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Invisible Presence: The Whitening of the
Black Community in the Historical Imagi-
nation of British Archives*
CAROLINE BRESSEY
RÉSUMÉ Le but de ce texte est de mettre en évidence les méthodes et les ironies de la recherche des histoires noires dans un contexte britannique. Il tente d’exposer les ten- sions entre la présence des personnes de race noire à Londres, leur présence matérielle dans les archives disponibles pour les chercheurs, et les complexités des histoires britanniques dans lesquelles leur présence est exprimée.
ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to highlight the methods and ironies of research- ing Black histories in a British context. It is an attempt to expose tensions between the presence of Black people in London, their material presence in the archives available to researchers, and the complexities of British histories that their presence articulates.
The permanent residence of Black people in Britain began with the develop- ment of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the greatest knowledge of the lives of Black people in British history (before 1948 and the arrival of the Empire Windrush ) is intimately related to this period of forced migration between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although Britain’s involvement in this sys- tem did not develop to a large scale until around the 1660s, as early as 1554 John Lock sailed back from the West Coast of Africa with a cargo of Black slaves. 1 Of course Black history is not just about slaves, and the works of Black authors and activists who left their stories, such as Olaudah Equiano (c.1745–1797) and Ignatius Sancho (1729–1780) provide us with evidence of this. 2 Between the elite they represent and those who were the property of oth-
- I would like to thank Richard Dennis and Claire Dwyer for their help with the development of this paper. I would also like to thank Cheryl McEwan and Alison Blunt for convening the AAG session where it was first presented, Joan M. Schwartz and Barbara Craig for editing this collection, and the Economic and Social Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship that enabled me to write it. 1 Kenneth Little, Negroes in Britain: A Study of English Race Relations in English Society (London, 1972). 2 Paul Edwards, “Black Writers of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in David Daby- deen, ed., The Black Presence in English Literature (Manchester, 1985), pp. 50–67.
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ers lay the experiences of the ordinary folk, the poor and the petty criminal. The Committee for Relief of the Black Poor set up in 1786 to oversee the plan to prevent Blacks from begging in Britain and send them instead to Sierra Leone, has provided evidence of this presence. In Edwardian London there are more texts written about London and Brit- ish society by Black authors. A.B.C. Merriman-Labor published his vision of Britons Through Negro Spectacles in 1909. Although it was taken to be a com- ical collection of observations, it does give some insights into the expectations and experiences a Black middle-class male might have had. In the book’s preface he justified his light-hearted commentary: “Considering my racial connection, and the flippant character of literature which, at the present time, finds ready circulation among the general public, I am of opinion that the world would be better prepared to hear me if I come in the guise of a jester.” 3 His claim that there were not many more than one hundred Black people living in London now seems a deliberate underestimate, as proved by the research on Black entertainers in the early part of the century, and the experi- ence of West Africans in Britain, particularly the influence on British social and political life of West African students, and the students’ own politics and political organizations. 4 The nineteenth century has proved to be the most difficult period for researchers to explore, despite the numerous archives that are available to researchers of this period. Census returns, parish records, birth, death, and marriage certificates, prison registers, poor law registers, hospital admission registers, orphanage registers, newspapers, and catalogues, are just a small selection of the numerous forms of archives that are available. Yet evidence of Black people from these sources is often collected from hints in lists, and searches of newspapers and periodicals that sometimes yield small glimpses, but often yield nothing at all.^5 The aim of this paper is to present some sight- ings of Black people during this period and to use their presence in the archives to suggest why there have been so few to date.
