CHAPTER ONE ‘In Our Grand Metropolis’
Sale of a Negro Boy. – In the account of the trial of John Rice, who was hanged for forgery at Tyburn, May 4, 1763, it is said, ‘A commission of bankruptcy having been taken out against Rice, his effects were sold by auction, and among the rest his negro boy.’ I could not have believed such a thing could have taken place so lately; there is little doubt it was the last of the kind.
Poet’s Corner A.A.
(Letter to Notes and Queries, 1858)1
it is wrong for 20th-century multi-culturalists to invent a spurious history for black settlement in Britain before the Fifties and Sixties.
(Geoffrey Littlejohns, letter to The Independent, 1995)2
A.A. WAS WRONG. In the years following his letter of baffled disgust, many of the antiquarians, genealogists and men of letters who made up the readership of Notes and Queries wrote in to provide subsequent examples of African men and women being parcelled off to the highest bidder at public auctions held in the centre of the English capital. A.A.’s question, the ensuing lost-and-found advertisements, and the details of slave auctions which were reprinted in the journal, are evidence of the speed and ease with which London’s malodorous past had been forgotten in some of the most learned quarters of English society. Although slavery had only been fully abolished as recently as 1838, it required archivists and antiquarians to fill in the large chinks that were already emerging in the public memory.
The most cursory glance at the paintings, the prints and the literature will prove how myopic it is to insist on a culturally homogeneous conception of the eighteenth century. Empire not only underpinned the swelling British economy during this period, but was crucial to the capital’s well-being. The Thames allowed London to become one of the world’s leading trading centres. Tea, sugar, cotton, cloth, spices, coffee, rum, fruit, wine, tobacco, rice, corn, oil were just some of the products ferried into London from India, Africa and the Americas. Nearly all of these goods depended on slave labour. Not for nothing did a coin – the guinea – derive its etymology from the West African region of that name, the area from which hundreds of thousands of natives were seized in order to work on plantations across the Atlantic. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the African became literally a unit of currency.
By 1750 London was the second most important slaving port in the country. Alderman Newnham, one of the capital’s MPs, and a partner in a banking firm who had formerly worked as a sugar merchant, as well as the head of a grocery business, claimed Abolition ‘would render the city of London one scene of bankruptcy and ruin’.3 Between 1660 and 1690 fifteen Lord Mayors, twenty-five sheriffs and thirty-eight aldermen of the City of London were shareholders in the Royal African Company, the trading operation that held a monopoly on shipping Africans to the colonies. Many MPs were either West India planters or their descendants. Sir Richard Neave, a director of the Bank of England for forty-eight years, was also Chairman of the Society of West India Merchants.4
One consequence of this transatlantic trade was the rising number of black Africans who began to enter the capital. They were brought over as servants by planters, returning Government officials, and military and naval officers.5 They were used as reassuring companions to comfort their masters on their long voyages back to an island from which some had been absent for decades. Other blacks had been offered as perks for the commanders of slaving vessels:
The post of captain of such a craft was a lucrative one, and those who gained it were prone to make display of their good fortune by the use of gaudily-laced coats and cocked hats, and large silver or sometimes gold buttons on their coats. A special mark of distinction was the black slave attending them in the streets.6
These naval captains were allowed to sell their slaves in the capital. Auctions were by no means secret affairs: slaves ‘were sold on the Exchange and other places of public resort by parties themselves resident in London’.7 That this was possible, despite the longstanding belief that the air of England was too pure for slaves to breathe, and the assertion in 1728 by Lord Chief Justice Holt that, ‘As soon as a negro comes to England he becomes free’, was confirmed by two legal rulings. The first, in 1729, was issued by the attorney-general Sir Philip Yorke and the solicitor-general Charles Talbot; their counter-opinion was that the mere fact of a slave coming from the West Indies to Great Britain or Ireland did not render him free, and that he could be compelled to return again to the plantations. The second, in 1749, was a judgement by Lord Hardwicke, that runaway slaves could legally be recovered.8
Many Africans found themselves working as butlers and attendants in aristocratic households. Their duties were rarely onerous and their chief function seems to have been decorative and ornamental. They served as human equivalents of the porcelain, textiles, wallpapers, and lacquered pieces that the English nobility was increasingly buying from the East.9 These slaves were often dressed in fancy garb, their heads wrapped in bright turbans. Owners selected them on the basis of their looks and the lustre of their young skin much as dog fanciers today might coo and trill over a cute poodle.
