Still Hidden?  –  Black and Asian History in the Yorkshire Dales

By Audrey Dewjee, 14^th June 2025

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The Dales Countryside Museum is situated in the market town of Hawes in Wensleydale, North Yorkshire, in the heart of the Yorkshire Dales National Park. In 2007 and 2009 the Museum mounted two exhibitions to which Audrey Dewjee was invited to contribute research. Audrey recently gave a talk at the Museum recalling the exhibitions and recounting information that has come to light since the exhibitions were on show. This is the text of her talk.

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Introduction

The year 2007 marked the bicentenary of the official British Abolition of the trade in enslaved Africans, and the government decided that this should be celebrated. The outcome was the creation of a huge parliament-financed exhibition in Westminster Hall, and government funding made available to various bodies for commemorations elsewhere.

Although the Act of 1807 prohibited the trade in people, it was not the end of enslavement in the British Empire – the enslaved had to wait until 1838, after the passing of the Abolition of Slavery Act in 1834 and an additional four years’ ‘apprenticeship,’ before they were finally pronounced ‘free.’ The government took out a loan to pay the £20 million compensation which they gave to slave ‘owners’. The formerly enslaved received no compensation at all for their terrible suffering and arduous work, and they had to start to rebuild their lives with nothing. British tax-payers finally finished paying off the £20 million loan ten years ago, in 2015.

It should be noted also that the official banning of the trade in people did not completely stop it. It was so lucrative, that some British traders found ways of carrying on illegally for a number of years after 1807.^[1]For more information see After Abolition by Marika Sherwood, I.B. Tauris, 2007. https://www.amazon.co.uk/After-Abolition-Britain-International-Relations/dp/1845113659.

The 2007 Exhibitions

As 2007 approached, Museum Manager, Fiona Rosher, decided that the Dales Countryside Museum would take part in the commemoration, as she was already aware that there were connections to transatlantic enslavement in the area and she wanted to find out more. She obtained funding to create an exhibition and to provide educational resources and learning opportunities for local pupils. She was ably assisted in this work by her team at the Museum, and the North Yorkshire County Record Office (recently renamed North Yorkshire Archives) collaborated on the project.

I came to be involved after I rang the Museum in 2006 with a query about Black History in the Dales. Fiona asked me if I would be interested in helping the project and I subsequently became lead researcher for the exhibition which was called Hidden History of the Dales. It first opened in March 2007, then went on tour to several locations around Yorkshire, before returning to the Museum for an official opening in October, during Black History Month.

The project encouraged community involvement and many local groups and individuals provided information. Researchers were asked to find evidence of any involvement in the trade in enslaved people in the Dales and in the wider catchment area of the museum. Much evidence of this involvement was found in archives and old books, on church walls and in parish registers, and in the memories of local people. The resulting research is still on file and available to view in the Research Room at the museum.^[2]For information about access to the Research Room see https://www.dalescountrysidemuseum.org.uk/research-facilities/

What was discovered?

We found men who became slave traders and others who were employed on slave ships as sailors or surgeons. Christopher Bowes from Richmond in Swaledale was a slave ship surgeon – the image of a page from his log book while he was working on board the Lord Stanley in 1792 used to be online.^[3]Now there is only a written description. http://surgicat.rcseng.ac.uk/Details/archive/110004314   Ecroyde Claxton from Kendal was another slave ship surgeon, as were two of his brothers. Claxton settled for a while in Burton-in-Lonsdale where he married and raised a family.

Thomas Wycliffe, also from Richmond, became a slave trader who had shares in over 20
voyages between 1753 and 1766.^[4]David Pope lists 14 certain and 8 possible voyages for Thomas Wycliffe in his chapter in Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery, David Richardson et al (eds.), Liverpool University Press, 2010. The rates of loss at sea for the 20 voyages for which
figures are available average 17.4%. Wycliffe and his partners shipped 7,716 souls from
Africa: 1,344 did not survive the voyage. The rate of loss on the William which sailed in 1760
was horrifying in the extreme – 41.2% of those embarked, died during the voyage. Of the 354
Africans on board only 208 arrived at their destination, 146 having perished en route.^[5]Percentages of loss calculated from figures provided on the SlaveVoyages Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
Database: https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/trans-atlantic#voyages

When researching for the exhibition, plaques on the walls of old churches were a valuable source of information. There is one in Askrigg church headed, ‘Sacred to the memory of Thomas Pratt, son of Thomas and Rose Pratt of Askrigg, captain of the Hibernia,’ who was buried in Liverpool.

