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Spectacularly set in the beautiful Tywi valley of Carmarthenshire, Aberglasney House features one of the finest gardens in Wales. Aberglasney Gardens have been an inspiration to poets since 1477. The story of Aberglasney spans many centuries, and at the beginning of the 19th Century it offers Bittersweet the opportunity of looking in depth at the influence and popularity of tea-drinking (impossible to most without sugar) as it was bought in 1803 by Thomas Phillips, a 'nabob' who during 30 years as surgeon with the East India Company had amassed a fortune (and a consort, Mrs. Moore, who happened to be married to someone else). It was his wealth that enabled descendants to make embellishments to his property - adding a portico to the Queen Anne façade, throwing out a bay on the garden front, running an avenue across the fields from the road, and having a new coat of arms created in a fine painted-glass window.
John, Lord Mountstuart, acquired huge estates in South Wales on his marriage to Charlotte Windsor and the family moved to Cardiff in 1766. When coal became king in the late 18th century, the Butes built the Cardiff canal to Merthyr to aid industrialisation. Described as a popular ‘green lung’ for the city of Cardiff, Bute Park offers Bittersweet the chance to look at how rich industrialists developed South Wales and how goods from South Wales such as copper pans, china and so on were exported to Africa to buy slaves. Cardiff is also home to around twenty families whose origins lie in the Cape Verde Islands, a former Portuguese slave colony off the coast of West Africa. Their forebears were merchant seamen who worked on vessels exporting coal and oil from south Wales via a fuel bunkering port in Cape Verde from the late 19th century to the 1970s
Home to the Myddleton family for 500 years, Thomas Myddelton 1550-1630, made part of his fortune trading in sugar. His Journal shows sugar transactions amounting to a turnover of over £6,000 in three months in 1583. Dealings with the Antwerp 'sugar baekers' continued till 1586. Myddelton helped to finance explorers’ voyages between 1588 and 1596 - sometimes as treasurer of the voyage, sometimes as a shareholder in the vessels. The names Drake, Hawkins, Frobisher and Raleigh appear regularly in his accounts. [See also ‘privateers’ in Dyffryn Gardens]. Most notably in 1592 he was investor in and treasurer of the voyage principally financed by Raleigh and led by Frobisher of which detailed accounts survive. He became a very wealthy man, investing heavily in the Welsh economy and was responsible for (without profit) the publication of religious works in the Welsh language, most notably 'Y Beibl Bach', the first portable bible in the Welsh language. |
Clyne Gardens & Singleton Park, Swansea Once owned by the Vivian family, copper kings of Swansea, a visit to Clyne & Singleton reveals shocking working class links to the slave trade. Throughout the Eighteenth Century the copper industry grew in Swansea by 1800 making it the premier smelting centre in Britain for more than a hundred years. The chief source of copper at this time were Cornwall and Anglesey and the new technique of smelting the ore with coal (in plentiful supply near Swansea) was rapidly developing and feeding the copper-hungry industries of Bristol and Birmingham, the capital of brass. To maintain the British Empire and the slave trade, there was a huge demand for guns, chains, manacles and hoes and brass locks. Large profits were to be made from brass and the numbers of foundries, factories and manufactories grew at an alarming rate from the late Eighteenth Century. By the mid- nineteenth century the manufacture of every conceivable item that could be made of brass (copper and zinc) - from tacks to bedsteads and gas fittings - were being produced in huge quantities, with Birmingham being one of the main centres for the trade. The growth of the slave trade and the development of the British brass industry were linked. Brass and copper trade goods were a very important part of the slave ship cargoes bound for Africa, because copper was highly valued in Africa and called ‘red gold’. African traders therefore happily accepted brass items and would buy it from European traders in blocks, which could be melted down to make decorative items. Europeans made brass ‘manillas’, which was brass molded into a bracelet shape. These became a form of money in West Africa. Two factories in Swansea, the Forest Works and White Rock Works, both on the outskirts of Swansea, specifically produced manillas. A copper works in Penclawdd, Gower, set up by Thomas Williams (who managed the Parys Mine Company at the height of its success) made copper pans and at one time its entire output was used to buy slaves. All sorts of items produced in Britain including Swansea were traded for slaves, from stoneware (pottery) jugs and bottles to pewter (metal) jugs and bowls, they all made sturdy items for use in the kitchen. Tobacco pipes and tobacco were in the cargo. Glasses, decanters and glass lamps were taken, as glass was not made in West Africa, but was valued for its attractive qualities. Glass beads were taken, as Africans used them for decorating clothing and for making jewellery. Guns, gunflints, lead shot and gunpowder were in the cargo. There were also small, usually low-value items, that were either useful or attractive and would be accepted as part of a mixture of goods in payment for a slave. These included cutlery, razors, fishhooks, penknives, rings and snuff boxes. And Welsh industry prospered.
