This is the first article in a new series for the Victorian Commons on Peter McLagan (1823-1900), by Dr Martin Spychal, Senior Research Fellow on our House of Commons 1832-1868 project. McLagan was the first Black MP to represent a Scottish constituency, sitting for Linlithgowshire between 1865 and 1893. The series will explore McLagan’s personal, political and professional life, the lives of his close family members and his connections to slavery in the British Caribbean. It will also consider the wider significance of McLagan for understanding race and Black participation in nineteenth-century British politics and society.

Peter McLagan (1823-1900) represented the Scottish county of Linlithgowshire between 1865 and 1893. A Liberal MP for most of his career, he was regarded as one of Britain’s ‘leading agriculturalists’ and on his retirement was the longest serving Scottish member. At the time of writing, McLagan is thought to be the seventh Black MP to sit in the Commons, and the first to represent a Scottish constituency*. He is currently considered the tenth MP elected to Parliament from a ‘minority ethnic’ group (as defined by the UK Parliament in a 2023 briefing).

I’ve been researching Peter McLagan for the House of Commons 1832-1868 project as part of my wider research into Scottish county politics during the period. In this series of articles I’ll explore McLagan’s personal, political and professional life, the biographies of key family members and the McLagan family’s colonial connections, particularly to the British Caribbean and slavery. My research builds on that already completed on McLagan by the historians Sybil Cavanagh, David Main, the National Records of Scotland and Dr Alison Clark, as well as Professor Ewen Cameron, who wrote McLagan’s entry for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Identifying the ancestry and ethnicity of historical figures can be a difficult, often contingent and imperfect process. Archival sources such as birth records might not exist, or may contain deliberately incorrect information, particularly when the person in question had legally been considered ‘illegitimate’ at birth (born outside marriage). Without formal records, a person’s ethnicity might be extrapolated from their birthplace, historical knowledge about their family and wider social networks, visual imagery (e.g. portraits, caricatures or photographs) or fleeting remarks discovered in a diary, court case or newspaper.

It is by employing a combination of these approaches that historians have identified, and continue to uncover, Black participation in numerous historic British institutional and social settings. While such discoveries are of importance in their own genealogical and biographical right, they are also of major significance in complicating assumptions (written or unwritten) about British society in the past, and providing new ways for researchers, students, teachers and readers to conceptualise British history. In this regard, McLagan’s story is an example of Black elite participation in nineteenth-century British politics, and adds an important Scottish dimension to evolving understandings of Black presence in Victorian Britain.

Such discoveries have increased over the past decade as Black British history has become an integral aspect of curriculums and research in schools and universities, and the digitisation of genealogical records and newspapers has allowed for new methods of source interrogation. Histories of politics and the UK Parliament are no exception, as demonstrated by Helen Wilson’s ground-breaking research into Black participation in British politics between 1750 and 1850, Gillian Williamson’s discovery of the earliest known Black voter in the UK at the 1749 Westminster by-election, and Amanda Goodrich’s biography of the father of Henry Galgacus Redhead Yorke, MP for York between 1841 and 1848.

As no formal birth records exist for McLagan, his status as a Black MP is based on a number of considerations. We know from his entry in Dod’s Parliamentary Companion from 1865, and a number of his public statements thereafter, that he was born in Demerara (now Guyana). In modern terms the ethnicity of his father was White British. However, at no point during his life did McLagan disclose the identity of his mother. There are also, at present, no known official or unofficial records that confirm who she was.

In addition to comments on his birth in Demerara, a number of contemporary statements were made about McLagan’s nationality and ethnicity. During the 1868 election his opponent suggested that McLagan was ‘not a Scotchman’ and a racist cartoon was circulated in the constituency depicting McLagan as a slavedriver with a blackened face, flogging a topless man in a kilt. The cartoon played on the status of McLagan’s father as an enslaver, local perceptions of McLagan’s racial identity and statements McLagan made during the 1868 election in support of flogging in the military.

There was little further public comment about McLagan’s ethnicity until the publication of the 1885 Popular Guide to the New House of Commons. In the guide, McLagan was described as ‘a creole, born in Demerara’. While ‘creole’ may just have been employed in this sense to describe someone of European descent born in the Caribbean, it led to a number of racist descriptions of McLagan in the press. For instance, in 1888 the Sheffield Independent welcomed the prospect that McLagan faced defeat at the next election on the basis that he ‘was not only born at Demerara – he is not even a white man’.

On his retirement in 1893 journalists deployed a range of racist descriptions in their potted biographies of McLagan. The Western Morning News stated he was ‘one of the swathiest [sic] men in the House of Commons’, the Newcastle Journal reported on his ‘dark complexion’, the Dundee Courier suggested that he was ‘in appearance a little heavy, Dutch-looking man’, and the Penny Illustrated Paper stated that his ‘sensible honest face bore traces of the dark blood which flowed in his veins’.

