface: A Speculative Feminist Visual History of other Windrush Itineraries’, in del Pilar Kaladeen, M. and Dabydeen, D., The Other Windrush: Legacies of Indenture in Britain’s Caribbean Empire, (London: Pluto, 2021); Lafhaj, S. ‘Windrush stories of the Indo-Caribbean community’, (Museum of London, 2023), https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/discover/windrush-stories-indo-caribbean-community; Lowe, H., (2014) Oromonde (London: Hercules, 2014); Boston, N., ‘Some of the most interesting Windrush passengers were Indo-Caribbean – yet their stories remain untold’ (Independent, 2021) https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/windrush-day-indo-caribbean-britain-b1869704.html; Wolstenholme, L. (2023) ‘IndoCaribbeans in the UK: “Our stories are yet to be heard”’ (BBC News, 2023) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-66267574

This chapter derives from a presentation of the same name I delivered at Kingston University’s Experimental Archives Symposium in January 2024 based on original interviews conducted as part of my PhD. My paper juxtaposed Black London knowledge-making enforced by media and publishing, with my research about postwar Black Caribbean Northants. Representations of Blackness, historically and now, are dominated by city-centric narratives and that must change.

Londoners can sometimes be joked about as people who do not like leaving London for the shires! Every time I visit the capital, it is as alien to me as places like the Home Counties can be to many Londoners. Yet, it seems us in provincial England know more about London than many Londoners know about our minor cities, towns, and the countryside. My research about postwar Black Caribbean Northants troubles the official history peddled in the mainstream that treats London as the centre of the universe.

Through autoethnography, this chapter considers my PhD opposed to the mainstream narratives of Black London. It is vital to decentre Black London in postwar histories of Black Caribbean communities because not everybody who arrived between 1948 and 1971 settled there, or in other major English cities. London is not the centre of the universe, so why does industry pretend that it is?

Beyond London, Beyond Tilbury

Black British films and television programmes across time periods remain fixated on English cities, notably London. Rural crime shows like the BBC’s Murder is Easy (2023) showed me the possibilities of period dramas made to unsettle the ‘green unpleasant land’.3 This programme did more for me than Three Little Birds (2023) or even Small Axe (2020) showing the potential of Black leads in period dramas set in the postwar period where racialisation isn’t the primary focus. Despite this miniseries following a Nigerian in rural England in 1954, I saw scope for doing the same in other places that housed lone Black Caribbean individuals and communities.

During the same years that Small Axe is set, Northampton and Wellingborough had thriving Black Caribbean communities. Meanwhile, from the 60s and into the 70s, housing developments were necessitated by large movements of people relocating from the cities to provincial areas of the Midlands. This is what led to the building of estates like Hemmingwell and Queensway in Wellingborough and The Arbours in Northampton, whose existence did not come without challenge from locals – lots of whom saw their neighbourhoods as guarded sites of belonging.4

3Fowler, C., Green Unpleasant Land, (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2020). 4Ibid., p.18.

Many of those who came from London had Northampton and Wellingborough ‘sold’ to them as ‘new towns’ that were cheaper to live in and were every bit London’s match as far as high street shopping experiences – a history that has been lost due to mainstream preoccupations with London. Novels such as Lonely Londoners5 and Small Island6 are part of a canon of great writing that have been positioned by UK publishing as representative of all postwar Black Caribbean experiences. Likewise on big and small screens: from Pressure, 7 through to Babylon8 and Burning an Illusion9, Black British films almost exclusively treat London as if it’s the pinnacle of Black British experiences. Other texts include Desmond’s, 10 Young Soul Rebels, 11 and The Real McCoy, 12 giving rise to films like the Kidulthood Trilogy,13 Belle,14 Rocks, 15 and Rye Lane16

Northamptonshire, the site of my research, has an adjacent history going back to 1948 when Winston Nelson, a demobilised Jamaican RAF pilot came to Northampton. He married a white woman called Phyllis Turner. Their daughter Barbara, along with her siblings, were part of a generation of Northamptonians from mixed parentage who lived alongside local children of Black American servicemen and white women in the 1960s.

