This October marks Black History Month, and it is a time where we, as a school and as a country, challenge our perceptions of the past and explore a part of British history that is too often left overlooked. I was fortunate enough to be able to give a talk in Chapel this Monday on Granville Sharp, an OD who is regarded as being one of the primary figures behind the abolition of slavery in Britain. I was only able to provide a brief overview of his career, but there is far more to discuss about his singular life.

An interesting detail about Granville Sharp is that, from August 1775, he began to spend increasingly more time in the Sharp family home, which was a barge moored in the middle of the Thames. This barge was something of a political centre of eighteenth century society, being visited by foreign ambassadors and ministers and, on at least one occasion, King George III and his wife Queen Charlotte. Built in 1775, the Union Yacht was seventy feet long and thirteen and a half feet wide, and the whole family would tour England in it, stopping "to play a variety of music, songs, glees &c". The Sharp family was a very musical one, and (as seen above in the 1781 painting by Johann Zoffany) each member had their own instrument they could play. Granville was an excellent bass singer, but he also played the English flute, clarinet, kettle drums, oboe, double-flute, and the 'traverse harp', and instrument of his own construction which had two rows of strings. Two of his similarly musical brothers, Thomas and John, had attended Durham School.

It is not these river-bound concerts that Granville Sharp is most known for, of course, but rather his great work in championing the abolitionist cause. I have written in prior Friday Flyer articles of his initial 1765 involvement with the escaped slave Jonathan Strong, but perhaps the key legal case of his career occurred later. Within the Chapel, to the right of the pulpit, is the following brass plaque:

In Memory of GRANVILLE SHARP 1735 – 1813 Educated at this School circa. 1750 Noted philanthropist, he was a member of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade and co-founder of the British and Foreign Bible Society. It was by his efforts that in 1772 it was established that "as soon as a slave sets his foot upon English territory, he becomes free."

The particular ruling mentioned is that of Somerset v. Stewart, an eighteenth century cause celebre that changed the way English law viewed slavery. It began on the 13th January 1772, when James Somerset, an escaped slave from Virginia, called upon Granville Sharp. He had escaped from his former master, Charles Stewart, but had been recaptured and was imprisoned on the Ann and Mary slave ship headed to Jamaica. Sharp was able to be Somerset's main backer, bringing the case to court before Lord Mansfield on the 24th January 1772. If Lord Mansfield seems familiar, it is because his great-niece was the famous Dido Elizabeth Belle, the black illegitimate daughter of Sir John Lindsay who was brought from the West Indies in 1765 and introduced to high society.

Sharp was able to thoroughly brief the lawyers attached to the case due to his hard-earned knowledge of slave-related legal cases. This was done in secrecy, however, as Sharp had become a controversial figure whose involvement might be damaging; in previous legal cases he had acted in opposition to Lord Mansfield, and so he knew that the judge for the case would not be sympathetic to the cause, and Sharp's presence would sour him further. In the note attached to the documents given to the lawyers, Sharp wrote "the author requests that they may not be mentioned, or shown, to any person not immediately concerned in this cause, unless the same reason should make it absolutely necessary." Privately, Sharp was able to negotiate the assistance of prominent lawyers such as Sir Francis Hargrave on the case.

This case was important, as its result would determine not only the release of James Somerset, but also the release of every escaped slave who arrived on British soil.

The argument made by the defense- and, by extension, Granville Sharp's argument- was that while the laws of the American colonies might permit slavery, there was neither any British common laws nor any Parliamentary statutes that acknowledged the existence of slaves. If slavery had no presence in the law, they reasoned, then it was be definition unlawful. Mansfield famous ruling is quoted on the plaque in chapel, declaring that slavery was "odious", and that "as soon as a slave sets his foot upon English territory, he becomes free." This did not prevent the slave trade from happening overseas, but it was the first blow to the institution that would later see its abolishment in 1807.