Legacy From Slavery in Bristol

The slave trade significantly influenced the growth of racism, most obviously in the U.S. where it is institutionalised, but also, less obviously, in Britain. Stories of slave rebellions, runaways and attacks on plantation owners were rife in the colonies and were also echoed in the British press and this succeeded in perpetuating the myth that black people were lawless, untrustworthy and violent. The slave trade in all its aspects, significantly influenced the growth of racial theory as a method for society to justify its unjustifiable actions. Thus racism was vindicated and impacted black people adversely over hundreds of years from the 17^th century on until today when official racism has long been outlawed in Britain though informal racism  still exists, allegedly, within the police force and employment.

Street names in Bristol such as Guinea Street, Jamaica Street, Codrington Place, Tyndall’s Park, Worral and Stapleton Roads are all references to Bristol’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. Using the wealth generated from the slave trade, many merchants invested in municipal land purchase, sponsoring cultural/municipal buildings and upgrading ships. The Theatre Royal in Bristol, the second oldest working theatre in Britain, was built as a result of very wealthy subscribers that directly or indirectly benefited from businesses involved in the slave trade, each pledging a substantial sum of money for the design and erection of the theatre, a locally prestigious project. Some municipal buildings and institutions such as schools were named after their slave trading benefactors; for example, Colston Hall, Colston Girls’ School and Colston Primary School [recently re-named Cotham Gardens Primary School following the defenestration [as it were] of Edward Colston’s statue.] Edward Colston was a Bristol-born slave trader, member of the Royal African Company and of the Merchant Venturers Society and a prominent local benefactor. He was perhaps the most important name in a veritable compendium of slave traders who used their wealth to bestow their names by funding prestigious municipal and other public projects.

A temporary name change while seeking a permanent new title
The Colston Arms re-named, for now, Ye olde Pubby Mcdrunkface

Georgian House in Bristol was originally built for John Pinney [1740-1818] who owned several sugar plantations in the West Indies. From 1762-1783 Pinney lived in Nevis running his plantations but in 1783 he returned home to Bristol, bringing two black attendants with him: Fanny Coker and Pero Jones, both bought by him in 1765 when Pinney also bought Pero’s sisters, Nancy and Sheeba but left the little girls to work on the Matravers Plantation in Nevis. There is related original documentation held by the University of Bristol Library recording the date of purchase of the little slave family with evidence of the physical appearance of each member of the family sold. Interestingly, Pero’s Bridge, a footbridge across the River Frome was opened in Bristol docks in 1999, and memorialises the black boy of 12 who died, aged 45, in 1798 in Ashton, Bristol after a lifetime of domestic service in the area.

Pero's Bridge, Bristol.

By the early 1960s, Bristol had an estimated 3000 residents of West Indian origin, some of whom had served in the British Army during WW2 and included a large number who had arrived, by invitation of the UK Government, as part of the Windrush generation from 1948 onward. [And for the recent (2018 on) Home Office hostile treatment of Windrush descendants, Google it!]There was a significant number of West Indians therefore, living in the St. Paul’s area of Bristol which had set up its own churches and other associations, developing a real sense of community in the face of[ widespread discrimination in housing and employment and sporadic violence from Teddy Boys, gangs of white racist youths.

The Bristol Omnibus Company at this time, openly employed only white bus drivers and conductors [while allowing black cleaners and maintenance men]. In fact this was in line with widespread racial discrimination in housing and employment in other British cities at this time. In Bristol, an organisation founded by Roy Hackett and led by youth worker, Paul Stephenson, and including the so-called West Indian Development Council, a local black pressure group, instigated what became known as the Bristol Bus Boycott in 1963. The idea had come from the indomitable Rosa Parks and her refusal to give up her seat for a white person which led to the ensuing Montgomery Bus Boycott in Alabama. The Bristol Bus Boycott drew overwhelming local support from black and many white residents and lasted for four months until the company backed down and overturned the discriminatory policy. The Boycott drew national attention to racial discrimination in Britain and attracted the active support of politicians, Church groups and the High Commissioner for Trinidad and Tobago, the famous Leary Constantine.