Oil paintings of aristocratic families from this period make the point clearly: artists such as John Wootton, Peter Lely and Bartholomew Dandridge positioned negroes on the edges or the rear of their canvases from where they gaze wonderingly at their masters and mistresses. In order to reveal a ‘hierarchy of power relationships’, they were often placed next to dogs and other domestic animals with whom they shared, according to the art critic David Dabydeen, ‘more or less the same status’.10 Their humanity effaced, they exist in these pictures as solitary mutes, aesthetic foils to their owners’ economic fortunes.
Yet, on the whole, black people were well-treated by the nobility. Relationships flourished, not only in the kitchens and the pantries where blacks and working-class maids flirted and fondled, but between black servants and the aristocracy itself. Owners often took it upon themselves to educate their possessions and gave them lessons in prosody, drawing, musical composition. Dr Johnson famously left his Jamaica-born employee Francis Barber a seventy-pound annuity and, much to the disgust of his biographer Sir John Hawkins, made him his residuary legatee.11 Johnson was happy to pray together with Barber and refused to let him go and buy food for his cat as he felt that ‘it was not good to employ human beings in the service of animals’. His politics both shaped and were shaped by this friendship: ‘How is it’, he once roared about America, ‘that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?’12 Over two hundred years on, Barber’s descendants still live in the Lichfield area where he moved after Johnson’s death. They are all white now, and the name will die out with this generation: the last male descendant’s children are all daughters.
Less well-known than Barber is Julius Soubise who was born on the Caribbean island of St Kitts in 1754. Brought to England as a ten-year-old, he was fortunate enough to be taken under the wing of Kitty, Duchess of Queensberry. She tried to bribe one Dominico Angelo Malevolti Tremamondo, an Italian fencing master based in Windsor, to teach him to fence and ride. Reluctantly he agreed but refused to take her money. Soubise was an adept student and soon became an accomplished equestrian and fencer. He also learned to play the violin, compose musical pieces and, with the help of the elder Sheridan, improve his elocution.
Soubise’s self-regard burgeoned dramatically and he began to claim to all and sundry that he was an African Prince. Never shy of an audience, he sang comic songs and delighted in amateur dramatics. According to Henry Angelo, ‘his favourite exhibition was Romeo in the garden scene. When he came to that part, “O that I was a glove upon that hand, that I might touch that cheek,” the black face, the contrast of his teeth, turning up the white of his eyes as he mouthed, a general laugh always ensued, which indeed was not discouraging to his vanity, and did not prevent him pursuing his rhetorical opinions of himself.’13 He goes on:
I remember seeing him, when presenting a chair to a lady, if from some distance, make three pauses, pushing it along some feet each time, skipping with an entre-chat en avant, then a pirouette when placed. One of his songs, truly ridiculous, his black face and powdered woolly head not suitable to the words, was a Vauxhall song then, ‘As now my bloom comes on a-pace, the girls begin to tease me’; when he came to tease, making a curtsey to the ground, and affecting to blush, placing his hands before his face, an encore was sure to follow.14
Soubise excelled as a fop and doused himself with such powerful perfumes that members of the audience attending the same theatrical performance as him had been known to exclaim, ‘I scent Soubise!’15 He was also a serial philanderer and was often spotted at the opera surrounded by aristocratic women. Even during the time he worked as an usher to Dominico Angelo at Eton he often drove up to Windsor ‘with his chère amie, in a post-chaise and four. There, Madame, waiting his return from the college, he would meet her, dine in style at the Castle-inn, take his champagne and claret, entertain half a dozen hangers on, and return to town by the same conveyance.’16
A member of fashionable London clubs, and accustomed to riding fine horses in Hyde Park, the increasingly cocky Soubise also fancied himself not only as a poet – composing chiefly romantic sonnets – but as an accomplished letter-writer. His notoriety flourished, no doubt to his satisfaction, and it was rumoured that the Duchess of Queensberry was besotted – and possibly sexually involved – with him. In 1773 William Austin produced an engraving that showed her and a dandified Soubise fencing.
