The free seminar takes place on 3 December 2025, between 5:30 and 7:30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

On 3 December 2025 I will be discussing my doctoral thesis ‘Black & Political: Black Political Participation in Britain, 1750-1850’. My research re-examines the political landscape of the long eighteenth century through the lives of Black and mixed-heritage individuals active in British political culture.

Focusing on a self-built database of over 80 figures, my work combines archival research, digital methodology, and prosopography. It illuminates modes of political participation during the long eighteenth century, ranging from electoral voting and petitioning to informal political influence and community leadership.

My paper for the seminar will reflect on the methodological challenges and opportunities involved in recovering these individuals, many of whom left fragmentary archival traces. I will explore how sources such as poll books, wills, newspapers, personal correspondence and institutional records can be read together to reconstruct political agency beyond the traditional boundaries of office-holding and elite reform circles.

I will also explain how I constructed the profiles for several key individuals in my database and the methods I used to identify race and uncover instances of previously marginalised political activity.  In doing so, I will discuss how implicit markers and passing references can be used to identify race, as well as the variety of historical sources that can be used to confirm political participation.

Importantly, my case studies illustrate both the limitations and possibilities of the historical archive for demonstrating the diverse forms of political life that have been overlooked in British historiography. In doing so, my work acknowledges the entangled histories of race, empire and politics at the heart of British political history. 

HW

Helen’s seminar takes place on 3 December 2025, between 5:30 and 7:30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

You can read more about Helen’s work in the following History of Parliament articles:

H. Wilson, ‘Profile of an 18th century Black Voter: George John Scipio Africanus’, History of Parliament (2022)

H. Wilson, ‘The Presence of Black Voters in the 18th and 19th Centuries’, History of Parliament (2022)

H. Wilson, ‘Catherine Despard (c.1755-1815): Wife, Mother, Radical advocate’, History of Parliament (2023)

On the eve of the February 1828 Weymouth and Melcombe Regis by-election, a Black seaman named John Lewis was arrested for being ‘at the head of a mob chiefly composed of boys’. Anxious to preserve the ‘peace of the town’, the mayor and magistrates of Weymouth decided to commit him to the county gaol for a month of hard labour.

Lewis’s entry in the register of Dorchester Prison [Figure 1] identifies him as a native of ‘Congo’ and describes him as ‘a black man with a large cut over his left eye’. Little is known of Lewis’s early years. However, Admiralty records held at The National Archives reveal that in 1811, as a young man no older than 18, he joined the crew of HMS Mutine when she briefly docked in the Azores on her return journey from Rio de Janeiro to Portsmouth. On his arrival in Britain Lewis immediately deserted (along with several other crewmen) and disappeared from the historical record. Seventeen years later and now in his thirties we find him at Weymouth.

Lewis’s fleeting appearance at the by-election of 1828 adds to a growing body of work that continues to dispel what some historians have termed the ‘Windrush myth’, namely the misconception that people of African and Caribbean heritage did not migrate to Britain before the arrival of Empire Windrush in 1948. Lewis’s apparently leading role in the election ‘riots’ also serves as an example of Black political participation in early nineteenth-century England, which in recent years has begun to gain greater historical attention.

Given his maritime connections, it appears that Lewis was part of a motley group of sailors hired to support the campaign of Major Richard Weyland, the ‘Blue’ candidate at the 1828 Weymouth by-election. Weyland was standing thanks to the support of his wife, the dowager Lady Charlotte Johnstone, who possessed considerable property and influence in the constituency. Weyland’s opponent for the ‘Purples’ was Edward Sugden, a chancery lawyer and future Conservative lord chancellor.

At the previous general election in 1826, Lady Johnstone (as she was commonly known) helped ensure the return of her brother, John Gordon, for the four-member constituency. According to the historian and antiquarian, George Alfred Ellis, a notable feature of that election was its lawlessness due to the candidates’ use of hired ‘gangs of desperate individuals’. Reports in The Times suggest that Gordon’s extremely costly campaign (£40,000) relied heavily on the ‘powerful services’ of the sailors of Portland, who lived and worked on the rocky peninsula lying to the south of Weymouth.

The same tactic was employed in 1828, with the Dorset County Chronicle noting that Weyland’s Blues had again ‘called to their assistance a number of the hardy race of Portlanders’, describing them as men who ‘care little for the means by which they obtain their object’.

Weyland began canvassing vigorously from the start of February and shortly thereafter local newspapers reported election disturbances in the streets of Weymouth. Lewis appears to have been arrested on the evening of 8 February, before the official nomination of candidates which took place the following day. He was therefore in jail for the entirety of the polling.

According to a visiting magistrate, John Morton Colson, Lewis’s behaviour in prison was exemplary. Colson contrasted this with his riotous conduct ahead of his arrest, which the magistrate believed had been orchestrated by the Blues. In Colson’s view, the migrant sailor’s ‘ignorance and simplicity’ had been ‘taken advantage of by a cowardly and disigned [sic] party [i.e. Weyland’s election committee]’ who had plied him with drink. Writing two years after the fact, Colson blamed Weyland for corrupting Lewis and for plunging Weymouth into chaos and disorder during the subsequent poll.

Figure 4 – Map showing key sites of the Weymouth and Melcombe Regis By-Election of 1828. Borough boundaries based on TNA, T 72/11. Basemap: © National Library of Scotland

Polling took place in Weymouth and Melcombe Regis across ten days between 11 and 20 February (which was normal for elections before the 1832 Reform Act restricted the duration to two days). During the first days of the poll, Weyland’s election committee was reported to have stationed 300 Portlanders in front of Weymouth’s Guildhall to intimidate electors coming there to cast their vote for the Purples [see Figure 4].

Weyland’s opponent, Sugden, initially tried to secure a suspension in polling, after complaining to town officials that his rival had employed ‘foreigners’ (as he termed them) to win the election by ‘fraud and violence’. After his request was denied, on the third day of polling Sugden engaged his own small army of farm labourers from nearby Radipole to protect his electoral interests. This proved a pivotal moment in the election. Sugden’s supporters gradually gained dominance over key election sites, allowing their candidate to secure a comfortable majority by the end of polling. 

Lewis meanwhile languished in Dorchester jail under a charge of vagrancy. Remarkably, official records suggest he was the only individual imprisoned for offences related to the by-election. This is despite the fact that hundreds of sailors and labourers (not to mention several election agents!) contributed to the ‘disorder’ of February 1828 and Weymouth’s mayor and magistrates threatened to draw up indictments against the worst offenders. This highlights the significance of Lewis’s case for those seeking to develop a wider understanding of racial attitudes within the nineteenth-century English legal system.

At the same time, Lewis’s ‘orderly and inoffensive’ conduct whilst incarcerated caused the prison authorities to raise a small subscription on his behalf. Furthermore, in the run up to his release from prison in March 1828, Colson organised for Lewis to serve as a cook’s mate aboard the naval frigate HMS Blonde that was preparing to embark for the Mediterranean.

