Untold lives blog

13th century Arabic manuscripts in the Al-Aqsa Mosque Library, East Jerusalem; rock inscriptions in the Tadrart Acacus mountains in Libya; records of the sale of slaves on the island of St Vincent in the West Indies; photos of Andean culture from Peru; Buddhist manuscripts from Bhutan – all of these and more have been preserved through funding from the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme.

EAP298/14/4/34 Saqras dancers of the Diablada Dance. Torres Belon Stadium, Puno, Peru 
 

The Endangered Archives Programme (EAP), sponsored by the charitable foundation Arcadia, was set up in 2004 and will be celebrating its 10th anniversary next year. During this time 214 projects have been funded in countries around the world: from Azerbaijan and Argentina, to Vietnam and Zambia, vulnerable archival material has been preserved. This is achieved through the relocation of the documents to a safe local archival home where possible, digitising the material, and depositing copies with local archival partners and with the British Library. These digital collections are then available for researchers to access freely, either by visiting the local archives, visiting the British Library, or viewing them online through the EAP website. To date, the digital collections from 35 projects are available online.

 
EAP310/4/2/23 – Tshamdrak Temple - Thor bu sTon pa'i skyes rabs 

One of the more popular items that has been viewed online is the Banns of Marriage (1849-1924) from the remote island of St Helena in the South Atlantic. The island’s archives in Jamestown hold records from its first years as an English colony, with the earliest documents dating from 1673 and including East India Company records through to 1834. After 1834 and the transition to direct Crown rule, the records follow the standard pattern of similar colonies. The Banns of Marriage are remarkable in allowing an insight into people’s lives at this time and are of great interest to people researching their family history.

EAP524/2/3/1 Banns of Marriage (1849-1924)  

EAP524 St Helena Ordinances

Do you know of any collections that merit preservation? The Endangered Archives Programme is now accepting grant applications for the next annual funding round – the deadline for submission of preliminary applications is 1 November 2013 and full details of the application procedures and documentation are available on the EAP website.

Cathy Collins
EAP Grants Administrator 

Further reading:

More about EAP

13th century Arabic manuscripts in Al-Aqsa Mosque Library
Rock inscriptions in the Tadrart Acacus mountains
Sale of slaves on St Vincent
Photos of Andean culture, Peru
Buddhist manuscripts from Bhutan

In the British Library’s stall of social history, the curious Cadbury company provides a chocolate box of interests.  The Cadbury family of Birmingham grew their cocoa products empire throughout the 19th century and this led them to building not only a factory but a whole factory town.  In fact, Bournville was a conspicuously composed community that worked wonderfully. 

By the 1930s, the company’s complex of neighbourhoods hired 9,000 workers but the Quaker ethos of the owners gave the staff, and their families, a wide range of social services that would not have been affordable by local government.  You probably know that Cadbury’s provided housing, classroom education, health care, swimming and other sports, and music.  But they ran summer camps for boys, a seaside holiday camp for families, Continental holidays, and the firm even taught adults Esperanto!

From pamphlets about the Bournville Works (BL, 08248.m.9.)

In 1934’s English Journey travelogue, J B Priestley appreciated the paternalist benevolence that the company served up, but he still thought it a politically sour spoonful.  Perhaps the lack of even one public house offended his nature (Bournville’s still pub-less).   But if you want to form your own opinion of Cadbury’s town built of cocoa beans, the British Library offers many morsels of its history. 

The Bournville reading room had “every kind of newspaper and magazine.” While it’s unlikely they stocked the Communist Party’s Daily Worker, the jazz fans’ weekly Melody Maker, or any timely tip-sheet for horse racing aficionados, it was probably a good resource nonetheless.

In 1936 Cadbury’s published a magazine, The Cococub News (P.P.5793.bch) and many pamphlets, including a generously illustrated guide to the factory and the lifestyle of their workers’ community (YD.2013.b.490).  The Library has a collection of similar items, which form a good sampler of their works, 1913-1948 (08248.m.9).  And the Bournville Village Trust today publishes In View (ZK.9.b.29447).

In the wake of interest in the Cadbury legacy are two recent novels from Pan Books : Annie Murray’s The Bells of Bournville Green (LT.2009.x.517) and Chocolate Girls (H.2003/1412).  Modern overviews of the company can be found in Deborah Cadbury’s Chocolate Wars : From Cadbury to Kraft – 200 Years of Sweet Success and Bitter Rivalry (YC.2010.a.15674), Paul Chrystal’s Cadbury and Fry Through Time (YK.2013.a.9579), and John Bradley’s Cadbury’s Purple Reign : The Story Behind Chocolate’s Best-Loved Brand (YC.2008.b.1108).  But for an acrid taste of the supply chain, there’s Catherine Higgs’ Chocolate Islands : Cocoa, Slavery and Colonial Africa (YC.2013.a.4010).

