Sunderland Black History Walk

The Victoria Hall is best known as the venue for a terrible fire tragedy in which 183 children died, the memorial to which marks the original site of the hall, which was destroyed by the Luftwaffe in 1941.

In 1898, the Victoria Hall was the venue for the world premier of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s ‘Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast’, part of a series of compositions based on Longfellow’s famous poem. Coleridge-Taylor was only 23 years old at the time, but conducted his cantata to great acclaim.

Hailed as a twentieth-century musical genius, Coleridge-Taylor broke many societal norms. Conscious of his African descent, his compositions were influenced by his cultural heritage. His work was so well received, he was even invited to the Whitehouse in 1904 by President Theodore Roosevelt as a result of the popularity of this first work, ‘Hiaiwatha’s Wedding Feast.’

They heard it here first, in Sunderland. The Musical Times reported:

‘Like Tschaïkowsky in his most characteristic movements, there is a certain barbaric opulence about his music, an absence of any apparent labour, and a passionate energy that are in perfect keeping with the subject. Dvorák, who has anticipated him in treating of the ‘forest primeval’, has hardly a greater wealth of fresh melodic ideas.’

The Sunderland Echo was similarly enthusiastic about the quality of Coleridge-Taylor’s composition, but where their report mentioned the ‘barbaric’, it is not in connection with an established, white composer, but instead is tinged with racism:

‘When one remembered the African blood which coursed through the composer’s veins, one could appreciate more fully the wild bursts of barbaric harmony which occasionally characterised the work.’

You may need to crane your neck somewhat to see this blue plaque, in honour of the Quaker women activists.

The block of buildings you are now facing, numbered 170-173, are all that remains of a once-affluent terrace of Georgian properties. Built as a commercial premises, with a double-height front window, 173 was bought by Quaker George Binns in 1811 to be the new premises of his growing drapers’ business. The Quakers were long-standing abolitionists, and the Sunderland Quaker meeting minute books show that they were active in this campaign from the early 18th century. When slavery was outlawed in the British Empire in 1807, they continued to raise awareness of the plight of those people still enslaved. Sunderland became particularly well known for one campaign whereby the Quaker shop keepers refused to stock (slave-produced) West Indian sugar, and this act was widely copied by other grocers in the town. This was just one of the awareness-raising campaigns that the Quaker women devised.

James Field Stanfield (1749-1824) was born in Dublin but spent most of his later life in Sunderland, living here at Bodlewell House (the original building is no longer standing). He initially trained for the priesthood but did not go on to take orders. Instead, he became a sailor and, as such, was the first ordinary seaman involved in the slave trade to write about its horrors. He described conditions on board slaving ships as ‘floating dungeons’.

In 1788 he wrote 'Observations on a Guinea Voyage', which is a vivid account of a trip from Liverpool to Benin, West Africa, on a slaving ship. He also published The Guinea Voyage as ‘a poem in three volumes’ in 1789, featuring the description: ‘The direful Voyage to Guinea’s sultry shore / And Africa’s wrongs, indignant Muse deplore’.

He wrote a series of letters describing the horrors of the conditions on these ships to his close friend and leading anti-slavery campaigner, the Reverend Thomas Clarkson. Stanfield’s evidence included the additional argument that the slave trade was extremely destructive to the lives of the English sailors, describing the psychological trauma the men suffered.

Thomas Clarkson was a founding member of the Society for Effecting Abolition of the Slave Trade, and he included Stanfield’s writings in the evidence this society collected. Passages from Stanfield’s writing were used extensively in antislavery pamphlets.

Although giving their name to another part of Sunderland, the Thornhills' wealth entered the town in this area.
The Thornhill family were the main benefactors of enslaved people in Sunderland, using some of their accumulated wealth to build St John’s Church. The church here, Seventeen Nineteen (formerly Holy Trinity), formed the model for St John's Church which was built by the Thornhills.

The old exchange building (demolished in the 1960s) was at the bottom of Church Street and would have been the one used by the Thornhills when they first established their quay in a prime position which is now taken up by Corporation Quay.

You might be able to see on the map that the furthest point for the streets here is called 'Barrack Street', which is where the barracks were situated. St John's would have stood between Barrack Street and Hartley Street on Prospect Row, facing the town moor.

The Thornhill family became wealthy initially through shipping, but later invested in plantations in India. John Thornhill commissioned the building of St John’s Church as a mirror image of Holy Trinity in 1764. He was a divisive figure, famously described by local historian James Corder as 'a curious mixture of piety, public spirit, conceit and fraud'. The Thornhills moved to North Yorkshire in the late eighteenth century but their legacy remains in the area of Sunderland that still carries their name.

