Black History Month No 24: Floella Benjamin

Official portrait of Baroness Benjamin crop 2.1, 2019.jpg
Floella Benjamin

October is Black History Month, so every day during October I will be posting up an introduction to an historical person of colour with a place in the history of the United Kingdom.

‘Historical’ includes people still alive today, doesn’t it? Damn straight it does! So the last eight people in this journey will be modern Britons who have put their mark on this country in their various ways.

Floella Benjamin, Baroness Benjamin, DBE, DL was born in Pointe-à-Pierre, Trinidad, in 1949 – one of six siblings, with three brothers and two sisters. An actor, author, television presenter, singer, businesswoman, and politician, she is known as a presenter of children’s programmes such as Play SchoolPlay Away and Fast Forward and now sits in the House of Lords as a Liberal Democrat life peer.

When her father, a policeman and a talented jazz musician”, decided to emigrate to Britain, the children were left in the care of family friends. In 1960 they joined him in Beckenham, Kent, and Floella has discussed the racist experiences she endured as an immigrant.

Having left school to work in a bank, she studied for A-levels at night school. After a spell as a stage actress in West End musicals, she began presenting children’s television programmes in 1976.

Floella has appeared in HairJesus Christ SuperstarThe Black Mikado and on screen in the 1975 horror film I Don’t Want to Be Born and the 1977 film Black Joy. Her television credits include AngelsWithin These WallsCrown CourtThe Gentle Touch and Dixon of Dock Green. She also appeared in the first episode of Bergerac (Jersey’s own detective) in 1981.

In 2007-09, and again in 2011, she guest-starred in the Doctor Who spin-off The Sarah Jane Adventures as Professor Rivers, and narrated three ‘making-of’ documentaries on the Doctor Who DVD box set The Black Guardian Trilogy. In 2007, she played a small role in the British comedy Run Fatboy Run.

Floella was chief executive of Floella Benjamin Productions Ltd, which produced television programmes from 1987 to 2014. 

Floella’s twentieth book, Coming to England, about moving from Trinidad, was published in 1997, and is now used to teach modern history to young people. Other books written by Floella include titles such as Floella’s Fun BookWhy the Agouti Has No TailCaribbean Cookery and Snotty and the Rod of Power.

Floella was made an OBE for services to broadcasting in 2001, while she was chairperson of BAFTA, from whom she has also won a Special Lifetime Achievement award. She was chairperson of the Women of the Year Lunch for five years and a Millennium Commissioner. She is president of the Elizabeth R Commonwealth Broadcasting Fund and a governor of the National Film and Television School. She was a governor of Dulwich College, where her mother once worked and her son attended.

In 2006, she was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Exeter and became Chancellor of the University, a post she held for ten years.

In 2008 she was appointed a Deputy Lieutenant of Greater London and made a life peer in 2010. This year Floella was listed in the Top 100 most influential people in the UK of African/African-Caribbean descent in the UK, and made a DBE for her services to charity – she received the honour from Prince Charles at a ceremony at Buckingham Palace just before the COVID-19 lockdown.

Floella served on the 4Rs Commission established by the Liberal Democrats to look into primary education in the UK. She is vice-president of NCH Action for Children and Barnardo’s, and was in the NSPCC’s Hall of Fame. She runs the London Marathon to raise funds for Barnardo’s and the Sickle Cell Society. She was a cultural ambassador for the 2012 Summer Olympics.

She is a patron of the charity Beating Bowel Cancer, having lost her mother to the disease in 2009.

More about Floella Benjamin at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floella_Benjamin

Latest COVID support allocations to local councils

On Thursday the Government announced the fourth slice of COVID-19 funding for local councils.

  • Cambridgeshire County Council is set to receive almost £5M, bringing its total to date to almost £35M.
  • East Cambridgeshire District Council will receive £100,000, bringing its total to date to £1.16M.

This confirms the details by council of the Chancellor’s announcement earlier this month.

Cambridgeshire County Council has already indicated that it faces a funding gap of at least £40M next year.

