The Barretts of Wimpole Street ( and Trenchtown, JA) Catherine Johnson

This post was going to be a review of one of my all time favourite books which I recently re-read; Andrea Levy's The Long Song. There doesn't have to be a good reason although it is, here in the UK at least, Black History Month. Yesterday's post by H. M. Castor was a review of the book, 12 Years A Slave,  a wonderfully written and thorough look at 19th century American slavery. The Long Song, although fiction, looks at the demise of that industry from a distinctly British perspective.

The book is beautifully written and a wonderful read, and it illuminates a period of history often forgotten but hugely important to Jamaican and British history, the 1830s and what were known as The Baptist Wars, the rebellions and reprisals in the fight for emancipation. But as I was thinking and writing I thought that while many of us here in the UK have no knowledge - or at least only a little - about this time in the West Indies, we might also have forgotten something else.

Although the British Empire had outlawed the slave trade in 1807, the practice and ownership of slavery went on until well into the 1830s, even after formal abolition in 1833.  It only ended when slave owners - not slaves, not their families, the slave owners - were paid huge sums (in total over £20 million - what would that be worth today?) in compensation by the British government. All slave owners could apply to the government for compensation and payouts continued way into the 1840s.

Can you imagine that? Not the victims, not those who suffered, not their families, uprooted and tortured on an industrial scale, but their exploiters. Each and every one paid enormous amounts by the UK government, funded by all British taxpayers. The reasoning was that the owners had lost their 'property' and deserved compensation. Of that 20 million pounds, 10 million stayed in Britain, that is it went to slave owning families who resided wholly in the British Isles.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

These slave owning families lived in country estates and town houses all across Britain. They might have been the owners of grand plantations or maybe simply owned a handful of niggers to toil for them thousands of miles away conveniently out of sight and mind across the Atlantic. Many of these people might have no idea of the root of their wealth. Or maybe they just shut their eyes and looked away, like many of the German population did during World War II.

Some of these families may even have been against slavery, as, no doubt, many of us rail against, but end up buying cheap clothes from Primark or use computers that have been assembled by people exploited and worked in conditions we cannot imagine and do not want to think about.

One of these numerous beneficiaries included the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Her family owned mining rights and plantations across Jamaica, they had made huge fortunes in their 300 years of slave owning on the island. In fact there are many Jamaicans today that share the name and most probably the genes - brothers Aston and Carlton Barrett might just be the most famous. They were The Wailers' rhythm section  and played with Bob Marley as well as with many of reggae's foremost musicians.

But hey, let's get back to Elizabeth, She was very sensitive, she thought slavery awful, terrible, she even wrote a poem - The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point - in which she imagines herself into the skin of a black slave raped by her master. But she was also completely sure of the fact that her family deserved to be compensated for the loss of family property, all the while believing slave owning a 'bad' thing.

Her poem is of its time, overlong and overwrought - unlike a good tune. This one, Small Axe, by Bob Marley and The Wailers is in my mind infinitely preferable  and I do hope we're all sharp and ready when it comes to exploitation and art.

Aston 'Family Man' Barrett

Carlton Barrett

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ia6Tvpj6dPw

People are and always will be complicated, but I do know I'd take the Wailers or The Heptones or anything Aston or Carlton Barrett played on over Victorian long form poetry. (Except maybe small doses of Hiawatha).

 Here's another gem,   Watch This Sound by Slim Smith, bass by Aston Barrett which is also lovely.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRuG86cEz98   - skip the ad though!



Catherine Johnson's latest book - SAWBONES is out now, a forensic murder mystery set in 18th century London - 'thoughtful and impressive' -Booktrust.

Twm o'r Nant and Valentine Dwyer; Different Sorts of Inspiration Catherine Johnson

Those two gentlemen lived at almost the same time on different sides of the world. Twm o’r Nant – that’s his nom de plume – was Thomas Edwards, born in 1739. Valentine Dwyer, owned the Green Mount estate in the parish of Manchester, Jamaica, he died in 1824.

I haven’t a history book out until 2013, and over the summer, as a kind of massive distraction to various comissions and rewrites started digging up my own family history. I would love to say, like K.M. Grant earlier, that there were nobles, that I was named for and descended from Catrin of Berain. That’s her in the second picture, a Tudor heiress who married often and well, (every husband bought more land and power and usefully, predeceased her) or someone like that. And I suppose given that North Wales, before cars and trains and aeroplanes was a reasonably tiny gene pool perhaps I am. And just looking at her, hand on skull, widow’s cap on her head I want to write about her. What a frock, what sleeves....
Oh there you go another major digression.

Back to those two men I mentioned earlier. Well, I was lucky that one of my cousins had actually traced my Welsh family tree as far back as Thomas Edwards, Twm o'r Nant. There’s something! I bet you have no idea who he is? Well he was a playwright, one of the foremost in the Welsh language, a peasant who went to school for a fortnight and wrote plays and interludes sometimes using blackcurrant juice instead of ink, and he is my great great great great great Uncle (I may be missing a great or so but you get the picture).

My father was born in Jamaica. He was an old Dad, 46 when I was born, and this summer I went to the funeral of his last surviving sister. Their parents, whom I never met were married in Edwardian times, my Grandmother, Teresa’s parents, my great grandparents, were born in the 1860s. It almost boggles the mind. There is more. If you think that just thirty years earlier, slavery still existed. My great great grandparents, most probably, belonged bodily to someone else, could be bought and sold.

And that’s where we get to Valentine Dwyer. His plantation was in the parish my family are from. I haven’t gone further back than my great Grandfather, who must have been born between 1840-50, but it’s not too large a leap of faith to imagine his parent or grandparent came from Valentine Dwyer’s estate in 1817.

I can read, online, the list of his slaves; Hector, Limerick, Moir, Sally, Marget and Daphne. And the children Cuffie, 8, Mary Anne, 1, Prudence 5, just to name a few. There are no pictures, but the names strike almost the same note to me as Catrin of Berain.

Who were these people? What was it like to be Cuffie, 8, running down a hill on the Green Mount estate in the parish of Manchester, barefoot in the red earth, running to get inside before the storm broke…