Some Black Bristolians before Windrush
John and Penelope Quaco
John Quaco married his wife Penelope at St Michael’s Church in 1743, and the parish register describes them as “two negroes”. John was a sailor living in Princess Amelia Court and other records tell us he paid local taxes. In 1763 his application for a pension noted that he had been a free man for more than 21 years and had never been out of work. His name suggests he came from West Africa, Quaco being the usual name for a boy born on a Wednesday.
Henry Parker
Henry Parker escaped from slavery in the United States and came to Bristol in the 1850s. He married a local woman, learned to read and write and became a lay preacher at the Hook’s Mills church on Ashley Hill. The couple had numerous descendants (at least one of his grandsons was killed fighting in the First World War), some of whom are still in Bristol today.
Joseph St Clair
Born in Barbados in about 1876 Joseph St Clair arrived in Bristol, either as a merchant seaman or a stowaway. He set up in business as an unlicensed dentist, pulling teeth at fairs and in Bristol. He also took advantage of his perfect white teeth to sell his own brand of tooth powder. He married local girl Mabel Stallard in 1913 (family legend has it that he came across her in Victoria Park, crying because her parents had forbidden her from marrying a Jewish Man). The couple raised a large Bristolian family and he was also a lay preacher at the same church Henry Parker had attended.
Lucy Moore
“Lovely Lucy” or “the Jersey Lily” appeared in shows and fairs as the “fattest woman in the world”. Much about her is mysterious, but she was American, either Black or mixed-race and was living with her sister in Clifton Wood when she died in 1920.
Carlos Trower
Trower (1850-1889) started life as a slave in the American south, but escaped at the age of 11 and was sent by sympathisers to Scotland, where he met some African circus acrobats and decided to join them, becoming a popular and well-known performer in Victorian Britain, with trapeze antics that saw him carrying out all sorts of daring stunts. He performed in Bristol and lived here for some time in the 1870s, giving his address as 7 Christmas Steps, where he stayed with his wife Annie and where his daughter Celia was born.
Dixie Brown
Anthony Charles, born in St Lucia in 1900, moved to Cardiff and was living in St Jude’s in Bristol by the early 1920s as Dixie Brown, working as a professional boxer at welterweight and middleweight levels. He lost his eyesight following a fight in the 1930s and moved to Knowle West after the Blitz. He had a large family and was popular throughout the city (a collection was raised to send him to Lourdes in the hope of a cure for his blindness). He died in 1957.