Challenging the British Historical Imagination
The struggle to highlight the presence of “other voices” in British history has been taken up by a number of people and organizations working in a variety of subjects that touch upon aspects of British history, identity, and memory. In
3 A.B.C Merriman-Labor, Britons Through Negro Spectacles (London, 1909). 4 See Stephen Bourne, Black in the British Frame: The Black Experience in British Film and Television (London and New York, 2001); Hakim Adi, West Africans in Britain 1900-1960: Nationalism, Pan-Africanism and Communism (London, 1998); Jeffrey Green, Black Edward- ians: Black People in Britain 1901-1914 (London and Portland, 1998); Jeffrey Green, “Some Findings on Britain’s Black Working Class, 1900–1914,” Immigrants and Minorities , vol. 9, no. 2 (1990), pp. 168–77. 5 Hans Werner Debrunner, Presence and Prestige: Africans in Europe (Basel, 1979).
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These and the many other entries have prompted a number of questions for researchers of Black history. What was the true nature of the historical geogra- phy of the Black presence? Evidence of Black people living within small communities such as Strickland, Royton, and Kirkeaton challenge the popular geographical imagination that Black people who lived in the British past were concentrated in port areas and perhaps a few aristocratic country houses. Black people lived all over the British Isles – what was their experience of rural and urban life? How did they live? Was St. John, not noted as a slave, a freeman, and an independent carpenter? Was Danl Whitley also a freeman, and if so, how did he make his living? These questions are stimulating new directions in the research and theorization of the historical geography of the Black presence in Britain – but these indications are available to researchers because parish clerks noted the colour of the men and women whose lives they were recording. The central concern of this paper, the absence of colour in British archives, is hinted at in one entry from Tunstall, towards the Suffolk coast, made in Sep- tember 1761, when the baptism of Hannah Norbrook was recorded. Hannah was the daughter of Henry Norbrok, a “negro” and his wife Hannah. A note at the bottom of the page of this entry reads: “The registering of Henry Norbrook as a Negro may assist some future person in observing how long [a] time the colour wears out by marrying with white men or women Hannah being his first child.” 12 It is not clear why the parish clerk made this note. Perhaps he was reflecting an interest in debates he might have heard on miscegenation. If so, was an interest in “inter-breeding” the only reason why he bothered to record the colour of Henry’s skin? If so, is it possible that if he had recorded that baptism of a child who had two Black parents he would not have bothered to record the child’s colour? And if this is the case, how are we to know how many other Black people lived in Tunstall during this, or any other time? The census for England and Wales in 1991 was the first time that a person’s “ethnic group” was specifically defined by self-classification. 13 As a result neither a person’s ethnicity, nor the colour of their skin, was recorded in the census as a matter of course before this date. However, there are references to
12 Ibid., 26 January 2000, p. 21. 13 For a discussion on the implications of this see Roger Ballard, “Negotiating Race and Ethnic- ity: Exploring the Implications of the 1991 Census,” Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 30, no. 3 (1997), pp. 3–33. Further discussions include Norbet Peabody, “Cents, Sense, Census: Human Inventories in Late Precolonial and Early Colonial India,” Society for Comparative Study of Society and History , vol. 43, no. 4 (2001), pp. 819–50; Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake, “Identity on the Borderline: the Colonial Census, New Ethnicities and the Unmaking of Mul- ticulturalism in Ethnic Violence,” Identity, Culture and Politics , vol. 3, no. 2 (2002), pp. 25– 50; Melissa Nobles, Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics (Stanford,
The Whitening of the Black Community in the Historical Imagination 51
race and colour to be found in the census. For example, in 1881 Thomas Beach and May Ashley, both to be found at 2 Chapel Street, Rickergate, Cum- berland, had their occupation listed as “Professional Negro Singer Musician.” Down on the Southern coast Henry Smith, who was boarding in Thomas Street, Brighton was working as a “Nigger performer.” Frank May, who at 31 was only two years younger than Henry Smith, worked in London as a “Nig- ger Wig Maker.” That the occupation of people was filled in (rather than a box to be ticked) by the recorders left them with some room to manoeuvre, and so here we have a richer source for accessing the presence and representations of Black people. But what does this data actually tell us? There is no way of knowing, from the census return, whether Henry Smith