His fall from grace, though it had been long forecast, was sudden. The Duchess, upon learning that one of her maids had been raped by Soubise, tried to dissuade her from going to court. The young woman was adamant, and in July 1777 the Duchess paid for Soubise to flee the country. Two days later she died. Soubise sailed to Calcutta where he established a riding and fencing academy and trained Arab horses. He died in August 1798 after falling from a horse and damaging his skull.
The following letter originally appeared in the anonymous Nocturnal Revels (1779). Lascivious and strategically self-abasing, it is unfortunately the only piece of Soubise’s writing known to have survived:
Dear Miss,
I have often beheld you in public with rapture; indeed it is impossible to view you without such emotions as must animate every man of sentiment. In a word, Madam, you have seized my heart, and I dare tell you I am your Negro Slave. You startle at this expression, Madam; but I love to be sincere. I am of that swarthy race of Adam, whom some despise on account of their complexion; but I begin to find from experience, that even this trial of our patience may last for a time, as Providence has given such knowledge to man, as to remedy all the evils of this life. There is not a disorder under the sun which may not, by the skill and industry of the learned, be removed: so do I find, that similar applications in the researches of medicine, have brought to bear such discoveries, as to remove the tawny hue of any complexion, if applied with skill and perseverance. In this pursuit, my dear Miss, I am resolutely engaged, and hope, in a few weeks, I may be able to throw myself at your feet, in as agreeable a form as you can desire; in the mean time, believe me with the greatest sincerity,
Your’s most devotedly,
My Lovely Angel,
Soubise.17
Soubise’s letter did not elicit quite the response he hoped for. The recipient, a wealthy young lady known to us as ‘Miss G—’, broke into hysterical laughter before writing back sarcastically:
I acknowledge a Black man was always the favourite of my affections; and that I never yet saw either OROONOKO or othello without rapture. But lest you could imagine I have not in every respect your warmest wishes at heart, I have inclosed a little packet [a parcel of carmine and pearl powders] (some of which I use myself when I go to a Masquerade), which will have the desired effect, in case your nostrums should fail. Apply it, I beseech you, instantly, that I may have the pleasure of seeing you as soon as possible.18
It’s not hard to see how, educated and smothered with the kind of love that Soubise was, blacks might identify with their masters and begin to assume their airs and graces. Some even adopted their methods of conflict resolution. In 1780 Lloyd’s Evening Post lamented that
The absurd custom of duelling is become so prevalent that two Negroe Servants in the neighbourhood of Piccadilly, in consequence of a trifling dispute, went into the Long-Fields, behind Montagu-house, on Thursday morning, attended by two party-coloured Gentlemen, as their seconds, when on the discharge of the first case of pistols, one of the combatants received a shot in the cheek, which beat on some of his teeth, and the affair was settled.19
Good treatment was no substitute for liberty. To be treated as a clever pet was not much of an existence. Many wore metal collars, inscribed with the owner’s name and coat of arms, riveted round their necks. The numerous ‘lost-and-found’ advertisements in London newspapers during this period attest to the high incidence of slaves running away:
a Negro boy by name Guy, about 14 years old, very black, with a cinnamon colour’d serge coat, waistcoat, and breeches, with a silver lace’d black hat, speaks English very well, hath absented himself from his master (Major Robert Walker) ever since the 4th instant. Whoever shall bring the above said Negro boy into Mr Lloyd’s Coffee-house in Lombard-street London, shall receive a guinea reward, with reasonable charges.20
Highly visible on account of their colour and their loud dress, it wasn’t easy for runaway blacks to escape detection and capture:
Mary Harris, a black-woman of the parish of St Giles in the Fields, was indicted for feloniously stealing a pair of Holland sheets, three smocks, and other goods of Nicholas Laws, gent, on the 30th November last. It appeared that she was a servant in the house, and took the goods, which were afterwards pawned by the prisoner; she had little to say for herself and it being her first offence, the jury considering the matter, found her guilty to the value of 10d. To be whipt.21