Markets and COVID: share your views

Cllrs Mark Inskip and Lorna Dupré at Ely Market

Market trader? Local shopkeeper? Customer?

A new study has been launched with the support of NMTF (formerly the National Market Traders Federation) and the University of Greenwich to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on traditional markets in our town centres in the UK and France.

This study includes a brief online survey, giving market traders, local shops and the general public a chance to share their views and experiences.

Recent planning applications

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is ECDC-building-small-300x182.jpg

The following planning applications in the Sutton division have been published by East Cambridgeshire District Council.

20/01331/FUL
Coveney
Old School House 10 Main Street Coveney
Proposed conservatory incorporating study area.

20/01344/FUL
Little Downham
Land south of 2-2A Pymoor Lane Pymoor
Construction of four-bedroom two-storey detached dwelling.

20/01378/FUL
Sutton
Trinity Cottage 36 High Street Sutton
Front entrance porch and dormer window.

Further information can be found on the district council’s planning pages. If you would like to respond formally to the council about any planning application, comments should be addressed to the district council and not to me.  Comments may be made

  • online using the council’s public access web page (the link above);
  • by email to plservices@eastcambs.gov.uk;
  • or by post to the Planning Department, The Grange, Nutholt Lane, Ely, CB7 4EE.

Care during COVID

Healthwatch Cambridgeshire study published

Healthwatch Cambridgeshire has today published the findings of its three-month survey of residents’ health care during COVID.

1,131 people took part between 28 May and 31 August.

A summary of the findings can be found at https://www.healthwatchcambridgeshire.co.uk/report/2020-10-22/report-shines-light-covid-health-and-care-struggles

Key points are

  • Older people, those with disabilities or long-term health conditions, carers and those not online were hit hardest by the pandemic and subsequent service changes.
  • Three in ten people avoided getting help for a health problem. 
  • Out of those that did get help, three out of four rated it highly.
  • One in three people told us that the pandemic had a high or significant impact on their mental health and wellbeing.
  • The shutdown of dental services worsened existing problems around access to high street NHS dental care.
  • Although some people have taken to online hospital or GP appointments, they don’t work for everyone. Many people don’t have the internet and those with sensory impairments find remote consultations hard to access.

Healthwatch Cambridgeshire has also published a number of briefings arising out of its survey

Black History Month No 23: John Blanke

Extract from the Westminster Tournament Roll almost certainly showing John Blanke

October is Black History Month, so every day during October I will be posting up an introduction to an historical person of colour with a place in the history of the United Kingdom.

John Blanke was a black musician in London in the early 16th century.

He probably came to England as one of the African attendants of Katherine of Aragon in 1501, and is one of the earliest recorded black people in England after the Roman period.

Little is known of Blanke’s life, but he was paid 8 pence per day by King Henry VII. A surviving document from the accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber records a payment of 20 shillings to “John Blanke the Blacke Trumpet” as wages for the month of November 1507, with payments of the same amount continuing monthly through the next year. He successfully petitioned Henry VIII for a wage increase from 8d to 16d.

Dr Sydney Anglo was the first historian to propose that the “Blanke Trumpet” in these accounts was the same as the black man depicted twice in the 1511 Westminster Tournament Roll – an illuminated, 60-foot-long manuscript now held by the College of Arms. It recorded the royal procession to the tournament held in 1511 to celebrate the birth of a son, Henry, Duke of Cornwall to Catherine and Henry VIII on New Year’s Day 1511. (Henry sadly died within two months.)

John Blanke is depicted twice, as one of the six trumpeters on horseback in the royal retinue. All six of the trumpeters wear yellow and grey livery, and bear a trumpet decorated with the royal arms; Blanke wears a brown and yellow turban, while the others are bare-headed with longish hair. He appears a second time in the roll, wearing a green and gold head covering.

Black trumpeters and drummers were documented in other Renaissance cities, including Naples and Edinburgh.