The Hibernia had been a slave ship, one of the last to trade legally before abolition and Pratt had been its master on four voyages between 1803 and 1808. At the bottom of the main plaque, is a smaller panel commemorating the death of Thomas’s brother, John, ‘who died in his first voyage from Jamaica to England’ in 1801, aged 20. According to an explanatory notice in the church, it is likely that he was on the slave ship Will, which sailed from Liverpool on 6^th November 1800 and called at the Bight of Bonny, in modern day Nigeria, collecting 298 enslaved people who were taken to Kingston, Jamaica. John was buried at sea.

Ordinary sailors on slave ships were not always there by choice. ‘Crimping’ – recruitment by force – was employed at times to get a full crew, and naïve and unsuspecting youngsters could be picked up as they arrived in ports and tricked into service. William Butterworth, a lad from Leeds, was one of these. He ran away to Liverpool when he was only sixteen or seventeen, and became employed on a slaving voyage. He witnessed unspeakable horrors and was lucky to survive the experience and return to Leeds three years later.^[6]Butterworth later wrote about his experiences: Three Years Adventures of a Minor in England, Africa, the West Indies, South Carolina and Georgia was printed and published by Edward Baines in Leeds in … Continue reading

We found numerous plantation owners who had either been born in the Dales or who retired here after their time in the West Indies. For example, two sons of the Wilkinson Family of Sedbergh owned several coffee plantations in Jamaica, John Sill of Dent owned a sugar plantation and a farm also in Jamaica, while George Kearton of Oxnop Hall left Swaledale to set up a sugar and arrowroot plantation on St. Vincent. Christopher Weatherhead of Knight Stainforth Hall near Settle went bankrupt and had to sell off his plantations in Dominica and Tobago along with numerous enslaved workers. George Metcalfe, former Governor of Dominica, owned successful plantations in both Dominica and Demerara and retired a rich man to Rigg House, just outside Hawes.

It is reputed that the missing middle section of Rigg House was demolished because it was haunted!

Many other dalesmen went out as workers on plantations in a wide range of occupations. Matthew Terry of Askrigg, for example, had several jobs in the West Indies. He spent four years in Dominica as a bookkeeper and overseer, one year in Tobago as a land surveyor and seven in Grenada as a colony surveyor. He returned home in 1781 and built Grenada Hall in Askrigg before mortgaging it and moving on to Settle.

John Terry, also of Askrigg, spent 14 years in Grenada, first as an overseer, and then as a manager.

Henry Coor of Settle spent 15 years in Jamaica as a millwright. While there he daily supervised from 16 to 20 enslaved skilled millwrights who assisted him in his work, as well as ‘owning’ 20 enslaved people personally. Windmills were an extremely important feature of every plantation. They were used to crush the cane to extract the sugar. We know about Henry Coor and his activities in the West Indies because, in March 1791, he was one of several local men who testified to a House of Commons Select Committee enquiring into the Slave Trade.^[7]Among the sixty who testified were other local men, including Ecroyde Claxton, Matthew Terry, John Terry, and Robert Foster of Sedbergh. An abstract of the evidence given to the Select Committee can … Continue reading

Numerous lawyers found employment and wealth in the Caribbean – for example, members of the Coulthurst family of Gargrave. They practiced as lawyers in Barbados, Matthew Coulthurst becoming Attorney General of the island in 1823, before retiring the following year owing to ill-health.

Doctors also worked in the West Indies. William Hillary was born at Birk Rigg near Hawes in 1697, his family moving to the village of Burtersett two years later, to a house which is still known as Hillary Hall. After practising for some years in Ripon and Bath, in 1746 William went to Barbados on the advice of another Yorkshire doctor, John Fothergill, who originated from Carr End in Wensleydale. William came back to England in 1758 with a reputed fortune of £6,000. On his return, he wrote one of the first books in English to deal with tropical diseases.^[8]Observations on the Changes of the Air and the Concomitant Epidemical Diseases, in the Island of Barbadoes. To which is added a Treatise on…Yellow Fever, and Such Other Diseases as are … Continue reading  The Hillary family had other Caribbean connections. William’s younger brother, Richard, a Liverpool Merchant, owned a plantation in Jamaica. One of Richard’s sons, also Richard, was a member of the Jamaican House of Assembly.

We discovered merchants galore. They sold everything from enslaved Africans and gunpowder (which was used in exchange for captives), to hats and clothes for enslaved workers as well as for their exploiters, food, and anything else the planters needed which was unavailable in the West Indies. The famous knitters of Dent included ‘bump caps for the negroes’ among the items they produced.