Runaways tended to flee in the direction of St Dunstan’s, Ratcliff and St George’s-in-the-East, areas blighted by poverty which had comparatively large black populations.22 Here, amongst overcrowded and unhygienic houses located in stenchy, ill-paved alleys full of brothels, rundown lodging houses and dens for thieves, sailors and the dregs of society, they eked out illicit, subterranean livings. They had to. Few of them had marketable skills. Nor did they have contacts in the provinces or in the countryside to whom they could turn. They scraped together piecemeal lives – begging, stealing, doing odd jobs, going to sea – alongside the white underclasses of the East End who extended the hand of friendship to them. So much so, in fact, that Sir John Fielding, a magistrate, and brother of the novelist Henry, complained that when black domestic servants ran away and, as they often did, found ‘the Mob on their Side, it makes it not only difficult but dangerous to the Proprietor of these Slaves to recover the Possession of them, when once they are sported away’.23
Africans and English sang and danced together at mixed-race hops. Inevitably they also slept with each other – much to the disgust of the literate middle classes: the narrator of Defoe’s Serious Reflections (1720) spots a black mulatto-looking man in a London public house speaking eloquently and intelligently. During their conversation, the mulatto, whose colour had precluded him from entering the kind of respectable profession his education merited, curses, to the obvious approval of the narrator, his father who ‘has twice ruin’d me; first with getting me with a frightful Face, and rhen [sic] going to paint a Gentleman upon me’.24 Over half a century later in 1788, Philip Thicknesse bemoaned that ‘London abounds with an incredible number of these black men [ … ] in almost every village are to be seen a little race of mulattoes, mischievous as monkies and infinitely more dangerous’.25
Demographics, as much as the easy-going tolerance of the proletariat, shaped the high levels of intermarriage. Throughout the eighteenth century barely twenty per cent of the black population was female. Most men – including the likes of Francis Barber and the writer Olaudah Equiano – married white women. This challenges the common assumption that the high percentage of black-white relationships in Britain today is a recent phenomenon, one that is a by-product of multiculturalism or increased social liberalism.
It also shows how misleading is talk of ‘the black community’ in eighteenth-century London. Certainly slaves did meet up whenever possible to gossip, reminisce and exchange vital information. When two of them were imprisoned in Bridewell for begging they were visited by more than 300 fellow blacks. And in 1764 a newspaper reported that
no less than 57 of them, men and women, supped, drank, and entertained themselves with dancing and music, consisting of violins, French horns and other instruments, at a public-house in Fleet Street, till four in the morning. No whites were allowed to be present for all the performers were Black.26
But such occasions seem to have been exceptional. The black population, even in big cities such as Liverpool and London, was simply too small for its members to try to isolate themselves from the white English majority. Of course, it was itself racially diverse: black Londoners hailed from different tribes and regions of Africa. Some had been born or spent long stretches in the Caribbean or in North America; others had spent most of their lives in the United Kingdom. They spoke different Englishes: some, brought up by their aristocrat owners, used language that was refined and decorous; others, educated at sea, preferred jack tar lingo, a stew of Cockney, Creole, Irish, Spanish and low-grade American. Class mattered at least as much as colour in how they dealt with day-to-day vicissitudes.
Recent studies indicate that there were probably never more than about 10,000 blacks in eighteenth-century England at any one time.27 This out of a population that had swollen rapidly to over nine million by 1800. Even in London, where swarthy men and women were most commonly found, they made up less than one per cent of the citizenry. Numbers did rise, however, in the early 1780s when, following the War of Independence, hundreds of black Americans who had been promised their liberty in return for supporting the Loyalist cause fled to London. Lacking money and education, many starved or froze to death on the city’s streets. Their plight attracted widespread public sympathy. Money for food and relief was contributed by all sections of society. The philanthropists and Abolitionist Evangelicals who sat on the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor decided that the best long-term solution for their charges was to offer them assisted passages out of England.
