4. The black community takes shape
So far we have been looking at Britain’s black population exclusively through the eyes of the natives of the country they were brought to against their will. We have had no alternative. Until about 1750 the traces left by their presence here – royal proclamations, entries in parish registers, instructions to slave-ship captains, offers of slaves for sale, advertisements for runaways – were the documents of native rulers, administrators, merchants, noblemen, and ships’ officers. But from about the middle of the eighteenth century there is something new in the records. There is evidence of cohesion, solidarity, and mutual help among black people in Britain. They had developed a lively social life. And they were finding ways of expressing their political aspirations. Black self-awareness took literary shape in autobiography, political protest, journalism, and other published writings by Africans who lived in or visited England and wrote in English. The lives and work of these writers and leaders of Britain’s black community will be described in the next chapter.
How many black people lived in Britain in the eighteenth century? In estimating the size of the black population we must bear in mind that it was constantly being reinforced. For the first three-quarters of the century at least, black slaves were brought here, not merely by slaver captains, but also by returning planters, government officials, and army and navy officers. However rich they might be, such people objected to paying wages to English servants when there were black slaves available to work for nothing but food and clothing.1 So they brought their slaves here as personal and household servants. Richard Bathurst, planter and colonel in the Jamaica militia, returning to England about the year 1752, brought back with him a young black slave called Francis Barber, whom he set free in his will and who became valet-cum-secretary to Samuel Johnson and ended his days as a village schoolmaster.2 Mrs Valentine Morris, wife of the governor of St Vincent, returned to England with a black slave who later served the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds.3 The politician and poet Robert ‘Doughty Deeds’ Graham, returning from Jamaica after a stint as a tax collector, brought back his black slave Tom, who had been left as a legacy by his former owner.4 Admiral Lord Romney brought over a black slave he acquired in the West Indies, who served him for many years and cared for him on his death bed.5 A subordinate of Pitt’s favourite admiral, Edward ‘Old Dreadnought’ Boscawen, turned up one day with a surprise present for the admiral’s wife: a 10-year-old black boy. She told her husband that their son, aged four, ‘took to him immediately and whispered he should be his servant’ – and soon the black child was waiting on the white one at table.6 The ‘little negro boy . . . pretty, and very good humoured’ given to the first Lady Shelburne by Richard Wells in 1768 was only five years old.7
In 1772 there was a legal decision which, while not stemming this flow of black people into Britain, did slow it down. After a long and perhaps embarrassed delay, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield handed down his famous but often misinterpreted judgment in the Somerset case. We shall see later that he did not rule against the institution of slavery as such, but simply that slaves could not lawfully be shipped out of England against their will. In the course of the hearing Mansfield accepted, and based certain delicate calculations on, an advocate’s estimate of 14,000 or 15,000 for the number of black people in the country.8 This is the figure generally cited by historians. Some contemporary estimates were much higher. Eight years before Mansfield, the Gentleman’s Magazine had come up with an estimate of 20,000 for London alone;9 Granville Sharp, the energetic humanitarian campaigner against slavery, privately accepted that figure for the country as a whole.10 But F.O. Shyllon has recently argued that Britain’s black population must have fluctuated constantly during the eighteenth century, since ill-treatment, starvation, disease, and poverty checked the growth of its permanent core, and that it is unlikely to have exceeded 10,000 at any given time.11 By the turn of the century the total population of England and Wales had reached almost 9,000,000.
More important, of course, than its size, which can never be calculated precisely, is how the community conducted its affairs, reacted to the atrocious circumstances so many of its members had to endure, and took part in the movement for the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery. In London at least, black servants were able to gather informally in small groups from time to time, no doubt to exchange information and discuss matters of common concern. One of Samuel Johnson’s visitors stumbled across such a gathering about the year 1760. Johnson was away from home, ‘and when Francis Barber, his black servant, opened the door to tell me so, a group of his African countrymen were sitting round a fire in the gloomy anti-room’.12 Barber was no longer a slave, and in Johnson – who once scandalized ‘some very grave men at Oxford’ with the toast: ‘Here’s to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West-Indies’13 – he had an employer who treated him as a human being. So the meeting was more probably a regular event that had Johnson’s blessing than one hastily convened while his back was turned. (For Francis Barber, see pp. 424-6 below.)
But London’s black community organized very much bigger and more elaborate affairs, with music and dancing, at various taverns – ‘the wonted haunts of Moormen and Gentoos’, as the author of The Servants Pocket-Book (1761) called them, noting that black servants invariably tended to ‘herd together’ there.14 ‘Among the fashionable routs or clubs, that are held in town, that of the Blacks or Negro servants is not the least’, reported a newspaper in 1764, telling how black domestics of both sexes ‘supped, drank, and entertained themselves with dancing and music, consisting of violins, French horns, and other instruments, at a public-house in Fleet-street, till four in the morning. No Whites were allowed to be present, for all the performers were Blacks’.15 The black community attentively followed the long-drawn-out Somerset case and sent representatives to attend the hearings. At the lord chief justice’s fateful words, ‘The man must be discharged’, they bowed to the judges, then clasped each other’s hands in joy and relief.16 A few days later this partial victory was celebrated by a gathering of about 200 blacks, ‘with their ladies’, at a Westminster public house. Tickets of admission cost 5s., so these were either better-off servants, whose masters paid them wages, or else delegates each of whom represented many others. Lord Mansfield’s health was ‘echoed round the room’ and the evening ended with dancing.17
Besides small private meetings and more elaborate gatherings with music and dancing there was also community observance of christenings, weddings, and funerals – precisely those events in the human life-cycle which, if we take christening as a special case of name-giving, figure so largely as social occasions throughout black Africa. A christening at the parish church of St Giles, London, in 1726 assembled ‘well-drest’ black people of both sexes. The two godmothers and their half-dozen attendants are described in a newspaper report as ‘all Guiney Blacks, as pretty, genteel Girls, as could be girt with a Girdle, and setting aside the Complexion, enough to tempt an old frozen Anchorite to have crack’d a Commandment with any of them’.18 At least one black kinsman of Jack Beef, footman to the Leeward Islands solicitor-general John Baker, attended Beef’s funeral in Bloomsbury in 1771;19 and Samuel Bowden, physician and versifier, in ‘An Epitaph, On a Negro Servant, who died at Governor Phipps’s, At Haywood near Westbury’, recorded that
Black guests, and Æthiopian night,
Sit round this funeral room.20
And when, in 1773, two black men were imprisoned in the Bridewell house of correction for the crime of begging, they were ‘visited by upwards of 300 of their countrymen’ and the black community ‘contributed largely towards their support during their confinement’.21
It is tempting to speculate about these black organizations in eighteenth-century London in the light of what is known about their counterparts in, for example, Buenos Aires, where seven neo-African societies were flourishing legally as late as 1827, some taking their names (Angola, Bangala, Conga, Mina) from the regions of Africa to which members traced their descent.22 The differences are obvious. Most black Londoners were very young. Most of them had been torn from their parents and ethnic groups while still children. They were atomized in separate households, cut off from the cultural nourishment and reinforcement made possible by even the most inhumane plantation system. These circumstances could not but limit severely those neo-African forms of organization that found their richest expression in Brazil, Cuba, and Haiti. All the more value, therefore, attaches to the details about London’s black clubs provided by three hostile witnesses.
