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An Act to introduce a national day to raise awareness of the need to eradicate all forms of slavery, human trafficking and exploitation; and for connected purposes.

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1 minute 38 seconds

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KS2 / KS3 Black British History Animation of Olive Morris

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2 minutes 43 seconds

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Mary Seacole KS2/KS3 Educational Animation

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1 minute 50 seconds

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Fanny Eaton Animation for KS2/KS3 History Lesson

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1 minute 48 seconds

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Lilian Bader - Black History Educational Animation for KS2/KS3

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William Brown was a Black woman who joined the Royal Navy under a man's name in the early nineteenth century. It is undisputed that she was a sailor of HMS Queen Charlotte, but historians have reached varying conclusions about her service record.

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'William Brown' was a Black woman who joined the Royal Navy under a man's name in the early nineteenth century. Actual name is unknown, she is regarded as the first biologically female person to serve in the Royal Navy.

A sailor of HMS Queen Charlotte she was a subject of conflicting reports based on her age and rank.

The muster list of the HMS states that the 21 year old William Brown joined the crew of the ship on 23 May 1815 and was then discharged on the 19 June that year for "being a female". It rates her as a "landsman", the lowest grade of adult crew member in the Royal Navy.

This conflicts with alternative reports described in a piece in The Times printed on 2 September 1815. In the report Brown is described as a 'a female African, who served as a seaman in the Royal Navy for upwards of eleven years' and 'She is a smart well formed-figure, about five feet four inches in height, possessed of considerable strength and great activity; her features are rather handsome for a black, and she appears to be about 26 years of age.'

Since the appearance of Brown on the HMS Queen Charlotte, there has immense speculation over how she came to be in the Royal Navy. The Times report says: 'She says she is a married woman; and went to sea in consequence of a quarrel with her husband, who, it is said, has entered a caveat against her receiving her prize money.'
What can you do to support this Black History Month?
Check out these organizations:

You can also read Fawcett's research on The Gender Pay Gap by Ethnicity to find out more about how the pay gap affects women of colour, and our Invisible Women report exploring how race, faith, ethnicity, age, disability, sexuality, location and employment status can combine with gender to create distinct and particularly troubling experiences of discrimination and inequality.

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Seaman 'William Brown': the first black woman in the Royal Navy

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'William Brown' was a Black woman who joined the Royal Navy under a man's name in the early nineteenth century. Actual name is unknown, she is regarded as the first biologically female person to serve in the Royal Navy. A sailor of HMS Queen Charlotte she was a subject of conflicting reports based on her age and rank.

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Is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, actor, and professor. His production company, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, has produced more than 35 films since 1983

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Spike Lee: Everything You Need To Know | Netflix

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Winner of the Emmy, BAFTA and Peabody Awards, Academy award nominee Ava DuVernay is a writer, director, producer and film distributor.

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The Best of Ava DuVernay Director Trademarks | Netflix

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Is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. He directed the Marvel film Black Panther (2018), which broke numerous box office records and became the highest-grossing film of all time by a black director.

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In conversation with... Black Panther director Ryan Coogler

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Is an American filmmaker. After making his filmmaking debut with the short film My Josephine, he received an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best First Feature for Medicine for Melancholy (2008).

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Is a Liberian-American film director, producer, screenwriter, editor and actress. Dunye's work often concerns themes of race, sexuality, and gender, particularly issues relating to black lesbians.

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Is an American actor, voice actor, comedian, writer, director, and producer. He is best known for his television and film work in the comedy and horror genres.

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Oscars 2018: Jordan Peele Backstage (FULL PRESS CONFERENCE)

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Is a British filmmaker and video artist. He is known for his film 12 Years a Slave (2013), a historical adaptation of an 1853 slave narrative memoir, for which he won many awards. McQueen is the first black filmmaker to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.

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Steve McQueen at the Tate Modern: ‘I have no choice but to create’  - BBC Newsnight

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Is an American costume designer for film and television, with over 40 films to her credit, who has mastered the look of multiple periods and genres in envisioning the clothing and overall appearance of a character or performer.

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Costume Designer.

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Trayce Field is a talented costume designer who works on one the funniest hit shows on TV, NBC's Two Broke Girls. You might be wondering what a costume designer does.....so for our current issue, we had a chance to talk to Trayce to find out what her job entails. We also find out how she got her start in the fashion business, how she landed this amazing job out and her inspirations in designing for the show. Having worked in both films and TV, Trayce tells us the difference in working for either medium and what she has in store for the future. Keep up with her on Twitter: @traycegigifield

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Trayce Field is a talented costume designer who works on one the funniest hit shows on TV, NBC's Two Broke Girls. You might be wondering what a costume designer does.....so for our current issue, we had a chance to talk to Trayce to find out what her job entails.

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Costume Designer.

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"There's great attitude and affectation in how he's staging each of these portraits. And it's like theater . . ."

Costume designer Paul Tazewell reflects on Anthony van Dyck's portraits in this episode of The Artist Project-an online series in which artists respond to works of art in The Met collection.

About the Artist
Paul Tazewell, born in Akron, Ohio, is an American costume designer for the theatre, dance, and opera. Read more Read less

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The Artist Project: Paul Tazewell | Perspectives | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Costume designer Paul Tazewell reflects on Anthony van Dyck's portraits in this episode of The Artist Project.

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Costume Designer.

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EMILIO SOSA hails from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic and has been working as a costume designer for years. He realized his passion for design when he was merely 14 years old, continuing to work towards that goal until he achieved it. A fan of Charles James, he's had ...

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Was the first African-American author of a published book of poetry. Born in West Africa, she was sold into slavery at the age of seven or eight and transported to North America. She was purchased by the Wheatley family of Boston, who taught her to read and write and encouraged her poetry when they saw her talent.

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PHILLIS WHEATLEY (Poet) - Black History Month

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Director.

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he Old Guard might be Gina Prince-Bythewood's first foray into the action genre proper, but the writer-director has always been a fighter of sorts. She made her feature debut in 2000 with Love & Basketball, a romance based partly on her own high-school sporting career, growing up in a middle-class California suburb. "Everything sport teaches you is so apropos to this industry," she says. "Aggression is good, stamina, the ability to fight ... I bring the same passion to film-making - except for the tears. There's no crying in directing."

Speaking over Zoom from her Los Angeles home, the walls behind her decorated with framed photographs, she seems relaxed and happy to reminisce about the varied career that led to here. She jokes that her love of storytelling "came from tragedy", in that her parents opted not to replace a broken television set. "So for seven years all I could do was read." It wasn't until she got to UCLA, however, that she realised she could direct: "I think it came that late because I just didn't have any role models."

Eight years after Love & Basketball, she made the civil rights-era coming-of-age drama The Secret Life of Bees, followed six years later by Beyond the Lights, with Gugu Mbatha-Raw as a troubled pop star. In the gaps between, she worked on TV projects and raised two sons, whose questioning helped compel her towards her latest project: "I remember my boys saying, before Black Panther: 'How come we never get to see ourselves up on screen in these movies?'"

Adapted from Greg Rucka's graphic novel series, The Old Guard stars Charlize Theron as Andromache of Scythia -- "Andy" for short -- the leader of an immortal warrior crew that has been secretly saving humanity from itself for centuries. Then, young US marine Nile (KiKi Layne) becomes aware of her own immortality, and it falls to Andy to bring her into the fold.

The very first day of production involved a gritty Andy v Nile fight scene. "From the get-go I said they're never gonna be fighting in heels. That's not them. Nile is a marine and Andy is the greatest warrior of all time." Again, Prince-Bythewood's athletic background served her well. "I did kickbox for a couple of years. I know what good fighting is, I know what it feels like. It was fun because I got to talk to our fight coordinator, Danny Hernandez, fighter to fighter. I got his respect really early on and that's integral. You hear horror stories about stunt folks, when they work with female directors ... "

Otherwise, she made it a point to hire female heads of department where possible, for practical reasons: "Résumés of female department heads are not usually as extensive as those of male, but it's not because of talent; it's because of opportunity. I feel lucky I'm getting these dope people that others are not utilising."

Taking this approach has also made Prince-Bythewood a serial launcher of Hollywood careers. In 2006, for instance, she hired a graduate fresh out of Chicago's Columbia College as her postproduction assistant on The Secret Life of Bees. That graduate was Lena Waithe, who went on to become the first black woman to win a comedy writing Emmy. Earlier this year, Oscar-nominated Ava DuVernay tweeted to mark Love & Basketball's 20th anniversary ("a film that captured the hearts of black folks and we've never let go"), and also paid tribute to Prince-Bythewood as "an early role model for me".

Gina Prince-Bythewood. Photograph: Michael Buckner/Deadline/Rex/Shutterstock

She sees holding the door open behind her as a responsibility. "It's not something to celebrate to be the only one in the room. It's frickin' lonely and hard!" One person who's always had her back, since they met working on the college sitcom A Different World, is her husband and fellow film-maker Reggie Rock Bythewood. Among their most powerful collaborations is Shots Fired, a 2017 miniseries about a racially charged police shooting that is as topical today as it was then. That, however, is as close as Prince-Bythewood's varied back catalogue gets to the kind of serious historical subject matter -- Selma, Harriet, 13th -- for which female African-American directors are most often celebrated. As recently as last year, DuVernay told the Guardian about the subtle sort of pigeonholing that can result: "I'm not getting John Wick 3, even though I'd love to make it."

