The first Black Britons By Sukhdev Sandhu

“In 1731, the Lord Mayor of London, responding to moral panics about the size of the non-white population in the city, banned them from holding company apprenticeships.”

lack people have lived in Britain for centuries – from at least the 12th century. Throughout history their circumstances have varied greatly, many were enslaved and exploited, while others enjoyed privilege and status.

Records show that black men and women have lived in Britain in small numbers since at least the twelfth century, but it was the Empire that caused their numbers to swell exponentially in the 17th and 18th centuries.

As the British Empire expanded, African and Afro-Caribbean slaves were transported across the seas to work on plantations in the Caribbean or the Americas, where their brutal and inhumane treatment has now been well documented. 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 indigenous people were seized against their will. For traders of 17th- and 18th-century Britain, the African was literally a unit of currency.

Others, in much smaller numbers, were transported into the ports of London, Liverpool and Bristol - on the same ships that brought imperial products such as tea, sugar, cotton, coffee, rum, fruit, wine, tobacco and oil to enrich the national economy.

The black and white poor of this period were friends, not rivals, and often protected each other�s communities�

Those who came to Britain were often brought in by planters, government officials, and military and naval officers returning to the United Kingdom - the slaves were seen as reassuring companions, who might staunch some of the loneliness felt by the white expatriates on their long voyages back to an island they had not seen for decades. Other black people were offered to the commanders of slaving vessels as gifts, and were later sold into domestic service at quayside auctions or at coffee-houses in London, where they were given names such as John Limehouse or Tom Camden.

Slavery was legal in Britain until 1807, and many of these Africans found themselves working as butlers or other household attendants in aristocratic families. Their duties were not necessarily onerous; their chief function often seems to have been just to look decorative. They served as human equivalents of the porcelain, textiles, wallpapers and lacquered pieces that the English nobility was increasingly buying from the east.

These slaves were often used as a fanshionable accessory. Oil paintings of aristocratic families from this period make the point clearly. Artists routinely positioned “Negroes” on the edges or the rear of their canvasses, 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 and novelist David Dabydeen, ‘more or less the same status’. Their humanity effaced, they exist in these pictures as solitary mutes, aesthetic foils to their owners’ economic fortunes.

‘Owners often took it upon themselves to educate their ‘possessions’, and gave them lessons in accomplishments such as prosody, drawing and musical composition.’

Until the Abolitionist movement of the 1770s and 1780s began to challenge existing stereotypes about the moral and intellectual capacity of black people, it was not unusual for them to be portrayed as simians or as occupying the bottom rung of the great chain of being. Nonetheless, more humane relationships between black servants and the nobility were not unknown. Owners often took it upon themselves to educate their ‘possessions’, and gave them lessons in accomplishments such as prosody, drawing and musical composition.

In 1731, the Lord Mayor of London, responding to moral panics about the size of the non-white population in the city, banned them from holding company apprenticeships.

Servants who ran away from their masters’ houses were the subjects of lost-and-found ads in the press, and rewards for their capture were offered. They tended to flee to the East End of London, where they lived in overcrowded lodging houses with stinking courtyards, surrounded by brothels and thieves’ and sailors’ dens.

Few of them had marketable skills. Nor did they have contacts in the provinces or in the countryside to whom they could turn. They were forced to eke out illicit, subterranean livings - a bit of tailoring, voyages at sea, pick-pocketing, begging. They were especially renowned for their skills at the latter; some played musical instruments or pretended to be blind. The black and white poor of this period were friends, not rivals, and often protected each other’s communities.

A Parliamentary report in 1815 claimed that one slave had been able to return to the West Indies with a fortune of £1,500. The likes of Billy Waters and Joseph Johnson made an artistic spectacle out of their poverty, became underworld celebrities, and were so well rewarded that by the 1850s many white beggars had begun to black up.
Historians often talk about the ‘black community’ in pre-20th-century Britain, but to what extent did this exist? Slaves and ex-slaves certainly did meet up whenever possible to gossip, reminisce and exchange vital information. It is known that when two of them were imprisoned in Bridewell for begging, they were visited by more than 300 fellow blacks.

A newspaper report from 1764 also describes how 57 black men and women ate, drank and entertained themselves with dancing and music until four in the morning, at a public-house in Fleet Street. No whites were allowed to be present, and all the performers were black. Despite these signs of community, however, barely 20 per cent of the black population was female, and intermarriage of blacks to members of the white population was common, much to the disgust of the white middle classes.

African and English people also shared the same cramped social spaces - from below-deck quarters at sea, to Newgate gaol cells. They drank gin at the same taverns, and danced together at mixed-race hops. This lack of segregation, combined with the relatively small number of blacks in Britain (even in London there were not many more than 10,000, around 1 per cent of the capital’s population), created a fleeting and vernacular multi-culturalism.
The word ‘black’ itself is a loose term; those men and women in Britain hailed from many different tribes and regions of Africa. And they spoke several different kinds of English: some, brought up by their aristocrat owners, used refined language; others, educated at sea, used Jack Tar lingo, a stew of Cockney, Creole, Irish, Spanish and low-grade American.
Poverty was the norm for most, but not all, black people. Cesar Picton was a former servant, who became a coal merchant in Kingston-upon-Thames, and was wealthy enough by the time he died to be able to bequeath two acres of land, and a house with wharf and shops attached.
More famous yet was Olaudah Equiano (c.1745-1797), a former slave who went on to become a radical reformer and best-selling author. In 1773 he became the first black person to explore the Arctic when he sailed, on the same ship as Horatio Nelson, on Lord Mulgrave’s famous expedition to find a passage to India.

Most celebrated of all was Ignatius Sancho (1729-1780). This African of Falstaffian girth and bonhomie was born on a slave ship. By the time he was two, both his parents were dead (his father through suicide), yet he went on to become a major literary celebrity in Georgian London. He published four collections of musical compositions, and he sat for a Gainsborough oil portrait. His life demonstrates a rare triumph of talent and resourcefulness over the poverty and prejudice that snuffed out so many black men and women in 18th-century Britain.

For further information see www.bbc.co.uk

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