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Sharp and strong is the sword of justice Harry Potter (LLB 1992)
Earlier this year I took part in the unveiling of a plaque at St Bartholomew’s Hospital to Granville Sharp, the inveterate antislavery campaigner whose dogged persistence and refusal to give up ultimately triumphed in what became known around the world as The Mansfield Judgment. Here is the story of how a moral crusade began; how a chance encounter in a London street between a man and a boy led to the sword of justice striking its first blow against the chains of slavery. In eighteenth-century England a premium was put on property rights. They were defended by the ‘bloody code’ that stipulated hanging for many forms of theft or fraud – and were held sacrosanct by the courts. Owners of property could do with it pretty much as they pleased, justifying all sorts of casual cruelty to animals, wives and slaves, all in their way ‘property’. Enter Granville Sharp. Born in 1735 and named after Queen Elizabeth’s vice-admiral Sir Richard Granville, he was the twelfth of fourteen children of the Archdeacon of Northumberland and the youngest of his five sons. There was no money left for his education, but he was prodigiously clever and became an autodidact. He read all of Shakespeare as a boy and taught himself Greek and Hebrew as an adult. He became an ordnance clerk, an odd job for a pacifist – which by that time he was. He was also a staunch Anglican, with an absolute moral certainty and clarity. It was just this unbending ethical rigidity that was needed when a sin the size of slavery entered his consciousness. 32
One morning in 1765 the twenty-nine year old Sharp was leaving his brother William’s surgery in Mincing Lane, when he encountered a teenage boy who was battered and bruised, ‘nearly blind and doubly lame’. He was called Jonathan Strong and was a slave whose owner was David Lisle, a lawyer. Lisle had bought Strong in Barbados for £70 and brought him back to England. For some infraction Lisle had pistol-whipped the boy so hard around the head that the butt had separated from the stock. The valuable weapon could be repaired, but why bother with a slave? Lisle had thrown this now worthless object, like so much rubbish, onto the street. Somehow Strong had strength enough to stagger to William Sharp’s surgery, which he must have known offered a free service to the poor. Granville saw the boy and took him to his brother who arranged for his admission into St Bartholomew’s. Strong remained there for four and a half months. On his discharge Granville got the lad a job as an errand-boy for a Mr Brown, an apothecary in Fenchurch Street. By ill chance, after two years, the then ‘good-looking, stout young man’ was spotted by Lisle in the street. Lisle seized and sold his property to a Mr Ker, a Jamaican planter, for £30. Kerr would not pay until that property was safely stowed aboard a Jamaicabound ship captained by James Laird. So Lisle put the boy in a lock-up called the Poultry Compter, pending transit to the West Indies. Strong wrote to Brown for help. Lisle threatened Brown