Author

Family connections

Four families with connections to slavery are remembered in the nomenclature and symbolism of the University of Bristol: Wills, the Frys, the Colstons, and the Goldneys. Devices representing the first three of these appear on the University's current logo (designed in 2003 from the coat of arms awarded at foundation in 1909). Halls of residence are named after both the Goldney and Wills families, and several other buildings and facilities across the University's campuses bear the name of either the Wills or the Frys. The nature of the link between each of these families and the University is different, with the memorialisation of the Wills and Frys reflecting financial connections to the institution, and that of the Colstons and Goldneys being symbolic.

The Wills and slavery

There can be no doubt that the Wills family benefitted from slavery. They were not, though, (as popular imagination often believes) either slaveowners or slave-traders. The records of all 2,114 known Bristol slave-trading voyages do not mention the name 'Wills'.¹ No members of the family claimed compensation when Britain abolished slavery in 1833, and the family's property records reveal that they held no land in the United States prior to the 1890s.²

Undoubtedly, however, they did owe a substantial proportion of their wealth to trading in tobacco grown by enslaved people. Expanding over several generations from a tobacco shop on Castle Street in Bristol, W. D. and H. O. Wills became one of England's leading tobacconists. Tobacco in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was principally grown in the south of the United States, where slavery was not abolished until 1865. For the first seventy-seven years of the business, founded in 1786, the vast majority of the tobacco Wills processed was thus produced by enslaved Africans and their descendants.³ The family did not deal directly with the planters, purchasing their tobacco from brokers in Liverpool, London, and Bristol.⁴ However, correspondence with the brokers leaves no doubt that this tobacco was grown in the slave plantations of the US south. The latter nineteenth century saw the Wills firm grow at a significant pace, particularly off the back of purchasing the patent for the Bonsack machine in 1883, which pioneered the production of machine-rolled cigarettes. In 1901 W. D. and H. O. Wills merged with other British tobacco producers to form Imperial Tobacco, with William Henry Wills serving as the first chairman.⁵ While this last, and arguably biggest, phase of expansion post-dated the use of enslaved labour in tobacco production, it is important to note both the continued use of highly exploitative 'sharecropping' arrangements on the tobacco plantations throughout the latter nineteenth century, and that the Wills family would not have been able to expand their business in such a way without the foundations and capital laid during the slavery era.

The Frys and slavery

The Fry family arrived in Bristol in 1753, when Joseph Fry set up as an apothecary. He is known to have been selling chocolate from at least 1759, and in 1761 (in partnership with John Vaughn) purchased an established chocolate business.⁶ By 1764 the firm had agents in 53 towns, and a warehouse in London.⁷

As the firm passed through the generations of the Fry family, it was clearly becoming more than just a regional business. By the 1820s, Frys were using as much as 39% of the nation's imports of cocoa beans, and the introduction of new products (including eating chocolate) saw their sales grow from £11,000 in 1836 to £103,000 in 1867 and £1.9 million by 1914.⁸ While two other firms of Quaker chocolate-makers (Cadbury Brothers and Rowntree and Co.) took an increasingly large share of the market, their business remained successful and profitable. Cadburys and Frys eventually merged in 1918, but it was not until the first decade of the twentieth century that Cadburys sales surpassed Frys.⁹

As with the Wills family, there is no evidence of the Frys either owning or trading in enslaved people.¹⁰ There can be little doubt, however, that the chocolate the Frys processed was, until 1833, produced from ingredients cultivated by enslaved labourers. For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the cacao beans used by the Frys were grown in Caribbean slave plantations. From 1784 to 1853, cacao grown in the British possessions paid an advantageous customs rate, so given Bristol's strong focus on Caribbean trade this would have been the obvious source of beans for J. S. Fry and Sons.¹¹ The abolition of slavery in the Caribbean coincided with the abolition of protectionist duties, so thereafter other sources of plantation goods, including many where slavery was still legal, were able to compete. The Frys thus turned to other sources of cacao beans and sugar, including the Portuguese island of São Tomé where slavery was not abolished until 1875. Their business thus used goods produced by those who were legally recognised as slaves for almost 150 years.