In addition to these newspaper reports, there are a number of contemporary portraits, caricatures and photographs of McLagan. As well as the cartoon noted above from the 1868 election, he was caricatured standing upright as ‘the judicious McLagan’ by Punch in 1888, and in a head and shoulders profile etching in the Linlithgowshire Gazette following the 1892 election. He was also the subject of an etching [Figure 1], which was probably published at an earlier stage of his parliamentary career, potentially following the 1865 election. The image, which is pictured above, was recently discovered by a descendant and is now held by West Lothian Council Museums and Archives Service.

McLagan was also captured in at least four known photographs. There are two side profiles of McLagan that probably date to the 1880s, one of which held by the Hulton Archive can be viewed here. McLagan also appears in two photographs taken in December 1887 during the foundation stone laying ceremony for Victoria Halls, Linlithgow. McLagan laid the foundation stone at the ceremony in full masonic attire (he was the Linlithgowshire provincial grand master), and is pictured at the centre of a group photo of local dignitaries in front of Linlithgow Palace Fountain [Figure 3]. In a second, remarkable, group photo of the laying of the foundation stone, McLagan can also be seen under a set of pulley chains, staring directly at the camera with a somewhat bemused look on his face [Figure 4].

Considered together, these sources suggest that McLagan’s mother was probably of Black Caribbean or Black African descent. To explore why this was likely to have been the case, the next articles in the series will focus on McLagan’s family.

The first will discuss McLagan’s father, Peter McLagan (1774-1860), who enslaved over 400 people on his plantations and personal estate in Demerara. McLagan’s father was awarded a share in over £20,000 (around £2.5 million today) in compensation for persons formerly enslaved on his plantations and personal estate following the abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean in 1833. Along with the profits of a three-decade career in Demerara, McLagan’s father invested this compensation into estates in modern West Lothian, which allowed McLagan to establish himself as one of Scotland’s leading agriculturists, shale oil proprietors and longest-serving MPs.

Following this I will explore the potential identity of McLagan’s mother. Recent research by Dr Alison Clark has suggested that McLagan’s mother may have been Elizabeth Games or Elizabeth Goodwin, two ‘free women of colour’ that McLagan senior made property transactions with in Demerara in 1817.

My research into the enslaved persons on McLagan’s father’s estates has also identified a Barbadian-born woman named Filly (b. c. 1789/90), another possible candidate to have been McLagan’s mother. Filly, and her three children, Henrietta, Joe and Robert, were enslaved on McLagan’s father’s personal residence on Water Street, Georgetown, between 1820 and 1823, just before McLagan was born. While McLagan and his father left Demerara for Scotland in 1825, Filly and her children continued to live on McLagan’s father’s residence as enslaved ‘domestic servants’ until at least 1834.

To read the second article in Martin’s series click here. To find out more about the House of Commons 1832-1868 project click here.

MS

* I use Black as a category of ethnicity in its modern sense to refer to people of African and Caribbean heritage. This contrasts with contemporary nineteenth-century British discourse, and some twentieth century political and historiographical contexts, where ‘black’ was also used as a term to refer to persons of non-African and Caribbean heritage, particularly people of South Asian descent.  It also understands race as a cultural, social and political phenomenon.

The author would like to thank Sybil Cavanagh for sharing her unpublished research on McLagan, and several quotations which have been used in this article.

Suggested Reading

E. A. Cameron, ‘McLagan, Peter (1822/3-1900)’, Oxford DNB (2023), www.oxforddnb.com

D. W. Main, ‘The Remarkable Career of Peter McLagan MP’, History Scotland (April 2021)

Scotlands People, ‘Our records: Peter McLagan (1823–1900, British Liberal Party politician and Scotland’s first black MP’, (2022)

A. Clark, ‘Expanding the Boundaries of Empire, 1790-1838: Scottish Traders in the Southeast Carribean: Slavery, Cotton and the Rise of Sandbach Tinné & Co.’, PhD Univ. Edinburgh (2024)

H. Wilson, ‘The Presence of Black Voters in the 18th and 19th Centuries’, History of Parliament (2022)

J. Baker, ‘1833 Slavery Abolition Act: The Long Road to Emancipation in the British West Indies’, History of Parliament (2024)

‘C. Bressey, ‘The Next Chapter: The Black Presence in the Nineteenth Century’, in G. Gerzina (ed.), Britain’s Black Past (2020), 315-30

H. Adi, African and Caribbean People in Britain: A History (2023)

K. N. Abraham & J. Woolf, Black Victorians (2023)

T. Scriven, ‘‘The Black Prince of Baker Street’ and the Black Presence in Britain, 1837–1849’, History Workshop Journal (2024)

D. Alston, Slaves and Highlanders: Silenced Histories of Scotland and the Caribbean (2021)

P. Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984)

A. Goodrich, Henry Redhead Yorke, Colonial Radical Politics and Identity in the Atlantic World, 1772-1813 (2019)

D. Livesay, Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833 (2018)

D. Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History (2016)

N. File & C. Power, Black Settlers in Britain 1555-1958 (1981)