About five to six years ago I took a copy of a letter I had found at Duke University (see below) to the Greenwich Maritime Museum, in the hope of spurring some research. I took the same letter to the Naval Historical Branch, with no result until the latter produced Ethnic Minorities in the Royal Navy 1757 – 1998, an information pack, which I was sent in May 2001.

This publication was produced in order to facilitate recruitment for the RN through its exhibition ‘We Were There’, which toured the UK in 2000-2001. It consists mainly of quotations from books (including N.A.M. Rodger’s The Wooden World, London, 1988) and the Naval Chronicle. Also included were instructions by the Navy Office and the East India Company on how to treat black people, as well as various Admiralty Fleet circulars, Naval Station and Admiralty Orders. Dated 1784, ‘Of the Government of Negroes’, is the first Navy Office document quoted in the pack. It deals with the ‘purchase of Negroes’, aged 12 to 14, who were to serve apprenticeships. Their ‘treatment shall be considerate and humane’, they were only to be ‘flogged for flagrant Crimes, and then in the Manner practised in the Navy’. Out of working hours, the apprentices were to be place under superintendence ‘for their Morals and Behaviour…to be taught to read and attend regularly at church…’. At least on the surface this is similar to the situation described in Newsletter 32, in the report on A Boyhood at Sea by Roland Pietsch (pp.19-22).

There is some data on pay rates and conditions of employment, on pensions and clothing allowances. Comparative data is not given, so we do not know if there was, or the level of, racial discrimination. In the 1939 ‘Instruction for Recruiting’, ‘Maltese, and black and coloured men or boys’ were listed as ineligible for entry. Winston Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty advised on 14 October 1939 that ‘There must be no discrimination of race or colour. In practice much inconvenience would arise if this theoretical equality had many examples…’.(1) In 1953 the Queen’s Regulations stated that ‘Candidates for entry…must be British subjects and normally the sons of British subjects’. In 1958, an Admiralty letter stated that ‘to avoid unnecessary disturbance wherever possible non-white personnel should not be appointed or drafted to ships whose programmes are known to include visits to South African ports.’

What we learn therefore, is that by 1784 there were sufficient number of black people, free or enslaved, in the RN for regulations to have to be drawn up. We also learn that from an unknown date there was widespread discrimination. Was it deliberately that the Historical Division missed out on the de facto reinforcement of the colour bar in
1945? On 27 April the Secretary of the Principal Personnel Officers Committee advised that though the ‘entry of Maltese or men of colour as ratings was not excluded, but the entry of these for other than local service was subject to special Admiralty sanction. In practice, the cases that came up were usually those of half-caste people, and the decision depended mainly on the “Britishness” of the man’s appearance and habits.’ (PRO: WO32/10592.) How many black people were ever employed and thus how crucial they were to the Royal Navy at any time remains unknown.

That there were black people in the RN before 1784 is demonstrated by a sad story sent to us by Roger Jacques. The Gloucester Journal of 4 June 1764 reported the ‘most barbarous murder committed on the body of George Harford, a Negro, who had been formerly a servant to William Liston…but late a sailor on board the Stag man of war’. Harford was murdered after he had been out drinking with friends, for his ‘wages and prize money’. However, we can get a glimpse from some available data regarding admissions in the Dreadnought Hospital Ship.(2) The Dreadnought catered for both merchant seamen and the Royal Navy; the proportion of each receiving treatment is as unresearched as the rate of illness. Nevertheless, the numbers are interesting. David J. Kirwan, in his Palace and Hovel: Phases of London Life (Hartford, Conn. 1870) states that in the past 30 years 2,014 East Indians, 3,212 West Indians, 1,200 Africans, 347 Chinese, 80 South Sea Islanders had been admitted. The ethnicity of the 3,316 Americans admitted is not stated. I then discovered some more data on this: from 1821 to 1840, 1,164 ‘colonials’ were admitted; from 1841 to 1871, 2,770. East Indians or Lascars numbered 493 before 1841 and 1,975 in the middle period respectively. This was from a paper by Conrad Dixon, ‘Lascars: The Forgotten Seamen’ of which I have a draft copy; it was published subsequently, but I do not know where. He obtained his figures from the Annual Reports of the Seamen’s Hospital Society. I do not know what the explanation for the discrepancies might be. These admissions do not, of course, mean that the seamen were necessarily domiciled in the UK.

The Naval Historical Branch’s publication throws no light on the correspondence at Duke University, in the Henry Brougham Papers. It is undated, but written on it is ‘about 1810’. The first letter reads:

The second letter, also undated, from Southill, Monday:

[Henry Brougham, lawyer, in 1810 MP for Camelford, one of the founders and
constant contributor to the Edinburgh Review, was active in the anti-slavery
movement. ‘Yorke’ was presumably Sir Joseph Sydney Yorke (1768-1831), who was
Lord of the Admiralty 1810-1818.]

The handwritten Recollection of Service by former Marine Lt. W’m Clarke, of Epperstone, Notts, 1839 was shown to me some time ago by the curator of one of the Nottingham museums. The events described took place on the Powerful (it could have been the Resistance) under Captain Pellew.

[Pellew was the son of Sir Edward, admiral (1814) and vice-admiral of the United
Kingdom (1832). The son, Sir Fleetwood Broughton (1789-1861) was ‘commander-
in-chief of the East India and China Station (1852), where in 1853 his arbitrary
severity provoked a mutiny, the third which had broken out under his command;
summarily recalled in consequence; saw no further service; admiral, 1858.’ (from the
Concise DNB)]

Editors Note – This is an edited version of an article which first appeared in the Black & Asian Studies Association Newsletter #54 in July 2010.