At first glance, the 1749 Westminster constituency by-election does not seem to warrant too much attention, with the incumbent, Viscount Trentham, being re-elected following his appointment to office. However, as Dr Gillian Williamson explores, the election provides the earliest known record of a Black person voting in a British parliamentary election – John London.

In November 1749 John London walked from his home to vote in the Westminster constituency parliamentary by-election at St Paul’s, Covent Garden. He was probably with a group of his near neighbours from Hungerford Market, just south of the Strand (where Charing Cross railway station stands today). He cast his vote for the government candidate, Lord Trentham, then presumably returned home to continue his day’s business. His vote, and those of his neighbours, was recorded at the time by the polling clerk and before the year was out all the polling data was available as a published ‘poll book’, price 2s 6d. John London’s name duly appears on page 233, misspelt as John Loudon. The entry is unremarkable: we have his name, address (One Tun, a narrow alley leading from the Strand to the market), occupation (Vict. for victualler, what we would call a pub landlord) and his vote in the T column for Trentham.

His poll book entry does not stand out from those surrounding it in any way.  John London was just one of 9,465 men who had voted, 1,961 of them from his parish of St Martin in the Fields, 694 of whom had, like him, voted for Trentham. Nor was his occupation unusual: among the voters in the 1749 by-election were eight other victuallers who traded in Hungerford Market alone. But the election result was tight. Trentham won by just 157 votes. His rival, Sir George Vandeput, called for a scrutiny, an ex post facto examination of potentially bad votes where disqualification might alter the result. John London’s was one such vote and it is the manuscript minutes of the protracted scrutiny hearings of 1750 (held in the British Library) that reveal that John London, businessman, householder and voter, was Black. A non-white racial identity was no bar to voting. In Westminster the franchise was open to all adult (over twenty-one), British, male ratepayers (‘householders’). The challenge to John London’s vote was not on the face of it based on his Blackness. Rather it was alleged that he was not a ratepayer at the time of the poll. Vandeput’s witness, Mr Rybot the Overseer of the Poor in the parish, had to admit defeat here.  London was ‘on the blew leaf’, that is, the rate collector had written his name and payment on the blue paper cover of his notebook when calling door-to-door for the September 1749 rates. This was because London was a recent arrival in One Tun Alley, so not already listed, although he was ‘in the book’ by the time of the next rate collection in 1750.

London had arrived at his new home just in time to exercise his householder’s right to vote in November. It is Rybot’s throw-away next remark at the hearing that identifies London as Black: ‘… he paid me he’s a Blackamoor’ [an outdated historical term describing a Black or dark-skinned person]. Was this an attempt to move the challenge on to the question of Britishness based on racial identity? If so, this too failed. London appeared in person (unusual at the scrutiny). He was asked where he was born and with his answer – ‘St Edmunds Bury in Suffolk’ – the matter was closed in London’s favour. His vote stood. This fact makes John London the earliest known Black person to have voted in a British parliamentary election, some twenty-five years before Charles Ignatius Sancho (c. 1729-80), the formerly enslaved Black Mayfair grocer, composer, and writer who voted in Westminster elections in 1774 and 1780.

What does this episode tell us about voting and race in Georgian London? Firstly, it is a salutary reminder to historians not to assume that names in an eighteenth-century list are necessarily those of white people. There was a significant and rising population of Black Londoners, numbering some 10,000 in a total population of between 575,000 and 700,000. Many had been enslaved and had arrived from Britain’s Atlantic colonies rather than directly from Africa. Although technically free in England, they were often found working in domestic service in conditions of near servitude, or eked a living among the capital’s poor. Black soldiers, sailors, musicians, street sellers, seamstresses, beggars, prostitutes and their pimps are depicted in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century art. Such men, like their white neighbours, were unlikely to be ratepayers and have the franchise. The discovery of John London, however, shows us that we should not assume all Black Londoners fell into these two categories. It confirms the presence of Black men who were entrepreneurs on a small scale, sufficiently prosperous to be independent householders and so exercise the right to vote. This was active participation in civic life, not the bystander role of Black men depicted in images of polling-day crowds. There may indeed have been other Black voters who have not yet come to light since, as with John London, there was no need to include any racial identifier in the polling records themselves. 

Finally, while John London was clearly enjoying a modicum of success in life in 1749 the scrutiny records do hint at the vulnerability of Black people and the inherent racism they faced in Georgian London.  He was clearly not prevented from casting his vote in November 1749, but we cannot tell whether this was straightforward or whether he was subject to abuse in any way (as Sancho records he was in moving about the city a generation later). There may have been some protection from the presence around him of his neighbours from Hungerford Market.  We can interpret his appearance in person at the hearing as his understanding that his racial identity might be discussed and might count against him were he not there to speak for himself.  The term ‘blackamoor’ as used by Rybot was, after all, not exactly affectionate. London’s name appears in parish rate book records until 1751 and in none of these is he noted as a Black man – racial identity did not matter as long as one paid up. After 1751 he was gone from One Tun Alley and is archivally elusive until spring 1770 when, a sick man, he was admitted to the St Martin’s workhouse where he died.  At the end of his life, he was recorded as both a pauper and as Black. As with his challenged vote, this again marks him out as vulnerable and marginal.  Racial identity was irrelevant to his settlement rights under the Old Poor Law but was perhaps noted because he was now a cost to the parish. Was whoever recorded admissions expressing an underlying anxiety about Black paupers?  Finally, there is one other record for John London in the licensing lists for Westminster that shows something of the bold spirit, sense of humour, or enterprise in seeking out a specifically Black clientele of this Black voter and businessman. He named his victualling business The Blackamoor’s Head.   

Further Reading

A Copy of the Poll for a Citizen for the City and Liberty of Westminster (‘Poll Book’) (London: J. Osborn, 1749).

Frances Crewe., ed., Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho: An African, to which are Prefixed, Memoirs of his Life, 2 vols (London: John Nichols, 1782).

David Dabydeen, Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1987).

David Dabydeen, John Gilmore and Cecily Jones, eds, The Oxford Companion to Black British History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

Gretchen Gerzina, Black England: A Forgotten  Georgian History (London: John Murray, revised edn 2002,1st pub. 1995).

Frank O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties: The Unreformed Electorate of Hanoverian England, 1734-1832 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History (London: Macmillan, 2016).

Nicholas Rogers, Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).