The quarrelsome eccentric Philip Thicknesse, whom we shall meet later as a vehement racist, complained in 1778 that ‘London abounds with an incredible number of these black men, who have clubs to support those who are out of place’.23 ‘Out of place’ means out of work, but the reference here is clearly to black people who had escaped from servitude and in many cases, no doubt, were living under cover. The father of English racism, Edward Long, had complained in 1772 that those blacks who had escaped and not been recaptured were influencing the rest, especially newcomers:
Upon arriving in London, these servants soon grow acquainted with a knot of blacks, who, having eloped from their respective owners at different times, repose themselves here in ease and indolence, and endeavour to strengthen their party, by seducing as many of these strangers into the association as they can work to their purpose.24
But the most interesting and informative of these hostile witnesses is Sir John Fielding the ‘Blind Beak’, magistrate and half-brother of the novelist. He noted in 1768 that it was the practice of blacks ‘intoxicated with Liberty’ and ‘grown refractory’ to ‘enter into Societies, and make it their Business to corrupt and dissatisfy the Mind of every fresh black Servant that comes to England’. Worse still, it was often hazardous, according to Fielding, for an owner to try to recapture a runaway. For the blacks had succeeded in getting ‘the Mob on their Side’. That made it ‘not only difficult but dangerous’ for owners to recover possession of their black chattels ‘when once they are spirited away’. When blacks were brought to England, ‘they no sooner come over, but the Sweets of Liberty and the Conversation with free Men and Christians, enlarge their Minds’. So they grew ‘restless, prompt to conceive, and alert to execute[,] the blackest Conspiracies against their Governors and Masters’.25 And to this fact Fielding, authentic voice of the English governing and master class, attributed the frequent slave rebellions in the West Indies.
Now, when Fielding says the blacks had the ‘Mob’ on their side, what exactly does he mean by ‘Mob’? He himself had identified them, ten years earlier, as the ‘infinite . . . Number of Chairmen [i.e. carriers of sedans], Porters, Labourers and drunken Mechanics in this Town’.26 And he himself, in the Gordon riots of 1780, was to have his house sacked by them. The ‘Mob’ were the working people of London, the pre-industrial craftsmen and labourers who, in the very year that Fielding wrote of their support for runaway black slaves, poured onto the streets of the capital in their thousands to demonstrate for ‘Wilkes and Liberty’. Groups marched or ran through Shoreditch, the City, Westminster, and Southwark, ‘captained’ by men like the journeyman wheelwright William Pate-man and the coach-master Thomas Taplin, gathering numbers as they went, smashing lamps, windows, and accessible woodwork in the Mansion House and the big town houses of the nobility. Among them were apprentices, journeymen, labourers, servants, waiters, craftsmen, shopkeepers, small traders, Spitalfields weavers, east London coal-heavers, tanners, brewers’ draymen, and sailors.27 Ever since the political upheavals of the seventeenth century, this ‘Mob’ had been impregnated (or, as Fielding had it, ‘intoxicated’) with a love of liberty, a hatred of slavery, and a spirit of‘sturdy independence and hostility to the executive’.28 No wonder it was not merely difficult but dangerous for masters to try to recapture people who had such formidable allies. And allies they were. London’s working people were not trying to make use of the black community or usurp its leadership. Their attitude to slavery had nothing in common with the sentimentality of many middle-class abolitionists. They saw black people as fellow-victims of their own enemies, fellow-fighters against a system that degraded poor whites and poor blacks alike. With their help, London had by the 1760s become a centre of black resistance.
