LANCASTER BLACK HISTORY GROUP

Professor Gordon Walker

The Gillow archive is an extensive record of the activities of the Gillow furniture business, through nearly 200 years of trading. The archive includes the period of the 18^th century when mahogany was being regularly shipped to Lancaster, initially largely from Jamaica, having been cut, transported and loaded onto ships by enslaved labour in the British colonies.  Part of what made this a successful and rapidly growing business involved its high-end, expensive furniture, handcrafted from imported mahogany, being shipped back to the West Indies and sold to the rich European plantation owners, merchants and pillars of colonial society looking to furnish their homes in the latest fashionable styles. Ships moving mahogany planks one way, and the same mahogany in crafted furniture being transported back, with the violence of enslavement and forced labour therefore integral to the profit and wealth made from this trade.  

The archive held on microfilm at Lancaster University library is extraordinarily detailed, including records of day-to-day sales, ledgers and invoices, along with accounts, letters, memos and sketchbooks of furniture designs. When its original 150 volumes were put up for sale in 1962 it was banned for export because of its national importance and has proved something of a treasure trove for those interested in business history and the history of furniture making. It has formed the basis for several academic studies focused mainly on Gillow furniture designs, and on how its business was conducted. However, little is said in most of this work about Gillow’s success being both dependent on an ‘exotic’ tropical commodity produced by enslaved labour, and on selling directly into the wealth produced by the slave trade, both at home and in the colonies. With a few exceptions[i], either this is largely ignored, or taken as a simple matter of fact and of history.

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Shipping fine furniture to the slave colonies

The archive does not provide any insights directly into the working of the slave trade, it can though tell us something about related business activities and flows of commodities and income. For example, moving the microfilm reader through the ‘Waste Book’ record of day-to-day business during 1771-72 there are entries listing purchases of mahogany furniture by wealthy local families and by owners of grand houses across the country, along with commissions of work for Lancaster Castle and transfers of chairs, tables and sideboards to Gillow’s London shop. But then a long entry appears, dated 22^nd November 1771, covering five pages of the records, headed with ‘Adventure of the Nancy, Robert Russell Master, for Jamaica consigned to Mr Swarbrick merchant there’ (see Figure 1 below)

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‘Mr Swarbrick’ to whom the consignment is destined is John Swarbrick, a fellow Lancastrian and one of a number of agents or merchants based in the Caribbean that Robert Gillow, and his sons Richard and Robert who took over running the business, worked with, both for selling furniture and sourcing mahogany and other plantation, slave-produced commodities (such as sugar and rum) to ship back to Lancaster. The list of furniture that follows includes chests, chairs, dining tables, wash stands, sideboards and side tables, along with other ‘sundry goods’ to be packed with the furniture, coming to a grand total of £267.13s.6d (equivalent to about £46,000 today). This is the biggest single transaction listed in the Waste Book during the year. The Nancy is a ship that figures in the records two more times in 1772 (in July and November) reflecting the pattern of its movement (or ‘adventures’ to use the term at the time) backwards and forwards across the Atlantic. The Nancy is just one of 56 ships listed in the archives as transporting goods for Gillows to the West Indies from 1744 to 1796[ii], emphasising the scale and continuity of what must have been a lucrative trade.   

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Relationships with slave traders and slave owners

A number of Lancaster family names also figure repeatedly in the records of sales of 1771-72 – Rawlinson, Hinde, Satterthwaite and Lindow – all of whom had family members involved in either the transatlantic slave trade (through captaining or owning slave ships, and/or investing in slave voyages), or involved in what Catherine Hall terms the wider ‘ slavery business’, for example as slave owners (see for example the LBHG blog on William Lindow who was involved in every aspect of these trades). These families are detailed in the archive entries as buying furniture and other luxury goods from Gillows, spending wealth accumulated, at least in part, through the slavery economy. Some, such as the Rawlinsons, were also shipping Gillow furniture to colonial outposts, and bringing back mahogany and other goods to sell in Lancaster and Liverpool as an integral part of the triangular structure of the Atlantic slave trade. For example, there are entries detailing sales of Gillow furniture and other goods to the Rawlinsons that are destined for various named ships including The Molly and The Sally.[iii]