Cyfarthfa Park, Merthyr Tydfil At Cyfarthfa Park, we will explore the links with wealthy tobacco merchant and government contractor Anthony Bacon (whose family made a fortune in Virginia growing tobacco and using slaves) who arrived in Merthyr Tydfil in 1763, and who has been described as "a wealthy London merchant who had acquired a knowledge of iron melting in his native Cumberland.’’ He became one of Merthyr Tydfil’s founding ironmasters. Bacon’s government contracts included supplying food to troops guarding slave forts on the African coast. And he provided "seasoned and able working Negroes" for government works on Caribbean sugar islands. He was paid a monthly fee for these slaves, which stopped if they died or ran away. "Every aspect of his life touches upon slavery in one way or another. His early life as a tobacco trader, and his later life as a government contractor," says Professor Chris Evans of the University of Glamorgan. Bacon was already an important and rich merchant when he came to Merthyr. He used some of his money to build the Cyfarthfa Ironworks at Merthyr in 1765 and develop infrastructure, like the first road link between Merthyr and Cardiff. Professor Evans believes that Bacon turned Cyfarthfa into the most important centre for gun founding in Britain and also an important producer of iron products from canon balls to weapons used in naval conflicts and the slave trade. The slave-based wealth of the Caribbean was important in providing markets for the guns. Bacon's principal business was supplying cannon to the Royal Navy, and the Royal Navy's principal business, after the defence of the British Isles themselves, was to patrol sea lanes and to look after the West Indies, the most valuable colonial possession that the British had at that time. Cyfarthfa was started by Bacon in 1765, and when firmly established, it was sold in 1794 to Richard Crawshay and so began a period of even greater prosperity. The Crawshays amassed considerable wealth and in 1824 commissioned the building of Cyfarthfa Castle, built in 1825 by William Crawshay. It cost £30,000 and was home to the Crawshays until 1889. This grand castellated mansion overlooked his immensely successful ironworks and has been called, "the most impressive monument of the Industrial Iron Age in South Wales. We will work with Cyfarthfa’s new Access & Outreach Officer to connect some of the groups she works with as the Museum’s Outreach and Access officer and also with Community First groups who garden in the Park’s nurseries. Cyfarthfa will be showing a touring slavery exhibition at the beginning of 2008. Merthyr has other links to the slave trade according to Professor Evans. Iron bars - known as "voyage iron" were used as a kind of currency on the coast of Africa and could be traded for slaves by merchants. Records of the Royal Africa Company in the late 17th century show precisely what the exchange rate was in particular places. Twelve iron bars bought an adult male slave. The sugar estates themselves - which were worked by enslaved Africans - needed iron for agricultural equipment and even shackles and implements of torture. Records show that iron from the Dowlais Ironworks in Merthyr were used to make sugar crushing rollers for Caribbean slave plantations.
