The Life and Times of Henry Clarke of Jamaica, 1828-1907

James Walvin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781135776947
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

When Henry Clarke died in 1907 his obituary described him as an Englishman, yet he had only spent the first 19 years of his life in England, the next 60 being spent in Jamaica. He was a teacher, a cleric politician, a businessman, an inventor, and the father of eleven children. He left behind an extraordinary amount of writing, including a six volume diary upon which this biography is based.

1
Early Days

IN DECEMBER 1847, the sailing ship Apolline from London made landfall in Jamaica after an Atlantic voyage of six weeks. It carried only a handful of passengers, most of them returning home from business or schooling in Britain. But among them was a newcomer, a young Englishman of nineteen, Henry Clarke, setting out on a career as a humble schoolteacher in Jamaica. Little in his early life could have prepared him for what he was to encounter.

Jamaica had been the most prized of Britain’s Caribbean possessions since its capture from the Spanish by Cromwell’s army in 1655. Like Barbados before it, it became a black society as ever more cargoes of enslaved Africans were brought to the island to convert the abundant fertile land to sugar production. But its natural beauty and economic importance stood in sharp contrast to the brutality and degradation of its human affairs. Jamaican slavery was brutal, inhuman and endemically violent.¹ The sufferings of the slaves were indisputable; a collective, lifelong exploitation of one generation after another; from imported Africans to their local-born off-spring. The slaves had no choice but to adjust to the grotesque conditions which passed for normal life in the island, shaping for themselves an independent black society which was a refuge from the rigours of enslavement. Accommodation and resistance went hand in hand. Jamaican history was punctuated by acts of individual and collective slave violence, followed inevitably by more punishing and bloody reprisals from a vindictive white plantocracy and the colonial authorities.²

After the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, supplies of imported Africans dried up and planters were forced to revise their management and labouring systems. Slaves now found themselves working harder, privileged slaves lost many of the privileges they had taken for granted and, in general, the system was tightened up and run more onerously than at any time in living memory. It was no coincidence that the most savage of slave revolts and the most severe of reprisals took place in the years after abolition. The decision to end slavery altogether was of course a complex political change, but the outcome, in August 1838, was freedom for 750,000 former slaves throughout British possessions.³

Freedom did not, however, herald a marked improvement in material conditions. Many quit the plantations to scratch a meagre rural living, often on marginal or legally disputed lands. Others continued to work on the plantations, but the fortunes of sugar were in decline. By the end of 1847 the Jamaican sugar industry faced its worstever crisis. It was agreed on all sides that the material lot of the island’s poor had declined quite markedly since 1838 (a fact which confirmed, to the planters’ minds, the folly of black freedom). It was also agreed that an effort was needed to improve the lot of Jamaica’s black population. They needed in particular a drive to educate and raise ‘them in the scale of social beings’.⁴

At precisely this moment, in December 1847, the young Henry Clarke stepped ashore at Black River, Jamaica, ‘a poor charity school assistant with a bare maintenance’.⁵ What had persuaded so young a man to strike out on this venture, so far from home and in so hostile and uncertain a climate?

Henry Clarke was born into a poor but respectable and upright family in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, on 30 April 1828. His father, John Corden Clarke, was a silk-dyer, specialising in women’s silks and ribbons, an occupation rendered precarious by the current transformation of the British textile industries. Helped by his industrious and God-fearing wife Mary Waters, John Clarke was a craftsman of repute and always seems to have had enough work to hand. But he needed all the work he could muster to provide for his family of five sons, who filled the small, two-bedroomed house to overflowing. The Clarkes were a poor working family, but both parents bore their material privations with a stoicism buttressed by a fierce religious commitment. Mary Clarke had been converted by a Wesleyan preacher when she was carrying her son Henry and she dedicated her unborn child to the Lord. In time her wishes came to fruition: of her five sons, three became clergymen.⁶

Both John Clarke and his wife were literate and anxious that their offspring should be better educated than themselves. Henry, for instance, attended two Dame schools (available to poorer children throughout much of England in the early nineteenth century). Some time around 1837 he progressed to Clarkson’s Charity School. This was the age before steel pens and Henry learned to write with quills, preferring to use them throughout his life. His father was keen to complete Henry’s education at a ‘good’ school, though it was an expense the family could ill afford, and in January 1840 he was enrolled at the Grove House Academy.

The burden of so many children, pressing on the meagre income of a silk-dyer, proved insupportable. One son was taken in by a friendly cousin, another son was apprenticed at an early age to yet another relative. In the year he entered Grove House Academy, Henry, aged twelve, also had to leave the parental home, moving into a neighbour’s house—a ‘well-to-do butcher and farmer’—as a companion to his son. For the first three or four hours each day Henry toiled in the man’s slaughterhouse before going to school. Despite the obvious rigours of this life, Henry was clearly a bright, industrious boy with a natural talent and zeal for book-learning. His success at school put paid to the suggestion that he should hire himself out as an agricultural labourer. By the age of fourteen, Henry had begun to excel at the local Elizabethan Royal Grammar School where he transferred when Grove House Academy had closed its doors. Under the eye of a friendly master he prospered, winning a prize, revelling in reading classical Greek texts and heading the class in French, history and arithmetic. He began to read novels, a habit which was to remain a major entertainment throughout his life. Despite his undeniable cleverness, though, Henry was uneasy about his prospects because of his family’s humble circumstances.

