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

      Soubise’s letter did not elicit quite the response he hoped for. The recipient, a wealthy young lady known to us as ‘Miss G—’, broke into hysterical laughter before writing back sarcastically:

      I acknowledge a Black man was always the favourite of my affections; and that I never yet saw either OROONOKO or othello without rapture. But lest you could imagine I have not in every respect your warmest wishes at heart, I have inclosed a little packet [a parcel of carmine and pearl powders] (some of which I use myself when I go to a Masquerade), which will have the desired effect, in case your nostrums should fail. Apply it, I beseech you, instantly, that I may have the pleasure of seeing you as soon as possible.¹⁸

      It’s not hard to see how, educated and smothered with the kind of love that Soubise was, blacks might identify with their masters and begin to assume their airs and graces. Some even adopted their methods of conflict resolution. In 1780 Lloyd’s Evening Post lamented that

      The absurd custom of duelling is become so prevalent that two Negroe Servants in the neighbourhood of Piccadilly, in consequence of a trifling dispute, went into the Long-Fields, behind Montagu-house, on Thursday morning, attended by two party-coloured Gentlemen, as their seconds, when on the discharge of the first case of pistols, one of the combatants received a shot in the cheek, which beat on some of his teeth, and the affair was settled.¹⁹

      Good treatment was no substitute for liberty. To be treated as a clever pet was not much of an existence. Many wore metal collars, inscribed with the owner’s name and coat of arms, riveted round their necks. The numerous ‘lost-and-found’ advertisements in London newspapers during this period attest to the high incidence of slaves running away:

      a Negro boy by name Guy, about 14 years old, very black, with a cinnamon colour’d serge coat, waistcoat, and breeches, with a silver lace’d black hat, speaks English very well, hath absented himself from his master (Major Robert Walker) ever since the 4th instant. Whoever shall bring the above said Negro boy into Mr Lloyd’s Coffee-house in Lombard-street London, shall receive a guinea reward, with reasonable charges.²⁰

      Highly visible on account of their colour and their loud dress, it wasn’t easy for runaway blacks to escape detection and capture:

      Mary Harris, a black-woman of the parish of St Giles in the Fields, was indicted for feloniously stealing a pair of Holland sheets, three smocks, and other goods of Nicholas Laws, gent, on the 30th November last. It appeared that she was a servant in the house, and took the goods, which were afterwards pawned by the prisoner; she had little to say for herself and it being her first offence, the jury considering the matter, found her guilty to the value of 10d. To be whipt.²¹

      Runaways tended to flee in the direction of St Dunstan’s, Ratcliff and St George’s-in-the-East, areas blighted by poverty which had comparatively large black populations.²² Here, amongst overcrowded and unhygienic houses located in stenchy, ill-paved alleys full of brothels, rundown lodging houses and dens for thieves, sailors and the dregs of society, they eked out illicit, subterranean livings. They had to. Few of them had marketable skills. Nor did they have contacts in the provinces or in the countryside to whom they could turn. They scraped together piecemeal lives – begging, stealing, doing odd jobs, going to sea – alongside the white underclasses of the East End who extended the hand of friendship to them. So much so, in fact, that Sir John Fielding, a magistrate, and brother of the novelist Henry, complained that when black domestic servants ran away and, as they often did, found ‘the Mob on their Side, it makes it not only difficult but dangerous to the Proprietor of these Slaves to recover the Possession of them, when once they are sported away’.²³

      Africans and English sang and danced together at mixed-race hops. Inevitably they also slept with each other – much to the disgust of the literate middle classes: the narrator of Defoe’s Serious Reflections (1720) spots a black mulatto-looking man in a London public house speaking eloquently and intelligently. During their conversation, the mulatto, whose colour had precluded him from entering the kind of respectable profession his education merited, curses, to the obvious approval of the narrator, his father who ‘has twice ruin’d me; first with getting me with a frightful Face, and rhen [sic] going to paint a Gentleman upon me’.²⁴ Over half a century later in 1788, Philip Thicknesse bemoaned that ‘London abounds with an incredible number of these black men [ … ] in almost every village are to be seen a little race of mulattoes, mischievous as monkies and infinitely more dangerous’.²⁵

      Demographics, as much as the easy-going tolerance of the proletariat, shaped the high levels of intermarriage. Throughout the eighteenth century barely twenty per cent of the black population was female. Most men – including the likes of Francis Barber and the writer Olaudah Equiano – married white women. This challenges the common assumption that the high percentage of black-white relationships in Britain today is a recent phenomenon, one that is a by-product of multiculturalism or increased social liberalism.

      It also shows how misleading is talk of ‘the black community’ in eighteenth-century London. Certainly slaves did meet up whenever possible to gossip, reminisce and exchange vital information. When two of them were imprisoned in Bridewell for begging they were visited by more than 300 fellow blacks. And in 1764 a newspaper reported that

      no less than 57 of them, men and women, supped, drank, and entertained themselves with dancing and music, consisting of violins, French horns and other instruments, at a public-house in Fleet Street, till four in the morning. No whites were allowed to be present for all the performers were Black.²⁶

      But such occasions seem to have been exceptional. The black population, even in big cities such as Liverpool and London, was simply too small for its members to try to isolate themselves from the white English majority. Of course, it was itself racially diverse: black Londoners hailed from different tribes and regions of Africa. Some had been born or spent long stretches in the Caribbean or in North America; others had spent most of their lives in the United Kingdom. They spoke different Englishes: some, brought up by their aristocrat owners, used language that was refined and decorous; others, educated at sea, preferred jack tar lingo, a stew of Cockney, Creole, Irish, Spanish and low-grade American. Class mattered at least as much as colour in how they dealt with day-to-day vicissitudes.

      Recent studies indicate that there were probably never more than about 10,000 blacks in eighteenth-century England at any one time.²⁷ This out of a population that had swollen rapidly to over nine million by 1800. Even in London, where swarthy men and women were most commonly found, they made up less than one per cent of the citizenry. Numbers did rise, however, in the early 1780s when, following the War of Independence, hundreds of black Americans who had been promised their liberty in return for supporting the Loyalist cause fled to London. Lacking money and education, many starved or froze to death on the city’s streets. Their plight attracted widespread public sympathy. Money for food and relief was contributed by all sections of society. The philanthropists and Abolitionist Evangelicals who sat on the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor decided that the best long-term solution for their charges was to offer them assisted passages out of England.

      Influenced by the naturalist Henry Smeathman’s arguments that Sierra Leone offered warmth, a fertile climate and a fine harbour, the Committee arranged for the blacks to be shipped there. Many members were keen for the black settlers to have an opportunity to run their own community. This, they believed, would be an effective rejoinder to the anti-Abolitionists who claimed Africans were incapable of self-government. After months of delay and prevarication, in April 1787 a small fleet of ships carrying 459 passengers finally set sail as part of the first ‘Back To Africa’ repatriation scheme in history. Unfortunately