After his discharge from the navy ‘with good character’ the following year, we know that Lewis was again arrested, this time for a petty theft he committed while destitute at Wolverhampton. It was this second conviction that prompted Colson to write three petitions on behalf of Lewis. It is these documents, held at The National Archives, which by chance provide us with most of the vivid detail of Lewis’s earlier career as a hired election ‘rough’.

After his release from prison in August 1830, Lewis served aboard two more naval ships. No record of his life after 1849 (when he would have been approaching his fifties) nor of his death (presumably in the middle years of the nineteenth century) can be found, though the author’s search continues…

Reduced from a four- to a two-member borough, Weymouth and Melcombe Regis survived as a constituency after 1832 and continued to be the site of violent contests for decades to come.

JC

Suggested Reading

H. Adi, African and Caribbean People in Britain: A History (2023)

K. N. Abraham & J. Woolf, Black Victorians (2023)

H. Wilson, ‘The Presence of Black Voters in the 18th and 19th Centuries’, History of Parliament (2022)

C. Bressey, ‘The Next Chapter: The Black Presence in the Nineteenth Century’, in G. Gerzina (ed.), Britain’s Black Past (2020), 315-30

D. Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History (2016)

S. Farrell, ‘Weymouth & Melcombe Regis‘, in D. Fisher (ed.), The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1820-1832 (2009)

G. Gerzina, Black England: Life Before Emancipation (1999)

P. Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984)

N. File & C. Power, Black Settlers in Britain 1555-1958 (1981)

Peter McLagan (1823-1900) represented the Scottish county of Linlithgowshire between 1865 and 1893. A Liberal MP for most of his career, he was regarded as one of Britain’s ‘leading agriculturalists’ and on his retirement was the longest serving Scottish member. At the time of writing, McLagan is thought to be the seventh Black MP to sit in the Commons, and the first to represent a Scottish constituency*. He is currently considered the tenth MP elected to Parliament from a ‘minority ethnic’ group (as defined by the UK Parliament in a 2023 briefing).

I’ve been researching Peter McLagan for the House of Commons 1832-1868 project as part of my wider research into Scottish county politics during the period. In this series of articles I’ll explore McLagan’s personal, political and professional life, the biographies of key family members and the McLagan family’s colonial connections, particularly to the British Caribbean and slavery. My research builds on that already completed on McLagan by the historians Sybil Cavanagh, David Main, the National Records of Scotland and Dr Alison Clark, as well as Professor Ewen Cameron, who wrote McLagan’s entry for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Identifying the ancestry and ethnicity of historical figures can be a difficult, often contingent and imperfect process. Archival sources such as birth records might not exist, or may contain deliberately incorrect information, particularly when the person in question had legally been considered ‘illegitimate’ at birth (born outside marriage). Without formal records, a person’s ethnicity might be extrapolated from their birthplace, historical knowledge about their family and wider social networks, visual imagery (e.g. portraits, caricatures or photographs) or fleeting remarks discovered in a diary, court case or newspaper.

It is by employing a combination of these approaches that historians have identified, and continue to uncover, Black participation in numerous historic British institutional and social settings. While such discoveries are of importance in their own genealogical and biographical right, they are also of major significance in complicating assumptions (written or unwritten) about British society in the past, and providing new ways for researchers, students, teachers and readers to conceptualise British history. In this regard, McLagan’s story is an example of Black elite participation in nineteenth-century British politics, and adds an important Scottish dimension to evolving understandings of Black presence in Victorian Britain.

Such discoveries have increased over the past decade as Black British history has become an integral aspect of curriculums and research in schools and universities, and the digitisation of genealogical records and newspapers has allowed for new methods of source interrogation. Histories of politics and the UK Parliament are no exception, as demonstrated by Helen Wilson’s ground-breaking research into Black participation in British politics between 1750 and 1850, Gillian Williamson’s discovery of the earliest known Black voter in the UK at the 1749 Westminster by-election, and Amanda Goodrich’s biography of the father of Henry Galgacus Redhead Yorke, MP for York between 1841 and 1848.

As no formal birth records exist for McLagan, his status as a Black MP is based on a number of considerations. We know from his entry in Dod’s Parliamentary Companion from 1865, and a number of his public statements thereafter, that he was born in Demerara (now Guyana). In modern terms the ethnicity of his father was White British. However, at no point during his life did McLagan disclose the identity of his mother. There are also, at present, no known official or unofficial records that confirm who she was.

In addition to comments on his birth in Demerara, a number of contemporary statements were made about McLagan’s nationality and ethnicity. During the 1868 election his opponent suggested that McLagan was ‘not a Scotchman’ and a racist cartoon was circulated in the constituency depicting McLagan as a slavedriver with a blackened face, flogging a topless man in a kilt. The cartoon played on the status of McLagan’s father as an enslaver, local perceptions of McLagan’s racial identity and statements McLagan made during the 1868 election in support of flogging in the military.

There was little further public comment about McLagan’s ethnicity until the publication of the 1885 Popular Guide to the New House of Commons. In the guide, McLagan was described as ‘a creole, born in Demerara’. While ‘creole’ may just have been employed in this sense to describe someone of European descent born in the Caribbean, it led to a number of racist descriptions of McLagan in the press. For instance, in 1888 the Sheffield Independent welcomed the prospect that McLagan faced defeat at the next election on the basis that he ‘was not only born at Demerara – he is not even a white man’.

On his retirement in 1893 journalists deployed a range of racist descriptions in their potted biographies of McLagan. The Western Morning News stated he was ‘one of the swathiest [sic] men in the House of Commons’, the Newcastle Journal reported on his ‘dark complexion’, the Dundee Courier suggested that he was ‘in appearance a little heavy, Dutch-looking man’, and the Penny Illustrated Paper stated that his ‘sensible honest face bore traces of the dark blood which flowed in his veins’.

In addition to these newspaper reports, there are a number of contemporary portraits, caricatures and photographs of McLagan. As well as the cartoon noted above from the 1868 election, he was caricatured standing upright as ‘the judicious McLagan’ by Punch in 1888, and in a head and shoulders profile etching in the Linlithgowshire Gazette following the 1892 election. He was also the subject of an etching [Figure 1], which was probably published at an earlier stage of his parliamentary career, potentially following the 1865 election. The image, which is pictured above, was recently discovered by a descendant and is now held by West Lothian Council Museums and Archives Service.

McLagan was also captured in at least four known photographs. There are two side profiles of McLagan that probably date to the 1880s, one of which held by the Hulton Archive can be viewed here. McLagan also appears in two photographs taken in December 1887 during the foundation stone laying ceremony for Victoria Halls, Linlithgow. McLagan laid the foundation stone at the ceremony in full masonic attire (he was the Linlithgowshire provincial grand master), and is pictured at the centre of a group photo of local dignitaries in front of Linlithgow Palace Fountain [Figure 3]. In a second, remarkable, group photo of the laying of the foundation stone, McLagan can also be seen under a set of pulley chains, staring directly at the camera with a somewhat bemused look on his face [Figure 4].