That is another reason why The Old Guard feels like a triumph. While the recently published industry stats on representation in screenwriting and directing are "still dismal", says Prince-Bythewood, she is excited about the diversity of content: "It's not all one thing, y'know?" Putting out a stereotype-subverting, shamelessly entertaining comic-book movie is part of that, but the revolution continues: "I don't feel discriminated against personally; but my choices are. Films which focus on black women are absolutely the hardest films to get made."

In The Old Guard, Theron and Layne have a roughly equal share of screen time. "I give all props to Greg Rucka, who wrote the original graphic novel," Prince-Bythewood says. "When I came aboard, the thing he and I worked on was filling out her character, giving her more agency. So often, especially movies like this, you look up and the black character is comic relief or a sidekick. I didn't want that for Nile."

One of the film's most strikingly soulful moments comes when, amid the mayhem, Nile centres herself by slipping earbuds in and closing her eyes. As Frank Ocean's Godspeed fills the audio track, we're fleetingly enveloped in Nile's inner world. It's an unusually interior mood for an action film, but it's typical of Prince-Bythewood's work. It's this sense of responsibility to the characters that gives her films a kind of political heft, regardless of genre.

Putting these stories out into the world is one way of affirming "Black Lives Matter" but that doesn't mean there aren't still plenty of difficult conversations to be had in Hollywood. "I've been incredibly blunt with people that I've worked with," Prince-Bythewood says. "Just a couple days ago, I said: 'Hey, when I walk into your building for a meeting, I don't see one person, not even an assistant, who looks like me. Like, how is that possible?' And there wasn't defensiveness, y'know? So I love that and I hope that sustains itself." The previously common scenario of meeting to discuss a script and being asked to recast black characters as white is also thankfully rarer: "What I am excited about is the fact that my next two projects, I have not had anyone mention anything like that ... I hope I'm not naive, but it does feel different."

She cannot say much about these projects yet, but neither of them is the Mbatha-Raw-starring adaptation of Roxane Gay's An Untamed State, announced to much excitement back in 2016. "I love that book so much but where we had it set up, they got scared of it ... we're in a little bit of limbo there." It remains on the long-term list, as does Prince-Bythewood's "dream project", a biopic of Toussaint Louverture, leader of the Haitian uprising and abolisher of the slave trade. "It's our Braveheart and I'm going to make it." Going on past performance, only a fool would doubt her.
The Old Guard is on Netflix from Friday 10 July

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Gina Prince-Bythewood: 'Films about black women are the hardest to get made'

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he Old Guard might be Gina Prince-Bythewood's first foray into the action genre proper, but the writer-director has always been a fighter of sorts. She made her feature debut in 2000 with Love & Basketball, a romance based partly on her own high-school sporting career, growing up in a middle-class California suburb.

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Invented the Wooden Clock, believed to be the first clock built in America. In addition he is known for developing/inventing the Almanacs.

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The exceptional life of Benjamin Banneker - Rose-Margaret Ekeng-Itua

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Pioneering NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson has died at the age of 101. Johnson was part of a group of African-American women who worked on critical mathematical calculations in the early days of human spaceflight, as chronicled in the best-selling book and hit movie “Hidden Figures.”

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George Washington Carver was born into slavery but went on to become a botanist and one of the most prominent scientists and inventors of his time.

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George Washington Carver "The Plant Doctor" Revolutionized Farming Industry | Biography

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Invented Global Positioning System (GPS).

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Navy Hidden Hero: Gladys Mae West and GPS

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Patricia Bath is the FIRST person to invent and demonstrate laserphaco cataract surgery. "Sometimes even now when I’m told I was a “first,” it comes as a surprise, because it’s only through history that you understand that kind of thing."

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Patricia Bath On Being The First Person To Invent & Demonstrate Laserphaco Cataract Surgery | TIME

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Invented the Electric Self- Feeding apparatus for amputees, a Neck frame for injured or ill patients and Emesis Basin.

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Invented the Carbon Light Bulb Filament.

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Lewis Latimer: Unsung Heroes of Science 2019

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A British composer, actor, and writer. He is the only Briton of African heritage known to have been eligible and voted in an 18th-century general election through property qualifications.

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Charles Ignatius Sancho (c. 1729 - 14 December 1780) was a British abolitionist, writer and composer. Born on a slave ship in the Atlantic, Sancho was sold into slavery in the Spanish colony of New Granada. After his parents died, Sancho's owner took the two-year-old orphan to England and gifted him to three Greenwich sisters, where he remained their slave for eighteen years. Unable to bear being a servant to them, Sancho ran away to the Montagu House, whose owner had taught him how to read and encouraged Sancho's budding interest in literature. After spending some time as a servant in the household, Sancho left and started his own business as a shopkeeper, while also starting to write and publish various essays, plays and books.

Sancho quickly became involved in the nascent British abolitionist movement, which sought to outlaw both the slave trade and the institution of slavery itself, and he quickly became one of the most devoted supporters of the movement. Sancho's status as a male property-owner meant he was legally qualified to vote in a general-election, a right he exercised in 1774 and 1780, becoming the first known Black Briton to have voted in Britain. Gaining fame in Britain as "the extraordinary Negro", to British abolitionists, Sancho became a symbol of the humanity of Africans and the immorality of the slave trade and slavery. Sancho died in 1780, with his The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African, edited and published two years after his death, being one of the earliest accounts of African slavery written in English from a first-hand experience.

Charles Ignatius Sancho was born on a slave ship crossing the Atlantic Ocean, in what was known as the Middle Passage. His mother died not long after arriving in the Spanish colony of New Granada, which formed parts of modern-day Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and Venezuela. His father reportedly took his own life rather than live as a slave. Sancho's owner took the young orphan, barely two years old, to England and gave him to three unmarried sisters living together in Greenwich, where he lived from 1731 to 1749. The Duke of Montagu, a frequent visitor to the sisters, became impressed by Sancho's intellect, frankness, and amiability. The Duke not only encouraged Sancho to read, but also lent him books from his personal library at Blackheath.

Sancho's informal education made his lack of freedom at Greenwich unbearable, and he ran away to Montagu House, Blackheath in 1749. For two years until her death in 1751, Sancho worked as a butler for the Duchess of Montagu at her residence, where he immersed himself in music, poetry, reading, and writing. Upon her death in 1751, Sancho received an annuity of £30 (about £7000 in 2020 according to the Bank of England inflation calculator) and a year's salary. On 17 December 1758 he married a West Indian woman, Anne Osborne, becoming a devoted husband and father. They had seven children: Frances Joanna, Ann Alice, Elizabeth Bruce, Jonathan William, Lydia, Katherine Margaret, and William Leach Osborne. Around the time of the birth of their third child, Sancho became a valet to George Montagu, the son-in-law of his previous patron. Sancho remained a valet until 1773.

In 1768, British artist Thomas Gainsborough painted a portrait of Sancho at the same time as the Duchess of Montagu sat for her portrait by Gainsborough as well. By the late 1760s, Sancho had already become well accomplished and was considered by many to be a man of refinement. In 1766, at the height of the debate about slavery, Sancho wrote to Anglo-Irish novelist Laurence Sterne encouraging the famous writer to use his pen to lobby for the abolition of the slave trade.

That subject, handled in your striking manner, would ease the yoke (perhaps) of many - but if only of one - Gracious God! - what a feast to a benevolent heart!

In July 1766 Sancho's letter was received by Sterne shortly after he had just finished writing a conversation between his fictional characters, Corporal Trim and his brother Tom in Tristram Shandy, wherein Tom described the mistreatment of an African servant in a sausage shop in Lisbon that he had visited. Sterne's widely publicised 27 July 1766 response to Sancho's letter became an integral part of 18th-century abolitionist literature.

There is a strange coincidence, Sancho, in the little events (as well as in the great ones) of this world: for I had been writing a tender tale of the sorrows of a friendless poor negro-girl, and my eyes had scarce done smarting with it, when your letter of recommendation in behalf of so many of her brethren and sisters, came to me - but why her brethren? - or your's, Sancho! any more than mine? It is by the finest tints, and most insensible gradations, that nature descends from the fairest face about St. James's, to the sootiest complexion in Africa: at which tint of these, is it, that the ties of blood are to cease? and how many shades must we descend lower still in the scale, 'ere mercy is to vanish with them? - but 'tis no uncommon thing, my good Sancho, for one half of the world to use the other half of it like brutes, & then endeavour to make 'em so."

Following the publication of the Sancho-Sterne letters, Sancho became widely known as a man of letters. Sancho, a British subject and voter in Westminster, noted that despite being in the country since the age of two he felt he was "only a lodger, and hardly that." In other writings he describes his life: "Went by water - had a coach home - were gazed at - followed, etc. etc. - but not much abused." On another occasion, he writes: "They stopped us in the town and most generously insulted us."

In 1774 with help from Montagu, Sancho, suffering from ill health with gout, opened a grocery shop, offering merchandise such as tobacco, sugar and tea, at 19 Charles Street in London's Mayfair, Westminster. These were goods then mostly produced by slaves in the West Indies.

