Amazing Grace - This is Hull

Birthplace of Wilberforce - and freedom

Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 17/03/2007

A year of events
Max Davidson visits Hull to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery.

The wheel, exhilaratingly, has come full circle. Travel back 200 years in time with Erica Kyere, a shy 26-year-old Ghanaian woman, rugged up against the English winter, and you can only shudder at what you see.

Fair trade farmer
Erica Kyere, a Ghanaian Fairtrade farmer

Had she been around in 1807, young and fit and living in the village of Mampong, in the Ashanti region, her fate would have been all too predictable. Capture, enslavement, a transatlantic crossing on a crowded slave ship, hard labour on a sugar plantation, rape, floggings... What chance of her even reaching the age of 30?

That Erica is here in Hull in 2007, representing the Kuapa Kokoo cocoa farmers' co-operative, talking about futures markets, chatting about her forthcoming marriage, makes the heart sing. If the ghost of William Wilberforce, whose statue looks impassively down on her, were to allow himself a small smile of satisfaction, no reasonable person would begrudge him it.

Hull is putting on its glad rags for its most famous son, and so it should. There are events all across the country to mark the bicentenary of the passing of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 1807, notably in Liverpool and Bristol, the two main ports involved in the trade. But it is in Hull, in this unfashionable, isolated city, on the banks of the Humber, that the Wilberforce story - a story that still reverberates around the world - begins.

His birthplace, now a museum, dates from the 17th century. It is a handsome redbrick building, in the "artisan mannerist" style, and would once have backed right on to the tiny Hull river, a tributary of the Humber. The house was built on reclaimed land and, with its crooked, sloping lintel, shows signs of earlier subsidence. A single, gnarled tree, silhouetted against the leaden Yorkshire sky, stands in front of it.

Wilberforce's father was a wealthy merchant when the city was in its heyday. There would have been warehouses all around his house, ships loading and unloading, stevedores bustling to and fro, the stench of fish and mud - the mud is still there, great steaming mounds of it, all along the estuary - and rotting fruit and vegetables. Hull was a busy seaport, not involved in the slave trade, but doing brisk business with cities in Holland, Germany and Scandinavia.

A child of privilege, then, but also - if the statue does not lie - a modest man. Wilberforce was slightly built, with a clean-shaven, boyish face, and not at all an imposing figure. When he rose to speak in the House of Commons on May 12, 1789, with the gallery packed with slave-traders from Liverpool, one can imagine him trembling in apprehension. Did the boy from Hull know, did anyone know, that he was about to spark a revolution?

"I mean not to accuse anyone, but to take the blame upon myself, in common with the whole parliament of Great Britain, for having suffered this horrid trade to be carried on for so long under their authority. We are all guilty." His chapter-and-verse denunciation of the slave trade, which went on for four hours, was one of the greatest of all political speeches: hairs-on-the-back-of-the-neck stuff. Melvyn Bragg, shrewdly, included the speech, which was quickly circulated in pamphlet form, in his Twelve Books That Changed the World. No squeaky-clean modern museum can come close to evoking the horrors that Wilberforce described to the Commons: the appalling conditions of the slave ships - "so much misery in so little room, more than the human imagination can conceive" - or the equally appalling conditions on the sugar plantations at the end of the voyage. But the Wilberforce House Museum makes an excellent fist of it, blending historical reconstruction with a look at slavery - still far from eradicated - in the modern world.

Erica, going around the museum with me, stares in obvious distress at the images of brutality: the whips, the chains, the whole grisly apparatus of oppression. But other exhibits - of West African music, of colourful Kente-cloth dresses, of exotic tropical trees - bring a smile of recognition to her face. The museum is not just an X-rated horror show: it is a celebration of a vibrant culture uprooted, but not destroyed.

It is also, stirringly, a celebration of little people daring to believe that they could make a difference. Here are the porcelain cameos - like modern campaign badges - designed by Josiah Wedgwood 200years ago. The African slave, kneeling in supplication, and the legend: "Am I not a man and a brother?" How many women of Hull wore those brooches, as the anti-slavery coalition gathered momentum? And how many Hull housewives, more than a century before women got the vote, took part in the sugar boycott of the 1790s? They had never been within a thousand miles of Africa, but they heard what Wilberforce and his fellow abolitionists had to say, and they wanted to make their statement, refusing to buy the sugar that was the end-product of all this human misery.

"Did you know about the sugar boycott?" I whisper to Erica.

