Tuesday, October 16, 2018

Black History Month 1: Ignatius Sancho

Since 1987, October has been designated as “Black History Month” in the United Kingdom. This is an annual opportunity to reflect specifically on the men and women of the African diaspora, and to commemorate their courage and contributions. Over the course of the rest of the month, I will be publishing brief articles relevant to black history month - especially but not necessarily limited to short biographies of often neglected or largely forgotten black men in Britain that I hope might prompt further reading and research. 

Ignatius Sancho

Ignatius Sancho, introducing himself in a letter to the Anglican clergyman and author Laurence Sterne, wrote: 


I am one of those people whom the vulgar and illiberal call 'Niggers.' The first part of my life was rather unlucky, as I was placed in a family who judged ignorance the best and only security for obedience. A little reading and writing I got by unwearied application. The latter part of my life has been - through God's blessing - truly fortunate, having spent it in the service of one of the best families in the kingdom.


The generally accepted account of Sancho’s early years is recorded in Life of Ignatius Sancho by Joseph Jekyll, written in 1782 (Sancho died in 1780) and usually attached at the beginning of posthumous publications of Sancho’s letters. It claims that Sancho was born on a slave ship in 1729, that his mother died from disease as a slave in the Spanish Viceroyalty of New Granada (modern-day Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and Venezuela), and that his father killed himself. Sancho was then taken to London, England where he was made a child house slave to three “maiden sisters”, for whom he worked from 1731 to 1749. He educated himself and was encouraged in his efforts to read by John, 2nd Duke of Montagu, to whose family he eventually fled from his enslavement. Not receiving the welcome he had hoped for, he reportedly purchased a gun and threatened to shoot himself at which point the Duchess of Montagu intervened and he was welcomed as a free man into their household.


The veracity of this account has been questioned: the reported place of birth contradicts Sancho himself who not long before his death wrote “I am not sorry I was born in Africa”, and the rest of the information is similarly not derived from his writings and would come from a secondary source at best. His exact origins then remain something of a mystery. Nonetheless it is certain that after being orphaned and enslaved in a London home as a child, a self-educated and emancipated Sancho began to work as a butler for the Montagu family. 


Alongside his work, Sancho became something of a Renaissance man: he was well-read, composed music, prose, and poetry, attended the theatre, and enjoyed high society life in general. Of Sancho’s music, Josephine Wright has written: 

There can be no pretense that the music of Ignatius Sancho equals that of the leading composers of his day.  But his musical compositions reveal the hand of a knowledgeable, capable amateur who wrote in miniature forms in an early Classic style.  His compositions are of great historical significance in understanding the roots and origins of a classical tradition among black musicians in the Western Hemisphere.  His published music records the achievements of one black composer from the eighteenth century who was active at a time when most persons of African descent were chained by the bonds of slavery on both sides of the Atlantic.


Sancho married Anne Osborne, a woman born in the West Indies, and they had seven children together. They enjoyed a middle-class British life, but nonetheless as a Black family in white-majority Britain they never felt completely at home or welcomed. Sancho would write about being followed, stared at, and insulted. 


Sancho served the Montagu family in some capacity or other until 1773 when, afflicted by gout, he opened a greengrocer shop in Mayfair, where he worked with his wife. It was during this last decade of his life that he wrote many of the letters that would form the lasting part of his legacy. In one of these letters, writing to a young friend who had expressed some racist sympathies, Sancho highlighted as a Black British man with a Christian worldview the hypocritical disconnect he saw in the beneficial message and mission of Christianity and the mess made by professing Christians who spread slavery instead of salvation, cruelty and consumerism instead of Christ:


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. But enough- it is a subject that sours my blood and I am sure will not please the friendly bent of your social affections.


In October 1774, Sancho became the first known black man to vote in a British general election. He would vote once more, months before his death in 1780 - on this occasion supporting a customer of his grocery shop, young establishment turned maverick Whig politician Charles James Fox - who was voted as a member of the Opposition into the Westminster constituency and hailed as “Man of the People”. Fox would become a leading campaigner for the abolition of the British slave trade, religious freedom, and individual liberty. 


Ignatius Sancho died on 14 December 1780 after a long and painful battle with gout. Admired in life as “the extraordinary Negro”, a faithful employee of one the nation’s greatest families, one of the first black men to compose and publish music in Britain, and the first black man known to cast a vote in a British general election, Sancho became the first black man known to have an obituary printed in the British press. He would become better known still through the publication of his letters in two volumes a couple of years after his death, the frontispiece of which was an engraving based on a portrait of Sancho by Thomas Gainsborough, one of the greatest artists of his time. All of this while across the Empire the  African slave trade was flourishing and slavery itself continued to dehumanise its victims. 

Ignatius Sancho was not human because he was successful, he was successful because he was human - but nonetheless his success was in its own way a powerful message of Black humanity and slavery’s immorality to the British public.


For further reading: 


Brycchan Carey, "‘The extraordinary Negro': Ignatius Sancho, Joseph Jekyll, and the Problem of Biography", British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 26 (2003), p.1-14 http://www.brycchancarey.com/Carey_BJECS_2003.pdf (last accessed 16 October 2018)


Vincent Carretta (ed.), Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African (Broadview: 2015)


Françoise Le Jeune, “Of a Negro, a Butler and a Grocer - Ignatius Sancho’s epistolary contribution to the abolition campaign (1766-1780)”, Études anglaises 61 (2008/4)



Reyahn King, Sukhdev Sandhu et al, Ignatius Sancho, an African Man of Letters (National Portrait Gallery: 1955)


Josephine B. Wright, Ignatius Sancho, 1729-1780, an Early African Composer in England: The Collected Editions of His Music in Facsimile (Taylor and Francis, CRITICAL STUDIES ON BLACK LIFE AND CULTURE, 1981)


Josephine B. Wright, "Ignatius Sancho (1729-1780), African Composer in England", in J. Southern (ed.), The Black Perspective in Music Vol. 7, No. 2 (Autumn, 1979), pp. 132-167 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1214319 (last accessed 15 October 2018)


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