An essay on Andrea Levy’s ancestry
In Andrea Levy’s last novel The Long Song, set in the early 19th century she imagined a relationship between a young black woman, July, and the white manager of the Jamaican sugar plantation where she was an enslaved domestic servant. It was several years after the publication of the book that Andrea discovered the true story of her own family ancestry. It has an uncanny resemblance to the story she imagined. In the essay that follows, her husband and widower Bill Mayblin researches in detail the story of Andrea’s family history, and the times that created it.
Letters from Mesopotamia
I am a white Englishman born and brought up in Sheffield, a city close to the geographical dead-centre of the country. My ancestors on both sides were also English and also white. As far back as I can trace they were farmers, butchers, textile weavers and railway clerks and they lived in places like Mansfield, Derby and Belper just thirty or forty miles south of where I grew up. One of them, my namesake William Mayblin, was a professional soldier, a corporal in the Royal Artillery whose one surviving diary describes his tedium on board a naval frigate skirting the coast of Spain during the Napoleonic wars. But apart from him I have no evidence of any of my more distant ancestors ever leaving the shores of Britain, or arriving from elsewhere.
But indirectly, through marriage, I have family connections much further afield. My late wife Andrea Levy, had parents who were Jamaican. They migrated to Britain as newly-weds in 1948 (the year I was born) and settled in London where they raised four children. When they came to Britain they thought they were coming home, to the mother country, the place that had always been at the centre of their cultural world. To the British at the time of course, they were complete outsiders and they were not made to feel welcome.
My mother- and father-in-law both came from Jamaican families that in the Caribbean would be known as the ‘coloured’ middle-class. They were mixed-race, and that mixture was long and complicated. It was a subject not readily talked about by older relatives and an accurate family history was always elusive, as is often the way in the Caribbean. But more recently, thanks to the efforts of a younger generation of the family, the power of the internet, and new academic research on plantation records, Andrea’s maternal line can finally be traced right back to its origins on the island of Jamaica. We now know that her great-great-grandfather was an Englishman called William Ridgard who was born and raised in the town of Gainsborough in Lincolnshire, barely thirty miles east of Sheffield. His life largely overlapped that of my soldier ancestor.
William Ridgard and I are separated in time by over a century and a half, and of course we are not related in any real sense. But through what I have found out about him there are certain things that we have in common. We share the same first name. We are both the youngest son of our families. We come from the same part of the country and from roughly the same strata of society. We also both left our home towns in the north of England as young men searching for better opportunities. For me in 1967 it was London and a college education that offered that opportunity. For him in 1817 it was Britain’s overseas colonies.
The colony he went to, Jamaica, was a controversial choice given the times that he was living through. Certainly it was a fateful choice for me. Not only did his life there enable me, one-hundred-and-fifty years later, to meet and marry one of his descendants, but as a result it has brought me into contact with a story of Britain that otherwise I would have been largely ignorant of. The island of Jamaica from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, played a very important role in British history, and yet that relationship is almost totally absent from modern Britain’s collective memory. William Ridgard’s career in Jamaica forms part of a missing chapter of British history. It’s a strange and rather uncomfortable chapter and perhaps this is the reason why in Britain we tend to forget it.
This missing chapter – let’s call it ‘The British Caribbean’ – would cover a full three-hundred years and it would be rich and involved, with lots of significant overlaps to more familiar chapters like The Industrial Revolution, The Royal Navy, The Growth of Capitalism, The British Empire, War, Piracy, Class, Culture and of course, Race. It is an integral part of who we are.
My distant ‘in-law’ played only a small role in that lost history, but a it’s a role that can help us to explore the legacy it has left for Britain today. So just who was William Ridgard? Why did he go to Jamaica, and what did he do there?
To set the scene the story should really begin with two women from the generation before William’s. The first was born Sarah Buxton in 1746, in the city of Nottingham in the East Midlands. At the age of twenty-one she married a young man called Nathaniel Ridgard. He was twenty-seven. The wedding took place in the parish church of Chesterfield – that’s the famous church with the crooked spire that still dominates the town of Chesterfield just a few miles from where I grew up. But most of Sarah’s married life was then spent in the small Lincolnshire town of Gainsborough where Nathaniel was a mercer, a linen draper and raffia merchant. Sarah gave birth to twelve children through the course of her life, not all of whom survived into adulthood.
The second, and younger woman, Minny, was born in 1770 in the parish of Westmorland, Jamaica. She spent all of her life there, probably never venturing more than a few miles from the very spot where she was born. She never got married, though like Sarah she did have a lot of children, fourteen altogether, but only four of them survived into full adulthood. We don’t know Minny’s other name, but that’s because she didn’t have one. She was one of 350-or-so black slaves of west African origin, the property of Joseph Foster-Barham the absentee owner of a sugar plantation called Mesopotamia.
I have said that Minny was black, so I must mention that Sarah Ridgard was white. I could have taken that for granted, but I should make it clear, because skin colour will be an important part of this story.
Sarah and Minny’s lives overlapped by only twenty-four years and they lived in different parts of the world, in very different circumstances, never knowing or even dreaming of each other’s existence. But although neither lived to know of it, they do have a tangible legacy in common. At some time in the month of December 1833 Sarah Ridgard’s son William, then aged 46, and Minny’s daughter Fanny Fisher, aged 28, had sex together – I think I can only put it like that – and this encounter produced the family line that, one-hundred-and-fifty years later, I married into. Sarah and Minny were the founding matriarchs of what is now a thriving diaspora of Ridgard descendants who live in Jamaica, America, Britain, Germany, New Zealand and beyond. They were my wife’s great-great-great-grandmothers.