Nidderdale people with links to enslavement included Michael Longbotham, baptised at Kirkby Malzeard in 1697, who was a plantation overseer in Barbados for 20 years. In his will he left £500 to be distributed by two gentlemen in Knaresborough to his poorest relations, and £20 to the newly-founded school in the village of Burnt Yates. One of the main benefactors of this school was Admiral Robert Long who had made his fortune in the West Indies serving in the Royal Navy which protected Britain’s sugar trade.

A gravestone listing several members of the Routh family can be seen beside the wall in the graveyard at Gayle just north of Hawes. The inscription at the bottom of the stone, which is now almost unreadable, commemorates Oswald Routh, who died in Dominica in 1829, aged 36.

About half way down, Richard Routh is commemorated. He died at Cape Coast Castle on the shore of present-day Ghana in 1824, aged 34. We don’t know what he was doing there, but Cape Coast Castle was a massive fortress.^[9]Link to a modern-day photograph of Cape Coast Castle, which is now much visited by tourists – especially African Americans: … Continue reading  Its dungeons were used to imprison African men, women and children until ships came to traffic them to the Americas.

Thankfully we also discovered Dales people who strongly disapproved of enslavement and who assisted the abolition movement. For example, in 1789 a Leeds newspaper reported a house-to-house collection amounting to £18, given by farmers ‘in a small part of the high end of Wensleydale’ to support the campaign for the ending of the slave trade.^[10]Leeds Intelligencer, 7^th April 1789.  People from the area signed some of the many petitions against the trade, including over 600 people from Addingham and its vicinity who lambasted the trade as ‘avowedly repugnant to every moral and religious principle’.^[11]A large framed copy of this petition is held by Bradford Archives.

Why did people leave the Dales to work in people trafficking and enslavement?

The British climate in the 18^th century was particularly cold, part of what has been referred to as the Little Ice Age. Life in the Dales was very hard. Severe winters, floods and disastrous harvests meant that farming was a very precarious way to make a living, and most people had to find an additional source of income, for example in knitting or lead mining. Families were often large, so younger sons would leave to seek their fortunes. The towns of Lancaster, and later Liverpool, were engaged in trade with Africa and the colonies across the Atlantic: trade which was highly profitable because of enslavement. It was a magnet for those who moved away.

Not everyone who left succeeded in making a fortune, some died in shipwrecks or from tropical diseases and others became bankrupt but, as a whole, a great deal of the wealth generated by the trade in enslaved people ended up in the Dales.

Africans in the Dales

For me, the most exciting part of the research was discovering the stories of people of African descent who came to the Dales as a result.

The first to mention is Thomas Anson who ran away from High Rigg End, a remote farm, high on the slopes of Whernside above the village of Dent, which was owned by the Sill family, previously mentioned as plantation owners in Jamaica.

Thomas’s escape was reported in the Liverpool Advertiser in 1758:

We often wondered whether he succeeded in getting away, as he must have been very conspicuous in the area.

The Sills’ plantation eventually provided enough money for the family to build a big new house for themselves, further down the Dale. West House still stands, now known as Whernside Manor.

Thomas Place was the enslaved mixed-race son of William Place, a former plantation owner in Jamaica, and Sherry Ellis, an enslaved woman on a neighbouring plantation. William arranged for the manumission of his son and his being brought over to England, but he died before Thomas arrived. Fortunately his aunt and uncle raised him on their farm and, when he became 21, Thomas inherited his father’s land at Newton-le-Willows.^[12]Read more of Thomas Place’s story on the North Yorkshire Archives Blog:  https://nycroblog.com/2022/10/20/thomas-place-freed-jamaican-slave/

John Yorke was brought to England (probably while still enslaved) when he was about 13 or 14. He was employed by John  Hutton at Marske Hall in Swaledale. Four years later, in 1776, he was baptised in the local church before being confirmed the following day in Richmond by the Bishop of Chester. Many years later, John saved someone’s life in a fire on the moors. He was rewarded with a cottage, which enabled him to marry, aged about 40, and start a family. We had already heard of John and some of his descendants, but publicity for the first exhibition spurred Jenny Thornton to get in touch with the Museum. She is one of John Yorke’s many present-day descendants, and she has done a great deal of research into the family tree, which she was willing to share. More recently, Jenny had her DNA tested. The results showed that her ancestry is 2% African from an area on the Gulf of Guinea – modern day Benin, Togo and Ghana.

Thomas Place and John Yorke were fortunate compared to ‘Black Jenny’ who was employed by former Liverpool slave ship captain William Findlay. Around 1803, Findlay retired and settled at Thorns Hall in Sedbergh with his wife, his mother-in-law and Jenny. In August 1804, Jenny Finlay, aged 17 was baptised in Sedbergh church. Four months later she gave birth to a daughter, Maria, and it is believed that William Findlay was the father. When William died in 1808 he left Jenny an annuity of £25 and ordered his executors to rent a cottage for her. Jenny died, aged 23, but Maria went on to marry in Liverpool and give birth to a daughter, though she too died young at the age of 39.

