The new series of David Olusoga’s A House Through Time (BBC2 Tuesdays 9pm) is compelling viewing for anyone interested in the history of Bristol. The story begins in 1718, when a handsome three-storey house in Guinea Street, Redcliffe, was built by a sea-captain who made his fortune trafficking thousands of slaves from Africa’s West Coast to the West Indies. In episode one we learn that the house was initially leased to another sea-captain, Joseph Smith, whose story involved pirates, an Old Bailey trial, a foundling and a runaway Black slave. Later a Wesleyan chapel on the same street would enable early Abolitionists to preach against the slave trade; as Olusoga points out, this must have created tensions for the widow at No. 10 Guinea Street, whose wealth derived from her husband’s many slave voyages.
The parallels with my novel set in early eighteenth-century Bristol are striking: one of my characters in A Pair of Sharp Eyes decides to build a fine house in nearby Queen Square with the profits from his voyages to the Guinea Coast and his plantation in Jamaica. Like Captain Joseph Smith, the first tenant of the house featured in Olusoga’s series, James Tuffnell ‘owned’ a negro page-boy – such children (and adults too) were popular ‘fashion accessories’ for wealthy white English people in the eighteenth century (Olusoga’s resonant phrase). What I love is the emphasis here and in previous series of A House Through Time on the marginal figures in the stories of the houses featured. A foundling child, for example, left on the doorstep of 10 Guinea Street, but not in fact adopted by the wealthy couple who lived there; instead, Martha (who had no surname) was sent to the parish, and buried in a pauper’s grave aged only three. The TV camera shows us the grand drawing-room at No. 10, with its elaborate plasterwork, as well as the elegant dining-room, which has scarcely changed since Georgian times, but we also get to see the servants’ attic bedrooms, and the cavernous vaulted cellar, which was no doubt used for storing hogsheads of sugar and rum brought from the harbour just a stone’s-throw from Guinea Street (in my novel the cellar of Mr Tuffnell’s first house in Wine Street serves another, more sinister purpose). Perhaps Thomas, the Holbrook family’s runaway slave, was made to sleep in the cellar, and perhaps it was from there that he escaped and made his way to Bristol harbour – Thomas was never found, so it seems possible he took refuge on a ship. There were many Black men in the English merchant navy, and so long as they weren’t captured by pirates and sold into slavery, their chances were good.
I could watch and re-watch A Street Through Time (and have done), and never tire of the subtle insights it offers into past mores, or the connections it makes between a single house and the societies around it. But this first episode had special resonance for me. Since growing up in Bristol I have been fascinated by the city’s deep dark roots in the slave trade, and while I was researching A Pair of Sharp Eyes I returned to the work of the historians featured in the show: David Dabydeen, Madge Dresser, Olusoga himself. And now the programme has turned up all kinds of online resources I didn’t know about, and which will help me hugely with my next book, The Darkest Voyage. The Slave Voyages database; the wills index at the Bristol Archives; the Bristol parish registers on @AncestryUK; the University of Glasgow Runaway Slaves project at runaways.gla.ac.uk, to name a few. I can’t wait to start, nor can I wait for the second episode, due to broadcast on Tuesday June 2.