Nonetheless, those with executive power in TV and film production continue to centralise London (largely) as the only site of ‘historical production’ of postwar Black Caribbean experiences.17 If we acknowledge the screen as a place where history is produced (as much as it is in publications), we may begin to understand firstly, why I am met with shock that Northampton has had a Caribbean presence since at least 1950. And secondly, the continued surprise that Black people have been in provincial England for centuries.18

When my great-grandfather Ben-Mark left Concord, Grenada, in 1960, he was leaving behind a very rural life. His daughters – my grandmother and auntie – told me that they came from a farming community sustaining themselves on natural produce made from the land. GreatGrandma Ty (Figure 6.1), with my grandmother and auntie (then children), arrived in 1962 after being sent for. Similarly, my cousin Weekes Baptiste, who came to Northampton in 1968, reminisced to me about his rural upbringing without a television in their family home, only to become obsessed with films and cinema on arriving.

5Selvon, S., The Lonely Londoners, (London: Allan Wingate, 1957).

6Levy, A., Small Island, (London: Review, 2004).

7Dir. Horace Ové, 1976.

8Dir. Franco Rosso, 1980

9Dir. Menelik Shabazz, 1981.

10Channel 4, 1989-94.

11Dir. Isaac Julien, 1991.

12Channel 4, 1991-96

13Dir. Noel Clarke, 2006-16.

14Dir. Amma Asante, 2013.

15Dir. Sarah Gavron, 2019.

16Dir. Raine Allen Miller, 2023.

17Trouillot, M.-R., Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), p.20.

18Habib, I., Black Lives in the English Archive, (London: Routledge, 2008); Aspinall, P. and Caballero, C. Mixed-Race Britain in the Twentieth Century, (London: Palgrave, 2018).

Figure 6.1. Toylie Noel. My great-grandmother, Grandma Ty, died before I was born. But like many Caribbean women in Northampton during the 1960s and 1970s, she was bold and of character.

(Source: Noel Family)

For many people who came from rural areas of the Caribbean only to be thrust into big cities, there is a rural heritage within the stories of transatlantic Caribbean relocation which is at risk of being lost. The alienating city life could possibly be one of the reasons why my grandmother’s auntie and uncle, Dina Cadore (née Noel) and John Cadore came to Northampton from London. Likewise, Ben-Mark started in London, as did my grandfather Sarge and his brother, Albert Ventour (known as Uncle Wiseman).

Ben-Mark coming from a farming background then worked at Phipps Brewery in Northampton for years, while Toylie worked at an M1 café. During the late 1960s, she also worked at St Andrew’s and St Crispin’s psychiatric hospitals as a cleaner and was victim to some of the worst white racism that has become synonymous with the British healthcare industry. In today’s language of ‘misogynoir’,19 she was overworked and underpaid for being a Black woman. My mother also remembers her grandmother defending herself from racist white people on Northampton buses. Whilst Northamptonshire did not have the kinds of uprisings seen in many big cities, my home county is a site of Black historical production. It has nuances that articulate a Black historical experience of provincial England that decentres those usual city landscapes.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes:

We are all amateur historians with various degrees of awareness about our production … [learning] history from similar amateurs. Universities and university presses are not the only … [producers] of the historical narrative. […] Most Europeans and North Americans learn their history … through media that have not been subjected to the standards set by [higher education]. Long before [non-academics] read the historians who set the standards … for colleagues and students, they access history through celebrations, site and museum visits, movies, national holidays, and primary school books.20

19Bailey, M., ‘They aren’t talking about me…’, (Crunk Feminist, 2010) https://www.crunkfeministcollective.com/2010/03/14/they-arent-talking-about-me/; Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance, (New York: NYU Press, 2021). 20Trouillot, Silencing the Past, pp.19-20.

Following Trouillot’s articulation, we might observe that the history which swathes of the British public have consumed about Black Caribbean lives from the screen, is one of cosmopolitan cities. Auntie Dina just like many of her Caribbean Londoner counterparts also ran blues parties (as we saw in the BBC’s Small Axe). She was one of many Black Caribbean people living locally to Northampton in the 1960s that loved to have a good time and ran basement parties on Vernon Terrace.