Ignatius Sancho is the first known person of African descent to vote in a British general election. As an independent male property owner, with a house and grocery shop on Charles Street, he had the right to cast his vote for the Westminster Members of Parliament in the 1774 and 1780 elections.

-Record of Ignatius Sancho's vote in the general election, October 1774, British Library.

As a shopkeeper Sancho enjoyed more time to socialise, correspond with his many friends, share his enjoyment of literature, and his shop had many visitors. He wrote and published a Theory of Music, though no copy is extant today. There are 62 known compositions by Sancho, which were printed in four collections in London between ca. 1767 and 1779: Minuets Cotillons & Country Dances, book I (ca. 1767), containing 24 dances; A Collection of New Songs (ca. 1769), six songs on words of William Shakespeare, David Garrick, Anacreon, and unidentified authors; Minuets, &c., &c., book II (ca. 1770), with 20 dances; and Twelve Country Dances for the Year 1779. In addition, he wrote two plays. As a financially independent male householder living in London, he qualified to vote in the parliamentary elections of 1774 and 1780; he was the first person of African origin known to have voted in Britain. At this time he also wrote letters and in newspapers, under his own name and under the pseudonym "Africanus".

Among his acquaintances were figures such as Thomas Gainsborough, the Shakespearean actor David Garrick, violin virtuoso Felice Giardini, the preacher William Dodd, the sculptor Joseph Nollekens, and the novelist Laurence Sterne. Nollekens gave Sancho a plaster cast of his 1766 marble bust of Sterne. Sancho received many prominent visitors at his shop, including statesman and abolitionist Charles James Fox, who successfully steered a resolution through Parliament pledging it to abolish the slave trade. He oversaw a Foreign Slave Trade Bill in spring 1806 that prohibited British subjects from participating in the trading of slaves with the colonies of Britain's wartime enemies, thus eliminating two-thirds of the slave trade passing through British ports.

Ignatius Sancho died from the effects of gout on 14 December 1780 and was buried in the churchyard of St Margaret's, Westminster. There is no memorial at the church, as the grave stones (which lie flat) in the churchyard were covered over with grass in 1880 and no inscription was found for him when a record was made of the existing epitaphs. He was the first person of African descent known to be given an obituary in the British press.

Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho

While his correspondence often included domestic issues, it also commented on the political and literary life in 18th-century Britain. One of his more famous series of letters includes his eye-witness accounts of the Gordon Riots in June 1780. The angry mob passed outside his shop on Charles Street. The protest that began when Protestants protested against parliamentary extension of Roman Catholic enfranchisement grew into a violent mob of 100,000 looting and burning parts of London.

There is at this present moment at least a hundred thousand poor, miserable, ragged rabble, from 12 to 60 years of age, with blue cockades in their hats - besides half as many women and children, all parading the streets, the bridge, the park, ready for any and every mischief. Gracious God! What's the matter now? I was obliged to leave off - the shouts of the mob, the horrid clashing of swords, and the clutter of a multitude in swiftest motion drew me to the door, when everyone in the street was employed in shutting up shop. It is now just five o'clock - the ballad-singers are exhasting their musical talents with the downfall of Popery, S-h and N-h, Lord S-h narrowly escaped with his life about an hour since' the mob seized his chariot going to the house, broke his glasses and, in struggling to get his lordship out, they somehow have cut his face.

In 1782 Frances Crewe, a correspondent of Sancho, arranged for 160 of his letters to be published in the form of two volumes entitled The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African. The book sold very well, with more than 2,000 subscribing to it. His widow received in royalties more than £500, equivalent to £63,970 in 2020. Joseph Jekyll provided a memoir of Sancho for the first edition, and four more editions had been issued by 1803.

Sancho's son, William Leach Osborne Sancho, inherited the shop on Charles Street, Mayfair, and transformed it into a printing and book-selling business. In 1803 at this shop he printed a fifth edition of Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho with Memoirs of His Life by Joseph Jekyll, with a frontispiece engraving by Bartolozzi.

''I am Sir an Affrican - with two ffs - if you please - & proud am I to be of a country that knows no politicians - nor lawyers - nor [word deleted] ... nor thieves of any denomination save Natural....''

Sancho was unusually blunt in his response to a letter from Jack Wingrave, John Wingrave's son. Jack wrote about his negative reaction to people of colour based on his own experience in India during the 1770s. Sancho's response was as such:

I am sorry to observe that the practice of your country (which as a resident I love - and for its freedom - and for the many blessings I enjoy in it - shall ever have my warmest wishes, prayers and blessings); I say it is with reluctance, that I must observe your country's conduct has been uniformly wicked in the East - West-Indies - and even on the coast of Guinea. The grand object of English navigators - indeed of all Christian navigators - is money - money - money - for which I do not pretend to blame them - Commerce was meant by the goodness of the Deity to diffuse the various goods of the earth into every part - to unite mankind in the blessed chains of brotherly love - society - and mutual dependence: the enlightened Christian should diffuse the riches of the Gospel of peace - with the commodities of his respective land - Commerce attended with strict honesty - and with Religion for its companion - would be a blessing to every shore it touched at. In Africa, the poor wretched natives blessed with the most fertile and luxuriant soil - are rendered so much the more miserable for what Providence meant as a blessing: the Christians' abominable traffic for slaves and the horrid cruelty and treachery of the petty Kings encouraged by their Christian customers who carry them strong liquors to enflame their national madness - and powder - and bad fire-arms - to furnish them with the hellish means of killing and kidnapping.

A plaque to the memory of Sancho was unveiled on 15 June 2007, by Nick Raynsford, MP for Greenwich, on the remaining wall of Montagu House on the south-west boundary of Greenwich Park. The plaque was funded by the Friends of Greenwich Park to commemorate the bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, made law in 1807. A second plaque to his memory is on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

When the City of Westminster commemorated the bicentenary by creating a walking tour of Westminster highlighting events and individuals involved in the campaign to abolish the slave trade, they included 19 Charles Street. This was a collaboration with historian S. I. Martin, the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Palace of Westminster, Tate Britain, Westminster City Archives, and Westminster City Council.

Sancho features on the list of "100 Great Black Britons".

The Portrait of an African (oil on canvas 61.8 x 51.5 cm, c. 1757-59; held in the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter, Devon) is probably of Ignatius Sancho, although it was previously thought to be of Olaudah Equiano, and is now attributed to Allan Ramsay (1713-1784). A full account of the attribution to Ramsay and identification of Sancho is contained in the article "The Lost African" published in magazine, August 2006.

In 2015, a play based on the life of Ignatius Sancho, entitled Sancho: An Act of Remembrance, written and performed by Paterson Joseph, was staged at Oxford and Birmingham in the United Kingdom, and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York. From 4 to 16 June 2018 the play had its London premiere at Wilton's Music Hall.

On 1 October 2020, Google commemorated British Black History Month by honouring Sancho with a Doodle.

Facs. Set for the harpsichord. (London: Thompson, 2014). Interpreted by V. Webster, illus. D. Durant, research S Petchy and P Cooper. Pbk 97 pp.

Dances for a Princess, humbly dedicated (with permission) to the Princess Royal by Her Royal Highnesses Most Obedient Servant Ignatius Sancho.

By Ignatius Sancho, 191 pp; ed. & intro. by S. Petchey (64 pp). 22 dances & facs. of their music and two more pieces. A recording of these dances is available from Green Ginger at https://greengingerband.co.uk. ISBN 978-1-5272-3701-8.

John Madin, "Abolition: Trading faces", BBC - Devon, 28 October 2014.

Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African. In Two Volumes. To Which Are Prefixed, Memoirs of His Life. Vol. I. London: Printed by J. Nichols, 1782.

Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African. In Two Volumes. To Which Are Prefixed, Memoirs of His Life. Vol. II. London: Printed by J. Nichols, 1782.

Carey, Brycchan. "Ignatius Sancho: African Man of Letters". Brycchan Carey's comprehensive collection of resources for the study of Ignatius Sancho.

The Music of Ignatius Sancho

Westminster Council's Abolition of the Slave Trade Commemoration website

Works by or about Ignatius Sancho in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

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Charles Ignatius Sancho (c. 1729 - 14 December 1780) was a British abolitionist, writer and composer. Born on a slave ship in the Atlantic, Sancho was sold into slavery in the Spanish colony of New Granada. After his parents died, Sancho's owner took the two-year-old orphan to England and gifted him to three Greenwich sisters, where he remained their slave for eighteen years.

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A Nigerian jazz musician who is believed to have been the only black participant of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.

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August Browne: The Nigeria-born man who joined the Polish resistance

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Among the hundreds of thousands of patriots that Poland celebrates for serving in the resistance movement in World War Two there is one black, Nigeria-born man. Jazz musician August Agboola Browne was in his forties, and had been in Poland for 17 years, when he joined the struggle against Nazi occupation in 1939 - thought to be the only black person in the country to do so.

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Louise Da-Cocodia MBE (1934 – 2008) *Her nephew is our colleague*

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Louise Da-Cocodia MBE (1934 – 2008) *Her nephew is our colleague*

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One of Manchester's foremost anti-racism campaigners

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Louise Da-Cocodia MBE (9 November 1934 - 13 March 2008) was an anti racism campaigner and former Deputy Lord Lieutenant of Manchester

Born in Jamaica, Louise Da-Cocodia moved to Britain in 1955 to train as a nurse, invited as part of a government overseas recruitment drive to staff the newly formed National Health Service. As a nurse-in-training, she often encountered racism from colleagues and patients. In 1958, Louise Da-Cocodia qualified as a Staff Registered Nurse, and began a nursing career spanning 31 years.

