City’s Black History
IT DOESN’T JUST DATE BACK DECADES, IT DATES BACK CENTURIES
BRISTOL’S Black population really only started to arrive in the late 1950s and early 1960s, right?
Not entirely. Since Tudor times, if not sooner, there have always been Bristol residents with African heritage. Even in the first half of the 20th century, long before the first arrivals disembarked from the Empire Windrush at Tilbury in 1948, there were a fair few Black Bristolians.
But when did the first arrive, and how?
We have reliable evidence that there were people of African extraction in and around the city by the mid-1500s. Any further back than that, though, is speculation, but it’s reasonable to assume that the region must have had a few Black inhabitants when Britain was part of the Roman empire.
Bristol itself did not exist at that time, but there were plenty of other settlements around, notably at Sea Mills – Portus Abonae to the Romans – and Kings Weston. Big Roman towns, such as Bath, Cirencester and Caerleon were not that far away.
We know that the Roman army employed Africans as Legionaries and auxiliaries and there is clear archaeological evidence of Black and mixed-race people elsewhere in Roman Britain. There were some who served as soldiers on Hadrian’s Wall, while in 1901 the grave of a wealthy woman was uncovered at York; known as ‘Ivory Bangle Lady’, she was either African or mixedrace.
Bristol, founded in Anglo-Saxon times was a trading port, and as such it would have had visitors – sailors and merchants – from many different places. It’s stretching things to imagine that any African set eyes on the place in its earliest times as almost all Bristolian commerce was with Ireland and elsewhere in Britain - but you never know …
However, by the later Middle Ages, when Bristol had developed extensive trading networks with France, Spain and Portugal it’s likely that we had visitors, if not actual settlers, from Africa.
It’s in the 1500s and early 1600s that we get the first firm evidence of Black Bristolians. This comes for the most part in the form of parish records of burials, marriages and baptisms which will occasionally mention that the person named is a “negro” or “blackamoor”.
One of the earliest, if not the first, records concerning an African in Bristol turns up in a court document saying that the wealthy merchant Sir John Young employed a “blacke moore” to guard his garden in around 1560.
This was at the Great House – Queen Elizabeth would stay there on her visit to Bristol some years later – and is now the site of the Colston Hall/Bristol Beacon.
Unfortunately we do not know the man’s name. You have to wait until the early 1600s for names. In 1612 Katherine, “a blacke negra servant” who worked at the Horsehead Tavern in Christmas Street was recorded as having died in a church register. Three years later, Philip White, described as a “Barbarian Moore” was baptised at Temple Church.
Up the road in Almondsbury, Cattalena, “a single negro woman” died in 1625 leaving property valued at £6; her possessions included a cow. By the standards of the time, she was not rich, but she was no pauper and better off than many single women at the time.
Bristol did not become involved in systematic slave trading until the late 1600s, but there were Black slaves in the city before that. The merchant Robert Yeamans bought two unnamed Africans that privateers had captured from a Portuguese ship in 1651. In 1677 we learn that the Bristol MP Humphrey Hooke “owned” a man named Titus Blackmore.
While Cattalena of Almondsbury and Katherine of the Horsehead Tavern were probably not slaves and Yeamans’ and Hooke’s Africans were, there are other people whose status is unclear. What are we to make of Francis, a merchant’s servant buried at the Broadmead Baptist Chapel in 1640? Or William, the “son of a black”, baptised at St Augustine the Less in 1684?
What’s clear is that even before the city’s involvement in the slave trade, Bristolians were queasy about the word “slave”, instead describing people who were almost certainly not free as “servants”. This is something we find in the 18th century as well; kidnapped Africans forced to work plantations in the Indies could be called slaves, but if their owners took them to England, they were almost invariably called servants.
Nowhere is the ambiguity more apparent than in the case of Dinah Black, described as the servant of a Bristol woman named Dorothy Smith. In 1667 it emerged that Smith had forced her onto a ship headed for the West Indies. Dinah, who had presumably been sold, was unwilling to go and was rescued. The Bristol Court of Aldermen decided that she should be free to earn her own living in Bristol until the next quarter sessions but, alas, we know nothing of Dinah’s fate thereafter.
Until the mid-20th Century, the Black population of Bristol was at its highest in the 1700s. Despite the long-discredited local legend, which you still occasionally hear, slaves were never brought to Bristol from Africa in large numbers, but there were quite a few who arrived as the servants of wealthy plantation owners. Slave ship captains were permitted to take one or two of the “cargo” as their own, and they were commonly to be seen in the streets locally in the early-to-mid 1700s.