"No. It makes you think, doesn't it?" It does indeed. Kuapa Kokoo, the cocoa farmers' co-operative of which she is the development officer, is a Fairtrade company, its products marketed in this country as Divine Chocolate.

"We're Divine," say two of its members, bounding up to me later, in another section of the museum.

"And I'm Gorgeous," I retort. But beyond the clowning, there is something else: a recognition that, 200 years after the most pernicious organised trading system in human history, a new order has emerged. The idealists of Hull - men and women who would once have campaigned shoulder to shoulder with Wilberforce - are now fighting for a new cause, with the dignity of labour as its end.

Hull is one of a growing number of officially designated "Fairtrade Cities", prepared to put its money where its mouth is. I had never visited the city before, and I suspect I am not alone. It is out on a limb, geographically, and the things one immediately associates with it - fish and chips, Rugby League players thrashing around in the mud, John Prescott, one of the Hull MPs - do not exactly whet the appetite. But it is a pleasant, compact city, and as I take to the streets the next morning, on a Wilberforce walking tour, its charms are not slow to impress themselves. Seagulls swoop above the marina. The sun glints on the water. There is a smell of freshly brewed coffee.

Hull got badly bombed during the Second World War and is the inevitable architectural mish-mash: fine Victorian buildings cheek-by-jowl with modern shopping arcades; riverside apartment blocks where once there would have been warehouses. Queen's Gardens, in the city centre, is a welcome oasis of green, although it is a shame that the Wilberforce column - think Nelson in Trafalgar Square - is backed by a hideous 1960s college-block.

What I had not expected was the rabbit-warren of cobbled streets, with names such as Dagger Lane, in the old city, the area around Wilberforce House. One gets the sense, not just of a flourishing community, but of a community with a healthy tradition of non-conformity. Dagger Lane was also known as "Nine Faiths Lane" because there were so many different churches, chapels - Quakers, Unitarians, Methodists - and distinct Christian traditions within a few doors of each other. Wilberforce himself was part of the evangelical movement. In the 17thcentury, in one of the defining moments in the history of the city, Hull refused admission to King Charles I. Challenging authority - religious, political or commercial - must have been as instinctive as breathing to the people of Hull.

If Wilberforce was Hull's most famous MP, he was run a close second by the poet Andrew Marvell, whose statue stands in the city centre, outside Holy Trinity Church, where Wilberforce was christened. There is a wry reference to the Humber in his best-known poem, To His Coy Mistress. Every great man becomes that little bit more inexplicable when you understand his roots.

And as with Marvell, so with Wilberforce. There are literally hundreds of Wilberforce events this year, right across the country, from exhibitions to lunches, from lectures to marches. That is as it should be. It was the passions he aroused in ordinary, decent people, as much as his tenacity or oratorical skill, that led to the demise of the slave trade.

His name is everywhere. Wilberforce Road, Wilberforce Close, Wilberforce Mews. Wilberforce Mansions. My 12-year-old god-daughter, I recently discovered, is a direct descendant of the great man and keeps his portrait on her wall, next to the Pirates of the Caribbean poster. He is an Everyman, the repository of all our hopes and ideals.

Yet in Hull, his birthplace, hot-bed of quiet radicalism, bolshie so-and-sos refusing to do things simply because they had always been done in that way in the past, he somehow seems that little bit closer.

Just around the corner from Wilberforce House, on a damp cobbled street, next to an antediluvian-looking pub called Ye Olde Black Boy, I come across Hitchcock's, as wackily non-conformist a restaurant as you could hope to find. It is vegetarian, but vegetarian with a charmingly democratic twist. The style of food - Chinese, Indian, Thai, Italian - is chosen, not by the chef, but by the first person to book a table. How laid-back is that? Gordon Ramsay would do his head in.

Tonight, in honour of Erica and her friends from Divine Chocolate, it is "Ghana and West Africa Fairtrade Night". Fairtraded red wine washes down a buffet of fried plantains and roasted chickpeas and stewed yams and red-bean salad and a dozen other goodies, light years from what you could expect to find in a Hull supermarket. A bit recherché? Low turn-out? Not a bit of it. Every table is packed and people are not here for the food, or not principally for the food. There is something deeper stirring.

"Fairtrade has become my greatest mission in life," says Peter Church, a grizzled-looking campaign veteran, who runs One World, a Fairtrade shop in the city centre.