In 1966 she was appointed as Assistant Superintendent of District Nurses, the first Black senior nursing officer in Manchester. Even as a manager she experienced racist remarks from colleagues; "Those black so and so's coming here and giving us orders!". These experiences of prejudice inspired Louise to dedicate herself to tackling race equality issues: "deep in my mind is my commitment to bridge the gap which has led to the blacks being treated as inferior."

In the 1960s and 1970s she served on regional Race Relations Board committees (later known as the Commission for Racial Equality, handling complaints brought under new anti-discrimination laws such as the Race Relations Act 1965. In 1981 she helped transport victims of the Moss Side riot to hospital, and later sat on the Hytner inquiry panel investigating the causes of the unrest. In 1984 she published a paper in the International Journal of Social Psychiatry exploring the effects of racism in nursing.

From 1984 she served three terms as Chair of the West Indian Organisation Co-ordinating Committee.

Louise Da-Cocodia undertook a number of community voluntary roles, both at a grassroots community level where she was affectionately known as 'Mrs D'; and at a more formal level by serving on a number of governing boards and committees including Manchester Health Authority; Voluntary Action Manchester; and Manchester Metropolitan University. She was also a lay inspector at the Crown Prosecution Service and a Justice of the Peace. In 1990 she was nominated to the Manchester Magistrates' Bench where she served for 14 years. In 1999 she was appointed Deputy Lieutenant of Manchester.

Louise Da-Cocodia strove to promote equality of opportunity for Manchester's inner-city residents in housing, education and employment, stating that she was inspired by an aim "...to help young Black people understand that this is their home, this is the society they live in, and that they have a part to play in developing it. Young Black people need role models around, not necessarily high profile ones...". She co-founded and steered a number of community enterprise schemes including Cariocca Education Trust and Arawak Walton Housing Association. She was also a founder member of Moss Side and Hulme Women's Action Forum; the Agency for Economic Development in Manchester.

In 1989 she was awarded an honorary Master's degree by the Victoria University of Manchester for services to nursing and the community. In 1992 she received the Manchester Race Award for improving race relations in the city. In the 1992 Birthday Honours she was awarded the British Empire Medal for her contribution to Greater Manchester's West Indians' Organisation's Co-ordinating Committee. In 2005 she received an MBE for services to the people of Manchester.

Louise Da-Cocodia's legacy lives on through the community organisations she help found. In 2008 Carrioca Enterprises renamed its education arm 'the Louise Da-Cocodia Education Trust' and it continues to build on her efforts to improve schooling opportunities for young people in particularly those of Afro-Caribbean heritage. In 2011, to honour its founder member and first chair, Arawak Walton Housing Association named a new housing development in Trafford 'Louise DaCocodia Court'. She was also an advisor on the Moss Side and Hulme Task Force, and a member of the General Synod of the Church of England and a lay canon.

Da-Cocodia was shortlisted in 2015 for the WoManchester Statue. Although Emmeline Pankhurst was decisively selected, Da-Cocodia's anti-racism work was brought to the attention of a new generation. The statue now sits in St Peter's Square, Manchester. First in the Fight (authors Helen Antrobus and Andrew Simcock, published 2019 ISBN number 978-1-84547-252-8) dedicates a chapter to Louise Da-Cocodia along with the other nineteen women considered for the statue.

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Louise Da-Cocodia MBE (9 November 1934 - 13 March 2008) was an anti racism campaigner and former Deputy Lord Lieutenant of Manchester Born in Jamaica, Louise Da-Cocodia moved to Britain in 1955 to train as a nurse, invited as part of a government overseas recruitment drive to staff the newly formed National Health Service.

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Anti-Slavery Day, 18th October, provides an opportunity to raise awareness of human trafficking and modern slavery, and encourage government, local authorities, companies, charities and individuals to do what they can to address the problem. It was created by the Anti-Slavery Day Act, a Private Members Bill introduced Anthony Steen CBE, now Chair of the Human Trafficking Foundation.

Each year more and more charities, individuals, local authorities and police forces take action to mark Anti-Slavery Day.

The Human Trafficking Foundation hosts Anti-Slavery Day Awards to recognise journalists, filmmakers and broadcasters who have exposed issues of modern slavery, and to celebrate organisations and individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to the fight against modern slavery. Find out more by visiting humantraffickingfoundation.org

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Anti-Slavery Day, 18th October, provides an opportunity to raise awareness of human trafficking and modern slavery, and encourage government, local authorities, companies, charities and individuals to do what they can to address the problem. It was created by the Anti-Slavery Day Act, a Private Members Bill introduced Anthony Steen CBE, now Chair of the Human Trafficking Foundation.

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Watch TV programmes from the Black & British collection on BBC iPlayer.

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Alison Hammond travels across the country and back in time on an historical journey to discover some of the black figures who have been hidden from Britain's history.

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Alison Hammond: Back to School - Tuesday 6 Oct 9pm

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Alison Hammond discovers some of the black figures hidden from Britain's history. ITV Hub - the home of ITV on demand and live TV.

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Watch and embed this video on your website. Simply play and click on the embed icon upper right to copy the embed code. "It's All About..." Black History Month on ITV
Black culture is brought brightly into focus from today on ITV as viewers will see brand new on air trails along with channel idents marking and celebrating Black History Month.

The creative work will complement newly commissioned programmes and content showing across ITV channels and platforms throughout October.

The campaign by ITV Creative (ITVs in-house creative team), who conceived and produced the layered animation, draws on the rich contribution to British life of black figures and culture across a wide range of areas from literature, history and science to music, food and fashion to deliver a visually vibrant, upbeat and thought-provoking palette.

The concept "It's all about" sees icons from Maggie Aderin-Pocock, Amma Asante, Baroness Floella Benjamin DBE and Dame Linda Dobbs to Arthur Wharton, Alison Hammond, Craig Charles, Fuse ODG and David Olusoga appear in vision amid a kaleidoscope of cultural imagery and textures as narrators Ashley Banjo, Noel Clarke, Maya Jama and Angela Griffin tell us "It's all about" everything from "the music... the style...the literature... the arts... the discovery... people coming together" to "... It's all about the past....the future...it's all about the culture."

Creatives Adie Headley and Anthony Dziworshie, who led the project for ITV Creative, said in a joint statement: "The inspiration behind our spot was to celebrate Black culture and all its many facets. We wanted to create a piece of work that showed the vast range of skills, talents and professions that Black people have thrived within across Britain, for many generations. Too often Black people are portrayed as being monolithic, so from shining a light on staple-holds such as Mary Seacole to modern day writers like David Olusoga, we wanted to show the breadth of how Black culture has influenced Britain."

The core team at ITV that worked on the trails also includes producer Angela Lyttle and production assistant Ttwarna Cordwell. The team worked in tandem with freelance design director Ogo Okpue and collaborated with music producer Khwezi on the bespoke and distinctive soundtrack, with sound design by Alex Bingham at Machine Sound.

Throughout Black History Month, ITV's on air branding will be designed by Black artists, who have created artwork for the channel idents as part of ITV Creates. This is a project that has seen artwork by individual and community group artists feature in channel idents since 2019.

Artists include: Hamed Maiye, Neequaye Dreph Dsane, King Owusu, Alfie Kungu and Carleen De Sözer.

Ade Rawcliffe, ITV Director of Diversity & Inclusion, said: "ITV has never marked Black History Month in quite this way before. In our Diversity Acceleration Plan, which we launched in July, we committed to ensuring that ITV commissioning better represents contemporary British life on screen within the next 12 months. As well as commissioning programmes showcasing Black British talent, both onscreen and behind the camera, we have also organised a range of talks from amongst others David Lammy, Munroe Bergdorf and David Olusoga and events for all ITV staff, led by our staff network ITV Embrace.

"Our ambition is that the legacy of Black History Month remains across our output, on screen and off and all year round."

The new ITV shows coming up in October are: IRL with Team Charlene; Alison Hammond: Back To School; Sorry I Didn't Know Craig & Danny Funny, Black and on TV. These will be shown along with updated programmes including David Harewood-presented film In the Shadow of Mary Seacole and Martin Luther King by Trevor McDonald, alongside acclaimed documentary First Among Equals: The Laurie Cunningham Story.

And ITV's flagship daytime shows will be supporting Black History Month with a range of on air activity throughout the month of October.

ITV's flagship daytime shows will be supporting Black History Month with a range of on air activity throughout the month of October.

Today, (October 1st) Good Morning Britain launched it's series of 'Black History Icons' short films to run throughout the month, which will recognise and celebrate the black figures and events that have changed history, all voiced by The Chase's Shaun Wallace.

Lorraine's award-winning 'Change And Check' campaign returns featuring the show's Dr Amir and his mother, Mama Khan, who discuss the importance of routine breast screenings for BAME women following her breast cancer diagnosis during a mammogram. Plus Lorraine's fashion expert Candice Brathwaite will look at what growing up as a British black woman means to her.

