A Tale of Two Pews
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In South West London, there is an area that plays an outsized role in British history.

Today, if you walk through Clapham, you will be greeted by formerly grand black and white manor houses, now playing home to the likes of popular coffee chains. Among Londoners, the area is mostly the butt of jokes about its reputation for bottomless brunches and its large cohort of Australian inhabitants. But in the 1770s, Clapham was the place to be, at least if you were a wealthy merchant looking to buy a quasi-country pad.

It was effectively a suburban area, so it's not actually classed as being part of London during that period. So if you're looking for records on Clapham, you sometimes have to use the Surrey Record Office. So it's a place that is a kind of halfway house, I guess, between city living and proper rural countryside living. This is Kate Donington, Senior Lecturer in Black Caribbean and African History at The Open University.

She's taking us on a tour of 18th century Clapham. And it was a space that was kind of developed as a place where people could have what were kind of known as suburban villas. So it was close enough to the city of London to mean that people could travel backwards and forwards by coach and horse. And there was a regular carriage service that went effectively, you know, kind of

ye olde bus service I suppose between Kinnock Clapham and London which meant that a lot of people who were working in the city so financiers, people who were involved in insurance, merchants, they moved to Clapham because it provided the kind of storal idyll but a kind of functioning one in that they could still get to work the same day so it was a

a sort of green, lush, open, semi-rural space with middle-class villas. But this was somewhere where the working middle-class man could approximate countryside living, but in a way which meant that their links to the city were still preserved. So why are we in the verdant growing suburb of Clapham today?

Well, it's to examine the congregation of a particular site of religious worship, the Holy Trinity Church, that would come to symbolise the debate raging in Britain over whether it was time to wrap up the enslavement of millions of Africans across its empire. In the space of a few pews sat two men with very different views on abolition and chattel slavery. Both of them would have a big influence on the existence of the British slave trade.

I'm Moyalothia McLean, a journalist on the journey to discover the truth about Britain's slaving history. This is Human Resources.

Hello, Human Resources listeners. This is Renee Richardson, producer and co-creator of the Human Resources podcast. I'm popping in to let you know that even though the podcast has ended, Arisa Lumba, who was a researcher on the podcast, and I have written a new book called Human Resources, Slavery and the Making of Modern Britain in 39 Institutions, People, Places and Things. And just like the podcast, the book...

takes modern Britain items and traces their roots back to slavery. We're introducing new topics that weren't quite covered in the podcast, like accounting, the Church of England, the colour indigo, denim blue jeans, sugar, Lloyds of London. But we also revisit some topics from the podcast and go a little further, like the Bank of England, chocolate and the Green King Brewery, which was in our pubs episode.

We'd love for you to support the book and get a copy. I hope you enjoy it. It's for all ages. And just as the podcast focused on accessibility and making this history accessible, the book does the same. And we hope it encourages conversations between different generations and helps people get a step into this history and encourages more research and more reading on this subject. Thank you.

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without the ads. So, would we say that Clapham is the Chipping Norton of its day, where the rich and powerful gather? I mean, certainly when you look at the kind of networks of people, so if we're thinking about, you know, the ways in which power circulates through the kind of neighbourhood networks, then yes, it is kind of that, not closed set, but, you know, there is a particular group of people who are working in finance, finance,

They are, you know, maybe going to similar cultural spaces. So they, you know, kind of share membership of elite clubs and they will all know each other through their kind of social circuits. But as we can see, they sometimes took very, very different views on political issues. And of course, a number of them were MPs. So they would be familiar to one another through Parliament as well.

And that's not a coincidence, is it? That the financiers and these merchants also happened to be members of parliament. Before the Parliamentary Reform Acts of the 1800s, getting a seat in the House of Commons basically solely depended on your wealth and connections. You either landed gentry, representing a county seat, or an urban professional, representing a borough seat.

It's not a coincidence at all, no. As we have today, it's very much a system in which networks of affiliation are extremely important and also independent wealth as well. You know, we're in a period of time in which members of parliament are not being paid a wage. They need to be independently wealthy and therefore you see the predominance of landowners and increasingly people

In the 18th century, you also see the rise of commercial men and then perhaps a little bit later in the early 19th century, industrialists who also have that wealth, that prestige, that power. Let's imagine we're in Clapham today.

