The incredible stories of black Americans who escaped the slave trade to make a life for themselves in Victorian Britain have emerged after more than 130 years.
From a woman who fled Tennessee and ended up meeting the Queen to a man who went from his master’s home to becoming a world boxing champion – their remarkable journeys helped shape the way the UK and Ireland viewed life across the pond.
Importing slaves was banned in America in 1808, but slavery wasn’t officially outlawed until 1865 and the end of the civil war. The conflict cost thousands of lives and saw southern states desperately cling on to the right to keep black people as servants. The slave trade was not banned in Britain until 1833, but prejudice continued for years.
Most of them never returned to the US, settling in towns and cities around the country and marrying British people.
Their portraits have been published in a new book written by historian Jeffrey Green, as part of his bid to get more information about them.
One shows Marta Ricks who travelled to Britain via Liberia and eventually ended up meeting Queen Victoria. American Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield had a similar experience, serenading the Queen at Buckingham Palace.
There is another striking shot of George Dixon, who escaped the slave trade and became a world bantamweight boxing champion after fighting in London in 1890.
Among the others illustrated in Black Americans in Victorian Britain are Peter Thomas Stanford who went on to become a church minister in Birmingham in 1889 and Samuel Ringgold War who arrived in the UK in 1853 and wrote a memoir called the Autobiography of a Fugitive Slave.
The incredible stories of black Americans who escaped the slave trade to make a life for themselves in Victorian Britain have emerged after more than 180 years. Pictured left are Calvin Harris Richardson and Thomas Lewis Johnson who studied in Stockwell, London in the late 1870s. With their wives (pictured), sisters Issadorah and Henrietta, they went to Cameroon in 1878 as Baptist missionaries. Pictured right is Martha Ricks. She was born a slave in Tennessee, but she was sent to Liberia in 1830. In 1892 she sailed from Africa to Liverpool and fulfilled a long ambition to meet Queen Victoria, even giving her a gift
George Dixon (pictured left) was the world bantamweight boxing champion and fought in London to gain his title in 1890. Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield escaped Philadelphia, USA and ended up singing for Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace
A poster (left) shows an advert for a talk by Moses Roper. He toured Britain in the late 1830s, married a Welsh woman, and they migrated to Canada. Roper revisited Britain, as did his wife and daughter. Another poster is pictured right advertising ‘Blind Tom’: The Negro Boy Pianist. Thomas Bethune-Wiggins known toured Britain in 1866-1867, aged 17. His performances at the piano attracted the curious, as he was often presented as a freak
Pictured standing left to right are C. W. Payne, Mattie Lawrence, Benjamin Thomas, Georgia Gordon, Loudin, George Barrett, Maggie Wilson, Patti Malone and seated Willey Benchley, Minnie Tate and Jennie Jackson. The group, known as the Fisk Jubilee singers sailed for Australia after arriving in London and toured the country as well as visiting New Zealand, India and Japan. They arrived in Britain in May 1875 and toured elsewhere between 1877 and 1878
Writer Paul Dunbarís is pictured left whose poems were well received in America and in 1897 he visited England for some months. The Times reviewed his cooperation with Afro-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, noting he possessed an undeniable gift. Pictured right is Samuel Ringgold War who escaped to Britain in 1853 and had his book Autobiography of a Fugitive Slave published in the UK in 1855
James Cooney (pictured back, left) is seen with colleagues of the Alex Dayís beach entertainers based in Morecambe, Lancashire in 1910. He is said to have settled in the town around 1902 but he married a local girl in 1898, having worked as a circus performer and with the Bohee brothers, and served in the Argentine navy. He died in Morecambe in 1932
Pictured left is Jesse Ewing Glasgow from Pennsylvania who came from America and studied medicine at Edinburgh University where he wrote The Harpers Ferry Insurrection in 1859. Right is William Peter Powell. He was born in 1834 and left New York with his parents and siblings in 1850. He studied in Dublin and Manchester and qualified as a doctor in 1858. He worked in two Liverpool hospitals and when the U.S. Civil War broke out, the entire family returned to New York where Dr Powell served in a Washington army hospital. He died in Liverpool in 1916