Others were fashionable among the upper classes as decorative status symbols. This was the era in which Scipio Africanus lived and died. We know almost nothing of him save what was inscribed on his gravestone at Henbury. He died in 1720 at the age of 18, having lived in the household of the Earl of Bradon and Suffolk, and the evident, if patronising, affection in which he was held suggests he had been a page boy or footman, quite possibly dressed expensive clothing made to make him look like a European’s idea of an exotic prince.
Pero, in whose memory the footbridge across the docks was named in 1999, arrived in Bristol as a personal servant to the merchant John Pinney, who had spent many years
on his plantation on Nevis. Pinney suffered from at-least mild reservations about the entire business of slavery (he reassured himself that God had not told him that it was wrong) and at least two of the “servants” in his Bristol household on Great George Street were later freed, Kate Coker (who seems to have been a children’s nanny) and Frances Coker, a seamstress and companion to Pinney’s wife.
Probably most Black people in 18th century Bristol in the mid1700s were slaves, whether you called them servants or not. But there were also sailors, whether from West Africa, or from the Caribbean, and these men were free, though many had to watch their step lest they be kidnapped and sold. Some even worked on slave ships, and one, John Dean, gave evidence to anti-slavery campaigner Thomas Clarkson.
Some had even more complicated stories, such as the two young who men arrived in Bristol having been kidnapped in Africa and put to work as slaves in Virginia. They escaped, stowing away on a ship but were imprisoned when they arrived here. It turned out that they were related to an important figure in West Africa who sold slaves to Bristol merchants, and so they were liberated from their local incarceration by one of the African dealer’s business contacts, a Bristol slave trader named Thomas Jones. That is, a slave trader secured the freedom of two Black men who were relatives of an African slave dealer. They were taken in by the brothers Charles and John Wesley who gave them accommodation and religious instruction before returning to Africa.
A handful of 18th century Black Bristolians were definitely free. In 1782, for instance, we know of one man, recorded as a “negro” who was a local Freemason. Apparently, the skin colour of “Brother Franks” was not to be mentioned by the other brethren.
By the time of the French wars of the late 1700s and early 1800s there were even more ethnic Africans in Bristol, whether free or “servants”. The wars’ insatiable demands for manpower would see a fair few soldiers and sailors in the area. Some even switched sides. At least 20 of the French prisoners-of-war held at Stapleton were in fact Black, and some were happy to enlist as soldiers and sailors in the British services.
Army colonels also competed with one another to recruit Black men as musicians in their regimental bands because of the fashionable “exotic” look they conferred. The exact same thing happened in Napoleon’s army.
At the end of the wars, large numbers of soldiers and sailors found themselves unemployed in the middle of a huge economic downturn. The mayor of Bristol complained about the strain that unemployed “foreign seamen, blackmen and men of colour” were placing on the city.
The end of slavery in the 1830s would see the number of Bristolians of African heritage drop dramatically, though it never fell to nothing. There were a fair few Black men and women in Victorian Bristol.
There were even more by the early 1900s.
This is something which would make a good research project, as there’s a widespread assumption that immigration from the Caribbean was only something that happened after WW2.
This is simply not true. It was on a far larger scale after WW2, but the early 20th century saw Bristol getting plenty of visitors from the Caribbean, and a fair few of them settled here either temporarily or permanently.
The likely reason for this is the Elders & Fyffes shipping line, which had secured the contract to carry the Royal Mail between Britain and the West Indies.
Royal Mail contracts were, for all practical purposes, government subsidies which opened up new shipping routes for other things as well as letters and parcels.
In the case of Elders & Fyffes it meant regular steamship services between the Caribbean and Avonmouth, which carried West Indies produce as well as passengers and mail. Above all, it meant bananas, and the expensive infrastructure to deal with this lucrative new product was all put in place in Avonmouth and inaugurated in 1901.
This regular service brought sailors from the Caribbean as well as people visiting on business or to study or to seek work. A few settled permanently, and if you read local papers from before 1945 it is evident that people almost always described as “coloured” were a common enough sight on the streets. We read of them in entertainment and sport, or as the accused or the victims in court cases. We also occasionally read of them coming up before the authorities for stowing away on Bristolbound ships.
Alas it’s very difficult to find even approximate numbers. But Black Bristolians did exist well before Windrush sailed, and there were more of them than most of us think.