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David Olusoga on the extraordinary story of Olaudah Equiano
Olaudah Equiano’s dramatic biography of his perilous journey from slavery to freedom added a powerful black voice to the burgeoning abolition movement. David Olusoga reflects on his extraordinary story
–Listen to this article: The history of black people in Britain during the 18th century is a series of unknowns. We don’t know the size of the black “community”, or even if black Georgians formed discrete communities. We only have fleeting glimpses as to how they interacted with one another and are unsure what proportion of them were free and what proportion lived in forms of unfreedom. While some were clearly servants, others were undoubtedly enslaved. Instead of detail, we have passing references which hint at lives that can never be better understood. What makes this all the more frustrating is that black Georgians themselves, despite these gaps in the historical record, are literally visible to us. They appear in hundreds of portraits, as servants, footmen, maids and stable-boys. Usually pushed up against the picture frames, they were painted not as individuals but as fashionable accessories, the exotic property of the main sitters, their masters and mistresses. Only a handful of black Georgians were the subjects of their own portraits. Yet despite this mountain of unknowns and frustrations, there are a tiny number of black Georgians who emerge from the historical record, not as fleeting apparitions, but fully formed characters. Those few were men and women who left behind their own words, in the form of letters, memoirs and biographies. The most significant of those rare texts was written by the most famous black person to appear in Britain of the late 18th century – Olaudah Equiano. Escaping enslavement Although the exact circumstances of his birth are the subject of a historical controversy, which will be discussed in more detail later in the feature, what is certain is that Equiano experienced slavery and was able to escape from it. In 1789, having been a freeman for 23 years he published his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself. In the early chapters Equiano describes his childhood in Africa and how it was brought to a sudden end when he and his sister were abducted by African slave traders. Marched to the coast they were separated, which devastated Equiano: “It was in vain that we besought them not to part us; she was torn from me, and immediately carried away, while I was left in a state of distraction not to be described. I cried and grieved continually; and for several days I did not eat any thing but what they forced into my mouth.” He was then shipped across the Atlantic on a British slave ship to Barbados. From there he went to Virginia and was sold to a tobacco planter, who in turn sold him on to Michael Pascal, a British naval captain. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2021/10/GettyImages-1141649319-crop-big-red-a9767ba-e1634140100329.jpg" width="1024" height="1245" alt="A portrait of Olaudah Equiano from his autobiography" title="A portrait of Olaudah Equiano from his autobiography, 1789. Equiano was a huge asset to the abolition movement, speaking against slavery “with the authority of a man who had escaped its clutches and witnessed its horrors”. (Image by Getty Images)" /> Although the legal property of Michael Pascal, Equiano experienced slavery in a form very different to that of most enslaved Africans. Escaping the brutal life of sugar fields he instead was employed on board ships, working for Pascal while travelling across the British empire of the mid-18th century. These travels took him to England and into battle, serving in the Royal Navy, under Pascal, during the Seven Years’ War. In 1762 Equiano was sold again, and by 1763 he was the property of Robert King, a Quaker merchant with interests in Monserrat. Again Equiano was employed at sea. In this stage of his life he was however permitted a life-changing liberty. Equiano was allowed to trade whatever goods he was able to acquire and keep the profits. Over the next three years he slowly accumulated a growing stash that he carefully used to buy goods in one part of the empire that could be sold at a profit in another. Astonishingly, and despite various moments in which he was swindled, robbed and short-changed, he was able to gather together the sum of £40, the price Robert King had set for the purchase of his freedom. In 1766 King was persuaded to allow Equiano to buy his manumission from slavery. Describing the moment he secured his freedom, Equiano said: “I who had been a slave in the morning, trembling at the will of another, was become my own master, and completely free. I thought this was the happiest day I had ever experienced.” A brief guide to the transatlantic slave trade As a freeman Equiano continued to work as a sailor and by 1767 had settled in London, returning to sea when financial circumstances dictated. By the early 1770s he was well established in London, becoming a leading black figure in the city, able to use his connections to campaign for the rights of other black Londoners. This was at a time when the legality of slavery in England and Scotland was being contested, and men and women brought to Britain as human property were being kidnapped on the streets of London and other cities and forcibly shipped back to the plantations. In 1783 Equiano began a campaign to draw attention to the Zong Massacre of 1781 – the murder of around 130 Africans who had been thrown overboard the slave ship Zong so as to enable a claim for their loss to be registered against the ship’s insurance policy. He was also a key figure in a bizarre and disastrous scheme to create a new colony – dubbed the “Province of Freedom” – on the shores of Sierra Leone. There Britain settled the so-called “Black Poor”, destitute former slaves who had served with British forces during the American Revolution. Brought to Britain they were then largely abandoned by the authorities. When the scheme to resettle them in Africa descended into a spiral of corruption, Equiano became a whistle blower. Although his letters condemning the scheme did not prevent it from going ahead, they did make Equiano moderately famous, and that fame became the springboard that led to him writing the Interesting Narrative. Other black Georgians had already written and published their memoirs and letters (Ignatius Sancho posthumously in 1782, and Ottobah Cugoano in 1787, with the help of Equiano), and others such as Mary Prince did so later. But Equiano’s narrative was to be the most significant of them all, in part because of the skill and lucidity with which it was written, but also because of the timing of its publication. The book was released in the spring of 1789, two years after the Society For Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade had been founded, and during a year in which abolitionists – led in parliament by William Wilberforce – launched their first parliamentary bid to bring about the abolition of the slave trade. The Interesting Narrative, the biography of a man who had himself been enslaved, was a key element in that great surge of abolitionist activity of that year. Equiano was keenly aware of his position, writing that the text was “the production of an unlettered African, who is actuated by the hope of becoming an instrument towards the relief of his suffering countrymen”. Yet while the book had a profound impact upon those who read it, 1789 was not to be the year in which the slave trade was abolished. The revolution in France so horrified the British elite that any form of radical political or commercial change was dismissed as dangerous and destabilising. Listen | Padraic X Scanlan discusses how slavery fuelled the British empire and explores the complicated motivations of abolitionists Booming business Deploying the skills he had acquired while trading between the Caribbean Islands, Equiano built the Interesting Narrative into an ongoing business. After publishing the first edition himself he retained the rights to his words, at a time when it was often deemed wiser to license books to publishers. With Equiano committed to promoting his book, the Interesting Narrative went through eight further English editions – a huge number for the late 18th century – and each new edition contained new passages that expanded the book, keeping it up-to-date with ongoing developments in the struggle against slavery. Every edition also contained an expanding list of subscribers: wealthy and influential figures who supported Equiano in the writing of the Interesting Narrative by purchasing copies before that edition’s completion. Succeeding editions attracted further subscribers, with their names printed at the front of the book. Among them were aristocrats and celebrities. The most notable were John Wesley the Methodist preacher, and members of the royal family. Equiano not only constantly refreshed the contents of the Interesting Narrative, but he also promoted sales through an intermittent speaking tour that lasted from 1789 to 1794. Read more about the abolition movement in Britain Tapping into the growing network of abolitionist supporters and sympathisers, he trekked across Britain and Ireland. Yet this was not a book tour in the modern sense: it was a feature of the great abolitionist campaign, as everywhere Equiano went he spoke against slavery, doing so with the authority of a man who had escaped its clutches and witnessed its horrors. This way Equiano contributed to the movement for abolition not just as an author, but also as a campaigner and public speaker. It was in the 1790s, as his fame grew, that Equiano married. In 1792 Susanna Cullen, who hailed from Cambridgeshire, became his wife. Two daughters followed in 1793 and 1795, before tragedy consumed the young family. Three years into their marriage, Susanna died. The following year the couple’s elder daughter also passed away, as did Equiano himself. His surviving daughter, Joanna Vassa, was left an orphan, although eight years of sales and her father’s energetic promoting of the Interesting Narrative meant she was left an estate worth around £1,000. The margins of history Despite being widely celebrated at the time of his death, Equiano’s fame rapidly faded. After his passing the abolitionist movement advanced and evolved. In 1807 an act for the abolition of the slave trade passed through parliament. In the 1830s, after rebellions in the Caribbean led by the enslaved themselves, slavery as an institution was swept away. The histories of the abolition movement that were later written focused on the lives of the white abolitionists. William Wilberforce was the subject of a secular canonisation that meant his story eclipsed the contributions of others. Olaudah Equiano, along with many of the female abolitionists who had been central to the campaign against slavery in the 1820s, were brushed to the margins of history and largely forgotten. It was only in the 1960s that historians began to recover the story of Equiano, and the Interesting Narrative was once again reprinted. Since then Equiano’s fame has grown to proportions that arguably exceed that of his own lifetime. The site of his London home now carries a heritage plaque, and the Interesting Narrative is a set text on university courses across the world. There is also an Equiano Society that celebrates his life and his writing, and even a brand of rum that carries his name. Olaudah Equiano left us with a powerful, first-hand account written by a man who had experienced slavery, but he also bequeathed historians with a mystery – there is one aspect of the Interesting Narrative that complicates his story. In the Narrative Equiano asserts to have been born in what is today Nigeria. Yet there are some historians and literary scholars who now call that claim into question. Read more: The black abolitionists who shocked Victorian Britain Fact or fiction? Back in the 1980s the Nigerian academic SE Ogude suggested that the early chapters of the book are a work of fiction. He argued that Equiano’s description of the society from which he said he had been stolen was based on literary sources available at the time of writing rather than firsthand experience. A decade later another literary expert, Dr Vincent Carretta, uncovered two tiny details in the archives that might suggest that Equiano was not born in Africa, but was instead born into slavery