Local Links with the Slave Trade

In recent times the issue of historic racism has been highlighted, especially by the Black Lives Matter movement. Organisations like English Heritage and the National Trust have updated their guides to record, in particular, any links with slavery, and some statues and memorials have been taken down. Admittedly it would be difficult for any wealthy family in the Georgian and Regency period to avoid at least an indirect link through their consumption of sugar, rum, cotton, tobacco and coffee. But were any of our local landed families involved with the actual slave trade?

The Slave Registers of former British Colonial Dependencies is the main source of information, although they only survive from 1813 until 1834, the year when slavery was finally abolished. I was relieved to find no Smijths of Hill Hall, no Abdys of Albyns, and no Budworths or Petres on the list. In fact west Essex was the home of two important campaigners for the abolition of the trade in slaves. William Smith MP, of Parndon Hall near Harlow, supported by his neighbour Montagu Burgoyne at Mark Hall, helped to get the 1807 act abolishing slave-trading (but not ownership) through Parliament.

However, there were also slave-owners from this area. Capel Cure of Blake Hall Bobbingworth inherited from his brother-in-law the role of trustee of the Belvidere estate in Jamaica, and it was his son, also Capel Cure, and another trustee who received compensation for the loss of their 378 slaves at emancipation. It is not known whether either of them ever visited Jamaica.

There was a similar link in the family of Augusta Smith, wife of Charles Smith of Suttons, Stapleford Tawney. Augusta, confusingly, was a Smith before she married, though neither she nor Charles was related to the campaigning MP William Smith. Augusta had an uncle, Thomas Smith “of Jamaica”. Thomas owned two plantations and several hundred slaves. When he died, his will stipulated that Augusta should choose one of her sons to inherit them. She chose her middle son Spencer (born 1806), who owned it from 1831 to 1838. Although his great-uncle Thomas had evidently lived in Jamaica, the day-to-day running of the plantations would have been in the hands of overseers, and many owners were absentees. When he first inherited, at the age of 25, Spencer sailed alone from Bristol to Jamaica to visit his property. He returned safe and well about six weeks later, and probably never revisited.

Two years after he inherited, the Emancipation Act was passed. As with Capel Cure, the government paid compensation to the slave owners (nothing to the slaves) for the loss of their “chattels”. In 1836, Spencer received over £10,000 for his 540 slaves, worth over a million pounds in today’s money. The estates had produced sugar, rum and coffee, but after the loss of free slave labour they switched to rearing cattle, which required less labour. Spencer’s newly-acquired wealth, just a year after his marriage, enabled him to live on an estate in Hampshire as a leisured country gentleman for the rest of his life, despite being a younger son. The Smith family left many letters and diaries, but no specific reference to slavery – approval or disapproval – has so far been found.