was a Black performer, or a White per- former who “blacked-up” for a living. This is also the case with Mary and Thomas in Cumberland. Was Frank May a Black man who made wigs, or, although it seems less likely, was he a wig maker who specialized in making wigs for blacked-up minstrels? These examples illustrate that racialized labels are often not conclusive evidence of ethnicity even when they do appear. In the case of Frank May, it turns out that both his parents were theatrical cos- tume makers, and on the original copy of the census “Nigger” is crossed out, implying that Frank made other wigs as well as those for entertainers who required “nigger wigs” for their act. There are some means of guessing (which is never a satisfactory tool of research) a person’s ethnicity when using the earlier census returns, such as a person’s place of birth or the spelling of a person’s surname. For example, on her work on the history of Asians in Britain, Rozina Visram discusses the presence of Lascars among those who signed up to be taken to Africa under the arrangements of the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor. She iden- tifies them by picking out their Portuguese sounding names; included are Domingo Anthony, Emanuel Pardo, and Anthony Sylva. 14 With some of the Black men who are discussed in this paper, surnames could have warranted a guess of an origin of African descent. However, the legacy of slavery means that most have names that would not raise particular interest. Unable to utilize more traditional methods of research, due to the absence of colour in the census returns, birth, death or marriage certificates, hospital admission registers, or prison registers etc., photographs have become an important primary source for my own search for the Black presence in nine- teenth-century London. As a result some of my research was focussed within institutions that had collated albums of their residents, such as prisoners and hospital patients. The use of photographic archives as a primary resource is
14 Rozina Visram, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London, 2002).
The Whitening of the Black Community in the Historical Imagination 53
wrapped the money in a handkerchief which she hid under her bed. When she returned from the theatre that evening with Mr. and Mrs. Mober, they discov- ered that the money and Branco were missing. He was apprehended the next day, and when he heard he was to be charged with the theft, he apparently retorted “why, they lock a man up for nothing nowadays.”^17 This theft from his landlady was not his first offence. He had been imprisoned for six months in July 1877, and then in October that same year he had spent three months in jail with hard labour. In July 1879, he had been sentenced for a year in prison with hard labour for another theft. His sentence in May 1880 saw him facing up to five years’ penal servitude, followed by three years’ probation. But throughout the retelling of this petty criminal’s biography there is no reference to the colour of his skin. However, in the write up of the case of Joseph Denny, who was sentenced for stealing less than a year later, there is a reference to his colour. In February 1881, The Times reported that, “Joseph Denny, a black man, who had pleaded ‘Guilty’ to a charge of larceny, was brought up for sentence.” 18 Denny was sentenced to eight years’ penal servitude, and it would be his second time in prison. Perhaps Denny’s colour was referred to because he was seen as more of a threat than Branco. Although Denny had been behind bars fewer times than Branco, he had had to serve the full seven years of his previous sentence because his conduct had been so bad. The details of the theft are not given, but when he heard his sentence he reportedly cried out “Why don’t you send me to the gallows right away? I shall be sure to do something. I shall commit mur- der before I have done.” 19 Although there are debates to be had as to why one man and not the other is described in one way or another, the point to reiterate is that without the photographs it would have been impossible to identify Branco as a Black man. Moreover and paradoxically, these discrepancies between the visual and the textual pry open an opportunity to investigate the racialization of people in the nineteenth century. For example, in the case of the male prisoners, although colour was not a form of categorization, did it nevertheless affect the way they were treated by the criminal justice system? James Johannes, alias Jonathan Williams, arrived at Pentonville on 22 November 1876. He was listed as a sailor with four previous convictions. This time he had been charged with larceny and sentenced to seven years, which he was to serve in Brixton Prison, followed by five years’ police supervision. One of his fellow inmates, admitted on the same day, was also charged with larceny. John Davies had only two previous convictions, but he received exactly the same sentence as Johannes. Francis Branco was one of five men