Black communities in Northampton and Wellingborough curated parties in their homes because many local clubs did not want Black customers. In Northampton, many of the pubs on Wellingborough Road practiced colour bars which created a need for the local Black community to “make our own fun”, in the words of my grandfather. They made their own fun due to racism, in some cases charging for entry, further for food and drinks. Someone would normally cook such delights as curry goat, curry chicken, plantain, rice and peas and more. Across the country, these parties were criminalised by police. In Wellingborough, some of the early parties occurred at the Co-ops on Oxford Street and Cannon Street. The Gloucester on Church Street also operated a shebeen, while Rock Street Community Centre (now WACA) held blues in the 70s.

From the early 1960s, ska had reached Northampton and there were ska parties in The Mounts (later morphing into reggae). One of my elder aunties told me that during the 1960s, she would “dance the night away” every weekend! At these parties you may have heard the sounds of the Skatalites, Prince Buster, Toots & The Maytals, Millie Small, Desmond Dekker, and more. Sometimes, neighbours complained to the police leading to raids. Often, police would tell partiers to turn the music down. Granddad Sarge recalls some officers could be reasoned with, and won over by drink or food!

These parties in Northamptonshire were in places that were in closer proximity to the rural –more fields than masses of buildings. Furthermore, there were fewer cars on the road back then. Those who came to Northamptonshire as children in the 1950s and 1960s and/or grew up locally in that era into the early 1970s talked to me about how they would go to youth clubs, scrumping, “nyam sweeties”, and go on bike rides. These descriptions remind me of the Kids-on-Bikes genre storytelling of the day: everything from The Goonies21 and Close Encounters, 22 to Stephen King’s Stand By Me 23

One of my participants telling me “Young people now, know lots about the world, but have little freedom in it” exists juxtaposed to the experiences of Black children in 1950s, 1960s, and early 70s Northants. Descriptions of childhood from Black people who grew up in Northamptonshire during these years appear no different to the texturally white palette of 1980s young adult adventure cinema. In many ways, their descriptions speak against the assumptions modern audiences have made about Black experiences of those who lived outside of the cities. The way people punch down on the 50s, 60s and early 70s, especially some people my age, is quite dismissive of the fact we are largely still fighting many of the same problems – particularly on the grounds of discrimination. Concurrently, many of my generation regularly talk to me about ‘modern times’ as ‘more enlightened’ because ‘it’s not old’ – I find this challenging. In the early days, Abington was where many of Northampton’s Black Caribbean community lived and because of this, it was much harder for white racism to present itself without being challenged, especially among young people. By the 1980s, social youth groups were increasingly mixed, and racism was not tolerated. In many schools, anybody caught doing it, got beaten up. Racism was pervasive in Northants but was not free from consequence.

21Dir. Steven Spielberg, 1985.

22Dir. Steven Spielberg, 1977.

23Dir. Rob Reiner, 1987.

Yet, for many Black people who were not in Abington or in town life could be much harder. Areas like Duston, Kingsthorpe, Delapré, and Far Cotton were described to me as places where Black people were fewer in number and less protected, while white racism was empowered. These were also areas that had a National Front presence, as the headquarters was in Rushden. At Delapré School in the late 1960s, June-Elizabeth White-Smith Gulley described being chased through Far Cotton Recreational Ground (a park known as Far Cotton Rec) by a mob of white boys chanting the N-Word.

Living in the Northampton area during the late 40s Phyllis Turner (Barbara Nelson’s mom) was spat at by white people for having children with a Black man. A Black Mixed-Heritage woman I spoke with recalls her white mother telling her about being sent to a reform home by her own father for being “wayward and uncontrollable” (he just did not like her dating Black men). Similarly, Mary Clarke as a Black Mixed-Heritage child in the late 1960s / early 1970s, recalls at four years old being chased through Kingsthorpe by white children holding shiny objects (probably knives). Her mother, Pat Heasman, had stones thrown at her by white people while pushing Mary’s brother in a pushchair.