Old [1950s] Bristol Omnibus Company bus.

The Bristol Omnibus Company was a nationalised company owned by the U.K. Government from 1950. Despite an acknowledged shortage of bus crews, black men were considered only for lower paid work in canteens and workshops. The policy was blamed by the Company management on the insistence of the Transport and General Workers’ Union [T.G.W.U.] This was denied by T.G.W.U. officials despite a 1955 T.G.W.U. resolution that ‘coloured’ workers could not be employed as bus crews and that if such happened, “if one black man steps on the platform as a conductor, every wheel will stop.” The underlying fear was of reducing wages from increased competition. The four months involving a war of words in the local media; a refusal by the T.G.W.U. to meet a delegation from the West Indian Development Council; plus perhaps some negotiation, was marked by real bitterness when Ron Nethercott, Regional Secretary of the Union, opined in the national Daily Herald, that Stephenson, who had emerged as the leader of the boycott, was dishonest and irresponsible. Stephenson, college-educated and articulate, sued in the High Court and won damages and costs in December 1963. Meanwhile, with the boycott causing increasing economic problems, and following a mass meeting of 500 bus workers on August 27^th it was announced that there would be no

Left to right:
Audley Evans; Paul Stephenson;  Owen Henry.
1963.

more discrimination in the selection of bus crews. Serendipitously, this announcement coincided with Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream ..” speech in Washington. On 17^th September 1963, Raghbir Singh, a Sikh, became Bristol’s first, non-white bus conductor with two Jamaican and two Pakistani men joining him ‘on the platform’ soon after.

Unite, the successor to the T.G.W.U. issued an apology for its shameful discriminatory actions and language in 1963. It was made by Lawrence Faircloth, the union’s South West Secretary, who agreed that its behaviour had been ‘completely unacceptable.’ Hilariously and appallingly, this public apology was made in FEBRUARY 2013. Oh, Perfidious Albion!

The Bristol Bus Boycott was believed to have been an important contributor to the passing of the Race Relations Act of 1965 which made ‘racial discrimination unlawful in public places’, and the Race Relations Act 1968 which extended the provisions to employment and housing.

Plaque attesting to Bristol as Capital of the Atlantic Slave
Trade, 1730-1745
From 12,000,000 captives, 6,000,000 died.

Colston Hall, Bristol.

Juneteenth

 

Celebration of Emancipation Day in Richmond, Virginia, 1905.

Juneteenth, June 19^th is now a federal holiday in the U.S.. In fact, it has been celebrated, especially in Texas, to commemorate the original announcement there, two and a half years late, of The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Although the holiday name is new to some, it has long been viewed as a major celebration, especially for and by black Americans. Interestingly, I noticed on the Merriam-Webster website [an impeccable source!] evidence of considerable and consistent use of the word since the late 19^th century.

“Last Wednesday the citizens of this city and vicinity, native Texans, assembled in the fair grounds to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the liberation of the bonded Afro-American of Texas.

...Closely following the speakers an animated game of baseball was witnessed, when this happy throng repaired to their homes expressing themselves as highly pleased with their first Juneteenth celebration.”

Parson’s Weekly. [Parsons KY] 22 June 1895.

Sherman people celebrated the Juneteenth at the beautiful Fred Douglas school grounds and the handsome Wood Lake park pavilion, midway between Sherman and Denison, on the electric railway.

Freeman [Indianapolis IN] 27 June 1908.

June 19^th, or, as it is humorously referred to, ‘Juneteenth’ is the day the news of the emancipation proclamation reached Texas, so annually the day is celebrated much as we do the Fourth of July.

Chicago Defender, 3 July 1915.

Tennessee has just banned Critical Race Theory from its schools.

My only surprise at the above quotations is that Texas has never seemed the most non-racist, diversity-encouraging, liberal state! And indeed, it wasn't; the formal Emancipation announcement was imposed on Texas by the Army. I am beginning to write this on Juneteenth, a celebratory date of which I had not heard until perhaps two or three years ago. What recently drew my attention to it was reading that Republicans are setting out to ban Critical Race Theory from school syllabi. I think that Critical Race Theory [CRT] is an academic theory that underlines the critical effect of race on identity and on law-making in America. I would guess that there is a much more extended and sophisticated academic explication of CRT but that is the basis. And that basic truth seems undeniable in any country but overwhelmingly so in America.