"We sell everything from coffee and cocoa to craft products such as woven baskets. In other retail markets, it is the goods that sell or fail to sell. In Fairtrade, it is the stories behind the goods. People want to do their bit to stop producers like Erica being exploited. You can't argue with that, can you?" I glance across at Erica, as happy as a sandpiper, telling people about her fiancé, and how she met him, and about their wedding arrangements, and about her plans for Kuapa Kokoo, a co-operative of the free-born, in a free market. And I think: "No, because of things started here, in Hull, on the muddy muddy banks of the Humber, you can't argue with that."

A year of events
# Wilberforce House Museum reopens on Sun March 25 at 2.30pm. Thereafter open daily, 10am-5pm Mon-Sat, 1.30pm-4-30pm Sun. Admission free
# Walking with Wilberforce, a self-guided heritage trail of Hull, is launched on Monday, May 7. Leaflets of the route will be available from the Tourist Information Centre, in Paragon Street (01482 223559); for more details about this, and the many special events taking place in Hull to mark the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade, see www.wilberforce2007.com
# Trains to Hull run direct from London King's Cross, return fares from £30 (08450 710222, www.hulltrains.co.uk)

Many other events will take place across the country to mark the bicentenary. Highlights include:
# March 23: general release of 'Amazing Grace', a film based on the life of William Wilberforce
# From April 23: Breaking the Chains: a special exhibition on the abolition of the slave trade at the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, Bristol (www.empiremuseum.co.uk)
# August: the opening of a major International Slavery Museum, in Liverpool (www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk)
# August: the opening of a permanent gallery - London, Sugar and Slavery - at the Museum of Docklands, in London (www.molg.org.uk)

For details of other events see www.enjoyengland.com, or www.direct.gov.uk/en/slavery

UPDATE:

Still fighting for freedom

Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 22/03/2007

Chance led Lord Wedderburn to trace his own passion for human rights back to his ancestor, the son of a slave, he tells Cassandra Jardine

Amazing Grace, the new film that tells the story of William Wilberforce's campaign to end the slave trade, is a glossy memorial to the passing of the Bill that ended the slave trade on March 25 200 years ago.

Slaves taken to market in Africa
To market: women slaves were used for breeding

But this Sunday, near Edinburgh, a less well-known event will be commemorated - even though was probably equally significant in bringing that grisly trade to an end.

The stars of this show will not be Ioan Gruffudd and Albert Finney, the actors in the film, but one of our most distinguished legal minds, Lord (Bill) Wedderburn of Charlton, and Geoff Palmer, a retired professor of grain science born in Jamaica.

These two men, both with direct links to slavery, will be reliving a walk made in 1795 by Lord Wedderburn's ancestor, Robert, from the port at Musselburgh to Inveresk House, where his father, James Wedderburn, was living.

It was not a happy reunion of father and son. Robert was the child whom James had fathered by a slave girl, Rosanna, while living as a plantation owner in Jamaica. He sold her on while pregnant but with the condition that the child should be born a free man, not a slave.

Yet when the young mixed-race boy used that freedom to become a sailor and travel to Britain, his father was not pleased.

He assumed Robert had come to demand money off him, so he instructed his under-butler to dismiss his young by-blow with two calculated insults: "a cracked sixpence" and "a glass of small beer", as Robert described in his autobiography.

The callous rejection was a turning point in Robert Wedderburn's life. "He left for London and became an activist against slavery," says his proud descendant, Bill Wedderburn. "He was outraged from having seen his mother and grandmother whipped by slave masters, and he spoke at public meetings against slavery.

"British workers didn't stand to gain from the end of the slave trade but, because ordinary people demanded it, it did end. Robert was also the first person to link the treatment of the slaves to the treatment of Britain's industrial working class."

Today Robert Wedderburn is considered one of the most eminent black Britons in history, but he is still little known. The heroes of the abolition movement have been, until now, white men of conscience: Quakers who spoke out against slavery and Church of England reformers, such as Wilberforce, who were in a position to put legislation before Parliament.

Even Bill (by then Lord) Wedderburn didn't know about his illustrious ancestor Robert until 1980, when he came across a newspaper article about the man with whom he shared a surname.

The article described Robert's early life in Jamaica, his years campaigning for free speech and emancipation, his autobiography, The Horrors of Slavery, and the occasions when he was sent to prison in England for his revolutionary views.

He sounded to Bill Wedderburn like someone after his own heart. "I contacted the author, Geoff Palmer, and researched my relationship to Robert," he explains over a cup of coffee in the House of Lords where, aged 79, he still speaks frequently, despite being wheelchair-bound.

He soon discovered that he was a direct descendant of Robert Wedderburn, who had married a white woman (her identity is unknown) and had several children. Ever since, this principled, humorous lawyer explains, his ancestor has been a guiding light.

