Why Cumberbatch’s mixed-race, slave-owning ancestors reveal the MORAL COMPLEXITY of the reparations debate
Amid a clamour for compensation to be paid by descendants of slave owners, a remarkable twist in the actor’s family history raises a thorny issue...
ON THE island of Barbados stand two of the grandest mansions in the Caribbean. Handsomely built in Jacobean style, both have featured in the upmarket magazine Country Life and in tourist literature promoting places for holidaymakers to visit.
Nowadays, for all their architectural significance, they come heavy with unpleasant associations.
Long ago, Drax Hall and St Nicholas Abbey were the centrepieces of sprawling plantations owned by rich white men making fortunes from the cruelties of slavery.
In the 18th and early 19th centuries, the sugar plantations of the West Indies helped to make Britain the world’s richest country — at appalling cost to millions of enslaved Africans, captured and forcibly shipped to the New World to tend the crops in brutal and degrading conditions.
Drax Hall is still in the hands of its original owners, a family headed by South Dorset MP and Old Etonian Richard Drax.
St Nicholas Abbey, meanwhile, was formerly owned by the slave-owning ancestors of Britain’s Oscar-nominated actor Benedict Cumberbatch — ironically the co- star of the Hollywood film 12 Years A Slave.
Only yesterday it emerged that Cumberbatch has bought an £8.1 million mansion set in 355 acres of land in Somerset complete with organic farm and cider orchard.
While the house may well have been bought with the proceeds of his film and TV work, it nonetheless focused attention on just how wealthy he is at a time when arguments over compensation — so- called ‘ reparations’ — for the misdeeds of long- dead sugar plantation owners are getting more and more heated.
Barbados, which in 2021 removed the late Queen as its head of state and became a republic, is certainly in the mood for a fight over slavery. And it is looking to the living descendants of 19th-century slaveowners to pay up.
Richard Drax is reputedly still the richest landowner in the Commons. Now, Barbadian activists say he must make amends
Amid secrecy they joined the upper class
for ‘profiting on the back of black slaves for generations’.
Yet it is the Cumberbatch clan that has the more intriguing Barbadian backstory, raising fascinating questions about the rights and wrong of reparations — and who exactly should pay them.
Now, one of the actor’s cousins has come forward to point out that some of the richest Cumberbatch clan plantation owners were, remarkably, themselves former slaves. These individuals, who were mixed-race, amassed huge fortunes as they forced slaves to grow sugar on their Barbadian plantations under the punishing Caribbean sun.
Helen Ashton — a retired home economics teacher living in the Cotswolds and a cousin of Cumberbatch — also believes that these wealthy mixed-raced ancestors of hers received British government compensation, like thousands of other colonial plantation owners, for freeing slaves when the practice was abolished in 1834.
Helen may have blonde hair and blue eyes. But genetic testing has shown that she herself is at least partially mixed- race — and a descendent of the black slavers who owned the poor souls toiling on their plantations. As Helen, 76, last week wrote in a letter to the Daily Telegraph, the ‘ rights and wrongs [of reparations] are by no means straightforward’.
Helen’s discovery about her own ancestry came when she looked again at the will of one of her greatgreat-great-great-grandfathers, Lawrence Trent Cumberbatch, who lived in St Nicholas Abbey and died a bachelor.
Lawrence was white. However, his will of 1833, found in Barbadian archives, shows that he had longstanding — and Helen believes loving — relationships with two of his female slaves, who between them bore him at least six children. As Helen now tells the Mail: ‘My four times grandfather Lawrence Trent Cumberbatch lived a wonderful lifestyle in Barbados.
‘He had relationships with two mixed-race slave women, Elizabeth and Lizzie, which produced many children. He never married them, but I believe they were happy unions.
‘His will shows he provided for both Elizabeth and Lizzie and their joint offspring. They included my direct ancestor, John Edward Cumberbatch, who was the son of the slave Elizabeth. Lawrence Trent Cumberbatch freed this mixed-race son from slavery.
‘He left him a Barbadian townhouse, to be shared with his brother Richard, also borne to the slave Elizabeth.
‘Both children were also given £100 [a sum running into thousands today], and a “proportion of my wearing apparel”, in other words his fine gentleman’s clothes.’
Helen has traced the bloodline of her ancestor John Edward (the freed slave) back to January 1823 and his wedding at St Michael’s Church, Barbados — ten years before his white father’s death.
Significantly, John Edward was marrying another mixed- race Barbadian, 19- year- old Julia Belgrave, who came from a wealthy family that owned no fewer than eight sugar plantations.
Both John Edward and Julia were described in the island’s marriage register of the time as ‘free coloured’. Within two generations, John Edward and Julia’s grandson, Alphonso, moved to England with his widowed mother.
Amid much family secrecy about their background, they joined the upper echelons of Victorian society. With help from the Barbadian
sugar fortune, Alphonso was educated at a ‘school for gentlemen’ in the West Country, and went on to become a famous Harley Street surgeon.
He and his mother appear in the 1861 census as living on private means ‘from property and land abroad’ at a smart address in Bath. A member of the family later donated money to build the ‘Cumberbatch building’ at Trinity College, Oxford.
