Slave Trade Links!

In this, the 200th Anniversary year of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, our media has been full of stories about the Slave Trade, many of them pointing out the way in which involvement in the trade went far beyond the business life of cities like Liverpool, and into the inland towns. It is therefore interesting to note that, nearly 20 years ago, a writer in one of our local newspapers, the ST HELENS STAR, was well ahead of his time when this article appeared in November 1988.

Who would suspect that a busy copper works which once blazed away amid a belt of spark-showered woodland trees, close to the old Blackbrook canal, could have triggered off screams of pain and moans of misery on the African continent.

For the old Stanley works, which operated in what we now know as the Sankey Valley country park, turned out the raw materials which led to the manufacture of cheap pots, trinkets and ornaments together with 'manillas'.

These were small brass bangles used as an early form of currency in West Africa.

This gleaming output was doubtlessly used in connection with the slave trade, which brought such a flush of early wealth to the port of Liverpool.

Traces of that barbaric age can still be found along the country paths of Blackbrook in the shape of copper slag which was used extensively for road-making.

And the Stanley Copper Works wasn't the only St Helens connection with the African trade. Ivory combs were made by Dagnalls of Windle and by the Barrows, who gave their name to Barrow Street in the town centre.

This manufacture of combs was once fairly widespread in St Helens and the old name for Copperas Hill - 'Comb Shop Brow' - was a memorial to that particular local trade.

The triangular Africa trade was a quick way to wealth, reports a scholarly chum of mine who kindly responded to a plea for details about the Blackbrook slave connection and who delved deep into his historical researches to come up with fascinating facts.

Until slavery was finally abolished in the British Empire in the 1830s, people bought shares in a slave-ship and its cargo of cheap goods which sailed to West Africa.

There the cargo was sold at a handsome profit.

These funds were used to buy slaves from the Arab - and even negro - dealers. The slaves were then either 'loose packed' or 'spoon packed' (crammed together like cutlery in a case) and taken across the Atlantic to the West Indies and America.

Here they were sold at further profit and this was used to purchase cargoes of cotton, sugar, indigo and tobacco which boosted the profit margin to dizzy new heights when the ship returned to England once more.

Then it was round again, getting richer all the time.

As comparatively late as 1897, many leading Liverpool families tried to snap up every copy of a book on privateers and the slave trade, published by Gomer Williams, in an attempt to conceal the source of their wealth.

Cheaper

But back to that Blackbrook works, opened in 1772 by Thomas Patten and partners (known as the Warrington Company).

Its chief purpose was to smelt ore to extract the copper, but most of the actual manufacturing of slave-trade goods was carried out either in Warrington or at the main works in Holywell, Flintshire.

The reason why copper ore was brought to the St Helens coalfield, and then barged along the canal systems, was that it took about 30 tons of coal to produce a ton of the precious metal. And so it was much cheaper to bring the copper to the fuel than the other way round.

In 1785 the Stanley Copper Works was taken over by an organisation controlled by the remarkable Thomas Williams of Anglesey, who put St Helens well up the national league as a copper-producing town.

His Welsh mines sent ore to Blackbrook and to a newly-built plant at Ravenhead which had been producing at least a sixth of the nation's fine copper by dealing with 12,000 tons of ore in a year.

Twelve months later, the two works together smelted 20,000 tons!

The Ravenhead company built Welsh Row (cottages for their workers) and took over the Navigation Tavern as a meeting place.

Thomas Williams' company built Copper House Row at Stanley and acquired, for the benefit of its workers, the Ship Inn (still a highly popular place to this day, though very much altered in recent years).

Payroll

In those rather unfeeling times, it is interesting to note that free medical attention was provided - though the wages seem nothing to write home about!

In 1805, with the peak of Stanley's prosperity past, there were at least 32 men on the payroll earning between one shilling and sixpence (7.5p) and two shillings and fourpence (11.5p) a day. Surviving old wage bills feature prominently such names as Atherton, Ed(d)elston, Whittle, Travis and Naylor.

Each works manager was much more comfortable off, on £100 a year. While Michael Hughes of Sutton, in overall charge, was rolling in it on am annual salary of £300.

The end of an era which had brought prosperity to a Merseyside few and misery to countless thousands came in 1815 when declining output from the Anglesey mines forced closure of the Stanley Works.

Did the Slave Trade fund the Sankey?

In his article on the Sankey Brook Navigation published in the Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, Volume 100, published in 1949, the historian Theo Barker draws attention to the fact that one of the Promoters of the Bill to create the waterway, John Ashton, was a member of the Company of African merchants, who had been involved in the Liverpool-based slave trade following Parliament's opening up of the trade in 1698. By the time Ashton was investing in the Sankey in 1754 Liverpool had become the dominant slave port of the country, and Ashton not only had money to invest in the Sankey but also acquired the saltworks at Dungeon on the Mersey sometime after 1746. He invested £9,000 in the building of the Sankey, which was then a considerable gamble in an enterprise with no certainty of success, or even completion. When he died in 1759 his Will revealed that he held 51 of the 120 Shares which were issued. The next most prominent promoter of the Navigation was John Blackburne, who owned the Liverpool salt works. In 1785 Blackburne held just five Shares in the Sankey. (They were then valued at £300 per share.)

Ashton, who was born in 1711, was Town Bailiff of Liverpool in 1749. He was from a well-established Liverpool family, with one ancestor, George Ashton, being bailiff from 1558 to 1561. It is recorded that he fell out with the Earl of Derby in 1561, as a result of which he was forbidden to use Toxteth Park as pasturage for his cattle. (Picton, Memorials of Liverpool) John Ashton's elevation to Bailiff would appear to suggest that he was a man of some influence, and probably wealth. John Blackburne would appear to have a similar background (his father was Mayor of Liverpool in 1760), and was also involved in the salt trade - but he inherited his, and did not invest heavily in the Sankey. Ashton, then, was the man with the money, able to buy himself into the salt refining business, and then to bankroll the building of the Sankey only five years later. Lucrative as the salt business may have been, it was small beer until the building of the Sankey had a dramatic effect on salt production (the figures are: 14,000 tons in 1752, 40,000 by 1783, 100,000 by 1796 and 186,000 in 1820).

Barker has no doubt that the money Ashton was able to put up for the building of the Sankey arose from his involvement in the African trade, and it is difficult to come to any other conclusion. Ashton probably had inherited wealth, judging by his forbears, some of which, by the time he inherited, may have been swelled by the slave trade. His returns on investing in the trade brought him the wealth to buy into the salt trade and then to seize the opportunity to increase the value of that by investing in the Sankey.

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