Considered together, these sources suggest that McLagan’s mother was probably of Black Caribbean or Black African descent. To explore why this was likely to have been the case, the next articles in the series will focus on McLagan’s family.

The first will discuss McLagan’s father, Peter McLagan (1774-1860), who enslaved over 400 people on his plantations and personal estate in Demerara. McLagan’s father was awarded a share in over £20,000 (around £2.5 million today) in compensation for persons formerly enslaved on his plantations and personal estate following the abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean in 1833. Along with the profits of a three-decade career in Demerara, McLagan’s father invested this compensation into estates in modern West Lothian, which allowed McLagan to establish himself as one of Scotland’s leading agriculturists, shale oil proprietors and longest-serving MPs.

Following this I will explore the potential identity of McLagan’s mother. Recent research by Dr Alison Clark has suggested that McLagan’s mother may have been Elizabeth Games or Elizabeth Goodwin, two ‘free women of colour’ that McLagan senior made property transactions with in Demerara in 1817.

My research into the enslaved persons on McLagan’s father’s estates has also identified a Barbadian-born woman named Filly (b. c. 1789/90), another possible candidate to have been McLagan’s mother. Filly, and her three children, Henrietta, Joe and Robert, were enslaved on McLagan’s father’s personal residence on Water Street, Georgetown, between 1820 and 1823, just before McLagan was born. While McLagan and his father left Demerara for Scotland in 1825, Filly and her children continued to live on McLagan’s father’s residence as enslaved ‘domestic servants’ until at least 1834.

To read the second article in Martin’s series click here. To find out more about the House of Commons 1832-1868 project click here.

MS

* I use Black as a category of ethnicity in its modern sense to refer to people of African and Caribbean heritage. This contrasts with contemporary nineteenth-century British discourse, and some twentieth century political and historiographical contexts, where ‘black’ was also used as a term to refer to persons of non-African and Caribbean heritage, particularly people of South Asian descent.  It also understands race as a cultural, social and political phenomenon.

The author would like to thank Sybil Cavanagh for sharing her unpublished research on McLagan, and several quotations which have been used in this article.

Suggested Reading

E. A. Cameron, ‘McLagan, Peter (1822/3-1900)’, Oxford DNB (2023), www.oxforddnb.com

D. W. Main, ‘The Remarkable Career of Peter McLagan MP’, History Scotland (April 2021)

Scotlands People, ‘Our records: Peter McLagan (1823–1900, British Liberal Party politician and Scotland’s first black MP’, (2022)

A. Clark, ‘Expanding the Boundaries of Empire, 1790-1838: Scottish Traders in the Southeast Carribean: Slavery, Cotton and the Rise of Sandbach Tinné & Co.’, PhD Univ. Edinburgh (2024)

H. Wilson, ‘The Presence of Black Voters in the 18th and 19th Centuries’, History of Parliament (2022)

J. Baker, ‘1833 Slavery Abolition Act: The Long Road to Emancipation in the British West Indies’, History of Parliament (2024)

‘C. Bressey, ‘The Next Chapter: The Black Presence in the Nineteenth Century’, in G. Gerzina (ed.), Britain’s Black Past (2020), 315-30

H. Adi, African and Caribbean People in Britain: A History (2023)

K. N. Abraham & J. Woolf, Black Victorians (2023)

T. Scriven, ‘‘The Black Prince of Baker Street’ and the Black Presence in Britain, 1837–1849’, History Workshop Journal (2024)

D. Alston, Slaves and Highlanders: Silenced Histories of Scotland and the Caribbean (2021)

P. Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984)

A. Goodrich, Henry Redhead Yorke, Colonial Radical Politics and Identity in the Atlantic World, 1772-1813 (2019)

D. Livesay, Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833 (2018)

D. Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History (2016)

N. File & C. Power, Black Settlers in Britain 1555-1958 (1981)

In 1756 William Murray left the House of Commons after 14 years as MP for Boroughbridge, having been appointed Lord Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench, and created Lord Mansfield. He was therefore a highly experienced judge by the time he made his ruling in the case of Somerset v Stewart on 22 June 1772. This dealt with the imprisonment of James Somerset, an enslaved person under the ownership of Charles Stewart. Although Mansfield had not wished it to be so, his decision was seen as a judgment on the legal status of slavery in England.

Prior to the Somerset decision, although slavery was rife within the British colonies, the status of slavery in England itself was disputed. Previous high-ranking law officers had left contrary opinions on the matter. In 1696 the Lord Chief Justice Sir John Holt, in the case of Chamberlain v Harvey, had ruled that ‘no man can have property in the person of another while in England’. Yet 23 years later, the West India lobby, opposed to Holt’s previous statement, obtained an unofficial opinion from the Attorney General Philip Yorke and the Solicitor General Charles Talbot:

We are of opinion that a slave, coming from the West Indies to Great Britain or Ireland, with or without his master, doth not become free; and that his master’s property or right in him is not thereby determined or varied; and that baptism doth not bestow freedom upon him, or make any alteration in his temporal condition in these Kingdoms. We are also of opinion that his master may legally compel him to return again to the plantations. – Yorke-Talbot Opinion, 1729

It is with these conflicting statements in mind that we need to understand the significance of the Somerset v Stewart decision.

Charles Stewart (or Steuart), a Scottish merchant who had become a cashier and paymaster of customs in Boston, Massachusetts, came to England on business in 1768/9, bringing with him James Somerset, an enslaved person under his ownership. During their time in England, Somerset was baptised, with three abolitionists – Thomas Walkin, Elizabeth Cade and John Marlow – acting as godparents. As the Yorke-Talbot opinion suggested, there was a belief, which their opinion disagreed with, that the baptism of an enslaved person made them free. Somerset eventually escaped Stewart’s service in October 1771, evading recapture until the end of November. He was taken to a ship anchored in the Thames – the Ann and Mary – and detained there for the purposes of being shipped to Jamaica to be resold as a slave.  His godparents intervened, issuing a writ of habeas corpus, a legal procedure under which a prisoner would be brought to court to decide whether they had been lawfully detained. Somerset was duly brought before the Court of King’s Bench on 9 December 1771.

The case eventually began in February 1772, heard by three judges with Mansfield presiding as Lord Chief Justice. Somerset was released pending the hearing, and in that time met with the famed abolitionist Granville Sharp, who had previously issued writs of habeas corpus for similar cases to resolve the uncertainty surrounding slavery. Although he supported Somerset’s case, he did not represent him; Somerset was instead defended by a team of barristers led by the sitting MP for Middlesex, John Glynn. 

The defence sought to frame the judgment on the basis that a ruling in favour of Stewart would set a precedent for legalising enslavement across the British Isles. Francis Hargrave, in this his first case, exemplified this position during proceedings, stating that ‘the question is not whether slavery is lawful in the colonies… but whether in England?’ Another main point of contention from the defence, articulated by John Alleyne, was that due to Stewart’s ownership of enslaved people being legalised through municipal law in America, his ownership of James Somerset did not hold sway in ‘a country where such municipal regulations do not subsist.’