Influenced by the naturalist Henry Smeathman’s arguments that Sierra Leone offered warmth, a fertile climate and a fine harbour, the Committee arranged for the blacks to be shipped there. Many members were keen for the black settlers to have an opportunity to run their own community. This, they believed, would be an effective rejoinder to the anti-Abolitionists who claimed Africans were incapable of self-government. After months of delay and prevarication, in April 1787 a small fleet of ships carrying 459 passengers finally set sail as part of the first ‘Back To Africa’ repatriation scheme in history. Unfortunately they had the misfortune to arrive at the start of the rainy season; about a third died, and the rest quarrelled with their African neighbours who, refusing to see them as ‘brothers’ or ‘sisters’, burned down their settlement.
In the eighteenth century, as has been the case since the Second World War, the notion (however insecurely founded in reality) that too many black people were entering the country animated a number of critics. In 1723 the Daily Journal wrote, ‘’Tis said there is a great number of Blacks come daily into this city, so that ‘tis thought in a short time, if they be not suppress’d the city will swarm with them’.28 And in 1731, long before the build-up of a sizeable African presence in the metropolis, the Lord Mayor of London issued a proclamation decreeing that blacks could no longer hold company apprenticeships.
Foreign travellers were startled (and Americans appalled) by how cosmopolitan the streets of London appeared. As early as 1710 one German visitor noted that, ‘there are, in fact, such a quantity of Moors of both sexes in England that I have not seen before’.29 In a city whose increasing prosperity meant its streets were awash with noble women wrapped in costly shawls and dazzling pearls and shops which displayed exquisite jewellery and exotic fruit, black people embodied a new kind of globalism. Sitting down to compose the ‘Residence in London’ section of The Prelude (1805), William Wordsworth recalled his thrill upon emerging from three years of blanched provincialism at Cambridge:
Now homeward through the thickening hubbub [ … ]
The Hunter-Indian; Moors,
Malays, Lascars, the Tartar, the Chinese,
And Negro Ladies in white muslin Gowns.30
Black faces could be seen, if only in isolation, in most quarters of London society. Many turned to music: black bandsmen – particularly trumpeters, drummers and horn players – served with army regiments; others mustered meagre livings by fiddling on street corners and around taverns. Non-melodians begged, swept crossings, or turned to prostitution. Johnson’s biographer, Boswell, even recorded the existence of a black brothel in London in 1774.
Black Londoners had a visibility far in excess of their small numbers. Images of them cropped up everywhere. They often featured in the prints of Hogarth, Cruikshank, Gillray and Rowlandson, as well as on countless tradesmen’s cards – particularly those of tobacconists. They were used to advertise products such as razors: ‘Ah Massa, if I am continued in your service, dat will be ample reward for Scipio bring good news to you of Packwood’s new invention that will move tings with a touch.’31 Huge pictures of negro heads or black boys were ostentatiously displayed on the signs outside taverns, shops and coffeehouses. Attractively painted and gilded, these extruded on to the streets, cutting out daylight on account of their size and, occasionally, falling and killing those people unfortunate enough to be passing below.
Swarthy Londoners also fleet-foot their way through much of the century’s metropolitan literature. In Thomas Brown’s Amusements Serious and Comical (1702), a quizzical Indian accompanies the narrator on his ambles through the city’s byways and sly-ways. One of the first people they see is another ‘sooty Dog’, who ‘could do nothing but Grin, and shew his Teeth, and cry, Coffee, Sir, Tea, will you please to walk in, Sir, a fresh Pot upon my word’.32 African characters were familiar to theatre-goers, with Southerne’s adaptation of Oroonoko (1696) being performed at least once a season until 1808. Stock characters with names like Mungo, Marianne or Sambo were especially popular; they functioned as comic and mangled-English-speaking versions of the black servants found in aristocratic households.
