Britain’s Black History Racket

There can be few people in Britain who have not heard of Mary Seacole, the Jamaican-British woman who ran an exclusive restaurant for officers during the Crimean War and sometimes administered medical treatment of dubious benefit to injured or sick people. Since the 1981 centenary of her death, Seacole’s reputation has grown and her legacy has now eclipsed Florence Nightingale’s in becoming the most famous British nurse of the nineteenth century. When London’s St Thomas’s Hospital wished to erect a statue to commemorate a nurse in 2016, for instance, it was Mary Seacole whom they chose to depict, rather than Nightingale. 

The case of Mary Seacole is interesting for the light which it sheds on a very modern preoccupation in Britain: that of hunting down and bringing to public attention people from the past who have lived in the country while happening to have had African ancestry. A recent example of this tendency is that of somebody from the sixteenth century who, after being illuminated by the black history searchlight, shows every sign of becoming as iconic as Seacole. This person, the focus of the illustration below, was a man called John Blanke, a trumpeter in Tudor England. Although almost nothing is known of his background, nationality, ancestry, or life, the mere fact that he appears to be black has been enough to propel him to stardom. The idolised image of this insignificant and obscure figure now features widely during Black History Month, which in Britain takes place in October.

The idea of Black History Month was of course imported from the United States, where African-Americans today make up around 15 per cent of the population. When one in six of the people in a country as vast as the USA belong to a particular minority who indeed have a history there dating back centuries, it is perhaps reasonable to dedicate a month to celebrate aspects of the past that might have, perhaps due to racial prejudice, been neglected in the past. In Britain, however, the case is quite different. In 1987, when Black History Month was first celebrated in the UK, black people made up a little over one per cent of the population – the great majority had only arrived in the preceding 40 years or so and consequently had scarcely any tangible history to speak of in the country. Particularly popular with left-wing people, it soon became clear that if Black History Month were to be regularly observed as a year-round celebration in Britain, then it would be necessary to unearth more people of African ancestry than just Mary Seacole. Thus, the race was on to fabricate a misleading and fictitious account of British history in which black people were somehow woven into the story. 

There are two main aspects of the stories of Mary Seacole and John Blanke though which make it justified to describe Britain’s Black History Month, as well as the various books and websites dealing with the supposed history of black people in Britain, as a racket or, to use a more demotic expression, a scam. The first is how some exceedingly sparse and ambiguous material has been melded together to provide what some suppose indicates a continuous black presence in the country dating back as far as the time of the Roman occupation. Also coming to mind is the way in which other ethnicities who have perhaps a stronger claim to have been living in Britain before the twentieth century are ruthlessly airbrushed from the picture or, more commonly, simply ignored. It is only black people, in the sense of those whose ancestors were from sub-Saharan Africa, upon whom the spotlight must fall.

It has not proved difficult to find isolated instances of black people who have visited Britain or lived in the country. John Blanke is one such person; though it is important to note that absolutely nothing is known of his origins or life other than the fact that he played the trumpet on ceremonial occasions, once requested a pay rise, and was probably not born here. To this end, it is frequently alleged that there existed a sizeable community of black Africans in England during the sixteenth century (possibly several hundred, perhaps as many as ten or fifteen thousand). Despite there being no grounds for this belief, the growth of the fictitious story has not been stopped and, aptly, it has now become solely incorporated into the dogma of Black History Month. John Blanke’s image for this event is now almost as popular as that of Mary Seacole. It is also worth noting that when historian Miranda Kauffman wrote a book called Black Tudors – the ‘factual’ information from which is also popular in the context of Black History Month – she was able to detail the lives of just five black people living in Tudor England. The rest of her examples, numerous and largely accompanied by fictional accounts, were from either other European countries or periods later than that of the Tudors.

Mary Seacole and John Blanke were at least genuine black people. Increasingly though, the efforts to promote the narrative of a continuous black presence in Britain depend upon purposeful distortions or downright fabrications. Take the popular idea promoted by the BBC, for example, that black people lived in the country at the time of the Roman occupation. Two examples of the way in which this false idea is propagated should be sufficient in demonstrating how this gambit works.

In 2014, the BBC’s website reported that an “exhibition exploring the origins of ancient skeletons in Sussex, including a woman from sub-Saharan Africa buried in Roman times, has opened.” This confident assertion was based solely on the shape of the unearthed woman’s skull, a notoriously uncertain – as well as medically and politically condemned – way of ascertaining ethnicity. Nevertheless, the so-called ‘Beachy Head Lady’ was soon being brandished as solid and irrefutable proof of the presence of black people in England dating back to the time of the Romans. In the years since the publication of the article, however, the BBC have yet to report the fact that, upon testing the DNA of this skeleton, scientists revealed that she was in fact from Southern Europe and was most likely born in Cyprus. The alleged “sub-Sarahan” in fact had no connection at all with Africa.