in Britain’s North American colonies. When as a child in 1759 Equiano had been brought to England by Michael Pascal he was baptised at Saint Margaret’s Church, Westminster, and in the records of that ceremony he was described as “Gustavus Vassa, a Black [man] born in Carolina 12 years old”. However, critically, that information was not provided by Equiano himself. Over a decade later in 1773, Equiano – by then a freeman resident in London – signed on as a crewman in a famous expedition to the Arctic. In the documents of the expedition he is described as having been born in South Carolina. Although again, there are doubts about the veracity of that evidence. However, other historians suggest that Equiano’s account of Africa appears flawed not because it is fictional, but because it is built upon the memories of a young child. And it is uncertain how much can be read into the two archival entries that suggest he was born in Carolina. While these questions of Equiano’s place of birth remain unanswered, what is certain is that Equiano’s words, both in the Interesting Narrative and in his many speeches, were those of a man who had lived as a slave and felt its brutality. As such they were enormously powerful at the time, and are enormously valuable today. David Olusoga is a historian and broadcaster. He has written the foreword for a new edition of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, out now from Hodder & Stoughton. This article was first published in the November 2021 issue of BBC History Magazine Explore more content from week four of our Regency course: Slavery and Abolition, with Dr Lizzie Rogers – watching time 12 mins The children who fought for the abolition of slavery – reading time 10 mins The Haitian Revolution: the enslaved Africans who rose up against France – reading time 8 mins Did George III support the slave trade? – reading time 7 mins African American abolitionists in Britain – listening time 43 mins 9 key places connected to the abolition of the British slave trade – reading time 13 mins The Zong Massacre: what the dark episode meant for the British slave trade and abolition – reading time 8 mins
David Olusoga's hidden histories: Victorian temperance
“The Victorians constructed a great empire of abstinence”, writes David Olusoga
Although largely forgotten today, Victorian temperance was, at its height, one of the biggest and most influential movements in British history. While the more extreme of the many temperance societies sought a legal ban on the sale of alcohol, most temperance activists aimed merely to persuade their fellow citizens of the social ills that it caused. From the 1830s onwards they persuaded millions to sign the temperance pledge, and commit to abstinence. Thousands of children joined the temperance youth organisation the Band of Hope. New members signed a pledge that read: “I do agree that I will not use intoxicating liquors as a beverage.” As well as condemning the ‘Demon Drink’ through a ceaseless stream of pamphlets, posters, marches and songs, the temperance movement set out to make it easier for people to keep their pledge by creating an alternative world in which those who had abandoned alcohol could socialise together. The first organised excursion in Britain was a temperance outing, a day trip from Leicester to Loughborough arranged, in 1841, for 500 temperance society members. The organiser was himself a committed temperance campaigner named Thomas Cook, the inventor of modern tourism. Yet to loosen the grip that alcohol had on Victorian society, the temperance movement needed more than day trips. It had to take on one of the nation’s most beloved institutions – the public house. To do this, the most forward-thinking among the temperance activists began to open temperance bars – alcohol-free spaces that offered those who had pledged themselves to abstinence a place in which they could meet and talk, free from temptation. Instead of beer, wines and spirits, the temperance bars offered cordials: sarsaparilla wine, dandelion and burdock, cream soda and ginger beer. Coca-Cola began as a temperance bar favourite. Considering most of these drinks were loaded with enormous quantities of sugar and syrup, we have to wonder whether some of the health benefits derived from eschewing alcohol might have been outweighed by the risk of diabetes. As well as temperance bars there was also a fashion for milk taverns, which sold hot and cold milk and hot chocolate. They promoted themselves as places where the teetotallers of Britain’s bustling industrial cities could enjoy a slice of rural simplicity. As the temperance movement began to lose momentum in the first half of the 20th century, the temperance bars began to close down. In a twist of fate that would have horrified the pious temperance campaigners, some former temperance bars – the jewels in the great empire of abstinence they had built up – were eventually converted into pubs. Until recently there was just one surviving temperance bar in the whole of Britain: Fitzpatrick’s, which opened in the 1890s in Rawtenstall, Lancashire – the county that was the spiritual birthplace of the Victorian temperance movement. However, today Fitzpatrick’s is not a lone relic because in recent years the temperance bar has undergone an unexpected revival. Each January millions of people, nursing post-Christmas hangovers, commit to four weeks of abstinence. Dry January is a temporary fix. Yet what the research shows is that people who stop drinking for one month tend to reduce their drinking afterwards. Many turn to low-alcohol and no-alcohol beers and wines, drinks that have seen enormous increases in sales. Tapping into the rise of this new form of modern teetotalism, a new generation of alcohol-free bars has appeared. With alcohol-free beer rather than sugary cordials, and without any of the Victorian proselytising, these 21st-century temperance bars are very different affairs. Yet they are still setting out to prove the same point the temperance movement wanted to establish almost two centuries ago – that it is possible to socialise without alcohol. This article was first published in the Christmas 2020 issue of BBC History Magazine
David Olusoga’s hidden histories: the homeworking revolution
“Desks went from a niche furniture item to the work station of millions,” writes David Olusoga
It seems that the age of the office may be coming to an end. Few people now imagine that after the great experiment in homeworking brought about by the pandemic there will be a wholesale return to the office. For centuries going to the office meant sitting for hours at a desk, an item of furniture firmly associated in our minds with the workplace. Yet for the desk, the homeworking revolution of 2020 represents a return to an earlier chapter of its history, because the desk was formerly part of the domestic realm. The first desks used in the home took their cue from those that had been used by scribes in medieval monasteries. These were small, portable and box-like, usually made from oak. In the 15th century, after the invention of the printing press, they became not just surfaces to write upon, but also containers in which books could be stored. Over time the tops of these portable desks were built to incline downwards, each of their bottom edges fitted with a lip to keep books in place. Inside were compartments for inks and quills, as well as books. William Shakespeare almost certainly wrote his plays at such a desk. The 17th century heralded the beginnings of what became a national postal system. There was a great boom in letter writing, and desks became increasingly common. After the Great Fire of London in 1666 and the destruction of over 13,000 homes in the capital, new types of desk became fashionable. As wealthy Londoners built new homes for themselves in the ashes of the old medieval city, they furnished them with larger, free-standing and more elaborate desks – true items of furniture rather than portable boxes. New desks like the escritoire or secretaire were brought over from France, with fronts that could be unfolded to create writing surfaces. These desks were known by their French name, ‘bureau’, and over time they became synonymous with the room the writing took place in – the office – which in turn gave rise to the word ‘bureaucracy’. By the 18th century, writing desks were common items of furniture in the homes of the wealthy. Master cabinet makers such as Thomas Chippendale began to produce elaborate mahogany desks, decorated with showy marquetry, that the wealthy placed in their townhouses and the libraries of their country homes. Yet it was the arrival of the Industrial Revolution that transformed the desk. No longer a niche item of furniture, it became the work station of literally millions of middle-class clerks. Complex industries such as manufacturing, railways and banking needed clerks to manage invoices, accounts and correspondence. Like the heavy manual work carried out in the country’s expansive mills and factories, the work of the clerks could be done more efficiently if they were brought together in large offices and each assigned to a desk. Increasingly large, purpose-built offices with rows of identical desks appeared, such as Somerset House, which housed the Navy Board and the Stamp Office. The East India Company built its offices in London’s Leadenhall Street, and from there its managers and clerks, the so-called ‘writers’, oversaw the rule and exploitation of the subcontinent. This tedious work involved endless hours sat at desks copying documents by hand up to five times over. In a letter to his friend William Wordsworth, the essayist Charles Lamb, who made his living as an East India Company writer, spoke of his yearning for “a few years between the grave and the desk!” So firmly was the office associated with the desk in the 19th and 20th centuries that whole generations were taught to aspire to ‘desk jobs’, which conveyed middle-class status. In the 21st century, the laptop, the internet and now video conferencing software – along, of course, with this year’s pandemic – have broken the hold of the office and the desk job. A small, portable desk on which a laptop can easily be placed is the new fashion, as the desk morphs back into one of its earlier forms. This article was first published in the December 2020 issue of BBC History Magazine
David Olusoga’s hidden histories: the massacre of Britain’s pets
"Half a million cats and dogs were put to death in 1939 – for no good reason," writes David Olusoga
On the brink of the Second World War, one of the many challenges facing those in government and the civil service tasked with planning for the coming conflict was securing the nation’s supplies of food. When war came and the expected aerial bombardment of Britain’s cities commenced, could a nation of 47 million people, dependent upon imports, be kept fed? By the summer of 1939, with war against Germany seemingly inevitable, plans for food rationing were being developed. In August, the government’s National Air Raid Precautions Animals Committee issued a pamphlet that was printed in national newspapers and broadcast on the BBC. Concerned that pet owners would either share their scarce rations with their pets, leaving themselves underfed, or abandon their animals to starve, the committee offered official Advice to Animal Owners. That advice was that, where possible, pets be sent from the cities to the countryside. But, in what appeared almost a throwaway comment, it concluded that where this was not possible, “it really is kindest to have them destroyed”. When war came in September, thousands of pet owners dutifully flocked to animal shelters to have their beloved pets euthanised. There were queues half a mile long; supplies of chloroform ran out. During the first days of the war, an estimated 400,000 to 750,000 dogs and cats were slaughtered in what the National Canine Defence League called, at the time, the “September Holocaust”. In Memoriam notices appeared in the press. “Happy memories of Iola, sweet faithful friend, given sleep September 4th 1939, to be saved suffering during the war. A short but happy life – 2 years, 12 weeks. Forgive us little pal,” said one in Tail-Wagger magazine. Why were pet owners so compliant? Some clearly feared food supplies would run out, while others felt the ‘luxury’ of owning a pet in wartime could not be justified and was therefore ‘unpatriotic’ – both sentiments that were reinforced by government propaganda. Others simply panicked. Yet the tragic truth is that the pet massacre was unnecessary. At the time the government advised it, food was not yet scarce (rationing would not be introduced until January 1940) and the full force of the Blitz had yet to be felt. Some pet owners later said they regretted their actions, partly because pets provided valuable companionship and, in the case of cats, vermin control. Criticism soon started to appear in the press. By November 1939, The Times was lamenting that “There is daily evidence that large numbers of pet dogs are still being destroyed for no better reason than that it is inconvenient to keep them alive – which, of course, is no reason at all, but merely shows an owner’s inability to appreciate his obligations towards his animal.” Unsurprisingly, there were protests from animal welfare groups including the PDSA (People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals), the RSPCA, and animal-lovers such as Nina Douglas-Hamilton, co-founder of the Animal Defence and Anti-Vivisection Society, who created a pet sanctuary at Ferne House, her Wiltshire country home. Battersea Dogs Home (now called Battersea) also came to the rescue of more than 145,000 dogs. Today, the Animals in War memorial at London’s Hyde Park pays tribute to the animals who served and died alongside British and Allied forces in various conflicts. Sadly there’s no memorial – yet – to the strangely forgotten, and shameful, massacre of Britain’s pets. This article was first published in the November 2020 issue of BBC History Magazine