Andy Simons, Printed Historical Sources, 1914-present 

In 1833, following the abolition of slavery in the British colonies, £20 million was awarded to the slave-owners in order to compensate for their loss. However, the recipients of this compensation were not simply the owners of vast West Indian plantations. Men, and women, of much more modest means also claimed compensation for their enslaved servants.

 A Whig politician slipping £20 million out of John Bull's pocket from a cartoon called 'Slave Emancipation; Or, John Bull Gulled Out Of Twenty Millions' by radical print-maker C. J. Grant.  Reproduced here by kind permission of the UCL Art Collection: UCL, EPC8032.
 

One of these women was Dorothy Little, a 70 year old widow who lived in Clifton, near Bristol. In 1833 she claimed £297 1s 6d for 13 Jamaican slaves and wrote multiple letters to the Slavery Compensation Commission asking for information and advice.

Dorothy Little’s letters demonstrate an active involvement in the slave compensation process. It is clear that she was acutely aware of the position she found herself in. ‘There is a wide difference between the situations of those who... are Owners of Slaves only and those who are owners of Estates and also of the Slaves,’ she noted. As a slave-holder who owned no land she was in a particularly vulnerable position. Indeed, since women constituted a large proportion of non-land-holding slave-owners they were, on the whole, disproportionately affected by the privileging of land in the compensation process. Dorothy Little clearly recognised this: ‘Your Petitioner…believes that there are many in her situation, but they are principally Widows and Orphans and she is sorry to perceive that the large Proprietors have not had the generosity to put forward their peculiar situation’.

Despite politics supposedly being a masculine domain, Dorothy Little is unashamed to reveal that she has ‘with the greatest attention read every debate in the House of Commons on the West India question’.  Indeed, she felt so passionately about the fact that in her view the compensation punished those who did not own land that she sent a petition to Lord Stanley, the colonial secretary, voicing her concerns. She questions why she cannot be given ‘£100 a piece for [her slaves]…which is the sum the French received for theirs in America’, demonstrating that her considerable knowledge extended to global as well as domestic politics.

However, the language she employed in her letters was inherently gendered. She deliberately and persistently used her position as an elderly widow to present herself as vulnerable and in need of protection. In asserting that ‘it is quite inconsistent with the character of the noble Englishman to reduce aged widows to beggary by forcibly taking their property from them’, Dorothy Little is fundamentally grounding her argument in early 19th century conceptions of masculinity and femininity. The proper role of the ‘noble Englishman’ was to provide for any dependents- primarily women and children- who were wholly reliant on him for financial support.

Dorothy Little was thus an intelligent, informed and strong-willed woman who simultaneously both challenged, reinforced and manipulated early nineteenth century notions conceptions about masculinity, femininity and the role of women in order to achieve her ends. This end, it should not be forgotten, was receiving money in order to compensate for the loss of property in people.


Hannah Young
PhD student on UCL's Legacies of British Slave-Ownership project with a particular interest in women slave-owners and relationships of power, gender and property.

Further reading:

Legacies of British Slave-Ownership

Records of the Slavery Compensation Commission are held at The National Archives in series T 71. Papers concerning Dorothy Little’s claim are in TNA: T 71/1608.

Hilary Beckles,  Centering Woman: Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slave Society Kingston: Ian Randle, 1999.

Invited in 1835 to review the state of agriculture in South India, the Scottish botanist Robert Wight was not short of ideas for its improvement. One proposal, outlined in a letter to the Government of Madras, was to employ convicts as agricultural labourers. Both convict and State, Wight suggested, would benefit: the convict by acquiring a useful skill, the state from the likely increase in crop production. But the right tools for the job were essential. Recollecting the successful introduction of the wheel-barrow and the long hoe, Wight recommended ‘the most perfect implement of the plough kind that has hitherto been produced’. This was Wilkie’s plough, manufactured by the Wilkie family at Uddingston in Lanarkshire, and the winner in ploughing contests across lowland Scotland. This sketch shows the plough’s innovatory tilt: the blade cut the furrow at an angle, which allowed the wheel to roll through the furrow more steadily. 

Sketch of Wilkie's plough

Wight also sought to help skilled convicts. He recommended that prisoners keep up their trades and be given the latest equipment: hammers for blacksmiths, fly-shuttles for weavers. Such tools, he insisted, would ultimately produce ‘better men, and better Artists’. The Government of Madras was less convinced, but agreed to deploy a small number of prisoners to work on government farms.