On This Morning Alison Hammond will take on the special role of Guest Editor, plus there will be regular health features - Black Health Matters - throughout the month that will focus on the issues affecting the BAME community. The programme will also deliver hair and beauty advice, musical performances and exclusive case studies to get everybody talking.

And as part of their Inspirational Women strand, Loose Women will be honouring black British women who have changed the world we live in today, featuring empowering interviews with guests such as Baroness Doreen Lawrence. Loose Women will also continue to tackle important taboo subjects close to our panellists' hearts. Kelle Bryan, Judi Love and Brenda Edwards will be leading the debate on issues such as why magazines are still not embracing black cover stars, exploring that little-discussed issue of secondary trauma and why black mums face discrimination in the labour ward.

BritBox is also showing the Black History Month Collection - details further below.

All Black History Month content will be available on ITV Hub, which will also feature an exclusive collection of drama, documentary and comedy content to mark Black History Month. Viewers will have a second chance to watch the pioneering true crime film The Murder of Stephen Lawrence, a well as Stephen Lawrence: Has Britain Changed?, a special programme examining how equal Britain really is. Comedy comes courtesy of Timewasters series one and two, Kate and Koji, Comedy Basement, panel show Don't Hate The Playaz series one and two and sketch shows The Ty and Ky Show, Pranksterz and All About the Bants. Unsaid Stories, a four part collection of short films inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, is also available on the platform.

The new ITV programmes are:
IRL with Team Charlene - TX 3 October on ITV and CITV
IRL with Team Charlene is a new show that aims to break down and explain major issues for children. In this special, ITV News Presenter Charlene White is joined by her team of celebrity friends, experts and young people from across the UK. They'll talk about everything from what racism is and the Black Lives Matter movement to why we have different skin colours. Through a mix of animation, musical performances and personal stories the team takes an engaging and accessible approach to serious events.

The programme will transmit simultaneously on CITV and ITV. Charlene White is the co-producer with Jessica Symons as Executive Producer for ITN Productions.

IRL with Team Charlene is commissioned for ITV by Paul Mortimer, Head of Digital Channels and Acquisitions, Michael Jermey, Director of News and Current Affairs and Gemma John-Lewis, Assistant Commissioner, Entertainment
Alison Hammond: Back To School - TX 6 October at 9pm on ITV
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Alison Hammond goes on the ultimate school history trip with a twist. In her own unique and inimitable style, Alison will be travelling the length and breadth of Britain to key historical sites - from Hadrian's Wall to Hampton Court looking at the history we're all taught in schools, but from a different angle. Revelatory and personal, the journey will uncover black figures throughout the ages who have been overlooked from the pages of British history and school textbooks. Alison will be given an insight into the significance of black people in Britain's history by experts who open her eyes to a new perspective on our country's past and will explore our current teaching of history in schools. Directed by Ryan Samuda and Mariam Hussain and Series produced by Anna Manton. Sue Walton and Noleen Golding are executive producers for ITV Studios Daytime.

Alison Hammond: Back To School is commissioned for ITV by Satmohan Panesar, Factual Commissioning Editor.
Sorry I Didn't Know - TX 6 October at 10.30pm on ITV
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Sorry, I Didn't Know is a brand new panel show with a twist that will start airing on ITV during week 41 (3-9 October).

Airing during Black History Month and part of specially commissioned shows on the channel the show will be bold and tongue-in-cheek viewing.

Sorry, I Didn't Know will be hosted by Jimmy Akingbola (star of hit ITV sitcom, Kate & Koji) and he'll preside over two raucous teams headed up by Chizzy Akudolu and Judi Love.

Each episode will see the two teams (of three) battle it out over four rounds, unveiling interesting Black history facts along the way.

The show will be a riotous showcase of some of the hottest comedians from diverse backgrounds as they have their knowledge tested of untold stories and unsung heroes.

Guests appearing throughout the four episode run include Angie Le Mar, Humza Arshad, Verona Rose, Toby Williams and Shaun Wallace.

Sorry I Didn't Know is commissioned for ITV by Joe Mace, Entertainment Commissioning Editor and Gemma John-Lewis, Entertainment Assistant Commissioner and is produced by TriForce Productions.
Craig & Danny Funny, Black and on TV - TX TBC October
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In celebration of this year's Black History Month, We take a look back on some of Britain's greatest comedy legends. Through a combination of archive footage and star interviews, we'll travel through the comedy years, from Britain's first black comic star, the iconic Charlie Williams, to rising stars of today. We will celebrate genre-defining shows from Desmond's to The Real McCoy and tell the story of Black Comedy Legends that brought laughter to a nation.

This celebration of the work of pioneering stars will draw our focus from their work to the present day to offer an insight into the legacy of decades of comedy talent that has touched the new generation of black comedians who are now shaping the future.

Craig & Danny: Funny, Black and on TV i s commissioned for ITV by Satmohan Panesar, Factual Commissioning Editor. and is produced by Big Deal Films. Series Producer is Marina Warsama and executive producers are Dhanny Joshi, Thomas Stogdon and Maxine Watson.
BritBox Black History Month Collection
Black History Month will be marked with a collection of documentaries, television series and films celebrating Black British voices. Documentaries in the collection include Mo Farah: Race of His Life, Shirley: The Shirley Bassey Story, Africa and Britain: A Forgotten History and the series Africa presented by Ade Adepitan. TV series featured include all six seasons of Desmonds (1989); the classic sitcom set in a Peckham barber shop, and the second season of super sharp sketch show Famalam (2019). Films including Mike Leigh's Secrets and Lies (1996) starring Marianne Jean-Baptist and Playing Away (1986), a comedy of manners from Horace Ové starring Norman Beaton complete the collection.

Satmohan Panesar, who has overseen commissioning for Black History Month, said: "These programmes span Factual, Entertainment, and Children's in an effort to reach out to viewers across the board at all levels. We hope viewers will enjoy the incredible stories, wonderful entertainment and fascinating people they focus on as we look at Britain from a vital and different perspective and celebrate the contribution of black people to Britain's story, our culture and our lives."

Two of the original main channel commissions are being made by BAME-led indies and off-screen BAME producers will take on development opportunities as they progress their careers in line with ITV's Step Up 60 initiative.

Panesar added: "Diversity on-screen must be accompanied by a commitment to diversity off-screen, with first time ITV primetime directing credits for Samuda and Hussain and Manton taking the reigns as a new series producer. We look forward to watching their progress in the industry."

Note to Editors: ITV recently ran a series of short films under the banner "Black Voices", which was shown across ITV and STV's promotional airtime, social feeds, as well as a dedicated campaign site at itv.com/blackvoices.

The series offered black voices a platform to share stories of racism and their vision of changes they believe should happen.

Aiming to promote understanding and discussion around a cause of profound importance and to contribute towards inspiring long term change, Black Voices featured a range of people discussing their experiences of racism, including MPs Helen Grant and David Lammy, founder of Operation Black Vote Simon Woolley, journalist Charlene White, actor Jay Kontzle and other colleagues from across ITV.

Also shown in August was Drama series, Unsaid Stories, a series of short films inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement. Each of the drama shorts featured powerful and impactful stories illustrating the importance of black perspectives.

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"It's All About..." Black History Month on ITV

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Watch and embed this video on your website. Simply play and click on the embed icon upper right to copy the embed code. "It's All About..." Black History Month on ITV Black culture is brought brightly into focus from today on ITV as viewers will see brand new on air trails along with channel idents marking and celebrating Black History Month.

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Look for the Black & Proud

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Watch your favourite shows online, from Channel 4, E4 and Walter Presents

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The Human Trafficking Foundation grew out of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery.

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Human Trafficking Foundation

The Human Trafficking Foundation grew out of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery with three objectives:

1. To shape policy and legislation by equipping parliamentarians and policy makers, lead government departments, local authorities, police and statutory agencies to better understand the extent and nature of human trafficking, and the need to adjust rapidly to changing trends;

2. To provide a sustained and collective voice amongst NGOs, civil society, and voluntary organisations fighting modern day slavery so that short-comings in current policy can be identified and addressed, and how that can best be tackled; and

3. Identifying opportunities for new and different types of intervention within the rapidly evolving landscape of human trafficking

In response to the Covid crisis, we have been collating helpful resources for organisations working with survivors here. If you have any resources you would like us to share here or in our newsletter, please contact katy@humantraffickingfoundation.org.

We have also been convening regular online meetings to hear from experts working across the sector in response to the pandemic. If you would like to attend these meetings, please contact us to sign up to our mailing list.

UK Anti-Slavery Day, 18th October, is a chance to raise awareness of modern slavery, highlight the important work being done by NGOs and statutory authorities, and focus attention on areas of policy and practice where improvements still need to be made.
Awards: To mark Anti-Slavery Day, the Human Trafficking Foundation hosts an annual Anti-Slavery Day Media Awards to highlight the contribution of the media and outstanding individuals in the fight against slavery. Details of last year's winners are available here.

The Human Trafficking Foundation, in partnership with ATLEU and the Modern Slavery Police Transformation Unit, has produced and continues to develop a national map of support services available for survivors in the UK. Find out more here.

