The Black Presence in England and Wales after the Abolition Act, 1807-1930

1. Black Historical Geographies

The black people who oversaw the 'era of abolition' were diverse and the majority probably lived their lives as ordinary members of the working class. This essay aims to give an overview of some of the people who were a part of the continuous black presence in England and Wales during the 'era of abolition', throughout the long nineteenth century and into the last century. The essay ends with the formation of the League of Coloured People in 1930. The League sought to fight increasingly overt racism in Britain, realized especially through the entrenchment of the colour bar which impacted upon the lives of black people from the Edwardian era until well beyond the Windrush era.

As Kathy Chater has illustrated in her paper for this volume, the ethnic origins of black people was not regularly recorded in official documents in Britain during the era of slavery. This pattern continued into the nineteenth century, and included the national census when it was introduced, and thus it is equally difficult to determine how large the black population in Britain was during this period. However, it seems that many historians have taken this absence of statistics of the black presence to mean an absence of black people themselves. Kenneth Little acknowledged that if the evidence of late nineteenth-century commentators was to be believed then by the 1870s the black man or woman had virtually disappeared except for crossing sweepers and an occasional black bishop.¹ Peter Ackroyd's London biography confirmed this as their presence was accorded only ten lines (although this amounts to a paragraph which is ten lines longer than many other publications). The final sentence of that paragraph tells us that, in the nineteenth century black people 'rarely appear in novels or narratives, except as occasional grotesques, and their general fate seems to have been one of settlement among the urban poor'.²

As Jan Marsh's recent exhibition of black figures in visual culture between 1800 and 1900 illustrated, there are other mediums which can give us alternative references to the black presence. These include images such as 'Victorian "crowd scenes" which characteristically include at least one black figure, in conscious tribute to urban diversity'.³ More ordinary characters have been revealed in studies such as Ian Duffield's research taken from the archive offices of New South Wales and Australia, among which he found 195 black men and six women, including Charlotte Claydon. An unmarried single parent, Claydon stole £6 in Bethnal Green and arrived in Sydney in 1837.⁴ In my own research I have used institutions with photographic archives as a means of accessing the archives of black people which led me to investigate the black presence in prisons, hospitals and children's homes. Others like Duffield have found similar records fruitful as occasionally the colour of a man or woman's skin is included in a description which accompanies their details. From such archives we know that William Cross Wasdon, a 'man of colour' who was a hawker in Exeter came into contact with the law for 'playing an unlawful game with 3 Thimbles and a Ball' when he was aged 19 in August 1823.⁵

However, the numbers of the nineteenth century's black working classes who avoided contact with the state because of poverty, illness or crime, are difficult to estimate and very difficult to calculate. They are to be found, as Chater has pointed out, in wills, baptism and other Church records, and newspapers. From such sources the presence of John Day in St Sidwells, Devon comes to light. A 'man of colour', he was a shopkeeper and known in his local neighbourhood as a waiter at dinner and evening parties. We only know about him because the Western Times reported his death in 1837.⁶ We know one young man was educated at the Gloucester British School in 1845, but his presence is highlighted because he was teased and had tricks played on him. Action was taken, offering rewards to boys who would give information on...