The records of the Tharp family of Chippenham, near Newmarket include substantial material relating to their estates in Jamaica where the family found its fortunes during the eighteenth century.
Deeds, plans of estates; inventories and valuations of slaves and stock; crop books and records of the sugar trade are all deposited at Cambridgeshire Archives.
John Tharp, Esq. 1736-1804 was born in Jamaica to a wealthy plantation owner and purchased his own vast estate there, Good Hope, when he was only 23. He prided himself on his reputation for being a more benevolent slave owner than most: ‘My negroes have increased and are happy. They kill me with their constant visits and attentions. It gives pleasure, though I am fatigued to death before the day is half gone for I must talk and shake hands with every one of them.’
It is known that John Tharp took pains to ensure his slaves were well fed, clothed and housed. He established a Free School to teach some of the more able children to read and write and next to that a hospital, depicted below:
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Plan of hospital for sick slaves on the Good Hope Estate, 1798.
[Cambridgeshire Archives: R55/7/121/16]
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In 1785, Tharp set up another estate in Jamaica which he named Covey. The sugar factory he established there was to become one of the largest and most productive in the West Indies and to work it he purchased over 300 slaves, formerly the property of Edward Gardiner, deceased.
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Valuation of Gardiner's slaves on the Bossue and Prospect Pen estates listed under their various occupations with their given names.
[Cambridgeshire Archives R55/7/123/3]
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The majority were field workers, two of whom called ‘Jammie’ and ‘Doctor’ we assume to be the more senior, experienced workers since they were valued at £150 each. At the other end of the scale were children like the curiously named ‘High Tide’ assessed at only £5.
Thomas Clarkson
Back in England at about this same time, Thomas Clarkson, who was born in Wisbech in 1760, was embarking upon his struggle to secure the abolition of the slave trade. His pamphlet 'A Summary View of the Slave Trade and of the Probable Consequences of Its Abolition' published in 1787 brought together all the evidence and arguments he had collected in support of the cause but it did not have the desired impact.
Although the 1807 Abolition of Slavery Act introduced a £110 fine payable for any slave found upon British ships, this had little effect in stamping out the trade and it was not until 1833 that an act to abolish slavery throughout the British colonies was passed.
The victory was hollow though: the system of "apprenticeship" introduced by this act still compelled former slaves to continue working for their masters for a further 6-12 years without pay, and full emancipation came only with the abolition of the system under the Slave Trade Act of 1839. Soon after this the Covey estate was abandoned.
Joseph Beldam
The framing of this ground-breaking legislation was the last major effort of Joseph Beldam, 1795-1866 of Royston, Herts. The many anti-slavery letters, pamphlets and other papers his work generated went undiscovered until 1946 when they were presented to the West India Reference Library (now the National Library of Jamaica) at the Institute of Jamaica but some duplicates of the pamphlets which he wrote for the Anti-Slavery Society survive among the Beldam estate and family papers in Cambridgeshire Archives [R58/8/5].