My late thirties saw me standing at a crossroads, having learnt that my wife and I wouldn’t be able to have children. I’ve always felt that family is a harbour, a place of shelter during storms, but also the embarkation point for great adventures – and now I found myself cast adrift in the middle of the ocean. So while my contemporaries threw themselves into the all-encompassing business of raising young families, and looked to the future, I turned to face the past.
I knew very little about the paternal side of my tree. My Dad, an only child, had died in 1973, aged 38, and my grandfather had died a few months later, so I was four when I inherited the crumbling ancestral home at Temple Sowerby in Cumbria. This was a 17th century farmhouse on to which a symmetrical front had been added in Georgian times. It was riddled with dry rot by the time I knew it, and had finally been sold in 1977 to be converted into a hotel.
One day, about 10 years ago, I was at my mother’s house, rootling around in a cupboard, when high up on a shelf I found a family tree in dad’s handwriting mapped out on a long roll of graph paper. There was also a cardboard box full of bundles of letters tied up with faded pink ribbon, mostly dating from the early 19th century. It took a while to get used to the copperplate script, but reading these letters felt like I was throwing open a window to the past. Mostly they concerned trades that my ancestors were engaged in two centuries ago – banking, farming, mining, tanning – which confirmed them, as I’d always suspected, to have been lower-rung Westmorland gentry. But there was one document that made my jaw drop. This was a ‘List of Negroes’ – an inventory giving the name, age, employment and value in sterling of each of the 196 enslaved workers on a sugar plantation in Jamaica in 1801.
There was one document that made my jaw drop. This was a ‘List of Negroes’
This disturbing discovery would alter the course of my life. I couldn’t simply sweep it under the carpet; I couldn’t just pretend that nothing had happened.
Like many novice family historians, I signed up to Ancestry and hungrily fell upon its all-you-can-eat buffet of records. I also spent countless hours searching for ‘atkinson’ online, along with any other words that might summon up my ancestors.
One evening I was searching the National Portrait Gallery’s website, and came across a result for a merchant named Richard Atkinson, whose dates matched someone on my dad’s family tree – a 5x great uncle. I clicked through to the portrait. Instead of the oil painting that I was expecting, what popped up was a cartoon from 1785 by satirist James Gillray [see above], in which the 25-year-old prime minister William Pitt the Younger was depicted as a schoolboy being thrashed by the leader of the opposition, Charles James Fox – and there in the background, identifiable by the ‘Rum Contract’ poking out of his pocket, was this namesake of mine. How had he ended up here, surrounded by the greatest statesmen of the age?
Digging deeper, I discovered that ‘Rum’ Atkinson had been the biggest contractor to the British Army during the American War of Independence. Along the way, he had amassed staggering wealth and connections; he was a director of the East India Company and an alderman of the City of London, as well as adviser to two prime ministers. His nickname stemmed from a notorious contract with the Government to supply 350,000 gallons of Jamaican rum for an (allegedly) outrageous price, and four years of political scandal had ensued. He had died in 1785, aged 46, leaving his vast fortune – including two Jamaican sugar estates – to his 17 nephews and nieces. Four decades of litigation followed as his heirs wrangled over their inheritance.
One day, I noticed a short page dedicated to my ancestors on the website of the hotel at Temple Sowerby. One paragraph leapt out. This was a description of a receipt book written by my 4x great grandmother Bridget Atkinson, sister-in-law of ‘Rum’ Atkinson, which gave recipes, among others, for collared eels, a sauce to serve with larks, bullace cheese and five kinds of blancmange. I publish cookbooks for a living – suffice to say, my interest was piqued.
Soon afterwards, I stayed a night at the old house. I must have invoked powerful magic, because within days I had managed to purchase this amazing receipt book from its bibliophile owner, located a branch of long-lost cousins, and discovered six boxes of family letters tucked away in Northumberland Archives… and this was merely the start. Soon I would unearth rich seams of correspondence in The National Archives at Kew, the British Library and the National Library of Scotland, plus many other depositories.
By this point I had realised that I might have stumbled on the material for a book. It turned out that ‘Rum’, and subsequent family members, had occupied ringside seats at some of the most momentous, as well as disturbing, episodes in British imperial history – not just the loss of the American colonies, but also the economic collapse of the West Indies. What began as a family history project soon acquired a life of its own.
But I was neither a trained historian, nor a seasoned author. I had to learn the ropes of archival research and the craft of writing from scratch. My challenge – and it was a daunting one – was to sift through thousands of letters in order to piece together the jigsaw puzzle of my family’s story. The research was exhilarating. Every discovery felt like a breakthrough.
My challenge was to sift through thousands of letters in order to piece together the jigsaw puzzle of my family’s story
I would not have found out the half of my family’s business dealings in Jamaica had it not been for a stroke of luck. About four years into my project, I was worrying how I’d account for the great gaps in my knowledge in this area – the family letters were frustratingly silent. Early on, I’d learnt that ‘Rum’ Atkinson had been close friends with Sir Francis Baring, the great merchant banker, and I’d visited the Baring Archive in the City of London, hoping (in vain) to find their correspondence. A few years later I was browsing the archive’s catalogue online, just in case, when a sentence caught my eye: “Of particular note are some boxes of papers relating to the business of Atkinson, Mure & Bogle of Jamaica and elsewhere.” When I returned to the archive, the librarian produced five volumes containing 20 years of letters between Sir Francis Baring and various Atkinsons – more than 1,000 pages.
I was never so naive as to imagine that my family’s activities in Jamaica could be unconnected to slavery, but even so, I was unprepared for the extent to which they had embraced this callous business. The Baring papers detailed how my ancestors had acted as agents to Liverpool-based slave traders, brokering the sale of their human cargoes to sugar planters in Jamaica. I’d set out to find my 18th century forebears, only to discover a deep, irreconcilable tension at the heart of my project. Some relations, such as Bridget, were easy to love. But others had participated in some of the most despicable activities it was possible to imagine. For example, Jamaican baptism records revealed that Matthew Atkinson, my 3x great grandfather, fathered several children with enslaved women. And yet, his family back home in England considered him the gentlest, sweetest man. It was upsetting and bewildering.
Shortly before finishing the book, I tracked down the ruins of the sugar works at one of my ancestors’ properties in Jamaica. Crumbling walls of cut limestone, overshadowed by a towering African tulip tree with bright red flowers, reared up out of the bush. Picking my way between uneven heaps of rubble, I came across an enormous cylindrical cast-iron boiler languishing in the undergrowth. It felt almost overwhelming to visit this place where hundreds of enslaved Africans had manufactured sugar, and horrifying to think they had been my family’s property, too.