But how and why William Ridgard and Fanny Fisher arrived in each other’s company and just what the nature of their relationship was, if we can even call it such – its motives on both sides, its vast imbalances of power, its fleeting nature and it’s lasting consequences – is the very nub of this story. There are clues already that this is not going to be a love story, but it is one that tells us much about how Britain got to be the nation it is today.
William B. Ridgard was the youngest of Sarah’s twelve children. We know that he was born in Gainsborough, in 1788, because the parish records tell us so. But beyond that we don’t know an awful lot about his early life. The Gainsborough that he would have grown up in was then a small market town serving the fertile agricultural area of north Lincolnshire. At this time the town was also a thriving in-land port, as it sits on the wide, navigable section of the river Trent that flows into the Humber estuary and the sea, twenty miles to the north.
The town had a mixed population of sailors, wharf workers, merchants, rope makers, craftsmen, farmers and agricultural workers. The Ridgard family themselves were more from the middling merchant class. William’s father Nathaniel owned commercial property in the town which he insured carefully against fire, and there are records of him taking on apprentices, so probably the family were a little more well-to-do than many.
The burial records for All Saint’s Parish Church in Gainsborough show that the Ridgard family had been in the Lincolnshire town for several generations before William was born. It is likely that William was educated at the local non-conformist school run by the Reverend J. Brettell who, when William was around twelve years old, proudly advertised to the burghers of the town that his school could teach their sons ‘…Writing, Arithmetic, Book-keeping, Mensuration and Mathematics, English Grammar, Geography with the use of Globes, and the Latin Classicks.’
Certainly later in life William showed a command of most of these subjects. But after leaving school and throughout his twenties there is still no trace of him in the records. He didn’t marry and there is no record of him being apprenticed or articled. Probably he worked for his father in the family business. But whatever he was doing he clearly wasn’t making his way in the world to his or his family’s satisfaction because around the age of thirty he suddenly changed the course of his life, and this is when we begin to pick up his trail.
The first mention of his name shows a dramatic change in his circumstances. On 14th October, 1819, a church register for the parish of St Elizabeth in Jamaica records the baptism of a two-year-old girl that had been born on the Bogue sugar estate to Polly, an enslaved black woman. The child is christened Caroline Ridgard and the father is plainly listed as William Ridgard. This is not the child that starts our family story, that won’t happen for another fifteen years. It’s merely the first proof we have that William Ridgard was now in Jamaica.
The Bogue estate was a plantation owned by Frederick William Foster, the latest scion of a family of Jamaica sugar planters that go right back to the first days of British Jamaica in the mid 17th century. In 1817 his son and heir, John Frederick Foster had married a distant relative of the Ridgard family. It seems probable that these new and influential family connections suddenly presented William, now aged about twenty nine, with a life-changing opportunity.
The Fosters, like many West Indian planters at this time, were absentee owners. They lived in England and employed white men from Britain to go out to the Caribbean as overseers and attorneys (estate managers) to run the plantations on their behalf. William was certainly qualified for the job, he was young, single, reasonably well-educated and probably with experience of commerce and book-keeping through the family business. But more to the point, he was without any better prospects in small-town Gainsborough. Like many young men of his time, from all classes, he would have reasoned that he could do better for himself in the colonies. He was, after all, the youngest son of the family, and at the turn of the 19th century Britain’s growing colonial empire was increasingly becoming the place to send the youngest sons of the gentry, who weren’t going to inherit, to make a career for themselves. There is a well-known poem called ‘The Younger Son’ by the Canadian writer Robert Service. It was written a hundred years later in a rather Kipling-esque style with the opening stanza:
If you leave the gloom of London and you seek a glowing land,
Where all except the flag is strange and new,
There’s a bronzed and stalwart fellow who will grip you by the hand,
And greet you with a welcome warm and true;
For he’s your younger brother, the one you sent away,
Because there wasn’t room for him at home;
And now he’s quite contented, and he’s glad he didn’t stay,
And he’s building Britain’s greatness o’er the foam.
The poem sums up what had come to be something of an institution for the large families of the British middle- and upper-classes. It may well be that William Ridgard, the youngest son of Nathaniel and Sarah, was subject to similar pressures back in 1817, and maybe he had his own dreams of bettering himself ‘o’er the foam’. The final push might even have come from an extreme weather event. 1816 was the infamous ‘year without a summer’ caused by the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia. Harvests across Europe failed and in the winter of that year Gainsborough’s Tudor manor house, the Old Hall, was turned into a soup kitchen to help feed a population that was literally starving.
By this time the island of Jamaica had been British for over one hundred and fifty years. It had been the jewel in Britain’s early imperial crown and the source of enormous wealth that contributed significantly to the industrial, commercial and military growth of the nation. The island was also of crucial strategic importance to Britain in its rivalry with other European powers in the New World and was regarded, at one critical point in America’s revolutionary war, as even more valuable to Britain than the American colonies.
But the Caribbean was not quite the open plains of Canada suggested by Service’s poem. By the time William decided to go, the Caribbean had already become a bitter political and moral battleground for Britain focusing on just one highly controversial issue. In going out to take up employment there, any person would have needed to face up where they stood on the subject. The subject of course was slavery. The supercrop that had given the Caribbean such status was sugarcane, and the cultivating, harvesting and processing of this difficult, labour-intensive crop had spawned the most shameful institution of Britain’s recorded history – racialised plantation slavery.