The majority of the 10,000 or so black people who lived in Britain in the eighteenth century were household servants – pages, valets, footmen, coachmen, cooks, and maids – much as their predecessors had been in the previous century. Among the aristocracy and those who aped them, the fashion for black servants in metal collars and showy livery continued – although, with the mid-century vogue of chinoiserie, it became for a time ‘more original’ for the trend-setting upper class to go in for Chinese servants.1 As in the seventeenth century, judging by the large number of contemporary portraits in which they appear, many of the black pages could not have been more than nine or ten years old.2 Andrea Soldi’s portrait of Catherine, Countess of Fauconberg, which hangs at Newburgh Priory in north Yorkshire, shows a black child holding the countess’s coronet. Some of Johann Zoffany’s family groups include a black servant. So do George Morland’s The Fruits of Early Industry and Œconomy (c.1785-90) and William Redmore Bigg’s The Charitable Lady (1787), and both a black page and a black footman figure in the fourth plate of Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode (1745).3 Using his own as a model, Reynolds painted black servants into a number of portraits: holding the Marquis of Granby’s horse, for instance.4 For a portrayal of a black child in service lower down the social scale we must turn to Hogarth again; in the second plate of A Harlot’s Progress (1732) a small boy, wearing a jewelled, feathered turban, is carrying a kettle or large teapot.5
Associated in many English people’s minds with the immense riches of Africa and India, and the immense riches amassed by the West and East Indians, black servants conferred on their masters and mistresses ‘an air of luxurious wellbeing’.6 They were at once charming, exotic ornaments, objects of curiosity, talking-points, and, above all, symbols of prestige.7 In the phrase of a minor poet of the 1790s, who wrote when the fashion was past its peak, a black attendant served as the ‘Index of Rank or Opulence supreme’.8 One gains the impression that there was scarcely a titled woman in eighteenth-century England who would have been seen dead without one. Elizabeth Chudleigh, for instance, the profligate Duchess of Kingston, had a black servant called Sambo, whom she brought up from the age of five or six, and of whom she was so fond that she took him, elegantly dressed, to most of the public places she frequented. He sat with her in her box at the theatre, watching The Beggar’s Opera. Unfortunately, when he reached the age of 18 or 19 he began staying away for several days and nights at a time and associating with ‘a set of whores and ruffians’, so she packed him off to the West Indies.9 Catherine Douglas, eccentric Duchess of Queensberry, who died from eating too many cherries, had a black servant whom she called Soubise. Son of a woman slave on St Kitts, the young man was an accomplished fencer, horseman, and musician. He was taken up by fashionable society, became a fop among fops, used expensive scent, was a favourite of Garrick, was sketched by Gainsborough, and was accused of raping one of his mistress’s maids – though he seems to have found no shortage of willing female partners, being indeed ‘as general a lover as Don Juan’. Eventually he was sent to India, where he ran a riding academy, became government horse-breaker, and was killed in a fall from a horse.10 Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, was an exception to the general rule, since the duke for some reason objected to her accepting a black boy, ‘eleven years old and very honest’. So she offered the child to her mother: ‘I cannot bear the poor wretch being ill-used; if you liked him instead of Michel I will send him, he will be a cheap servant and you will make a Christian of him and a good boy; if you don’t like him they say Lady Rockingham wants one.’11 The fashion still extended right to the top: according to Thackeray, when King George I came over to England from his duchy of Hanover in 1714 he brought with him his two black servants, Mustapha and Mahomet.12
What were the duties of a page waiting upon a lady of quality? He had to attend his mistress’s person and her tea-table; carry her train as she moved to and fro; take charge of her fan and smelling-salts and produce them when required; feed her parrots; and comb her lapdogs.13 From a black youngster’s point of view it was no doubt better to serve a slightly dotty duchess until she grew tired of you than a sadistic captain of a slave-ship or a rum-sodden absentee planter. Between the extremes of petting and brutality there must have been an infinite number of gradations. But all were servitude. As the hue-and-cry advertisements showed us and those complaints by Thicknesse, Long, and Fielding reminded us, a great number of black people resisted servitude in the only way open to them: by running away. There was liable to be about even the most docile, well-trained, and well-treated of black servants something that unimaginative English gentlefolk interpreted as an ungrateful restlessness, an itchiness of the feet. Some took it to be an inherent racial characteristic. Few realized just how bitterly the black members of their households loathed servitude and longed for freedom.
Higher-minded masters and mistresses had their black slaves taught to read and write, had them taught christian doctrine, even had them baptized, once it became fairly clear that baptism did not mean freedom. The two black slaves of the Duke of Marlborough were schooled in 1734 by one Charles Beesley, at a cost to the duke of £10 15s. for four months’ tuition, plus 2s. for ‘2 Writing Books for ye Blacks’, 3s. for Thomas Dyche’s Guide to the English Tongue, and 5s. for a history of England.14 Lord Chesterfield, while ambassador at The Hague, had his ‘Black-a-Moor boy’ instructed in the christian faith by his chaplain, personally catechized him, then had him christened.15 To those who had done their christian duty in this way the slaves’ itch for liberty came as a sore disappointment, a blow to pride as well as pocket.
Some runaways got a bit of their own back by taking with them some money or a few portable household goods. Black youths came up at the Old Bailey from time to time, charged with petty theft,16 and the hue-and-cry advertisements sometimes complain of theft. Not that freedom was an easy option, even if you had the ‘Mob’ to help you avoid recapture, a network of sympathizers to find you shelter, and a pair of your master’s silver candlesticks or a bolt of your mistress’s linen for sale to keep you from starving. To be young, black, and on the run meant scraping an existence at the very bottom of the social heap. Especially in London, where black people were not, after 1731, allowed to learn a trade. On 14 September of that year the lord mayor issued a solemn proclamation prohibiting apprenticeship for black people, some of whom had evidently been trying to acquire a useful skill:
It is Ordered by this Court, That for the future no Negroes or other Blacks be suffered to be bound Apprentices at any of the Companies of this City to any Freeman thereof; and that Copies of this Order be printed and sent to the Masters and Wardens of the several Companies of this City, who are required to see the same at all times hereafter duly observed.17
This is the earliest known instance of an employment colour bar in this country, and it seems to have been effective.
