Stories from Black Scottish History
October is Black History Month in the UK, and I wanted to use it as an opportunity to learn more about some of the Black people who’ve shaped Scotland through the centuries. I’ve written about a couple of Edinburgh’s historic Black residents here before, like Frederick Douglass and Malvina Wells, but this month I found so many more stories about amazing people I had never heard of. You can check out all of my Black History Month posts over on my Instagram, but I want to share a few of the stories I discovered in a little more depth.
Ellen and Margaret, the “Moorish Lassies”
Little is known about Ellen and Margaret, two “Moorish lassies” who worked as ladies in waiting to the daughter of King James IV in the early 1500s. We don’t even know their real names, because “Ellen” and “Margaret” were the names given to them after they were baptised as Christians. But we do know that these two African women held prominent positions in service at the royal court, probably from when they were around 10 years old.
They served in the court of Lady Margaret, the king’s favourite illegitimate daughter. She enjoyed a comfortable and courtly life, with her own household at Edinburgh Castle while James lived in Holyrood Palace. She was also a child of around the same age as Ellen and Margaret when they start working for her.
Edinburgh Castle, where Margaret and Ellen worked. Image: my own
It’s believed that Ellen and Margaret were captured from a Portuguese ship and brought to work in the royal household. The details are very sketchy, but we know they arrived to work at Edinburgh Castle in 1504. Ellen and Margaret were paid servants and not enslaved when they reached the royal court, but they had nonetheless been twice kidnapped to end up in that role – first by the Portuguese ship that took them from their home, probably in North Africa, and then again from that same ship to be brought here.
It must have been a very frightening experience for them. Imagine yourself, no more than 10 years old, snatched away from your parents and taken on a ship full of people speaking an unfamiliar language, taking you to an unfamiliar place, to face an unknown fate. And then you end up here in Scotland – a place so far from home that it might as well be the moon – in the rain and the dark winter, surrounded by pale faces that don’t look like yours, and weird religious practices that they want you to adopt.
Scotland and England were not yet engaged in the slave trade in the early 1500s, and the widespread white supremacist thinking that would drive it hadn’t yet developed. The European preoccupation at the time was much more on whether you were Christian than on the colour of your skin (see Miranda Kaufmann’s fantastic book Black Tudors for more overview and individual stories from this period in England). Nonetheless, people of colour were exoticised, and having an African servant was a marker of status in prominent households across the continent.
King James IV. Image: unknown artist, public domain
James IV saw himself as a worldly and cultured king. He sought to portray his court as well connected with the other royal households of Europe and engaged with the Renaissance. Having Black people at court was fashionable 500 years ago, and Ellen and Margaret were not the only ones employed by James IV. Records also survive of an unnamed African drummer who travelled with his court, and of a man known as “Peter the Moor”. Peter acted as a companion to the king on several journeys between 1500 and 1506, receiving a salary and eventually a severance payment at the same or higher rate as white courtiers. By employing Margaret and Ellen in the court of his daughter, James was conveying a particular kind of status on her – a higher status than that of his other illegitimate children – and building his own image as well. The girls might have been treated kindly as servants (or they might not) but either way they would have been seen as exotic and different.
Margaret and Ellen were paid a good wage for the time, and as ladies in waiting to the Lady Margaret they had a higher status than other servants. They were likely trusted confidantes of the king’s daughter, having essentially grown up together, and they would have known much more about the goings on of the court than your average citizen – or even your average servant – at the time. Records show that Ellen and Margaret wore fine gowns and learnt many of the same skills as Lady Margaret, from fancy embroidery to horse riding. As high-status servants, they also received more generous gifts for special occasions, like the ten gold coins they were given as a New Year present in 1513, or the new gown that Margaret received for the name day she shared with her boss.
Huntly Castle, where Lady Margaret moved to live with her first husband. Image: Lyall Duffus, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Although the trail of their stories goes cold around this time, we know that Ellen transferred to the main royal court, probably as an attendant to the Queen, after Lady Margaret married a Highland laird and moved up north. We don’t know exactly what happened to the other Margaret, but records suggest that she may have married a local man around 1512, so perhaps she left service after her marriage.
We might know frustratingly little about Ellen and Margaret – and nothing at all of their experiences in their own words – but the records we do have paint a fascinating picture of a Scotland 500 years ago that was less white and less culturally isolated than we might assume. I would love to travel back and be a fly on the wall as Lady Margaret chatted with her ladies in waiting as they got ready for bed after the latest boring court function. Did they teach her about the homeland from which they’d been torn away, and the language they spoke in childhood? How did they experience this strange, cold land so far from home? Did they yearn for someone to call them by their birth names? Did they live happy lives here as they grew up and perhaps left service? Their stories raise more questions than answers, but they remind us that the history of Black people in Scotland goes back many centuries, and that Black Scots are far from a recent phenomenon.