Illustration difficulties

We encountered a major difficulty with the exhibition. Although we amassed a lot of documentary evidence, there was a dearth of pictorial images, especially of people of African descent who came to the area. In the days before photography, few ‘ordinary’ people owned an image of themselves. Only the wealthy could afford to have their portraits painted, and there were very few other means at people’s disposal.

As a result, the exhibition panels in 2007 contained few pictures. We had to make do with the little we found at the time, and sometimes adapt contemporary illustrations to our purpose.

This was one of the original pictures we found, of a Black servant attending a young lady taking the waters at St. John’s Well in Harrogate in 1796. We subsequently learned from the late Malcolm Neesam, a noted historian of the town, that it depicts Charlotte, the wife Alexander Wedderburn MP, who served as Lord Chancellor from 1793 to 1801, and who had a house in Harrogate, close to the Well. Alexander Wedderburn was distantly related to two plantation owners – to John Wedderburn of Ballindean, protagonist in the Joseph Knight case, which in 1778 established that enslavement was illegal in Scotland; and to James Wedderburn Colvile, who was the father of Robert Wedderburn, the mixed-race radical and author of The Horrors of Slavery, which became a key text in the abolition campaign.^[13]See:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wedderburn_of_Ballindean

However, when we wanted to tell the story of Thomas Place, although we had a lot of documentary evidence about him which we discovered in the North Yorkshire Archives, we had no image of him. To try and give an idea of how Thomas may have looked when living on his uncle’s farm, we used the image of a mixed-race boy from the south of England, whilst making it clear this wasn’t actually him.

The 2009 exhibition

When Fiona decided to mount a second Hidden History exhibition in 2009, it had the subtitle The Dales and the Wider World, because this time it was intended to look for Asian links as well, i.e. links with China and undivided India.

Again we found plenty of local connections – exploiters of various sorts, and soldiers, although we discovered that few Asians came here. This project had a strong educational element. The Museum had partnered with St. Francis Xavier School in Richmond, so there was a need to try and provide information useful to the curriculum. Although again we concentrated on looking for specific Dales links with this part of the world, we also focussed on the products and influences that arrived in Britain and the Dales as a result of British activities in Asia.

We found several examples of military links with the East India Company’s army on plaques in churches around the area. For example the Wray family memorials in Aysgarth church, which also mention Ann Wray (by then Mrs. Fraser) ‘the Heroine of Cawnpore’. Details of army officers who served in India were quite easy to find, but the mentions of ordinary soldiers who served under their command were rare. However, we discovered two ordinary soldiers who returned to Britain recorded in an amusing story in Hird’s Annals of Bedale. The story also involved their officer, Randloph Marriott, who served for thirteen years in the East India Company’s army before retiring to Leases Hall near Bedale.

We found individuals who had made a fortune in India who came back to Britain and spent their money, or some of it, in the Dales. For example Alexander Nowell who built his shooting box, Netherside Hall, at Threshfield near Grassington.

After serving in the East India company army, Nowell took up indigo production in which he amassed a huge fortune. He learnt the secret of how to fix this dye, which was so important for naval and army uniforms. Prior to this, when uniforms got wet, the dye would run. Whether Nowell obtained this secret by fair means or foul is unknown, but Indians were known to take great care to keep their trade secrets secret. When Nowell returned to Britain he became involved in textiles in Bradford, where he made another fortune.

We found fewer examples of Indian and Chinese settlers or visitors, deep in the Dales, though there were several in Ripon, Harrogate and York. In 1820, Ruth, ‘a native of Hindustan, servant of Mrs. Fisher’ was baptised in Knaresborough, while a Chinese widow baptised her son in Ripon Cathedral in 1773 and remarried there two years later.

There is no record of what Isabella Paula was doing in York at this time, but perhaps she was there with a travelling fair or circus. Note the shawl and the ‘buta’ or ‘ambi’ pattern on her dress. Both Kashmiri shawls and the buta design that eventually became known as ‘Paisley pattern’ were introduced to Britain from India in the 18^th century. The Scottish town of Paisley began mass-producing shawls with these patterns in 1808, and gradually acknowledgement of the Indian origin of these designs was erased from public memory.

Parsee shipping magnate, Sir Dhunjibhoy Bomanji, and his wife Frainy, visited Harrogate several times to take the waters, buying Pineheath, a house in Cornwall Road in 1927. The family used to travel back and forth from their main homes in India and Windsor. Sir Dhunjibhoy died in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1937. Lady Bomanji got marooned in Britain during World War 2 when international travel was difficult, and in the 1950s she decided to make Harrogate her permanent home. She was awarded the Freedom of the Borough of Harrogate in 1984 for her charitable activities and support for the Arts, including the Harrogate Festival.