There is said to have been a concentration of destitute black people in the St Giles or Seven Dials district, then on London’s northern outskirts; it was a mass of insanitary hovels where beggars, whores, criminals, and other outcasts congregated. According to one late eighteenth-century source, black mendicants, conspicuous among London beggars, were dubbed ‘St Giles black birds’.18 Other black people lived in the unfashionable riverside hamlets of Ratcliff (as early as 1690) and Limehouse (long before any Chinese settled there),19 and local tradition has it that two riverside inns at Wapping were used as markets for the sale of black youths as domestic servants.20
A number of free black men, scattered all over the country, managed to earn their bread as labourers or craftsmen of various kinds, or in other ways. There were black agricultural labourers21 and, as we have seen, black seamen.22 A black fencing-master called George Turner, described as ‘tall, well-made and pretty’, was making a living in 1710 by sword-fighting at the Bear Garden in Southwark; his brother had been fatally wounded in the same occupation four years before.23 A ‘surprising Negro, or African Prince’ was performing as fire-eater and contortionist at Charing Cross in 1751-2,24 and a black actor was playing on the Dublin stage in the 1770s.25 In 1785 John Marrant, a black man from Nova Scotia, was ordained a minister of the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connection, a dissident Anglican sect; he died at Islington in 1791.26 At least one black hairdresser was working in London in 1788.27
Joseph Banks’s two servants, Thomas Richmond and George Dorlton (or Dalton) accompanied their master on Captain Cook’s first voyage round the world, in 1768. With a white seaman, they went up a mountain to gather rare plants for scientific purposes. All three froze to death in the snow-covered wastes of Tierra del Fuego.28
What of black girls and women in eighteenth-century Britain? Some found work as laundrymaids, seamstresses, and children’s nurses.29 Two London sculptors of the eighteenth century had black maidservants: Mary, servant to Roubiliac, died of smallpox; Elizabeth Rosina Clements, known as ‘Black Bet’ and ‘Bronze’, went grey in the service of the thrifty Nollekens, amused him on occasion by dancing his favourite cat round the studio, and was left 19 guineas in his will.30 A black actress performing in Lancashire as Polly in The Beggar’s Opera was reported to be ‘excellent as to figure, and speaking, but remarkably so as to singing’;31 her name has not come down to us.
It is clear that many black women were forced into prostitution as the only alternative to starvation. A German who visited London in 1710 noted that ‘there are . . . such a quantity of Moors of both sexes in England that I have never seen before’. He observed black women whom he described, naively or prudishly, as beggars. They wore European dress, ‘and there is nothing more diverting than to see them in mobs or caps [Cornetten oder Hauben] of white stuff and with their black bosoms uncovered’.32 These were merely the fashionable low-cut dresses of the period. A black woman is shown among a group of whores in the third plate of Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress (1735).33 One who was comparatively successful in this occupation in the 1770s was known as ‘Black Harriot’. Bought on the Guinea coast when very young, she was taken to Jamaica and sold to a planter who fathered two children on her. Then he brought her to England, where he died of smallpox and left her practically penniless. ‘Very alluring . . . tall, well made, and genteel’, she had ‘many attractions that are not often met with in the Female World who yield to prostitution’. Having educated herself by reading, she had attained ‘a degree of politeness [i.e. intellectual culture], scarce to be paralleled in an African female’. After only a few months she had acquired more than 70 regular clients, at least 20 of whom, according to a contemporary account, were members of the House of Lords.34 Titled patrons also frequented a black brothel in London in 1774, so Boswell was informed by the Earl of Pembroke.35 Mrs Lowes, of 68 Upper Charlotte Street, Rathbone Place, Soho, born in the West Indies, was working as a prostitute in 1788, charging clients three guineas for a whole night, one guinea for ‘a short visit’. She is described as short and plump, with ‘a sweet chearful disposition, fine dark hair, and eyes of the same friendly hue; fine teeth’.36 Five years later a Jamaican known as Miss Wilson was exercising the same profession at 27 Litchfield Street, Soho. She had ‘very pleasing’ features and was ‘a girl of considerable taste and fashion’, who danced well and sang ‘with much sweetness and science’ and whose ‘conversation denotes her to be a girl of sound sense’. She was generally to be found of an evening at the Covent Garden Theatre, and was friendly with the actors there.37
Some of the black performers in the seventeenth-century Lord Mayor’s Pageant were Asians, and some of the black servants in Britain in the eighteenth century were ‘Moormen and Gentoos’: Mohammedans and Hindus, in other words. Most of these came from Bengal, but there were some from Madras and elsewhere in India. They were brought back from the east by the nabobs. Sons of London merchants, army officers, country parsons, and petty gentry, the nabobs made their fortunes as writers and factors in the service of the East India Company. Like the West Indians, they came back to England to live luxuriously.1 During their stay in India they had grown used to personal service on a stupendous scale. When the barrister William Hickey left India in 1808 he doled out 2,000 rupees in farewell presents to his 63 servants, among them two bakers, two cooks, eight waiters, three grass-cutters, four grooms, a coachman, a hairdresser, and nine valets.2 But that was nothing out of the ordinary. Alexander Mackrabie, sheriff of Calcutta, lived with three friends in a household employing 110 servants, and the Revd William Tennant, a chaplain, lived with a family that employed 105.3 An English captain serving in the 1780 Mysore campaign had with him his steward, cook, valet, groom, groom’s assistant, barber, washerman, and ‘other officers’, plus 15 ‘coolies’ to carry his luggage, wine, brandy, tea, live poultry, and milch-goats.4
If a nabob hankered after a really expensive status symbol he could easily buy an African slave on the spot. Known in Calcutta as ‘Coffrees’, Africans were used by the English and French in their wars in India, chiefly ‘to stop a bullet from some more valuable life’. Before long the enterprising East India Company was running a regular service of armed slavers from Madagascar, mainly to supply its settlements on the west coast of India. Two-thirds of the cargoes were males aged 15 to 40; the rest were females aged 15 to 25 and children. Purchase price was £15 per head for adults; children were half-price; and captains, mates, and surgeons received a few shillings’ bonus for each slave landed alive. Judging by press advertisements, some Englishmen in Calcutta bred Africans for the slave market. Profits were slow but enormous. The selling price of an African butler and cook in Calcutta in 1781 was 400 rupees. Since African slaves in India cost about ten times as much as boys and girls from Dacca, most English expatriates preferred to acquire Indian domestics. And it was those they took home with them.5