This Grade 1 Edwardian garden is currently being restored with the help of Heritage Lottery Fund. The garden will give inspiration – particularly the newly restored kitchen garden – to looking at plants from the New World but we will also use Dyffryn to look at the historical links with the slave trade in Tudor and Stuart times. In the 16th century the manor was acquired by the Button family and the first house was built. The family occupied the estate for a number of generations and it is said that they still do to this day as the ghost of Admiral Sir Thomas Button, naval captain, explorer and privateer, haunts the grounds of the estate! In 1602 he sailed in command of the Wylloby on privateering raids in the West Indies. The Wylloby was owned by his fellow Welshmen, Sir Robert Mansel, who became treasurer of the navy in 1604. Since privateering crews were not salaried but received a percentage of the spoils, they threw themselves into their work with great enthusiasm. They often stole slaves, spices, ginger and pearls, silver and gold. In the late 16th and early 17th Century, British ships cruised in the Caribbean and off the Spanish coast, trying to intercept Spanish ships bringing gold and silver from Mexico. This early privateering was justified by an attack by Spanish ships on Sir Francis Drake and Sir John Hawkins, who were trying to sell West African slaves to Spanish colonies, which the Spanish considered illegal. At Dyffryn we can also look at the role of the poet Iolo Morganwg (Edward Williams) and other abolitionists, either Welsh or who visited Wales, who denounced slavery at his first Gorsedd at Primrose Hill in London in 1792. He was also a fair trade pioneer, declaring that sweets sold at his shop in Cowbridge (near Dyffryn) were "uncontaminated with human gore", as they were made from sugar produced by free labourers in the East rather than Caribbean slaves. |
Erddig is a completely furnished 18th-century large country house and has one of the last surviving 18th-century gardens. There is evidence that black servants lived here though no formal records exist. There is a portrait of an 18th Century 'Negro Coachboy', also known as the 'Negro Minstrel', 'Black Boy' or 'Meller's Coachboy' in Servants' Hall. We will use visits to Erddig to highlight a nearby estate bought with the profits of the slave trade, Acton Park, Wrexham, the home of Sir Foster Cunliffe (of which nothing remains). His family enjoyed the high life as a result of his grandfather, Foster Cunliffe (1682-1758), becoming the main slave trader in Liverpool and mayor on three occasions. His son was MP for Liverpool in 1755-67. The National Botanic Garden of Wales, near Carmarthen The National Botanic Garden of Wales is situated on land whose history as an estate stretches back over 400 years. This site offers the opportunity to consider the wealth of the Middleton family who made their fortune from the slave trade (see Chirk) and also Sir Thomas Paxton who made his money in India. The estate derives its name from the Middleton family, from Chirk Castle near Oswestry, who built a mansion here in the early 1600s. Three generations later the estate passed, via marriage, to the Gwyn family of Gwempa who were eventually forced to sell Middleton Hall in 1776 to pay off debts. Thirteen years later William Paxton bought the Middleton estate for £40,000 and began its great transformation into a water park. Although born in Scotland to a modest family in 1744, Paxton had made a fortune by the age of forty-two while working as Master of the Mint in Bengal and acting as an Agent. He used his great wealth to employ some of the finest creative minds of his day, including the eminent architect Samuel Pepys Cockerell, who he commissioned to design and build a new Middleton Hall after turning the original one into a farm. This new Middleton Hall became ‘one of the most splendid mansions in South Wales’ which ‘far eclipsed the proudest of the Cambrian mansions in Asiatic pomp and splendour’. The original Double Walled Garden, its glass Peach House, and the Ice House and Stable Block were also built during Paxton’s time. We will look also at Wellington’s Welsh General Sir Thomas Picton who was born in Pembrokeshire in 1758 and who retired to Iscoed a country house near Carmarthen at the beginning of the 19th century. Picton was a national hero who died at the Battle of Waterloo (the only Welshman to be buried in St Paul’s Cathedral), yet he spent part of his life as Governor of Trinidad and Tobago where he had a reputation for brutality and ruthlessness. Many regarded him as a beast. He increased the number of lashes able to be handed out to 39 from 25. He also outlawed the practice of allowing slaves to have Saturdays off in order to tend their own plots and grow their own