And Did Black Hands In Ancient Times Knit Upon Yorkshire’s Mountains Green?

During my Yorkshire Knitting Tour just a week ago we visited the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth, where one of the museum staff gave us a fascinating presentation about the Brontë sisters. In it she explored the long overlooked black identity of Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s novel, Wuthering Heights. We learned that modern literary scholars have in recent times inferred this identity from a number of textual clues in the novel itself combined with knowledge about the Brontë family’s moral interests and the social history of the time in which they wrote.

This week I have been extending my knowledge about the theories concerning Heathcliff’s identity, following a varied trail of information in online articles and historical archives. Through this process I was astounded to find that Heathcliff’s story was inspired by the life of an orphaned boy who lived with a Dentdale slave-owning family as a servant from the late eighteenth century well into the nineteenth. The connection to Dentdale excited me as this valley is where the Yorkshire Dales knitting tradition was strongest, finest, and lasted longest. Was I discovering a hidden black history in Yorkshire’s knitting past?

Richard Sutton, the boy in question, was not in fact black, nor was he fully orphaned. His widowed mother was however destitute, so going to live with the Sill family in 1796, albeit as a lowly servant, was for his own benefit, though he was reportedly flogged on at least one occasion. Nevertheless, it is clear that he endeared himself to the family as he ultimately became Ann Sill’s steward, and following her death in 1835 he inherited a significant portion of the family wealth, including two Dentdale properties. He then bought the family’s main Dentdale home, West House (now called Whernside Manor) from the son of Ann’s cousin.

Various records show that the Sill family were hosiers, organising Dentdale’s handknit stocking industry and trading the knitted goods it produced. This trade was lucrative for them, and in the middle of the eighteenth century John Sill used proceeds from the trade to develop business interests in Jamaica. With a merchant called David Kenyon he co-owned two ships that traded between Liverpool, Cork and the West Indies; the Dent and the Pickering. Presumably the goods traded via these ships included the handknit products of Dentdale, possibly some of the ‘bump caps for negroes’ that a display at Dentdale Heritage Centre says local folk knitted for export to Jamaica (‘bump’ was a rough worsted yarn). John also became the owner of a Jamaican sugar plantation called Providence. When he died in 1774 Providence had 266 enslaved people. Ownership continued with the Sill family, eventually resulting in compensation for Ann Sill’s heirs in 1836 as a result of the 1833 Slave Emancipation Act. At that time there were nearly 200 enslaved people at the Providence estate.

A newspaper advertisement from 1758 evidences the fact that the Sill family also had slaves of African origin in Dentdale. In ‘Williamson’s Liverpool Advertiser’ John Sill’s brother Edmund placed the following advertisement:

R  U  N     A  W  A  Y,
From Dent in Yorkshire,on Monday the 28^th of Aug. last,
THOMAS ANSON, a Negro Man, about five Feet six Inches High, aged 20 Years or upwards, and broad set. Whoever will bring the said Man back to Dent, or give any Information that he may be had again, shall receive a handsome Reward from Mr. Edmund Sill of Dent, or Mr.David Kenyon, Merchant in Liverpool.

Research by Audrey Dewjee, who specialises in discovering histories of Black and Asian people in Britain, and who unearthed this advertisement, discovered that following his escape from the Sills, Thomas remained a free man. He soon after became a trumpeter in the 4th Dragoons, a mounted regiment. Audrey’s written portrait of him mounted on a fine horse in an elaborate uniform is a heartening image!

Did the Sills have many more slaves in Dentdale? Local oral tradition suggests so. In the 2009 British documentary ‘A Regular Black, The Hidden History of Wuthering Heights’ Elaine Johnson, a recent owner of Whernside Manor, stated that local folk say there were about 30 black slaves working at the Sill’s West House estate. There are rumours of Black slaves working in the Dentdale marble quarries, and oral tradition tells of freed slaves wandering into Dent village following emancipation. Locals believe freed slaves remained in the valley as members of the community, resulting in some of the valley’s present-day residents having relatively recent African ancestry. These claims have been supported by references to Dentdale’s dentists, who are said to have found signs of recent African genetic heritage in some of the local white population’s teeth and mouth shape. In the aforesaid documentary the claims were also supported by reference to an antique picture of the local brass band, which appears to have included a black man. (I’ve ordered an antique postcard that pictures this band, and will post a scan once it has arrived.)

If this local oral traditon is historically sound we can safely assume that many of the freed slaves and their descendants would have been knitters, because until the late nineteenth century knitting was the principal income-generating occupation in Dentdale. Furthermore, given that the Sill family themselves were significantly involved in the hosiery trade, it seems reasonable to suppose that before emancipation the Sill family would have involved slaves they brought to the valley in the production of handknitted goods.

The context of this knitting past is the colonial evil of Britain. Evil that manifested in Britain’s enslavement of black peoples, forcibly severing them from family and home. The erasure that black people have subsequently suffered in Britain’s history continues in a world that still privileges whiteness. The work that is now being undertaken to dismantle white supremacy in the knitting industry is long overdue.