Governor-general Warren Hastings and his wife brought back to England a handsome all-black tiger, two Indian boys of 13 or 14, and four Indian maidservants. The boys, who spoke no English, were described by a German visitor as having ‘longish faces, beautiful black eyes, fine eyebrows, sleek black hair, thin lips, fine teeth, a brownish complexion and kindly, intelligent faces’. But Mrs Hastings, formerly the Baroness von Imhoff, complained that her four maids ‘refused to work any harder than in India, and wanted to lead exactly the same life’. So she got rid of them.6 In 1789, at Godalming, Fanny Burney’s friend Mrs William Lock watched the arrival of several post-chaises containing ‘East Indian families with their Negro servants, Nurses and Children’. She found it ‘touching . . . to see these poor negro women taken away from their country’. Her own servant met one on the stairs in tears.7 Hickey was given a ‘little pet boy’, a Bengali nicknamed Nabob, whom he brought back to England and dressed as a hussar. The boy was sent to school and baptized, betrayed his master’s whereabouts to a bailiff, and was at length reclaimed by his former owner.8
Many of the Englishwomen who travelled to the east brought Asian servants back with them. Returning from Bengal in 1774, a Mrs Gladwin was allegedly poisoned by her two Indian maids.9 Eliza Fay, returning from Calcutta in 1782, stranded her Anglo-Indian maid Kitty Johnson on St Helena, and to her embarrassment was called to account for it on a subsequent visit.10
Like African slaves in Britain, Asians were sometimes ill-treated. In 1800 a Surrey woman was accused of cruelty to her Indian maidservant during the absence of her husband, ‘who had brought the poor girl from her native country’.11 And, like African slaves, many of the Asians ran away and were the subject of hue-and-cry advertisements. An ‘East-India Tawny Black’ ran off and was advertised for in 1737, a ‘Runaway Bengal Boy’ in 1743.12
Asian slaves were sometimes advertised for sale. Steele’s and Addison’s Tatler, in 1709, carried an advertisement offering ‘a Black Indian Boy, 12 Years of Age, fit to wait on a Gentleman, to be disposed of at Denis’s Coffee-house in Finch-Lane near the Royal Exchange’.13 Indian servants were often sought by people planning to go to India,14 but other prospective employers sometimes advertised for them, like the advertiser who wanted to hire ‘a young female East-Indian Servant’ in 1758.15
Free Asians occasionally advertised their availability for work. In 1750 an East Indian who could speak six languages, among them Portuguese and German, and had been ‘christen’d according to the Establishment of the Church of England’, was looking for a place as a footman.16 Such advertisers often expressed a wish to return to India: ‘A Female Black Servant would be glad to wait on any Lady or Children going to India; she came from thence . . . to attend a Gentleman’s Child’; ‘A Young Man, a Native of Madras, and who understands shaving and dressing Gentlemen, and all other requisites necessary for a Valet, would be glad to engage with any Captain or private Gentleman going to that place the ensuing season in that capacity’; ‘WANTS a passage to attend on a Lady going to India, a Black Girl, who came home [sic] as a lady’s servant; has been in England some time; can dress hair; works well at her needle; get up small linen, &c’.17
But not all the Asians in Britain in the eighteenth century were servants. An ‘East Indian Gentoo’ conjuror, whose repertory included card tricks and thought-reading, was performing at Bartholomew Fair in 1790.18 And, as we shall see in a later chapter, the plight of stranded Lascars – Indian seamen – first troubled the public conscience in 1785.
Music played such an important part in the daily lives of Africans and their descendants – which is not the same thing as saying that all black people were born musicians – that the early appearance of black musicians in the British Isles is not surprising. It was in fact part of a general European phenomenon. As early as the thirteenth century the German emperor Frederick II had five young black trumpeters at his splendid court in Palermo, on the island of Sicily. Aged between 16 and 20, they wore purple livery and played on silver trumpets. The imperial decree sending for them was dated 28 November 1239, and three years later they were being listened to in amazement by an English visitor. Richard, Earl of Cornwall, son of King John of England and afterwards King of the Romans, was passing through Sicily on his way back home from the crusades, and he was given a brilliant reception at Frederick’s court. He was enchanted by the acrobatic dances of Saracen dancing-girls, noted that the page-boys were blacks, and heard strange music played by black musicians on instruments he had never seen or heard before.1 His account of his travels must have helped spread to England the fame of black musicians as part of the rich trappings of a feudal court far more sophisticated than his father’s. Other returning crusaders brought back to Europe, not only black musicians,2 but also ‘the particular combination of instruments in the Islamic military band’:3 the buisine, or herald’s trumpet, and the naqqāra, the medium-sized Arabian kettledrum that the Italians adopted as the nacchera, the French as the nacaire, and the English as the naker.4 The British Library has an illuminated manuscript of the late fourteenth century, attributed to the Genoese miniaturist known as ‘the Monk of Hyères’, showing a black cymbalist who is humping a pair of these laced kettledrums on his back. They are slung round his neck by means of a red strap and are being played with two small knobbed beaters by a white musician standing behind him.5 Seville’s black community were allowed to keep their dances and festivals in the reign of Enrique III of Castille (1390-1406).6 African singing was heard at Lagos in Portugal on 8 August 1444, when the slaves taken back by Lançarote ‘made their lamentations in song, according to the custom of their country’ (faziam suas lamentaçooēs em maneira de canto, segundo o costume de sua terra).7 Black dance music was heard in Lisbon on 31 October 1451, during the triumphs honouring the imperial ambassadors sent by Frederick III to fetch his bride Princess Leonor; highlighting the reception was an African in a dragon mask.8
Half a century later, as we have seen, black musicians had reached the royal courts of the British Isles. Early in the sixteenth century the English king had his black trumpeter, the Scottish king his black drummer. Queen Elizabeth I is portrayed as having seven black musicians and three black dancers. What could well have been a group of black musicians performed in the 1672 and 1673 Lord Mayor’s Pageants. Pinpointed in the hue-and-cry advertisement for a young black runaway in 1757 was his proficiency on the French horn. Black musicians performed on violins, horns, and other instruments at a social gathering of black servants in 1764. So much has been said in previous chapters.