Alphonso went on to marry into one of the most well-to-do families in England. He died in a mansion in the Home Counties. What a journey for a single family: the offspring of an enslaved mother reaching the apex of British society in a few short decades.
As Helen wrote in the Telegraph: ‘Within two generations, the offspring of John Edward and Julia Belgrave made their own way in life, becoming members of the British upper-middle classes . . . These descendants of enslaved people owned many slaves and plantations themselves.’
And, as Helen says, this raises another important question. Where did the money come from for her mixed-race branch of the family to uproot to England and live on independent means?
It has to be noted, of course, that Alphonso and his mother left Barbados soon after the British government compensated former slavers after the practice was abolished in 1834.
In total, the government paid out £ 20 million ( some £ 16.5 billion today) to 3,000 slave- owning families for the loss of their human ‘property’. It was 40 per cent of the Treasury’s annual income, and the loan to finance it was repaid from the public coffers only as recently as 2015. Yet there may be more to Helen’s family wealth than such compensation.
She has found that her own enslaved ancestors — in particular Julia Belgrave’s family, into which John Edward married — played a significant role in fighting slavery in Barbados.
However, the less creditable side of Helen’s ancestors’ lives, until now hardly touched on, is detailed in a research document, The Children Of Africa In The Colonies.
It recounts the experience of freed slaves in Barbados during the early 19th century. Held in Oxford University’s Bodleian Library and seen by the Mail, the research reveals how Helen’s mixed-race forebears themselves profited from slavery.
It states: ‘Very few people of colour were as wealthy as the Belgrave family, who between them, by 1816, owned at least three plantations [in Barbados] with hundreds of slaves.’
The conclusion seems clear. By marrying Julia Belgrave, John Edward Cumberbatch was marrying into a rich slave-owning family. This is despite the fact that he himself had a mother who had been a slave.
And that in turn means the past is rarely as clear-cut as we would like to think: that only white people kept slaves, for example, or that there are purely ‘good’ people in the debate and purely ‘bad’ ones.
The truth is that Barbados was something of a melting pot during the 18th and 19th centuries — and a long way from British Victorian society with its repressive social mores.
As the sugar trade boomed, African slaves soon outnumbered whites by many thousands.
Most of the Europeans were unattached plantation owners from England, chosen because the tough life encouraged the migration of bachelors rather than family men.
Needless to say, these men — among them Helen’s ancestor Lawrence Trent Cumberbatch — sought sexual partners and their eyes turned to slave women, some of whom were their property.
In time, the mixed-race offspring that resulted from these unions also went on to have relationships with the plantation owners, or overseers settling from England.
Couples married, others had illicit relationships that lasted a lifetime, or slept with black prostitutes. It was commonplace for Barbadian mistresses to be set up by rich, white men in handsome houses to bring up mixed-race children, who took their names from their English fathers. Some couples across the racial divide shared family homes for their entire lives. In an official history of Barbados, published in 1845, writer and explorer Sir Robert Schomburgk (who was knighted by Queen Victoria) observed that while ‘in England every 15th child is illegitimate . . . in Barbados the illegitimate children exceed those born in wedlock’. Now, there is awareness and shame over how Britain amassed great wealth from the profits of slavery. Lloyd’s of London, the global insurance brokers’ market, and giant brewer Greene King recently apologised for benefiting from the terrible trade. An official of the Barbados National Task Force on Reparations said last week that no claims against one family, such as the Cumberbatch clan, have yet been considered.
He explained that the name of British Conservative politician Richard Drax has been put forward for investigation because he still owns property — including Drax Hall plantation — on the island. The Drax family did well from compensation, receiving today’s equivalent of £3 million for the
It was a long way from British Victorian society
‘Relatives would quickly change the subject’
buy- out of 297 slaves on their Caribbean plantations. University College London has papers which show the Cumberbatch slave owners were handed a similarly large sum.
As for the Belgraves, the records reveal that the family got, in today’s money, nearly £400,000 alone for freeing 124 slaves at just one of their many plantations. It is likely, of course, that this was the tip of the iceberg.
As Helen has written: ‘I realise how much my Cumberbatch family have in common with the stories of thousands of “coloured” people on the island. Many were descended, like us, from liaisons between white plantation and slave owners and their female slaves. It is a story you don’t hear much about.’
Strikingly, DNA testing shows Helen has genes that are 0.8 per cent Nigerian and 0.2 per cent West African — which tallies with her research findings that she is descended, many generations ago, from slaves shipped from those regions.
Helen says that the money that her Barbadian relatives brought with them to England did nothing to hide the shame within her family of their mixed-race ancestry and being the descendants of slaves.
It was kept a closely guarded secret. ‘ Whenever the subject of race came up in family conversations, relatives would quickly change the subject,’ she says.
‘They may have known the truth about my Cumberbatch ancestor’s affair with his slaves . . .
‘I know one anecdote about a lady from Barbados called Cumberbatch visiting my grandmother in England with a gift of a beautiful inlaid table. Some of the older family members, including her, were shocked to find the lady was dark-skinned.’
They might, if alive today, be equally shocked by Helen’s recent discovery that her mixed-race Barbadian ancestors were prolific slave- owners themselves — and wonder what precisely that means for the knotty question of reparations, or who today might owe what to whom.