food. He was accused of allowing the judicial torture of a fourteen-year-old girl, Luisa Calderon in Trinidad. He had had her suspended on one foot on a sharpened stick for a minor theft. This procedure was dubbed ‘Pictoning’ in his ‘honour’. He was forced to resign as Governor and returned to London to face trial. Another local landowner responsible for changing the face of nearby Llanelli and turning it into an industrial town also had links with the slave trade. An article by Dr David Davies of the Llanelli Community Heritage Advisory Committee states that Sir John Cowell Stepney, owner of the Stepney estate (which covered much of the present-day town centre) from 1857 to 1877, was one of the men largely responsible for the development of Llanelli into a major industrial town. His father, General Andrew Cowell - whose portrait hangs in Park Howard Museum - was the son of Benjamin Cowell, a London surgeon, and his wife, Ann Arcedeckne (pronounced Archdeacon). The Arcedecknes were an Anglo-Irish family who had settled in Suffolk, but in the middle of the 18th Century they owned extensive estates in Jamaica, which inevitably meant that they also owned large numbers of slaves there - over 500 in the 1750s. Benjamin Cowell was a close business associate of his brother-in-law Chaloner Arcedeckne, whose main plantation on Jamaica was coincidentally named Golden Grove (a country park near NBGW), and Benjamin seems to have arranged much of the insurance for the sugar cargoes that Chaloner was shipping from Jamaica to England. Benjamin Cowell also owned slaves of his own. The mansion that he had purchased in Berkshire must have been paid for in part by his Jamaican income, and a Llanelli street and a former school is named after the village where it stood, Coleshill. When he died in 1780, Benjamin bequeathed his slaves, firstly to his wife Ann, who died in 1823, and then to his son Andrew, the general, so at least some of the inheritance that eventually descended to Sir John Stepney must have come from the proceeds of slavery. Sir John was a keen genealogist and was aware of who his ancestors were, so he must have been equally aware of how they made their money. That he was not ashamed of this slave-owning past is suggested by the fact that he named a Llanelli street after the Suffolk home of the Arcedecknes, Glevering Hall. Home to the same family for more than seven hundred years, in the 18th century Nanhoron had a 17th-century mansion surrounded by parkland and ornamental woodland, together with two walled gardens created from 1750 onwards. The present Regency house, designed by Joseph Broomfield, was built in 1797 and designed to sit in the already existing mature landscape. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, many wealthy and successful plantation owners, sea captains and sailors had begun to return to London with their fortunes and frequently with their personal slaves. Young and 'exotic' black servants dressed in a metal collar and extravagant Oriental costume became an almost necessary fashion accessory for London's powerful elites. Black children were bought and treated like pampered pets by wealthy white families, dressed up and given outlandish names. Black servants and soldiers became symbols of social status. In London's coffee houses, black children were sometimes sold as presents for upper-class women. Boys and girls with very dark complexions were particularly prized as pages; their 'blackness' helped to highlight the owner's pale complexion at a time when 'white' skin was seen as a sign of purity and beauty. These children were, in effect, viewed as pets by their owners. Bittersweet is uncovering evidence that this fashion for young black slaves extended to Wales. For returning sea captains, colonial administrators and plantation owners and the newly rich, a black page or handmaiden was an asset to be shown off as evidence of exotic wealth, so in the 18th century Black people were ironically more evident in the art and writing of the time than they were to be in the early Victorian period. At Nanhoron, there are records of one such, Captain Timothy Edwards RN. He was fighting the French in the West Indies during the 1770s and kept a detailed notebook of all his business dealings, correspondence &c. In it he noted that he had purchased "the first Black Boy, Thos. Finch; do. - 2nd, Thos. Corbett. [See Picton Castle below for another link to a young boy] Other gardens such as Aberglasney and Dyffryn are also examining their records to find out if eighteenth-century owners followed this fashion. Picton Castle Gardens, near Haverfordwest Picton Castle was built in the Thirteenth Century by Sir John Wogan and his descendants still occupy the Castle today, carrying the name of Philipps since the Fifteenth Century. The