Some black musicians were highly regarded. When the seventh Earl of Barrymore went stag-hunting he had in his train ‘four Africans, superbly mounted, and superbly dressed in scarlet and silver, who were correct performers on the French horn’.9 The musician said to ‘blow the best French Horn and Trumpet’ in eighteenth-century England was Cato, slave first to Sir Robert Walpole then to the Earl of Chesterfield, who gave him as a present to the Prince and Princess of Wales in 1738. Cato became the Prince’s head gamekeeper; his portrait, in a group of hunting celebrities, was painted by the landscape painter John Wootton.10 Others were less highly regarded. A satirical complaint in 1785 referred to two black musicians who ‘never do a turn except playing on the French horn, and sometimes making punch, when it is wanted particularly nice’.11
By as early as 1787 white Londoners as well as black were dancing to black dance music at what a contemporary account describes as ‘an innocent amusement, vulgarly called black hops, where twelve pence will gain admission’.12 In the same year an ex-slave from Virginia, blinded in the American War of Independence, was scraping a living with his violin around the London streets, as we shall see in a later chapter; and a black musician was leading an itinerant concert party round the country. Parson Woodforde’s diary tells how, one summer evening, a covered cart drew into his yard with three men in it, ‘and one of them, the principal, was a black with a french Horn, blowing it all the way up the Yard to the Kitchen Door’. After hearing songs from ‘a little Woman only 33 Inches high’, Woodforde asked the horn-player where he came from and was told that he had formerly served the Earl of Albemarle. Woodforde gave his visitors a shilling for the entertainment.13
The use of black musicians as military bandsmen in the British army, a tradition that reached its height towards the end of the eighteenth century, seems to have started in the second half of the seventeenth. Black drummers were first acquired by English regiments serving in the West Indies. There are several seventeenth-century records of a colonel ‘presenting a slave’ to his regiment to act as drummer.14 According to Sir Walter Scott, six black trumpeters were attached to the Scottish Life Guards in 1679. He describes them as wearing ‘white dresses richly laced’ and ‘massive silver collars and armlets’.15 A black kettledrummer can be seen in the background of Sir Godfrey Kneller’s portrait (c.1689) of Frederick, 1st Duke of Schomberg, who served as a cavalry general in the English army. This drummer wears a scarlet coat with gold-laced seams, embroidered back and front with the royal cipher and crown, and a small white turban bound round a blue cloth cap with a hanging hood or bag.16 At least one black drummer was present at the Battle of Blenheim in 1704, serving under Marlborough in the English army that defeated the French and Bavarians.17 In 1713 a black trumpeter and kettledrummer called Brown, in ‘Col. La Boucheterre’s Regiment of Dragoons’, petitioned for an increase of pay, but this petition was turned down on the ground that neither trumpeter not kettledrummer was allowed by the establishment to dragoons, and ‘the petitioner constantly received above the pay of Hautbois which the establishment allows’.18 A contemporary account of a parade of the 4th Dragoons at Stirling in 1715 said: ‘This was a show we could not pass by without looking at and to say truth I scarse think there is a more showy regiment in Europe . . . The six drumers were mores with bres [i.e. brass] drums . . . and they roade upon gray horses.’19 In 1755 the 4th Dragoons’ inspection returns recorded that ‘the Drummers are all blacks’.20 An 1802 painting of this regiment shows a black trumpeter in a white jacket with red collar, cuffs, and wings, all laced yellow with blue centre. He is wearing white breeches and, instead of the regulation fur cap, a white turban with cords or chains and an unusual green and red plume; his rolled cloak is red, and on the rear of his saddle is a small red box in which his trumpet was apparently kept when not in use. The 4th Dragoons’ black trumpeters are also shown in an 1821 picture.21 The Household Cavalry had its black trumpeters by about 1720,22 and a black trumpeter in oriental dress can be seen in the background of a portrait (c.1735) of Captain Gifford of the 4th troop of Life Guards.23 A contemporary engraving of the 12 musicians (‘His Majesty’s Trumpets’) at the installation of the Knights Companions of the Order of the Bath in 1725 shows that one of them was black.24
This established tradition was greatly boosted by the craze for ‘Turkish’ military bands that swept across Europe in the eighteenth century. Poland led the way with a full military band imported from Constantinople. Russia followed suit in 1725; Austria, in 1741, when Franz von der Trenck marched into Vienna preceded by a Turkish band; France was not far behind. By about 1770 the new style of military band, augmented by some new and very loud percussion instruments, was customary all over Europe.25 The kettledrum and long trumpet of the earlier military band had been borrowed, as we have seen, from the east. The fashion for what was often called ‘Janissary’ music – the word means, basically, a Turkish soldier – entailed the addition of five more oriental instruments. There were now large cymbals.26 There was now a large bass drum – sometimes twice as long as the diameter of the head. This was carried at the waist, not on the chest, and was beaten on one skin with a heavy felt-tipped stick while the other skin (or the shell) was rubbed on the off-beat with a kind of broom or switch held in the drummer’s left hand.27 There was now a large triangle, much heavier than its modern counterpart, and often having metal jingles threaded on the lower bar.28 Also added was a large tambourine, anything up to 90cm. in diameter, and often with many small bells as well as jingling plates in the rim.29 Most spectacular, and by far the noisiest of the innovations, was the Turkish crescent or chapeau chinois, the impressive stick jingle that the Turks called chaghána –a word soon anglicized to ‘johanna’ in the Royal Artillery Band.30 Usually known as the jingling johnny, this sonorous rhythm instrument consisted of a pole some six feet high surmounted by several crescents from which hung a myriad of bells; red horsehair plumes hung from its sides.31 The ‘Turkish’ rage spread both to popular music, with composers writing special parts for triangle and tambourine as an accompaniment to the pianoforte,32 and to orchestral music, as in the last movement of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony.