For more detail on the story of Ellen and Margaret, see this blog from Historic Environment Scotland.
Jesse Ewing Glasgow Jr.
By the mid-nineteenth century, it was not unusual for Scottish universities to have Black students, although they mostly came from abroad. They were also all men, as women of any ethnicity were barred from attending university until the 1890s. A brilliant student-led research project at the University of Edinburgh, UncoverED, has been looking into some of their stories.
Jesse Ewing Glasgow Jr. Image: Historical Society of Pennsylvania
It’s through their work that I first came across the story of Jesse Ewing Glasgow Jr., a leading African American intellectual who came to Edinburgh to study at the university in 1858. He was born in Philadelphia into a working-class African American family, and his father was a prominent radical activist in the area.
Jesse was academically exceptional from a young age. He was educated at elite African American institutions in Philadelphia (schools in Pennsylvania were segregated by race at the time), where he excelled amongst his peers. In 1856, he became the first graduate of the prestigious Institute for Colored Youth, where his aptitude for maths and academia in general was much admired.
Although slavery had been abolished in Pennsylvania in the late 18th century, Jesse and his classmates were studying at a time when it was still practised across the American South, and they lived under segregation in their home state. White supremacy wasn’t just a widespread concept at the time – it was the law of the land. Many believed that Black people were literally incapable of intellectual thought, and places like the Institute for Colored Youth were providing an academic education not only to advance their students’ prospects, but also explicitly to challenge this racist thinking by fostering Black excellence.
The former site of the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia. Image: Nick-philly, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
After his landmark graduation, Jesse came to Edinburgh to study in 1858, with many people from his community in Philadelphia donating money towards his tuition and expenses. Just as he had at home, he excelled academically, winning numerous prizes in a range of subjects. A close friend he met during his time here, Wazir Beg, who was also an international student, from India, wrote to the paper after Jesse’s death to share his recollections:
I can truly say, he was an Israelite, indeed, in whom was no guile. His Christianity, to a great extent, was unobtrusive and reticent. Ah! he was a simple, amiable disciple. He must have been a hard student, since he distinguished himself in several literary classes, and yet he was never ostentatious of his achievements. I never heard him whisper about his prizes. White lads, I know, envied him, and well they might, for he was studious and talented. Peace be with thee!
During his time in Scotland, Jesse achieved all this while still maintaining connections to the abolitionist movement back home – no mean feat when communication was possible only by transatlantic letter. He even published an abolitionist pamphlet for a Scottish audience during his time in Edinburgh, which you can read in its entirety here. Its explicit purpose was to raise abolitionist consciousness and earn money for the Underground Railroad.
He opens his pamphlet with a powerful and poetic excoriation of his experiences as a Black man in 19th-century America:
It so happened that nature gave me a coloured skin, and on account of this, from infancy up to the time I left America, 18 years, I had to grasp the cold, flinty hand, of what in America was a misfortune punishable as a crime. He who knows not what American prejudice is (and none can fully know except those who have felt it, which is a privilege only enjoyed by an unfavoured many), cannot know what is implied in the above sentence. It is to feel the world cold and unfriendly as soon as you have gained any knowledge of it; it is to have the dews which alight on life’s path evaporated by a precocious, mischievous sun as soon as they have fallen; to have youth’s sparkling fountain rendered insipid and impure, and manhood’s dry or filthy. In short, it is to have life drawn out into innumerable threads by a fell demon who sports with them, and ever and anon, by chance or otherwise, mostly the latter, breaks one.
10 Hill Place, where Jesse Ewing Glasgow Jr. lived and died in Edinburgh. Image: my own
Slavery had only been abolished across the British Empire in 1833, just 25 years before Jesse Ewing Glasgow Jr. came to study in Scotland. To put things in perspective, that’s approximately the same amount of time as it has now been since Tony Blair first became PM. It was not ancient history, and it was still going on in the United States. Indeed, his own name may point to a history of Scottish slaveowners in Jesse’s own family background – Ewing and Glasgow are both Scottish names. In Scotland, he would have likely met many abolitionist campaigners, but he would also have come across people whose families directly profited from slavery, and people who held white supremacist views. Jesse clearly understood that there was an audience for his work here, both amongst those who were already sympathetic and those who needed to have their minds changed.
An announcement of Jesse Ewing Glasgow Jr’s death in the Glasgow Courier, December 1860. Image: British Newspaper Archive
Unfortunately, Jesse never got to graduate from university. He died from tuberculosis at 10 Hill Place, his home in Edinburgh, on 20th December 1860. A disease for which we now have vaccines and antibiotics robbed the world of a brilliant man, and we’ll never know what else Jesse Ewing Glasgow Jr. might have achieved if we had had those things 160 years ago. As this newspaper clipping from the Glasgow Courier at the time shows, he had already become well respected in his new home during his two short years here. He was only 23 years old, his life cut tragically short before he could see the abolition of slavery in his home country or realise his own potential as a leading intellectual of his generation.
