Skip to main content

John Thomas of Liverpool and Lagos

Bangor and the surrounding parts of North Wales are noticeably less diverse than South Wales. There is less industry here and the region hasn't been as reshaped by overseas immigration as, say, Cardiff or Swansea. The major cultural change here has come from English migration, particularly in the last 50 years or so. I'm one of those migrants now, so my relationship to Bangor is understandably different to someone born here in North Wales. Coming from London, the lack of diversity here in Bangor is one of the big differences to life in a global megacity. But this is clearly changing. Bangor University and Ysbyty Gwynedd attract students and workers from all over the world, and many have brought their families with them or started families here. It's noticeable in some parts of the city, when walking past school gates at 3pm for example, just how diverse a population there is developing here.

That said, Black history has been interlinked with the history of North Wales since the 17th century. The Pennant family, originally of Flintshire, built their wealth by purchasing land in Jamaica and operating several sugar plantations. These were, of course, run using slave labour, and the Pennant family owned hundreds of enslaved people taken from West Africa during the Transatlantic slave trade. In the late 18th century, Richard Pennant used this wealth to build Penrhyn castle and to develop the slate industry at Penrhyn quarry. His descendants used the family's money, including over £1 million in today's money they received as compensation for the freedom of their enslaved workforce when slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1807, to build infrastructure in and around Bangor. Much of the city still bears signs of the Pennant family's investment into Bangor.

One literal sign bearing the family's name is in Pennants Crescent, just off Caernarfon Road. The street itself is a small cul de sac of 1920s-era housing, built long after the Pennant family's influence on Bangor had waned. When I saw the street sign, I thought of Pennants, Jamaica, a town that had grown up around one of the Pennant family's plantations, and one inextricably linked to this part of North Wales.

Opposite Pennants Crescent is Glanadda Cemetery, the oldest in Bangor. Glanadda holds the grave of a Black sailor, John Thomas from Lagos, Nigeria. He lived in Liverpool, where he was married to a white British woman, Amelia Thomas (née Andrews). He was Chief Fireman onboard the SS Apapa in 1917, when it was torpedoed by a German U-boat off the coast of Anglesey. Thomas had also been onboard the SS Falaba in 1915 when it was torpedoed, an incident that almost led to the early entry of the United States into the First World War. Thomas survived this sinking and had to identify the bodies of his fellow sailors, several of them also from West Africa. Two years later, Thomas died on the Apapa and was buried here in Bangor, next to his crewmate from Sierra Leone, Isaac Peppel. 
I looked for John Thomas's grave one morning last autumn. Glanadda Cemetery is not large, but it took me more than an hour to find this specific gravestone. Thomas is obviously quite a common Welsh name, and I found several graves of other Thomases who had died while serving in the First and Second World Wars. When I eventually found the grave of John Thomas, it was in a place I'd walked past several times already that morning. Not obscured or hidden at all, but easily overlooked. 

I thought about Thomas's wife, Amelia, who came here from Liverpool for his burial. I don't know why Bangor was chosen as his final resting place. I wondered what connected him to this town. He was just 21 when he died, so could not have lived in Liverpool for long either, although he had clearly put down roots there while not at sea. What about his family in Lagos, nearly 4000km from this cemetery in Bangor? Or the family of Isaac Peppel, in Sierra Leone? I'd guess that it's not unusual for sailors to die and be buried half the world away from their families, particularly during wartime. It must be very painful though. 

John Thomas had little connection to Bangor during his life, but his body has laid here now for over a hundred years. His story has become part of Bangor's history, and that of Wales. This part of the UK may still be very white but, if you look carefully, there is evidence that it hasn't been exclusively so for a long time. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Post Office Scandal and the Transformation of a Community

I live on the outskirts of Bangor, in a neighbourhood named Glanadda. It is built around Caernarfon Road, one of the main routes into and out of the city. Glanadda is a residential area bordered by several big box stores - Matalan, B&M, Go Outdoors, Aldi, and the just opened Food Warehouse, to name a few. A couple of minutes' drive away is the Tesco Superstore. The retail parks on Caernarfon Road have gradually replaced the hollowed out High Street as Bangor's shopping centre. If you live in Bangor or its surrounding villages and you need to buy something - providing you can't get it online - this is where you come. But if you require a more bespoke service, such as paying a bill, transferring money, or posting a parcel, then Caernarfon Road has nothing to offer you. These services are often crucial to communities, particularly for residents who can't drive, or who rely on consistent and familiar human assistance such as that you'd find at a post office branch. ...

In Praise of Peppa Pig

A few weekends ago, my daughter was feeling a bit unwell. On the Saturday morning, we took her to see some highland cows on a nature reserve. She wasn't too interested and seemed a bit lethargic. Before dinner, I sat down with her and some Peppa Pig stickers I'd got the day before. We spent a good 10 minutes peeling them off and sticking them into a sketchbook. We talked about the characters, especially "Mummy Pig" and "Daddy Pig," and she used a word I hadn't heard her use before: "brella," while pointing to Peppa's umbrella. She got some of the smaller stickers caught on her thumbs and asked for help getting them off. "They're really sticky," I said. She lit up at this interaction between us, and her enjoyment of the stickers continued over the next few days. In the settings I've worked in as an Early Years teacher, a certain pedagogy has mostly held sway. Open-ended and well-built toys, often made from wood,...

A Sense of Place

When you live in London you are rarely called upon to think about the rest of the UK. There is little pressure to consider the connection between the land beneath your feet and the other cities or rural parts of this country. Unless your personal circumstances force you to confront it, it is very easy to float through life without care or concern for the non-metropolitan view of what it means to live in the United Kingdom. Moving to North Wales, I was suddenly required to confront the boundaries and limitations of the place that I inhabit. The city I now live in, Bangor, is inextricably a place within a wider place. It would not exist if not for the resources within the mountains bordering it, or for the wealth Britain extracted from its colonies via slavery. My experience of living in Bangor is defined by both the city's close proximity to the mountains of Eryri and its distance from London, as well as almost every other major city in the UK. Before I moved here, I had...