But the heyday of sugar was already on the wane. In Britain the trans-Atlantic trade in African slaves had been made illegal by Act of Parliament back in 1808 and the campaign to end the institution of slavery itself was gaining strength throughout the country.
It takes a bit of imagination, from a modern perspective, to recreate the arguments that would have been common in William Ridgard’s time. By the turn of the 19th century the pro-slavery lobby was basing its case on the emerging ‘scientific’ notion, widely accepted at the time, that black African people were an inferior sub-species of humanity. They may even, the argument went, have been placed there by God precisely to be used by Europeans in this way. It could be seen as a positive outcome for them to be brought into contact with Christianity and white civilisation as a way of improving their ‘savage’ circumstances and introducing them to higher things.
The anti-slavery lobby, it has to be said, was hardly less racist in its basic assumptions. Black people were still ‘childlike’ and needing of white guidance and supervision. But the abolitionists, motivated often by religious conviction, saw all human life as God’s creation and slavery to be an abomination of Christian values – more of a moral blot on white civilisation perhaps than a blight on black lives. Various of Britain’s non-conformist churches were emerging as key players in the abolition movement, particularly the quakers, Baptists and methodists. But opinions were divided even within churches and William Ridgard’s non-conformist background would have been no guarantee of anti-slavery sentiments on his part.
The abolitionist’s famous campaigning image was the picture of a chained black slave in a crouching, pleading gesture with the plaintive words ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ put into his mouth. It was designed and produced by Josiah Wedgwood in 1787. That’s one year before William Ridgard was born, so there is little doubt that he would have been familiar with it, as well as the anti-slavery campaign, throughout his early life. The image was carefully crafted to appeal to British public opinion of the time and it panders to a paternalistic view of enslaved black people as passive, wretched and dependant on white patronage and kindness for their future ‘freedom’ and welfare. In effect it represented the benevolent face of a strain of scientific racism that had become widespread throughout Britain’s political spectrum. It was a successful campaign strategy though, and when William Ridgard was twenty years old the Atlantic trade in African slaves was abolished. But slavery itself continued as before on Britain’s Caribbean plantations and the campaign to end it intensified at home. It would have been a major moral and political issue throughout Ridgard’s early life in Gainsborough.
Given the wedding between the Foster and Ridgard families, and all the arrangements and festivities connected with it, it is pretty certain that William would have met the Fosters, his future employers, in person, and he would have had the chance of hearing their own rather slippery and hypocritical attitudes to slavery. For although the Fosters had grown very rich and powerful on many generations of Jamaican slave labour, they would have seen themselves as progressives on the subject of slavery. Joseph Foster-Barham, who Ridgard would end up working for on the Mesopotamia estate, had opposed the Atlantic trade in slaves even before the British Parliament made it illegal, and had instructed his attorneys to buy slaves only from other plantations in Jamaica and not from the slave ships arriving from Africa. He tried to press his own vision of replacing slavery with a switch to indentured labour from the Indian sub-continent. And although as a planter and slave-owner he was a reliable supporter of the powerful West Indian planters’ lobby in parliament he was also on cordial, and even at times co-operative terms with Wilberforce and the anti-slavery campaign.
The Foster and Foster-Barham families were also strongly influenced by the beliefs of the Moravian Church. Frederick Foster, the owner of the Bogue estate was himself a bishop of the church, and Joseph Foster-Barham financed the setting up of a Moravian mission on his Mesopotamia estate to look after the ‘spiritual well-being’ of his slaves. Although a non-conformist sect, the Moravians had a rather other-worldly credo which encouraged their adherents to accept their fate on earth in order to gain reward in heaven. Unlike the Baptists they were not going to ferment rebellion and so were the perfect choice for a rich slave owner who wanted to salve his religious conscience.
For the Fosters it was a very comfortable hypocrisy that could only really exist at the safe distance of 5,000 miles from the realities of plantation slavery. In his later letters to his employers it would become part of William Ridgard’s job to pay lip-service to these delusions of virtue whilst doing whatever was necessary to keep sugar production, and profits, high. For within the slave economy of Jamaica, the job that Ridgard was taking on was not an ancillary or neutral one where he could choose to ignore the issue. He was going to be there to manage and to run a plantation labour force. He was going to be a slave master.
In Britain when we think of plantation slavery in the New World it is invariably the American experience that we have in mind. The cotton plantations, the slave narratives, the escapes to the North, the Civil War – all are well documented and form an integral part of American history. And we can gloat that slavery continued in America until 1865. We have happily shifted the guilt of slavery onto America. But for every one slave that was shipped in chains from west Africa to America, twelve were shipped to the British Caribbean. This startling statistic alone shows a major difference between plantation slavery in America and in the Caribbean. Sugar plantations in the British Caribbean were on a vastly larger scale than plantations in America. On the Caribbean islands the slave population greatly outnumbered the planters and their white staff, and as a consequence the system of control was much harsher, the death rate much higher, and the constant need for replacement slaves much greater. Even by the cruel standards of the eighteenth and early-nineteenth century it was a very brutal system.
