The Black Victorians

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Title: The Black Victorians

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Scope and content: A number of Mckenzie Heritage Picture Archive images have been used by Channel 4 in connection with its Black History Map website, to which McKenzie Heritage has contributed informative pages on The Black Victorians website Black Victorians, describing the presence and lives of Black people in Britain in the nineteenth century and before. The following are extracts taken from the text which accompanies the images on this website:

THE HISTORY OF BLACK PEOPLE IN BRITAIN certainly goes back a long way - well before the reign of Queen Victoria. There were Black people in Britain in Roman times, and there has been a continuous Black presence here since 1555. For Shakespeare's London audiences, Black faces would have been a familiar sight. The eighteenth century saw a great expansion in Britain's Black population. After the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713, British slavers dominated the infamous Atlantic slave trade. Some slaves were landed and sold at London, Liverpool or Bristol, but many Black people were brought as domestic servants by returning sea captains, colonial administrators and plantation owners. For the English aristocracy and the newly rich, a Black page or handmaiden was an asset to be shown off as evidence of exotic wealth, so in the 18th century Black people were ironically more evident in the art and writing of the time than they were to be in the early Victorian period.

By the 1760s, the Black population had grown to somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000; Granville Sharp estimated the number of black servants in London alone at 20,000, in a city of 676,250 people. Many had attained freedom - or run away from their masters. In 1772, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield's historic decision in the case of runaway John Somerset ruled that a slave could not be deported from Britain against his or her will. This was the beginning of the end of slavery in Britain itself, and an encouragement to Black people and to abolitionist campaigners. The abolition of slavery was confirmed in 1806 by an Act of Parliament. As the 18th century drew to a close, Britain's Black population was well established, breaking free from slavery - but usually very poor, sometimes destitute. The first-generation immigrants were overwhelmingly male, supplemented by arrivals of Black sailors, plus 4,000 Black refugees who had fought for George III against the American Revolution. Black people integrated and intermarried into poor white urban populations, and entered the nineteenth century sharing in the misery and historical anonymity of the British poor.

...In Victorian times, Britannia clearly ruled the waves, and the maritime trade continued to bring an influx of Somali and other African sailors to London, Liverpool and Bristol. From the 1840s onwards, the Bute Town area of Cardiff gained a similar population, who worked around the docks as the South Wales coal trade flourished. This trend continued throughout the nineteenth century. >From 1870, a Somali and Yemini community developed in South Shields in County Durham, in a dockside area known as the `Arab Quarter'. The most visible Black people in Victorian society were performers of various kinds: prize-fighters, actors, musicians, and singers. Talent brought opportunities for travel. ...Groups included the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Black American students who toured in Britain in 1874-5 to raise money for Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, originally established as the Fisk Free Colored School in 1866 after the American Civil War to provide higher education for freed slaves. They had been invited to Britain at the initiative of an aide to Queen Victoria, and they introduced the Queen to gospel music. They also received a particularly warm welcome in South Wales and made several return visits. Other figures of this period include:

William Cuffay (1788-1870), a labour leader and prominent activist in the Chartist movement, who was convicted of insurrection and transported to Tasmania

Mary Seacole (1805-1881), the Jamaican-born nursing heroine of the Crimean War, whose autobiography is still read today.

Ira Aldridge (c.1804-1867), the American-born actor who rose to great fame on the British stage.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912), born in Croydon, a composer who wove Black musical themes into the classical repertoire much as Dvorak did for Czech folk music.

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Language/scripts of material: English

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DESCRIPTION CONTROL AREA

Recorder's note: This record was fully indexed June 2002 MR

Rules or conventions: Compiled in compliance with General International Standard Archival Description, ISAD(G), second edition, 2000; National Council on Archives Rules for the Construction of Personal, Place and Corporate Names, 1997.

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Interest: Black

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Photography

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Ethnic groups

Slavery

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Black and Asian seamen

Anti-slavery legislation

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Aldridge, Ira, 1804-1867

Coleridge-Taylor, Samuel, 1875-1912

Cuffay, William, 1788-1870

Seacole, Mary, 1805-1881

Sharp, Granville, 1735-1813

Somerset, John

Fisk Jubilee Singers

Places