Comments have been noted elsewhere in this website on three black men whose lives led to newspaper reports, often lengthy, in the 1880s – see the murder trials of Thomas Allen (page 088) and Charles Arthur (page 273), and the tricks of bogus churchman David Nero/Gustavus Fraser (page 064). Others were reported in the 1880s, revealing associations and activities which are sometimes unexpected.

The Dorset County Express of 14 November 1882 (page 2) reported on “Joachim Fernandez, a negro” who was charged with assaulting a colleague in “Mr. Day’s menagerie”. He “could speak but little English”, and was sent to prison for one month with hard labour. Working in travelling circuses and menageries was not rare for black people in Britain, as other sites indicate. James Albert Robinson “a coloured man and a boxer” was found guilty of assaulting another boxer in a pub in the Somerset village of Westonzoyland, and was sentenced to one month with hard labour according to the Taunton Courier of 22 September 1886, page 7. The small village harvested willows from the nearby marshes – a most unlikely place for the coloured boxer it seems.

It seems likely that the skin colour of Andrew Drayton enabled the authorities to trace him after election riots in Nottingham on 27 November 1885. His trial at the Nottingham Borough Sessions in January 1886 led the Sheffield Daily News (16 January 1886, page 1) to comment he was the sole person to have been brought to justice. It added that Drayton had had a “prominent” role in that riot, and that he was sentenced to six months hard labour. See website page 296.

Arguments, often fuelled by drink, were reported in the press. Seamen often appear to have been violent. In Liverpool one Charles Wallace stabbed two women, and was found “to be suffering from religious mania” – the distant South Wales Echo and the Bradford Daily Telegraph (both of 3 June 1887) reported this. Violence was reported in Sunderland in December 1889, when an inquest at the town’s workhouse found the death of “the coloured man, Abraham Jones” at that workhouse was at the hands of “another man of colour” Augustus George. George was found guilty of manslaughter – not a hanging offence.

And there were tricksters and conmen – Newcastle’s crown court dismissed a serious charge against Charles Alexander Theodore who claimed “to be the nephew of King Theodore of Abyssinia [Ethiopia]”, noted the Newcastle Journal on 18 February 1889, page 6. In June 1887 a John Cooksey had a short letter published in the South Wales Daily News (29 June 1887, page 4) which warned of “a coloured man who goes about with a coloured lady, purporting to be ex-slaves and Christians. They are ‘wanted’ in the Forest of Dean and other districts, and their doings have been more effective than their preaching”.