The lead counsel for Stewart, John Dunning, who was also a sitting MP, sought to challenge Alleyne’s argument. He posited that although municipal regulations were not binding in a different country, there were relationships similar to Stewart and Somerset’s of an equivalent status that could be transposed: ‘I have not heard, do I fancy, is there any intention to affirm, the relation of master and servant ceases here?’ William Wallace also questioned what the implications of setting Somerset free would be for the lucrative industries in the colonies that were dependent on the labour of enslaved people. He argued that ‘the Court must consider the great detriment to proprietors… that many thousands of pounds would be lost to the owners, by setting them [enslaved persons] free.’

On 14 May, Mansfield adjourned the final session before his judgment was to be given. As in previous cases he had presided over, Mansfield strongly recommended that an agreement between the parties be reached before an opinion was given, but it seemed that both sides were committed to a judicial resolution. Reluctant to give a judgment on the legality of slavery in general, Mansfield narrowed the remit of his judgment. Rather than answering questions on the morality of enslavement, or the potential detriment to British commerce, Mansfield stated that his decision would be based on ‘whether any dominion, authority or coercion can be exercised in this country, on a slave according to American laws?’

The Court of King’s Bench’s decision was finally read by Mansfield in Westminster Hall on 22 June 1772. The Morning Chronicle reported the day after the decision that ‘Lord Mansfield in a written speech, as guarded, cautious, and concise, as it could possibly be drawn up, delivered the unanimous opinion of the whole court…’ Within the parameters he had previously proposed, Mansfield asserted that ‘so high an act of dominion must be recognized by law of the country it is used.’ As the dominion over another person that slavery imposed was not supported by English law, Mansfield declared:

Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from a decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England.

James Somerset was therefore released.

Although this declaration created a judicial decision against the institution of slavery in England, the parameters Mansfield had set greatly narrowed the impact of Somerset’s release. The precedent set by this case was that the actions of Stewart to detain Somerset against his will to deport and sell him into slavery were not supported by English law. However, this did not outlaw the existence of slavery in the colonies, or the existence of domestic servitude. Rather it stipulated that the level of dominion over another which Stewart had tried to enforce – the forced deportation of an individual for the purpose of selling them as a slave – was unlawful in England.

Despite Mansfield later stating in 1785 that his decision went ‘no further than that the master cannot by force compel him [the slave] to go out of the Kingdom’, this judgment was seen by many as a boon to the emerging abolitionist campaign, posing the question, if slavery in its fullest extent could not be legal in England, why was it still legal in the colonies? With the emergent anti-slavery rhetoric gaining more traction, the West India Interest saw for the first time that there was unified opposition to the status quo. New tactics were needed to counter fears that Somerset v Stewart could eventually destabilise the practice of colonial slavery.

JMPB

Further Reading:

Somerset v Stewart, 1 Lofft 1, 1772

D. Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History (2016)

N. S. Poser, Lord Mansfield: Justice in the Age of Reason (2013)

E. L. Wong, ‘Emancipation after “the Laws of Englishmen”, in Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel (2009), 19-76

D. J. Hulsebosch, ‘Nothing but Liberty:” Somerset’s Case” and the British Empire’, Law and History Review 24, 3 (2006), 647-657

S. Swaminathan, ‘Developing the West Indian Proslavery Position after the Somerset Decision’, Slavery and Abolition, 24, 3 (2003), 40-60

In November 1749 John London walked from his home to vote in the Westminster constituency parliamentary by-election at St Paul’s, Covent Garden. He was probably with a group of his near neighbours from Hungerford Market, just south of the Strand (where Charing Cross railway station stands today). He cast his vote for the government candidate, Lord Trentham, then presumably returned home to continue his day’s business. His vote, and those of his neighbours, was recorded at the time by the polling clerk and before the year was out all the polling data was available as a published ‘poll book’, price 2s 6d. John London’s name duly appears on page 233, misspelt as John Loudon. The entry is unremarkable: we have his name, address (One Tun, a narrow alley leading from the Strand to the market), occupation (Vict. for victualler, what we would call a pub landlord) and his vote in the T column for Trentham.

His poll book entry does not stand out from those surrounding it in any way.  John London was just one of 9,465 men who had voted, 1,961 of them from his parish of St Martin in the Fields, 694 of whom had, like him, voted for Trentham. Nor was his occupation unusual: among the voters in the 1749 by-election were eight other victuallers who traded in Hungerford Market alone. But the election result was tight. Trentham won by just 157 votes. His rival, Sir George Vandeput, called for a scrutiny, an ex post facto examination of potentially bad votes where disqualification might alter the result. John London’s was one such vote and it is the manuscript minutes of the protracted scrutiny hearings of 1750 (held in the British Library) that reveal that John London, businessman, householder and voter, was Black. A non-white racial identity was no bar to voting. In Westminster the franchise was open to all adult (over twenty-one), British, male ratepayers (‘householders’). The challenge to John London’s vote was not on the face of it based on his Blackness. Rather it was alleged that he was not a ratepayer at the time of the poll. Vandeput’s witness, Mr Rybot the Overseer of the Poor in the parish, had to admit defeat here.  London was ‘on the blew leaf’, that is, the rate collector had written his name and payment on the blue paper cover of his notebook when calling door-to-door for the September 1749 rates. This was because London was a recent arrival in One Tun Alley, so not already listed, although he was ‘in the book’ by the time of the next rate collection in 1750.

London had arrived at his new home just in time to exercise his householder’s right to vote in November. It is Rybot’s throw-away next remark at the hearing that identifies London as Black: ‘… he paid me he’s a Blackamoor’ [an outdated historical term describing a Black or dark-skinned person]. Was this an attempt to move the challenge on to the question of Britishness based on racial identity? If so, this too failed. London appeared in person (unusual at the scrutiny). He was asked where he was born and with his answer – ‘St Edmunds Bury in Suffolk’ – the matter was closed in London’s favour. His vote stood. This fact makes John London the earliest known Black person to have voted in a British parliamentary election, some twenty-five years before Charles Ignatius Sancho (c. 1729-80), the formerly enslaved Black Mayfair grocer, composer, and writer who voted in Westminster elections in 1774 and 1780.

What does this episode tell us about voting and race in Georgian London? Firstly, it is a salutary reminder to historians not to assume that names in an eighteenth-century list are necessarily those of white people. There was a significant and rising population of Black Londoners, numbering some 10,000 in a total population of between 575,000 and 700,000. Many had been enslaved and had arrived from Britain’s Atlantic colonies rather than directly from Africa. Although technically free in England, they were often found working in domestic service in conditions of near servitude, or eked a living among the capital’s poor. Black soldiers, sailors, musicians, street sellers, seamstresses, beggars, prostitutes and their pimps are depicted in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century art. Such men, like their white neighbours, were unlikely to be ratepayers and have the franchise. The discovery of John London, however, shows us that we should not assume all Black Londoners fell into these two categories. It confirms the presence of Black men who were entrepreneurs on a small scale, sufficiently prosperous to be independent householders and so exercise the right to vote. This was active participation in civic life, not the bystander role of Black men depicted in images of polling-day crowds. There may indeed have been other Black voters who have not yet come to light since, as with John London, there was no need to include any racial identifier in the polling records themselves. 

