and patronize them, even if the motives for doing so were humanitarian – as with Thomas Wedgwood’s pro-Abolition medallion which showed a kneeling slave in chains with the slogan ‘Am I not a man? And a brother?’ But the chief reason for the lack of black celebrities was that the number of Africans in the city had begun to shrink. After Parliament abolished the slave trade in 1807, few new blacks were brought to the capital. Those Africans wrenched away to the West Indies to labour on plantation estates were now regarded as commodities far too valuable to be ferried over to England as decorative knick-knacks. Many of the black people who chose to stay in London died of poverty and ill-health. Some went to sea; others moved to different parts of Britain (Equiano was married near Ely in Cambridgeshire, the county where his eldest daughter, Anna Maria, died in 1797; Francis Barber set up home in Lichfield). Some blacks were transported to America or, far more commonly, to Australia. Widespread racial intermarriage led to the steady blanching of the black population. A member of the London City Mission claimed that it would surprise many people
to see how extensively these dark classes are tincturing the colour of the rising race of children in the lowest haunts of this locality: and many of the young fallen females have a visible infusion of Asiatic and African blood in their veins. They form a peculiar class, but mingle freely with the others. It is an instance of depraved taste, that many of our fallen ones prefer devoting themselves entirely to the dark race of men, and [ … ] have infants by them.3
Furthermore, the increasing reluctance to bestow upon slaves such demeaning names as Mungo or Pompey means that hundreds, if not thousands, of Africans and Asians still lie undetected in the dusty pages of parish registers.
A small but visible rump of black people did, remain in London. Among the most celebrated of these were the street beggars who attracted disproportionate alms and affection from contemporaries. They tended to be called Jumbo or, yet more commonly, Toby – after Mr Punch’s dog. They liked to gather in Covent Garden and Angel-Gardens, though one beggar who stood by a tea warehouse near Finsbury Square in 1813 was reputed, according to a Parliamentary report on mendicity, to have returned to the West Indies with a fortune of about £1500.4 Some blacks, not least those who played musical instruments or who pretended to be blind, were seen as charming; others less so:
There is one whose real name I do not know, but he goes by the name of Granne Manoo; he is a man who, I believe, is scarcely out of gaol three months in the year; for he is so abusive and vile a character, he is very frequently in gaol for his abuse and mendicity; he is young enough to have gone to sea, but I believe he has been ruptured, consequently they will not take him. I have seen him scratch his legs about his ancles, to make them bleed; and he never goes out with shoes. That is the man that collects the greatest quantity of shoes and other habiliments; for he goes literally so naked, that it is almost disgusting for any person to see him in that situation.5
The most famous mendicant was Billy Waters. Born in America, he lost his leg in a maritime accident, and was forced to take to the streets around Covent Garden to support himself and his family. Success was instant; sporting a ribbon-decked cocked hat and feathers, a smile rarely leaving his face, he would sing so mellifluously (signature tune ‘Kitty will you marry me./Kitty will you cry’) and clowned with such skill that he was known as the ‘Ethiopian Grimaldi’. Sometimes he would jazz up his performances outside the Adelphi Theatre in the Strand by kicking away his wooden leg and dancing around on the spot. His fans were legion and he was featured in Pierce Egan’s best-selling Life in London. For W.T. Moncrieff’s stage adaptation of the book, Waters was asked to play himself – this time inside the Adelphi. He was elected King of the Beggars by his fellow blackbirds. He was also made into a Staffordshire pottery figure, as part of the ‘English Characters’ series. His celebrity outstripped his financial success. He liked his gin and died in the workhouse in 1823. Covent Garden was brought to a standstill the day his funeral cortège passed through. Mourners included his friend and stage opposite African Sal, a legless man on a wheeled trolley, and Billy’s young son who knocked back one bottle of liquor after another. A broadsheet published after his death summarized his life:
Billy endeavoured up to the period of his illness to obtain for a wife and two children what he termed an honest living by the scraping of cat-gut by which he amassed a considerable portion of browns (halfpence) at the West-end of the town, where his hat and feathers with his peculiar antics excited much mirth and attention. He was obliged prior to his death to part with his old friend, the fiddle, for a trifling sum at the pawnbrokers. His wooden pin had twice saved him from the Tread-Mill. He lost his leg in his Majesty’s Service, for which he received a pension. Every child in London knew him.6
Another popular figure was Joseph Johnson. Injury had forced him to retire from his job as a merchant seaman but he was refused a pension or parish relief and was forced on to the streets. He cadged lifts to rural villages and to market towns such as Romford or St Albans where his tatty cloth cap was soon filled with pennies from farmers delighted by his renditions of such patriotic tunes as ‘The British Seaman’s Praise’ or ‘The Wooden Walls of Old England’. There, and at Tower Hill in East London, he drew on the repertoire of sea shanties he had sung below deck with his fellow sailors (now without a tankard of ale in hand to jolly up affairs). Johnson’s particular genius was to come up with the idea of building a model of the ship Nelson which he fastened to the cap he wore. This allowed him, ‘by a bow of thanks, or a supplicating inclination to a drawing-room window, [to] give the appearance of sea-motion’.7 All who saw him giggled and were enchanted. They were also reminded of his itinerancy, of the fact that he was a stranger much of whose life had been spent in the ‘grey vault’ of the Atlantic where so many of his countrymen perished during the slave trade.
Black beggars, then, were entertainers of a sort. They turned the pathos of their skin and their poverty into a visual spectacle from which they could profit. Their popularity and the affection in which they were held encouraged many white Londoners to black up as minstrels to earn a penny. According to the chronicler of London’s underclasses, Henry Mayhew, by the early 1850s no more than one in fifty of the black buskers singing in the city hailed from Africa or the Caribbean: they were white locals who had frizzed their hair and blacked up the better to win the attention of passers-by.’8
Other blacks in nineteenth-century London were performers of a more conventional type. Chief among them were the bare-knuckle boxers who trickled in from America. Perhaps the most famous of these was Bill Richmond. Born in New York in 1763, he was brought over to Yorkshire as a fourteen-year-old by General Earl Percy, later Duke of Northumberland. Here he trained as a cabinetmaker before coming to London as a journeyman. He also took up boxing. During the first decade of the nineteenth century he could regularly be seen fighting whipmakers and coachmen in Blackheath, Kilburn, Wimbledon and Golders Green.9 His most celebrated bout was against Tom Cribb, later the champion of England. He lacked stamina and was beaten in a fight that lasted ninety minutes. Later, with the help of his wife’s savings, he became landlord of the Horse and Dolphin pub near Leicester Square. He also exhibited his fistic skills at the Olympic Pavilion and Regency Theatres, and ran a boxing academy at which one of his pupils was William Hazlitt.10 He died near the Haymarket in 1829.
Blacks could also be found tumbling and gyrating at circuses across the city, where they performed as acrobats, dancing girls and French-horn players. Here they contributed to the spectacle of novelty and exotic glamour, to the feeling that for one exhilarating evening the world was turned upside down – racially as well as gymnastically. Did dazzled audiences conflate these exuberant negroes with those beasts alongside whom they starred? Harriet Ritvo has argued that the representation
