District councillor for Sutton, Mepal, Witcham, and Wentworth (East Cambridgeshire District Council) and county councillor for Coveney, Little Downham, Mepal, Pymoor, Sutton, Wardy Hill, Way Head, Witcham, and Witchford (Cambridgeshire County Council)
Pre-Raphaelite artists’ model Fanny Eaton (portrait by Walter Fryers Stocks c 1859)
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.
Fanny Eaton was born in Jamaica and became an artists’ model for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in the mid-nineteenth century, first in Simeon Solomon’s painting The Mother of Moses, and later in works by Rossetti, Millais, and others.
Fanny Eaton in Simeon Solomon’s The Mother of Moses
Fanny and her mother came to England from Jamaica in the 1840s, where Fanny worked as a servant. She became an artists’ model to add to her wages as a charwoman.
In 1857 she married James Eaton, a horse-cab proprietor and driver, and they had ten children. In the 1880s she had been widowed and was working as a cook on the Isle of Wight. She died in Acton at the age of 89.
More about Fanny Eaton at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanny_Eaton
Portrait possibly of Francis Barber, attributed either to James Northcote or Sir Joshua Reynolds (1770s)
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.
Francis Barber, born a slave on a Jamaican sugar plantation in 1742 or 1743, was the manservant of dictionary-writer Dr Samuel Johnson in London from 1752 until Johnson died over thirty years later.
In later years he had acted as Johnson’s assistant in revising his famous Dictionary of the English Language and other works. Barber was also an important source of information for Johnson’s friend and biographer James Boswell.
At the age of about 15, Barber had been brought to England by his owner, Colonel Richard Bathurst, and was sent to school in Yorkshire. He was then sent to Johnson as a valet, after the death of Johnson’s wife. The legal status of slavery was still unclear at that time, but when Bathurst died in 1754 he gave Barber his freedom in his will, with a small legacy of £12. Johnson himself was an outspoken opponent of slavery, not just in England but also in the colonies.
On being freed, Barber went to work for an apothecary in Cheapside then signed up for the Navy. He was discharged in October 1760, and returned to London and to Johnson to be his servant.
When Johnson died, he left Barber £70 a year (over £9,000 in today’s money) along with Johnson’s books and papers and a gold watch. Johnson wanted Barber to move to Lichfield, where Johnson had been born, which Barber did, opening a draper’s shop and marrying a local woman. He later opened up a small village school.
Barber died in Stafford on 13 January 1801 following an unsuccessful operation at Staffordshire Royal Infirmary. He was survived by his son, Samuel Barber, his daughter, Ann, and his wife, Elizabeth. Samuel became a Methodist lay preacher, while Elizabeth and Ann set up a small school. His descendants still farm near Lichfield.
More about Francis Barber at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Barber
East Cambridgeshire District Council has adopted two supplementary planning documents (SPDs).
The first SPD sets out East Cambridgeshire District Council’s approach to the natural environment, providing advice on policy requirements including issues such as:
‘net gain’ in biodiversity through development proposals
protection and provision of trees
protection of existing nature sites
supporting the Council’s position in relation to the recently adopted Local Nature Partnership vision to ‘double land for nature’ by 2050 across Cambridgeshire.
The second SPD on Custom and Self-build housing provides guidance to large scale developers who are obliged to meet the Local Plan policy to provide self-build plots (i.e. development consisting of more than 100 dwellings should set aside a minimum five per cent of plots for self-build purposes). The SPD also provides useful advice for individuals, groups or Community Land Trusts (or similar) who may be interested in providing self-build plots. Parishes interested in including self-build plots in their Neighbourhood Plans may also find this SPD useful.
(Note: any person with sufficient interest in the decision to adopt the SPDs may apply to the High Court for permission to apply for judicial review of the decision to adopt the SPDs. Any such application must be made promptly and in any event not later than three months after the date on which the SPD was adopted.)
Princess Sophia Duleep Singh selling The Suffragette newspaper outside Hampton Court in 1910.
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.
Princess Sophia Alexandrovna Duleep Singh isn’t everyone’s idea of a typical suffragette. Her father was a maharajah from the Punjab who had been forced to abdicate his kingdom to the East India Company, her mother was of German and Abyssinian descent and brought up by missionaries, her godmother was Queen Victoria, and she lived in Hampton Court.
On returning from a trip to India in 1909, Princess Sophia took up the cause of votes for women, not only in Britain but also in the colonies. In 1910 she accompanied Emmeline Pankhurst and other suffragettes to the House of Commons hoping to speak with the Prime Minister, but they were thrown out and many of them seriously injured.
She raised funds for women’s suffrage, sold The Suffragette newspaper outside Hampton Court, and appeared in court charged with failing to pay licence fees, part of her campaign of withholding taxes as a protest.
During WWI she volunteered as a British Red Cross Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse, serving at an auxiliary military hospital in Isleworth from October 1915 to January 1917, and tended wounded Indian soldiers who had been evacuated from the Western Front.
In 1918 the law was changed to allow women over the age of 30 to vote. Princess Sophia joined the Suffragette Fellowship and remained a member for the rest of her life.