This was the world that William Ridgard was about to become a part of. We must assume that he was well-briefed, that he had made his peace with his conscience and knew what he was letting himself in for. There is no record of his departure, not even where he sailed from, so we can only imagine a flurry of activity; a settling of his affairs in Gainsborough; a packing of trunks; fond farewells to friends and family; a coach trip to Liverpool, or maybe a coastal boat from Gainsborough’s own wharf to the port of London; then a packet brig with a cramped berth; a six-week Atlantic crossing to Kingston, seasick all the way; an arduous journey along the southern coast of Jamaica to the western parish of St Elizabeth; and finally, installed in the Great House of Bogue estate or in a house nearby, as the new overseer.
On arrival William Ridgard’s first challenge would have been to adapt to the morals and customs of this strange tropical society – a society unmistakably British, and yet vastly different from the rythms and mores of life in sleepy Gainsborough. The birth of the baby Caroline Ridgard perhaps only a year after he arrived seems to point to the fact that he adapted well, and quickly. Apart from his name on the baptism record there is no evidence that he took any interest in this baby girl. He certainly made no provision for her in his later will and made no attempt to secure her freedom. If she survived into adulthood then she would have spent the first sixteen years of her life, until emancipation in 1834, as the enslaved property of the owners of the Bogue estate.
The Foster family owned several sugar estates in the St Elizabeth and Westmorland parishes of Jamaica. As well as Bogue, where we first find Ridgard, there was the Lancaster, Two Mile Wood, and Elim estates. The other branch of the family, the Foster-Barhams, owned two estates called Island and Mesopotamia. In his early years in Jamaica it seems that William Ridgard worked, either as overseer or attorney, for various of these estates. But in 1824 he took up the job of attorney for Joseph Foster-Barham’s Mesopotamia plantation which was situated in the flat, humid coastal plain of the Cabarita river just five miles north of Westmorland’s port town of Savanna-la-Mar.
The record-keeping of this plantation was more comprehensive than most, mainly because of Foster-Barham’s paternalistic interest in knowing how his slaves were getting on. And many of the records still survive – this is the only reason we know the names of Fanny and her mother Minny. These records are now kept at the Bodleian Library in Oxford and they include bundles and bundles of letters that William Ridgard wrote in his small copperplate handwriting. Between 1824 and 1838 it was part of his job to keep his employer up-to-date with the fortunes of the plantation and the state of the ‘negroes’ as he would always refer to them, who were the slave labour force. A very typical final paragraph of one letter reads,
The negroes upon the whole are much better than when we last wrote to you. We have lost a diseased man (Jack) of consumption and there is another one in much the same state. The working and breeding stock are all in good order and the labour of the estate is going on to our satisfaction. Hoping this will find you in the enjoyment of good health.
We remain
Most respectfully
Dear Sir
Your Obdt Servants
The letters were always written by Ridgard, but signed by himself and Duncan Robertson who was the Scottish attorney on Island estate, the other Foster-Barham-owned plantation.
We can see, even from this little snippet, that one of the chronic problems of many West Indian slave plantations was the basic non-viability of the slave population. To put it bluntly, slaves could not, or would not, breed enough even to replace those that died, let alone increase the population, and this was a constant problem for estate managers. On the Mesopotamia plantation alone records show that during the period from 1762 to 1833 there were 331 more deaths than births, and 415 replacements were bought in over the same period. The sheer harshness of the slave experience in the Caribbean meant that the death rate was very high, average working life-spans were short, and birth rates and infant survival rates were correspondingly low. Enslaved women of child-bearing age often had to be used for the heaviest field work on the plantation. Miscarriages, stillbirths and ‘false’ pregnancies by slave women were frequent and there is evidence in Ridgard’s letters that he was unusually frustrated by this. He seems to have interpreted it as deliberate action by slave women that, in his eyes, fell somewhere between malingering and the sabotage of plantation property. According to his account in one letter he actually punishes a slave called Dido by sending her to the workhouse (where she would have been shackled to a treadmill) because of the stillbirth of her twin babies.
So he was clearly capable of a sort of casual cruelty that would have been expected behaviour for any overseer or plantation manager. Whether we can call William Ridgard pathologically cruel is more difficult to say. Many overseers clearly were. Most famously a man called Thomas Thistlewood, also from Lincolnshire, was the overseer of the neighbouring Egypt plantation a generation before Ridgard’s arrival. He kept a detailed diary throughout his long career in Jamaica that, as well as being a valuable record of plantation life, also details his sexual encounters and punishment practices with the slaves in his charge. These accounts are artless, honest and very shocking, and reveal him to be what we would now call a serial rapist and a sadistic sociopath.
Thistlewood was probably at the extreme end of a scale of behaviour that was more-or-less normal for white overseers. The constant application of violence and brutal punishment – effectively a reign of terror – was seen by plantation managers as the only way to hold the unstable slave labour system together. All we can say is that William Ridgard would have had to find his own place somewhere on that scale of behaviour. Once he was an attorney he would have been distanced somewhat from the day-to-day enforcement of control, which would have been the task of the overseer (a white man) aided by the driver (a slave), but he would have had overall responsibility for all that happened on the estate.
How completely Ridgard integrated himself into the life of the Jamaican plantocracy can be seen from his active role in a dramatic event that took place fifteen years after his arrival on the island, an event that has gone down in Jamaican history (though most British people will know nothing of it). The Christmas Rebellion, or The Baptist War, was a slave revolt that took place across much of Jamaica, led by the slave and preacher Sam Sharpe, who has since become a Jamaican national hero. It took place in late December of 1831 and continued into the new year. Believing themselves to have been already freed by the British Queen and Government, but kept in slavery by the planters, many slaves went on strike and swept through plantations destroying cane fields and burning buildings and machinery. The revolt centred on the west of the island where the Fosters had their plantations and Ridgard, as an artillery lieutenant in the St. Elizabeth Militia, was involved in suppressing it.