How do the street names give us clues about the figures who are involved in the story that we're going to unpack? There's Macaulay Road or Macaulay Street, named after Zachary Macaulay, who was resident in Clapham for a very long time. And he was very active within the abolition movement. Less well known to most inhabitants that lived there would be Hibbert Street.

Although there's a clue in the fact that there's also a Hibbert almshouse in the local area on Wandsworth Road. So you're beginning to kind of get an indication from the presence of street names and also important buildings in the area that the Hibbert family were an important part of the kind of social milieu in Clapham. But of course, the Hibberts, unlike the Macaulays, were involved in pro-slavery and defending slavery rather than trying to abolish it.

Both these families, the McCauleys and the Hibberts, were very influential in different ways and they both attended the same Clapham church, the Holy Trinity. It was an Anglican church, aka its congregation belonged to the Church of England, and was consecrated in 1776. I asked Kate to take us to the Holy Trinity on a Sunday in the 1780s and describe the scene inside the church. Well, I think it's interesting to think about what sort of

social scene of the church might have looked like. For anyone who is or has been a churchgoer, church is about more than just attending the service. It's about being part of the community and people turn up early so they can catch up with one another. And at the end, they often sort of hang around and talk and discuss things. So it's really, it's a social space as well as a place of religious practice.

I guess the kind of mapping out of space within the church itself is very much structured around kind of social hierarchies. So the pews at the front of the church are pretty much, you know, kind of reserved for the really the great and the good of the local area. And the closer you are to the altar, the kind of more social and religious prestige that you have.

There are spaces at the back of the church, which are effectively kind of benches that were used by the servants of the wealthier congregation. So if you had a lot of money, you would pay for your own pew, but then you would also book space for your servants to be able to attend church. And it was a sort of demonstration of,

the ways in which you could support dependent people, so dependents in terms of your family, but also dependents in relation to the rest of the members of your household. On this particular Sunday in the 1780s, who's at the front of the Holy Trinity? At the front of the church, you're going to be likely to see the most important influential members of the congregation. So your Macaulays, your Wilberforces, your Thorntons.

We've met the McCauley's briefly already. That family was led by Scottish abolitionist Zachary McCauley. He was a reformer who had worked on Jamaican plantations as an assistant manager, which saw him so appalled by the brutality of enslavement, it kickstarted his evolution into an ardent anti-slavery campaigner.

The Wilberforces were led by William Wilberforce, perhaps today remembered as the face of the British abolitionist movement, although he was driven by a conservative evangelical faith rather than a radical political background. The Thorntons, Kate mentions, was the household of Henry Thornton, William Wilberforce's best friend, a fellow reformer and a hugely influential economist whose ideas about central banking have helped shape Britain's modern monetary system.

I wanted to know if these reformers and any accompanying family members are at the front of the Holy Trinity, where are the pro-slavery individuals like George Hibbert sitting?

George Hibbert started off relatively far back in the church. So he was relegated to Q19 in the Middle Isle, which isn't sort of in terms of social kudos that great of a position, but he's very determined to move forwards and throughout the years he gradually kind of creeps further and further

towards the front of the church and eventually a kind of pew comes up, Pew 9, which is pretty much as close as anyone has been able to move to, to the front of the church. Let me guess, what George Hibbert wants, George Hibbert gets.

makes a petition to the church to have it. It's disputed because someone else wants it as well, a Mr Debris, and the trustees of the church have to decide who should get the pew. And they're not particularly enthusiastic about giving it to George Hibbert and their preference is to give it to Mr Debris, but it depends who can prove who moved to the area earliest. And in the end, George Hibbert manages to provide evidence that he was there first, and so he is duly awarded the pew.

What kind of philanthropy is someone like George Hibbert engaged in? Something we've seen a lot throughout human resources is the figure of the philanthropist who would be involved in lots of charitable acts domestically with money made from investment in the overseas slave trade.