17 The Times , 5 May 1880, p. 4. 18 The Times, 5 February 1881, p. 11. 19 Ibid.
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transferred to Pentonville in May 1880. Four of them were convicted of lar- ceny. One of them, William Osborn, also had four previous convictions; his sentence was for six years with five years’ police supervision, compared to Branco’s five-year sentence with three years’ supervision. This brief comparison with the other men who appear in the prison registers reveals no obvious themes of bias against the Black defendants. However, this is a limited sample with a limited perspective (although these are similar find- ings to preliminary work undertaken by Kathy Chater’s investigations of the Black presence in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries). 20 It tells us little about the lived experience for the men within prison walls and its one thousand cells, nor does it shed much light on whether racial prejudice played a part in the pursuit and charging of Black men by the police.
Inside the Asylum
Finding the voices of the insane is difficult; locating and recreating a bio- graphical presence of Black women in these institutions is even harder. This highlights one of the differences that existed in the catalogued and lived expe- riences of race in Britain compared to its colonies. In 1891 and 1894, two new asylums were established in South Africa, and both had exclusionary admit- tance practices based on colour.^21 This was also the case in nineteenth-century India, where European and India patients were generally confined in separate institutions and in the few instances when they were confined together, segre- gation provided the Europeans with better living conditions.^22 British asylums practised an exclusionary admittance procedure, but one that was based on economics rather than colour (although, of course, the two were closely tied).
The Case of Caroline Maisley
Caroline Eliza Maisley was admitted to Colney Hatch on 1 November 1898. She was 27 years old, and married to a dock labourer. Her previous address was given as the Stepney Union Workhouse. Her disorder was classed as “Mania” and her attack, which was officially the first one she had experi- enced, had lasted a week. As a result she had initially been admitted to the infirmary at Stepney Workhouse on 18 October 1898. She had been detained in the workhouse with a fourteen-day order, but on this order no medical rea-
20 Kathy Chater, “Black People in Old Bailey Trials, 1722-1812,” presentation at the Seminar of Metropolitan History, Institute of History, Senate House, London, November 2003. 21 Sally Swartz, “Lost Lives: Gender, History and Mental Illness in the Cape, 1891-1910,” Fem- inism and Psychology , vol. 9, no. 2 (1999), pp. 152–58. 22 Richard Keller, “Madness and Colonization: Psychiatry in the British and French Empires, 1800–1962,” Journal of Social History , vol. 35, no. 2 (2001), pp. 295–326.
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it would seem that Mary returned to her home in Bromley, or at least into her husband’s care. In the records that survive for the sisters, there are no references to the colour of their skin at all. If only the written records had been examined there would have been no way, or reason, to identify them as Black women. Follow- ing on from that, there is no indication in any of the women’s available records that their colour was thought to influence the state of their madness.
Black Histories in the Archives
The examples above provide us with a fleeting glimpse of the lives of some of the Black men and women who lived in Victorian London. Yet even these brief encounters illustrate the need for various media and archives to be con- sulted when attempting to establish the presence of Black people in Britain during this period. In this instance text was combined with photographs to enable the image of a Black person to develop. Yet these images came to light because these men and women were at some point removed from society at large and placed within institutions that recorded their presence. Formulating biographies of the ordinary Black Victorian man and woman requires different methods, although the presence of the Devon waiter, John Day, indicates they are there to be found. And what of the Black middle-class?