On the 10th February 1832 Ridgard wrote a letter to Foster-Barham giving his account of events. Of Foster-Barham’s two properties, Mesopotamia and Island, the Island estate was badly affected and clearly attorneys Ridgard and Robertson felt the need for an explanation to their employer of exactly what happened that would also put them both in as good a light as possible. In the letter Ridgard talks of the revolt as having originated in the northern parishes of Hanover and St James spreading south in three main groups. Having described the progress (and heroic defeat by the militia) of the first two rebel groups, he then continues with the crucial information about the fate of the Foster estates,
The third invasion came from the windward part of St James by Kensington and advanced within four miles of Cathcale Estate destroying everything before them. but they were checked by a detachment of our Regiment & several killed and taken. There intention was to have destroyed all, then & no doubt would have proceeded on to the Fosters Estates had they not been most fortunately checked. It appeard to have been an organised plan throughout the island emanating no doubt from the Baptist missionaries. Almost every one of the rebels who have been condemned have on being taken to the place of execution stated that the Parson Burchell had told them they were to be free after 1st Jan. On the 2nd nearly every property struck work in the upper part of the parish… Eless people turned out again on the 4th, Lancaster 5th & Two Mile Wood the 6th, the James Lother properties not until visited by the militia and severe examples made of them. Appleton & Baydale Estates in the Sassan turned out the first. We are however sorry to state it was not so at the Island, which was destined to be destroyed on the 4th. A mulatto named Cambell a carpenter had joined the rebels & came around to entice others to join him, on the 3rd but did not then succeed as he wished, he swore that would now do it the following day, fortunately a party of the 2nd Bath “Comp” & maroons came upon him in the woods & the later shot him, cut his ears off which were given to the head driver to show the people, this intimidated them so much that a few went to their work in the morning and have been gradually coming in ever since. Some of the supposed ring leaders were taken up & tried. In course evidence was obtained which appears 6 more belonging to the estate were more or less implicated one of which was shot, one hanged and his head sent to the estate to be nailed on a pole, one to receive 300 lashes with cat o nine tails two others 400 each & one 500, which was a severe example. No doubt they were all deserving death, but the evidence was rather weak (Cambell was stiled Captain) In Westmorland the low lands have been quiet but the rebels forced themselves into the mountains and displace all from hinder Forrest to Caladonia and … they succeeded in destroying our trash house there when they were driven back by a detachment of the Westmorland Regiment stationed there. They also attacked fort William Estate and met with the same treatment.
The letter has a rather breathless, gung-ho feel about it as though Ridgard is caught up in the drama of it all and is not thinking how his elderly and rather pious employer is going to react. There are very graphic and rather vindictive passages where he is describing the execution and brutal punishment (on evidence that was ‘rather weak’) metred out to various of Foster-Barham’s slaves supposedly involved in the uprising on the Island estate – slaves that were the valuable property of the very man he was writing to. But in a final paragraph he reports with satisfaction on the estate for which he is responsible,
At Mesopotamia the negroes have behaved remarkably well & have been left entirely to themselves, they took up two rebels who came to entice them from their duty & took them to the Guard. The time being about before Xmas they took off the liquor in the distilling house themselves.
The origins of the name ‘Baptist War’ are already clear in this contemporary account. Ridgard echoes the Jamaican planters’ distaste for evangelising the slaves and places the blame for the rebellion squarely on the provocative influence of Baptist preachers.
As we can glean from the letter, the rebellion was crushed and there was a most bloody retribution. Sam Sharpe was hanged along with countless others. But in this letter with it’s talk of rebels ‘deserving of death’ we see William Ridgard clearly on the wrong side of history. The very reasons for the revolt show that talk of emancipation was very much in the air. Public opinion in Britain had swung against slavery and within two years of this rebellion the Emancipation Act was finally passed.
The freeing of all slaves in the British Caribbean came into effect in August 1834. That is just one month after Fanny Fisher had given birth to a baby boy – the result of the brief liaison mentioned at the beginning of this story between William and Fanny. We will of course never know the exact nature of this relationship, but the circumstances surrounding it may give us some insight.
When Ridgard first became attorney for Mesopotamia estate in 1824 he would have taken up residence in the plantation Great House, the finest building on the estate and originally the home of the now-absentee Foster-Barham family. The house had a dedicated staff of domestic workers who although slaves, clearly had a less arduous life than the field slaves working on the cane pieces. One of those domestic workers at the house was the eighteen-year-old Fanny Fisher. She had started working when she was ten as a domestic slave in the overseer’s house but had been transferred at the age of fifteen to the Great House. She was a ‘mulatto’, the child of a black mother, Minny, and a white father, who we have no record of. There was no white man called Fisher on the estate so the origins of her surname are not clear. Her mixed race status was probably a key factor in her being assigned as a house slave in the first place. But she must have had some special qualities because after only seven years at the Great House, when she was only twenty-two, she is recorded as the ‘head house woman’ and would have had a workforce of twelve other house slaves under her supervision.