David Olusoga: "Black history affects all of us – it is British history"
David Olusoga talks to Matt Elton about his book Black and British, charting the story of black people in Britain, from the Roman era up to the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century
David Olusoga was talking to Matt Elton about the release of Black and British in 2016. An abridged version of the book, for children aged 12+, was released in October 2020. You write that this book is a kind of experiment. In what way? Black history came to Britain in part from an American model, which was largely about uncovering deliberately hidden and forgotten stories. Some very brilliant historians have done that groundwork so, for me, the next stage of black history is to integrate it into what we call ‘mainstream’ British history. Black history can’t just be a specialist subject, a little clearing in the historical forest that only black people want to go to and that is only about black people. It’s the history of a relationship: some of it tragic, some of it more heart-warming; some of it extremely difficult and some of it – believe it or not – more optimistic. It’s a history that affects all of us: it is British history. More from David Olusoga How Britain's grand houses descended into Victorian slums “London is the place for me”: David Olusoga on the Windrush generation "Thousands of Britons opposed abolition – because they owned slaves" You also write that there’s a lot of black history that Britain has managed to forget. How has that happened? The first generations of historians writing black British history were faced with mainstream history books that talked about the 18th century without mentioning slavery, which is like talking about the 19th century without mentioning steam or coal. It’s ludicrous. We had military histories that didn’t mention our impact on other parts of the world, or the multiracial nature of the British navy at various times in its history. A lot of the work those historians were doing was trying to put the black people back into the picture, and some of that still remains to be done. A lot of black British history is hidden in plain view in central London: the bronze reliefs on Nelson’s Column, for instance, depict a black sailor with a musket towering over the body of the dying Nelson. That sailor was included not because the Victorians were politically correct, or worried about tokenism or quotas, but because there were hundreds of black sailors at Trafalgar. Lord Nelson and slavery: Nelson’s dark side They were part of the history. It’s not a separate history, it’s right in the centre of our capital city in a national memorial to one of the most important battles in our history. The risk is that it becomes lost or just becomes seen as black history. In many ways we’ve taken the black history out of mainstream history, hence that important and necessary work of the early first generation in exhuming this lost history – because sometimes it was edited out, sometimes accidentally, sometimes deliberately. Are there other examples of this editing that particularly stand out? As someone who grew up in the north-east of England, a great example of this is the industrial revolution. We were told that this history was our history: it belonged to me because my mother is white, British and working class, and I had a tenure in it. But when I visited those mills, no one ever mentioned that the cotton came from the deep south of the United States, produced by 1.8 million black enslaved people. They are part of British history. They never set foot on British soil, but they spent their lives and exhausted their bodies, were beaten and whipped, to produce the raw material for its industrial revolution. It’s estimated that, at the start of the American Civil War, 20 per cent of the British population was somehow economically dependent on cotton. Black British history has to be global and intercontinental because we were an empire. Our history is by its nature imperial and global, so our black British history has to be imperial and global as well. What do we know about the earliest chapters of that history? One of the accusations often levelled against people who write black British history is that it’s really a postwar history, and that, for politically correct reasons, we are trying to imagine these deep roots within British history. People have been saying that since the 1950s: it’s a constant refrain. The reality is that, just as imperialism brought Britain into contact with Africa, Britain itself was once a colonial province of another empire: the Roman empire. The same force that took us to Africa in the 1550s brought Afro-Romans to Britain. We were colonised long before we became colonisers, and among the army that colonised Britain were north Africans and people from below the Sahara who seeped through the Roman empire’s porous borders. We know that black people got to Britain about a millennia before the first Tudor explorers got to the coast of Africa. That shouldn’t be surprising; it also shouldn’t be controversial. It’s inevitable: we were a province of the Roman empire, and that empire was intercontinental. How, then, should we see those Tudor expeditions to Africa? A common mistake by historians is that they’ve been so aware that the history of the Atlantic slave trade has been under-written that they’ve often rushed to talk about it and missed out the first stage. In this first stage of contact, the commodity that England and Scotland were after in Africa was not enslaved Africans but gold. Francis Drake’s forgotten role in the English slave trade People in the Middle Ages understood Africa as a land of gold: for centuries the Arab traders had been bringing it across the Sahara on caravans. The English and Scottish were desperate to elbow aside the Portuguese, who were much better mariners at that point, and get access to the legendary, immensely profitable gold trade of Africa. This was in the hearts and imaginations of traders across Europe. We’ve come to see Africa as this troubled, benighted continent, but it was a place of unbelievable potential and promise. They didn’t see it as we see it, and that’s a problem with all black British history: we have to remember that we must not go into it imagining that our ancestors saw Africa and Africans as we do now. What do we know of how black people were seen at this point? The medieval mindset was fascinated by black and white and their contrasts and extremes. Black was associated with all sorts of diabolical, devilish things, and white with purity and virginity. Human blackness was an immensely exciting, exotic and erotic challenge to that colour aesthetic. When slavery was not the dominant relationship between Africans and Europeans, Africans were seen as challenging to European ideas. There was a nervousness, a discomfort, but also an extremely exciting attraction to Africans, partly because of the association with the wealth of their continent. Now, we know where this was headed and how ideas of inferiority based on skin colour developed. But they don’t develop instantly, and in the period before the Atlantic slave trade there was a much more complicated and, I think, interesting relationship. The missing Tudors: black people in 16th-century England Are there any episodes or stories that particularly surprised you? I think we’ve forgotten how proud people in Britain were about the abolition of the slave trade. We’ve often overstated abolition, and wanted to talk about it more than slavery. But there was a period in the 1830s and 1840s when opposition to slavery was seen as part of what it was to be British. Millions of people signed petitions against slavery. All of these things can be exaggerated. The effort to suppress the slave trade was never, ever nearly enough to what would have been needed if Britain had been seriously interested in ending it. But the British did come to see themselves, and look down on other nations – particularly the US – through the experience of abolition. Abolition in Britain: the link between slavery and the British national identity What is the best way for black people to study their history, and history in general? The nature of the black community is changing. There’s an awful lot of intermarriage and we also know that, in the first decade of this century, more black people in Britain came directly from Africa rather than the New World for the first time since probably the 18th century. That’s a huge shift. What this means is that black British history needs to be more global, but also that it affects more and more people. There are millions of white people for whom black and mixed-race people are now part of their families. When black people first arrived in Britain in large numbers after the Second World War, a wave of racism meant that they were forced into a siege mentality. What mattered was recovering lost history and showing that our roots in this country were deep and long. That’s still really important, but there’s another moment now where we need to see that this is a shared history. This idea that black history is only about, for, and of interest to black people is breaking down. We are too integrated; our stories are now too conjoined for that idea. This is not about challenging mainstream history, it’s saying that black people’s stories are part of that history. When we talk about the rebellions of the enslaved that were critical to the ending of the slave trade, that’s not to say that the abolitionists didn’t matter. There are lots of people in this story who are white heroes of black history. There’s often been a reflex action in Britain to pretend that the slave trade didn’t happen, because it’s difficult and upsetting. We’ve forgotten that there are heroes as well as villains within this history, and a few moments where we can feel positive about ourselves. That’s not to say that this country hasn’t got a long way to go to accept what slavery was, and how central it and imperialism were to Britain’s economic development. But I think we’re a big enough and strong enough country to come to terms with our history. We are missing out if we don’t. David Olusoga is the author of Black and British: A Forgotten History (Macmillan, 624 pages, £25). Olusoga’s previous books include The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism (Faber and Faber, 2010) and The World’s War (Head of Zeus, 2014). Brought up in the north-east of England, Olusoga is also an award-winning broadcaster and film-maker, and will soon be presenting a major BBC Two television series, entitled Black and British: A Forgotten History. This article was first published in the December 2016 issue of BBC History Magazine
David Olusoga: "Thousands of Britons opposed abolition – because they owned slaves"
Thousands of 'ordinary' Britons profited from the slave trade – and, says David Olusoga, they weren't about to accept abolition without a fight...
