FOR Black History Month in October, we told the stories of 15 pioneering people of colour in our area, and we were surprised by how many there were from the 17th and 18th centuries.
William Wandoe was a manservant who died at Hexham in 1716 while John York was a manservant in Richmond nearly a century afterwards; in the 1740s, Francis Barber and Joseph Cooke were boarders at a school in Barton 1750, while only a fortnight ago we told of the unknown black boy who was the first burial in Cotherstone Quaker graveyard in 1797 having died at a boarding school in the village.
READ MORE: WILLIAM WANDOE'S STORY
READ MORE: FRANCIS BARBER'S STORY
READ MORE: THE FIRST BLACK DARLINGTONIANS
READ MORE: THE UNKNOWN BLACK BOY BURIED IN AN UNMARKED GRAVE
Now Jane Hackworth Young brings another headstone to our attention. It is now inside St Helen’s church in St Helen Auckland and it bears the words “Poor Charles, Died 9th March 1785” (below).
Poor Charles was an indentured black slave from the West Indies. Most of our other stories have concerned the illegitimate children that the male plantation owners had out in the Caribbean with an enslaved woman. When the owners returned to the UK as the tide turned against slavery at the end of the 18th Century, they felt compelled to bring their children with them but it seems they farmed they out to the “Yorkshire schools” of the north where they were out of sight and out of mind.
Perhaps that’s how Poor Charles came to be in St Helen Auckland.
“When he died, several women in the village raised funds to give him a Christian burial and there were sufficient funds left over for a head stone,” says Jane.
ANOTHER headstone in St Helen’s churchyard also catches the eye because it has such a long inscription on it detailing exactly how the person who lies beneath met the end of their days.
The length of the inscription means that the headstone (above) is protected as a Grade II listed building.
It tells how Thomas Corbett of West Auckland Colliery “was instantaneously killed at the above named colliery by being thrown into the flywheel hole with the rope getting out of its course, which he was assisting to put onto the drum of the engine while in motion on the 13th of February 1867, aged 17 years and nine months”.
In italics, the headstone then contains a frightening warning to the reader: “Watch, therefore, for you know not what hour your Lord doth come.”
The inscription finishes: “This stone was erected by the bankmen of the colliery as a token of respect.”
THE graveyard at St Helen’s Auckland (above) was, of course, where the alleged victims of mass murderer Mary Ann Cotton, of West Auckland, were buried.
We are following how Mary Ann’s case unfolded from a distance of 150 years. The latest instalment came in Memories 599 which told how, sensationally, the two bodies of her sons were exhumed from the churchyard so that they could be tested for arsenic.
The poison was found in their tissues and the evidence was prepared for Mary Ann’s appearance at the Durham Assizes on charges of murder.
However, her trial was put back to the spring because it was now becoming clear that Mary Ann (above) was pregnant for a 13th time (at least). Swelling apace, 150 years ago at Christmas 1872, she was confined to her cell in Durham gaol in the certainty that as soon as she gave birth, proceedings would re-commence and she would be facing execution.
Her baby was born in the cell on January 7, 1873, as we shall tell in the next instalment in the New Year.
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