Jessie Margaret Soga
In the 1870s, Janet Burnside, a Scottish missionary, returned to Scotland after the death of her husband, Reverend Tiyo Soga, the first Black South African to become an ordained Presbyterian minister. He studied theology in Glasgow, where he met Janet and fell in love. The couple relocated to South Africa in 1857, where they had eight children together, of which seven survived to adulthood. Like Jesse Ewing Glasgow Jr. before him, Tiyo sadly succumbed to TB in 1871, leaving Janet a widow.
Janet Burnside and Tiyo Soga. Image: public domain
Janet initially went with the children to live with their grandmother Nosutu in Mgwali. She had immersed herself in her husband’s Xhosa culture during their time in South Africa, and perhaps she felt it was important that the children maintained their connection to that side of their heritage. Janet and the children then moved back to Scotland to be near her own family.
Raising seven children as a widow could not have been easy. Janet herself came from a very poor background, and Tiyo would not have been a rich man as a rural minister. Raising biracial children in Glasgow in the Victorian era must have presented additional challenges in an already very difficult situation, but Janet clearly did a remarkable job, and her children went on to their own amazing achievements.
Her oldest son, William, became a doctor and returned to South Africa as a medical missionary. His brother John established a mission in Mbonda, where he also became an author writing on Xhosa culture. Their younger brother Allan studied law at Glasgow and became a magistrate and newspaper editor in South Africa. The youngest boy, Jotello, trained in Edinburgh to become the first South African graduate in veterinary medicine, and was later a founding member of the Cape Veterinary Association. The eldest daughter, Isabella, also returned to South Africa as a missionary, and their sister Frances served as secretary of both the Girls’ Association and the Women’s Manyano for the presbyterian church. The youngest, Jessie, became a professional singer, a music teacher, and a prominent suffrage activist in Glasgow. She was the only one of her siblings to settle in Scotland, perhaps because she came here as a toddler and had no memory of her previous home.
Sadly, I couldn’t find a picture of Jessie, but I’m convinced there must be one out there somewhere! She studied singing at both the Royal Academy of Music in London and the Milan Conservatoire, and spent time in Paris. When she returned to Scotland, she established a business as a private singing teacher and performed in choirs and as a soloist across the country. One review in 1899 described her as “a great favourite … the possessor of a rich mellow voice” and said that she was “heartily encored” after her first song.
Jessie might even have brought her contralto voice to the stage of the Mòd, an annual festival of Gaelic music and culture held in Scotland since 1891. As far as I could find out, her own family weren’t Gaelic speakers, but Jessie might have learnt the language later in life. Records show that she became a member of An Comunn Gàidhealach in 1924, so she must at least have had an interest in Gaelic culture. Nowadays there is a growing community of Afro-Gaels in Scotland, but could a Scottish-Xhosa woman have been singing at the Mòd nearly a century ago?
Protesters at a Women’s Freedom League rally in Glasgow in 1914. Jessie is not pictured, but she must have been there! Image: Glasgow City Council via The Glasgow Story
Jessie was also a prominent suffragist and a leading member of both the Women’s Freedom League and the Women’s Social and Political Union in Glasgow between 1908 and 1917. One of the founders of the Women’s Freedom League, Teresa Billington-Greig, described Jessie as a “prime mover” in establishing a major new WFL branch in the West End of Glasgow. Jessie was the branch secretary and dedicated years to the cause, using her musical talents to raise funds and helping to organise major national events. She also established a circulating library of women’s rights literature, and in addition to fundraising she donated plenty of her own money to the movement.
Some women gained the right to vote in 1918, after the First World War, and finally got the vote on equal terms in 1928. Militant campaigning was put aside during the war and never really resumed on any great scale afterwards. Perhaps for that reason, there isn’t much information online about what Jessie got up to in the years after 1917 – maybe she simply settled into a quieter life as campaigning wound down. The record of her death in 1954 lists her as a retired music teacher, so it seems she carried on with that passion throughout her life.
Further Stories
People like Ellen, Margaret, Jesse Ewing Glasgow Jr. and Jessie Soga remind us that Black people have been here in Scotland for centuries. These three stories are just the tip of the iceberg, and there are so many other fascinating examples! Historic Environment Scotland have some blogs on Black history here, and if you want to learn more about Scotland’s role in slavery you can find lots of resources at the National Library of Scotland. The NLS also participated in the Struggles for Liberty project, along with other international institutions. It investigates the history of African American revolutionaries in the Atlantic world, and includes interactive maps of locations in Scotland with links to abolitionists like Frederick Douglass. You can also find more information about Black History Month in Scotland here.
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