Tucked away under the trees in a shady corner of Clapham Common, south-west London, stands Holy Trinity church. Inside, above the ornate mosaic floor and the neat rows of pews, are three stained-glass windows. They depict the lives of saints – not biblical saints, but the ‘saints’ of the abolition movement. From the late 18th century, Holy Trinity Clapham was the parish church of the Clapham Sect – the ‘Clapham Saints’, as they are sometimes called. This loose affiliation of friends and like-minded men committed their considerable energies to bringing to an end first the British slave trade then slavery itself. On the southern wall of Holy Trinity is a grey marble plaque, set into the red Georgian brickwork. It proudly lists the names of Clapham’s abolitionist heroes – men who, we are told, “laboured… until the curse of slavery was swept away from all parts of the British Dominions”. The last name in that alphabetical list is that of the man who became the moral lodestar around which the Clapham Sect orbited: William Wilberforce. Lord Nelson and slavery: Nelson’s dark side The Clapham Sect was famous in its day, and its legend has not dimmed. The homes of its most celebrated members – Wilberforce, Zachary Macaulay and Thomas Fowell Buxton – are all stamped with approving blue plaques. The crusade they led, against what late Georgians felt comfortable calling ‘negro slavery’, has been the subject of innumerable books and is part of the national curriculum. Abolition has long been the prism through which British slavery is remembered. The other forces – social, economic and military – that also played roles in the demise of slavery have been ushered to the wings to permit the story of abolition to dominate the historical stage. That some of the impetus for abolition came from the enslaved people themselves, who rose up in a series of rebellions, is all too often overlooked. What has similarly been forgotten is that there were two sides in the political battle fought over slavery. Thousands of British men and women opposed abolition because they themselves owned slaves. They and their supporters in manufacturing, finance and parliament portrayed slavery as critical to the national interest. Britain’s slave owners funded a pro-slavery lobby that opposed the abolitionists at every step. Their pro-slavery campaign was just as sophisticated as that of the abolitionists, and at times the arguments of the pro-slavery men were in the ascendancy. The leading voices of that campaign have been little remembered, while their battle to defend slavery, like British slave ownership itself, has been little examined. More from David Olusoga How Britain's grand houses descended into Victorian slums “London is the place for me”: David Olusoga on the Windrush generation David Olusoga: "Black history affects all of us – it is British history" Abolitionists’ dilemma From the 1790s until 1830, one of the most significant figures in the pro-slavery lobby was another member of the congregation of Holy Trinity Clapham. George Hibbert was a slave trader and slave owner. He is one of the anti-heroes in the story of British slavery – an ‘anti-Wilberforce’. In defending slavery Hibbert demonstrated himself to be both a brilliant political tactician and a skilled propagandist. At times he became the campaign’s vocal figurehead, bitterly clashing directly with Wilberforce from the benches of parliament and on the pages of newspapers. On Sundays, George Hibbert took his place in the pews of Holy Trinity Clapham, alongside Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect. George Hibbert’s name, however, does not appear on the walls of Holy Trinity church. His elegant London town house – which stands on the opposite side of Clapham Common from the home that Wilberforce shared with his cousin Henry Thornton – is bereft of a blue plaque. Jamaica’s Morant Bay Rebellion: brutality and outrage in the British empire The near invisibility of Britain’s slave owners in the common modern understanding of slavery is partly a lingering consequence of geography. Throughout the two centuries during which Britain was heavily involved in slave trading and slavery, the vast majority of slave owners resided in the Caribbean. The 4,000 miles separating Britain from that region made it possible for the workings of slavery to be concealed from the public and, when slavery was abolished, for it to be filed away as a closed chapter in the history of the empire, rather than of Britain herself. The ghosts of slavery slept more ‘unquietly’ in the US, on whose own soil plantations had been laid out and slave markets built. In the years after the abolition of slavery in 1834, the families who had made their fortunes from sugar and slaves completed this historical disappearing act by covering up the incriminating chapters of their own dynastic histories. Men who in the 18th century had unashamedly regarded themselves as slave owners were, during the 19th and 20th centuries, re-branded by their descendants as ‘planters’. Men who had driven the ‘triangular trade’ were likewise concealed behind an innocuous euphemism: ‘West India merchants’. If there is a reason why, of all Britain’s forgotten slave owners, we should remember George Hibbert, it is that he was one of the earliest proponents of the mechanism that ultimately offered Britain a way out of slavery. In the aftermath of the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 it was evident to Hibbert and others that the abolitionists would, sooner or later, embark upon a second crusade to end slavery itself. During the debates about the slave trade, Hibbert had suggested that, if the enslaved were to be freed, the slave owners who would lose their ‘property’ should be compensated. The abolitionist firebrand Thomas Clarkson responded with mock incredulity. Addressing the slave owners, he admitted: “That compensation is due somewhere, there is no doubt. But from whom is it due? It is due from you to Africa!” Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad: how one woman saved hundreds from hell Clarkson’s bombast disguised a justifiable concern among the abolitionists. Their official position was that it was impossible for one human being to hold ‘property in men’, but they understood that an attack on the institution of slavery was, by default, an assault on the principle of private property. The dilemma they faced was that supporting compensation, though possibly the key to freeing the enslaved, would require them to accept that the slaves were property. The author of an anonymous letter of 1831 summarised the paradox: “Admit the slave-holders claims to compensation, and you admit the justice of slavery.” As is almost always the case when great moral issues are fed through the threshing machine of political negotiation, the discussion – between the abolitionists, the slave owners and the government, beginning after the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act in the summer of 1833 – ended with a grubby, technocratic compromise. The abolitionists did accept that compensation was the only way to end slavery and the government accepted that it would have to foot the bill, finally agreeing to pay the slave owners £20m – in modern terms, around £16bn. The slave owners also won another grudging concession: a system of ‘apprenticeship’, whereby slaves who worked the fields were to continue their labours for an additional six years, domestic slaves for a further four years. Yet what had been agreed was remarkable. The Slavery Abolition Act liberated 800,000 human beings from bondage, and the compensation of the slave owners represented what was at that time the largest payout in British history. The process of paying the compensation turned out to be just as extraordinary as the decision itself. Though the number of slaves and the total amount of compensation payable were known to the government, the number of slave owners and where they resided were not. The famous owners – the men who had demanded compensation and lobbied in defence of slavery – were the only known quantity; the Hibberts, along with the Gladstones, Lascelles and other slave-owning dynasties, all came forward to claim their share of the £20m. George Hibbert was awarded £63,067 and another 10 members of the Hibbert family also received payouts. Yet what is more remarkable, and more significant to historians of slavery, is that tens of thousands of others – middling to small-scale slave owners – were also lured out of the shadows of history by the money on offer. Lincoln and slavery: “If I could save the union without freeing any slave, I would” In order to claim compensation, all slave owners, no matter how many or how few slaves they were claiming compensation for, had to register their claims with the Slave Compensation Commission, the government bureaucracy established to distribute the money. The process demanded that each slave owner committed their name to the official record and filled out a claim form, identifying the number of slaves to which they laid claim and where those enslaved people resided. In the frenzied rush to stake claims, discretion was abandoned and the taboo that had developed around the owning of slaves was set aside. Britain’s slave owners, all 46,000 of them, bombarded the commission with claims. Punctilious clerks This story is captured in the records of the Slave Compensation Commission, a great haul of yellowing ledgers and neatly tied bundles of letters held at the National Archives. The commission’s records represent a near-perfect snapshot of slavery as it was on one day – 1 August 1834, the day of its demise. Just as Al Capone was convicted not on charges of murder or intimidation filed by the FBI but on charges of tax evasion brought by the bureau’s accountants, Britain’s secretive slave owners were identified, catalogued and recorded not by the efforts of the abolitionists but by the punctilious clerks and accountants of the Slave Compensation Commission. For 180 years, the commission’s records lay in the archives, largely unexamined until they became the focus of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project. Led by Professor Catherine Hall and Nick Draper, and completed through the efforts of a team of co-directors, researchers and students at University College London, the project has collated all 47,000 claims. The slave owners upon whom they have shone the brightest light have been the 3,000 or so who were resident in Britain. The picture that emerges from the collated claims is of a Britain in which slave ownership was far more widespread and far more ordinary than had once been imagined. It cascaded further down the social spectrum than had previously been understood, and was distributed broadly across the nation, from the Isle of Wight to the Orkney Isles. Who was Olaudah Equiano – and why was his story of slavery so important? Among the names that appear in the records are many famous ones. The ancestors of the architect Sir George Gilbert Scott appear in the ledgers, as do those of Graham Greene and George Orwell (the latter listed under his real family name, Blair). In the end, however, the obscure families tend to be more interesting than the famous ones: the very ordinary people – middle class and lower middle class – who either invested in the slave economy or, through inheritance or other mechanisms, were drawn into it. The claimants about whom the records reveal the most are those who entered into correspondence with the Commissioners for Slave Compensation. Among their letters are blatant attempts to influence the process. There are angry complaints at rejected or questioned claims, and unctuous reminders penned by claimants awaiting news. These letters expose not just the addresses of the claimants but also give voice to the ordinary slave owners. One example was Dorothy Little, a widow living in Clifton in Bristol who struggled in vain to persuade the commissioners to increase the valuation placed on the 13 enslaved men and women she owned in Jamaica. Her letters, and those written on her behalf by her barrister son Simon, repeatedly reminded the commissioners that Dorothy was an aged widow with few means of support other than the forced labour – of what she called “my slaves”. In one petition, Simon Little warned the commissioners that if they were not to increase the valuation they would have “deprived an aged widow of her property without any fault alleged on her part”. These letters capture the mindset of people trapped in a bureaucratic system, unable to understand that such a system was not open to special pleading. But they are also the words of people who have, all too often, lost sight of the fact that the true victims of the system were the enslaved Africans, unseen and unconsidered, 4,000 miles away. Three British slave owners People from very different backgrounds benefited from ‘property’ they owned in the Caribbean John Gladstone: the prime minister’s father By 1834, John Gladstone and his family had acquired 2,039 slaves for which they were awarded £93,526 by the Slave Compensation Commission. The heart of their slave empire was in British Guiana, at that time the most profitable of the British Caribbean colonies. John Gladstone used the compensation to diversify, investing in the booming railways. His son, William Ewart Gladstone, rose to become prime minister, making a speech in defence of slavery. The Gladstones replaced slaves with indentured Indian labourers on their Guyana plantations. Nathaniel Wells: the mixed-race absentee In many ways a typical absentee slave owner, Wells was the favourite son of a prominent St Kitts plantation owner. Sent to Britain for his education, on his father’s death he inherited a fortune worth around £200,000, including sugar estates and slaves. What makes his story unusual is that he was mixed race: his mother was a slave, the legal property of his father. As a mixed-race man – albeit a very rich one – Wells would have had few rights in the Caribbean, and he never returned to St Kitts. He used his fortune to buy a country home, the grand Piercefield House, near Chepstow. Anna Eliza Elletson: the powerful woman On the death of her first husband in 1775, Elletson inherited 300 slaves and the Hope sugar plantation in Jamaica. She remarried to become Duchess of Chandos, and from Chandos House dispatched a stream of instructions to her attorneys in Jamaica. Carefully navigating the complex gender roles of her age, she presented herself as a woman in need of professional assistance, yet sent her attorneys detailed instructions on managing her estates. The work of the men and women she called her property delivered Elletson an annual income, in the 1780s, of £6,000 per year – around £5m today. David Olusoga is a historian and broadcaster This article was first published in the May 2015 issue of BBC History Magazine
From riches to rags: David Olusoga reveals how Britain's grand houses descended into Victorian slums
Slums were one of the great scandals of the Victorian age. And, all too often, that scandal was played out in once-elegant townhouses that had fallen to rack and ruin. David Olusoga reveals the dark side of social mobility in the 19th century
In 1849 a letter arrived at the offices of The Times newspaper. Its authors were a group of poor Londoners who lived on Church Lane and Carrier Street in what was then known as the St Giles Rookery. Their names, 54 of them in all, were listed at the end of the letter. The parish of St Giles today stands under the shadow of the Centre Point tower block, at the eastern end of Oxford Street, and includes the wealthy streets and squares of Bloomsbury. The St Giles of the 1840s was a very different place. Home to thousands of impoverished Londoners, many of them of Irish descent, it was an infamous slum, one of the capital’s dirtiest and most unhealthy districts. The letter sent by the slum dwellers to the newspaper editor, written in broken, misspelt, phonetic English, is one of the few documents through which we can hear the voices of the very poorest of our Victorian ancestors speaking directly into the historical record. They describe, in their own words, the appalling conditions in which they were forced to subsist. Their plaintive appeal began: “Sur, May we beg and beseech your proteckshion and power. We are Sur, as it may be, livin in a Wilderniss, so far as the rest of London knows anything of us, or as the rich and great people care about. We live in muck and filth. We aint got no priviz, no dust bins, no drains, no water-splies, and no drain or suer in the hole place.” Listen | David Olusoga delves into the story of Bristol’s past and explains the value of studying history through our own homes Like the millions who today are forced to eke out meagre existences in the slums and favelas of the developing world, the poor of 1840s St Giles well understood the depth of their plight, and were well aware that the absence of basic amenities and elementary sanitation was the cause of their ill health. They rightly concluded that human beings should not be expected to endure such conditions and after going on to express their entirely justifiable fear of a return of “the Colera” (the last epidemic had arrived 10 years earlier; the next was five years away) – they requested that the editor of The Times agree to “let us have our complaints put into your hinfluenshall paper, and make our houses decent for Christions to live in”. Finally, they asked: “Preaye Sir com and see us, for we are living like piggs, and it aint faire we shoulde be so ill treted. We are your respeckfull servents in Church Lane, Carrier St., and the other corts.” If the slum dwellers of St Giles exhibited any naivety in their letter, it was their seemingly earnest hope that by appealing to the wealthy and the influential, via the pages of a newspaper of record, they might inspire those in positions of power to address their concerns and alleviate their plight. The slums were one of the great scandals of the Victorian age. In his 1898 book The Wonderful Century, Alfred Russel Wallace, the eminent co-discoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection, counted Britain’s slums as being “among the most terrible failures of the century”, a national disgrace that even risked undermining Britain’s claim to regard itself as a great civilisation. In Bleak House, Charles Dickens, a writer whose literary and philanthropic attentions were often directed towards the slums, lamented that in the middle decades of the century “civilisation and barbarism walked this boastful island together”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/05/2A4W732_cmyk-ea354e9-scaled-e1590509148184.jpg" width="1024" height="659" alt="Regency dandies mix with Irish labourers and prostitutes in a gin palace in St Giles, London" title="Regency dandies mix with Irish labourers and prostitutes in a gin palace in St Giles, London, in an 1821 engraving. By 1849, conditions in the infamous slum were so bad that its residents had written to the editor of 'The Times' to beg for help. (Image by Alamy)" /> Mazes of misery In London, as in the nation’s other great cities, slums existed in various forms and in multiple places – dismal enclaves of desperation and squalor, both small and large, scattered across the cityscapes. Near what is today King’s Cross and St Pancras stations, for example, stood Agar Town, a maze of narrow, muddy streets lined with shanty houses. As the homes of Agar Town were built on land leased for just 21 years, they were constructed to miserably low standards. Some were even been built by their impoverished inhabitants from whatever materials they were able to procure. Agar Town was in effect a purpose-built slum. Yet if a modern visitor were able to embark upon a tour of the Victorian slums, what might surprise them most is the size and grandeur of the many slum houses. This feature of the slums, one that was commentated upon by reformers, journalists and so-called ‘social explorers’, had come about because some slums had emerged when middle-class districts of the cities, their streets lined with desirable residences, fell out of fashion and were abandoned by the well-to-do. Frederick Engels, who visited St Giles a few years before the residents of the Rookery sent their letter to The Times, recalled seeing “tall, three or four-storied houses” that were “occupied from cellar to garret, filthy within and without, and their appearance is such that no human being could possibly wish to live in them”. More from David Olusoga “London is the place for me”: David Olusoga on the Windrush generation "Thousands of Britons opposed abolition – because they owned slaves" Something of this pattern of decline and decay can be seen in the houses featured in the BBC Two series A House Through Time, of which I am the presenter. Series 3, which is set in Bristol and to be broadcast this spring, tells the long history of a large and elegant house in one of that city’s older districts. What this house has in common with the stars of the previous two series 62 Falkner Street in Liverpool and 5 Ravensworth Terrace in Newcastle – is that, while it was built as a home for a single wealthy family and their servants, in its later decades it was subdivided and became cheap housing for the poor. Of the houses featured in the three series of A House Through