The Human Trafficking Foundation established the Victim Fund with a grant from the Vandervell Foundation. We supplement this with funding from other supporters. The fund is available to help survivors of human trafficking and modern slavery with small one-off grants to meet their immediate needs when no other sources of funding are available.

More information can be found here. Please note that we are continuing to accept new applications.

The Human Trafficking Foundation's Advisory Forum newsletter supports NGOs and professionals engaged in anti-trafficking work to stay informed of policy updates and relevant inquiries. It is also an opportunity for stakeholders to share their own updates, including reports, job vacancies and service developments. To be added to our mailing list, please email katy@humantraffickingfoundation.org.

The Human Trafficking Foundation doesn't provide direct support or advice to survivors of human trafficking. If you suspect human trafficking or modern slavery, contact the Modern Slavery Helpline on 08000 121 700. In an emergency call 999

We are incredibly grateful for any donation you can make to help us continue to influence anti-trafficking policy and improve the support provided to survivors.

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Human Trafficking Foundation To shape policy and legislation by equipping parliamentarians and policy makers, lead government departments, local authorities, police and statutory agencies to better understand the extent and nature of human trafficking, and the need to adjust rapidly to changing trends; To provide a sustained and collective voice amongst

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This Anti-Slavery Day we want to spread this message: modern slavery is closer than we think.

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The history of British slave ownership has been buried: now its scale can be revealed

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The history of British slave ownership has been buried: now its scale can be revealed

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The past has a disconcerting habit of bursting, uninvited and unwelcome, into the present. This year history gate-crashed modern America in the form of a 150-year-old document: a few sheets of paper that compelled Hollywood actor Ben Affleck to issue a public apology and forced the highly regarded US public service broadcaster PBS to launch an internal investigation.

The document, which emerged during the production of Finding Your Roots, a celebrity genealogy show, is neither unique nor unusual. It is one of thousands that record the primal wound of the American republic - slavery. It lists the names of 24 slaves, men and women, who in 1858 were owned by Benjamin L Cole, Affleck's great-great-great-grandfather. When this uncomfortable fact came to light, Affleck asked the show's producers to conceal his family's links to slavery. Internal emails discussing the programme were later published by WikiLeaks, forcing Affleck to admit in a Facebook post: "I didn't want any television show about my family to include a guy who owned slaves. I was embarrassed."

It was precisely because slaves were reduced to property that they appear so regularly in historic documents, both in the US and in Britain. As property, slaves were listed in plantation accounts and itemised in inventories. They were recorded for tax reasons and detailed alongside other transferable goods on the pages of thousands of wills. Few historical documents cut to the reality of slavery more than lists of names written alongside monetary values. It is now almost two decades since I had my first encounter with British plantation records, and I still feel a surge of emotion when I come across entries for slave children who, at only a few months old, have been ascribed a value in sterling; the sale of children and the separation of families was among the most bitterly resented aspects of an inhuman system.

Slavery resurfaces in America regularly. The disadvantage and discrimination that disfigures the lives and limits the life chances of so many African-Americans is the bitter legacy of the slave system and the racism that underwrote and outlasted it. Britain, by contrast, has been far more successful at covering up its slave-owning and slave-trading past. Whereas the cotton plantations of the American south were established on the soil of the continental United States, British slavery took place 3,000 miles away in the Caribbean.

That geographic distance made it possible for slavery to be largely airbrushed out of British history, following the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833. Many of us today have a more vivid image of American slavery than we have of life as it was for British-owned slaves on the plantations of the Caribbean. The word slavery is more likely to conjure up images of Alabama cotton fields and whitewashed plantation houses, of Roots, Gone With The Wind and 12 Years A Slave, than images of Jamaica or Barbados in the 18th century. This is not an accident.

The history of British slavery has been buried. The thousands of British families who grew rich on the slave trade, or from the sale of slave-produced sugar, in the 17th and 18th centuries, brushed those uncomfortable chapters of their dynastic stories under the carpet. Today, across the country, heritage plaques on Georgian townhouses describe former slave traders as "West India merchants", while slave owners are hidden behind the equally euphemistic term "West India planter". Thousands of biographies written in celebration of notable 17th and 18th-century Britons have reduced their ownership of human beings to the footnotes, or else expunged such unpleasant details altogether. The Dictionary of National Biography has been especially culpable in this respect. Few acts of collective forgetting have been as thorough and as successful as the erasing of slavery from the Britain's "island story". If it was geography that made this great forgetting possible, what completed the disappearing act was our collective fixation with the one redemptive chapter in the whole story. William Wilberforce and the abolitionist crusade, first against the slave trade and then slavery itself, has become a figleaf behind which the larger, longer and darker history of slavery has been concealed.

Plan of a slave ship showinmg how slaves were stowed, manacled, into the hold. Photograph: Christopher Jones/Bristol Museum

It is still the case that Wilberforce remains the only household name of a history that begins during the reign of Elizabeth I and ends in the 1830s. There is no slave trader or slave owner, and certainly no enslaved person, who can compete with Wilberforce when it comes to name recognition. Little surprise then that when, in 2007, we marked the bicentenary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, the only feature film to emerge from the commemoration was Amazing Grace, a Wilberforce biopic.

George Orwell once likened Britain to a wealthy family that maintains a guilty silence about the sources of its wealth. Orwell, whose real name was Eric Blair, had seen that conspiracy of silence at close quarters. His father, Richard W Blair, was a civil servant who oversaw the production of opium on plantations near the Indian-Nepalese border and supervised the export of that lethal crop to China. The department for which the elder Blair worked was called, unashamedly, the opium department. However, the Blair family fortune - which had been largely squandered by the time Eric was born - stemmed from their investments in plantations far from India.

The Blair name is one of thousands that appear in a collection of documents held at the National Archives in Kew that have the potential to do to Britain what the hackers of WikiLeaks and the researchers of PBS did to Affleck. The T71 files consist of 1,631 volumes of leather-bound ledgers and neatly tied bundles of letters that have lain in the archives for 180 years, for the most part unexamined. They are the records and the correspondence of the Slave Compensation Commission.

The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 formally freed 800,000 Africans who were then the legal property of Britain's slave owners. What is less well known is that the same act contained a provision for the financial compensation of the owners of those slaves, by the British taxpayer, for the loss of their "property". The compensation commission was the government body established to evaluate the claims of the slave owners and administer the distribution of the £20m the government had set aside to pay them off. That sum represented 40% of the total government expenditure for 1834. It is the modern equivalent of between £16bn and £17bn.

The compensation of Britain's 46,000 slave owners was the largest bailout in British history until the bailout of the banks in 2009. Not only did the slaves receive nothing, under another clause of the act they were compelled to provide 45 hours of unpaid labour each week for their former masters, for a further four years after their supposed liberation. In effect, the enslaved paid part of the bill for their own manumission.

The records of the Slave Compensation Commission are an unintended byproduct of the scheme. They represent a near complete census of British slavery as it was on 1 August, 1834, the day the system ended. For that one day we have a full list of Britain's slave owners. All of them. The T71s tell us how many slaves each of them owned, where those slaves lived and toiled, and how much compensation the owners received for them. Although the existence of the T71s was never a secret, it was not until 2010 that a team from University College London began to systematically analyse them. The Legacies of British Slave-ownership project, which is still continuing, is led by Professor Catherine Hall and Dr Nick Draper, and the picture of slave ownership that has emerged from their work is not what anyone was expecting.

The large slave owners, the men of the "West India interest", who owned huge estates from which they drew vast fortunes, appear in the files of the commission. The man who received the most money from the state was John Gladstone, the father of Victorian prime minister William Ewart Gladstone. He was paid £106,769 in compensation for the 2,508 slaves he owned across nine plantations, the modern equivalent of about £80m. Given such an investment, it is perhaps not surprising that William Gladstone's maiden speech in parliament was in defence of slavery.

The records show that for the 218 men and women he regarded as his property, Charles Blair, the great-grandfather of George Orwell, was paid the more modest sum of £4,442 - the modern equivalent of about £3m. There are other famous names hidden within the records. Ancestors of the novelist Graham Greene, the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and the architect Sir George Gilbert Scott all received compensation for slaves. As did a distant ancestor of David Cameron. But what is most significant is the revelation of the smaller-scale slave owners.

Slave ownership, it appears, was far more common than has previously been presumed. Many of these middle-class slave owners had just a few slaves, possessed no land in the Caribbean and rented their slaves out to landowners, in work gangs.These bit-players were home county vicars, iron manufacturers from the Midlands and lots and lots of widows. About 40% of the slave owners living in the colonies were women. Then, as now, women tended to outlive their husbands and simply inherited human property through their partner's wills.

The geographic spread of the slave owners who were resident in Britain in 1834 was almost as unexpected as the gender breakdown. Slavery was once thought of as an activity largely limited to the ports from which the ships of the triangular trade set sail; Bristol, London, Liverpool and Glasgow. Yet there were slave owners across the country, from Cornwall to the Orkneys. In proportion to population, the highest rates of slave ownership are found in Scotland.

The T71 files have been converted into an online database; a free, publicly available resource.

During the production of a documentary series about Britain's slave owners for the BBC, made in partnership with UCL, all of my colleagues who learned of the existence of the database found themselves compelled to enter their own family names. Those whose surnames flashed up on screen experienced, like Ben Affleck, a strange sense of embarrassment, irrespective of whether the slave owners in question were potentially ancestors.

