Ignatius Sancho's London

The Black population in London in 1800 was thought to have been between 10-20,000 out of one million people. It consisted of:

• Black British citizens and enslaved people • Formerly enslaved people • Black Loyalists who had fought for the British during the Revolutionary War • Black/African sailors • Free Black immigrants • Several African princes

Digital maps allow us to see the complex social geographies of eighteenth-century London. We can pinpoint various places associated with Black Londoners, creating more vivid and dynamic portraits of the diversity of their lives and a more complex picture of British social history.

Focusing on mapping Sancho's world enables us to recover and literally see Black presences in Britain well before the more familiar migrations that followed the Second World War.

Joseph Jekyll’s biography, prefacing Sancho’s Letters, has proven to be largely fictionalised. And while it is often assumed that between 1729-1749 Sancho lived in Greenwich near the Montagus, as a member of the household of sisters related to the Earl of Dartmouth, in fact, the dates of the Legge sisters do not align with the other confirmed facts of Sancho’s early years. Therefore, evidence of Sancho’s early life remains elusive.

Before or soon after Duke John died in 1749, Ignatius Sancho formally joined the Montagu household. He soon became the Duchess of Montagu’s butler, receiving an annuity of £30 per year after her death in 1751.

After Sancho received his yearly annuity, rather than ‘gambl[e] away his money’ as the Jekyll biography claims, evidence from the Boughton archives of the Montagu/Buccleuch families’ bond records suggests he remained associated with and working for the Montagus, either partially or throughout this time. 

After he received the £30 a year annuity, rather than lost years of ‘gambling away his money’ as the Jekyll biography claims, new evidence from the Boughton archives of the Montagu/Buccleuch families suggests he remained associated with and working for the Montagues, including at their Riverside villa in Richmond.

As the butler in the Montagu household, Sancho would have been the head of the household staff and other servants would have worked for him. He also would have eaten the same food as the Montagu family at the second table, before the other servants (which might have led to the development of his gout).

Sancho had his own room in the Richmond villa. This 1772 room inventory document comes from the Buccleuch archives and demonstrates his long service and importance to the Montagu family.

While working for the Montagues, Sancho would have traveled with them between their various houses, including Richmond, Greenwich, Bloomsbury, and Westminster in the South East—and also to Deene Park and Boughton Hall in Northamptonshire, shown here.

Sancho's travels also took him to the Montagu residences in Scotland.

Among the locations Sancho stayed in Scotland was the Lord Chief Baron's House in Dalkeith.

The Montagu family had 27 houses in total, and one of the most important was at Privy Gardens in the heart of Westminster, on the bank of the Thames. This would have been the Montagu house that Sancho knew best—and explains the connection between Sancho and the servants of other aristocratic families who worked nearby and with whom he corresponded.

Sancho worked as a valet for George, 1st Duke of Montagu (of the Second Creation), who from 1752 was Governor and Captain of Windsor Castle. Sancho would have often accompanied him there, giving him access to royal circles.

Sancho had his own room in Windsor Castle. This 1763 inventory from the Buccleuch archives reveals its contents.

Sancho’s network of correspondences crossed many class and racial boundaries. As this flow map demonstrates, Sancho and his letters traversed the entire country.

In 1758 Sancho married Ann Osborne here at St Margaret’s church right next to Westminster Abbey. Ann was born in London and baptised at the Church of St. Mary in Whitechapel on 26 September in 1733. Her parents, John and Mary (Clarke) Osborne had married in the same church in 1732 on the 5 of November. Ann Sancho was a free Black British woman and central to Sancho's story.

After they were married, the Sanchos moved to Cannon Row. Valets often travelled with their employers and it is likely that Anne would have remained at home, looking after their burgeoning family.

It was previously understood that Ann and Ignatius had seven children. In the course of our research, we unearthed evidence that they actually had eight children in total.

In addition to the letters, Sancho also wrote music. In 1767 the Duke of Montagu spent 5 shillings buying Ignatius Sancho’s music books. Sancho continued writing music such as minuets and cotillions and published several of these pieces in 1769, 1770, and 1779.