Finally, while John London was clearly enjoying a modicum of success in life in 1749 the scrutiny records do hint at the vulnerability of Black people and the inherent racism they faced in Georgian London.  He was clearly not prevented from casting his vote in November 1749, but we cannot tell whether this was straightforward or whether he was subject to abuse in any way (as Sancho records he was in moving about the city a generation later). There may have been some protection from the presence around him of his neighbours from Hungerford Market.  We can interpret his appearance in person at the hearing as his understanding that his racial identity might be discussed and might count against him were he not there to speak for himself.  The term ‘blackamoor’ as used by Rybot was, after all, not exactly affectionate. London’s name appears in parish rate book records until 1751 and in none of these is he noted as a Black man – racial identity did not matter as long as one paid up. After 1751 he was gone from One Tun Alley and is archivally elusive until spring 1770 when, a sick man, he was admitted to the St Martin’s workhouse where he died.  At the end of his life, he was recorded as both a pauper and as Black. As with his challenged vote, this again marks him out as vulnerable and marginal.  Racial identity was irrelevant to his settlement rights under the Old Poor Law but was perhaps noted because he was now a cost to the parish. Was whoever recorded admissions expressing an underlying anxiety about Black paupers?  Finally, there is one other record for John London in the licensing lists for Westminster that shows something of the bold spirit, sense of humour, or enterprise in seeking out a specifically Black clientele of this Black voter and businessman. He named his victualling business The Blackamoor’s Head.   

Further Reading

A Copy of the Poll for a Citizen for the City and Liberty of Westminster (‘Poll Book’) (London: J. Osborn, 1749).

Frances Crewe., ed., Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho: An African, to which are Prefixed, Memoirs of his Life, 2 vols (London: John Nichols, 1782).

David Dabydeen, Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1987).

David Dabydeen, John Gilmore and Cecily Jones, eds, The Oxford Companion to Black British History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

Gretchen Gerzina, Black England: A Forgotten  Georgian History (London: John Murray, revised edn 2002,1st pub. 1995).

Frank O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties: The Unreformed Electorate of Hanoverian England, 1734-1832 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History (London: Macmillan, 2016).

Nicholas Rogers, Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

The Despard conspiracy occurred in early 1802 and was led by Colonel Edward Marcus Despard (1751-1803), an Irish army officer and Catherine’s husband. They had met possibly in Jamaica or while Edward was stationed at the Bay of Honduras (now Belize), where he fought in the Spanish Main. During this period, Edward became an elected administrator in Belize. Still, he became highly unpopular with the mahogany loggers and enslavers because he instituted a land lottery to distribute the land fairly. In Jamaica, he was an engineer responsible for infrastructure works. He fought in Nicaragua alongside Nelson and then administered in Belize. In all these places and through their experiences, he fostered a genuine empathy and commonality across race, class and gender. Catherine’s story is less well-known. Her mother’s will has been identified, confirming she was born in Jamaica. Her mother, Sarah Gordon of St Andrew’s Parish, a free Black woman, died on 25th Jul. 1799. 

Catherine and Edward’s marriage does not appear in the records in any of the parishes in Jamaica, indicating either that they were married in Belize or were not officially married. However, throughout their time in England, only Edward’s family struggled with them being married, writing both Catherine and their son John Edward Despard (c.1780-1836) out of the family tree. Catherine was, however, repeatedly referred to as his wife in newspapers, letters and by their friends. Catherine’s story is indelibly tied to Edward’s. Edward was called to London because of complaints about his land lottery. The system did not recognise race or class when dividing land rights; this did not favour the Baymen (mahogany loggers who owned enslaved peoples). The Baymen were angry that they were seen in common with the “lowest mulatto or free negro”. Edward kept land in common ownership and tried to keep food prices low so that poor people could buy it. In 1790, Lord Grenville recalled Edward to London, and he, Catherine and their son sailed for England. 

The Despards arrived in London in 1790, and Edward attempted to settle his dispute with the Government over what he saw as his unfair dismissal. He believed that he was deserving of compensation for unpaid earnings. The Government disagreed. This conflict took two years to resolve and ended with Edward not being charged or receiving any payment. Meanwhile, he was pursued with lawsuits by the Baymen and spent two years in debtor’s prison (1792-4). In 1795, Edward was again arrested for referring to himself by the title citizen when a police constable stopped him at a riot in Charring Cross, one of many forms of protest seen during the summer of 1795. There had been instances of crowds gathering outside Downing Street or surrounding the King in procession to parliament. The riot in Charing Cross was an extension of this unrest, and by October, the Government introduced the Seditious Meetings Act and the Treason Act. Edward was politically active and was seen as a threat by the Government. He was a member of the London Corresponding Society (LCS), a federation of reading and debating clubs that agitated for democratic reform of parliament by petitions and demonstrations. He was a prominent figure in discussions held in 1797 involving plans for a French-supported rebellion in Ireland. He was involved in radical groups, including LSC, the United Irishmen and the United Britons. Catherine’s role in these schemes is unknown. The LCS does not appear to have had female members, but it did support Women’s meetings, and women attended their demonstrations. However, from her closeness to Edward throughout his multiple incarcerations and her fervent advocation for his improved treatment, it may be fair to assume that she at least supported her husband’s actions and beliefs. The plot for which he was imprisoned for the final time was regicide. The aim was to have George III’s carriage fired upon by a stationary cannon while on its way to Buckingham House (Palace). Once the King had been assassinated, the plotters would seize the Bank of England and incite a military rising of the Third Grenadiers stationed at the Tower of London. Edward was arrested in 1802, and his execution occurred on 21^st February 1803.  

Catherine and Edward were staunch abolitionists; they advocated for the working class and common land not to be enclosed. When Catherine arrived in London, Europe was in a state of fomenting unrest and radical politics. London’s Black population was not exclusively made up of servants and service members. It is clear from her letters that Catherine was educated. Her fluent, thorough, persistent style and beautiful penmanship exude a well-read and confident communicator. At the gallows, Edward’s final words, delivered to a crowd estimated to have amounted to 20,000 people, were a collaboration between them. She had been back and forth for days, helping him write his speech, his petitions for mercy and carrying papers. Famously, Sir Richard Ford, the Chief Magistrate of London, wrote to Lord Pelham, Home Secretary, on the night of the execution, said of her, “Mrs Despard has been very troublesome, but at last she has gone away.” Catherine had launched a campaign advocating for better treatment of her husband and his fellow inmates beginning in 1798. Her activism incited a debate in the House of Commons about the suspension of Habeas Corpus, in which MP John Courtney read one of her letters in the chamber. Catherine wrote to Sir Francis Burdett, MP, who was known for his opposition to war and political prosecutions. Eliciting the support of influential politicians shows political shrewdness and an understanding of political power.  