During the war, a number of Indian pilots came to Britain to train with the RAF. There was an Empire Receiving Station in Harrogate. Lady Bomanji and her daughter, Mrs. Mehroo Jehangir, hosted a reception for a group of new arrivals in 1943, at which they were welcomed to Britain by the then Princess Royal (Princess Mary, Countess of Harewood).

Another person similarly marooned during the war was Chinese artist Chian Yee, who published several books under the pen name of ‘The Silent Traveller’. He was invited to stay at Parcevall Hall in Wharfedale after which he produced a book of paintings and drawings of scenes from the Dales together with some of the poems he wrote about the area. It is fascinating to see a different artistic interpretation of Dales scenery.

We looked at products which became of importance to Britain, and influences on design, language, and everyday life. Products included tea from China and a taste for Chinoiserie – European interpretations of Chinese motifs – willow pattern china being an example. Products from India included diamonds. In the 17^th century India was their only known source, and returnees found diamonds a convenient means of bringing their wealth back home with them. Other products of course included spices, which first attracted adventurers to sail to the East, fine textiles in which Indian artisans excelled, and opium for medicinal, and recreational, purposes. Opium was very important as it gave relief from pain at a time when there were few effective medical treatments in Britain.

Unknown to many is the fact that opium was a major crop grown by the East India Company. It was sold or smuggled into China in order to generate cash with which to pay for the tea the Company bought from China. The Chinese Government wanted to ban its import because it had created an enormous number of Chinese addicts. The British fought two major Opium Wars – not to stop the trade as I had assumed, but to force China to accept the import of opium.

According to an article on the BBC website, by the turn of the 20th Century, Britain had become the biggest drug dealer the world had ever known, and China had developed the biggest drug problem experienced by any nation ever. According to official figures, in 1906, 23.3% of the adult male Chinese population was addicted to opium.^[14]‘The dark history behind India and the UK’s favourite drink,’ by Justin Rowlatt, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-36781368  [accessed 09/06/2025]

New discoveries

This talk has been billed as an update on our findings – so what has been discovered since 2007 and 2009?

The Museum’s interest in the subject has not waned over time, and Fiona and I started to do additional research in 2019. We spent a day in the local area, photographing scenes connected with the history and looking for new information. We had hoped to do more research trips – but covid struck and put an end to our endeavours.

Despite this, we do have new information – more evidence of visits of people of colour to the area, more evidence of local involvement in all aspects of the slave trade and in India – and, in particular, we have updates on what happened to some of the people of African and Asian descent that we had featured in 2007 and 2009.

In 2022, Leeds University put on show a memorial tablet with a lengthy Roman inscription. It was unearthed in 1960 when the university carried out excavations at Bainbridge, a village 4 miles east of Hawes at the site of the Roman fort, Virosidum, on Brough Hill. In the interim years, the tablet had been kept in a cellar at the University because of its weight. It commemorates the building of the fort, during the reign of emperor Septimus Severus who was born in North Africa.^[15]For more information, see https://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/65447

Septimus Severus came to Britain in the year 208, along with his wife and two sons. He resided in York (then known as Eboracum), from where he governed the empire until his death in 211. The University’s interpretation panel explains:

Coming to power after a period of political turbulence, Severus tried to lay the foundations for a more stable imperial dynasty. In the inscription we can see his teenage son Marcus Aurelius Antonius (known as ‘Caracalla’) titled Imperator and Augustus (lines 3-4) indicating they ruled jointly as co-emperors.

Publius Septimius Geta, the younger son of Severus, appears twice on the inscription (lines 5 and 8). From 209 CE Geta was also made co-emperor of Rome. After the death of their father, Caracalla had Geta killed. He then ordered his brother to be struck from the historical record. In most cases Geta was successfully erased from inscriptions and images of him were destroyed, but unusually his name and status survive here. Instead line 6 was erased in error, as is visible on the stone.

In 2011, Museum Officer, Debbie Allen, discovered evidence that her husband’s family had had involvement in Jamaica. Henry Foster was born at Beckermonds, a remote spot in the heart of Langstrothdale – which can truly be described as the ‘back of beyond’. In the 1830s, he went to Jamaica where family tradition says that he married a lady of colour and had two daughters. Subsequently these two women visited the family at Beckermonds.

