NOTES FROM NOW

Observations about the news from 1822

ThomasClarkson, a veteran of the successful drive in the Britain of 1807 to abolish the transatlantic trade in human beings, was just approaching his 63rd birthday this month 200 years ago. His campaigning days might have been over at what was then a quite advanced age, but Clarkson was no ordinary man.

In spring 1823, Thomas Clarkson was a key part of the new movement, begun in January, to abolish slaverynot just the trade itself, but the ownership of people across the British empire. He covered 10,000 miles on horseback, spreading the word and setting up local anti-slavery groups. Clarkson, unlike William Wilberforce, lived long enough to see not only legislation passed to abolish slavery in 1833, but emancipation itself actually happen in 1838.

For Thomas Clarkson, the revelation that fighting slavery should be his life’s work came in 1785.

After entering an essay competition at Cambridge University on the subject of slavery, Clarkson spent the journey back to London engrossed in the issue. He stopped his horse and paused for a break at Wadesmill in Hertfordshire, where he resolved to devote his life to the ending the “calamities” of slavery. The spot where man and horse stopped is marked by an obelisk and display board on Ermine Street, what was then the main road. These are pictured above. ____________

Most extraordinary though is the fact that Wells was of mixed race, with a plantation owner father and a black slave mother on St Kitts. He was described by one visitor to his estate as “a man of very gentlemanly manners, but so much a man of colour as to be little removed from a Negro”.

Nathaniel Wells’ ethnicity seems to have been no barrier to him being appointed by the then Prince Regent in 1818 as Britain’s first black high sheriff, as well as a deputy lieutenant of Monmouthshire.

One of the slave-owners who was compensated in 1837, to the tune of о £1,400, for the freeing of his 86 slaves on the Caribbean island of St Kitts was a wealthy Welsh land owner, whose home was Piercefield House in Monmouthshire. Nathaniel Wells was a pillar of the community, a magistrate, churchwarden, and lieutenant in the local yeomanry.

Piercefield House has spent much of the last 200 years in a sad state of repair, shown below left. Part of the estate is now Chepstow racecourse and the park hosts the Green Gathering festival in August.

In March 1823, Wells had just married Esther Owen, whose brother-in-law was William Wilberforce’s son. Did William senior and Wells ever meet? One can only wonder how any conversation about slavery would have developed.

The silhouetted woman in black below is Frances Rolleston, a key figure in the ladies committee set up to send clothing to women and children in Ireland after the famine in 1822. The ladies’ main focus in 1823 was to raise funds “for improving the condition and promoting the industry and welfare of the female peasantry,” as they put it. Frances had a full life with interests including poetry, painting, and astronomy (writing a book, Mazzaroth: the Constellations), as well as working with William Wilberforce against slavery and setting up infants schools. A biography by Jane S. Poole appeared in 2017.

William Wilberforce’s attack on slavery in March 1823 was published by Hatchard’s of Piccadilly, founded in 1797 by John Hatchard. Extraordinarily, 200 years on, they are still there at 187 Piccadilly, now London’s oldest bookshop.