The gallows speech expresses a deep concern for the principles of equality. They use the rhetorical device of threes; he stated, “[I] served my country faithfully, honourably and usefully”. This echoes the cry of the French Revolution liberté, égalité and fraternité. They use the address’ citizen’, intended to strip away hierarchical titles such as Sir, My Lord and My Lady. This term was already internationally recognised within radical speech as expressing affiliation with the Revolution and the collective humanity of all people. The sheriff threatened to stop Edward’s speech at the use of the phrase ‘Human Race’ because it was deemed too inflammatory. Edward and Catherine’s perception of the human race differed from what was being established politically and scientifically: a strict hierarchy between races and classes. 

The late eighteenth century was a politically turbulent period. There was political unrest in Britain from radicals who sought democratic reform, republicans who called for the end of the monarchy, abolitionists who fought for the end of the slave trade and emancipation of the enslaved, and loyalists to either the King or parliament. The continuing wars strained the British economy, which helped create discontent within the general population. Catherine was part of a political milieu that included the abolitionists Olaudah Equiano (c.1745-1797) and Ottobah Cugoano (c.1757-1791), the radical author Henry Redhead Yorke (1772-1813), Cato Street conspiracist William Davidson (1786-1820) and the radical preacher Robert Wedderburn (1762-1835/6). Catherine could not gain her husband’s freedom, but she was disruptive. She did not stay in her place and play the forlorn wife; she instead campaigned, wrote and organised.  

HW

Conner, Clifford D. Colonel Despard: the Life and Times of an Anglo-Irish Rebel. Pennsylvania: Combined. 2000 

“EXECUTION OF COLONEL DESPARD, ….” Morning Post, 22nd Feb. 1803. British Library Newspapers. 

Gerzina, Gretchen. Black London: Life before Emancipation. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. 1995.  

Gillis, Bernadette M.’ A Caribbean Coupling Beyond Black and White: The Interracial Marriage of Catherine and Edward Marcus Despard and Its Implications for British Views on Race, Class and Gender during the Age of Reform.’ Masters, Duke University, 2014.  

Jay, Mike. The Unfortunate Colonel Despard. London: Bantam Press, 2004. 

Linebaugh, Peter. Red Round Globe Hot Burning: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Closure, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class, and of Kate and Ned Despard. University of California Press, 2019. 

Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000. 

The National Archives of the UK (TNA), Home Office (HO) 42/43/127. Folios 291-293. 1798. 

The eighteenth century saw many geo-political expansions and retractions for the British empire, including the gaining of territories in the Caribbean, West Africa and Asia and the loss of the American colonies. These undulations of the British state created a web of people across the world connected to this small European island. Unsurprisingly that connection in many cases led to migration. Black people had been arriving in British ports for hundreds of years, but the East India Company and the Africa Company had a hand in accelerating population movements. Black Slaves came to Britain to be traded to other countries in Europe and to work, mostly in domestic roles to wealthy masters. The Black loyalists arrived in London after the failed campaign against America’s independence, their freedom assured by the British government if they fought with the British. There were also the Mixed-Race children of West Indian plantation owners who, when recognised, could inherit huge fortunes. Therefore, it cannot be ignored that Black people lived, worked and thrived in eighteenth-century Britain. But, as always, the Black British experience was unique, challenging and nuanced.

Black British political participation in the eighteenth century has largely been interpreted through the lens of slavery and the abolition movement. However, Black Britons were not all tied to slavery even if it was why they were brought to these shores. George John Scipio Africanus is one of those people. He is thought to have been born in West Africa possibly Sierra Leon c.1763. His journey to England probably began at the end of 1765 or early in 1766, because he was baptised on 31 March 1766. The baptismal record described him as a negro boy belonging to Benjamin Molineux of Molineux House. Africanus was given an education as soon as he became part of the Molineux family. This was not especially common as many masters chose not to educate those held in their service for the purpose of keeping them submissive. When Molineux died in 1772 his son George took over the responsibility for Africanus’ education and, when he was old enough, he was apprenticed as a brass founder.

At the age of 21 Africanus’ service ended with the Molineuxs and he moved to Nottingham, around 1784. Africanus was fortunate to have been discharged from his service to the Molineux family; in many instances someone in Africanus’ position would not have known if they would ever have been freed from bondage. As he had completed an apprenticeship, he was in a position to be able to move and earn money, and his education gave him opportunities not available to others in a similar position. He met and married a local woman Esther (Ester) Shaw on the 3^rd of August 1788 at St Peter’s Church in Nottingham. It was approximately five years later that they started an employment agency Africanus Register of Servants, which they ran from their home, 28 Chandlers Lane. The business helped primarily Black servants get jobs in respectable homes, and paid service. However, both also had to take other forms of employment, as seen in the trade directories where Africanus is listed as being a waiter and a labourer. But this was not unusual; many of those in the burgeoning middle-classes faced a similar situation at this time, as the British economy was stretched from wars and poor harvests. The Africanuses ran their business from 1793-1853, Ester taking control after George’s death in 1834.

Africanus voted in three general elections in Nottingham: 1818, 1820 and 1826. Africanus exemplifies the diversity in the British electorate, even within a system that was not designed to be inclusive. A successful business owner regardless of race was able to be part of the political discourse of their area and nation.

Nottingham returned two MPs to Parliament at each general election, while certain constituencies such as London returned four and a small amount returned one. Voters would use their votes in a few different ways, which can be seen in the poll books. They could vote for two candidates of the same party, split their votes and vote for a candidate of either party, or plump, using only one of their votes and signalling that they only supported that candidate and did not support any of the others. Africanus chose one of each of these options for each election: he split his vote in his first election, 1818, which was the only time he voted for a candidate that won. In the second election, 1820, he voted for the two Tory candidates, one of whom had West Indian interests, although there is no evidence that Africanus knew that nor if it factored into his decision. In his third and final election in 1826 Africanus plumped his vote and only voted for John Smith Wright, who did not win. From Africanus’ voting behaviour it appears he was a Tory supporter. On their own, the three general elections cannot show much about his politics, but they are clear evidence that he was politically engaged. Therefore, it is likely that he also participated in more local politics, which combined with his national choices may build a clearer profile of his political ideology.

Africanus exemplifies the diversity of eighteenth-century Britain and the Black experience within it. The dichotomy of the slave trade and the perceived wealth and status of business ownership feels too distinct to be embodied in one person. However, one of the many things that Africanus highlights is that those in the middle classes in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain were not a homogeneous group of wealthy individuals. Many of them had come from rural, working class and even from enslaved backgrounds working their way into a newly described class. Africanus is not only a person to use to look at Black participation in politics, but also an individual who represents how the middle class formed and grew.  Many people whose lives started as his did were not as fortunate to be able to be in the position he was in, however, through ingenuity more Black Britons than previously thought were thriving in Britain.

H W

Read Helen’s earlier blog here.

