LONDON RADICAL HISTORIES

In our last post we discussed the ongoing and intertwined links of the ownership of landed estates in England, the process of enclosure that concentrated the land in fewer hands, the massive profits some rich families made from the slave trade and owning slaves on Caribbean plantations, and the continuing networks of wealth power and influence that benefit from all these ‘historical’ factors today.

These processes are not confined to the aristocracy and to grand country houses; they are mirrored in thousands of smaller parcels of land, both open space and where houses now stand.

Our West London correspondent has uncovered more about another nexus of slavery profiteers/enclosers of land/ builders of wealthy estates in London & rurally… As previously covered in this blog, the Hobbayne Trust, like the Merchant Adventurers in Bristol, of Colston statue fame, profit and power can be dressed up with charity … but power and control are at the heart.

When Hanwell was run by slaveowners

Following up from our piece on resistance to enclosures in Hanwell, we return to this part of west London and a story that tells us much about where the power lay in the countryside around London in the 18^th century and how wealth derived from the British colonies was making its mark back in Britain.

Our previous piece contained the story of a landowner, the Charity of William Hobbayne, fencing off a piece of a public park and of the local residents’ resistance to it. The Hobbayne charity keeps a low public profile but the response to any criticism is usually to state that the charity has been doing good work since its foundation in 1484.

For Past Tense, this was an open invitation. Grubbing around in the past is what we do. Of course, no one can really be sure what an organisation such as this was up to centuries ago, so we decided to go digging.

In doing so, we discovered an extraordinary story of an aristocratic oligarchy, land deals, members of parliament oiling the wheels and the demolition of cottages to improve the view from a slave-owner’s house.
All taking place in what is now a West London suburb.

The Charity of William Hobbayne

The Charity of William Hobbayne (usually shortened to the Hobbayne charity or Hobbayne Trust) was founded in 1484, when local landowner William Hobbayne left land in his will, the income from which was to be used for the benefit of Hanwell’s poor. By the 18^th century, the Hobbayne Trust owned a significant amount of land in the parish of Hanwell. Its board of trustees was drawn from the wealthiest and most influential residents and operated as a de facto parish council.

In 1769, a number of new trustees were admitted to the board. Among them were Henry Berners and Nathaniel Bayly.[i] The Berners and Bayly families were what has since become known as ‘absentee slaveowners’, a rising class of ‘new money’ which was shaping 18^th century society.

The rise of the absentee slaveowner

Our image of slavery in the Americas has been shaped by the US TV and film industry, which, almost to the exclusion of everything else, focuses on the decades leading up to the American Civil War. The picture is of slaves toiling on vast cotton plantations and the master living in his huge white house.

In the British Empire, though, the boom years were a century earlier and the cash crop was sugar. Such were the profits from this trade that the wealthiest of slaveowners could afford to leave the management of their Caribbean estates to their stewards and use the proceeds to live as country squires in Britain. In the 18^th century, many of them acquired country houses and estates, thus buying their way into the landed gentry.  Research by University College London found that these absentee slaveowners accounted for 10 per cent of the Empire’s slaveholders but between them they owned half of its slaves.

William and Henry Berners

One such man was William Berners who, as well as owning land in Hanwell, held estates in Norfolk, Suffolk and Fitzrovia. He developed the streets on his land north of Oxford Street and west of Tottenham Court Road, one of which, Berners Street, still bears his name. He also owned the Wagwater plantation in Jamaica.

In 1767 William, together with his brother Henry, inherited Hanwell Park, a large country house on the hillside where Drayton Manor School now stands. As the map below shows, Hanwell Park’s grounds (at the top right of the map) extended some way to the north and were laid out with avenues of trees but, to the south, what would otherwise be a spectacular view down towards Boston Manor, was interrupted by a collection of cottages and barns. Ideally, the Berners brothers would have liked to knock these buildings down but they didn’t own the land on which they were built.

Fortunately for the brothers, the landowner was the Charity of William Hobbayne, of which Henry was a trustee. The brothers therefore proposed a land swap, trading some of their land in Hanwell for the piece in front of their house. This was agreed at a meeting of the trustees, where it was noted:

“Mr Berners is very desirous to have the cottage and barns belonging to this Trust situated in front of his house moved to some other place, as being an obstruction to his view and an obstacle to his improvements.” [ii]

However, there was one potential snag. In the 1770s, a land swap of this nature, involving a charitable trust, required an Act of Parliament. As luck would have it, though, the charity also had a Member of Parliament on its board of trustees, Nathaniel Bayly.

Nathaniel Bayly

While the Berners family acquired their plantations through serendipitous marriages and inheritances, the Baylys were the real deal. They were large-scale slave owners whose land holdings in Jamaica dwarfed those of Berners. Nathaniel’s brother Zachary is believed to have been one of the ten richest men on the island in the 18^th century. He was involved in the suppression of Tacky’s Revolt, a large-scale slave uprising during which one of the Bayly plantation houses was burnt.

On Zachary’s death, Nathaniel inherited most of his brother’s estates and, after combining them with his own, held a series of connected plantations known as Bayly’s Vale, worked by around 2,000 slaves. He also owned the town of Port Maria. The picture below shows the viaduct Nathaniel Bayly built to bring water to his plantations for the production of sugar and rum.