 A sample of the music can be found here. 

In 1766, Sancho wrote to the popular sentimental novelist, Laurence Sterne and asked him to include an anti-slavery message in his next novel. Sterne replied that he had been thinking along the same lines and in the 1767 volume of Tristam Shandy, he includes a 'tender tale' about 'the sorrows of a  friendless poor negro girl.'

In 1768 when Gainsborough was painting the portraits of the 3rd Duke and Duchess of Montagu, he also painted Sancho's portrait. This painting remained with the Sancho family, until daughter Elizabeth gifted it to the painter William Stevenson–one of Sancho’s letter writers and a major supporter of the family.

In 1773, it is thought that the 3rd Duke of Montagu purchased a shop in Westminster for Sancho after he retired from household service—supposedly because of his gout. While a shopkeeper, he wrote many letters to former servants, as well as to gentry and nobility.

The shop, which opened in 1774, was small but sold a variety of items, many of them slave-produced products such as tobacco, sugar, tea, and coffee. It also sold sheet music of Sancho’s own compositions and other daily supplies. Many of the recipients of his letters, who came from a range of social and racial backgrounds, frequently visited Ignatius Sancho and his family here throughout the 1770s. It is fair to assume it was a social hub in Westminster.

Here is the view of Charles Street from Parliament Street in Westminster: 1780 vs 2022.

One side of Sancho's business card which was used to promote his shop on Charles Street.

The shop and its location allowed Sancho to continue his friendly connections across a diverse range of London society. In addition to close relationships with friends and colleagues that he met during his service with the Montagues, Sancho was also acquainted with the popular actor David Garrick - who was known for his adaptations of Shakespearean roles. Sancho also knew John Henderson, an up-and-coming actor of the time.

Sancho took Ann and his family to the theatre, getting tickets for the best seats in a box from his acquaintances Mr and Mrs Ireland, with whom actor (and friend of Sancho’s) Mr John Henderson was residing at the time in Maiden Lane. In 1777 Sancho took two of his daughters, Mary Ann and Elizabeth, to see Henderson perform Falstaff (Shakespeare’s Henry IV), having received a complimentary ticket from Henderson himself.

Sancho became a literary celebrity in 1775 after the publication of his letter to Laurence Sterne in a volume of Sterne's correspondence. In addition to offering vivid details of his own life in London as a Black family man, Sancho’s letters also provided fascinating descriptions of local events such as the Gordon Riots that rocked London in June of 1780.

Sancho died after a long illness, assumed to be associated with his gout, in December 1780. He left behind his wife and five children. In 1782, some of Sancho’s letters were collected, edited, and then published by his friend, Frances Crewe. They were incredibly popular and went through five editions.

After his father's death, William Sancho had a series of successful careers. He undertook an apprenticeship with Edward Jeffery’s printing and publishing business on Pall Mall. William sourced and bound books for the Montagu-Buccleuch family libraries.

He was also secretary for the Vaccine Pock Institute – a group pioneering the use of cowpox vaccinations to guard against infection with the deadly disease of smallpox. As secretary, William would have been a key figure in the group's work, and he remained involved as it occupied various premises around the Golden Square area in Soho in the early 1800s.

Insurance records show that in 1806 he was once again living and working as a bookseller with his mother Anne, this time at the Mews Gate on Castle Street.

The location of Anne and William's bookshop provides yet another powerful reminder of the centrality of Sancho's story to British history more broadly – the bookshop sat on the site of what is now the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square.

A white plaque commemorating Sancho in Westminster was placed near the historical site of the shop by the Nubian Jak Community Trust in 2007. People walking from Whitehall to St. James Park can look up and see it – on the first floor of what is now the Foreign and Commonwealth office. Sancho's remarkable life can help facilitate the recovery of historic Black British communities more broadly.

More research is needed to unearth the full range and scale of these important histories as many other notable Black people were living or travelling through London during the eighteenth century. Click the link to the  Unforgotten Lives  exhibition map to learn more…