Castle is still a home retaining its medieval features in the undercroft. The principal rooms were remodelled in the 1750s by Sir John Philipps the sixth Baronet, with plastered rooms and fireplaces by Sir Henry Cheere. There are 40 acres of Woodland Gardens. Sir John Philipps was given a gift of a black boy in 1761. He was brought from Africa by Captain Parr, an officer of the British army who had been working in Senegal. It was mentioned in Sir John’s journal that he was given Cesar along with "a parakeet and a foreign duck." Nothing is known about him from those early years in Senegal. Senegal was a major slave trade departure point in the Eighteenth Century. He was named Cesar Picton, after Picton Castle, the Philips family home in Wales. Cesar was brought up as a servant. It was not unusual to have black servants in wealthy households, but from letters the Philipps family seem to have been were abolitionists. They were against the slave trade and supported overseas missions. Cesar was educated by the family, became very religious and hard working. He was close to Lady Philipps and mixed with the family on equal terms, often entertaining visitors with them. When Lady Philipps died in 1788 Cesar was left £100 in her will. This was a considerable amount and it gave him independence. He eventually became a wealthy coal merchant living in Kingston upon Thames which is where the Phillips had their London house. The discovery of a rich copper vein at Parys Mountain on Anglesey vastly increased the fortunes of Sir Nicholas Bayly of Plas Newydd – who with his heirs earned £305,000 from the mine between 1768 and 1800. The heir of Sir Nicholas Bayly (1707-1782) was Henry Bayly (1744-1812). During his lifetime he would own land extending to 100,000 acres, within which the mineral wealth alone was worth fortunes. Under his guidance the appearance of the house at Plas Newydd changed dramatically and was given the Gothic look that it has to this day. Henry married Jane Champagne (1746-1817). The discovery of a low grade copper ore near the surface at Parys Mountain in 1768, meant it later become the world's biggest opencast copper mine, which revitalised the region's industrial fortunes. By 1785 the Mona Mine Company was supplying the British Navy and those of France, Holland and Spain with copper sheathing, nuts, bolts – see also Gwydir Castle. Stackpole Estate, Pembrokeshire The history of piracy and the slave trade is completely intertwined and piracy was only stamped out by the Royal Navy in the 1720s because of pressure from slave traders and plantation owners as it was important to create a world that was safe for the slave trade to develop. The pirates had prayed on slave ships and other trading ships on the coasts of the slave islands of the Caribbean, the African coast and the coast of North America. As a coastal designed landscape, the Stackpole Estate offers the opportunity to look at Welsh pirates as slave traders, looking at Black Bart who hailed from this area. Nearby Tenby was also the main port for the unloading of slave produced tobacco from Virginia (where there were many Welsh plantation owners – and some historians argue that is why of the ten most common black surnames in the United State, five are Welsh). We will invite our participants to research more of this tobacco trade link. Black Bart was born between Fishguard and Haverfordwest in 1682. He had worked on slave ships before falling into piracy. He 'turned pirate' when the slave ship he was working on was captured by pirates in 1720. In Roberts’s case, he was captured by fellow Welshman Howell Davis, whose crew was raiding the slave ports and forts along the coast of West Africa. Davis was born in Milford Haven and his pirate career lasted eleven months, July 1718 - June 1719. His ships were the Cadogan, Buck, Saint James, and Rover. Black Bart raided shipping off the Americas and West Africa between 1719 and 1722 and would have certainly had slaves as part of the crew. These slaves would not have had a share of any booty. They were usually sold rather than hanged when pirate crews were captured by the Royal Navy. Black Bart was the most successful pirate of the golden age of piracy, capturing far more ships than some of the best-known pirates of this era such as Blackbeard or Captain Kidd. He is estimated to have captured more than 400 vessels. He is said to have disliked alcohol, was possibly gay and did not make his captives walk the plank. He behaved brutally towards African salves, however, and is said to have set fire to a slave ship with its ‘cargo’ still in chains. Eighty Africans died as a result. He died in battle 1722 and the capture of his crew marked the beginning of the end for the golden age of Caribbean piracy. Ironically his crew was held in the dungeons