There are, however, millions of people, in the Caribbean and the UK, who do not need a database to tell them that they are linked to Britain's hidden slave-owning past. The descendants of the enslaved carry the same English surnames that appear in the ledgers of the Slave Compensation Commission - Gladstone, Beckford, Hibbert, Blair, etc - names that were imposed on their ancestors, initials that were sometimes branded on their skin, in order to mark them as items of property.
Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners, the first of two episodes, presented by David Olusoga, will be broadcast on Wednesday on BBC2. Click here for the Legacies of British Slave Ownership Database
THE LONG ROAD TO ABOLITION

■ In 1807, parliament passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, effective throughout the British empire.

■ It wasn't until 1838 that slavery was abolished in British colonies through the Slavery Abolition Act, giving all slaves in the British empire their freedom

■ It is estimated about 12.5 million people were transported as slaves from Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean between the 16th century and 1807.

■ When the Slavery Abolition Act was passed, there were 46,000 slave owners in Britain, according to the Slave Compensation Commission, the government body established to evaluate the claims of the slave owners

■ British slave owners received a total of £20m (£16bn in today's money) in compensation when slavery was abolished. Among those who received payouts were the ancestors of novelists George Orwell and Graham Greene.

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The history of British slave ownership has been buried: now its scale can be revealed

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A new BBC documentary tells how a trove of documents lays bare the names of Britain's 46,000 slave owners, including relatives of Gladstone and Orwell

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Colonial slavery shaped modern Britain and we all still live with its legacies. The slave-owners were one very important means by which the fruits of slavery were transmitted to metropolitan Britain. We believe that research and analysis of this group are key to understanding the extent and the limits of slavery's role in shaping British history and leaving lasting legacies that reach into the present.

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Jamaican director of UCL's slavery research centre: British racism is 'clear and sharp'

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Jamaican director of UCL's slavery research centre: British racism is 'clear and sharp'

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atthew Smith did not plan to quit Jamaica. Until last year the historian, who previously headed the history and archaeology department of the University of the West Indies at Mona, near Kingston, had made a point of staying. "I wanted my career to be an example that you don't have to leave," he explains on a video call. But when the directorship of UCL's Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership came up, he couldn't resist. "I couldn't think of a better job," he says. "For me it was the perfect way to bridge research on the Caribbean with meaningful public engagement."

Smith, 46, takes over the reins of the centre at an extraordinary time. Awareness of the UK's role in slavery is arguably at an all-time high after the toppling of the statue of the Bristol slave trader Edward Colston in June.

UCL's research centre has played a part: its database of compensation payments to British slave owners opened up this slice of history to the public. But Smith believes this knowledge is just the start of a long-overdue shift in historical awareness.

British Black Lives Matter activists are shining a strong light on British history and the choices made about how to remember it, and universities are among the institutions being forced to confront the ways in which they benefited from slavery and colonialism. Last year the University of Glasgow agreed to pay £20m in reparations via a partnership with the University of the West Indies. In Oxford, a commission is due to report on the future of Oriel College's statue of Cecil Rhodes next year.

At UCL, efforts to confront the racist past have focused on the university's links to eugenics, with a decision in June to rename facilities named after the eugenicists Francis Galton and Karl Pearson. Smith believes such steps are important and looks forward to joining the discussions about racism, past and present, at UCL. Currently he is working remotely from Williams College in Massachusetts, where he was staying when Covid-19 struck.

Having experienced racist treatment as a postgraduate in Florida, he is acutely conscious of the obstacles black and ethnic minority students face today. "The fiction told to descendants of the enslaved was that the horrible past of racial exploitation was over," he says. "That fiction continues in 2020." He says he has noticed a "bluntness" in British racism: "it doesn't pretend to be diplomatic, it's very clear and sharp".

In addition to financial reparations and forms of recompense such as positive action schemes, Smith believes history itself can serve a reparative purpose. UCL's database containing details of some 61,000 individuals connected to the slavery business, about a quarter of whom were women, opened many people's eyes to the fact that when slavery was abolished, British slave-owners were compensated while slaves were not. Now Smith and his colleagues plan to switch their focus to the lives of those who were enslaved.

University College London, which is addressing its racist links. Photograph: Tony French/Alamy

"Looking at the decline of sugar, and the establishment of free villages, and joining all that up with the corpus of remarkable historical scholarship on post-slavery Caribbean societies can give us a much firmer understanding of the impact of slavery on the enslaved and their descendants, how it led to emigration and so on."

Smith's enthusiasm for his subject comes across in everything he says. His mother, who worked as a freelance typesetter after leaving school at 15, encouraged him to read magazines she worked on, including the Jamaica Journal. His father was a self-employed salesman who took pride in his studious son. Smith says he has never forgotten the atmosphere of the lessons in which he and his classmates were first taught about their ancestors' struggle for freedom. "The history of slavery was fundamental, I learned it very early on, I may not have understood every aspect but I was very much aware of it as an aspect of our national story," he says.

In the UK, by contrast, slavery has traditionally been about as far from a main component of the national story as it is possible to be. Where it is discussed, the dominant narrative has usually been about the fight for abolition led by William Wilberforce.

"It was an active campaign that was very much connected to black consciousness," Smith says of the work done by the first generation of post-independence Caribbean historians, who are among his heroes (and one of whom, Eric Williams, became the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago). But while he was drawn to follow in their footsteps, finding new ways to interpret the hierarchies of race, colour, class, language and nationality that shaped plantation societies and persist to the present day, he has long been conscious of swimming against a tide of those who would rather forget.

"It might seem like a strange thing to say but because they learned it through school, and because of its darkness, there is a resistance to studying slavery among Jamaican students in the 21st century. There is this sense that it is more of a lodestone than a launching pad for success."

The first anthropometric laboratory, c1885, of Francis Galton, who had links with UCL. Anthropometry is the study of the measurements and proportions of the human body. Photograph: SSPL/Getty

Researching the lives of slaves is also difficult. There are registries of slaves, but no Caribbean equivalent to the first-person account of the American captive Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave. Smith traced five families over five generations for one of his books, and explains that while the physical evidence of slavery is everywhere in Jamaica - the university campus where he worked for 18 years is based on two former plantations - research about people is made "very complicated by the assigning of new names, the division of families ... you hit pitfalls and roadblocks in the early 19th century".

The official investigation into the Windrush scandal said that "poor understanding of Britain's colonial history" was one reason why British people who had arrived in the UK from the Caribbean as children were appallingly mistreated.

Smith plans to work with museums and other partners to increase awareness. But it is not only in the UK that he thinks Caribbean voices, and those from other former colonies, need to be raised. In the US, too, he has been troubled by the lack of interest. And so it is as a kind of ambassador that he comes to London, with his wife, a social scientist, with plans for digital classrooms bringing together British students with students in Barbados, Trinidad or Jamaica.

"Looking at what happened to freed people and their descendants means having an active dialogue with the Caribbean, and this is what excites me."

* This article was amended on 24 September 2020 to set out the full name of the country Trinidad and Tobago.

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Jamaican director of UCL's slavery research centre: British racism is 'clear and sharp'

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atthew Smith did not plan to quit Jamaica. Until last year the historian, who previously headed the history and archaeology department of the University of the West Indies at Mona, near Kingston, had made a point of staying. "I wanted my career to be an example that you don't have to leave," he explains on a video call.

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Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners - Part 1 of 2 - Profit and Loss

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Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners - Part 1 of 2 - Profit and Loss

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In 1834 Britain abolished slavery, a defining and celebrated moment in our national history. What has been largely forgotten is that abolition came at a price. The government of the day took the extraordinary step of compensating the slave owners for loss of their 'property', as Britain's slave owners were paid £17bn in today's money, whilst the slaves received nothing.

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Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners - 1. Profit and Loss

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Historian David Olusoga uncovers the untold stories of Britain's slave owners.

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Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners - Part 2 of 2 - The Price of Freedom

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Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners - Part 2 of 2 - The Price of Freedom

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Historian David Olusoga continues his examination of Britain's forgotten slave owners. In this episode, David explores how in 1834 the government arrived at the extraordinary decision to compensate the slave owners with the equivalent of £17 billion in today's money. Tracing the bitter propaganda war waged between the pro-slavery lobby and the abolitionists, he reveals that paying off the slave owners for the loss of their human property was, ultimately, the only way to bring the system to an end.

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Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners - 2. The Price of Freedom

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David Olusoga traces the propaganda war waged between pro-slavery lobby and abolitionists.

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Week 3 Quiz

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A series of striking images of modern slavery across the industries – including agriculture, construction, maritime, cannabis farming and food processing, child trafficking for sexual exploitation and forced prostitution.

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Lincoln Cathedral will be lit up yellow this Sunday highlighting the plight of thousands of victims of modern-day slavery to mark the tenth national Anti-Slavery Day (Oct 18th).

Anti Slavery Day 2020. Invisible People. We See You.

It is one of two Church of England cathedrals leading on the anti-slavery initiative this Sunday in partnership with The Clewer Initiative, with Ely Cathedral also at the forefront of the campaign and Sunday services at both cathedrals will focus on modern day slavery.