A year later in 1830 she had her first child, William Allen, born of a black father. This meant that Fanny’s first son was a ‘sambo’ (regressing back to ‘black’}. To grasp the meaning of this label we have to understand the strange classification of interracial breeding that the British had imposed on their Caribbean populations. The main thrust of the racial theories of the time, the theories used to underpin slavery, was that black Africans were a separate species of humanity, inferior to white Europeans. We can see in this the beginnings of ideas about racial purity. But paradoxically the practical realities of the creole societies of the British Caribbean meant that inter-breeding was more-or-less part of the system and sexual predation by white men on enslaved black women was tacitly encouraged. Unlike in America where the ‘one drop of blood’ theory meant that black always stayed black, in the British Caribbean it was legally possible to ‘breed to white’ in carefully classified stages. This created another class – mulattos, quadroons, octaroons, mustaphinos etc. – the ‘coloured’ class, who were seen by the British as having racially benefitted from an input of white European stock. They were better than black, but not as good as white. Coloured slaves were much more likely to be assigned to more desirable jobs on the plantations, the girls to domestic work in the Great Houses, the boys to learn the skilled trades like carpentry, masonry, coopering or stock keeping. They were also more likely to be manumitted – that is to have their freedom purchased by their white fathers and to benefit from some degree of education.
Whether they were free or enslaved, the coloureds were a buffer class that could be used as an interface between the minority of whites and the bulk of the black population. They could also attract the envy or animosity of blacks because of their relative privilege and so they contributed to a divide-and-rule effect that was useful to the British.
White attitudes to the coloureds was ambivalent. They were seen as useful and valuable, but the weird logic of racial theory meant that the injection of white blood was seen to grant them a sort of crafty unreliability – an independent intelligence – that was seen by whites as distasteful and dangerous, and the stigma of ‘miscegenation’ was always present. It’s interesting to note that in Ridgard’s letter he blames the destruction of Island estate on one single person, Cambell, the treacherous mulatto carpenter.
On the sexual front mixed-race women were clearly attractive to white men and this set up a sort of survival mechanism or even an escape route for many enslaved coloured women, where attracting the patronage and protection of a white man and giving birth to even ‘whiter’ children became an insurance policy and an effective strategy for life. From here on we can see that the story of Jamaica, and all of the British Caribbean, is no longer one of simply ‘black’ and ‘white’, but a complicated psychological landscape of colour gradations all entangled with notions of class, racial superiority, upward mobility and the fear, resentments and prejudice that accompany that. The insidious legacy of this ‘pigment-ocracy’ has lasted a long time in the Caribbean.
As a domestic house slave Fanny Fisher had already benefited from her coloured status. She was now in her mid-twenties and the head house woman at the Great House where William Ridgard was the manager of the estate. When he was staying there they would presumably have come into daily contact. She was a young mixed-race woman, clearly intelligent and highly capable. He was the most powerful white man on the plantation. We already know that in due course a sexual encounter occurred between them. But we can only speculate on the motives.
As we have seen, this could easily have been rape, though for Ridgard to have forced himself upon such a key worker in his own household, might have had repercussions even for him. It could just as easily have been totally consensual, or even encouraged by Fanny. Given the politics of colour that prevailed Fanny could have had good reason to want to gain the kindly attention of, or even to bear the quadroon child, of the white manager of the estate that owned her. She had been born into a system where she was destined to a lifetime of powerlessness and servitude and any small advantage available would doubtless have seemed attractive.
One scenario that I haven’t mentioned is the growth of a genuine and lasting affection between William and Fanny. This also is a possibility of course, but further evidence we have makes it seem unlikely. That evidence is William Ridgard’s last will and testament which was validated on 26th August 1841 after his death. We don’t know what he died of, or even where he died, but his will contains perhaps the most revealing information we have about him. After a formal preamble about funeral arrangements and the settling of debts, Ridgard goes on to detail what he wishes to happen to his estate.
I give and bequeath to my computed children by Mary Morais, viz. Mary Ann Ridgard, Sarah Ridgard, Elizabeth Ridgard, Ann Ridgard, Samuel Ridgard, William Ridgard, George Ridgard, and Joseph Ridgard, my pen in this parish, called Gainsborough, formerly Lanterwood, with all buildings stock etc. etc. upon it, share and share alike to my above named children, their mother Mary Morais to be allowed to live thereon during her natural life.
From this document we suddenly learn that William Ridgard had no fewer than eight children by another woman called Mary Morais. Not only this, but that at the time of his death he owned a cattle farm in St. Elizabeth parish which he had renamed Gainsborough Pen in memory of his home town back in England. William Ridgard had been busy in more ways than one.
Mary Morais was not from the Mesopotamia estate and so we know nothing about her, not even if she had been a slave or a free person. Her surname, Morais, is Portuguese/Jewish in origin, a heritage that goes back a long way in the Caribbean. She would definitely have been of mixed race but probably not of simply Afro-British parentage like Fanny Fisher. She was most probably from the area around Two Mile Wood or Lancaster, the Foster plantations where Ridgard would have worked in his early years in Jamaica. Intriguingly, in the Jamaican Return of Proprietors for the years 1829 to 1833 William Ridgard is listed as ‘owner/guardian’ of four slaves at Eden (Eden at that time seems to have been a place name in the area of the Foster plantations). Was Mary one of these slaves?
