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

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      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 of black people and zoo animals (a growing number of whom were being shipped to London) was remarkably similar:

      Zoo pets represented not Britain, but their native territories, which were invariably British colonies in Africa and Asia, and never colonies which, like Canada and Australia, had signified European populations. It is probably no accident that they were often accompanied by exotic human attendants who [ … ] were presented in the press as equally curious if not equally lovable.¹¹

      The exhibited creatures were often likened to human beings. Bartholomew Fair posters trumpeted orang-utans as ‘Ethiopian Savages’ or ‘Negro Men of the Woods’.¹²

      One of the most famous black performers was Pablo Fanque (1796–1871). Born William Darby in Norwich, he went on to become an equestrian, acrobat, rope-walker, and later a circus proprietor. He toured extensively in northern England, where stories about his achievements were passed down from generation to generation. The Beatles allude to him in ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite!’ on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967):

      There will be a show tonight on trampoline

      The Hendersons will all be there

      Late of Pablo Fanque’s Fair – what a scene

      Over men and horses hoops and garters

      Lastly through a hogshead of real fire!

      Fanque appeared at Astley’s Amphitheatre in February 1847 where his talent was widely plaudited. ‘Mr Pablo Fanque is an artiste of colour’ stated the Illustrated London News, ‘and his steed [ … ] we have not only never seen surpassed, but never equalled.’¹³

      There were other black circus performers of note: Alexander William Beaumont, known as ‘The African Lion King’, wore a coat made from leopard skin and died at the age of twenty-seven in 1895 after being mauled by his favourite lion ‘Hannibal’, at the Agricultural Hall in Islington; George Christopher, whose father used to balance cartwheels on the streets of London, christened himself ‘Herr Christoff’, and became one of the finest ropedancers in the world.

      Celebrity did not guarantee financial security. Performers grew frail and ended up destitute. Tightrope-walker Carlos Trower, also known as ‘The African Blondin’, died at the age of forty in 1889. Two months earlier his wife wrote to The Era appealing for help:

      My husband has been ill for some time and three weeks ago went quite out of his mind. There are no hopes for his recovery, and he has been removed to Grove Hall Asylum, Bow. I am left with three children unprovided for. If you will mention this I am sure there will be a few friends that will help me.¹⁴

      Not all black people in nineteenth-century London performed freely. There was a longstanding tradition of putting Africans and West Indians on display for the delight and wonder of city-dwellers: Amelia Lewsam, ‘the White Negro Woman’ was exhibited in 1755 at Charing Cross, as was Primrose, the ‘Celebrated PIEBALD BOY’ at Haymarket in 1789.¹⁵ In 1810 Saartjie Baartman was brought over to England by her Boer keeper. Promising her that she would make a fortune and be allowed to return home after two years, he renamed her the ‘Hottentot Venus’ and charged visitors two shillings to see her standing in a cage at 225 Piccadilly (where, reputedly, Eros stands today).

      Baartman soon became widely known and featured in street ballads and political cartoons. Many of the spectators who flocked to see her noticed that she looked tearful and depressed as she was shunted to and fro across the cage for their benefit. One visitor ‘found her surrounded by many persons, some females! One pinched her, another walked round her; one gentleman poked her with his cane; and one lady employed her parasol to ascertain that all was, as she called it, “nattral”.’¹⁶ Baartman’s humiliations never ceased. She was later displayed in Paris where, upon her death in 1815, not only was her body dissected, but plaster casts and wax moulds were made of her genitals and anus. Replicas of these moulds were presented to the Royal Academy of Medicine. Baartman’s skeleton and brain were also preserved and, until the decision in early 2002 by the French senate to return her remains to South Africa, could be seen together with a plaster cast of her body at the Musée de L’Homme in Paris.¹⁷

      In such cases two ideas about the nature of black people were crucial. First, the assumption that Africans were simply not human, which legitimized their ill-treatment as well as their enslavement. Secondly, the fact that blacks were not regarded as ‘one of us’ permitted them to be seen as mute and passive vehicles for the diversion and delectation