Snapshots of life in modern slavery has created a haunting photographic exhibition which opened this week in Lincoln. Entitled 'Invisible People,' the free exhibition is on display in the newly opened Dean's Green outside the cathedral. Designed by the National Crime Agency, it features a series of striking images of modern slavery across the industries - including agriculture, construction, maritime, cannabis farming and food processing, child trafficking for sexual exploitation and forced prostitution. The exhibition runs until next Monday.

Similarly in Chester Cathedral a new exhibition by London-based Syrian artist, Sara Shamma opened on Saturday. Called Modern Slavery it highlights the global issue of modern slavery and is based on interviews with women who have lived experience of modern slavery and experts in the field. The exhibition runs until 22 October.

This Sunday in Ely Cathedral, Bishop Alastair Redfern, Chair of the Church of England's anti-slavery group, The Clewer Initiative, will preach and this will be followed by a livestream presentation on modern slavery and exploitative work with a short conversation.

It is part of Ely Cathedral's Called to Change programme which was born out of the lessons learned from the global pandemic, and looks at justice and community in the light of how much we human beings depend upon each other for our wellbeing and how we are called to care for, and, about the world. The NCA's "Invisible People: Human Trafficking in the UK" will also be on display will be in the Cathedral's North Transept throughout Sunday 18 October.

Bishop Alastair Redfern said:
"The larger initiatives at Lincoln and Ely are wonderful examples of what is possible when a community - both church and local government - come together to raise awareness of modern slavery. These striking exhibitions are an excellent way of reminding people that slavery is not a thing in the past and help them know what tell-tale signs to look out for. We hope that the activities surrounding Anti-Slavery Day on Sunday 18th October will result in many more people understanding what modern slavery looks like and inspiring others to join the fight against it."
The Clewer Initiative has also put together a list of six practical actions individuals can take to make a difference. These include becoming a modern slavery champion, starting a poster campaign, organising a book club, downloading the Safe Car Wash or Farm Work Welfare app, discovering your personal slavery footprint and spreading the word on social with The Clewer Initative's #WeSeeYou campaign.

More here > The Clewer Initiative

The Clewer Initiative was launched in 2016 with the backing of then Prime Minister Theresa May and the Archbishop of Canterbury. It exists to raise awareness of modern slavery, enhance victim identification and provide victim care and support. The Clewer Initiative is funded by the Clewer Sisters, an Anglican order of Augustinian nuns founded in 1852 to help marginalised, young women who found themselves homeless and drawn into the sex trade.

More about Sunday's Anti Slavery Day and the Feast of St Luke here.

On Sunday, cathedrals will be saying a prayer for the nation as stricter restrictions are applied and our NHS staff and the Social Care community are still looking after and protecting so many sick and ill people. The Prayer for the Nation can be read here.

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Anti Slavery Day - Invisible People - The Association of English Cathedrals

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Lincoln Cathedral will be lit up yellow this Sunday highlighting the plight of thousands of victims of modern-day slavery to mark the tenth national Anti-Slavery Day (Oct 18th). It is one of two Church of England cathedrals leading on the anti-slavery initiative this Sunday in partnership with The Clewer Initiative, with Ely Cathedral also at the forefront of the campaign and Sunday services at both cathedrals will focus on modern day slavery.

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Inside Cinema - Black History Month: 1. Jordan Peele 

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Inside Cinema - Black History Month: 1. Jordan Peele 

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Documentary that explores the work of Jordan Peele, an era-defining horror auteur, incisive social critic and influential media mogul.

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Inside Cinema - Black History Month: 1. Jordan Peele

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Documentary from Ellen E Jones on the zeitgeist-capturing film director Jordan Peele.

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Inside Cinema - Black History Month: 2. Ava DuVernay

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Inside Cinema - Black History Month: 2. Ava DuVernay

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Documentary that explores the work of a film director of groundbreaking firsts. Ava DuVernay is the first black woman to win Best Director at Sundance, for her romantic drama Middle of Nowhere, the first black woman to direct a $100-million budget film, the youth fantasy drama A Wrinkle in Time, and the first black woman to direct a film Oscar-nominated for Best Picture - Selma, the first major feature film about Martin Luther King Jr.

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Inside Cinema - Black History Month: 2. Ava DuVernay

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Documentary from Corrina Antrobus on groundbreaking film director Ava DuVernay.

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Inside Cinema - Black History Month: 3. Barry Jenkins

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Inside Cinema - Black History Month: 3. Barry Jenkins

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An exploration of the work of Barry Jenkins, a trailblazing film director whose Best Picture winner Moonlight made Oscar night history in 2017, beating La La Land to Best Picture following a dramatic and unprecedented envelope mix-up.

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Inside Cinema - Black History Month: 3. Barry Jenkins

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Documentary from Grace Barber-Plentie on trailblazing Moonlight director Barry Jenkins.

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Inside Cinema - Black History Month: 4. Ryan Coogler

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Inside Cinema - Black History Month: 4. Ryan Coogler

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An exploration of the work of Ryan Coogler, a record-breaking film director, whose Oscar-winning and box office-conquering superhero adventure Black Panther scaled new heights for big-budget black cinema in Hollywood. Written and voiced Kambole Campbell, a writer and film critic for Empire Magazine, Little White Lies and Sight & Sound, this short profile documentary follows Coogler’s career from independent drama Fruitvale Station through Rocky franchise spin-off Creed to comic-book epic Black Panther.

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Black History Month: 3. Barry Jenkins

Documentary from Grace Barber-Plentie on trailblazing Moonlight director Barry Jenkins. ...

Documentary from Grace Barber-Plentie on trailblazing Moonlight director Barry Jenkins.

14 mins Available for 25 days

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Inside Cinema - Black History Month: 4. Ryan Coogler

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Documentary from Kambole Campbell on Ryan Coogler, director of Black Panther and Creed.

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Enslaved with Samuel L Jackson - A Stolen People

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Enslaved with Samuel L Jackson - A Stolen People

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Samuel L Jackson traces his ancestry to Gabon, visiting the coastal area of Loango National Park to see from where his enslaved ancestors were shipped in their millions to the Americas.

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Enslaved with Samuel L Jackson - Series 1: 1. A People Stolen

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Samuel L Jackson and a team of journalists and divers explore 400 years of slavery.

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Enslaved with Samuel L Jackson - A Precious Cargo

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Enslaved with Samuel L Jackson - A Precious Cargo

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Samuel L Jackson - with journalists Afua Hirsch and Simcha Jacobovici - examines how, for over 400 years, the trans-Atlantic slave trade became the greatest wealth-generating machine the world had known and the engine that drove the global economy.

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Enslaved with Samuel L Jackson - Series 1: 2. A Precious Cargo

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How the trans-Atlantic slave trade became the world's greatest wealth-generating machine.

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LINCOLN AND ELY SHINE A LIGHT ON MODERN SLAVERY

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LINCOLN AND ELY SHINE A LIGHT ON MODERN SLAVERY

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In Lincoln, The Clewer Initiative has worked alongside Lincolnshire County Council and the Safer Lincolnshire Partnership to bring a striking photographic exhibition to the city.

Entitled 'Invisible People', it features a series of striking images, capturing snapshots of life in modern slavery - in agriculture, construction, maritime, cannabis farming and food processing, child trafficking for sexual exploitation and forced prostitution. Each image comes with written commentary describing what the viewer is seeing, and information about signs which may indicate someone is a victim.

Put together by the National Crime Agency (NCA), it will be on display outside the main entrance of Lincoln Cathedral from 12-19th October. On Anti-Slavery Day itself, Lincoln Cathedral will be holding a special Eucharist service in the morning and lighting the cathedral in yellow from dusk onwards. It hopes many people will notice the dramatic illumination.

The exhibition and illumination are the beginning of a wider programme of activity in Lincolnshire. The Lincolnshire County Council and the Safer Lincolnshire Partnership have worked with The Clewer Initiative to develop Lincolnshire-specific resources to raise awareness about modern slavery and will be organising more events over the coming months.

In Ely, The Clewer Initiative has partnered with the team at Ely Cathedral to bring a similar, pop up exhibition to the city. The NCA's "Invisible People: Human Trafficking in the UK" display will be in the Cathedral's North Transept throughout Sunday 18 October. There will also be a special, livestreamed service at 10.30am to mark Anti-Slavery Day with Rt Revd Dr Alastair Redfern, former Bishop of Derby and Chairman of The Clewer Initiative preaching on the subject. After the service, Shayne Tyler, Group Compliance Director for Fresca Group and campaigner against modern slavery and exploitative work, will give a short presentation, followed by a panel discussion with Shayne, Canon Martin of Ely Cathedral and Caroline Virgo from The Clewer Initiative.

These are just two ways in which cities in the UK are marking Anti-Slavery Day. We wish them the best of luck and hope that many people will learn more about modern slavery through the exhibitions and services.

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Lincoln and Ely shine a light on modern slavery - The Clewer Initiative

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In Lincoln, The Clewer Initiative has worked alongside Lincolnshire County Council and the Safer Lincolnshire Partnership to bring a striking photographic exhibition to the city. Entitled 'Invisible People', it features a series of striking images, capturing snapshots of life in modern slavery - in agriculture, construction, maritime, cannabis farming and food processing, child trafficking for sexual exploitation and forced prostitution.