Interestingly, John Thornhill was so enamoured with the church that carried his name that he was said to have been buried under its altar. However, when the church was demolished in 1972, no trace of him was found.

As you look upon this beautiful grade II listed building, formerly a bank, it is easy to feel it has historical significance. However, the history of the ground upon which it stands runs deeper still. Before this building was erected, another building stood proudly here. The Sunderland Assembly Hall was built on the site of the old Ebenezer Chapel, on the northern corner of Fawcett Street and St Thomas Street. It was opened in 1884. The building was converted into the Assembly Hall at a time when the street was moving from being primarily residential to commercial.

It was in the old Assembly Hall that speakers such as Celestine Edwards spoke out against slavery and racism.
Edwards was a passional anti-racism and anti-imperialism activist, and regularly spoke at the Assembly Hall in the 1880s and 1890s. He lived in Sunderland for a short time.
(Samuel Jules) Celestine Edwards was born sometime in late 1858 or early 1859, on the island of Dominica. The youngest of ten children, his free-born French-speaking parents moved to the neighbouring island of Antigua when Celestine was very young. There he went to school until the age of about twelve. He ran away to Gaudaloupe and then to sea. The reason for this is not known, but there are some stories that he was bullied by his older brothers. When at sea, Celestine recalled later that he learned to swear and drink like a sailor.

Although born into a Christian family, it was only when he was working as a sailor that he fully committed to the faith. In 1877, he arrived in the UK, first in Edinburgh where he worked as a labourer. He then moved to live in Sunderland, where he had a career change again and worked as an insurance agent, earning the sum of £80 per year, a sum which is considerably higher than that of the average skilled labourer at that time (about £1 a week). By this time, he was a committed Methodist, and fully embraced the temperance movement associated with this.

Edwards became a passionate speaker in favour of temperance, and spoke at length on religious matters at various locations both in Sunderland and more widely. He was a regular speaker at the new Assembly Hall on Fawcett Street, but also spoke at the Bethesda Chapel on Tatham Street, and at other venues around the city.

A very tall man at just under 6 feet at a time when the average height for men was around 5 feet 6 inches, he was an imposing figure. From newspaper reports of his many public appearances in Sunderland, it seems he was a very popular and engaging speaker, who was not afraid to argue on points of theology, imperialism and race. He was particularly critical of some of Darwin’s ideas, highlighting the implicit racism of these (perhaps also linking them to Darwin’s eugenicist cousin, Francis Galton). In a speech recorded in the Sunderland Daily Echo on 30th September 1891, he is reported to have

'dealt at length with the theory of evolution, and said that Darwin had somehow got the negro race mixed up in his book, and had stated that in his opinion it was somewhere in Africa that the human race first originated from ape. The lecturer then dealt with the various objects raised against the negro, and caused much amusement by the comparison he made between negroes and white men. The lecture was listened to with great attention, and was much applauded, Mr Edwards concluding a fine peroration by saying that the time was coming, and coming fast, when public opinion would be turned, and it would be found that, given equal opportunity and equal time, the negro race would show as honourable a record as any race with which the earth was blest.'

Edwards lived only two or three years in Sunderland. Details of his life are somewhat sketchy as he moved around a great deal. Sunderland is one of the few places he actually settled for any length of time. He did move to London in the late 1880s, where he moved around various locations. He helped former slave Walter Hawkins write his autobiography, 'From Slavery to Bishopric' (1891). He became editor of the Christian fortnightly magazine, Lux, and also the Society for the Recognition of the Brotherhood of Man’s newsletter, Fraternity. He thus becomes what is thought to be Britain’s first black editor. He used these publications to fight for racial equality, the demise of imperialism, and of course temperance. In the 10th December 1892 edition of Lux, he wrote that

'as long as such unrighteous deeds as cold-blooded murders are permitted under the British flag, as long as avarice and cupidity prompt the actions of a missionary nation, so long we shall protest against public money being spent in the interest of land-grabbers. The injustice under which the black man is smarting will come home to his oppressors’ children’s children. He will surprise and disappoint those who never dreamt that the quiet happy-go-lucky black would turn like the worm upon those who wronged him. If the British nation stole no more, they have stolen enough and have sufficient responsibility at home and abroad to occupy her maternal attention for the next hundred years. If the British nation has not murdered enough no nation on God’s earth has.'

In this extract, we can see that he is clearly arguing against racial inequality and imperialism, telling uncomfortable truths. It is a message he repeated in Lux a few months later, pointing here to the trading habits of the British in their colonising avarice.