"One constantly comes across appalling oppression. Knowing about his work, I ask myself: 'What would Robert think about this?' "

In a speech earlier this year, which he opened by declaring himself the descendant of a slave, he spoke about the current trafficking of women and children. Other causes on which he has spoken include corporate manslaughter, the genital mutilation of women and the human rights implications of anti-terrorist legislation.

Robert Wedderburn has inspired him but this is not a case of a man expiating his guilt at having profited from slave-owning forebears.

Despite the handle to his name, there is nothing patrician about Bill Wedderburn. It's pure coincidence that, even before he knew of the relationship, he was already devoted to causes that Robert Wedderburn might have espoused had he been alive today.

The son of a scale-maker in Deptford, south London, Bill Wedderburn went from grammar school to Cambridge, where he won the top law prize even though he only took up the subject in his third year. He was equally pre-eminent in his bar exams but chose to teach rather than make money at the bar.

At Cambridge, where he taught Lord Irvine, he started the first course in "labour" law - a term that he far prefers to "employment" law. "In Deptford, this was what concerned people, yet it was not taught," he explains.

In 1977, when he was asked to become a Labour spokesman in the Lords on legal matters, he took the title Lord Wedderburn of Charlton in honour of the football team he has supported all his life. Though a loyal Labour supporter, he resigned the whip - but not his party membership - last year.

"There were two reasons: the first is Blairism," he explains. "Since 1997 there has been a constant stream of measures that are either in conflict with the last manifesto or with what the Labour Party stood for in the 1980s and 1990s.

You cannot have an intellectual argument with someone whose answer to questions such as the need to go to war in Iraq is, 'If you knew what I know...'

"The second reason was 'the smell'," as he calls the cash-for-honours scandal. "Last year I had to go into hospital for an operation on my spine.

When the nurse read my notes and saw I was a lord she asked with a giggle, 'How did you get that?' When I came back to the House of Lords, I decided I wasn't going to go on having dreadful conversations along the lines of that song, 'This is my party, and I'll cry if I want to...' "

Bill Wedderburn has no such mixed feelings about Robert Wedderburn, who was, he says, "a serious man who did not give up his fight". Robert Wedderburn's battle against slavery that began in 1795, with his father's rejection of him, dominated the rest of his life.

He worked as a tailor and set up a Unitarian chapel in Soho. Despite charges that he was inciting revolution, and three spells in prison, he successfully defended his right to speak his mind and tell his tale.
Lord Wedderburn

Fascination with history: Lord Wedderburn

Geoff Palmer, the author of the article that first alerted Bill Wedderburn to Robert's existence, is well versed in the life story of the activist who came to his attention when he found a copy of his autobiography in an Edinburgh bookshop.

As a black Jamaican himself, Palmer was fascinated by Wedderburn's tales of the slave era and his battle for abolition. He felt some bond with him for he too had made something of himself in Britain despite a fractured family background.

He became a professor of grain science at Heriot-Watt University, where he made his name by cutting two days off the malting time for barley.

Palmer says that James Wedderburn, Robert's father, had gone to Jamaica after his father, a Catholic, was hanged by the English following the Battle of Culloden. He stayed there for 27 years, amassing a huge fortune which he then invested in Inveresk House - now a National Trust property - built high on a hill, like a plantation house, so the owner could observe his slaves at work.

"In 1762, when Robert was born, Jamaica was more valuable to Britain than the United States because of the sugar trade and the regime was brutal," says Palmer. "Women like Rosanna, Robert's mother, were used for breeding.

Slaves had no right even to life, as Robert told numerous public meetings. Like Bob Marley, he was half-black, half-white and more interested in justice than in race. After rejection by his father, he didn't whine, he took action. He told people that slavery was being supported both by the Church and by the Government."

Robert Wedderburn's speeches helped create the groundswell of public opinion that resulted in the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. But, to him, that was the beginning, not the end of the struggle because the trade by then was a side issue.

With 300,000 slaves in Jamaica, from whom more slaves could be bred, and the Spanish and Americans continuing with the trade until 1865, nothing would change, he knew, until slavery itself - rather than the slave trade - was abolished.

He continued to campaign for just that until he died in Dorchester prison some time after 1830. No one knows whether or not he lived to see the Abolition of Slavery Act finally passed in 1833.

At one of his trials, in 1820, he said that he flattered himself that "my simple exertions will one day or other be of no mean importance". It has taken nearly 200 years, but on Sunday Robert Wedderburn takes up his rightful place in history.