The stories of racism I have been told across 100+ hours of interviews range from being infantilised to being infirmed. Yet, many who grew up between 1955 and 1975 recall having wonderful childhoods. The racism they experienced was mainly tolerable due to unofficial solidarity networks. And for lots of them, they say racism is worse now since there’s less community today and the fighting spirit that manifested in the school playground and in local pubs in the face of racism has been domesticated out of us!

Stranger Things

Terms like ‘rural’, usually conjure images of diddly chapels, rolling hills, bowls, cricket, pubs, fêtes, cows, sheep, and locals chasing outsiders with pitchforks! Going to school in the stix as I did, my early school days were more akin to the whiteness of those Edwardian children’s novels than the Black aesthetics of Rocks or Desmond’s

Although some may argue towns like Northampton and Wellingborough are not ‘rural’ in the traditional sense, Londoners in those days considered them as ‘country’. Many of the housing estates we now have were fields. Areas like Lings, Standens Barn, The Arbours and others which expanded Northampton to the east were built to cater for those problematically labelled as ‘London Overspill’, many of whom moved for jobs and cheaper housing. In the 70s, there was a lot of discontent from ‘Northamptonians’ to Londoners coming to live here that could be compared to village tribalism. Many locals saw Londoners as an infringement on ‘their way of life’. Northampton was a town, but its mentality was so rural like a bad parody of an English village – very Midsomer Murders!

Between 1950 and the early 1970s, if somebody Caribbean came to Northampton, everybody knew: ‘Who are you?’, ‘Where are you from?’ and ‘Who’s your family?’ are questions that were asked. Newcomers were met with curiosity and suspicion, whether from overseas or from another city or town. This is why I find myself relating to many of the village period dramas lots more than films made about Black Caribbean people living in London. Seeing village suspicion and the eventual welcome of Luke Obiako Fitzwilliam, from Nigeria, in Murder is Easy, 24 brought me joy. Similarly, how Georgiana Lambe, a Bajan is scrutinised in Sanditon25 (based on Jane Austen’s unfinished novel) reminded me of my childhood rural schooling and cricket matches.

As a child, I would visit many of my school friends at their village homes. Childhood sleepovers were never in the more diverse Northampton; I was going to Sywell, Horton, Yardley Hastings, Gayton… an apparent interloper to the countryside even though Black people have existed in the English countryside for centuries. However, these rural areas are spaces that have been conceptually claimed by ‘our’ white overlords as sacred to them. The existence of groups like Black Girls Hike and Stroud Against Racism remind us of the racism inherent in who is conceptually allowed to belong in the countryside. Black hikers and pubgoers, for example, in these spaces, are still seen as outsiders – what Nirmal Puwar calls ‘space invaders’ in institutional contexts.

When I have talked about my experiences of growing up and going on long walks in Brixworth Country Park with my Jamaican godmother and her family, my Black colleagues who grew up in big cities are aghast in disbelief. This became more apparent during my undergraduate degree. When Black students from north and south London asked me where I was from, they couldn’t believe I grew up in Northampton. Let alone a childhood of nature walks and camping that was entirely normal to my family’s way of life. Yet, in hindsight I can say my family were always the only Black family in these environments. Whilst in Northampton, I was also socialised by the stix. I love the rural, as I rediscovered going to Cumbria for the first time in November 2023. Though there is ‘rural racism’,26 this is familiar to me, and I think this is why I have more ease with rural whiteness than white spaces in big cities.

As students from London have started coming to study at my local university, the same fear of Londoners that occurred in the 1970s in some cases has resurfaced, aimed at students from local residents. Being victim to that type of geographical ‘othering’ is something I experienced being a ‘townie’ going to school in a village. It is a reminder that representations of Black history on our screens must account for other British geographies since London is not the centre of the universe. There will be acute differences to how different Black Caribbean communities express themselves and act, but also how Black Caribbean individuals are seen when surrounded by the whiteness of the Home Counties and Middle England, very different to their experience of the whiteness that pervades major cities. One of my participants, a Jamaican who moved to South London as a child, encountered this, when she moved to the Northants village of Bozeat in 1980 and was the only Black woman in the village for a while. Living in white Bozeat, she used to have to go to Northampton, Wellingborough, or London for Black cultural stuffs, like events, foods, and hair appointments. She was often going back to the capital. But many did not, in fact many made their own fun.

For Black youth in Northampton, Matta Fancanta on Sheep Street was a unifying force – a self-organised and self-managed space that provided activities and professional development for young people. It was an alternative to the local youth service, which was not functioning effectively to cater to Black youngsters.27

24BBC, 2023.

25ITV, 2019.

26Chakroborti, N. and Garland, J., Rural Racism, (London: Routledge, 2004).

27Tre Ventour ed., ‘“Wi Likkle, But Wi Tallawah”: Northampton Town Blacktivism + Matta Fancanta Caribbean Youth, 1970-95’, (YouTube, 2024), https:// youtu.be/4XtCH7Ih8eU.

6.2. This news article published by the West Indian World in 1977 was saved by Lee Bryant. He showed me this and many other documents when I interviewed him in May 2023. (Source: Lee Bryant / Photo:

BabyloNN: A Local History

In 1975, a group of Black men drove from Knightsbridge in London to The Gambia on the African continent. One of these men was Lee Bryant, who had come to London as a child from Jamaica in 1959, moving to Northampton in the early 1970s as a motivated and inspired young adult. In The Gambia, he was inspired by young Black people on a beach. None of them were older than eighteen years old, but they were running a youth centre. His experiences changed his perceptions of what responsibility can look like. If they could run a centre, why couldn’t Black youngsters do that in Northampton? This is in-part what led to Matta Fancanta, developed through many conversations in people’s houses. For example, on his return, Lee’s house in Lumbertubs and then Palmerston Road was filled with people for weeks wanting to know about Africa. It was then suggested by a Black American man called Julian that they could squat a place.

In 1977, Black Caribbean youngsters conducted a forty-eight-day squat of the old Salvation Army Citadel on Sheep Street in the town centre (Figure 6.2). People like Lee Bryant, Ras Jabulani, Pedro Samuel, Ira Moven, Jobe, and others were part of the original squatters crew. Jobe used to sleep there overnight while undercover police disguised as homeless people tried to coax him out under false pretences. That first night, they did battle with the police and really every night until the police stopped coming!

What became known as Movement or MFM (Matta Fancanta Movement), was a self-managed space for youth activities and professional development – an alternative to local authority youth provisions. Before MFM opened, a white man called Tom ran Steps Youth Club on Kingswell Street, which was attended by many young white and Black people. When Steps folded, many that used it simply transitioned to MFM. After the local establishment stopped threatening

Figure

Tré Ventour-Griffiths)

Figure 6.3. Sarah Berry, 1976. Between 1973 and 1977, Sarah did lots of work on racism in education and work in the Northampton area. In particular, the work she did collaboratively with people like Morcea Walker and Ivan Bryan was instrumental in the convening of the West Indian Parents Association in 1974 as part of a wider Black Parents Movement. She also spoke out in support of Matta Fancanta. (Source: Sarah Berry)

Movement, they gave them some money in the form of grants to run classes in electronics and reprographic printing. A Jamaican called Herbert McKenzie, who had trained in printing at the local paper The Chronicle & Echo, ran the printing press (that was owned by the organisation). Electronics was run by a guy called Phil, nicknamed ‘White Phil’, who taught electronics to many Black guys for several years. These professional development opportunities allowed young people to upskill themselves, many of whom had already been failed by local schools. With many MFM members being Rastafarian, they faced discrimination in employment and from elders. This was compounded by racist schooling, illustrated in the work done by the West Indian Parents Association (WIPA) founded in 1974.

Before the founding of WIPA, in 1973 Sarah Berry (a white woman) came to Northampton to work for what was called Northampton Council for Community Relations (Figure 6.3). Her boss was a Black man called Bernard Gibbs (from Grenada). Growing up on a farm between Market Harborough and Corby, she witnessed her parents’ activities in the anti-apartheid movement. Soaking up this kind of politics, including the left, she later worked at the UK Immigrants Advisory Service in Manchester and Preston Community Relations Council before circling back to Northants. In Northampton, she did a lot about racism in workplaces and education. She was also part of a collective, that conducted a survey on Black student aspirations. This lead to the formation of WIPA in 1974, including the convening of local Caribbean Saturday Schools. The construction of WIPA followed the ESN scandal where during the late 60s and early 70s lots of Black children were being called ‘educationally subnormal’.28 Likewise, able Black children in Northants were targeted within this ableist racist logic such as at Weavers School in Wellingborough and Billing Brook in Northampton.