The Case of Henrietta Cormack
Henrietta Cormack, a woman of a “dark swarthy complexion,” became a patient at Holloway Sanatorium, at Virginia Water, Egham, in February 1891. Unlike Colney Hatch Asylum, Holloway Sanatorium was a private institution, built on St. Anne’s Heath, Virginia Water in Surrey. Henrietta was then a thirty-two year old, married, Roman Catholic woman. 30 In the admission records her previous address is given as 93 Cromwell Road, Kensington. When the census was taken in April 1891 John Claude Cormack, aged forty and a registered GP born in Dublin, was staying with his business partner Robert Mois, also a GP, born in Edinburgh. 31 Robert Mois, his wife, and their two children lived at 93 Cromwell Road, Kensington. They all enjoyed the benefit of Mois’ two servants, both in their late twenties and both born in Scotland. Henrietta is not listed because she was at Holloway, though in the census records for the asylum only her initials identify her; the entry confirms her age and marital status. She is listed as being a lunatic, and having no pro- fession, her place of birth was recorded as Devizes.^32
30 Wellcome Institute Archives (hereafter WI), WMS 5158, Case Book no. 4. 31 Family Record Office, 1891 RG12/150, p. 34. 32 Family Record Office, RG12/1010, p. 17, folio 163.
The Whitening of the Black Community in the Historical Imagination 57
The attack that took her to Holloway was not her first. She had been treated for an initial attack about two years before when, between 19 December 1889 and 18 April 1890, she had been treated by Dr. Wood at The Priory, a private institution in Roehampton. The attack that resulted in Henrietta’s admittance to Holloway had begun about five months earlier, thought to be a relapse from her previous attack, one that was considered “hereditary” rather than “epilep- tic.”^33 In her family history it is noted that her half-sister and niece were also “insane,” but no further details are given about them. There is nothing to indi- cate that Henrietta received treatment during the initial five months. She had been suicidal and become dangerous, throwing missiles and attempting to strangle those around her, and these are perhaps the reasons her family took her to be treated at Holloway. In her medical notes Henrietta was described as a woman of dark swarthy complexion. It is among these notes that one doctor considered her ethnicity, adding “Creole” to her physical description, as well as noting her jet-black hair, dark eyes, thick lips, pale dusky complexion, and vacant expression. The examination also included comments on Henrietta’s occasional refusal to eat any food, although it was noted that she appeared fairly well nourished and suffered from no signs of physical disease. She would only give yes and no responses when questioned, and otherwise she remained silent, unoccupied, and she also refused to eat. There are no further notes until 25 August. On that day she was discharged, “released at the request of her husband.” 34 However, it is not clear that Henrietta was a Black woman. The comment in her medical notes which described her as a Creole woman was preceded by a question mark. The doctor who took the details of her physical appearance engaged with the superficial nature of racial classification. What denoted a Black woman, or a Creole woman? Was it the colour of her skin, the texture of her complexion, or “thick lips”? After the detail of Henrietta’s eyes, the examiner, at a later time, perhaps after some consideration, added “thick lips” to her list of physical features. In the late nineteenth century these were a sign of Black ancestry. Did the doctor add this because it gave weight to his belief that Henrietta might have been a Creole? There is a photograph of Henrietta within her case notes, taken in the spring of 1891. It is a very faded, sepia image. The picture shows a woman lying in bed with the covers up to her chin. Her hands are above the covers. She has thick eyebrows. But the image is so discoloured that is impossible to gauge the “original” colour of the woman’s skin, or any “defining” features of her physicality. Was she a “Creole,” and if so, what did this actually mean in terms of her ethnic heritage?