Another local visitor was Harry Forbes, ‘reputed mulatto son’ of plantation owner William Forbes. In 1762 Harry was staying with the Sills in Dent at the same time as his father was making his will in London. In the will, John Sill was appointed as one of Harry’s two guardians. Stories like these show that people kept in touch with their relatives and friends overseas and that, despite the travel conditions of the time, they came and went more frequently than is often supposed nowadays.

Over the years, we tried and failed to discover any more about the enslaved Africans supposed to be hidden by the Sills in the cellars at West House and/or at High Rigg End in Dent. I first heard this story from Kim Lyon, but she could not (or would not) give any evidence of what she was claiming. Nothing new has come to light in the intervening years, and I suspect locals from the ‘old’ families like to keep the world guessing as to whether or not the story is true.

However, one of the exciting things that did come to light was the fate of Thomas Anson, the runaway from the Sills’ farm. John Ellis is a long-term colleague in Black History research. He has compiled a database of the names of men of African and Asian descent who served in the British Army. I have made databases of runaways and of parish records. In 2017 John and I got together to see if we had records of any people in common. I was totally shocked to discover that John had a Thomas Anson on his list. Comparing dates and notes, origins, etc. we realised that Thomas Anson had indeed escaped, and had joined the army two years later. He served for eight years as a trumpeter, retiring with a pension.

Trumpeters were of vital importance as a means of battlefield communication, but once orders to charge etc. had been given, they drew sabres and joined the fight. Trumpeters wore elaborate and distinctive uniforms so that they could be easily seen by their comrades, but that meant they were also easily seen by the enemy, and regarded as a prime target. To destroy your opponent’s means of communication was an important advantage. Fortunately, Thomas survived his time in the army as no major war occurred during his service.

‘Bertie’ Robinson, a footman at Harewood House, was one of the people featured in the original exhibition. Much more of his story came to light after I wrote an online article about him in 2020.^[16]https://www.historycalroots.com/bertie-robinson-of-harewood-house/   This was followed up with a second article that added to Bertie’s … Continue reading  I sent a copy to Harewood and, as a result, Diasporian Stories Research Group, the small Leeds-based Black History group I am a part of, was invited to work with Harewood House to put on an exhibition about Bertie’s life in 2021.

Archivists at Harewood researched in the family archives and much new and fascinating information was discovered, including several letters to the Lascelles family from Bertie’s mother in St. Vincent. What was even more amazing was that we discovered that Bertie had a son, Bertie Robinson Wray, whose descendants still live in Yorkshire. The story of Bertie and his son is also available on the Harewood House website.^[17]See:  https://harewood.org/stories/bertie-robinson-the-footman-from-st-vincent/

In the 2007 exhibition, we had looked at people who passed through the Dales – men and women such as itinerant preachers, lecturers, actors and other entertainers, and people who resided in the area for only a short period of time. For example, Lonnie Lawrence Dennis and his mother who were itinerant preachers, and Sophia Pierce a young girl who worked in a cotton mill at Burley in Wharfedale for a few months in the 1790s before deciding to return to  London. Since the exhibition, we have discovered another visiting preacher, who was very well-known in her day. On the census of 1841, Zilpha Elaw is listed as staying with the family of cotton weaver, John Brayshaw, in the village of Addingham.

We knew that the Fisk Jubilee Singers had performed in Harrogate on 12^th January 1877, on their second European tour to raise funds for their university in Nashville, Tennessee. They performed several times in large Yorkshire towns such as Leeds, Bradford and York, but we now know that they also performed in Skipton six days after they appeared in Harrogate.

A later group, the Fisk Jubilee Trio had also performed a programme of spirituals and secular songs at the Winter Gardens in Harrogate in 1911, but recently, North Yorkshire Archives discovered an advertisement for another performance by the Trio in Bedale in 1912.^[18]See:  https://nycroblog.com/2020/10/16/black-history-month/

Photos have been found by Diane Elphick of Sedbergh and District History Society and by the Museum team, of Mally Gibson, one of the knitters for which this area was famous. Research has so far failed to discover her story, but the two images have been added to the Hidden History collection.

John Perry is another person whose image has been located since 2007. In 1844 he was married in Ripon Cathedral to a young woman from Bramley near Leeds. Sadly his wife died a year later, a few days after the birth of their first child, and the baby went to live with his maternal grandparents. John Perry subsequently became a boxer and began to make a real name for himself. A contemporary report makes him sound like a forerunner of Muhammad Ali!

Poised on his toes, he danced around his man, jabbed with consistency and accuracy and delivered his punches cleanly. He was perfection so far as science was concerned.

Unfortunately, Perry became involved with a gang of American fraudsters and passed a forged bank note for them. He was caught, tried and imprisoned in Pentonville. Eighteen months later he was transported to Australia where he became the Australian heavyweight champion in 1849.

