Black and British: A Forgotten History, from the acclaimed historian and star of 'Celebrity Traitors'

by David Olusoga

Among the mixed-race students sent to Britain for their educations were the children, usually the sons, of British planters in the West Indies who had children with enslaved women. The most fortunate of these received the educations befitting Georgian gentlemen. One of the most remarkable cases was that of Nathaniel Wells, the favourite son of a prominent St Kitts plantation owner. Educated in Britain, in 1794 he inherited a fortune worth around £200,000 on his father’s death, which included three sugar estates and the slaves who worked them. Among the slaves was his own mother, an enslaved woman who had remained the legal property of his father. Wells freed his mother and a handful of other relatives but continued as a slave owner, despite his own racial heritage. As a mixed-race man he understood that his presence in the Caribbean would be unwelcome and so never returned to St Kitts. He used his great fortune to buy a country home, the grand Piercefield House, near Chepstow, and there he played the part of a country gentleman, becoming High Sheriff of Monmouthshire.