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Everywhere In Chains - North-East Wales

There are connections between this part of Wales and the transatlantic slave trade.

Acton Park in Wrexham was home to the Cunliffe family until the early 20th century. The Cunliffes made their money in 18th century Liverpool by operating a profitable trade in slaves, tobacco, sugar, rum and manufactured goods.

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Foster Cunliffe & Co. owned twenty-six ships, including four slave ships, working the Triangular trade between Africa, the West Indies, British North America and Britain.

This portrait of Sir Foster Cunliffe by John Hoppner was used as inspiration for an artwork in the V&A's exhibition 'Uncomfortable Truths' held to mark the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade.

Foster Cunliffe’s grandson, Sir Foster, used the family wealth to buy Acton Park and estate. While willing to spend money on extending the house, building the Four Dogs gateway on Chester Road and his archery parties, Sir Foster was less willing to acknowledge the source of his family’s prosperity.

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Industry in 18th century Wales gained new markets because of the slave trade. The copper works in Greenfield Valley, Holywell, produced manillas, which were used to buy slaves in Africa. The Pennants, a family from Flintshire, ran a very profitable plantation business in Jamaica. Its profits were spent on developing the Penrhyn slate quarries and building Penrhyn Castle.

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The ironworks at Bersham produced the sugar rolls that the plantation owners in the Caribbean needed to crush their sugar cane. John Wilkinson, the ironmaster, went into business with Anthony Bacon. Bacon’s wealth, made in the slave trade, bankrolled the development of Wilkinson’s cannon boring machine. Yet Wilkinson was a supporter of human rights and was a close friend of Joseph Priestley and Josiah Wedgwood, both well-known opponents of slavery.

There is some evidence of local attitudes to slavery in the 19th century. An opinion column in the Wrexham Registrar in 1848 condemned slavery in principle, but attitudes towards race, then as now, were often ambivalent:

Correspondence

A Black Man in a White Skin

Sir

While walking through your town on Thursday last, my curiosity was excited by seeing a Black Man and his boy walking up the street, and I was much surprised when they came opposite the New Market Hall, to find this poor Black seized by the breast by a ferocious looking individual, with along whip and a gold laced cap, who with all the ‘insolence of office’ demanded of him a halfpenny for hawking a few tracts… Having heard a deal of the ignorance of the blacks and of the civilisation of England’s sons, I was much struck with the contrast then exhibited – the poor black showed the meekness and docility of a peaceable citizen – the other the spirit of a tyrant; and I was led to look deeper than the skin, and judge men not by their colour or complexion, but by their character, and was forced to conclude there was a fearful possibility of being a BLACK MAN IN A WHITE SKIN.

J.Jones
Gresford, Dec.26, 1848

Letter to the Wrexham Registrar, published January 1849

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