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| Robert Wedderburn, Museum of Colour |
A brief ‘Thought for the Day’ given at a lunchtime service of Holy Communion at St Giles-in-the-Fields on July 30th 2025 based on the text of Matthew 13.44-46.
Today the Church of England remembers anti-slavery campaigners William Wilberforce, Olaudah Equiano Olaudah Equiano (who lived in the area and was buried just off Tottenham Court Road) and Thomas Clarkson. It is perhaps also a day when here at St Giles especially we should remember Robert Wedderburn, whose book ‘The Horrors of Slavery’ he dedicated to Wilberforce, who was a frequent visitor while Wedderburn was incarcerated – branded one of the most dangerous reformers in England.
Born and raised in Jamaica, Robert Wedderburn arrived in this parish in 1778
aged seventeen after serving in the British Navy. He lived in the infamous
Rookeries - or slums - around this church as part of a community of
“Blackbirds” - most of whom worked as low paid actors, labourers,
street-sweepers, prize fighters or earned their living through illicit means.
While many of the Blackbirds were slaves
who fought for the British in the American Revolutionary Wars in return for
their freedom, Wedderburn was born free. But while never a slave himself, he
was a witness to and victim of the system. His writings describe the brutal
world into which he was born.
Robert’s freedom was the product of a
deal struck by his mother Rosanna, who had been physically and sexually abused
by her then owner. Wedderburn’s text reports one occasion when his mother was
tied down and beaten up while pregnant with him. Sold back to Lady Douglas her
previous, more benevolent owner, Rosanna agreed to work only if her son - later
christened Robert - would be free. Lady Douglas remained a support to him
throughout her life. As a young man Robert lived in Kingston with his
grandmother known as “Talkee Amy”. An enterprising slave who had gained the
trust of her masters and set herself up as a fixer of both legal and illegal
transactions - an apprenticeship of sorts which may have helped Robert survive
here in the St Giles Rookeries.
Thanks to the influence of Lady Douglas
in his youth, Robert was literate - and as a result at he was able to learn the
craft of tailoring. But, for the most part, like the other St Giles Blackbirds,
he lived in abject poverty.
After hearing an itinerant preacher on
the streets of Seven Dials he became a Unitarian Minister and set up a chapel
in the loft of a building on Hopkins Street near Soho Square, where bales of
hay served as pews. The walls were said to be adorned with slogans promoting
universal suffrage, working-class rights and the abolition of slavery - as well
as insurrectionary revolution.
His preaching caught the attention of
the authorities. The Home Secretary branded him a “notorious firebrand” and he
served time for blasphemy in Dorchester Gaol.
His sermons - some of which survive in
print - focus on the inter-connectedness of oppression. Physical, spiritual and
economic. While embellished with many ideas that we would not consider to be
orthodox or doctrinally correct, the consistent underlying message in the
writings and preaching of Robert Wedderburn is that it is God - and not the
establishment - who has ultimate authority and who is the arbiter - and source
- of true freedom.
Throughout his life on the margins,
including many years in the slums of this parish, Robert Wedderburn was
determined to make that truth known, no matter what the personal cost.
Like the man in our gospel reading who
sold everything for one field – or the merchant who gave up everything for the
single pearl, Wedderburn gave up everything in return for the fight for
emancipation. Robert knew the value of the Kingdom of God. He embodied in every
fibre of his being a deep connection between faith and social action because he
knew that we cannot separate the ethics and morality of the harvest that
nourishes us physically with that which nourishes us spiritually.
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