Black History Month No 22: Pablo Fanque

Pablo Fanque.jpg
Pablo Fanque, the first circus proprietor of colour in Britain

October is Black History Month, so every day during October I will be posting up an introduction to an historical person of colour with a place in the history of the United Kingdom.

Pablo Fanque was born William Darby in 1810 in Norwich. He was a British equestrian performer and circus proprietor, the first recorded circus owner of colour in Britain. His circus was popular in Victorian Britain for 30 years.

Church records suggest Pablo Fanque was born in Norwich in 1810 and was one of at least five children. When Fanque married in 1848, he said on his marriage certificate that his late father’s occupation was ‘butler’.

There has been speculation that his father was Indian-born and had been brought to  Norwich and trained as a servant. Fanque was reportedly orphaned at a young age. Another account says he was born in a workhouse  to a family with seven children.

Fanque’s gravestone claims that he was born in 1871, but his age was recorded in the 1841, 1851 and 1871 censuses of England as indicating he was born in 1810. A birth register at St. Andrew’s Workhouse in Norwich reports the birth of a William Darby to John Darby and Mary Stamp at the workhouse on 1 April 1810.

William Darby was apprenticed at age 11 to circus proprietor William Batty and made his first known appearance in a sawdust ring in Norwich on 26 December 1821, as ‘Young Darby’. His acts included equestrian stunts and rope walking, and he was described in one account as ‘a negro rope-dancer’. Once established as a young adult, William Darby changed his professional name to Pablo Fanque. 

Fanque made a highly successful London debut in 1847. In the 30 years that Fanque operated his own circus he toured England, Scotland, and Ireland, but performed mostly in the Midlands and the North of England. His children also joined his circus.

In the 1960s John Lennon composed The Beatles’ Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!, borrowed from an 1843 playbill for Pablo Fanque’s Circus Royal. Lennon had bought the poster from an antique shop, and the title is taken from it. The Mr. Kite referenced in the poster was William Kite, who is believed to have performed in Fanque’s circus from 1843 to 1845.

Fanque married Susannah Marlaw, the daughter of a Birmingham buttonmaker. They had two sons, one of whom was named Lionel. In 1848 Susannah died in Leeds at an accident in the building where the circus was performing. Their son was performing a tightrope act when the gallery collapsed, but Susannah was the only fatality.

In June 1848, Fanque married Elizabeth Corker, a circus rider and daughter of George Corker of Bradford. Fanque and his second wife had two more sons, and again both joined the circus. A daughter died aged 1 year and 4 months and is buried in the same plot as Susannah and William, as recorded on the gravestone.

The 1861 census records Fanque as living with a woman named Sarah, 25, who is described as his wife. In 1871, just before he died, census records show him living again with his wife Elizabeth and his two sons, in Stockport.

Pablo Fanque died of bronchitis at the Britannia Inn in Stockport in 1871. Fanque is buried in Woodhouse Lane Cemetery, Leeds, next to his first wife Susannah Darby.

Black History Month No 21: Mahatma Gandhi

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Mahatma Gandhi in London in 1931

October is Black History Month, so every day during October I will be posting up an introduction to an historical person of colour with a place in the history of the United Kingdom.

Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma) Gandhi (1869 – 1948) was of course born in India, and died in India, but studied in London so is included in my month’s roll-call due to his connection with Britain. My blog, my rules.

A lawyer who led the successful campaign for India’s independence from British rule, Gandhi inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. The title Mahātmā is Sanskrit for ‘great-souled’ or ‘venerable’, and was first applied to him in 1914 in South Africa.

Born and raised in a Hindu family in Gujarat, Gandhi trained in law at the Inner Temple in London, and was called to the bar at age 22 in 1891. Unsuccessful in his attempts to set up a law practice in India, he moved to South Africa in 1893 to represent an Indian merchant in a lawsuit – and stayed for 21 years. He raised a family there, and first employed nonviolent resistance in a campaign for civil rights. (The composer Philip Glass wrote an opera about this period in Gandhi’s life, called Satyagraha, which I saw in London a couple of years ago.)