Looking for work, Henry saw a suitable position advertised in the Stamford Mercury for a resident ‘usher’ at the National School at Conningsby near Lincoln. Thus at the age of fourteen, in 1842, Henry Clarke ‘took leave of my dear mother and father with a heavy heart and wept bitterly’. In a bedroom crowded with other boys, Henry Clarke cried himself to sleep on his first night away from home.

Henry enjoyed teaching for the school’s owner Mr Chapman, but Mrs Chapman was another matter, easily angered and always volatile. Henry worked there until December 1842 and in the New Year moved on to become tutor to the five children of the Lister family who lived at Goltho House, near Wragby, Lincolnshire. He received the handsome salary of £15 a year.

The Lister home was warm and friendly, a farm of 400 acres with its own family schoolroom where Henry worked in a congenial atmosphere. He loved the rural setting, he enjoyed his work and, most important of all, it was here that he met his future wife. In March 1843, on a trip to Lincoln with Mrs Lister, he was introduced to his employers’ niece, Jane Lister, ‘a short, compactly-built, black-eyed, round-faced brunette girl, apparently about my own age of 15’. Shortly afterwards Henry Clarke and Jane Lister were confirmed into the Church and took their first communion together. Jane was a shy girl and Henry felt immediately drawn to her.

At Christmas 1843 Henry’s employer gave him a small pocket book, a diary, in which he made his first entry on 21 January 1844. What began as the inconsequential jottings of an intellectually curious young man developed into a lifelong undertaking which was at once a private confession of a difficult and often lonely life, and a self-conscious effort to create an important historical document.

Throughout 1844 Henry Clarke was happy tutoring the Lister children and studying diligently in his leisure hours and rare holidays. By the age of sixteen he was seriously considering the Church as his natural and ultimate destination.

The Lister family, however, now fell on hard times and a dispute with their landlord resulted in notice to quit the farm. A harsher future beckoned. Henry followed the Listers to Lincoln in April 1845 and continued to teach, but the family could no longer afford his services and in December 1845 he left.

Henry spent Christmas 1845 with his family in Mansfield and advertised in The Times for a teaching post. On 1 January 1846 a Mr Henry Pritchard of London wrote that he might have a suitable opening. Henry travelled to London on 12 January, where Mr Pritchard, a wealthy hat manufacturer, showed him round the city and later took him to the Orphans’ Asylum. But the school’s directors rejected Henry’s application because of his youth. For two days he wandered through the city in a daze of disappointment, before recovering his senses and registering with a teaching agency. In the event he secured a post as tutor to the principal of a private school, a prosperous clergyman, the Rev. Pritchard, via personal contact. All too soon he began to feel the temper of the Rev. Pritchard, who ‘told me indirectly I was both a liar and a hypocrite’. Despite the alleged clerical nature of the school, Henry Clarke ‘met no signs of spiritual life anywhere’. The schoolmaster even took Henry and three senior pupils to Vauxhall Gardens, one of London’s favourite, indeed infamous, places of entertainment, past assembled prostitutes and into ‘the devils own den’ of lights, fireworks and singing. The pupils stayed behind for an assignation with prostitutes. Henry was mortified, retreating home in some confusion.⁷

It was in every way a far cry from the rural or smalltown settings which Henry had so much enjoyed in earlier positions. Like many migrants before and since, Henry was taken aback at what he saw in London; his youthful spirituality shocked by the scenes of low life and vice so readily available at every turn. In London, and later in Jamaica, there was no doubt in Henry’s mind that he had been put on this earth to do the Lord’s bidding in the midst of human frailty and wickedness. This, from first to last, was to prove an unequal struggle.

Henry’s relationship with the Rev. Pritchard deteriorated further and on 3 October 1846 he was given notice to quit at Christmas. It was ‘a thunderclap’ which plunged the young man into a despondent bout of prayer and soul-searching. The next five years, until his marriage to Jane Lister in October 1851, were years of mounting personal and professional misery. He left Pritchard’s employment with the demoralising advice ringing in his ears that he was ‘fit for nothing but a junior clerk and scarcely for that’.

Henry tried desperately to find a teaching post, always in the hope that he could work towards ordination. His frequent applications were met with regular rebuffs, and cries of anguish filled his diary.

Henry’s only good fortune was being able to stay in the South Lambeth home of a former colleague at Pritchard’s school. But even these domestic arrangements were disturbed by the man’s financial recklessness. Whether at home or out of doors, Henry felt besieged by troubles and uncertainties.

