A Coat of Many Colours is a Dolly Parton song she plays at every concert. Growing up in poverty, her mother made her a treasured patchwork coat made of many types and colours of fabric.
In some ways that is the port of Southampton – which has a long history of immigration from other parts of the world.
It recorded the third-highest number of ‘aliens’, as they were called, as a percentage of the local population in England in 1377. An African carpenter known as Black John settled in the town in 1492. Jacques Francis, an African salvage diver, led
the 1546 attempt to salvage the Mary Rose.
Huguenots refugees settled here in the sixteenth century. St Julien’s, the ‘French church’, in Winkle Street still only has one annual service in English every July.
Although Southampton was not a hub for the transatlantic slave trade in the same way that Bristol or Liverpool were, some of its residents prospered from the exploitation of enslaved people, particularly in the Caribbean. Ships and sailors based here went on to transport slaves from Africa to the sugar plantations in the Caribbean or the cotton fields in the USA. Some slave owners such as Thomas Combes and John Morant, lived locally, owning plantations from Sumatra in Indonesia to the West Indies.
There is a painting by Maria Spilsbury from around 1800 which shows Anthony de Source and his son working as black servants at a New Year’s Day feast given by engineer Walter Taylor for his 100 employees.
A map exists of a sugar plantation in Nevis, owned by a Southampton resident. There was the Sugar House in Gloucester Square, where Caribbean sugar cane was processed for use locally.
Of mixed-race descent, Ann Middleton was born in Jamaica. She married Nathaniel Middlelton, a rich East India Company merchant. He created Townhill Park Estate c.1787, which she inherited on his death. Today the Gregg Independent School is on the site.
Southampton did have extensive trading links with the West Indies. Some former West Indian planters and merchants had retired to the town and surrounding areas.
At the Audit House in January 1824, a petition in support of the government’s proposals to improve the conditions of slaves in the West Indies was defeated. The Southampton Herald reported that all the nobility and gentry of the town had attended the meeting and voted against.
In March 1825 a Southampton branch of the Anti-Slavery Society was set up and in 1828 around 1,400 locals signed a petition to end slavery. In 1834, Parliament abolished slavery in the British West Indies. In 1839 the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS) was established in London with the aim of abolishing slavery worldwide, particularly in the United States. In 1840 the Southampton Anti-Slavery Society became a branch of the BFASS. Prominent in the local branch were Thomas Adkins, Minister of the Above Bar Congregational Church, Edward Palk, a High Street chemist, and George Laishley, a Methodist and a draper. Southampton sent five delegates to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in 1843.
The Reverend Thomas A Pinckney (1809-1887) was born in South Carolina, a southern slave state, and ordained in 1852. By 1858 he was in London at the Colonial Church and School Society. He was sent to Quebec province where many were fugitive slaves and established a school. On 29 February 1860 he married Elizabeth King, a white English missionary. Some handbills described this interracial marriage as ‘this violation of the law of God, and our common nature’. The couple moved to Southampton. In the 1871 census they were at Brent Cottage, Avenue Road, where they lived quietly until their respective deaths.
The most common reason for immigration was trade.
Medieval merchants from the Low Countries often brought materials crucial to the textile industry, including alum and woad both used in cloth-making. Merchants from Italy, who comprised the largest group among Southampton’s immigrant population, regularly brought spices including pepper, ginger and saffron. Export of English wool accounted for 90 per cent of English trade during the reign of Henry VII (1485–1509). It was exported through Southampton more often than any other port.
The impact that immigrant merchants had on Southampton is shown by the response to the Hosting Act of 1439, introduced to curtail the activities of foreign merchants. They now had to declare themselves to local authorities upon arrival, in order to be assigned an English ‘host’ who would supervise their business transactions.
To persuade English merchants to volunteer as hosts, the Act stipulated that an English merchant could take two pence in every pound’s worth of merchandise sold by the foreign merchant. However, Southampton’s civic officials treated the Hosting Act as nothing more than a formality as the city’s economic prosperity depended on foreign merchants being able to trade freely. Alien merchants remained able to rent their own houses, whereas the Hosting Act required that they lived in the same property as their designated host.
14th century merchant John Le Fleming became mayor and MP and his statue is on the north wall in Bargate Street.7
In the 1370s, immigrants could apply for ‘letters of denization’ which granted them a form of citizenship that gave the right to own property. William Overeye, an Irish immigrant, was twice mayor of Southampton before becoming the Member of Parliament in 1426. A Venetian, Damiano de Pezaro, stated in 1438 that after fifteen years as a resident he had been honoured with appointment as a ‘freeman of the city’. Another Venetian, Gabriel Corbizzi, served as a steward of the city in the 1440s. Christopher Ambrose came from Florence and was mayor in 1486 and 1497. Hostility to Italians in London drove many to relocate to Southampton in the mid-1400s. Merchants from Genoa provided two-thirds of the city’s petty customs revenue in 1451.
Ships to call at Southampton carrying West Indian migrants in the 1940s include the Almanzora, in December 1947.
Black History Month has been held since 2005 in Southampton. Plaques remember events such as when Bob Marley played at the Coach House Inn at the rear of the Fleming Arms on 29 May 1973. Mae Street Kidd was the Red Cross Director of Services for black American soldiers in Southampton during the Second World War. Her plaque is at the Royal South Hants Hospital. Craig David has a plaque above The Painted Wagon venue. The Ebony Rockers mural in Above Bar Street includes his father, George David.
The chapel of St. Julien in Winkle Street Also known as the French church as it was a place of worship for Walloon and Huguenot refugees who were given permission by Elizabeth 1 to worship in French.
Ebony Rockers were a local reggae band signed to EMI.
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