James Africanus Beale Horton was born in 1835 and raised in Sierra Leone, qualified as a medical doctor in Britain in 1859, served as an officer in the British army in West Africa (retiring as a lieutenant-colonel), and authored several books including West African Countries and Peoples, A Vindication of the Negro Race (1868). He died in 1883. His second wife was Selina Beatrice Elliott, a descendant of the Nova Scotia (Canada) settlers in Freetown. Their daughter Nannette Susan Adelina was born in Cape Coast (then in the Gold Coast: now Ghana) in May 1876.

After her father retired from the military the family settled in Freetown in the 1880s. Nannette was sent to England and Germany for her education, for five years. Soon after her return to Africa she married William Henry Boucher, who seems to have been an Englishman. There were arguments and legal disputes over her father’s estate. She died in Hackney (London) in 1924, aged 48. There were four children and two grandchildren. There was no return to Africa.

The Bouchers moved to London along with Africanus Horton’s widow – who died in Dover in 1910.

Information on the family is from Christopher Fyfe, Africanus Horton 1835-1883, West African Scientist and Patriot (New York: Oxford UP, 1972; rev. ed. Aldershot: Gregg Revivals, 1992) except for Boucher’s forenames which are from the West Sussex County Times, 28 November 1903, p 5.

The expectation that funds would be inherited from her father’s estate – undergoing protracted bureaucracy over decades – must have influenced Nannette Boucher. She and her husband were “African merchants” with offices at 20 Basinghall Street near the Guildhall in London’s business district. They lived near Notting Hill Gate, at Kensington Park Road. These and other details were published in several newspapers in 1903, for the Bouchers and a Gold Coast resident of London named Albert Duke Essien made several court appearances, on charges of conspiring to defraud a jeweller named Leopold Leapman of Brighton.

The Brighton Gazette of 20 August 1903 (page 5) noted the defenders were African merchants and that the Bouchers were “both apparently creoles”. When facing a higher court, the Sussex Express (28 November 1903, page 10) noted that Essien and Mrs Boucher was “persons of colour”. They and William Boucher were accused of conspiring to defraud Leapman of a diamond ring back on 31 July 1903. The jury convicted all three: Boucher had been imprisoned so was sentenced to three months’ hard labour, whereas his wife and Essien had obtained bail and so were sentenced to five months, with hard labour. The Brighton Gazette‘s report of 26 November (page 6) was headed “The Diamond Ring Conspiracy”, valued the ring at £45, noted that Essien paid for it with a cheque from Boucher which the bank rejected, and that Essien had been in prison for 34 days, Boucher for three months, and Nannette Boucher for one month before the trial.

The story gets muddied when we examine the report in the Croydon Observer (27 November 1903, page 8), which confirmed the trio had acted “with intent to defraud”, taking jewellery from Leapman valued at £170: the ring was not returned with the other items.

The ages of the trio were listed in the Sussex Express of 28 November: Essien was 33, Nanette (sic) was 27, and her husband was 29.

Nannette Boucher had contacts within London’s West African community, as can be seen when members of Will Garland’s Negro Operetta Troupe got into difficulties when touring imperial Russia in 1913. Emma Williams wrote to Mrs Boucher, who was unable to obtain funds from her uncle and so then contacted the British Foreign Office – her letter of 1 September 1913 from 87 Elmhurst Mansions in south London’s Clapham is with other documents in file FO369/617/33073 in the National Archives in Kew, London. See Rainer Lotz, “Will Garland and his Negro Operetta Company” in Rainer Lotz and Ian Pegg (eds), Under the Imperial Carpet: Essays in Black History 1780-1950 (Crawley: Rabbit Press, 1986), pp 130-144.

Nannette Boucher’s son James was born at the beginning of January 1901 in London. He became a respected violinist and saxophonist, working in jazz-dance groups in England, Sweden and Germany in the 1920s, and dying in Geneva, Switzerland in 1973. Although his name is often pronounced in a French manner (as Boo – Shay), Jamaican musician Leslie Thompson, who worked with him in the 1930s, pronounced it Bow [as in COW] Cha. The French pianist Alain Romans recalled Paris in the 1930s: “There was Jimmy Boucher, a black fellow who played very beautiful violin. He died a couple of years ago in Switzerland” as noted by Chris Goddard, Jazz Away from Home (London: Paddington Press, 1979), p 278.

His sisters Madeleine and Enid were singers and dancers, who settled in the USA in the 1920s. Essien’s son was also active in music, but in England – see this website’s pages 122 and 272.