London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City. Sukhdev Sandhu

onlooker, the sight of a well-dressed, rotund negro limping away from Westminster hustings, perhaps comparing notes with other members of the audience, perhaps on his own, cursing and wheezing, would have been incongruous and funny. It does have a comedic aspect. But there’s also pathos and poignancy. Sancho participates and is present at the great events of his day. Yet it’s a struggle – his family is poor; he is famished. His body is falling apart and, though his feet are swollen with gout, he can’t afford a carriage in which to go home. He has travelled so far in his life, he can barely hobble any farther. He has trafficked between the worlds of the grocery and of high culture, an enslaved past and a liberated present, the slave ship and the metropolis. He can’t stride much farther. Almost at the centre, but not quite, Sancho’s experiences foreshadow those of many of the writers who follow him down the centuries.

^* ‘Orangoutangs do not seem at all inferior in the intellectual faculties to many of the Negroe race; with some of whom, it is credible that they have the most intimate connexion and consanguinity. The amorous intercourse between them may be frequent; the Negroes themselves bear testimony that such intercourses actually happen; and it is certain that both races agree perfectly well in lasciviousness of disposition.’ Edward Long, History of Jamaica (London: T. Lowndes, 1774), vol. 2, p.370.

       CHAPTER TWO Sheer Chandelier

      WILLIAM SANCHO – ‘Billy’ in the Letters – was almost as successful as his father. During the 1790s he worked as the librarian of the distinguished botanist Joseph Banks, and in 1803 became the first black publisher in the Western world when he brought out the fifth edition of Ignatius’ correspondence. Four years later he also published Voltaire’s La Henriade.

      Another black man to strike it rich was Cesar Picton. Inheriting a legacy of a hundred pounds from a former employer, he added this sum to his own not inconsiderable savings and in 1788 began operating as a coal merchant in Kingston upon Thames. By the time he died in 1836, he was sufficiently wealthy to bequeath a house with a wharf and shops attached, as well as another house with a garden, stables, coach house and two acres of land.¹

      Sancho and Picton are exceptional in two ways – their financial success, and the social distinction they achieved. Most of their fellow black Londoners enjoyed neither. After the spate of books by and about black people that spewed from the printing presses at the height of the Abolitionism debate in the 1780s, references and allusions to them become far less common. Fashions changed and the prosperous classes began to regard negro servants as passé. At Knole there had been a black page – invariably named ‘John Morocco’ – since the reign of James I; after a house steward had killed the latest John Morocco in a fight in Black Boy’s Passage, Chinese replacements were used. The most famous of these was Hwang-a-Tung, renamed Warnoton, who was educated at the grammar school in Sevenoaks and appears in a Reynolds portrait of Knole.²

      By 1800 there were almost no famous blacks left in London. Ignatius Sancho, Olaudah Equiano, Julius Soubise – all had died, the last ignominiously in a riding accident in Calcutta. Sensationalist accounts of the slave revolts in Haiti from 1791 onwards led to a resurgence in the belief that blacks were bloodthirsty savages. This made it less easy to sentimentalize 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