of the famous slave fort Cape Coast Castle - usually occupied by Africans awaiting export to the Americas. Fifty two of them were hanged on the beach - the biggest pirate hanging of the era. (Source: If a Pirate I Must Be... The True Story of Bartholomew Roberts, King of the Caribbean by Richard Sanders and published by Arum Press) We also hope to link a visit to the nearby private estate of Slebech Park. Nathaniel Phillips was born in Lampeter Velfrey in 1730 and made his fortune in Jamaican sugar and owned many estates. His daughter Mary Dorothea (de Rutzen) bought the Slebech estate (then 3700 acres and owning most of Narberth) with £10,000 she had inherited from his sugar wealth in 1830. From 1710 onwards, the Gnoll became the home of the Mackworth family, who were wealthy industrialists and owned the town's copper works. Sir Humphrey Mackworth, MP (1657-1727), was the pioneer of the copper industry in South Wales. The Mackworths constructed one of the largest and most modern copper smelting factories in the country at Melincryddan in 1695; the refined pigs of copper were transported to the Gnoll mills where they went through a number of processes of battering, rolling and eventual manufacturing into pots and pans. This Grade II Star-listed site is steeped in history. From the 18th century, the Mackworths, the family of industrialists who owned Gnoll, used their considerable wealth to mould the landscape both for industrial purposes and also to create magnificent pleasure gardens on an ambitious scale. Successive generations of the Mackworth family developed the estate. The many surviving garden features include: formal French Cascades, a magnificent water feature dating from the 1720s and ponds, the water from which was originally used to power machinery in the Mackworths’ nearby metal-producing factories. Set in a beautiful 90 acre park, Tredegar House is one of the best examples of a 17th century Charles II mansion in Britain. The earliest surviving part of the building dates back to the early 1500s. The Morgans of Tredegar House were one of the wealthiest families in Wales. At Tredegar we will look at a Llanrumney Morgan, the Seventeenth Century adventurer and buccaneer, Sir Henry Morgan, and later acting Governor of Jamaica, who was a privateer and planter. He took over as deputy Governor and later acting Governor, winning praise for strengthening the island's fortifications against the Spanish threat. Sir Henry saw out his days as a planter and respected member of the ruling class before he fell ill and died in 1688. We can also investigate the fashionable eighteenth-century Morgans. In 1725 Sir William Morgan’s annual expenditure amounted to more than £3.8 million in today’s terms. The Eighteenth Century members of the family were fashionable and extravagant and dressed themselves in the finest and most fashionable woven damasks and brocaded silks from London, some of which survive today in the Museum of Welsh Life and are likely to have black boy servants as fashion items. (See also Nanhoron). Sir Charles Morgan lived at Tredegar House and served as the Brecon and Monmouthshire MP for 44 years. We will encourage our volunteer researchers to discover how he voted in the Abolition of Slavery bill. According to Elisabeth Whittle, Inspector of Parks & Gardens for Cadw, Piercefield is one of the most outstanding picturesque and sublime landscapes of the eighteenth century in Britain, ranking in importance with Downton in England and Hafod. The Piercefield Walks were laid out for the pleasure of the owners, their friends and visitors and were first laid out by Colonel Valentine Morris (c.1678-1743) who was born in Antigua, the son of a sugar planter and merchant. The estate was then inherited by his son, also Valentine Morris (1727-1789), who began living at Piercefield with his family in 1753. Morris soon added to the magnificent splendour of the estate and its setting, by landscaping the parkland in the fashionable style of Capability Brown. In the 1770s Valentine Morris's gambling, business and political dealings bankrupted him, and he was forced to leave his beloved Piercefield and set sail for the West Indies. He had been an absentee plantation owner who owned around 600 slaves in Antigua. He spent some of his wealth on improving agriculture and roads in the area. After leaving Piercefield he became governor of St Vincent, another Caribbean slave island. In 1802 the Piercefield estate was sold to Nathaniel Wells who had inherited the fortune of his father, a plantation owner of St. Kitts in the Caribbean. 