Another surprise was a photograph, given to me by a friend in 2011, of the pupils at Nidd School in 1919. In the middle of the image was a very pretty little Black girl. My friend had done some research to try and find out who she was but had got no further than discovering that there had been an orphanage in the village at the time.

In 2017, I made contributions to an exhibition in Hull, when Hull was City of Culture. Gifty Burrows who was the project lead sent me a story before it went on the project’s website because she thought it would be of interest to me. It was written by actress Cleo Sylvestre about her mother, Laureen Goodare, who had been born in Hull. As Laureen’s mother mother was unable to look after her she went into care and for a part of her childhood she lived in a children’s home – in Nidd.

Suddenly, I realised that the photo must be of Cleo’s mother – the dates fitted, so I submitted the photo to the website. Cleo was absolutely thrilled as she had never seen a photo of her mother as a child.^[19]For more of Laureen Goodare’s story see: https://www.africansinyorkshireproject.com/laureen-sylvestre.html

Cleo and I hoped to meet when she began filming for the new version of All Creatures Great and Small. Unfortunately we didn’t make it, and Cleo has sadly died recently.

The original TV version of All Creatures Great and Small also has connections to Black history. Do you remember Mrs. Pumphrey and her pug, Tricki Woo?  The location for her house in the original series was Ellerton Abbey, which was built as a shooting box for the Drax family.

The Drax family was one of the first to become plantation owners in Barbados in the 1600s and they are credited as the first to introduce both sugar production and enslaved Africans to the Caribbean. Prior to this, workers in the Caribbean colonies had been white indentured servants or transported criminals. Richard Drax, the former Conservative MP who was ousted at the last general election, still owns the Drax Hall plantation in Barbados, as well as his enormous Charborough Estate in Dorset.

Historian, Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, has called Drax Hall a ‘crime scene where 30,000 Africans died in slavery,’ and he has stated that ‘The Drax family has done more harm and violence to the black people of Barbados than any other.’  For more information, see  https://fabians.org.uk/blood-money/  or read the recently published book, Drax of Drax Hall  by Paul Lashmar.

The character of Mrs. Pumphrey was based on a woman who lived in Sowerby near Thirsk. This was Miss Marjorie Warner, a descendant of Thomas Warner founder of St. Kitts, the earliest British Caribbean colony, and father of many plantation and slave-owning families across several islands in the Caribbean and in Virginia in America. When Miss Warner donated a field to Sowerby village for use as a children’s playground, she acknowledged that her fortune had come from enslavement. The story of the Warner family is included in Gentlemen of Fortune by Derrick Knight.

In the 2009 exhibition, we featured an Indian magician, Amar Nath Dutt, who had performed in Harrogate in 1928, under the stage name of Linga Singh. We managed to contact his grandson who told us as much as he knew at the time about his grandfather’s life story. In 2023, he sent us an update, which showed that information we had put on one of the original exhibition panels was incorrect. Amar Nath Dutt hadn’t come to Britain to study. Along with others, he had been conned into working for a man who pretended to be an Indian prince on his way to Britain to attend the coronation of Edward VII. However, it transpired that the recruits were intended for work in an upmarket Indian restaurant, about to be set up on Fifth Avenue in New York. Amar escaped from his trafficker and, after many adventures, eventually became a highly successful magician.^[21]https://www.davenportcollection.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Linga-Singh-Story-Potpourri.pdf

 

Maulds Meaburn became a part of the expanded Yorkshire Dales National Park in 2016 and we subsequently discovered the story of a house in the village. Flass House was built in 1851 for merchant brothers Lancelot and Wilkinson Dent who made a fortune in China dealing in tea, and particularly in opium. Wilkinson Dent also received huge amounts of money in compensation for 269 enslaved people on two plantations in British Guiana (now Guyana).

The Dent family owned Flass House until 1973, after which it had a variety of owners. In 2000, the house was sold to a couple who ran it as a performing arts school. After the couple divorced, the husband, Peter Davies, took control of the mansion where he and five accomplices grew cannabis, worth a street value of £5.26 million. A neighbour became suspicious and contacted the police and Davies and his colleagues were jailed in September 2015.

On our research trip in 2019, Fiona and I visited Sedbergh to follow up on several stories, the most of important of which referred to Thorns Hall, former home of Captain Findlay and ‘Black Jenny’. Similar to the folk memories about Dent, Sedbergh tales also spoke of enslaved people being kept in cellars, including at Thorns Hall. Again, these could have been inaccurate memories of the distant past, but this story did have some more recent evidence to consider. Thorns Hall is now a hotel.