It's a form of social power, I think. And so in order to be considered a respectable gentleman, you needed at that time to really be exercising your social power. And that involved participating in philanthropic activities, so donating to charity, being on the board of various different charities, even founding your own as well. And George Hibbert was sort of no different in that respect. He had come...

from a family in Manchester that was involved in the cloth trade. And over the generations, the Hibbets had built up effectively a kind of commercial empire that spread from

Manchester to Jamaica, where his family were involved in slave trading and plantation ownership. And then they set up a branch house in London, which dealt with selling slave produced commodities. There is an anxiety in this period around the idea of new money, money made in trade, and particularly as the 18th century progressed and the issue of abolition emerged, money made through the slave trade.

So for George Hibbert, the sort of exercise of philanthropy was part of his claims to the trappings of gentlemanly respectability. But also, really importantly, it was part of his activities in relation to defending the slave trade and slavery. So he was very much a leading member of the London West India lobby.

How did Hibbert defend the slave trade? One of the things that he argued was that wealth generated through slavery was being spent in maintaining respectable Christian families. So again, if we think of the importance of that visibility in the church in Clapham, it's a performance of that sort of idea of Christian, respectable family life.

This sort of crafting of this identity is part of his around why slavery is important. And not only was

supporting good Christian families, but also it was being spent on worthy causes. So he also makes arguments in his speeches to Parliament on the slave trade about the ways in which he uses his wealth to support philanthropic causes to make sure that the poor, the needy and the destitute of the metropole of Britain itself are the recipients of his largesse. He also does work

what I would sort of frame as, I guess, kind of religious charitable work, religious philanthropy. So he's involved in the Society for the Conversion and Religious Instruction in Education of Negro Slaves in the British West Indies. So that was a missionary society that was established in 1794 and it had the Bishop of London as its president.

In the Human Resources Season 2 episode, Origin Stories Part 1, we heard about how the Catholic Church provided religious arguments in defence of the slave trade. Kate has outlined how passionate Christians like George Hibbert also use their faith to underwrite their pro-slavery beliefs. But Hibbert is sitting alongside evangelical Christians in his local church who use their faith as a bedrock to argue the complete opposite.

In regards to why it was that the abolitionists really pushed for the abolition of slavery, I think it's very much linked to

this idea that the enslaved in the Caribbean represented an untapped congregation for God. And this is a point in time when evangelical Christianity is seeking to kind of expand its reach. And the enslaved were a population that could be quote-unquote "civilized" through exposure to

to improving virtues of Christianity, so to marriage, to church attendance. And you see that reflected in some of the issues that the abolitionists really go after. They're very, very interested in the issue of sexual morality in the Caribbean, and they campaign and push hard on that, both in relation to the ways in which

the enslaved population itself is being sexually exploited by slave owners. And I mean, of course, you can see that through the rising population of people of mixed heritage that are located in the various different Caribbean colonies. And this was considered to be a sort of gross immorality. It's a betrayal of Christian principles of marriage,

The denial of Christian marriage to enslaved people, the breakup of families as a result of the selling of enslaved families away from one another, either for financial purposes or as a form of punishment as well.

What other areas did the abolitionists focus on? For example, enslaved people having to work on a Sunday. That didn't create a space for them to be able to, or time for them to be able to go to church, to hear the words of God, which again was an issue that the abolitionists wanted to stop. They wanted enslaved people to have a spiritual life.

For missionaries, for example, Unitarian missionaries, where the active engagement with the gospel required the ability to be able to read, enslavement meant that people were not educated. The priority for planters was to have

enslaved people working and not to spend time and money on educating them. There was also a deep fear that should they become educated, it would lead to an engagement with ideas that would encourage them to seek their own freedom.

So you can see some of the different ways in which the abolitionist movement is being influenced by its Christian principles and morals and also this kind of evangelical impetus as well. The notion that enslaved people could be a new spiritual congregation under God should the

prohibitive nature of enslavement be removed from them. So they didn't necessarily value and see African cultures and traditions and religious practices as equal. They wanted to change those things about the enslaved people.

But they wanted to get rid of slavery because slavery in effect was impeding the spread of Christianity because people were not educated enough to be able to engage with their religious faith in a way that was kind of serious and would enable them to really embrace faith.

