London: The Biography

On 11 August 1659, an advertisement in Mercurius politicus concerned “A Negro boy, about nine years of age, in a gray Searge suit, his hair cut close to his head, was lost on Tuesday last, August 9, at night, in St. Nicholas Lane, London.” Those who were “lost,” or ran away, found themselves upon the mercy of the streets. One German observer noted, in 1710, that “there are in fact such a quantity of Moors of both sexes … that I have never seen so many before. Males and females frequently go out begging.” The most significant abuses occurred, however, among those who were in more orthodox employment; until a famous trial in 1772, the Somerset case, established that the English courts would not recognise slave status, they were still slaves labouring for their masters. The London Sessions reported a case, in 1717, of a black immigrant, John Caesar, who with his wife had worked as a slave “without wages for fourteen years” for a company of printers in Whitechapel. As late as 1777 an advertisement appeared concerning a “black servant man about twenty-four years of age named William of a brown or tawney complexion” wearing “a parson’s great coat, blue breeches, white Bath flannel waistcoat, yellow gilt shoe buckles, and a beaver hat with a white lining.” He had run away and, although his appearance seemed fashionable and exemplary, the advertisement noted that “He is also the property of his master, and has a burnt mark L.E. on one of his shoulders.” This was the brand not of infamy but of inhumanity; it was a way in which the blacks could be marked out as something less than human. In a commercial city, they became part of its movable property. Thus in the eighteenth century there were a large number of notices advertising their sale-“To be sold a negro boy aged eleven years Enquire at the Virginia Coffee House in Threadneedle Street … his price is £25, and would not be sold but the person he belongs to is leaving off business.”

And yet the condition of London bears another witness to their fate. These commercial transactions were undertaken by the wealthy or the well connected; there can be little doubt that the “gentlemen” who purchased and sold their little slaves would have been quite happy to see the “lower orders” of London generally consigned to such servitude. In that sense the fate of the black slave was representative of civic and administrative oppression on a larger scale. That is why the London crowd treated the black population with a certain amount of sympathy and fellow-feeling. It is a manifest expression of that native egalitarianism which has already been defined as one of the moving spirits of London life. That egalitarianism, to be seen at its most profound among the poor and wretched, is evinced in the life of a “black one-legged violinist” named Billy Walters who was nicknamed “the King of the Beggars.” It was said that “every child in London knew him.” It has often been observed how the prophets of racial conflict in London have been proved false; the voices crying doom, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, have since fallen quiet. We may find the causes of that relative harmony and tolerance, between black and white, in the general urban sympathy for the mistreated black immigrants of the eighteenth century.

Yet as their presence grew, even very slightly, so did the anxieties about the “blackness” in the midst of London. John Fielding, a London magistrate in the mid-eighteenth century, suggested that they became a subversive element almost as soon as they arrived in the city, particularly when they realised that white servants performed the same functions as themselves. To be black, in other words, was not a unique or an inalienable mark of servitude. So “they put themselves on a footing with other servants, became intoxicated with their liberty, grew refractory … so as to get themselves discharged.” And when they were “discharged” into London, what then? They “corrupt and dissatisfy the mind of every black servant that comes to England.” Others made their way to the retired streets and alleys where a black community had established itself. So for the civic authorities “the black presence,” as it has been called, posed a double threat. Those in habitual servitude were being aroused to anger or complaint, while small clusters of immigrants were to be found in the “low” districts of Wapping, St. Giles and elsewhere.