28 Coard, B., How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Subnormal In the British School System, (London: New Beacon, 1971); Subnormal: A British Scandal, (BBC, 2021).

So, the founding of Matta Fancanta by many young Rastas was viewed as antagonistic to the white establishment (namely policing and local authority), in addition to Black organisations who saw Rastas as criminals and drug-dealers – as many of their parents arrived in Britain in the 50s and 60s with colonial mindsets. These young people were victims of local police, further to security in the new shopping complex – the Grosvenor Centre. In that era, police already targeting Black people (predominantly young men) had those actions greenlit by the state with the introduction of Sus Laws in the 1980s.

Matta Fancanta existed in a time where white supremacy pervaded mainstream employment and education and stunted Black progression. This organisation was a form of activism that inspired others, including Punjabi youths in Leicester who went on to squat the Moat Boys’ School in around 1982-83 as an alternative to local authority youth services and Asian organisations based around religion and dominated by old(er) men. Movement was freedom from oppression, as many of their elder parents had arrived in England with colonial mindsets. Rastafari became identifiable with many youth experiences. MFM held many activities, including a magazine, fashion shows, arts and crafts, film exhibits, sports teams, African dancing workshops, Rasta education, Sound System, and Caribbean dances. This centre became a point of engagement for many young people and a hub for any young person who wanted a piece of the action.

White in Black

Although cities like London have similar yet different Black Caribbean histories to counties like Northamptonshire, friends and colleagues in my vicinity have frequently reminded me of the importance of my localised research. To see the place you call home written and talked about with same enthusiasm that broadcasters give Black London has brought belonging – both to white and Black people. Nuances exist in many of the stories, including the relationship between Persuaders Youth Club and local police in the 1970s and 1980s. This would not have happened in many cities – in the same era as uprisings in Brixton and Lewisham in London, Moss Side in Manchester, and Handsworth in Birmingham. Though my local police are not beyond criticism, the Met’s style of policing especially, is very specific to London and has its own history.

With films like Babylon (set in London) and ITV’s Three Little Birds (set in Dudley), I observed a familiar representation of racist policing. In provincial 1970s Northampton, we too had those scenarios concurrently with a community policing that has its own stories worth telling. Image-making remains influential to tell stories, but current film and television depictions of postwar Black Caribbean life centralise those city lights. For producers and production houses, it would do them well to consider other stories that existed from the earliest days of the 1950s when many Caribbean people settled in places like Aylesbury, Gloucester, Doncaster, Leighton Buzzard, and High Wycombe.

Lone white police officers were not the only white people to positively influence how various communities saw the Black presence in Northamptonshire. Similarly, the founding of Wellingborough Oral History Group in the 1980s was a mixed affair, including a public meeting that saw Staying Power author and historian Peter Fryer speak at The Victoria Centre. Whilst London had people like Sally Tomlinson (now a university professor) working against the ESN Scandal, alongside figures like Gus John (also now a professor), Eric and Jessica Huntley, and New Beacon founders John LaRose and Sarah White, Northamptonshire also had many equally committed characters. You have already heard about Sarah Berry. White historians like Dr Julia Bush and activists like Paul Crofts played vital roles in the origin story of Northamptonshire Black History Association, with many others – Black and white.

End

My communities have incredible stories going back decades that could well be put to screen. London has long been presented as the Black British knowledge centre, but maybe it’s time to explore beyond its borders into provincial England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. In mainstream representation about Black England, cities eclipse the narrative, notably London and other port cities like Bristol and Liverpool – while other geographies have been wilfully ignored. Here, tales like that of my family history (and others), trouble Britain’s small island story and notions of Black London as universal. There are many Black British histories. All we need do is look.

This chapter is based on interviews done as part of original PhD research