You've got these two groups, abolitionists and pro-slavery advocates, mingling regularly within the very small space of the Holy Trinity. Do you have any idea how they interacted on an interpersonal level, especially as both campaigns heated up in the 1790s? We've got some idea of how they interacted. There's not sort of voluminous correspondence which would really elucidate that. George Hibbert was very, very careful to kind of cultivate this idea

sociable and polite sense of gentlemanliness. And William Wilberforce did say of George Hibbert that he was one of the only ones of his opponents to treat him as a gentleman. So I think there is this sense that sort of foreshadowing

forms and practices of gentlemanly sociability are kind of greasing the wheels of social interactions, particularly, you know, in Capham. I mean, George Hibbert lived there for, I think it's about 28 years. So there is an impetus there to really make those relationships work. They also were both involved in a variety of different charitable endeavours together. So they

were both involved with the Society for the Elimination of Smallpox. They were both involved with the founding of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. Wilberforce was also involved in the Society for the Conversion of Enslaved People in the Caribbean as well. And of course, they're both members of parliament.

Wasn't there an instance where an abolitionist who lived in Clapham went to visit the Hibbets? What happens in this encounter between George Hibbett and the abolitionist William Smith? George Hibbett's response indicates that effectively what William Smith had said to him was that if your family hadn't been involved with transatlantic slavery, you wouldn't be a supporter of slavery. And Hibbett writes back saying perhaps if

his family hadn't been involved, he wouldn't have taken such an interest in the issue. But given that they were, he had effectively done his homework and he was entirely convinced and could make the arguments without contradicting his conscience. So they're writing to each other, they're visiting, they're going to the same church and they are also active within the same philanthropic spheres.

Although his letters to his planter clients are far less complimentary when it comes to William Wilberforce, he writes to one of his clients in Jamaica, a plantation owner called Simon Taylor. Effectively, he calls Wilberforce a wasp that has been flapped out the window, but in order to stop could do with being squashed on the foot.

I never know whether to praise this sort of disingenuity and civil political discourse. Is it an indicator of maturity and the ability to find common ground that is so vital in politics? Or a sign that these people don't actually consider the stakes very high because ultimately it's more of an intellectual exercise for them?

To some degree, it's still the same today. Political opponents can be civil towards one another. You don't know what's said in private. And of course, you know, you don't know the degree to which Hibbert's also performing a role for his planter client, Simon Taylor, as well, who will want to hear that he is really adamantly against Wilberforce. So you sort of have to try and wade through and measure up. What is it that...

these people are really thinking between the lines of what they're saying. I guess we could think about maybe a parallel today with the ways in which the arms trade is presented as a central part of the British economy. Respectable people work in its board of directors or who sort of facilitate those wheels of commerce.

It is a trade which deals in human death and human maiming, and it's defended on the same grounds as being, you know, a sort of integral part of the British economy. If we didn't do it, someone else would do it. We do it better because we have laws to regulate it. In terms of political rhetoric, there's quite a lot of parallels between the two.

Beyond the Machinistians of Westminster, I want to know about the hidden stories of the Holy Trinity Church. We're aware of some of the big names, but what are the stories of people who might have been involved in either abolitionism or pro-slavery in Holy Trinity that we don't know so much about?

Maybe one of the stories that's interesting that people don't know a huge amount about, Zachary McCauley, who was an abolitionist, was very much involved with the project to effectively set up a colony in Sierra Leone. After the ending of the American Revolution, enslaved people belonging to the colonists that had rebelled against the British government were offered their freedom if they would fight for the British.

When the British lost the war, those enslaved people who would become free were effectively the responsibility of the British. And a number of them were sent to Nova Scotia and a number of them came and settled in London. Following that, it was decided that these people should be sent to Sierra Leone. So there was a project that was set up in order to do that.

So Zachary McCauley was interested and involved in that project. His brother, I think, was sort of very much one of the leading figures who established that colony there. In 1799, children were brought over from Sierra Leone and they were brought over by Zachary McCauley and

and they came to participate in what Zachary McCauley had founded and named the African Institution. And the idea was that these children would receive an education and they would be Christianised. So they came over and they were living in Clapham at the same time as the abolitionists and also as this kind of contingent of slave owners as well. So, you know, you can sort of imagine as George Hibbert

trooped off to church with his wife and many, many children and servants in tow. There would have been African children also living on the Common as well at the African institution.

