News Archive
Precious Cargo
When singer/songwriter Paul Field docks his dramatic anti-slavery play in Newcastle this Friday, it will have special resonance in a region that offered so much support and safe haven to abolitionists.
While much of the wealth of British cities such as Liverpool and Bristol was founded on the profits of the slave trade, Tyneside played a significant part in its abolition. Fugitive slaves and American abolitionists regularly visited Tyneside to speak at meetings held by the Gateshead and Newcastle Anti-Slavery Society.
It moved abolitionist William Wells Brown to write that "In no place in the United Kingdom has the American Slave warmer friends than in Newcastle."
However, there is evidence that local merchant ships might have been involved in the trade of slave produced goods and that local businesses also profited.
Field’s play, Cargo, uses contemporary music, dance and images to tell the story of the tortured struggles of the countless African slaves and the abolitionists campaign to stop the trade in human lives. Field, whose career highlights include penning a No.1 hit single, will perform the play with local dancers and singers from Church High School and Heaton Baptist Church at The People’s Theatre on Friday, October 19th at 8pm.
The British slave trade was finally abolished in 1807, but 200 years on Northumbria Police have a full time officer, based at Newcastle Airport, to detect and prevent human trafficking – modern day slavery.
Field says he hopes the play, which is being performed at 12 venues around the country, will also highlight the fight to stop modern day people trafficking. “A conservative estimate is that 20 million people are still tricked, traded and trafficked in some form of slavery,” he says. “One of the main things I want to put across through Cargo is the fact that poverty, ignorance, injustice and unfair trade are at the root of today's slavery.”
Tyneside and slavery
1. In 1833 more than 6,000 women from the Newcastle and Gateshead area signed a petition calling for the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean. Tyneside Quaker women opposed slavery by refusing to use sugar or wear cotton. When, in 1847, escaped slave Frederick Douglass gave a speech in Newcastle, the Richardson sisters of Newcastle were so moved by his story that they bought his freedom from slavery in the US – which meant it was safe for him to return to the US and continue with his campaign.
Earl Grey, whose monument stands in the centre of Newcastle, supported the anti-slavery cause in Parliament as Foreign Secretary and later as Prime Minister.
Thomas Bewick, the famous wood-engraver, supported the campaign and produced an etching used on items, such as snuffboxes, to promote the campaign.
2. Landowners in the region owned or invested in slave plantations, while Crowley's ironworks at Winlaton Mill made cheap and simple tools for use by slaves. Newcastle-owned and registered ships also carried slave produce back to Europe.
3. Tickets priced £6.50 for adults, £4.50 for children/concessions and £20 for a family ticket (two adults, two children)
4. For more on the campaign to stop human trafficking, visit www.stopthetraffick.org