After the Abolitionist movement began to flourish in the 1770s and 1780s, it became difficult to avoid the constant gush of anti-slavery poems, songs and broadsheets flooding from the printing presses. Black men and women were cast as heroic leviathans, their teeth of finest ivory, their brows set most nobly, their souls full of pride and vigour. Yet, despite such epic stature, they rarely spoke. Their enslavement and death were drawn out with the maximum of Latinate polysyllables and pathos. It’s no surprise that almost all of these poems – florid, well-intentioned, and crammed with formulaic pieties – have been long forgotten. They deserve the scorn cast upon them by the literary historian Wylie Sypher: ‘The slave and his wretched lot were a poetical pons asinorum: the worse the poet, the more he felt obliged to elevate his subject by the cumbrous splendor of epithet, periphrasis, and apostrophe, even at the cost of dealing with the facts only by footnotes and appendices.’33
Africans were represented rhetorically as well as visually. Despite being cherished by their aristocratic owners and blending relatively seamlessly into underclass society, a cluster of negative clichés about black people developed and calcified over the course of the century: they were portrayed as stupid, indolent and libidinous. Violent and untrustworthy, they were said to lack ratiocination. They were wild and emotional. Often compared to orang-utans,* their simian propensities encouraged audiences to believe that enslaving them in no way contradicted the laws of humanity. Such tropes peppered cartoons, stage plays, private journals, plantocratic tracts, coffeehouse pontification, parliamentary invective, and the thick-skulled, blue-blooded pomposities bandied about over the clink and gleam of crystal decanters in noble dining rooms. These views were also confirmed by textbooks – the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1810 described the negro thus:
Vices the most notorious seem to be the portion of this unhappy race; idleness, treachery, revenge, cruelty, impudence, stealing, lying, profanity, debauchery, nastiness, and intemperance, are said to have extinguished the principles of natural law, and to have silenced the reproofs of conscience. They are strangers to every sentiment of compassion, and are an aweful example of the corruption of man left to himself.34
It’s clear, then, that black people were almost inescapable in eighteenth-century London. Yet though they’re often spoken about in this period, they’re rarely heard to speak for themselves. Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, or James Albert as he was christened, is an exception to this rule. His memoirs, ghost-written by Hannah More ‘for her own private Satisfaction’, were published in Bath in 1772.35
Gronniosaw, whose grandfather was the King of Baurnou in the north-eastern corner of what is now Nigeria, was sold on the Gold Coast to a Dutch captain for two yards of check cloth. After a long sea journey to Barbados, he eventually found himself in New York serving a young man called Vanhorn. He was soon sold again, this time to Theodore Frelinghuysen, an evangelical Dutch Reformed pastor who tried to educate him.36 Mental collapse ensued: having been introduced to Bunyan’s writings, Gronniosaw became so convinced of his own wickedness that he tried to kill himself with a large case-knife. His master died, forcing him to become a cook on board a privateer’s ship in order to pay off his outstanding debts which an unscrupulous friend of Frelinghuysen had promised to clear. He came through countless adventures at sea before arriving in England where he was immediately robbed of his savings by a corrupt landlady. Eager to visit the Methodist evangelist George Whitefield, whose sermons he’d been enthralled by in New York, he headed for London where the minister greeted him warmly before directing him to a lodging house in Petticoat Lane. While eating breakfast the next morning, Gronniosaw heard a clatter coming from above his head. Curious, he climbed upstairs to discover a loft full of women crouched over their looms weaving silk. One of them (never named) besotted him instantly. Despite learning that her errant husband had died, leaving her in debt and with a child to raise on her own, he decided to marry her.
Difficulties soon arose when Gronniosaw left London to earn money for his new family. Following a brief spell as a servant in Holland, he and his wife settled in a small cottage near Colchester. It was a hideously bleak winter. Gronniosaw had been discharged from work, his wife was sick and bedridden, they had no money. At one stage, they had only four carrots (given to them as a gift) to last them four days. As there was no fire the carrots had to be eaten raw. To make them digestible for her infant child, Gronniosaw’s wife chewed them before passing on the mulch to her baby. Gronniosaw himself went without.
Help arrived unexpectedly from a local attorney, and shortly afterwards they decided to move to Norwich where weaving work was easier to find. However, hours were long, wages irregular, their landlady was inflexible about rent payments, and their three children contracted smallpox. When one of the daughters later died of fever, the Baptists refused to assist with the burial. Nor did the Quakers help. The Gronniosaws had begun burying her in the garden behind their house when a parish officer relented. Even then, he declined to read a burial service for her.
The narrative ends with Gronniosaw, aged sixty, pawning his clothes to pay off his family’s debts and medical bills, and moving to Kidderminster where he tries to make a living by twisting silks and worsteds: