Lancaster is a pretty town, with a wealth of imposing Georgian houses, civic buildings, monuments and statues built during the town’s 18th century heyday. I never gave much thought to this, but during my recent visit I was stopped in my tracks by the sight of a gravestone in the churchyard of the Priory Church next to Lancaster Castle. Daubed in red paint were the words ‘slave trader’.
The headstone marks the grave of members of the Rawlinson and Lindow families, very wealthy local merchants. The story of how they came by their considerable riches is the story of how Lancaster and England became rich. It’s hard to reconcile with the town you see today, but in the 18th century, Lancaster was the fourth largest slave trading port in the country. Its wealth built upon human suffering.
Many Lancaster merchants were heavily involved in the slave trade and traded in goods produced from slavery in North America and the Caribbean. The Rawlinson and Lindow families were not only traders in enslaved African men, women and children, they owned slaves who worked on their plantations in the Caribbean. Wealth made them powerful, Abraham Rawlinson was Member of Parliament for Lancaster.
Between 1749 and 1800, Rawlinson family ships transported an estimated 1,454 captive Africans to be sold into slavery. Their sugar plantation in Grenada exploited African slave labour. They even had an enslaved African servant in their Lancaster home. They may have been some of the leading Lancaster slave traders, but the whole town was in some way complicit.
The political graffiti on the tombstone was put there during Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. The vicar of the Priory Church chose to leave it on the tomb as testimony to this unspoken and hidden history. Thanks to this, I discovered Facing the Past. A project that has done exemplary work exploring Lancaster’s role in the slave trade, while engaging with local communities.
It led me to the Enslaved Africans Memorial, one of only three such memorials in the country. Compared to the thousands of statues of slave traders and those who profited from slavery, it’s easy to appreciate why this history remains hidden. The memorial lists the names of ships that traded slaves. It names the owners but only lists the number of enslaved people transported on each ship.
As is so often the case, the victims of colonial crimes are anonymous, numbers not names. As if mirroring this fact, the memorial is in an obscure spot next to the river away from the town centre. But this is where cargoes used to trade for captive Africans were loaded, and commodities produced from slavery were unloaded: indigo, tobacco, cotton, sugar, rum and tropical hardwoods.
Growing up in this area, the name Gillow was well known as furniture makers. The family made their fortune and reputation during the 18th century using tropical hardwoods, especially mahogany, to craft fine and very expensive furniture for the aristocracy. In the 1740s the family owned a share of a ship used to import goods from the slave islands of the Caribbean. Their profits were built on the enslavement of Africans.
Lancaster traded directly with the slave colonies from the 1670s onwards, only entering the slave trade itself in 1738. At least 122 ships sailed from Lancaster to the coast of Africa, mostly modern day Gambia, Senegal and Sierra Leone, and then onwards to sell their human cargo. When slavery was abolished in 1807, they were responsible for the capture, transportation and sale of around 30,000 people.
What seems remarkable today, is that Lancaster had a port at all. I walked along the river on St George’s Quay past wharfs and warehouses where slaving ships docked. In the 18th century, the River Lune was deep enough for ocean going ships, but later silted up, ending Lancaster’s ‘Golden Age’. A fact I learned in the small Maritime Museum in the former Customs House.
The museum tries hard to tell both the story of Lancaster’s seafaring history, but also the wider story of the town’s role in the slave trade. It’s a fine balance, one they mostly succeed in. It’s reassuring that, in the backlash to Black Lives Matter, and the toppling of slave trader Edward Colston’s statue into Bristol harbour, that one town is addressing modern inequities and prejudice by understanding their relationship with the past.