In Britain, Bayly owned property in the West Country and a house on Dover Street in Mayfair, where he was described by his nephew, Bryan Edwards, as living “in a high and elegant style of life”.

The Gentleman’s and Citizen’s Almanack for 1772 lists Bayly’s country residence as Hanwell but the location of his property there is unknown. In the 1770s, he commissioned a survey and garden design from Capability Brown (See Page 96 of Brown’s account book) but the house for which the work was to be done is not recorded. Bayly’s son Charles was born in Hanwell and married a daughter of the Earl of Jersey who acquired nearby Osterley Park in the 1770s.

In the 18th century, due to the small number of voters in most boroughs, it was possible for rich men to buy themselves seats in Parliament. Nathaniel Bayly sat for one of these ‘pocket boroughs’ in his family’s home town of Westbury, where he was ‘elected’ unopposed. Bayly did little to represent his constituents. He was part of a group of around 80 MPs known as the West India Interest, who spent most of their parliamentary time working on behalf of the Caribbean slave owners.

Nevertheless, in 1775, he did find time to sponsor an act with the catchy title Act to exchange lands between the Trustees of a certain Charity estate at Hanwell and William and Henry Berners, Esqs.[iii]

The land exchange

The Act enabled a land exchange to take place, giving the Berners brothers the Hobbayne Trust’s property stretching almost as far as Uxbridge Road. In return, the Hobbayne Trust received a number of parcels of land in Hanwell, including one named as Bittons, which is probably what we now call Bittern’s Field.

By the time the Act was passed, the Berners Brothers had already demolished the cottages and barns that were spoiling their view. This was considered a bit of a rum deal even by 18th century standards and, after concerns were raised about the loss of housing stock, the Berners Brothers agreed to rebuild the houses on the land transferred to the Hobbayne Trust.

The ownership of this new land didn’t only improve the Berners brother’s view. It also enabled them to close Cuckoo Lane (which then ran the whole length of what is now Greenford Avenue) and the lane running up from Church Road.[iv] Not only did the brothers not want unsightly cottages spoiling their view, they didn’t want people walking past their grounds either.

As a result of the Act, the Berners brothers got their view and their privacy and the Hobbayne Trust expanded its land holdings. The Trust calculated that it was in profit on the final deal, the value of the land and houses it had acquired being more than that of the property it had transferred to Berners.

Everybody pronounced themselves satisfied with the outcome. Everybody who counted, that is. The views of the original occupants of the demolished cottages and of the people locked out of roads they had been using for generations are not recorded. The views of the poor seldom are.

Aftermath

The Berners brothers didn’t have long to enjoy their new view and privacy. Henry died in 1782 and William the following year. The legacy of their extensive land ownership can still be seen in street names, Berners Drive, on the borders of Hanwell and West Ealing and Berners Streets in Fitzrovia, Ipswich and Norwich. An obelisk, 96 feet high, was erected in memory of William Berners in the grounds of his house at Woolverstone Hall in Suffolk. It was damaged by fire in 1943 and subsequently demolished.

Nathaniel Bayly died in 1798 after being forced to return to Jamaica to deal with his relatives and problems on his estates.

The descendants of both Berners and Bayly are to be found among those claiming compensation for loss of their human property when slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1834. Bayly’s son Charles complained that the measure “has greatly impoverished me during the latter part of my life.”

Hanwell Park passed through a series of owners before being demolished in the early 1900s and its estate sold off. Drayton Bridge Road and the streets to the East of Greenford Avenue were built on its land. Drayton Manor School (once attended by ’12 Years A Slave’ director Steve McQueen) now stands on the site of the house.

The Charity of William Hobbayne still exists. Records at the London Metropolitan Archives indicate that it has been through a number of land disputes over the centuries. It still owns land and houses in Hanwell and makes a tidy surplus most years. Its most recent accounts show assets of £7.2 million. In 2022, despite protests from Hanwell residents to the then Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries, it received a Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service.

Seems slave profiteering, historical and contemporary enclosure only get rewarded…

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This story, set in one parish in the late 18th century, shows how the wealthy slaveowners were becoming integrated into the landed gentry. Britain’s aristocracy is often depicted as exclusive and snobbish but it has proved adept at welcoming in new men in a relatively short time. There may have been sniffy comments about ‘new money’ and ‘coming from trade’ but, essentially, if a chap had the means, he (or his children) could always acquire the manners later. Another of the Charity of William Hobbayne’s trustees, James Clitherow, is a case in point. His family had made their money a century earlier in the East India trade but, by the 1770s, he was lord of Boston Manor and every inch a member of the landed gentry. As new men like Nathaniel Bayly made money and bought land, they were welcomed into the gentry, into its clubs, its social circles and onto the boards of its charities. This is one of the reasons why, despite rising public condemnation of slavery, it took so long to abolish. Around the West India Interest there was a series of commercial, family and friendship connections. Although they may not have owned slaves themselves, these powerful men were opposed to its abolition. The situation in Hanwell was a microcosm of what was going on in the rest of the country. The slaveowners and their friends in the landed gentry were running the show.

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[i] Meeting of 15 June 1991, in Charity of William Hobbayne Treasurer’s Account Book, 1736 – 1802. Available from London Metropolitan Archives, ref: ACC/0933/002