Whatever her origins Mary Morais effectively had become Ridgard’s common law wife, and clearly his children with her had become the focus of his paternal interest – they were his family. But the will makes it clear that his real concern is for the children rather than Mary herself. Although she is allowed to continue living on the property now to be owned by her children, he adds a further clause to the will: ‘… should their mother act indiscreetly it is my wish she should be removed from the pen and excluded from the above named share of the property.’ It is a tantalising glimpse of their relationship. Obviously not a conventional one, even by the patriarchal standards of the times. More one of a master and concubine.
Fanny Fisher is certainly not mentioned in the will, and neither is the child that she and William conceived together. He was born to Fanny in July 1834 and was named Richard Ridgard. The Slavery Abolition Act formally ended slavery in the British Empire on 24 August 1834. So technically Richard was born into slavery but became free when he was one month old. The one document that actually records his birth is both poignant and slightly shocking. In the National Archives at Kew, are housed the records of all the compensation claims submitted to the British government of the day by West Indian planters and British-based slave owners. Twenty million pounds (seventeen billion in today’s money) was paid out to slave owners for the loss of their ‘property’. Having lost the battle to keep slavery, slave owners were scrambling to claim from the public purse as much compensation as they possibly could. Document T71/1007 is a last-minute amended claim, dated October 14th 1834. In careful detail it itemises fifteen infants that had been born on the Mesopotamia estate since Foster-Barham’s initial claim of June 28th 1832 was submitted. Among the male children it lists,
Richard B. Ridgard, mother Fanny Fisher, age 3 months.
The claim document is in a familiar small copperplate handwriting, and is signed by William Ridgard. So the only acknowledgement in writing that William makes of Richard’s existence is in order that his employer John Foster-Barham can receive due compensation for the loss of Ridgard’s own son as a slave.
After emancipation the detailed slave inventories of Mesopotamia stopped abruptly, so we don’t know what happened to Fanny. But of course this silence is a triumph of sorts. At the age of twenty-eight she passes from a slave inventory to the anonymity of freedom. We should not pretend that it was going to be easy for her, because it wasn’t. The period after emancipation was a truly terrible one for the ex-slaves who became locked into extreme poverty, still with no political or civil rights and having to struggle for land and the right to earn a living in the way they chose. But there were certain things in her favour that could encourage us to imagine a productive life for Fanny. Her rapid rise to a responsible position as an enslaved person shows that she must have had unusual qualities and there’s every reason to believe that she would continue to use these to advantage. We know that her son Richard became a fisherman and lived to the age of seventy-one in the same part of Jamaica. He fathered four children, and there is now a thriving diaspora of descendants living all over the world. Fanny’s great grand-daughter (my mother-in-law) made the opposite journey to William Ridgard exactly one-hundred-and-thirty years after his, back across the Atlantic to settle in England.
William Ridgard died when Richard was seven years old and we have no way of knowing whether Richard had any sort of relationship with his father. But probably not, given that he was not formally recognised by William as his child. The same, of course, was true of little Caroline Ridgard, the baby daughter of Polly from the Bogue estate, way back in 1819. So it does rather beg the question how many other children did William father with other enslaved women during his life in Jamaica?
It also leaves a larger question hanging in the air. Just what sort of a man was William Ridgard, and how did life in British Jamaica affect him? Ridgard’s employer Joseph Foster-Barham died in 1832 and the new owner was his son John. As far as we know William Ridgard never met his new employer in person, but the working relationship continued by letter and John Foster-Barham clearly formed his own opinion of his employee, as one of his private papers shows.
‘Ridgard attorney for Mesopotamia Estate is I fancy a careful plodding man of business, a good Planter but not over bright, and quite at sea when put out of his daily routine.’
Reading between the lines this should probably be interpreted as attorney Ridgard – the experienced man on the ground – resisting the naïve demands of his new young employer who had never even been to Jamaica. But there is some trace there of Ridgard the man that seems to ring true. Especially the ‘careful plodding man of business’. William Ridgard was a natural conservative – pragmatic, self-interested, and keen to advance himself within whatever system he found himself a part of. In Jamaica he was part of a cruel and barbaric system. He didn’t invent it, and maybe he didn’t even like it. But there is no sign that he ever questioned it. In fact he enforced it and defended it at every turn and in the end he did quite well out of it. As slavery ended he moved adroitly from one system to the next and profited from the relative decline that occurred. He became a land and stock owner, probably purchasing abandoned property at a cheap price, as many attorneys did. He was a local magistrate and ended up, as his will shows, a man of some small but significant wealth.
In his salaried jobs he seems to have been efficient and adept at handling people at different ends of the system – punctilious, diplomatic and courteous with owners, unsentimental and canny with slaves and, of course harsh, cruel even, when required. But his will shows that he was capable of responsible family relationships and concerned for the welfare and education of his children, or at least those that he chose to recognise. He was part of a brutally racist system, and yet his own Jamaican family was mixed-race. In this one intimate sense he had ‘gone native’. The will also reveals that he kept in touch in a kindly way with certain of his sisters, nephews and nieces back in England, leaving them money and certain small possessions to remember him by. He was not a boorish monster like Thomas Thistlewood, but he was clearly no saint either. We would have to see him as a fairly typical product of the British Caribbean.
By the time William Ridgard arrived in Jamaica the dirty business of plantation slavery had been adopted, developed and honed to perfection over 200 years. Ridgard typifies Kipling’s idea of the subaltern, the loyal administrator who makes the system work at ground level. He was one of those plodding younger sons who never came back to England but made a life for themselves in their adopted land and contributed something, even if it was only their DNA.