That all said, I had a mind, this Juneteenth, to explore Bristol, in England, where a statue of Edward

Edward Colston now housed in
Bristol Museum.

Colston, a prominent slave trader and municipal benefactor, was toppled from its plinth and thrown into the harbour during a Black Lives Matter demonstration in 2020. I am humbled, and aghast, at my discovery of a whole library of slavery information about Bristol and its eminent men of wealth during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Slaves became an increasingly important commodity during the 17^th

Aboard a slaving ship.

century as the British colonisation of the Caribbean and the Americas progressed rapidly; cheap labour was urgently needed for various colonies to work on sugar, rum, tobacco and cotton plantations. The Society of Merchant Venturers, an organisation of elite merchants in Bristol, wanted to participate in this lucrative commerce and eventually, in 1698, they managed, with help from business-men with similar commercial interests in Hull and Liverpool, to break the trade monopoly of the Royal African Company, a powerful London-based group which had controlled all trade between Britain and Africa between 1672 and 1698. As soon as the monopoly was broken, Bristol commenced its participation though there is some evidence for Bristolian illegal slave trade before that date. The first legitimate slave ship from Bristol was the Beginning, owned by Stephen Barker, which purchased and ferried a cargo of enslaved Africans and delivered it to the Caribbean in 1698. In her will of 1693, Jane Bridges bequeathed her share of £130 in this ship, to her grandson, Thomas Bridges and her will indicated that the ship then belonged to the city of Bristol. A full-rigged ship was the essential technology which enabled the transatlantic slave trade to flourish.

Selling slaves in a slave market.

Bristol became one of the biggest centres of the transatlantic slave trade between 1725 and 1740 when up to an estimated 20% profits were made from slave-trading from the city. By the 1730s an average of 39 slave ships left Bristol annually and between 1739 and 1748, there were 245 slave voyages from Bristol, an estimated 37.6% of the whole British slave trade. In the later years of slave-trading, Bristol’s share decreased to 62 voyages while Liverpool’s share increased to 62% or 1,605 voyages. An estimated 2108 slaving traders departed from Bristol between 1698 and 1807 with the average number of slaves per ship believed to be around 250. Thus in a century plus, Bristol’s merchants trafficked more than 500,000 enslaved Africans to the Caribbean and North America. But, it must be added, that estimates suggest that up to half of each ship's slave cargo would perish en route, due to the harsh conditions aboard and the overcrowding. In any event, not a figure to be proud of!

The so-called triangular trade describes the route followed by English merchants from Bristol [or Liverpool or Hull] to north-west Africa, the Caribbean and America during the same period, i.e. 1698-1807. Bristol ships traded their goods for enslaved people from south-east Nigeria and Angola, exchanging goods like copper and brass as well as gunpowder which were typically offered by Bristolian merchants and manufacturers, as payment for shares in the slaving voyage. The ships then sailed to St. Kitts, Barbados and Virginia to supply English colonies requiring cheap or free labour, with the enslaved Africans to work on sugar, cotton and tobacco plantations. In addition to slaves, the British colonies were supplied with a wide range of goods for the plantation owners, such as guns, agricultural implements, soap, candles, ladies’ boots, and food stuffs plus ‘Negro cloth’ for the slaves. At the same time, the slaving ships imported goods produced in the colonies. Thus the British economy was inextricably linked to slave-produced Caribbean goods such as sugar, rum, indigo and cocoa. The imported goods were used in sugar refining, tobacco processing and chocolate manufacture, all important local industries in Bristol which employed thousands of working class people from Bristol and its surrounding areas. Thus the slave trade and its associated commerce was embedded in effect, in the British economy.

Various implements to secure and direct slaves.

Neck rings and chains with a gun in case ......

Cotton plantation.