Do we know anything about the lives of these Black children who ended up in Clapham? Those children participated in community and church life and they would have been, you know, a very visible part of the community as well. And so a number of them actually ended up dying quite young and effectively they were buried in St Paul's Church in Clapham. Now that church had been

funded by the great and the good of Holy Trinity Clapham, including George Hibbert, who had given money to establish that church.

So George's son, also named George, and his brother, William, are buried at St Paul's in Clapham, as are some of the African children who died, and as are some of the abolitionists as well. That's a very tragic postscript that so many of these black children brought to England from Sierra Leone died young.

I think it flags another key issue. Sometimes today, because our values have changed so much, there is a conception of the slavery abolitionist movement as an anti-racism movement, which is very ahistorical and imposes modern political values on the past.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's something that's really important to acknowledge that just because the abolitionists wanted to get rid of slavery, it didn't necessarily make them anti-racist. Anti-slavery and anti-racist are not the same things. And the abolitionists did not see African civilization, culture and religion as equal to slavery.

British forms of culture and civilisation and religion. And in fact, you know, the abolitionists, what they wanted to do was effectively to remake the enslaved in their own image, to make them into British subjects and to model their cultural, their familial and their spiritual lives in ways that

mirrored their own. So it's not about equality in that sense. And so it's not surprising to find some crossover with regards to some of these kind of colonial or projects of empire, including the Society for, you know, Affecting the Relief of the Black Poor, which was about or was set up in order to do something about those

freed people who had escaped slavery in America and had been brought over to London after the American Revolution, those people were viewed as a problem. Those people were viewed as a drain on resources. And there is an interest there for absentee planters who were living in Britain to effectively

shapes that society with their ideas about race. We've talked a lot about Holy Trinity, but I'm interested to know what other British locations, religious or otherwise, might serve a similar function in representing these overlaps between pro-slavery figures and abolitionists. The example I'm thinking of is Cross Street Chapel in Manchester, which the Hibberts worshipped at when the family was majority-based there. It's a dissenting church.

And again, you have this community of abolitionists and people involved in slavery being involved with the church. I would say in terms of thinking about the various different churches that we have across the country, everyone might be united in faith, but that doesn't mean that they're united in terms of their political opinions in other areas.

Another example, again, from London would be Newington Green Congregation. That's a different kind of congregation. So Holy Trinity Capham is Church of England, whereas Newington Green is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, Unitarian place of worship in the country. And Newington Green is

had some very famous abolitionists that used it as a place of worship. Mary Wollstonecraft was associated with Newington Green and she did a book review effectively of Oladek Riano's interesting narrative in which she talks about

the ways in which race is not an indication of civilisation and humanity and therefore enslavement is, you know, an oppressive institution that doesn't allow people to fulfil their entire selves. So she worshipped there. Also Anna Letitia Barbaud, again, a female abolitionist,

She wrote an epistle to William Wilberforce, which celebrated the work that Wilberforce did and encouraged him to carry on with his campaign to end the slave trade. She was a member of the congregation there. Do we know anything about how these households interacted within this space? At that point in time, the preacher there was Richard Price.

And he was very, very vocal on issues of American slavery. So he had written tracks denouncing American slavery. But he doesn't say a huge amount about Caribbean slavery. And other historians have kind of questioned whether or not that's perhaps because

it was easier to talk about American slavery in relation to his congregation than it was to talk about Caribbean slavery because his congregation included some very wealthy people who were involved in West India commerce. So it's interesting to think not only of how the congregation interacted with one another, but also how the issue of slavery was also impacting on people

how they were receiving the word of God or how they were being preached at and what that says about the sort of social and religious entanglements that enabled people to speak or not speak in different ways and at different times. The Holy Trinity in Clapham is a microcosm of the larger debates around slavery that were about to dominate British political life in the late 1700s.

In the next few episodes, we're going to examine the movement for abolition from sometimes overlooked perspectives. First up, the black abolitionists whose work was so crucial to the legal end of the slave trade, but found themselves shunted from historical record. ♪

Human Resources was written by me, Moyalothian McLean. Our editor and producer is Renee Richardson. Our researchers are Dr. Alison Bennett and Arisa Lumba. Production assistant is Rory Boyle. Sound design by Ben Yolovitz. This is a Broccoli Production, part of the Sony Podcast Network.