By comparison the relationship with Jamaica of the absentee Foster-Barhams and their like can only really be seen as a lethally parasitical one, taking enormous private wealth out of a distant land for over a century and a half, and putting nothing back but the human misery, and the toxic legacy, of chattel slavery. This is a narrative that we don’t tell ourselves so often. It is the reason, let’s face it, for our wanting to forget about the British Caribbean.
And, unlike in America, it is easy for the British to forget. One thing we can sense clearly about William Ridgard’s life in Jamaica is its remoteness from Britain. Ridgard, the ‘plodding man of business’ was clearly not a man who was interested in fame or a place in history, but had he been, he certainly chose the wrong place to achieve it. As an estate attorney a significant part of his job was to write letters describing his workplace and its circumstances. By chance these letters have survived and so by the standards of most colonial emigrés of his time he has left us with an unusually large and complete first-hand testimony. The letter about the Christmas Rebellion alone is a unique primary source for a crucial event. It was so crucial for Jamaican history that the face of Sam Sharpe still looks out proudly from Jamaican dollar bills today. But in Britain we know nothing of it. Ridgard’s letters lie in boxes in the vaults of the Bodleian Library untranscribed, unpublished and largely ignored by British historians of empire. To a large extent what happened in Jamaica, stayed there – and has stayed there ever since.
This was something common to Britain’s growing empire across the globe. Its vast distance and separation from Britain itself allowed the British by-and-large to see themselves as benevolent colonisers. The sharp end of British racism and oppression was always happening far away and out of sight and this helped to foster the paternalism that typified the British at the height of empire, and that still lingers to this day.
But whether ordinary Britons of the time were aware of it or not, the oppression that was taking place on their behalf had been carefully and elaborately justified by the racial theories of the era. By the time he was a young man Ridgard would have absorbed ideas of white racial superiority from his very surroundings. It was an outlook that he was going to need in order to function effectively in Jamaica, a place that was the very cradle of those ideas. For it was plantation slavery in the Caribbean and the Americas that effectively invented racism – modern, ‘scientific’ racism – out of necessity. Racially-based slavery on such a scale needed a justification of some sort, and racism was the belief system that grew to provide it. As the Victorian era progressed British racism spread across the empire and came to typify the relationship between the white British and their brown and black subject peoples.
The similarities I listed earlier between myself and William Ridgard are coincidental, but I can’t help wondering about how much else we might have in common. Or more specifically how much the Britain of 1815 has influenced the Britain I live in, over two hundred years later. If I try to imagine myself, for a moment, as a modern day William Ridgard it is immediately obvious to me that the beliefs about race that must have formed Ridgard’s attitudes and actions are still present to some extent in my own culture and background. As I grew up in Sheffield in the 1950s and 60s subtle messages about whiteness, and Englishness (and the inherent superiority of both) were certainly all around me. It was in my school education, in the films and TV that I watched and the books, newspapers and comics that I read. Today those ideas are still with us, and not so subtle.
To imagine that racially-based slavery could have existed for so long, and on such a large scale, and for it to have no long-term consequences for the descendants of the enslaved, or for the white society that absorbed the racial theories underpinning it, is naive in the extreme. But this effectively is the position that modern Britain takes. We are happy to learn about William Wilberforce and his noble struggle to end slavery, but nothing about slavery itself – how or why Britain used it, how we justified it, what slave societies were actually like, what lasting benefits Britain gained from the system.
For the sake of modern Britain some form of truth and reconciliation is needed here. And for this to happen, the forgotten lives of people like Minny, Fanny Fisher, Mary Morais, William Ridgard, Thomas Thistlewood and of course the slippery Foster-Barhams, are of much more use to us than the saintly story of William Wilberforce. They are of more use because they help to clarify important truths about Britain and its empire. They show us that Britain, along with other European powers, invented modern racism, and that this happened in the Caribbean as a part of plantation slavery. They teach us that the British empire, of enormous benefit to the wealth and status of Britain, was a lasting disaster for its black and brown subject peoples. And they remind us that the legacy of all this is still very much with us, and that ignoring it distorts our education system, impoverishes our culture and infects our political life and our standing in the world.
William Ridgard’s life and times have become invisible to us. If he had gone to Canada to grow wheat, or Australia to raise sheep, or India to plant tea, we may now have no personal record of him at all, but his occupation – his place in the colonial story – would be part of our collective memory.
But he went to Jamaica to grow sugarcane using the labour of hundreds of black slaves, and that is a story that we have quietly forgotten. The first step in addressing modern issues of race is to acknowledge that missing history, to look at it closely and clearly, and to learn its lessons. William Ridgard and Fanny Fisher are tiny footnotes, but ones that are part of a vital history that needs to be heard – the story of the British, and what we did in the Caribbean.
Bill Mayblin
2026
Acknowledgements
Much of the historical and biographical information in this essay regarding the Mesopotamia estate in Jamaica I owe to the painstaking research by the Harvard historian, the late Richard S. Dunn, both from his excellent book A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia (HUP 2015) and also from his kind correspondence with me. I have also drawn heavily on the enthusiastic research of current descendants of the Ridgard family, in particular Natalie Hinds-Scott who lives in New Jersey, USA, and Kate Merrick who is Andrea’s niece and lives in the UK. They are both sixth-generation descendants of Fanny Fisher and William Ridgard.