In June, Henry’s diary consists of almost thirty pages ‘of a closely written agony’. His letters home clearly troubled his parents. ‘I do not quite like your manner of writing’, his mother, by now very ill, wrote from Mansfield, suggesting that the Lord might not want Henry as a church minister. ‘I do not wish to hurt your feelings, but when people follow their will instead of prudence and judgement they are always involved in difficulties.’⁸ These words of maternal wisdom seem to have made little impression on the unhappy but resolute son.

By the mid-summer of 1847 Henry was virtually penniless, in need of new clothes and becoming more desperate by the day to secure a teaching post. At this, his lowest point so far, he recorded that ‘Satan assaulted me with temptation’ and he decided ‘to eat of the forbidden fruit—but the Lord prevented me, and I passed through the burning fiery furnace and suffered no harm’.⁹ Time and again, until his marriage in 1851, Henry’s sexuality was to be a source of frequent and acute torment. As far as we can tell, Henry succeeded against all the odds in preserving his virginity until his marriage.

In July 1847 Henry’s fortunes changed. On yet another trip to a teaching agency, he was told of a vacancy at Manning’s Free School in Savanna-la-Mar in Jamaica—with the distant prospect of ordination into the Church of England in Jamaica.

The salary is £60 per annum, board and lodging, and the passage money would be paid…When 23 years of age, if my conduct had been uniformly good, I should be eligible for ordination by the Bishop of Jamaica.¹⁰

It was an opportunity he could scarcely turn down. After months of anguish and frustration it seemed that his fortunes were on the rise. He secured a summer teaching job in London and began to prepare himself for the move to Jamaica. Returning to see his parents in Mansfield, Henry was invited to visit the Lister family in Lincoln and renewed his acquaintance with Jane. He recorded in his diary: ‘the truth is, I love her. To tell her so however would I think be of no use’. Jane gave Henry a lock of her hair, but apart from that and the occasional hint of friendship, Henry had no practical evidence that she harboured any special affection for him. Nevertheless, he was convinced in his own mind that a special bond had been forged between them. In his first lonely sojourn in Jamaica, this affection for Jane Lister seems to have remained one of Henry’s few strengths and comforts during a time of unqualified gloom.

At the beginning of October 1847, Henry Clarke returned to his family in Mansfield, visiting as many relatives and friends in the neighbourhood as possible. He doubted whether he would ever again see his ailing parents. As he left them he ‘burst into a fit of involuntary sobbing’. He returned to London on 7 October, and a week later boarded the sailing ship Apolline, along with the rest of the passengers, a cow, four sheep and a mound of vegetables. On board he found himself the centre of attention of six young women returning home from school in England. Later that same day the vessel anchored at Gravesend before finally heading down the Channel and out into the Atlantic bound for Jamaica.

It was Henry’s great fortune that he was a natural sailor, quite unaffected by the Atlantic storms. The thought of the even more uncertain tempests of life ahead plagued Henry much more than the Atlantic itself and prayers dotted his journal. When the weather was good, life aboard passed pleasurably enough; reading to each other on deck, playing cards and chess in the evenings. Henry quickly developed ‘a special penchant for the eldest of the maiden ladies’. They touched hands playing chess and Henry recorded that ‘our attachment was pleasant while it lasted and did no harm.’ But the young woman warned him about his future employer, Mr Fidler, ‘a coarse vulgar man’, assuring Henry that ‘teaching a lot of brown boys’ would be Very irksome’.¹¹ Other passengers plied him with miserable accounts of Fidler’s character.

On 1 December, Henry and his fellow passengers caught their first glimpse of Jamaica, at Morant Point on the easterly tip of the island: ‘It seemed a perfect paradise’ The vessel nosed its way along the island’s southern coast, dropping anchor at Port Royal, the former headquarters of Jamaica’s early piratical years. Henry was rowed across Kingston harbour and took lodgings in the town. He was impressed by a group of young ladies, ‘of all hues between black and white’, but he was even more struck by the vast amount of alcohol consumed by the locals and noted: ‘I must take a resolute stand against it’ Indeed, Henry Clarke was to spend the rest of his life taking a resolute stand against an extraordinary array of the island’s deeply rooted social habits. Rejoining his ship, the closer he came to his place of employment, the lower his spirits dropped. By the time the Apolline dropped anchor off Savanna-la-Mar in the west of the island, a mood of gloomy foreboding had engulfed him. Events were to justify his feeling that his path was ‘crook...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1: Early Days
• 2: Tormented In Jamaica 1847–51
• 3: Making a New Start 1851–55
• 4: Preaching and Inventing 1856–65
• 5: Rebellion 1865
• 6: Conflict and Trial from First to Last 1866–74
• 7: Not a Friend In the World 1874–80
• 8: No Way Forward, No Turning Back 1880–84
• 9: Family Woes 1885–93
• 10: A Preacher In Politics 1894–97
• 11: An International Audience 1897–98
• 12: Unfulfilled Old Age 1898–1903
• 13: Alone Again 1903–7
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Sources