But in fact the musicians who played in these ‘Turkish’ military bands, and whose playing inspired instrumental and rhythmical innovations by composers, were more often Africans and people of African descent than Turks. In Britain, indeed, Turkish musicians were never used. Elsewhere, when Turkish musicians died or were discharged they were usually replaced by black men33 – so that when Frederick II of Prussia commanded his ‘Turkish’ band to perform before the Turkish ambassador, the latter complained: ‘That’s not Turkish.’34 Black musicianship had a far earlier influence on European concert music than most historians of music and compilers of musical encyclopedias have been prepared to admit.35 The outstanding exception is H.G. Farmer, who writes:
It should not be forgotten that these negro drummers not only gave a tremendous fillip to regimental music . . ., but it was their contribution in this so-called ‘Turkish music’ that opened the eyes of the great composers, beginning with Mozart and Beethoven, to the possibilities of a new tone colour and fresh rhythmic devices in the wider realm of orchestral music.36
Public money was not provided for the creation or upkeep of British army bands until 1757, when the Duke of Cumberland succeeded in getting funds voted for six enlisted musicians in each battalion.37 From then on, every British regiment with any pretension to smartness had its corps of black musicians, gorgeously dressed38 and often – cymbalists and triangle-players especially –very young, though the bass drummer, if only because of the weight of his massive drum, tended to be ‘of imposing physique’.39 In 1759 eight or ten black drummers were ‘procured’ for the 29th Foot (afterwards The Worcestershire Regiment) by Admiral Boscawen, apparently in Guadeloupe. Thinking they would be ‘very ornamental’ in the regiment, which was commanded by his brother, he took them home with him. The 29th were then stationed in Ireland, and special permission had to be obtained from the king before the drummers were allowed to join them. Fifteen years later the regiment had ten black drummers, at least three of whom were survivors of the original group. The black drummers of the 29th always came in for high praise by the top brass at inspection time. They ‘beat and play well’, said a major-general in 1774, and another said the same in 1791. In 1797 a lieutenant noted in his diary that the black bandsman who beat the big drum was ‘a handsome man, 6 feet 4 inches’. In 1821 there were ‘4 men of colour’ in the band, and three years later it was reported that 11 vacancies in the band were ‘reserved for black boys, who are on their way from Africa for the purpose’. In 1831 the band still had three black musicians: George Carvell, big drum; Peter Askins, kettledrum; and George Wise, tambourine. The last of The Worcestershire Regiment’s black drummers died on 15 July 1843.40
Having been stationed in the West Indies for almost 60 years, the 38th Foot (afterwards the 1st South Staffordshire Regiment) brought back three black drummers when it returned home in 1765.41 By 1772 the Grenadier Guards had black ‘time-beaters’ playing bass, tenor, and side drums and cymbals.42 Three black drummers of the Grenadier Guards are shown marching out of St James’s Palace with their white comrades in a 1790 engraving;43 the regiment’s black drummer, wearing a turban, is shown in an 1829 engraving by E. Hull;44 and ‘Francis, the last of the blacks in the Grenadier Guards, was discharged in 1840’.45 An army inspection return in the Public Record Office shows that the 3rd Hussars had a black kettledrummer in 1776, and the regiment is said still to possess the solid silver collar he wore, presented in 1775 and worn by a mounted drummer of the regiment at the Edinburgh Military Tattoo a few years ago.46 The 1st Life Guards had black drummers and trumpeters in the last quarter of the eighteenth century,47 and the 2nd Life Guards had three black trombonists in its mounted band until ‘just before the Crimean War’ (1853-6).48
About the year 1784 the Duke of York, colonel-in-chief of the Coldstream Guards, imported a band from Germany to replace the regiment’s British band, and the newcomers included two black tambourinists and a black player of the jingling johnny.
This band became very popular, and attracted crowds of persons to St. James’s Park to listen to its performances . . . The Africans . . . produced such effect with their tambourines, that those instruments afterwards, under their tuition, became extremely fashionable, and were cultivated by many of those belles of distinction who were emulous to display Turkish attitudes and Turkish graces.49
The Coldstream Guards spent £3 9s. 2d. on ‘Boots for the Black Musicians’ in 1792, and there were similar disbursements in 1803 and 1804; in the latter year £24 15s. 2d. was spent on ‘silver collars for the Black Musicians’. Boots were again provided in 1807, and in 1808 ‘Turbans for the Band’ cost £55.50 The Coldstream Guards retained their black musicians until about 1840.51 There is a well-known half-length mezzotint portrait of Fraser, their black tambourine-player.52
During the last decade of the eighteenth century all the drummers of the 7th Royal Fusiliers were black men.53 The Buckinghamshire Militia had a black tambourinist and a black cymbalist in their band about the year 1790,54 the Middlesex Militia two black tambourinists and a black cymbalist in 1793.55 Two years later the Scots Guards’ band had ‘three black men performing on the tambourine, Turkish bells and cymbals’,56 and Martinique-born Jean Baptiste, the last black to serve in that regiment, was discharged on 22 December 1841.57 A black musician was discharged from the King’s Light Dragoons in 1803.58 Black musicians were members of the Royal Artillery Band in 1812, and probably earlier; in that year jackets, waistcoats, pantaloons, caps and trimmings, feathers, gaiters, shirts, stockings, and leather stocks were ordered for their use.59 Gaiters were bought for the black musicians of the 1st Foot Guards in 1802 and 1803, and those of the 3rd Foot Guards had breeches bought for them in 1809 and boots in 1810.60 A ‘native of the West Indies’, aged 23, was discharged from the 1st Foot Guards in 1823 ‘in consequence of not being of a sufficiently black complexion’.61 A print of the East India Company Volunteers being reviewed by George III (who died in 1820) shows that quite small units had black bandsmen.62 And there was even a black drummer in the West Essex Yeomanry Cavalry, a regiment not raised until 1830 (and disbanded in 1877); he is said to have served previously with the Coldstream Guards.63
As the army agents’ ledgers and contemporary portraits show, black military bandsmen were smartly and colourfully dressed, often in oriental style. They had gorgeous braided and slashed tunics with sashes, high-plumed turbans or bearskins or cocked hats, top boots or gaiters, and jewelled dirks, ‘each regiment striving to outdo others in unconventionality and bizarrerie’.64 This, for instance, was how the black ‘time-beaters’ of The Worcestershire Regiment were dressed in 1831:
A muslin turban with a silver crescent in front, surmounted with a scarlet hackle feather 12 inches long, with silver cord and tassels, entwined round the turban. A silver-plated stock for the neck which opened with clasps and fastened behind. Yellow cloth jacket, hussar fashion, trimmed with black fur on collar and cuffs, the breast was embroidered with black silk cord, and three rows of silver buttons in front. The jacket was worn open. – The waistcoat was of white cloth embroidered with crimson silk cord, and had a row of silver buttons down the front. – A yellow and crimson silk sash round the waist.