33 WI, WMS 5158, Case Book 4. 34 Ibid.
The Whitening of the Black Community in the Historical Imagination 59
Considering the Victorian Vision of Race at Home
The reason colour was not included in official national records such as the census, asylum, or prison registers is most likely because there was no space allocated for it. But that begs another question. Why was there no box for it? Was it because there were so few Black people that it was not considered a category that was needed? Or was it because seeing a person of colour was no longer unusual and it was not thought necessary to record it? Why was the classification of the male prisoners’ colour not added to their official records? In a society where the physical features of a person were sometimes thought and represented in art and literature to reflect (even determine) a person’s per- sonality, why was race not included in the list of things that were recorded about prisoners? Was the photograph considered enough of an identifier? Although unlikely in the light of debates around the Victorian fascination with theories of race and the practical administration of those ideas in Empire, was it because the colour of a person’s skin was not thought to be important from the perspective of “The State”? In 1868, a report on the experiences of a number of mixed-race girls was read to the Anthropological Society of London by Mr. Groom Napier, the local secretary for Bristol. One of the women he discussed had been educated in England and then became a governess. With a talent for music she was an organist of a parish church. However she had found life difficult for, while looking for work, those “inferior to her in everything but colour have been preferred to her and this in a country where, in the eye of the law, all shades are equally blended.” 37 In 1894, the Black American journalist Ida B. Wells visited Britain for the second time to gain support for her anti-lynching campaign. She felt she was given a degree of attention by the press that exceeded all her expectations and according to many of the papers that considered Wells’ cause, Black Ameri- cans were to be treated with the respect that being citizens of a “civilized” country allotted them. Vron Ware has pointed out that Wells’ view of racial prejudice in England must be seen in the context of her horrific experiences in the American South, but Ware has also questioned why Wells did not face more opposition than she did, especially when segregation in the South was very similar to social constructions in the Empire.^38 One of the reasons is because she stayed with Catherine Impey. Then work- ing as a journalist for the New York Age , Wells came to Britain at the invitation of Impey to gain the support of the British public for her anti-lynching cam- paign which she had undertaken following the murder of the husband of a close friend. Following her arrival in Britain, she stayed in Somerset with
37 Anthropological Review , vol. 6 (1868), Appendix. 38 Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (London, 1992).
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Catherine Impey and her sister where her “experience more than ever con- vinces me” that “... In spite of the fancies of youth, There’s nothing so kingly as kindness, There’s nothing so royal as truth.” Impey was an anti-racist cam- paigner and the editor of Britain’s first anti-racist magazine, Anti-Caste. Impey believed that prejudice was not natural to the human mind, but por- trayed it is a disease; remove the cause, and the effects would cease – in other words, to eradicate racial prejudice, one first had to eradicate race. Catherine Impey, it seems to us now, was a woman ahead of her time. Her journal illustrates that there were debates about the nature and understanding of race as a social construction at the end of the century. But, interestingly, Anti-Caste rarely touched on issues of racial prejudice occurring in the UK; its focus was on the subjects of Empire who lived outside Britain, although they were connected – in Impey’s mind at least.
[W]e English are, as it were, but an inner cluster of the big crowd of British subjects, the masses of whom live in lands other than ours, and have been brought under British rule sometimes voluntarily but more often, we fear, by force and fraud, and for ends not purely disinterested. Now they, like us, press around the same British Government with its might and cumbrous machinery of State, looking to it, as we look to it – though almost despairingly at times – for power to carry out necessary reforms, for the redress of public grievances. One is led to wonder how long the slender fabric of the empire shall hold together? Especially does this thought press when the bitter cry of suffering and oppression reaches us from some outer part of the great crowd. 39
Perhaps there was a spatial geography at work in the Victorian imagination of race. A geography that saw Black people in Britain as Black but considered them to be different to Black people in Africa, and other parts of the empire. One that meant that they should not be catalogued by the colour of their skin. The rights that the British press believed Wells and those she represented were entitled to were not called upon to be extended to Black people in Africa. Following the first Pan-African Conference, held in London in July 1900, the Aborigines Protection Society recorded their support for the event, along with,
all supporters of natives’ interests, and there is great promise in this inaugural confer- ence, in which about two dozen men and women of remarkable intelligence and educa- tion took part. They are champions of the already civilised Africans chiefly to be found in America and the West Indies, however, rather than the uncivilized and oppressed millions in Africa itself.^40
So, perhaps Black Britons were thought of in the same light, and were to be
39 Anti-Caste , vol. ii, no. 12 (December 1889), p. 2. 40 Transactions of the Aborigines Protection Society , 1896–1900, p. 560.