In 2014, I gave a talk to a Probus group in Harrogate and at the end of the talk I was approached by a retired civil engineer. He told me that he and his wife had stayed at Thorns Hall several times and ‘had been shown the slave cellars with the rings in the walls’. I asked him if the rings could have been used to tether animals and he said ‘no’, because the only way into the cellars was via a spiral staircase which animals could not have negotiated. He then offered me the following extracts from his diary.

1990 December:  First visit to Thorns Hall. We were offered a tour of the cellars by Sandra the manageress. We entered by a single door, and went down stone steps. There were several stone walled enclosures about a yard wide with iron rings still in the walls. These were said to be slave pens.

1993 December: Second visit to Thorns Hall, Sedbergh. By then Sandra had died, and we were told the cellars had been filled in with concrete.

Fiona and I asked about this when we visited Thorns Hall in 2019 and the team then in charge  knew nothing about these stories, though they did show us the cellar. We entered via a single door and down stone steps, narrow and spiral at the top. There were only two enclosures about a yard square, but no sign of any rings in the walls. One of these enclosures didn’t appear to have a door, as though the back wall, where perhaps there had once been a door, was plastered or concreted up to the ceiling. We took a number of photographs on our visit including one of a notice someone had placed there, perhaps in jest.

The staff did tell us an intriguing ghost story about the house. They said that a very reliable person, who knew nothing of the house’s history, had seen a small black boy in chains on the landing….

What other discoveries have been made since 2009?

One of the most notorious Liverpool slave traders, Thomas Parke, co-owner of no less than 63 slaving voyages, came from Low Row in Swaledale. Fifty of those voyages were in partnership with Arthur Heywood, and Heywood and Parke were amongst the ten most important firms trafficking Africans between 1783 and 1793.

A few more baptism and burial entries have been added to our list of local parish records. These include Robert Wadeson, ‘a black’, baptised at Sedbergh in 1753 and the death from smallpox of 18-year-old Egbo, in 1871. Egbo was born in ‘Old Calabar’ in Nigeria and was working for Thomas Sayer, a medical practitioner in Kirkby Stephen, at the time of his death.

In Pigot’s Directory of 1829, listed under ‘Hosiery Manufactures, Knit’, we came across another reference to the Dales’ supplying clothes for the enslaved. Charles Blythe of Hawes, was listed in the directory as selling ‘Negro caps, jackets, etc.’

Unfortunately, we have no surviving information about how people of African descent felt about their lives in the Dales. No doubt they were objects of curiosity when they first arrived in the area, and probably victims of prejudiced attitudes, but if they lived in the locality for a long period of time, it is probable they were eventually accepted as ordinary members of the community. Thomas Place and John Yorke both married and had families, as did Maria Salthouse, daughter of Jenny Finlay. Thomas Anson was clearly not happy with his life in Dent, but he escaped and found better prospects for himself, while Mally Gibson achieved prowess in the local skill of knitting.

How did the exploiters who settled in the area feel when the abolition movement became a popular campaign?  Did they become ashamed of their past; or were they so well insulated from public opinion by their wealth that they took little notice?

Prior to changes in 1974, Yorkshire consisted of three Ridings (East, West and North) with the Ainsty of York at its heart.^[22]‘Riding’ is an old Norse word meaning third.  The Ainsty of York was a separate administrative area until 1836.  It included the City of York and an area to the west of the city bounded by … Continue reading Numerous books have been written about the history of Yorkshire. In them I have looked in vain for inclusion of any Black or Asian history prior to the Windrush era. Our research in the Dales, and the similar research carried out in East Yorkshire,^[23]The African Stories in Hull and East Yorkshire Project produced an exhibition in 2017 to coincide with Hull being City of Culture.  The Project’s website is still available … Continue reading has shown that there is a rich vein of Black History in the county. It is impossible to tell the story of Yorkshire without including the important role that enslavement, as well as exploitation in India, played in the economy of the area and without acknowledging the contributions made by people of colour. It is high time that mainstream historians took a more honest and inclusive approach.

Still Hidden?

The title of this talk –  ‘Still Hidden?’ – asks a question. In fact it asks two questions.

Firstly, are people nowadays more aware than they were eighteen years ago of the Black and Asian History to be found in the Yorkshire Dales, or is this history still hidden?

Only the general public can answer that.

And secondly, is there yet more hidden Black and Asian History to be found in this area?

I will answer this second question. I think there is probably a good deal more history that is still hidden. Perhaps some has been deliberately destroyed over the years, but I suspect that a lot more is just waiting to be discovered in archives, parish records and old books and diaries – so PLEASE KEEP LOOKING, and ensure that you let the Dales Countryside Museum know if you find anything new.