Blue Plaque for anti-slavery campaigner Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton
An English Heritage Blue Plaque for the anti-slavery campaigner and social reformer Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton (1786-1845) was unveiled today (Wednesday 26 September), at The Directors’ House, Old Truman Brewery, 91 Brick Lane, London, where he lived from 1808-1815, and occasionally in later years.
Buxton took over the leadership of the parliamentary campaign against slavery from William Wilberforce in 1823. He was at the head of the anti-slavery movement when abolition was secured eleven years later, and it was he who sought to ensure that the slave trade ban was adequately policed. Of his achievements, Buxton once modestly observed that: “with ordinary talents and extraordinary perseverance, all things are attainable”.
Buxton was the son of another Thomas Fowell Buxton and Anna Hanbury. Both his mother and his wife, Hannah Gurney, whom he married in 1807, were Quakers - who were among the first groups to question the morality of slavery. Thomas attended Friends’ meetings himself until he was formally baptised an Anglican in 1812.
Buxton faced fierce hostility from those who had invested in the slave trade. Some anti-slavery campaigners also criticised him for his compromise over financial compensation for slave owners. His persistence paid off in 1832, when Lord Grey’s government passed his private bill, and the abolition of slavery in British dominions was given royal assent in August 1833. The law came into force on 1 August 1834 and has been described by Buxton’s most recent biographer as “a victory of moral principle over economic power”.
Buxton was first elected to Parliament for Weymouth in 1818. He took an interest in prison reform, following the lead of his sister-in-law and leading prison reformer Elizabeth Fry; he wrote An inquiry: whether crime and misery are produced or prevented by our present system of prison discipline (1818). Buxton features in the group portrait around Elizabeth Fry on the present £5 note, being the tall, spectacled figure on the far left. He also worked to end suttee, the old Hindu practice of the self-immolation of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres, and to soften the penal code at home, under which the death penalty still applied for many minor crimes.
Buxton lost his parliamentary seat at Weymouth in 1837 but continued to work against slavery; in that same year he founded the Aborigines’ Protection Society, which is among the precursors of the present-day campaigning charity Anti-Slavery International. He campaigned for legislation against the slave trade in other countries’ spheres of interest and worked to ensure the British Navy ran patrols to enforce the ban on slavery in the British Empire. His book, The African Slave Trade (1839) presented evidence that the worldwide slave trade had actually increased since 1807. Buxton followed this with The Remedy: being a sequel to the African Slave Trade (1840), which advocated the promotion of legitimate trade as a means of ending African involvement in the traffic of indentured labour.
As a boy Buxton went to school in Greenwich and after completing his university education at Trinity College, Dublin, he was invited by his uncle to join the Spitalfields-based brewery of Truman, Hanbury and Company. Thanks to his good business sense, Buxton was offered a partnership, whereupon the firm became known as Truman, Hanbury and Buxton. He remained an active, and largely resident, director until 1818 and took an active role in local charitable and philanthropic concerns. It was at the brewery too, on 4 June 1831, that Buxton entertained members of Lord Grey’s cabinet, then in the process of enacting parliamentary reform and soon to agree to abolish slavery.
Buxton was conferred with a baronetcy in 1840. A statue was raised to his memory in Westminster Abbey, and his son and first biographer Charles arranged the erection of the Buxton Memorial Fountain which now stands in Victoria Tower Gardens, Millbank, London SW1, and has recently been restored.
Buxton’s Memorial and a plaque erected to him on the Friends’ Meeting House in Norwich feature in the free English Heritage leaflet and web micro-site, Sites of Memory – The Slave Trade and Abolition. The leaflet provides a trail around England of the houses, docks, graves, plaques and memorials that are the last tangible links to the story of abolition, slavery and black lives in England 200 years ago. It features sites that were the homes, memorials or places of work of some of the great abolitionists; such as Olaudah Equiano, Thomas Clarkson, Ignatius Sancho, William Wilberforce, Ottobah Cugoano and Granville Sharp.
Sites of Memory is available from English Heritage sites and tourist information offices – and from English Heritage customer services on 0870 333 1181. The web micro-site is available from the English Heritage website at www.english-heritage.org.uk/abolition
For more press information contact Angelah Sparg, English Heritage Corporate Communications, on 020 7973 3250 or angelah.sparg@english-heritage.org.uk or Matthew Hall at Government News Network on 0207 261 8343 or matthew.hall@gnn.gsi.gov.uk
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