In February 1902, Joseph Storrs Fry received a letter from William Cadbury, informing him that enslaved labour was being used in the São Tomé cocoa plantations.¹² The chocolatiers sought to investigate labour practices on the island, but continued to purchase cocoa produced there. While legally registered as Indentured Servants and paid a small wage, there can be little doubt that these labourers were subject to both de facto slavery and horrific conditions. In the words of the Fry's agent Joseph Burtt, a contract worker was 'taken from his home against his will [...] forced into a contract that he does not understand, and never returns to Angola. The legal formalities are but [a] cloak to hide slavery'.¹³ Around 70,000 people were brought to the island from mainland Africa between 1880 and 1908, and mortality amongst newly-arrived laborers was consistently reported at 19-28%.¹⁴ Even before this they had to face horrific conditions, with one journalist describing 'shackles in profusion – shackles for the hands, shackles for the feet, shackles for the three or four slaves who are clamped together at night' and 'the skeletons of slaves who have been unable to keep up with the march, and so were murdered or left to die'.¹⁵ Nonetheless, on being presented with a report on conditions in São Tomé, Joseph Storrs Fry remarked 'the main point of the question is not how the serviçal [servant] is treated, but whether or no, he is a slave'. It was not until 1909, two years later, that he ceased to buy slave-grown São Tomé cocoa.

Wills, Fry, and abolition

It is also important to note that members of both the Fry and Wills families were supporters of the campaign to abolish slavery. This highlights that important point that it is possible through your actions, such as dealing in enslaved produced goods, to further a practice to which you are morally opposed. Involvement in the abolition movement also shows that the families would have been acutely aware of the conditions under which the goods in which they were trading were produced. The Wills were not leading proponents of abolition, and hence evidence for their support is limited. However, the four leading members of the family all made financial contributions to the campaign of abolitionist candidate Edward Protheroe in Bristol's 1830 parliamentary election. Given that the issue of abolition dominated the election campaigns in Bristol that year, and the public nature of the ballot, this is a clear statement that at this time the Wills family supported the immediate abolition of slavery.

The Fry family was much more active campaigners for abolition than the Wills, showing a long-term commitment to the cause. As early as 1793, Joseph Storrs Fry (grandfather of the generation linked to the University) was listed as a subscriber to Olaudah Equiano's famous abolitionist text The Interesting Narrative.¹⁶ This commitment clearly lasted throughout his life and when leading abolitionist Thomas Clarkson started a new campaign in 1822 to abolish slavery itself, J. S. Fry was one of just six Bristol residents on his nationwide list of 519 supporters.¹⁷ By 1826 Bristol once more had an Anti-Slavery Society, and J. S. Fry, with his son Joseph (the father of Bristol University's Joseph Storrs, Lewis, and Albert), was on the committee.¹⁸ J. S. Fry's second son was also a firm supporter of the abolitionist movement, and in 1850 went on a three month tour of Europe promoting the cause. His son Francis and granddaughter Norah both made significant donations to the University.

Wills, Fry and financial connections

The Wills might well be described as the founding family of the University of Bristol, such was the volume of cash and other resources that they poured into the institution over its first fifty years. Indeed, Bristol's former Vice-Chancellor Hugh Brady had described these 'transformational gifts' as an 'embarrassment of riches for which we remain truly grateful'. Having been the second-worst funded higher education institution in Britain, the supporters of University College Bristol (predecessor of the modern University) needed to secure £200,000 in order to show a sound financial footing and be awarded the full University status which would allow them to independently award degrees.¹⁹ An initial gift of £100,000 from Henry Overton Wills proved crucial in getting the ball rolling in the fundraising process, and other members of the Wills family also gave significant sums, taking their total contribution to £161,000. Significant funds also came from the Fry family, with £10,500 from Joseph Storrs Fry, £5,000 from Francis J Fry, and £2,000 from the University's Chairman Lewis Fry.²⁰ Donations from the Wills and Fry families thus made up 89% of University of Bristol's inaugural £200,000 funding.

The initial contributions from the Wills family were just the tip of the iceberg of the financial benefits that the University received from them. Donations with a known value total over £1.37 million were recorded between 1909 and 1957, excluding several significant gifts of land and property to the University. These include Royal Fort House, Coombe Dingle Pavilion and Sports Fields, and Bracken Hill House. Combined with other properties where the value of the donation is known (including Wills Memorial Building, H. H. Wills Physics Laboratory, Victoria Rooms, and Wills Hall), these represent a considerable proportion of the University's current estate. The Wills donations make up 63% of all identified gifts to the University between 1909 and 1960.²¹ Given University College Bristol's precarious financial state, these gifts were thus truly transformative. Indeed, the University may not have existed or endured without these injections of capital.