In 1915, aged 45, Gandhi returned to India, where he organised peasants, farmers, and urban labourers to protest against excessive land-tax and discrimination. Gandhi became leader of the Indian National Congress in 1921, and led nationwide campaigns on poverty, women’s rights, religious and ethnic amity, ending ‘untouchability’, and achieving Swaraj or self-rule.

The same year Gandhi started to wear the Indian loincloth or short dhoti and shawl as a mark of identification with India’s rural poor. He lived modestly in a self-sufficient residential community, ate simple vegetarian food, and undertook long fasts as a means of self-purification and political protest. He led the 400 km (250 mi) Dandi Salt March in 1930 in protest against British salt taxes, and called for the British to ‘Quit India’ in 1942. He was imprisoned for many years, on many occasions, in both South Africa and India.

Gandhi had a vision of an independent and pluralistic India, but in 1947, Britain granted independence but partitioned its Indian empire into two dominions, a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan. Displaced people made their way to their new lands amid outbreaks of religious violence – one of the worst mass migrations in history, with over a million deaths. Gandhi visited the affected areas, attempting to provide solace and undertaking several fasts to the point of death to stop the violence.

In 1948 Gandhi was assassinated by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist.

Gandhi’s birthday, 2 October, is commemorated in India as a national holiday, and worldwide as the International Day of Nonviolence. Gandhi is commonly considered the Father of the Nation in India. 

More about Mahatma Gandhi at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi

General Purposes Committee meeting

An over-lengthy and fractious meeting of the County Council’s General Purposes Committee this morning, as the development of the Council’s budget for next year begins.

The prospects are not good. Even if the battle against COVID goes well, the Council will need to find savings of £40M in the financial year starting next April. If COVID goes bad – and the evidence so far suggests cases are continuing to rise – then the savings needed could be over £82M.

It is unlikely, to put it mildly, that the Government will come charging over the hill with £82M in its pocket. And unless there is more cash coming Cambridgeshire’s way, the options available to the Council will mainly be ‘efficiency savings’, cuts to services, increased fees and charges, lucrative commercial investments*, and council tax.

(*Not working out so well at the moment – the money they put into buying student accommodation in Cambridge and leisure facilities in Wisbech isn’t making great returns in a pandemic.)

Already lines are being drawn ready for the political arguments that will last through to February’s budget meeting and beyond. The predictions we’ve been given so far assume that Conservative councillors running the Council will go for an increase of two per cent in council tax for adult social care (a service facing huge increases in need), but zero council tax increase for general services.

We don’t yet know what maximum council tax increase the Government will allow this coming year. In the past few years councils have been allowed to set rises of around two or three per cent without having to conduct a ruinously expensive referendum – and the Government generally assumes councils will do that. Assuming the maximum this coming year is of a similar level, it might be considered sensible to start building that figure into the calculations. (If the Council were to try to bridge the whole of a £40M funding gap by way of council tax increases, the rise would have to be about 15 per cent, and nobody – absolutely nobody – is suggesting that.)

Conservative councillors are talking about council tax rises being their last resort after every other option. Liberal Democrats are saying that while nobody relishes higher council taxes, cutting services and increasing charges will affect the most vulnerable population worst, and assuming an increase in council tax of a couple of per cent at this stage would help bridge that gap (albeit only partly in the scheme of the financial problems unfolding).

The Council is now approaching Government to ask for more financial support. That’s all well and good, but the Government will want to see the Council doing all it can to bridge its own gap – and appearing to resolutely stand against raising council tax at all probably won’t persuade the Government of the urgency of the Council’s case.

It’s also fair to say that the Conservative Council has been asking the Conservative Government for ‘fair funding’ for many years with little to show for it, and there’s no reason to assume they will have any better luck this year when COVID has already trashed most of the economy, and a no-deal Brexit in a couple of months’ time will trash the rest.

We could of course all be surprised, but seeing what the Government has just done to Greater Manchester doesn’t suggest that will be likely.