Time, perhaps only 62 Falkner Street in Liverpool fell far enough down the social scale to be regarded as a true slum property. But all three houses at various moments teetered on the edge of the abyss. Across Britain in the 19th and early 20th centuries, thousands of similarly grand houses and some that were grander still, did become slums dwellings. For, no matter how architecturally elegant or well-appointed a house was, if the district in which it stood declined far enough, it was liable to be dragged under, converted into a tenement or a cheap lodging house and neglected by landlords, who were often absentees. In 1842, Robert Rawlinson, the great Victorian sanitary reformer, reported that, “in our great sea-ports and inland manufacturing towns” stood homes that had been “originally erected for the merchant princes” but that were “now in ruins… having been the abodes of those possessing wealth, they are now the abodes of the improvident, of the vagrant, of the vicious, and of the unfortunate”. The strange effect, Rawlinson noted, was that the poor lived amid crumbling grandeur and decorations intended for the former wealthy residents. “The quaint carving on the stone-work looks out of place, the walls are half in ruins, the gables are shattered, and foul weather-stains of damp blotch the surface. The staircase is darkened, its massive hand-rail and carved balusters are crippled and broken; the once firm stairs are now rickety and dangerous; the stucco-finished plastering is blackened and in holes…” How much have British homes changed since the Georgian era? A House Through Time historian Melanie Backe-Hansen explores the evolution of housing in Britain over the past 300 years Polluting industries Between 1851 and the end of the 19th century, the population of Britain almost doubled. As the industrial cities burst at the seams, their poorest residents, along with the polluting industries upon which they often relied, expanded into the surrounding fields and farmland. But they also spread into earlier suburbs that had been built in previous decades, on what had then been the outskirts of town. The homes built in these districts had been designed for the affluent middle classes, people who had the means to pay rents far beyond those that the poor could afford people who in many cases had moved to the suburbs in order to escape the pollution and the unhealthiness of the inner-city districts. When cities expanded, those genteel residents fled further afield, migrating to more distant suburbs that were often linked to the city centres by the omnibuses routes and later the railways. They left behind them three and four-bedroom townhouses in elegant streets that were then inhabited by the poor. Was Victorian life really so grim? 5 reasons why the Victorians were 'happy' This process was so familiar that it was commented upon not just by sanitary reformers and journalists, but by novelists. In 1857, the writer Charles Manby Smith recounted the history of Strawberry Street, a fictional London address located in the very real suburb of Islington. When Strawberry Street was first built in the 1820s it consisted of a “double row of two-storied dwellings” that soon attracted “professional ladies and gentlemen, whose neat brass-plates informed you that they taught drawing and painting and japanning, and French, Italian and German, and the pianoforte and singing, and the practice of all kinds of musical instruments. Then there were clerks, managers and responsible persons employed in the city, who came home to their families in Strawberry Street, as regular as the clock, about seven in the evening.” By the 1850s, however, the population of London had increased by more than a million to reach a total of around 2.5 million, and Strawberry Street had been wholly “swallowed up in Babylon’s bosom”. No longer a fashionable street in a stylish inner suburb, the “professional ladies and gentlemen moved by degrees further north, and their places were supplied by a new class – by tradesmen’s clerks, by foremen and overseers of workshops, men… who came home at all hours of the night, and let themselves out in the dark mornings of winter long before sunrising, and who let lodgings to help to pay the rent… the whole street on both sides of the way, with the exception of a very few houses, was transformed into a third-rate business street, and had lost all trace of its original neatness.” When a factory opened up nearby, Strawberry Street was on its way to becoming a slum. All slums were miserable and insanitary, but districts that had fallen from respectability to impoverishment, like Strawberry Street, had specific problems. Low wages meant that the poor who were drawn to them had to spend a higher proportion of their income on rent than the middle classes – they were victims of what today is termed ‘housing stress’ or ‘rent poverty’. To create accommodation that was within their limited financial reach, and in the hope of drawing as high a rental income as possible from their properties, landlords converted large homes that had been designed for single family habitation into tenements and lodging houses. Multiple small rooms were created out of once elegant dining rooms and parlours, using thin partition walls. These rooms were linked together by labyrinths of dark, windowless corridors. Life in 19th-century slums: Victorian London’s homes from hell Unavoidably insanitary Having never been designed for multiple occupation, the residents of subdivided tenements had no choice but to share water supplies and privies. Such communal facilities were often unavoidably insanitary, a condition made worse by the fact that when the supply of rooms that the poor could afford declined, often as a result of slum clearance schemes, yet more people were packed into houses intended for single families. In 1851, within the infamous Hillgate slum that clung onto the southern banks of the Tyne, Robert Rawlinson encountered one large house in which 71 people lived. Such overcrowding had the inevitable effect of making bad conditions worse. Over a long enough timeframe, houses, as well as people, are capable of social mobility. They can rise up or fall down the social scale according to the vagaries of fortune. Hundreds of thousands of houses across Britain have histories of decline and decay that in recent times have been perhaps overshadowed by our passion for renovation and gentrification. Most of the worst of the Victorian slums were long ago demolished. Yet many homes that today are highly sought-after have concealed behind discussions of original features and the salesmanship of estate agents – chapters of their pasts in which they became the refuges of the very poor and anything but desirable residences. David Olusoga is the presenter of A House Through Time, the third series of which begins on BBC Two on 26 May This article was first published in the June 2020 edition of BBC History Magazine
David Olusoga on house histories: "Our homes are often the sites of great dramas and tragedies"
The first series of BBC Two's A House Through Time turned an unheralded Liverpool townhouse into a media sensation. Now, fresh from filming a second series, David Olusoga reveals why Britons are finding the history of their homes so captivating. Accompanies the four-part BBC Two series A House Through Time
What are the first things we do when we move into a new house? We immediately set about stamping on to it our tastes and our identity. We redecorate, organise the furniture and methodically arrange our books – the carefully collected volumes that we hope say something about us and our lives. This, and the frenzy of cleaning and scrubbing that precedes it, is about much more than personal taste and domestic hygiene. It is also an attempt to exorcise from our new private space the lingering presence of its past residents. In order to make the empty frame of an old house into a new home, we attempt to disguise an unavoidable truth: that until recently it was the home of other people, and before them yet more people, a line of strangers stretching back decades and sometimes centuries. Our homes – the most private and intimate spaces in our lives, and the most expensive material objects we ever purchase – are, in some ways, things we can never truly own. Because, whatever it might say on the deeds, there’s no escaping the reality that we are merely the latest characters to appear on stage for an inevitably short cameo. People live for decades. Houses last for centuries. We are just passing through, and no matter how many layers of paint we slap on, or how many changes and alterations we make, we can never quite succeed in wiping away the traces of the lives that have been lived before us. Some people find it unsettling to think too deeply about this, but there are others who have no desire to exorcise their home of its former owners and tenants and instead seek to commune with them. The television series A House Through Time, which I present on BBC Two, has tapped into that phenomenon, and perhaps played a small part in accelerating it. What the series demonstrates is that, for some homes, it is possible to excavate from the archives a full genealogy, a list stretching back in time of everyone who has ever lived there. The team behind the series uses deeds, land registry documents, wills, tax records, maps (lots of maps), business directories, the national census, local and national newspapers, birth and death certificates to build what is in effect the family tree of a single house. Fans of the series are fascinated by that process of historical detective work, and moved by the human stories that tumble out of the documents. So many people were captivated by the stories of the former residents of 62 Falkner Street – the beautiful townhouse in Liverpool's Georgian quarter, featured in the first series of A House Through Time – that it has become an unofficial addition to Liverpool's list of tourist attractions. An endless stream of selfies taken by people who watched the series appeared on social media within days of transmission. Some people apparently took day trips to Liverpool specifically to see the house. The history of one’s home is becoming a new form of popular genealogy. People who have already traced their families back through the generations and the centuries are now turning their attention to their homes. They want to commune with the ghosts of past owners and residents, to discover their names and something about their lives. Chilling discoveries What those looking for the histories of their homes quickly discover is that, while the architectural history of our homes is fascinating, it is the flesh and blood stories of