Wight never forgot the value of proper implements. In later years, when setting up experimental cotton farms at Coimbatore, Madras, he rewarded Ram Sing, who had procured some Bourbon cotton seeds for him, with a complete set of ‘Ploughs, Harrows, Hoes, Yokes and Gear’ (IOR/F/4/1964/86089 folio 37r).

The file about convicts can be read at IOR/F/4/1815/74864.

These files have been digitised as part of the “Botany in British India” project. A complete list of digitised material is available.

Antonia Moon
Lead Curator, Post-1858 India Office Records    

Further reading:
H. J. Noltie, The Life and Work of Robert Wight (Edinburgh, 2007)

To celebrate Black History Month and the anniversary of Untold Lives, we return to two black East India Company London warehouse labourers who appeared in our very first story.

James Inglis is described in the Company records as a ‘Negro’.  He had worked as a servant for a ‘Mr D. Inglis’ before joining the cloth warehouse in April 1820 at the age of 33.  He was nominated for the job by director William Taylor Money. Money’s sister Martha was married to David Deas Inglis, so he seems a likely candidate for James’s previous employer.  David Deas Inglis was born in Charleston Carolina in 1777 and served the East India Company in Bombay. The Inglis family plantations in Charleston may explain how James came to be his servant.

In 1820 James was living at 3 Rose and Crown Court, Moorfields.  He served as a private soldier in the Royal East India Volunteers, a corps first formed in 1796 to protect East India House and the Company warehouses ‘against hazard from insurrections and tumults’ and to assist the City government in times of disorder.  James was discharged from the Volunteers in February 1828 but the reason is not given.  He then seems to disappear from the surviving Company records. 



WD 2425 Consecration of the Colours of the Third Regiment of Royal East India Volunteers at Lord's Cricket Ground, London, 29 June 1799 © The British Library Board Images Online


Richard Lane, ‘a man of Colour’, entered the Company’s Bengal Warehouse in New Street in March 1820 aged 32. He had been a servant to Mr Wood before being nominated for a labourer post by director Robert Campbell.  His home address in 1820 was 101 Houndsditch. Richard also served in the Royal East India Volunteers, but for only a short period from August 1820 until February 1821 when he was discharged, again for unknown reasons.  We next hear of him in the 1830s when the warehouse labourers were being made redundant after the government forced the Company to wind up its commercial operations.  In March 1837 Richard submitted a petition to be allowed to retire and go to his native country of America where he wished to remain with his relations.  This was approved and he was allowed to commute his pension of £19 10s per annum to a one-off lump sum payment of £184.

I am keen to know more about these two men. Can any readers shed any further light on the lives of James Inglis and Richard Lane?

Margaret Makepeace
Lead Curator, East India Company Records


Further reading:

IOR/L/AG/30/5 Admission register for East India Company warehouse labourers – data available on the India Office Family History Search

IOR/L/MIL/5/485 Register of soldiers in the Royal East India Volunteers

The Collections of the Board of Control, the body which oversaw the activities of the East India Company 1784-1858, contain many cases relating to slavery. One such tragic case is that of an Indian boy by the name of Hussain Bushkh bin Cutura Coombhar. In early 1842 it came to the attention of the Native Agent at Muscat that an Indian male had at some point in the past been brought to Muscat by an Indian named Meer Ameer Ally and sold to one Suliman Kinar. The Agent was able to secure the boy’s release and despatch him by boat to Bombay with a request that the authorities take charge of him.

Muscat Arabs BL: WD 315 no.51 © The British Library Board Images Online

On 14 November 1842, P W LeGeyt, Senior Magistrate of Police at Bombay reported to the Secretary to the Bombay Government that his Department had taken charge of Hussain Bushkh. In a statement made to LeGeyt, Hussain Bushkh related that he was a native of Lucknow, that his father was a porter in the suburbs of the city, and that he was 12 or 13 years old. He said that one day many years previously he had been playing with some other boys near his home when a person named Meera Meer Ali enticed him away and took him to Calcutta. He told Hussain Bushkh that he was taking him on a pilgrimage to Karbala, but instead he took him to Muscat and sold him as a slave to Suliman, where he remained as a domestic servant until the Native Agent at Muscat secured his release. Hussain Bushkh expressed to LeGeyt his wish to return to Lucknow, though he feared he would be unable to recognise his parents.

A request was made by the Bombay Government to the Resident at Lucknow to make enquiries regarding the boy’s parents, and communications were also made to the Police authorities at Bombay and Surat to be vigilant in preventing kidnapped children being taken away, particularly during the season for the embarkation of pilgrims to the Red Sea.

Sadly the correspondence on this case ends with a letter from LeGeyt informing the Bombay Government that Hussain Bushkh had been sent to the Native General Hospital where he subsequently died from the prevailing epidemic of cholera.