Sometimes, linguistic trickery is used to muddy the waters and confuse issues on this matter. Books on black history frequently claim that an emperor of Rome was ‘African’. And, while this is technically true, it is horribly misleading. The emperor in question, Septimius Severus, ruled between 193 AD and 211 AD. And although being born in what is now Libya, indeed an ‘African’, he was certainly not black. His mother’s family were Roman settlers of European descent and his father came from a Carthaginian family. The Carthaginians were themselves of course Semitic colonists from the part of the eastern Mediterranean which we know today as Lebanon. But, because in our modern parlance ‘African’ is so often used interchangeably with the adjective ‘black’, it is an easy step between describing Septimius Severus as an African emperor and describing him as black. This same trick is used when talking of a unit of troops stationed on Hadrian’s Wall. They too, of course, were African, coming from the Roman North African province of Mauretania. These African’s however were most probably Berbers, rather than black men from sub-Saharan Africa.

This then is the first part of Britain’s black history racket, in which sleight of hand is used to force large numbers of black people into the British Isles’ several thousand-year-long history. It may perhaps be objected that this nonsense is indeed harmless enough and that it does not really matter if some people wish to persuade themselves that sub-Saharan people were living and working in Britain many centuries before there was actually such a presence. After all, who could be hurt by such an imposture? This though brings us neatly to the second constituent part of the black history racket and one which is ironic in the extreme. It is how our supposed black British history, a product of modern multicultural ideology, is used to suppress and erase the achievements of other ethnic minorities and conceal them from view. We of course all know about John Blanke, whose claim to fame was playing the trumpet in Tudor England, but how many readers have ever heard of Micheal Shen Fu Tsung, the Chinese scholar who lived in England for three years during the seventeenth century? Among other achievements, he helped to catalogue Chinese manuscripts in Oxford’s Bodleian Library and was presented to James II, who, so captivated upon meeting the Chinaman, had his portrait painted. This may be seen below.

Mary Seacole is today very famous, although hardly anybody seems to know much about what she really did. Travelling to the Crimea during the Crimean War with the intent of opening a commercial restaurant for officers, she sometimes distributed folk remedies that, in our modern knowledge, are known to have actually been more likely to cause harm than they were in helping to cure or alleviate any symptoms or injuries. Her autobiography, for instance, describes how she treated one person suffering from cholera with a solution of lead acetate, which is of course very poisonous. Despite this, she has somehow come to symbolise the epitome of female ethnic minorities who practised medicine in some form during the nineteenth century. Still, very few readers are likely to know about a real doctor of ethnic descent who worked in a British hospital during the nineteenth century – Kadambini Ganguly. Born in India in 1862, Ganguly in 1883 received a BA in medicine from the University of Calcutta. The first woman to graduate from a university in India, in 1893 she travelled to Edinburgh where she was enrolled at the Royal College of Physicians. Eventually passing what was then known as the Scottish Triple, while at the college she undertook courses in medicine, therapeutics, surgery, anatomy, midwifery, and medical jurisprudence and, by the time that she had completed her education, she had qualified to practice as a doctor in Britain.

I hope that readers will see the extraordinary thing which has happened here: a restaurant owner with a side-line in quack remedies becomes so famous throughout Britain that her life story is taught in many schools while a genuine doctor who had to struggle against enormous prejudice in order to qualify as a genuine doctor is completely forgotten. The only possible explanation for this strange state of affairs is that one was black and the other Indian. Both were women of colour. Both were compelled to struggle against racism. Yet today only one is remembered. In the same way, an educated man who travels to England and spends years helping to catalogue manuscripts in the Bodleian is disregarded, but a man who comes to England and blows a trumpet on ceremonial occasions is lauded and his idolised image is widely reproduced. Of course, one was Chinese, and the other was black.

The fact is, before the twentieth century, there were indeed small numbers of foreigners and people of various ethnicities visiting and sometimes living in Britain. These people did not in general, however, make up communities in the sense of a permanent population of families, rather consisting of disparate groups of individuals who were temporarily resident in the country. Some were sailors, staying in dockside districts of Liverpool, Cardiff, or London while awaiting a new ship to sign on for, while others were drifters who had no money to enable them to return to their own country. There were Chinese, Indians, and Africans, as well as Arabs, Americans, Scandinavians and others from every part of the world. They stayed for a while and then left. The black British history game is played by ignoring all of these various nationalities and ethnicities in pretending that only black people were present in sizable numbers and that, accordingly, any other ethnicity’s contribution to the nation’s history must be deliberately overlooked.

What has been described here is the black history racket. What began as a modest enterprise following the model of America’s Black History Month has now snowballed into something a good deal more pervasive – demands are now being made, for example, to incorporate this largely fictitious version of British history into the national curriculum. Meanwhile, other ethnicities are deliberately and specifically excluded from the business, with the result being that the genuine history of foreign peoples in Britain in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, many of whom made notable contributions in various ways, are side-lined and forgotten. Only the claims of the presence of black people and black achievements, however modest, are to be recognised. There is an ugly word for this process, whereby individuals are purposely ignored because of the colour of their skin or because they have epicanthic eye folds. The word is racism.

Simon Webb is the author of many books on social and military history. He also runs the History Debunked YouTube channel.