Ship owning was integral to the partnerships between families and friends in Lancaster, and Gillows were part-owners, often with other Lancastrians, of a number of ships plying various trading routes to a range of destinations, mainly on a bi-lateral basis. Evidence recently identified in the archive by Elder and Stuart[iv], however shows that one of these ships, The Gambia, was used for the triangular transatlantic slave trade, making two voyages from Lancaster to enslave Africans in 1755 and 1756 and selling this human cargo in Charleston (South Carolina) and Jamaica respectively.  Robert Gillow had a 12^th share in the ownership of The Gambia and Figure 2 shows details of his 12^th share of income from the first of these two voyages. The ‘Net Proceeds of Sales’ of £170.8s.10^1/2d (equivalent to about £32,000 today), listed here includes proceeds from the selling of enslaved Africans, but the relative amounts of contributing elements are not itemised. Elder and Stuart argue that this was not a financially successful or significant investment by Robert Gillow, and after The Gambia was wrecked and lost on a 3^rd voyage in 1757, he and his sons do not appear to have repeated this direct involvement in making profit from transatlantic slave trading.

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Making money from slave produced commodities

Other parts of the archive make clear that the Gillow family members involved in running the business were not just buying mahogany as supplied by ships arriving at Lancaster or Liverpool, but were closely embroiled in discussions about the quality and price of the wood they were directly sourcing, with a letter from Richard and Robert Gillow to John Swarbreck, for example, detailing the length, breadth and hardness of the ‘mahog planks’ he needed, including the example in Figure 3 complaining that the roots and branches of mahogany trees ‘are good for very little’.  The felling of trees to obtain the most valuable main trunk was dangerous and harsh work for the enslaved African labourers in Jamaica (working in gangs of 30 or 40 men, women and children), as was dragging the enormous logs to the coast or to rivers, cutting them into planks and loading onto ships[v]. Whilst far removed from these working conditions, the Gillows were surely well aware of what was involved and whose lives were being exploited. Furthermore, both Robert Gillow (the father) and Richard Gillow (his son) travelled to the West Indies as they were developing and learning about the merchant and mahogany trade and would have consequently experienced the system of colonial slavery at first hand[vi]. The letters in the archive also make clear they were getting their colonial agents to buy significant quantities of other slave produced plantation commodities to ship back to Lancaster to sell on and build the wealth of their business (they were very much merchants as well as furniture makers), including shipments of sugar, rum and cotton.

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Using the archive

Although the archive has been studied intensively for various purposes, more could potentially gleaned from carefully working through the extensive records of the Gillow furniture business. It is slow work winding through the microfilm reels (see Figure 4) and making sense of what has been written into ledgers and sales books centuries ago. There are none of the searching capabilities we are used to with digital archives, and the information which might be most relevant and revealing is not immediately obvious. But even just dipping into the archive makes clear, as Melinda Elder[vii] has argued, that mahogany and Gillow furniture were a distinctive part of the story of how Lancaster, a small port in North West England, was able to sustained strong connections into the colonial slave trade and why so much prosperity was drawn into the city during this period.    

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FOOTNOTES

i – Elder makes some use of the archive in her detailed account of Lancaster’s involvement in the slave trade, as does Schofield in earlier work; Stuart’s extensive analysis of the archive briefly discusses how Gillows trading activities were and were not connected to the slave trade. See also footnote 4.

ii – See pages 50 and 51 in Ingram, K. E. (1992) Furniture and the plantation: further light on the West Indian trade of an English furniture firm in the eighteenth century, Furniture History, 28, 42-97

iii – Entries in Day Book 344/20

iv – Elder, M and Stuart S (2021) Were the Gillows of Lancaster slave traders?, Contrebis, 39. https://lahs.archaeologyuk.org/contrebis39.htm

v – Anderson, J.L. (2012) Mahogany: the costs of luxury in early America, Cambridge: Harvard University Press

vi – Stuart S, Gillow 1730-1840, Dictionary of British and Irish Furniture Makers, https://bifmo.history.ac.uk/entry/gillow-1730-1840

vii – Elder. M. (1992) The Slave Trade and the Economic Development of 18^th Century Lancaster, Halifax.

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