The UK Guardian yesterday reported that evidence has come to light that Sandbach, Tinne and Company – a corporation closely linked to the merchants who got the biggest taxpayer-funded compensation payouts at the end of slavery – continued to traffic enslaved Africans illegally after abolition to then British Guiana.
The report said that the discovery is detailed in a book, Searching for My Slave Roots, by author Malik Al Nasir, who has been researching his family history.
The Slave Trade Act of 1807 abolished the trade in humans in British territories. Then, in 1833, the Slavery Abolition Act banned slavery itself in most of the British empire.
But the report said that an 1847 letter, written to Sandbach Tinne’s Liverpool office by Peter Miller Watson, who managed the company’s interests in Demerara, refers to a ship from the company’s own fleet arriving with a “cargo of negroes”, including dozens of young children.
The letter details how the ship, called “the Parker”, was carrying “115 adult males, 86 adult females, 82 under 14 years, and 41 under 4 years,” adding: “There have been only three casualties during the passage – 1 man and 2 children – which Captain R. says may be attributed to the wretched state in which they had lived ashore.”
Malik said in the report: “Slavery had been abolished, so how do we know the people on the Parker weren’t indentured, or Africans liberated by the Royal Navy? Firstly, Watson specifically refers to them as cargo, and not passengers, when liberated Africans were not regarded as cargo, enslaved people were called cargo.
“In referring to the ‘wretched state’ in which they had lived ashore, he’s saying they were shipped from land and are the architects of their own condition – if they had been previously enslaved blame would have been on their former masters, and they would not have been bought if they were sick. When [Watson] talks about casualties, he’s attributing the deaths as a loss of property. By process of deduction, we can see these are people illegally trafficked from Africa.”
The report said that Peter Miller Watson was a distant cousin of the British prime minister William Gladstone and the father of Andrew Watson, who became the first Black international footballer when he captained Scotland in the 1880s.
Sandbach Tinne, which was wound up in 1975, was the family business of the Sandbach and Tinne families, who, along with their collaborators and relatives in the Gladstone family, dominated the Demerara sugar trade.
The report said that by the time of the 1847 letter, Sandbach Tinne and their subsidiaries had already received compensation equivalent to millions of pounds today for the “loss” of the people they enslaved before abolition. While family patriarch Samuel Sandbach had left the partnership in 1833, the UK Guardian report said that his son William Robertson Sandbach and son-in-law Charles Stuart Parker Jr were principal shareholders in 1847.
“John Gladstone, the father of William Gladstone who owned plantations in Guyana and Jamaica, got the biggest single individual payout, while Sandbach Tinne got the second largest on aggregate – both were among architects of the compensation scheme,” Malik said in the report.
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