Black History Month – unexplored narratives along and around the River Thames

Black History Month is an occasion to recognise and celebrate the invaluable contributions of black people to British society.

This year’s theme for Black History Month, which is celebrated in the UK in October,  is “Reclaiming Narratives”, and marks a significant shift towards recognising and correcting the narratives of black history and culture.

The first Black History Month in the UK happened in 1987, marking the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean and the 25th anniversary of the Organisation of African Unity.

In order to understand our present times, it’s important to look to the past. Here, we want to use this opportunity to highlight the often-unexplored relationship between black people and the River Thames and update our 2023 article.

Roman times

There is evidence to show that people with African ancestry lived and worked in Britain since Roman times. In AD 43, the Romans invaded Britain and around AD47 they built ‘Londinium’ (a.k.a London) on the banks of the River Thames. Londinium was a diverse city. People travelled here from all corners of the Roman Empire.

Research has shown that the remains of several adults of African descent were found in a cemetery in Southwark.

Tudor period

Historians have also recently unearthed fascinating evidence of Black Tudors.

It is estimated that there were around 300 black people living in England and Scotland at that time. Documents show that black people were living, working and intermarrying into British society during this time.

Jacques Francis was an expert swimmer and salvage diver and was part of a team hired to salvage guns from the wreck of the Mary Rose in 1546. He was originally from Mauritania. When his Venetian master, Peter Paulo Corsi, was accused of theft by a consortium of Italian merchants based in Southampton, Francis became the first known African to give evidence in an English court of law. He gave evidence at the High Court of Admiralty in London. The Blackfriars area near the River Thames is close to this court.

John Blanke was a Black trumpeter who performed at the courts of both King Henry VII and King Henry VIII. He would have lived in the household of Henry VII – the Tower of London. There are records to show that he asked Henry VIII for a pay rise and a promotion in his role as trumpeter.

Blanke would have visited and worked at the Palace of Placentia in Greenwich near the River Thames, very close to where the National Maritime Museum now stands. He performed at Henry VIII’s coronation in 1509, and in 1511 at the Westminster Tournament, a huge celebration organised in honour of the new prince, Henry. This child was born to Katherine of Aragon on 1st January 1511 but sadly died only ten days after the Tournament in February.

In the Stuart period, the presence of black people in London arose from the growing English involvement in the horrific Atlantic slave trade, which began in earnest in the mid-1600s. This had started in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I when John Hawkins undertook four voyages to Sierra Leone (between 1564 and 1569) and transported a total of 1,200 African people across the Atlantic to sell in the Spanish Caribbean. In fact, between about 1500 and 1900, Europeans forcibly uprooted millions of people from throughout West Africa and West Central Africa to the Americas. This journey is known as the Middle Passage. Enslaved Africans were forcibly transported on ships from the West Coast of Africa to the Americas.  It is estimated that two million enslaved people died during this journey, due to the horrific conditions on the ships. For those enslaved people that survived the cruel journey, more cruelty arrived in the Americas which often resulted in death.

18^th Century England/19^th Century England

Many of those involved in British colonial activities, such as ship’s captains, colonial officials, merchants, slave traders and plantation owners brought enslaved Africans as servants back to Britain with them. In the latter half of the 18th Century, England had a black population of around 15,000 people. They lived mostly in major port cities – London, Liverpool, and Bristol – but also in market towns and villages across the country. The majority worked in domestic service, both paid and unpaid.

Whilst slavery had no legal basis in England, the law was often misinterpreted. Black people previously enslaved in the colonies overseas and then brought to England by their owners, were often still treated as slaves. Some individuals who had formerly been enslaved got baptized, believing this would ensure their freedom. Others took advantage of being on English soil and absconded. Notices for ‘runaway slaves’ from ships boarded on the Thames featured in newspapers during this period.

During the latter half of the 18th century the law was tested in the courts; most notably in 1772 with the case of James Somerset. Somerset helped to kick start the anti-slavery movement in Britain.  It was recorded in the Public Advertiser in 1772 that 200 Black people celebrated the Somerset verdict at a pub in Westminster. Lord Mansfield presided over the case. Elizabeth Dido Belle, daughter of an enslaved woman, was the niece of Lord Mansfield. After she married John Davinier in 1793, she set up family life in Pimlico, London.

Dido Belle had quite a privileged life, which was unusual for black people living in Britain at the time. There was always danger of recapture and the prospect of a worse enslavement, even perhaps early death in the West Indies, if a person ran away from his or her owner in Britain. British authors Thomas Day and John Bicknell wrote a poem about the true story of the suicide of a enslaved man kidnapped from England and from his English wife, who shot himself on a boat on the Thames rather than face slavery.

Charles Ignatius Sancho is an important chapter in our shared history, during this period.

Sancho was born, around 1729, on a slave ship en route from Guinea to the Spanish West Indies.  As a toddler, still enslaved, he moved to Greenwich to work for three sisters near Dartmouth Row, where he met the Duke of Montagu. After the duke’s death in 1749, Sancho ran away from the house in Greenwich and persuaded the duke’s widow to employ him. He became her butler and head of a large household close to Greenwich Park.

In the last six years of his life, Sancho’s celebrity took off. He opened a grocery shop in Charles Street, Westminster, where the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office now stands. He composed many pieces of music and would eventually be best known as an epistolary writer, penning accounts and critiques of 18th-century culture and politics.

In fact, he was known for conducting lively correspondence with his friends, including aristocrats, artists, actors, bankers, and booksellers.

As a literate man of property, Sancho was able to vote. He was the first recorded black voter in a Westminster election when he voted for Charles James Fox, the abolitionist who proposed a successful bill to abolish the slave trade in 1807, who wrote to thank him. Like Sancho, Fox would not live to see the bill pass.

Sancho died in 1780 and was the first black man to have an obituary in the British press. His letters were published posthumously in two volumes, raising the large sum of £500 for his widow and surviving children.

Sancho is an important chapter in British history and lived near the Thames.

Another prominent author in London was Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753 – December 5, 1784). She was an American author who is considered the first African-American author of a published book of poetry. In 1773, she travelled to London to publish her first set of poems. Whilst in London, she toured the Tower of London, Greenwich Park and Westminster Abbey.

Francis Barber was born in Jamaica around 1735. He was born with the name Quashey, which showed that he had Ghanaian roots. He came to Britain with a planter from the island. For one year he went to school in the small village of Barton nr Darlington in Yorkshire England.

Then, as he got older he entered the service of his owner’s son who sent him to work for the writer Samuel Johnson whose wife had just died. Two years later the plantation owner died and in his will, he left Francis 12 Pounds and his freedom. However, as Francis was a young man and high-spirited, he ran away to Cheapside and worked as an apothecary’s assistant. He did however, keep in touch with Samuel Johnson. However, in 1758 Francis went to sea serving 2 years on H.M.S. Stag.

He has descendants who live in Britain today.

‘William Brown’ was a black woman who joined the Royal Navy under a man’s name in the early nineteenth century. She was discharged from Queen Charlotte (which launched from the River Thames in Deptford) in 1815 for being a woman.