IOR/F/4/2014/89999 f.23

John O’Brien
Curator, Post 1858 India Office Records

Further reading:

IOR/F/4/2014/89999 ff.1-28

The Collections of the Board of Control are searchable online

Today we are pleased to share a story contributed by guest blogger Professor Huw Bowen.

It is well known that, alongside its trade in goods, the East India Company used its ships to transport large numbers of people around the world: merchants, administrators, soldiers, sailors, adventurers, women, children, convicts, and so on.   Less well known is that the Company also played a small but significant part in the slave trade.  In the mid-seventeenth century attempts were made to establish a plantation colony in Madagascar, but over a much longer period the slave populations of St Helena and Fort Marlborough (Bengkulu) were replenished with West African slaves.  Indeed in 1718 the population of St Helena consisted of 542 whites and 411 slaves.
 
The last dedicated slaving voyage organised by the Company appears to have been that of the Royal George, commanded by Nicholas Skottowe, in 1764-6.  Skottowe was ordered by the directors to procure slaves at Cabinda in Angola and then sail on to St Helena and Bengkulu before heading to Bombay.   He was given a consignment of commodities to exchange for slaves, including guns, gunpowder, cutlasses, and piece goods. 
 

BL, P329 'A view of the Government House & Council House at Fort Marlborough' 1799.  Images Online.

The Royal George was moored off Cabinda between 26 February and 29 April 1765 while 236 slaves were purchased: 125 men, 45 women, 38 boys, 25 girls, and 3 'children'.  The ship then sailed to St Helena (it was surely no coincidence that Skottowe's brother John was Governor of the island), where in late May the slaves were sent ashore and 'refreshed'.  Skottowe was paid a commission of 15 shillings for every slave (£177 in total) and his Chief Mate was paid 5 shillings per slave (£59 in total). 150 of the slaves were sent on from St Helena to Bengkulu.
 
The official journal of Royal George reveals very little about the slaves and the conditions they experienced. We know that all 236 slaves purchased at Cabinda were delivered to St Helena, and 149 of the 150 sent on to Bengkulu were landed at Fort Marlborough in early September: 60 men, 31 women, 31 boys and 27 girls.  This survival rate is very surprising, because Royal George was not a happy or healthy ship.  Of the 77 members of the crew, 21 died during the voyage, 10 were discharged, and 2 were recorded as having 'run' from the ship.  These losses were unusually high for a Company ship.

Further research will reveal what happened to the slaves. Skottowe went on to command the ship Bridgewater before becoming a Principal Managing Owner of some of the East Indiamen hired by the Company.  He died in 1792 aged 67 and is buried at Chesham in Buckinghamshire.
 
Skottowe’s voyage may only be a small footnote in the broader commercial history of the East India Company, but it opens up a window on a little known and very dark world, exposing as it does the part played by the Company in the transoceanic slave trade.

Huw Bowen, Professor of Modern History at Swansea University

Further reading: IOR/L/MAR/B/17/H Official journal of Royal George; IOR/G/32 and IOR/G/35 Administrative records for St Helena and Fort Marlborough.

In my previous blog about Austrians and Germans repatriated from India during the First World War, I mentioned that some women had an ‘unfortunate’ profession.

There were six women from Calcutta with an ‘unfortunate’ profession, eleven  from Bombay described more bluntly as prostitutes, five female brothel-keepers, and two servants in a brothel. This was the first time we had seen a reference to European prostitutes in India – documents in the India Office Records focus mainly on local women and the health problems in the Indian Army.

Image and description of a Bombay brothel-keeper (IOR/L/PJ/6/1389)

However, Our Army in India and Regulation of Vice refers to the ‘White Slave Traffic which has provoked the indignation of the Western World, which exists also in the East’. Calcutta Vice, a tract against prostitution, refers to the longstanding import of girls from Germany and Eastern Europe. According to Philippa Levine in Venereal Disease, Prostitution, and the Politics of Empire: the Case of British India, British authorities were relieved to find that most white prostitutes were not from Britain, and therefore not such a challenge to social norms and the delicate balance of imperial power as they had feared.

The presence of European women in brothels in India raises all sorts of questions. Were they trafficked? Did they go to India expecting an entirely different life? Did they go there with the intention of pursuing this occupation? What were their circumstances in Germany and Austria? Were they born in India?

How did these women get on with their fellow passengers to Europe, the missionaries, nurses, clergymen’s wives and other pillars of society?

The Public and Judicial files (IOR/L/PJ/6/1386-1389) telling the story of their repatriation may be found in Search our Catalogues of Archives and Manuscripts
Further reading can be discovered in Explore the British Library

Penny Brook, Lead Curator India Office Records