the former residents that really matters. The house, and its physical fabric, is the tangible link we have to them, but our true connection is a human one. What did our home mean to them? What role did it play in their lives? Were they happy within its four walls, or did misfortune overtake them? What scenes played out in the rooms we now call our own? Every house not only has a chain of former residents; it is also, inevitably, the site of a string of dramas and tragedies. We don’t have to go far back into our national past to find ourselves in an age where births, and also deaths, took place at home rather than in hospitals. That’s a fact that leads many house historians to chilling discoveries. And our homes need not be centuries old for them to be the repositories of such dramas. We only have to go back 75 years – still within living memory – to meet people for whom homes were not just personal spaces but the refuges where they sheltered from German bombs. Hundreds of thousands of homes were destroyed in the Blitz. Many houses carry the scars of bomb damage today. Those shrapnel marks and patches of repaired brickwork, combined with the documents in the archives, can transport us back to the nights when former residents cowered inside steel Morrison shelters in what are now our living rooms, or huddled together in Anderson shelters dug into our gardens. That most tantalising of questions – “Who lived in my house during the war?” – can be one of the easiest to answer, as in 1939 the government carried out a national register of every home in England and Wales. It was used to organise the issuing of identity cards and ration books, but eight decades later this special, one-off census provides us with a snapshot of Britain at the start of the conflict. As such, it carries the names of most of the 43,000 people who were to be killed in the Blitz, and lists most of the addresses that would not appear on the first postwar census. The comparatively easy, online exercise of looking up who was living in our homes in 1939 can be the gateway to deeper research. Townhouse to flophouse In the same way that the history of a house is much more than the architectural history of the building itself, the story of any single dwelling is something that spills out into the surrounding streets. The history of any individual address is intimately wrapped up in the history of the neighbourhood where it stands – then, as now, it is 'location, location, location' that counts. Both 62 Falkner Street in Liverpool, the house in the first series of A House Through Time, and 5 Ravensworth Terrace in Newcastle, the subject of the second series, are homes whose place on the ladder of respectability and desirability has changed over time. The latter was built in the 1820s for Newcastle's booming merchant classes, who were keen to escape the noise and pollution of the overcrowded quayside area. Yet by the early 20th century, it was a lodging house in an area that had fallen out of fashion and into neglect, outdone in the desirability stakes by the emergence of newer and swankier Victorian suburbs situated ever further away from Newcastle's heavy industries. It is these rises and falls, these shifts in the fortunes of neighbourhoods and whole cities, that make the histories of individual houses so fascinating. The economic cycle, combined with the coming of the railways and the expansion of city boundaries, condemned once fashionable districts to precipitous declines. They became urban twilight zones, and houses designed for wealthy families were subdivided into lodging houses or tenements. The pattern was so common that foreign visitors to Victorian and Edwardian Britain noted with surprise that the poor lived, packed sardine-like, in elegant homes originally designed for the rich. And it didn’t take much for a once desirable residence in a formerly fashionable area to become a flophouse. A new railway line cutting across a Victorian city, for example, could condemn the streets on one side of the line to decay and degeneration. Literally on the wrong side of the tracks, such areas spiralled ever downwards – and this was only one of the mechanisms by which houses built for the rich became the homes of the poor. Material wealth What this means is that even some of the country’s grander Georgian and Victorian townhouses have humbler chapters in their pasts. Without giving too much away, the history of 5 Ravensworth Terrace begins as you might imagine, with lawyers and doctors – men of means for whom the house is a symbol of social status and material wealth. A century later, the address had little cachet. For those who lived in its rooms – as it was, by then, a lodging house favoured by Tyneside’s Irish community – it was not a ‘des res’, but simply a place to pass through. What the two series of A House Through Time demonstrate, I hope, is something many historians are well aware of: that looking at the past through a highly particular and often narrow aperture can open up, counterintuitively, into a broadened and enhanced picture of the past. The history of a single life, a single year, or, in this case, a single house, can be unexpectedly wide-ranging. The new series follows the story wherever the lives of the residents take us – to art galleries and factories, abandoned docks, faded seaside retreats, cemeteries hundreds of miles away, and even to one of the battlefields of the American Civil War. The best historical biographies do exactly the same. As well as allowing us into the inner lives of their subjects, they also take us into the worlds they moved within and introduce us to the tensions and obsessions of the age. The makers of Who Do You Think You Are? have been pulling off the same trick for 15 years, following leads and exploring the surprising hinterlands they take us into. Yet while I understand all of this in principle, I am still struck by the fact that so many people turned on their TVs and laptops last year to spend four hours with figures from the past who were neither famous nor exceptional. A House Through Time presented the viewer with a string of individual lives, a collection of strangers who had nothing to link them together other than their connection to a single house in a single British city. Why did this journey into the past – something that on paper seems so pedestrian and (literally) domestic – prove so popular and so emotionally engaging? If pushed for an answer I’d say that, when it comes to the big things – life and death, birth, marriages, childhood, love and loss, hope and despair – the lives of others become universal. We recognise the parallels with our own lives and our own families. And when arranged into a family tree or the history of a single house, they remind us of our place in a longer story. And that we are just passing through. How to research your home’s history Sarah Williams, editor of Who Do You Think You Are? magazine, offers advice to budding historical house detectives The history of a house is as much about its past inhabitants as its bricks and mortar. As David mentions, if your house predates 1939, you should be able to find who was living in it at the outbreak of the Second World War because a register was taken to provide the nation with identity cards and ration books. Next, use census records to trace who was living in your home from 1911 and all the way back, in 10-year increments, to 1841. The 1939 register and census records are available on subscription websites findmypast.co.uk and ancestry.co.uk and may be free to access at your local library. To fill in any gaps, you can use electoral rolls, phone books and even rate books and land tax records, all of which are gradually being added to these websites. Historic maps are also increasingly going online. The National Library of Scotland has put online OS maps from across the UK (maps.nls.uk), while there are local projects such as Know Your Place (kypwest.org.uk) for the west of England. For old photographs, try historicengland.org.uk or visit your local record office and see if they can help; they may also have building plans. Always check an archive's website before you visit, as they often have guides to their resources and you may need to order some records in advance. For more house genealogy advice, go to whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com David Olusoga is a historian and broadcaster. His books include Black and British: A Forgotten History (Macmillan, 2016) The four-part series A House Through Time, presented by David Olusoga, airs on BBC Two from 8 April This article was first published in the April 2019 edition of BBC History Magazine
“London is the place for me”: David Olusoga on the Windrush generation
There's plenty of feelgood symbolism surrounding the 70th anniversary of the arrival of West Indians in Britain on the Windrush. But, argues David Olusoga, Britain's nostalgia for this event obscures a more complex story of imperial subjects attempting to exercise their rights in the face of institutional racism
On the day that Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury docks in late June 1948, a contingent of newspaper reporters and a film crew from Pathé News were on hand to film, photograph and interview the hundreds of men and women from the Caribbean who disembarked. Among the press pack was Peter Fryer, a journalist at the Daily Worker who would later write the book Staying Power, the first encyclopedic history of the black presence in Britain. His report, entitled Five Hundred Pairs of Willing Hands, was largely in step with the upbeat and positive tone that characterised how the day’s events were presented to the British public. The film crew from Pathé sought out one of the celebrities on board, the Trinidadian calypso singer Aldwyn Roberts, who performed under the stage name Lord Kitchener. He provided the day with a soundtrack: an impromptu a cappella performance of a song he had composed on the voyage across the Atlantic, ‘London Is the Place for Me’. Both newsreels and newspapers portrayed the unexpected arrival of the West Indians as something of a novelty, but were careful also to frame it within the bigger story of Britain’s slow journey towards economic recovery. The incessantly forward-looking positivity, which was an inescapable feature of news reportage during those less-cynical years, reflected the fact that maintaining public morale in 1948 was almost as essential as it had been during the war. Thus, the new arrivals from the Windrush were depicted as plucky pioneers, victims of economic difficulties in their home islands, who had come to Britain to help the ‘mother country’ in its hour of need. Their misfortune was to be