'Mr Wells a West Indian of large fortune, a man of very gentlemanly manners, but so much a man of colour as to be little removed from a Negro'. One story goes that he liked it so much when he was invited for dinner he agreed to buy it there an then for around £90,000 in cash, and then swapped seats with the owner. Wells also inherited his father's plantations and slaves in St Kitts. When slavery was abolished in the colonies in 1833, Wells was compensated by the Treasury, along with white slave owners (Source: The National Archives). Wells added to the estate until it reached a size of almost 3,000 acres. Nathaniel's father left south Wales to seek his fortune and had several children but his surviving heir was a result of his relationship with a black slave called Juggy. (On the 1842 census Nathaniel is listed as being born in ‘Foreign Parts’) Nathaniel was educated in England and became a slave owner and trader himself on the death of his father, William. In 1818 he became Sheriff of Monmouthshire and later Deputy Lieutenant. He married a clergyman's daughter and brought up a large and successful family in Wales. The BBC' South East Wales web article declares that in 1800 there is little doubt that Nathaniel Wells was the richest black man in Britain. Despite his ethnic background, he gave no special treatment to the Africans he forced to work on his estates. One of the estates was, in fact, accused of handing out illegally cruel punishments to the slaves who worked on them. Nathaniel's father William Wells came from an old Cardiff family and emigrated to St Kitts, where he was a slave trader and became a wealthy plantation owner. After his wife died, William Wells began fathering children by his slaves - at least six children, mostly by different women. The rape of female slaves by their owners in the Americas has been well documented, but Anne Rainsbury, curator of Chepstow Museum, believes that in this case Wells looked after both the children and their mothers. "I think his will says an awful lot about him. The first thing he does is his women - they are given their freedom and sums of money to live on," she told a special BBC Radio Wales programme on Welsh links to the slave trade. "He obviously cared about them." One of the women was even given slaves of her own in the will. While Nathaniel Wells enjoyed his life in high society in Chepstow, his slaves in St Kitts didn't have it so good. From his country seat in Chepstow, Wells would have had little control over the way the slaves he owned were treated. But the punishment of slaves by the manager of one of his estates was singled out for criticism by abolitionists. The treatment of the slaves on one of his estates became the subject of an abolitionist tract. A lot of the treatment certainly goes against the amelioration laws. There were only supposed to be 39 lashes administered in a certain period of time. Slaves would be given 39 lashes plus a 'brining' - putting pepper water on to those lashes - to really make them scream. The punishment was also administered at illegally frequent intervals. Nathaniel Wells married twice and had 22 children. He died in Bath in 1852 at the age of 72. A memorial tablet can be seen at St Arvan's Church, while Piercefield Park is now the home of Chepstow Racecourse. Portmeirion gives us the opportunity to look at the history of ship building in the area. More than 400 ships were built in Pwllheli between the 18th and 19th centuries, and this "Guineman", (namely a ship for trading with Guinea on the coast of Africa) probably the Mary, would have been one of the largest ships to sail from the town and was constructed for a Liverpool owner – the main centre of the salve trade. A ship left Liverpool for Africa to buy slaves every three days. In the hundred years before the slave trade was abolished in 1807, approximately 5 thousand slave ships commenced their voyages from Liverpool (compared to about 2 thousand from Bristol and 3 thousand from London). (America Gaeth Cymru S4C) The recreated medieval garden and late medieval manor house at Tretower will enable us to look at the early Welsh links to the slave trade and history of afternoon tea as well as later local connections, Captain Thomas Phillips from nearby Brecon, for example, who got money from the local MP and slave trader Sir Jeffery Jeffries to buy the Hannibal, a large slave ship. Welsh cloth was among the goods he exchanged for the Africans. He made one journey from Britain to Africa and then on to the Caribbean before returning, in ill health, to live out his days in Brecon. Captain's Walk in Brecon is still named in his honour. Phillips' diary has become a valuable source for historians studying the slave trade. He describes, for example, the branding of Africans: "We mark the slaves we had bought on the breast or shoulder with a hot iron, having the ship's name on it, the place being before anointed with a little palm oil which caused but little pain, the mark usually being well in four or five days." |