Ignatius Sancho’s grocery

From 1774 the writer, composer and abolitionist Ignatius Sancho ran a grocery here — and from this address became the first Black Briton known to vote in a parliamentary election. Charles Ignatius Sancho was born in 1729, almost certainly aboard a slave ship in the Atlantic, and brought to England as a small child. After years in service to the Duke and Duchess of Montagu — and an extraordinary self-education — he and his wife Anne opened a small grocery and tobacconist’s at 19 Charles Street, Westminster, in 1774.

As a male householder paying parish rates, Sancho qualified for the parliamentary franchise, and in 1774 and again in 1780 he cast his vote — the earliest documented Black voter in British political history. His correspondence, posthumously published as Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African (1782), was a publishing sensation and a quiet, careful argument against the slave trade.

He died from gout at the shop on 14 December 1780; his obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine was the first known to be given to a Black Briton in the British press.

People

• Charles Ignatius Sancho

Themes

• Abolition
• Literature
• Civic life
• Music

Place

• Westminster
• Georgian

Hero image

• File: /media/people/ignatius-sancho.jpg
• Credit: Francesco Bartolozzi, after Thomas Gainsborough
• License: CC0
• Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AIgnatius_Sancho_MET_DP820264.jpg

Sources

• Carretta, Vincent. Ignatius Sancho: An African Man of Letters. London: National Portrait Gallery, 2015.
• Sancho, Ignatius. Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African. London, 1782 — full text on Project Gutenberg. — https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/27169
• Wikipedia — Ignatius Sancho (covers the English Heritage blue plaque and his civic legacy). — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignatius_Sancho#Recognition