Black Greenwich Pensioners
This show was mainly information boards with just a few artefacts from the family of John Simmons who served at Trafalgar and is shown in this picture with his Trafalgar medal. However it was packed with stories and insight into the area in the 18th and 19th century. What a fantastic piece of research!
The Royal Navy was the largest employer of free black labour at the time in Britain however the hospital did not record the race of new pensioners just their county of origin so it isn’t clear how many of them were black. It is likely that many registered as American were black former slaves. The show pointed out that in the navy all the sailors lived equally on board ship and probably at the hospital, rank was more important than race. As pensioners could live in or out of the hospital in the local area, many of the black pensioners married local women.
Figures who stood out for me included John Thomas, who as a slave alleged cruelty on his plantation on Barbados and ran away to sea. In 1813, having been at the hospital, he asked to return to the island in return for “no stripes” ie no punishment. In 1830 his owed pension of £56 was paid to a trustee in Barbados for his children.
The show ended with a board on Greenwich and the slave trade pointing out that a local man, Ambrose Cowley, supplied manacles and yokes to the trade. The hospital itself owned a plantation in Jamaica which it gained as part of the settlement of a debt.
Closes 21 February 2021
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