The Frys, while successful, were comparatively less wealthy than the Wills. Their financial contributions to the University, while still significant, were thus on a more modest scale. Their contribution came more through leadership and advocacy, particularly through younger sons of the family Albert Fry (a carriage maker) and Lewis Fry (solicitor and MP). The two brothers served successively as chairmen of the University College Bristol and Bristol University from 1822 to 1914, and Lewis Fry continued as a Pro Chancellor until 1921.²² Support from the Frys continued into the next generation, with Norah Fry serving on the council for over 50 years.²³ She made numerous donations to the University throughout her life and on her death, totalling over £29,500, principally focused around teaching, and researching the needs of people with disabilities.²⁴

Colston: symbolic connections

While often remembered for the £63,000 he gave to charitable causes in the city, there is perhaps no more famous slave trader in Bristol than Edward Colston. Colston was a member of Bristol's Society of Merchant Venturers. Founded in 1552, this was essentially a merchant's guild, which helped to regulate and facilitate trade in Bristol, carrying out philanthropic activity, and lobbying on behalf of the city's merchants over issues such as access to the slave trade.²⁵ He was also a senior figure and investor in the Royal African Company, the organisation which pioneered the British slave trade. During Colston's time with the Company, it forcibly carried 84,500 enslaved men, women, and children across the Atlantic. The University has no direct connection to Edward Colston, who died nearly two centuries before the founding of the University.²⁶ The descendants of Colston's heirs were not involved in the University's creation and donated no money in the early years. There are, however, two donations in 1956 and 1968 (of £75,000 and £25,000 respectively) from the Colston Educational Trust/Charles Colston Trust. In 2020 values, these would be worth between £2.4 million (RPI) and £8.7 million (%GDP). Rather than one of the charities founded by Edward Colston, this would appear to originate with Conservative politician Charles Colston (1854-1925), a direct descendant of Mary Hayman, niece of Edward Colston and heir to the vast bulk of his considerable fortune.²⁷ These donations to the University can thus be connected to money made by a trader in enslaved people.

The University's principal connection with Edward Colston is the foundation in 1899 of University College Colston Society.²⁸ The name comes from a long tradition of founding philanthropic societies in Bristol, both to honour the memory of Edward Colston, and to continue charitable works in a similar vein.²⁹ For the first century or so of their existence the Colston societies were not particularly significant, raising only modest sums of money, and essentially acting as 'gentlemen's clubs'. In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, however, they underwent unprecedented growth, becoming the focus of both much civic pageantry, and of Bristol's charitable giving.³⁰ University College Bristol treasurer J. W. Arrowsmith and several members of the Wills and Fry families were presidents of the Anchor Society, which also made grants of £1,350 to University College 'in remembrance of Edward Colston's interest in education'.³¹ The Colston society model was thus an obvious one when seeking to raise funds for the financially struggling nascent University. It may also have conferred an air of respectability and tradition upon the University. As Eric Hobsbawm and others have observed, the late nineteenth century witnessed widespread creation of 'invented traditions', which imbued legitimacy by 'establish[ing] continuity with a suitable historic past'.³² Indeed, it could be argued that the University today is attempting to do the same in its marketing, with its brand identity organised around the idea of 'tradition with edge'.³³ In the early days of the University, such legitimisation would have been seen as necessary due to the social, political, and religious backgrounds of its founders, who were predominantly dissenting Liberals and had made their money in business. Indeed, for a number of years the predominantly Conservative Society of Merchant Venturers opposed the University, and promoted its own rival institution.³⁴ Associating with the broader attempt to establish Colston as a unifying 'founding father' figure for the city thus served a clear purpose for the University.³⁵ The Society of Merchant Venturers Technical College was eventually to be merged into the University, with several members of the Society joining the board.³⁶ This, combined with ongoing support, has led to the building which houses the department of Engineering being named for the Society of Merchant Venturers.