Further reading:

Ben Truslove, ‘George Africanus: From slave to respected businessman’, BBC News, available here

‘George Africanus – from rags to riches’, BBC Nottingham, available here

‘George John Scipio Africanus: 1763-1834’, University of Nottingham: Nottingham Schools and Transatlantic Slavery Project, available here

There has been a marked change in the research into Black political participation in the eighteenth century; a topic now proving as rich an area of study as that of the participation of women. In the wake of modern scandals like the Windrush scandal the push for a more inclusive British political and social history is clear to see. In the last 20 years significant scholarship into Black British history has exposed the richness of Black lives in all areas of British life: Black MPs have been identified, as have Black property owners, and the mixed-race children of West Indian merchants and plantation owners have been recognised and studied.

One enduring area of interest is the British electoral system; how it functions now is under consistent scrutiny and the introduction of political reform in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is a subject of increasing historical interest. For a long time, the unreformed parliament was seen as venal, corrupt and wholly unrepresentative. And in some respects that was correct: rotten boroughs, as characterised in Black Adder: The Third (s03e01), treating, and patronage were all real factors in eighteenth and nineteenth-century electoral politics, but now there is much research being conducted, by projects like the AHRC-funded Eighteenth Century Political Participation & Electoral Culture (ECPPEC) project, working to expand the narrow view that this corrupt system was all it was.

To be entitled to vote an individual had to meet specific criteria and these varied depending on which constituency an individual lived in and if this was a county or borough. A basic review of the franchise during the time period demonstrates that counties required a voter to own a property of at least 40 shillings. The boroughs had a significantly more complicated system with six distinct types of franchise, with some constituencies utilising two of these types at once. These franchise types range from fairly inclusive, if a resident was paying tax and owned or rented a property, to exclusive where only certain properties (burgess) conferred the right to vote and new burgesses were not allowed to be created. The basic premise was that the right to vote centred around wealth and property ownership.

The existence of successful property-owning Black people juxtaposed against the slave trade feels apocryphal. However, the story of Blackness in Britain is not one or the other and to view it as such is a flattening of the experience. Black Britons were a relatively small part of the whole population, but they were by no means new to Britain in the eighteenth century. This is in part because the trans-Atlantic slave trade had been happening since the mid-sixteenth century. The interaction of Europeans with Africans had been long established and both free Africans and those in bondage lived in Britain. A common misconception of the state of slavery in Britain is that there were no slaves nor slave trading. This was not the case and those who were brought to Britain as children, taken from the coast of Africa or traded in the West Indies, came without their freedom and under the control of an often-wealthy master. This can be seen by the runaway slave advertisements in contemporary newspapers. However, as a result of Britain’s slavery activities in Africa and the West Indies there was a flow of people across these regions.

Black business owners like Ignatius Sancho (c.1731-1780) who owned a grocery shop in Mayfair and George John Scipio Africanus (c.1763-1834) who owned an agency business were both voters. They had both been enslaved during their early lives and by fortune had masters who chose to educate them and nurture their talents. It was not the standard and these men stand out; many in bondage in Britain did not have such opportunities and were never able to start businesses or own their own property. Sancho, however, voted in the 1774 and 1780 elections in Westminster and described his voting process in his letters, published posthumously.

The Westminster franchise was in the freeholders (people who owned their own property) and Sancho voted for two non-partisans in the first election and for two Whig candidates in his second election. He was considered for a long time the only example of a Black voter in the eighteenth century, until Africanus was found to have voted in three elections in Nottingham, in 1818, 1820 and 1826. He split his vote between the two parties on his first vote, he voted for both Tory candidates on his second vote and plumped (only used one of his votes and discarded the second) on his final vote. From his voting behaviour it is fair to say that he preferred the Tory candidates even though they were ultimately unsuccessful.

These two men are a perfect example of the Black presence in Britain. They were both brought to Britain under a system of ownership and by luck and their own ingenuity were able to participate politically. They both did this before the Great Reform Act 1832, which broadened the electorate by adding new constituencies like Birmingham and Manchester, making the requirements universal across the country instead of a patchwork and described who a voter could be. At this point all of the currently known Black voters voted prior to 1832, however the number of identified Black voters is still very small. As more research into Black political participation is conducted more individuals who were entitled to vote and used their vote will be discovered. Political participation took many forms in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and voting was only one element of the political process. Exploring eighteenth-century political culture through the lens of Black participation expands both the complex stories of the Black British experience and the nuanced local and national political landscape in Britain.

H W

Look out for a second blog from Helen later in the week…

Further Reading

Ignatius Sancho, Letters of the late Ignatius Sancho: an African, (Penguin Classics, 1998)

Philip Salmon, ‘‘Plumping Contests’: The Impact of By-elections on English Voting Behaviour, 1790–1868’, in By-elections in British Politics, 1832-1914, ed. by T. G. Otte and Paul Readman (Boydell Press, 2013), pp.23-50

In recent months the Black Lives Matter campaign has incited demonstrations and protests on an international scale, including in towns and cities across Britain. The means of conducting such protests have been debated in Parliament and the media, provoking controversy and division. Thus, the politics of protest has been thrust into the public sphere, further complicated by Covid-19 restrictions. Parliamentarians and Parliaments in the past have also come under scrutiny in these debates. The statue of MP and slave trader Edward Colston was toppled in Bristol, bringing to the fore a broader ongoing debate about appropriate memorialisation and frustrations between Bristolians and their local authorities. The politics of protest is an ongoing area of debate, and the violent disorders that spread around England in 1980–81 provide a historical demonstration of what can happen when sections of society believe their voices are being wilfully ignored.

Beginning with several hours of disorder in Bristol in April 1980, disturbances subsequently spread around England the following year – most prominently in Brixton, and later reaching Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham, to name but a few locations. With a backdrop of deep-rooted social and economic problems, thousands of people took to the streets to protest as almost 200 disorders occurred around England in July 1981 alone.

While it is important not to oversimplify or overemphasise the uniformity of events in 1980–81, they can be broadly characterised as anti-police uprisings largely involving Black Britons. In the years since, in some quarters at least, they have acquired something of an air of legitimacy as a rational response to ongoing racism, discrimination, and disadvantage – coupled with a perceived failure of state mechanisms to address the situation. At the time, the Bristol Council for Racial Equality concluded that the disorders displayed a widespread feeling amongst Black people that there was ‘no other way to make their points of view known’. As John Solomos, Professor of Sociology who has published extensively on race and ethnicity, has argued: ‘not all groups enjoy the same opportunity to participate politically through channels defined as legitimate’.

While in 1981 the Labour Shadow Home Secretary, Roy Hattersley, announced in Parliament that ‘the Opposition deplore[s] the violence that took place’, Labour MPs generally took a more sympathetic viewpoint to the disorders than their Conservative counterparts – which is perhaps unsurprising from an opposition Party. Hattersley himself declared that he had ‘no wish to allocate blame or responsibility, but the breakdown of the relationship between the police and the public is an undoubted fact’. John Fraser, MP for Norwood in South London, spoke of the ‘deep disaffection about relations with the police’, and prominent left-wing figure Tony Benn reasoned that increasingly over-relying on the police to ‘deal with problems … fundamentally political and economic in character’ – such as rising unemployment, social deprivation and other inner-city issues – was placing an unfair ‘burden’ on the police. Thomas Cox, MP for the Greater London constituency of Tooting, agreed that such issues, in addition to daily racist discrimination and violence, had made life for many in South London a ‘desert of despair’.