Britain’s gain, but the stress was firmly on the message that they had come here to work, as indeed they had. What few people in the drab, war-ravaged Britain of 1948 could have imagined is that 70 years later the events of that day would be regarded as a landmark in 20th-century British history – the symbolic beginning of a wave of migration that was to last for decades and change Britain in multiple ways. Nor would those who read the newspapers the next day, or watched Pathé’s newsreel report in their local cinema, have dreamed that, by the time their own baby-boom infants were in their sixties and seventies, the obscure troopship moored at Tilbury would have given its name to a public square in Brixton – then a poor, white, working-class district. The notion that in the same square would stand a Black Cultural Archives, an institution dedicated to the celebration and research of something called black British history, would have sounded preposterous. Yet today there is not only a Windrush Square and a Black Cultural Archives but also a Windrush Foundation, and there have been calls for a Windrush day to be established. It’s even less likely that the Britons of 1948 could have conceived that, 70 years later, the government would be rocked by a public outcry over the news that some of the so-called ‘Windrush generation’ had been asked to prove their rights to UK citizenship, with some denied benefits or medical treatment, even deported. Why has the story of the Windrush, and the journey it made in the summer of 1948, been so embraced and latterly inducted into the British national story? The ship was not even the first to bring West Indian migrants to Britain. In March 1947, the SS Ormonde transported 108 migrants from Jamaica to Liverpool. In December that year the Almanzora, carrying around 200 people from the West Indies, docked at Southampton. Read the stories of mixed-race babies born after the Second World War In the media glare Part of the answer lies in the fact that the Windrush’s arrival was so well recorded by the men from Pathé and journalists such as Peter Fryer. But it was also an event ideally suited to mythologisation: the ship that carried to England the hopeful and the industrious, the empire’s own “huddled masses”. That the Windrush sailed to Tilbury, the Thames port from which Elizabeth I gave her speech in defiance of the approaching Spanish Armada, adds to the potency of the symbolism. Today, in another very British gesture, a heritage plaque marks where the Windrush landed. But if there was any single moment in which the Windrush’s place within mainstream British history was confirmed, it was during the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games. In that great pageant of national celebration, a miniature replica of the Windrush was paraded around the track of the shiny new Olympic stadium built on former industrial land that had been heavily bombed during the Blitz. The miniature Windrush was presented to the crowds alongside other symbolic representations of pivotal events in British history: the industrial revolution, the First World War, the campaigns of the suffragettes, the Jarrow march, and the creation of the NHS in 1948 – the same year that the Windrush arrived. That evening, the place of the Windrush in the British national story was affirmed and made almost sacrosanct. "Black history affects all of us – it is British history", says David Olusoga The importance of the Windrush in postwar British history is all the more surprising given the vessel’s forgotten backstory. The ship we know as the Empire Windrush was built in the early 1930s and originally fitted out as a passenger liner, then converted into a cruise ship. But she was constructed not in one of the shipyards that then lined the Clyde and the Tyne but in Hamburg, by the German firm Blohm & Voss. The name the ship was given at her launch was MV Monte Rosa, and between 1933 and 1939 she carried German families on holiday cruises. These jaunts were organised and subsidised by Strength Through Joy, a Nazi party organisation created to promote public health and break down class barriers. According to Nazi doctrine, the only distinctions that mattered in the Third Reich were those of blood and race. In 1939, the MV Monte Rosa was requisitioned and became a troopship, landing the grey phalanxes of Hitler’s Wehrmacht on the shores of Norway during the one-sided invasion of that vulnerable nation. Among the passengers she carried on a return trip from Norway were Norwegian Jews – men, women and children who were then deported to Auschwitz, where most died. The Monte Rosa herself, having survived attempts by both the RAF and Norwegian resistance to sink her, was finally captured by British forces and claimed as a prize of war. The fact that a ship once operated by a regime built upon notions of racial purity should, by random chance, have become the most potent symbol of Britain’s post-war transformation into a multicultural and multiracial society is loaded with irony. A right to travel Among those who travelled on the Windrush in 1948 were men and women from Jamaica, Trinidad, British Guiana (now Guyana), some of the smaller Caribbean islands, and the Atlantic island of Bermuda. Officially, their journey was not so much a migration as a relocation, and in the strict sense they were not immigrants. Rather, they were British citizens moving from one part of their empire to another, as so many of those on board had done during the war years. By making the same journey in peacetime, they were merely exercising rights they shared with all citizens of the British empire, and with the 49 million inhabitants of the United Kingdom itself. That same year, British parliamentarians debated a new act intended to reaffirm exactly those rights. The 1948 British Nationality Act was passed in order to maintain and enhance the bonds between Britain and what were then called the ‘white dominions’ – Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa. It was the white people of those lands that MPs hoped would feel the warm embrace of the empire, and whom those MPs imagined would exercise rights of residence. Thousands of men and women from other parts of the empire had served Britain in wartime. What British politicians of all parties had failed to appreciate was that, by dint of that transformative experience, these people had come to understand how the empire worked, and how it might be made to work for them. These were people unafraid of travelling huge distances, who had, in many cases, already spent time in Britain, in the forces or in the factories. Having fought or laboured for king and empire, they now sought work in the mother country in peacetime. A significant reduction in the costs of international travel in the postwar years removed the last barrier that had prevented earlier generations of West Indians, Africans and Indians from exercising their rights to live in Britain. Even as MPs sat across from one another on the benches of parliament, debating the new nationality act, the ship that was to become the symbol of postwar migration was already at sea. The migrants no one expected, the nucleus of the Windrush generation, had already found their berths, intent on exercising their rights of citizenship and residence. Windrush happened by accident. The idea that, in the aftermath of the Second World War, Britain introduced an open-door immigration policy is a misreading of history. The door had long been open; all that was different is that, after the war, black people as well as white people passed through it. In one telling of the Windrush story, opposition to black settlement in Britain came only from the bottom up – from working-class people: boarding-house keepers who put “No Blacks, No Irish” signs in their front windows, or trade unionists who opposed black workers being given jobs alongside whites. What has been lost in this version of the past is the level of official opposition to what was then called new Commonwealth immigration. Skilled people Having failed to foresee that educated, worldly West Indians would seek to use their rights of residence, the government sought other ways to keep them out. Even before the Windrush had set sail from Jamaica, Prime Minister Clement Attlee had sought to find some pretext to prevent it from leaving Kingston. When that failed, the government enquired as to whether the Windrush might be diverted to east Africa where the black migrants – engineers, welders, students, academics, mechanics, tailors, electricians, civil servants, machinists, boxers, and musicians such as Lord Kitchener – might be offered agricultural work in the fields of Kenya. The day after the Empire Windrush reached Tilbury, Attlee received a letter from 11 Labour MPs demanding immediate actions be taken to prevent black British citizens from exercising the rights they held equally with other subjects of the empire. “The British people,” they wrote, “fortunately enjoy a profound unity without uniformity in their way of life, and are blest by the absence of a colour racial problem. An influx of coloured people domiciled here is likely to impair the harmony, strength and cohesion of our public and social life and cause discord and unhappiness among all concerned.” Three decades before Windrush, the then secretary of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines' Protection Society, John Hobbis Harris, remarked that what “the British public does not realise adequately is that we are a coloured empire… We are an empire of 435,000,000, and 350,000,000 are coloured… You cannot prevent the black man from coming here, because this is the centre of his empire. You could no more tell him that he must not come to London, Liverpool or Cardiff than he has the right to tell you that you must not go to Lagos or Durban or Johannesburg.” One of the great ironies of British history is that it was at the very moment the empire began to disintegrate that its black and brown citizens began to settle in the mother country in large numbers. As Britain’s global power ebbed away, her colonial subjects flocked to her shores, and only in the final act of the imperial story did the faces on the streets of London, Liverpool and Cardiff remind the onlooker that the nation had for centuries stood at the centre of a “coloured empire”. David Olusoga is an award-winning historian, broadcaster and author of Black and British: A Forgotten History (Macmillan, 2016). Television: Black and British: A Forgotten History, presented by David Olusoga and shown on BBC Four, is currently available online at BBC iPlayer. This article was first published in the July 2018 edition of BBC History Magazine