1. ^ D. Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the Eighteenth-Century Slave Trade to America, 4 Vols. (Bristol: Bristol Record Society, 1986-1996).
2. ^ A search of the Legacies of British Slave Ownership Database (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/search/, [accessed 10/07/20]) reveals four claimants with the name Wills, none of whom are members of the Bristol family. The earliest of the eighty American properties listed in the W. D. and H. O. Wills archives was not owned until 1891. See: Bristol Archives, 38169/Est/3.
3. ^ E. Royce, The Origins of Southern Sharecropping (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), ch.6.
4. ^ B. Alford, W. D. and H. O. Wills and the Development of the UK Tobacco Industry, 1786-1965 (London: Methuen, 1973), p.41.
5. ^ The history of the Wills business in this section is drawn from Alford, W. D. and H.O Wills.
6. ^ J. Mosley, 'Fry, Joseph (1728-1787)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004).
7. ^ S. Diaper, 'J. S. Fry and Sons: Growth and Decline in the Chocolate Industry, 1753-1918', in C. Harvey and J. Press (eds.), Studies in the Business History of Bristol (Bristol: Bristol Academic Press, 1988), p.36.
8. ^ Diaper, 'J. S. Fry and Sons', pp.37-40.
9. ^ Diaper, 'J. S. Fry and Sons', pp.45, 40.
10. ^ A search of the Legacies of British Slave Ownership Database (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/search/ [accessed 10/07/20]) reveals two claimants with the name Fry, neither of whom are members of the Bristol family. There are three people with the name Fry listed as involved in Bristol's slave-trading voyages, but again none of these are members of the family. Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the Eighteenth-Century Slave Trade.
11. ^ A.W. Knapp, Cocoa and Chocolate: Their History from Plantation to Consumer (London: Chapman & Hall, 1920).
12. ^ L. J. Satre, Chocolate on Trial: Slavery, Politics & the Ethics of Business (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), pp.18, 22-3.
13. ^ C. Higgs, 'Happiness and Work: Portuguese Peasants, British Laborers, African Contract Workers, and the Case of São Tomé and Príncipe, 1901-1909', International Labor and Working-Class History, No. 86 (2014), p.67.
14. ^ W. G. Clarence-Smith, 'The Hidden Costs of Labour on the Cocoa Plantations of São Tomé and Príncipe, 1875-1914', Portuguese Studies, Vol. 6 (1990), pp.153-6.
15. ^ H. W. Nevinson, A Modern Slavery (London: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1906), pp.112-3.
16. ^ V. Caretta (ed.), O. Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings (London: Penguin, 2003), p.388.
17. ^ M. Dresser, Slavery Obscured: The Social History of the Slave Trade in Bristol (Bristol: Redcliffe Press, 2007), p.199.
18. ^ Bristol Auxiliary Anti-Slavery Society, Report of Proceedings.
19. ^ M. Sanderson, The Universities and British Industry (London: Routledge, 1972), pp.70-71.
20. ^ The other Wills contributions were: Henry Overton Wills, £100,000; Lord Winterstoke, £35,000; the estate of Sir Fredrick Wills, £10,000; E. Channing Wills, £10,000; George A. Wills, £3,000; H. H. Wills, £2,000; W. Melville Wills, £1,000. C. S. Knighton (ed.) Bristol University: Conception to Foundation (Bristol: Bristol Record Society, 2019), p.447.
21. ^ Total recorded donations to the University (excluding those it has been impossible to value) were £2.16 million, and those from the Wills £1.37 million. 'List of Major Donations to the University of Bristol'. This spreadsheet was compiled by Sally Meadows from the University's Development and Alumni Relations Office from Council and Senate minutes. I am grateful to Alicia Jago from DARO for sharing it with me. The spreadsheet (DM2980), along with the minutes from which it was compiled (DM2287) are held in the University of Bristol Special Collections. This spreadsheet has been supplemented with information from the Endowments spreadsheet, held by the Finance office.
22. ^ S. Whittingham, The University of Bristol: A History (Bristol: University of Bristol, 2009), p.13.
23. ^ 'Obituary, Mrs. Norah Cooke-Hurle' [née Fry], University of Bristol Gazette, vol. 5 no. 1 (October 1960), pp.6-8.
24. ^ O. Russell, 'Norah Fry – what can we learn from history?', British Journal of Learning Disabilities, 43 (2015), p.86; 'List of Major Donations'.
25. ^ P. McGrath, The Merchant Venturers of Bristol (Bristol: Society of Merchant Venturers, 1975).
26. ^ K. Morgan, 'Colston, Edward, 1636-1721', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (2020).
27. ^ Steeds and Ball, From Wulfstan to Colston, p.84. Following the terms of Edward Colston's will, Alexander Reader (husband of Hayman's daughter and heir Sophie) changed his family name to Colston to secure the inheritance.
28. ^ D. Carleton, A University for Bristol (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 1984), p.13.
29. ^ H. J. Wilkins, Edward Colston: A Chronological Account of his Life and Work, Together with an Account of the Colston Societies and Memorials in Bristol (Bristol: J.W. Arrowsmith Ltd., 1920), pp.96-118.
30. ^ S. Jordan, 'The Myth of Edward Colston: Bristol Docks, the "Merchant" Elite and the Legitimisation of Authority, 1860-1880', in S. Poole (ed.), A City Built Upon the Water: Maritime Bristol, 1750-1900 (Bristol: Redcliffe Press, 2013), pp.178-196.
31. ^ Wilkins, Edward Colston, pp.114-5.
32. ^ E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: CUP, 1983), p.1.
33. ^ M. K. Lee-Warren, Our Brand Identity Design Principles, University of Bristol (Revised March 2020), p.8.
34. ^ Knighton (ed.), Bristol University, pp.xliv-xlvii.
35. ^ Jordan, The Myth of Edward Colston, pp.175-196.
36. ^ Knighton (ed.), Bristol University, pp.xliv-lix.