However, particularly during the years of Margaret Thatcher’s often controversial Government, the Conservative Party – the ‘party of law and order’ – were unlikely to accept violent disorders as a ‘legitimate’ form of protest. For instance, Conservative MP Anthony Grant declared in Parliament that ‘the first duty of a democratic Government … is to maintain law and order’. Thatcher herself described the events as ‘criminal’, concluding that ‘nothing, but nothing justifies what happened’, and Home Secretary William Whitelaw concurred that ‘No reason, no explanation, for recent troubles justifies what has occurred’. Conservative MP David Mellor furthered this position in Commons debate by deeming it ‘grossly wrong and unfair to talk about social protest’ when he believed the disturbances should be viewed simply as ‘sheer criminality’ – concluding that ‘the day that we confuse the two is the day that we shall be speaking of the end of civilised society’.

Some members of the Conservative Monday Club, an anti-immigration political pressure group, portrayed the disorders as being the consequence of postwar immigration, and the apparent movement away from a (perceived) previously monoracial society. Harvey Proctor urged the Government to ‘end large-scale, permanent immigration from the New Commonwealth and encourage repatriation’, and John Stokes portrayed ‘these riots [as] something new and sinister in our long national history’. While Whitelaw conceded that many protestors were British-born, he also argued that ‘a large number of those concerned came here between 1957 and 1962, and all of us who were in the House at that time bear a similar share of the responsibility’ – 1962 being the year of the first Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which began to tighten restrictions on immigration.

By disregarding Britain’s long history of violent protest and staunchly retaining long-standing attitudes that racial harmony could best be achieved through stricter controls, this reaction attempted to shift focus away from wider issues or governmental policies and clearly portrayed immigration – and, by extension, migrants and Black Britons themselves – as the cause of this ‘new and sinister’ disorder. Scholars such as Michael Rowe have argued that respect for the law is often considered to be part of the British national character, and that arguments regarding broader social, economic, or political factors are thus generally rejected when such public disorder is regarded as being ‘un-British’.

When a public inquiry, chaired by Lord Leslie Scarman, into the events of 1981 was announced, it was criticised by Conservative MPs who suggested this appeared to have legitimised violence: that such a governmental response signified some form of ‘victory’ for ‘rioters’ who had protested in the ‘wrong way’. However, Whitelaw strongly rejected suggestions that this inquiry ‘encouraged violence on the streets’, and warned: ‘If we do not take action to make this clear to people who feel the bitterness that they do, and if we do not take action to try to overcome that, we shall make the situation more dangerous.’ Despite acknowledging the dangers of inaction, subsequent governmental measures were an inadequate response to the scale of the problems, and further disorders occurred in 1985.

Many recommendations made by Scarman in 1981 were not implemented, and it would take until Sir William Macpherson’s 1999 public inquiry into the ineffectual police investigation of the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence before official acknowledgement of institutional racism within the police. Macpherson’s inquiry had only been established after a persistent years-long campaign by Lawrence’s family and supporters, demonstrating the difficulty of obtaining such governmental-established responses and actions. However, events in subsequent years have demonstrated that many of the fundamental issues remain unresolved – including continuing debates on ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ methods of protest.

S P

Further reading:

• John Benyon (ed.), Scarman and After: Essays Reflecting on Lord Scarman’s Report, the Riots and Their Aftermath.
• Michael Keith, Race, Riots And Policing: Lore and Disorder in a Multi-racist Society.
• Paul Gilroy, ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation.
• Trevor Phillips and Mike Phillips, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain.

The proposed PhD research will examine ‘The Black and Mixed Ethnicity Presence in British Politics, 1750-1850’. It will be supervised by Dr Amanda Goodrich (Open University) and Dr Robin Eagles (History of Parliament Trust). For further details on the project, see https://www.oocdtp.ac.uk/black-and-mixed-ethnicity-presence-british-politics-1750-1850

The full text of the Open University’s advertisement for this post is reproduced below. Please note that enquiries and applications should be directed to the Open University, as outlined in the section on ‘How to apply’.

Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership Collaborative Doctoral Award

Open University-History of Parliament Trust /AHRC PhD Studentship

The Open University has available an AHRC funded PhD studentship through the Open-Oxford-Cambridge DTP consortium to start 2020/1.  It is a collaborative award with the History of Parliament Trust on ‘The black and mixed ethnicity presence in British politics, 1750-1850.’

There is today a move to restore Black and mixed ethnicity (BME) people to their rightful place in British history, yet few BME individuals have been identified in formal or extra-parliamentary British politics in the period.  This doctoral thesis will aim to identify, quantify and analyse the BME presence in British politics and political culture more broadly. We aim to provide a broad mandate to the candidate, so that s/he can have scope for exploring avenues of research that interest her/him in relation to the project.

Awards for UK residents cover all tuition fees and provide a maintenance grant at the standard RCUK rate (£15,009 p.a. in 2019/20). Non-UK citizens may be eligible to apply and should check on the OOC DTP CDA page at https://www.oocdtp.ac.uk/eligibility.

The Open University is internationally recognized for innovative research across the Arts and Humanities. We host a number of major AHRC- and ESRC-funded research projects.  We have a strong commitment to cross-disciplinary work, to national and international public engagement, and to creative partnerships with a range of non-university partners. We also have a track record of supporting a wide range of diverse communities in different modes of flexible learning.

The History of Parliament Trust specialises in researching and publishing reference works on the history of the Westminster-based Parliament. It has an international reputation for the value and quality of its research and its resources, online and published on the British parliament, are unparalleled. The Trust will bring considerable experience to the research and supervision of this doctoral studentship.

We invite candidates from all backgrounds and ethnicities, and particularly, although not exclusively, BME candidates. The successful applicant would be expected to begin her/his studies in October 2020, although a February 2021 would also be possible.

How to apply

• Anyone interested in applying should follow the link to the consortium website where full details of the CDA are provided: https://www.oocdtp.ac.uk/collaborative-doctoral-awards.
• For general enquiries about this studentship please contact Amanda Goodrich: Goodrich@open.ac.uk
• For general enquiries related to the Open-Oxford-Cambridge DTP, please contact Professor Paul Lawrence, Deputy Director, Open-Oxford-Cambridge DTP (lawrence@open.ac.uk)
• For details as to how to how to complete the proposal that must accompany your application follow that accompanies the application follow the link to the OU history page: http://www.fass.open.ac.uk/history/postgraduate/history-phd-proposal
• Completed application forms, together with a Research Proposal and a covering letter indicating your suitability and reasons for applying must be sent to FASS-PhD-Applications@open.ac.uk
• Application forms are available from http://www.open.ac.uk/postgraduate/research-degrees/how-to-apply.

Closing date: noon 15^th June 2020

Equal opportunity is University Policy.