Princess Sophia died in 1948 and was cremated at Golders Green.
Charles Ignatius Sancho (oil painting 1768 by Thomas Gainsborough)
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.
Writer and composer Charles Ignatius Sancho was born on a slave ship. His mother died shortly afterwards in a Spanish colony in South America, and his father took his own life rather than live as a slave.
Sancho’s owner took him to England and gave him to three sisters at Greenwich. There he attracted the attention of John Montagu, second Duke of Montagu, who took the young man under his wing. Working as a butler in the Montagu household, Sancho developed his interest in music, poetry, reading, and writing. He later opened a grocery shop in Mayfair.
Sancho had his portrait painted by celebrated artist Thomas Gainsborough, corresponded with novelist Laurence Sterne on the need to abolish the slave trade, and was the first person of African origin to vote in Britain, as well as being the first person of African descent to be given an obituary in the British press when he died from the effects of gout in 1780. He was buried in St Margaret’s churchyard in Westminster.
More about Charles Ignatius Sancho at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignatius_Sancho
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor – image by unknown author, restored by Adam Cuerden, from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3c22324.
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.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (not to be confused with the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who is someone else entirely) was born in London in 1875 to Alice Hare Martin. His parents were unmarried and his father Daniel Taylor – from Sierra Leone – left the UK not knowing Alice was expecting his child.
Alice named her son after the poet, and he was brought up in Croydon. Alice’s family was a musical one, and Coleridge-Taylor studied at the Royal College of Music from the age of 15 including composition under professor and composer Charles Villiers Stanford.
On graduating he became a professional musician, being appointed a professor at the Crystal Palace School of Music and conducting the orchestra at the Croydon Conservatoire. He was also encouraged by composer Edward Elgar, and on a tour of America in 1904 met President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House, an unusual event for a man of African ancestry.
Coleridge-Taylor’s most famous and popular composition was Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, and indeed when he married and became a father he named his own son Hiawatha. Unfortunately, like many composers of the day, his financial situation was far from secure and he had sold the rights to the piece outright. After his untimely death from pneumonia at the age of 37, which some attributed to the stress of his financial situation, his case contributed to the establishment of the Performing Rights Society.
Coleridge-Taylor is buried in Bandon Hill Cemetery, Wallington, Surrey – now in the London Borough of Sutton.
More about Samuel Coleridge-Taylor at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Coleridge-Taylor
Mary Prince, whose autobiography of her harsh life as a slave in the British colonies caused a stir in early 1830s London
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.
Mary Prince was born into slavery in Bermuda in 1788. As an infant, she and her mother and younger siblings were sold, and later resold to cruel and abusive owners. At the age of eighteen Mary was transported as a slave to the Turks and Caicos islands where for four years she was forced to work long days in the corrosive salt ponds. She was sold again twice, initially back to Bermuda and then to an owner in Antigua, where she joined the Moravian Church and learned to read.
Mary married a freed slave in 1826, but her harsh treatment at the hands of her owner worsened after this. In 1828 she was taken by her owner and his family to London, where she took shelter with the Moravian Church in Hatton Garden and began working with Thomas Pringle, an abolitionist and secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society.
Mary petitioned Parliament for her freedom in 1829, but unsuccessfully. Transporting slaves out of England had been made illegal in 1772, but slavery itself was still legal in Antigua, meaning Mary could not return to her husband without the risk of being re-enslaved. Mary stayed in London, where she was employed by Pringle.
Pringle encouraged Mary to write her harsh life story, and her autobiography The History of Mary Prince was printed in 1831. This was the first account published in Great Britain of a black woman’s life, and caused a considerable stir, selling out three printings in its first year.
Mary remained in England until at least 1833, the year in which slavery was abolished, but it is unclear whether she ever returned to her husband in Antigua as she had wished.
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.
Mary Seacole, born in Jamaica in 1805, was the daughter of a Scottish army lieutenant and a free Jamaican woman. She was a nurse, healer, and businesswoman who nursed wounded servicemen on the battlefield during the Crimean War.
Mary Seacole had no formal British nursing qualifications or training, but had a family background as a healer and ‘doctress’ from Jamaica. Refused by the War Office as part of its nursing contingent, she travelled independently to the battlefront to nurse wounded soldiers.
Mary’s autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, is one of the earliest autobiographies of a mixed-race woman. There is a statue of Mary Seacole at St Thomas’ Hospital in London.
More about Mary Seacole at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Seacole
The following planning applications in the Sutton division have been published by East Cambridgeshire District Council.
20/01261/FUL Mepal 16 School Lane Mepal CB6 2AJ Two storey rear extension.
20/01259/FUL Witchford 239 Main Street Witchford CB6 2HT Glazed link to rear of property between existing dwelling kitchen and existing outhouse.
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);
Works on the A142 BP roundabout at Ely are currently ahead of schedule – and the Council will be bringing forward the carriageway surfacing which will now start on Monday 19 October for five nights.
For those five nights, all arms of the roundabout will be closed with access granted only to the frontages of the A10/A142 and the services area. Depending on where the works are taking place vehicles may be asked to travel the appropriate diversion route to access properties within the works area.
