Ignatius Sancho
(Lewisham Heritage)
Monday, 29 October 2018
Remarkable Resident: Ignatius Sancho
Ignatius Sancho (c.1729 – 14 December 1780) writer,
campaigner, abolitionist, composer, shopkeeper.
He was celebrated in the late 18th-century as a man of
letters, a social reformer and an acute observer of English life. He gained
fame in his time, and to eighteenth-century British abolitionists he became a
symbol of the humanity of Africans and immorality of the slave trade.
Sancho grew up an orphan. At the age of two he was taken
from West Africa to London where he was forced to work as a slave for three
sisters at a house in Greenwich. During this time he met the 2nd Duke of
Montagu, who lived in nearby Blackheath. He liked the young Ignatius and bought
him books, and tried to persuade the sisters to educate him. After the duke’s
death Sancho ran away from the house in Greenwich and persuaded the duke’s
widow to employ him. Sancho worked in the Montagu household for the next 20
years, serving as Mary Montagu’s butler until the Duchess’s death in 1751, and
then as valet to George Montagu, 1st Duke of Montagu, until 1773.
In 1758 Sancho married Anne Osborne, a West Indian woman
with whom he had seven children. After Sancho left the Montagu household, the
couple opened a grocery store in Westminster, where Sancho, by then a
well-known cultural figure, maintained an active social and literary life until
his death in 1780. As a financially independent male householder, Sancho became
eligible to vote and did so in 1774 and again just before his death in 1780. He
was the first person of African descent to vote in a British general election.
He is also the first known person of African descent to have an obituary
published in British newspapers.
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