By Kate Phillips

After much clamour from the anti-slavery lobby, much of it from Scotland, in 1823 the British government passed legislation to give enslaved people new rights. The Jamaican Assembly refused to implement these rights and Scottish planters were particularly vociferous in their opposition.

The press in Scotland printed the new rights in full. They included being allowed time off to go to Christian churches, not selling little children away from their parents and not stripping women naked and flogging them with whips.. that gives you some idea of what had become routine behaviour amongst some of the planters in Jamaica.

The enslaved knew all about these new rights and the Scottish planter opposition to granting them. There was a revolt on the Scottish estates in the west of Jamaica. It took a whole lot of troops to put down the rebellion.

John Malcolm of the slave trading/ owning family from Argyll who lived on the estate called Argyle with his ‘slave wife’ Mary asked that the slaves from this estate who had been involved should be hanged in his mill yard and the rest of his several hundred slaves assembled to learn a lesson by watching the hangings.

Governor Manchester (William Montagu, the 5th Duke of Manchesrer, who waa Govenor of Jamaica from 1808 to 1827) reported that there were horrible scenes as the enslaved tried to rescue their co -workers and family members.

Three of these slaves John Clarke, John Miller and Ben Reynolds killed themselves saying they would rather die as free men than be hanged as slaves and urging their fellow enslaved to continue the fight. This atrocity went down in slave history and Argyll became the cry for ‘don’t give up the fight’.

John Malcolm’s children from those days came to live at Crinan Argyll with their slave mother Mary. One of them emigrated to New Zealand. I gave a talk about all these events at University of Glasgow Human Rights forum which alerted members of the ‘Malcolm clan’ to read my book.

Kate Thomas who is descended from both sides of the family got in touch and I sent her some photos of the place where her ancestors grew up.

I had written a letter to the Herald around the time of the referendum expressing my concern that my children and grandchildren were not learning their real history. My grandchildren had learned about Scotland’s part in ending slavery but not how Scots were involved in slavery.

Lots more research from newspapers, letters home, memoirs of the people who lived at the time, then led me to writing an essay. I finally wrote a book and Luath Press in Edinburgh agreed to publish it.

Knowing what I did about all the black descendants of Scots in Jamaica I was concerned in 2019 that all the white diaspora in Canada, New Zealand and America had been invited to a ‘home coming’. The Jamaicans, so many of whom were our relatives, were not invited.

I have since given lots of talks. At one of the talks which I gave online I asked the Jamaicans in the audience how did they feel about a white lady writing their history. They replied that they knew their history and didn’t need anyone to tell them but we Scots needed to know that same history to accept the things which happened in the past and their consequences today.