A growing number of mentions of people of African descent in widespread British sources seems to challenge the conventional wisdom that the black presence before the Windrush (1948) was to be found in seaports, universities and other educational institutions, and in the world of entertainment. Over the years several apparently isolated individuals have been noted, a challenge to historians who seem to have missed this evidence.
You need a good map to locate the village of Fen Drayton (fewer than one thousand people live there) in Cambridgeshire where thief Henry Morris was found in 1842. The American-born Henry Morris, a 27-year-old black man pleaded guilty to a charge of stealing a pair of shoes belonging to a fellow at Fen Drayton in Cambridgeshire. That village in the flat often-water-logged farmland seems an unlikely place for Morris in 1842 (Cambridge Chronicle and Journal, 22 October 1842, p 2). A second report indicates he was a sailor from Philadelphia who missed his ship in Scotland in May, but why did he end up in the Cambridge fens? He was sent to prison for three months (Cambridge Independent Press, 29 October 1842, p 1).
In April 1841 a man named Thompson was reported in the Norfolk village of Aldborough near Cromer. The local newspaper reported ‘A coloured man of rather low stature, calling himself Thompson, professing to be a Methodist, and pretending that he wanted to purchase the freedom of his mother, (who is in Orleans [sic]) which would cost about forty pounds, and stating that he had obtained thirty, which was in the hands of the Rev. Dr. Leifchild, of London, for that purpose, was in Aldborough last Thursday and Friday, leaving printed papers about our town [sic] and neighbourhood, and begging in various ways for the pretended object of releasing his mother, but it is all a fabrication, Dr. Leifchild never having seen or heard of such as fellow’ (Suffolk Chronicle [Ipswich], 24 April 1841, p 3). John Leifchild was a highly respected Congregational minister and author of several publications. Thompson has not been identified. He may be the ‘coloured man’ professing to be a Wesleyan Methodist who was noted in Norfolk in late 1845. (The Black Boys pub in the village of Aldborough seems to have its name from a monastic establishment long since vanished.)
Leonard Merrick, The Quaint Companions (London: Grant Richards, 1903) is a novel which centres on a London-based African American concert singer; Fergus Hume’s ‘The Amber Beads’ detective story first published in Hagar of the Pawn-Shop in London in 1898 focusses on a West Indian house servant in London. Black Joe was published in 1930 (see this website’s page 044).
Some Britons who aided blacks got their stories into print. For example, Charles and George Jo Jo were born in Natal and out of curiosity made their way to Norway and then England in the 1870s. Charles worked for some months as ‘King Koffee’ in a circus and a menagerie. His elder brother was befriended by Harry Gratton Guinness whose Christian mission in east London took care of George Jo Jo, and Charles joined him. They returned to South Africa and went to college at Lovedale (Lovedale Register, Past and Present [Lovedale Mission Press, 1887], p 103 courtesy Catharina Weinek of Kensington, South Africa). Lovedale was where several future leaders of black South Africans were educated.
Those who worked in fairs and the circus, participated in stage shows (bogus Africans were far from rare in the exhibitions that boomed in Britain), and were outside the circles which published details in newspapers (as with Morris and Thompson, above) or house magazines (as with Lovedale) have left little trace. Edgar or Will Knight, who ran a herbalist enterprise in 1920s Barnsley, is known to us only through the autobiography of a veteran and local newspaper reports of his death and funeral (see this website’s page 266). One veteran resident of Paddington, London, interviewed in the early 1980s, recalled a black man who was a long-term resident of that neighbourhood, remarking ‘we watched his hair turn white’.
John Stroud’s history of the Church of England’s Children’s Society (13 Penny Stamps: London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1971) mentions black children who lived in these homes from the 1880s, and their monthly publication Waifs and Strays is known to have photographs. The names remain confidential unlike Barnardo’s archives. There is no name for the coloured man who seems to have sought lodgings in north London’s semi-slum Campbell Road around 1919, mentioned in Jerry White’s The Worst Street in North London (London; Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986) whereas Harriet Vincent, born in Cardiff of a Nova Scotia (Canada) black sailor and his Welsh wife, has eight pages in Paul Thompson’s The Edwardians: The Remaking of British Society (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975).
A very sad tale was detailed in Reynold’s Newspaper on 15 May 1898 under the heading ‘Civilizing the Savage. A Black Boy’s Rights’. Edwin French Bartlett, a hunter and trader active in eastern Africa, had been charged at Lambeth Police court earlier that month with assaulting ‘an African boy, known as “Lioney” by striking him with a stick’. Bartlett had come to England on holiday and brought the lad with him. The twelve year old lad was a Maasai. A Church Missionary Society missionary who had spent five years in Uganda – at this time what was to become the western region of Kenya, the Maasai homeland, was part of Uganda – had spoken to him. Bartlett said he had been ‘treated as one of the family’ but the magistrate commented he ‘saw no reason why a black boy should be more cruelly beaten than a white boy’. He noted that only Bartlett was able to talk to him in his language. The ‘excessive’ thrashing led to a £5 fine or one month in prison. The fine was paid. The newspaper report ended with a note that the lad had been sent to the Camberwell workhouse. One hopes that the Church Missionary Society officials were able to get the youngster out and off to Africa. The Times report was on page 4 of its issue of 11 May. Bartlett and the lad lived in Caulfield Road, Peckham, and it was the station master at nearby Queen’s Road railway station who found the African ‘running up the line’ and had taken him to the police. A police sergeant stated ‘he had marks of violence about his body’ and a blood-stained shirt.
Novelist W. W. Jacob’s story ‘An Odd Freak’ was published in 1901. Three sailors try to sell a fourth (“the mother ‘ad been ‘alf a nigger an’ ‘alf Malay”) as a wild man to a showman-entrepreneur in London (Light Freights [London: Methuen, 1901] repr. The Monkey’s Paw and Other Stories [Penguin Books, 1962], pp 34-47).
The 1901 census of the village of Mundesley on the coast of Norfolk shows Zaccharias Molafe, born in Basutoland, living in the home of Alice Mildmay. Nothing has been recovered on this link to southern Africa.
In these and other ways the ‘isolated’ black population of Britain can be found – leaving us with more questions which may never be answered.
Jeffrey Green. Historian 