Our Barking - Heritage Exhibition at Eastbury Manor House

We were invited to move the Barking Heritage Exhibition from its Summer residence at Barking Learning Centre to Eastbury Manor House for the Open House Festival in September.

During that fortnight there was a low-key opening-up of the splendid Tudor house, due to the sad passing of Queen Elizabeth II. Visitors to the historic home and grounds could view more about Barking’s heritage, including the grand homes which once graced Barking’s town centre, from Our Barking - Heritage Exhibition. Our wooden display boards look very handsome in the beautiful Painted Chamber – the traditional, plastic-free materials used, suited the Jacobean décor - and we are proud of B&D College students and staff who creating them!

In addition to the replica chamber of the period, we showed two further models – a model of Barking and the Roding River constructed from card by Gascoigne pupils and the maquette of a Barking Abbey model, designed to scale, - the bronze version to be installed at the Curfew Tower in coming weeks!

In addition to the exhibition, we put on family activities for the Sundays of the Open House fortnight. These included the opportunity to create colourful fish, a fun craft activity designed by Lesley Gould, in reference to Barking’s fishing industry, alongside creating colourful, paper, mosaics of Barking’s historic landmarks – The Curfew Tower, Wellington Mill and Barking fishing boats of course.

Younger visitors enjoyed recreating traditional shops, including balancing weights on the old-style weighing scales, and playing with traditional wooden toys. There were caps and bonnets, aprons, and shopping baskets to try and to help them act out roles of shoppers and shop assistants. There was also a magnetic fishing game and family fun was had playing the old Barking pub game, Quoits – trying to throw them on the numbered hobs.

The pop-up exhibition was also a starting point for a reminiscing workshop on, Bygone Barking, during the last week of the Open House festival. The aim of the session was to share memories of growing up, shopping, or working in Barking! We opted to focus on a few popular themes that we have researched on the project and which recur in Facebook chat on the Heritage Groups etc and which link to themes of the project - childhood/schooling, shops/shopping, food and drink…

We had linked refreshments, traditional cakes from Ritchie’s Bakery in nearby Faircross, with our hot drinks or R Whites Lemonade – which was produced in Barking for many years. We also worked in partnership with the LBBD archive - a treasure trove of local history, to find additional images and texts, as well as objects from the exhibition to help stimulate the memories/conversations.

We completed our series of events at Eastbury Manor House with a talk on Barking and Dagenham’s Colonial Heritage. Eastbury Manor House itself was a key starting point for the history of British colonialism, despite being built three decades before the first British Colony was established in the Americas. The sixteenth century was a time when Britain was keen to join the European race to be global traders and expand their territory overseas, affording all the bountiful benefits that entailed, such as access to fertile lands with a wider range of natural resources. British adventurers, like Sir Francis Drake, were chasing established European traders and colonisers, from Spain, Portugal, and The Netherlands, throughout the Tudor era, when Eastbury was built. John Moore, who was an Eastbury resident from 1590-1603, was a merchant and early investor in the East India Dock Company – originators of colonisation in Asian territories.

Andre & Chapman Map, 1772-4, showing 'East-Bury', south of Upney and north of Barking LevelAnne Sisley, wife of Clement Sisley - who built Eastbury Manor House in the 1500s, married Augustine Steward the elder, after Clement’s death. When she was widowed a second time her son, Augustine Steward the younger, invested his inheritance into the Virginia Company of London – established in 1606 by James I, to encourage settlement in eastern America. In 1612, Augustine’s name appears on the London Company’s third Virginia Charter, which extended the colony’s boundaries to include the Islands of Bermuda. He was perhaps hoping to profit from the emerging tobacco trade. When his cousin Samuel Argall was appointed Deputy Governor, he decided to board a sailing ship to Jamestown, Virginia – Britain’s first overseas colony. He arrived in 1618, greeted by his cousin, however tensions were fraught and instability in the colony led to both Augustine and Samuel returning to London by the Autumn of 1619. Read more about Eastbury's history here: https://www.eastburymanorhouse.org.uk/100-pictures

When the indigenous and indentured workers on the America plantations became unable to meet the intense demand for labour on colonial plantations, human trafficking from Africa spread into the British Colonies. This begun with the creation of The Royal Africa Company in 1660 and Virginia was the first British colony to legally establish slavery in 1661.

The first Caribbean colony established by the British was in St Kitts, in 1634-5. A century later the daughter of William Manning, a planter and trader from St Kitts, married Henry Bird, who was a cousin of William Wilberforce MP. When they were young children, Charlotte, an enslaved girl, was ‘gifted’ as an attendant and companion, to Elizabeth Manning 'and to her heirs forever'. Charlotte, most likely accompanied Eliza to Britain, whereupon she would have become her maid - as slavery had not been legalised on home soil and eighteenth century lawyers and magistrates such as Grandville Sharp and Lord Mansfield had argued and established that any enslaved workers brought over from the colonies would be legally liberated here. Wilberforce had abolitionist friends, including Prince Naimbana of Sierra Leone, and represented this movement within Parliament. His regular petitions and speeches eventually enabled the laws which ended the British slave trade in 1807, and outlawed the persistence of slavery throughout the British Empire in 1833. Last year students from Robert Clack School imagined the conversations that Henry Bird may have had with his wife and cousin and their various friends and family over a cup of tea and gave voices to their 'domestic servants' from St Kitts. These scenes were filmed by B&D College students at Valence House.

The cast of 'When Wilberforce Came to Tea' created and filmed at Valence House with students from Robert Clack School

https://valencehousecollections.co.uk/exhibitions/when-wilberforce-came-to-tea/

Several decades earlier the Quakers became the first religious group to publicly challenge the transatlantic slave trade. In 1760 Barking Quaker William Mead went on trial with William Penn for their beliefs – a famous hearing that led to the rule of law that a jury’s decision should be reached without a judge’s interference. Penn went on to found Pennsylvania in America – the first state to have an abolition society and to begin the emancipation of slaves from 1780. Harriet Tubman escaped slavery and risked her life to bring many more slaves to freedom in Pennsylvania during the nineteenth century, before the American Civil War, which finally led to the abolition of slavery across the United States in 1865. Revered Brown who had endured slavery in Baltimore before escaping to join the Unionist Army, visited a Barking Baptist Church in 1881, to share his experiences of Slavery and challenge its persistence in other parts of the world. His tour was entitled, ‘Scenes from a Slave Land’. His wife and family travelled with him and were photographed in Halifax: http://www.19thcenturyphotos.com/Mr-and-Mrs-Brown-and-family-126634.htm

These are some of the local historical reference points we covered in the Colonial Heritage Talk - as a starting point for discussions on both our colonial and cultural heritage. We also celebrated the story of Jack Leslie, a football player of both British and Jamaican heritage who made a dramatic impact on Barking FC a century ago and has recently been honoured with a statue at Plymouth Argyll FC. He was a striking forward, whose England call up and international potential was never fulfilled.

Jack Leslie sitting next to the Barking FC president after his memorable contribution to the 1919-20 season when they won two trophies!

Many local residents have a heritage that hails from other parts of the world, often because their families migrated from ex colonies, as far away and diverse as Australia, the Caribbean, India and Pakistan, Ghana and Nigeria. We welcome people to share their family histories with us and celebrate their stories of cultural heritage.

Thank you for The National Lottery Heritage Fund for funding our heritage engagement activities. The Our Barking Heritage Exhibition is currently in the Painted Chamber at Eastbury Manor House which is open on Sundays 10-4pm. We are also planning an online version of the exhibition and further research into various connections with our colonial heritage and sharing stories that have yet to be told.