They also wore Turkish scimitars, brass scabbards with sling waist belts. The pantaloons were scarlet with a broad silver stripe on the outside seams, and fitted tight at the knee. Yellow Hessian boots with large black silk tassels in front.65
But if the black bandsmen’s uniforms were a joy to the eye, their playing was a joy to both eye and ear. For they made vigorous bodily movements as they played. In Farmer’s words, ‘they capered rather than marched, and flung their drumsticks and tambourines into the air, adroitly catching them in discreetly measured cadence. Their agility with fingers, arms and legs was only equalled by their perfect time in the music.’66 Drummers would throw a drumstick up in the air after the beat and catch it with the other hand in time for the next. Players of the jingling johnny would shake it, in perfect time, under their arms, over their heads, under their legs. Players of cymbals would clash them ‘at every point they could reach’.67 And their white comrades loved the display as much as the music. Regiments returning from service in the West Indies ‘were the objects of envy in proportion to the number of “blacks” they could muster in the ranks of their bands’.68 ‘No other type of music demands such a firm, precise, and overwhelmingly dominant beat’, wrote a musicologist. ‘Every bar is so strongly marked with a new positive accent that it is almost impossible to get out of time.’69 Or, as a military historian puts it, ‘they were rattling good drummers’.70 Farmer calls the practical results in the military sphere ‘simply amazing’. Troops were said never to have marched better than they did to those ‘rhythmic crashes and accented drummings’. And the effect on the general public was ‘astounding’. Crowds thronged to see the latest craze.71
These army musicians probably had a better life than most other Africans and persons of African descent in Britain. When they worked, they played. They were valued for something they did outstandingly well. Ordinary soldiers enjoyed the energizing beat, exciting cross-rhythms, and justified swagger of black musicianship. And black military bandsmen were clearly popular with officers who found that they added a new dimension of smartness to a regiment. By sheer excellence, and long before the stereotype of ‘the black as entertainer’ arose, they won a special place for themselves within a privileged sub-culture of an alien society. In this achievement they echoed both the functionality of African traditional music and the pride and professionalism of its performers.
But they were not saints. Musicians, like other people, get into trouble sometimes. Toby Gill, a black drummer in the 4th Dragoons, described as ‘a very drunken profligate Fellow’, went to the gallows in 1750 for murdering a woman, and afterwards they hanged his corpse in chains at Blythburgh, Suffolk.72 Eleven years later a black drummer in the same regiment killed his horse. He was tried by court martial, sentenced to 1,000 lashes, and had his pay docked by 2s. a week until the value of the horse – £23 – was made up.73 In 1790 Othello and Carter, two of the 4th Dragoons’ trumpeters, went absent without leave. They were recaptured and locked in the guard-house. One of them tried to escape by shinning up the chimney, but it was too narrow for him to get out. A court martial sentenced them both to be flogged and next day they ‘entered on board a man of war’.74 In 1796 William Russell, a black drummer in the 63rd Foot (afterwards the West Suffolk Regiment), was committed to jail at Ipswich on a charge of burglary.75
After all, these men were soldiers as well as musicians. In battle, their place was not on some distant hill:
When the regiment was in line the band normally formed in rear and played during the action – probably a more exacting demand on courage than standing in the ranks with a musket. When a battalion formed square the band moved to the centre, taking post near the Colours – a particularly dangerous position.76
And the musicians’ task, in the thick of the action, was not merely to encourage their comrades, and transmit signals, with trumpet and drum. Farmer spells out what else was expected of them: ‘It is highly probable that many a bandsman, bugler, fifer and drummer – whose positions were within the square – not only cared for the wounded and dying who were carried into the square, but even handled musket and bayonet so as to close a breach in the ranks.’77 Like other British troops, the black bandsmen were taught how to look after themselves. And they did not take racist insults lying down. That no doubt explains the riot at Plymouth Dock in 1780 when a large crowd took sides in a quarrel between two black bandsmen from the Somerset Militia and some white soldiers from the Brecknock Militia. What started the quarrel we can only guess, but in no time at all a serious riot was going on, and the ‘piquet’ (or, as we would say, military police) fired on the rioters, killing one and wounding ten.78
An anecdote tells how a black military bandsman was strolling down the Strand when he was accosted with the question: ‘Well, blackie, what news from the devil?’ He knocked the questioner down, remarking: ‘He send you that – how you like it?’79