I have invited Paterson Joseph to write an article about his novel – The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho.
I was first introduced to Charles Ignatius Sancho by my parents who also introduced me to Olaudah Equiano. I recently watched a play about Olaudah Equiano called The Meaning of Zong. Charles Ignatius Sancho is an important and significant person in context to my own life and many others who may or may not be aware why. Paterson Joseph to me represents a sort of spirit of Ignatius Sancho. He brings his story to life.
The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho
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The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho: Remarks from Actor and Author Paterson Joseph 5.9.23
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British Library, Preface to Sancho: An Act of Remembrance by Paterson Joseph
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Paterson Joseph takes Waterstones inside The British Library to see the documents that helped him write The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho
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Why Sancho?
By Paterson Joseph
London
June 6th, 2023
There are many personalities of African or African-Caribbean descent in Great Britain from the long eighteenth-century that I might have chosen to focus on. Why did I choose the controversial, long-overlooked and sometimes vilified figure of Charles Ignatius Sancho for my study in Black British history?
To begin with, Professor Gretchen Gerzina’s seminal book Black England – Life before Emancipation turned me from an ignorant Black Briton, convinced those who spoke of an earlier than-twentieth-century origin of Black Britain merely wishful thinkers – desperate to claim a place in the country that ignores or denies their presence – into an avid believer and student of that anterior African and Caribbean history that stretches all the way back to at least Roman Britain.
What I found in Professor Gerzina’s work changed not only my perspective on those seeking a knowledge of a Black British history, but also wrought a sea-change in me that has taken these past twenty-four years to fully complete.
… It began with an image, of course, the iconic image.
A Black Man is painted by the famous painter of The Blue Boy, Thomas Gainsborough. It is 1768. The sitter is looking off to our left. We observe him, but he is definitely not unaware of our gaze, our fascination. He gives nothing much away except … is that a faint smile playing around his beautifully rendered mouth?
This is no ‘noble savage’, that staple image of the Black body from time immemorial; he is neither object nor a complete fantasy – though, it must be remarked this is certainly a performance. He is depicted with a hand in his waistcoat; his right, working hand. This denotes a ‘man of leisure’. Not true, since he was working as the chief servant, the valet, to the Duke of Montagu – who in turn was Governor and Constable of the royal residence, Windsor Castle. A remarkably exalted position for a Black man. Nevertheless, there is his hand, tucked deeply into his waistcoat. This red waistcoat is not the livery of the Montagus but rather a costume from Thomas Gainsborough’s dressing up box, a box he used for many a client. Theatre as Art and Art as Theatre. The red pings out like a beacon, offset by the vibrant, shimmering gold of the rich braiding on the edges, the gold buttons, all capped with a bright, white cravat; the pigment Gainsborough used designed to cause the white to glow like a lamp.
Painted in his accustomed candlelight in one-hundred minutes in Bath in 1768, either in the spring or autumn of that year, this is a performance of person by both Thomas and Charles. They are ‘saying’ something here, not merely recording an image of a trusted, loved and loyal servant. This man was liked by his employer, more, he seems to have been admired by him, too. And it was this image more than the other stories I had read up to that point in Professor Gerzina’s book, that caught my eye and captured my imagination.
Charles Ignatius Sancho’s image tells us something of the painter, too, it reminds us that Gainsborough was an outsider, as Sancho was an outsider. Gainsborough had come from Sudbury in Suffolk, a semi-rural spot to the South and east of the great Metropolis, growing exponentially in the early days of the eighteenth century. Later that century Thomas moved to the more fashionable (less expensive?) Bath, the famous spa town where the infirm and the hopeful came to ‘take the waters’ to cure their ailments and restore their health. It was also a town of pilgrimage for the great and the good – and the not-so-good to be vibrantly painted in the sombre gloom of the studio of that high-priest of portraiture, Thomas Gainsborough.
Gainsborough preferred landscape but, alas, portraits paid the bills. Given his workmanlike one-hundred minutes, he clearly had a lot of clients to get through. However, with this client he seemed to take a special delight in the set-up.
I first saw this image in Black England in 1999. I had never seen an image like it, that I can recall. I thought it must be a William Hogarth, that older contemporary of Gainsborough and his nearest, more successful rival Joshua, soon-to-be-knighted, Reynolds. William Hogarth, the lover of satire who laced several of his most famous works, not the least being A Rake’s Progress with Black witnesses. David Dabydeen’s brilliant book Hogarth’s Blacks details that purposeful peopling of Black figures in Hogarth’s prints, masterfully. I believed that Hogarth had attempted to depict the image of a free Black Man who might be dressed as finely as any lord, if granted an education and all the advantages high status could afford.
But, when I read the account of the life of a baby born on a slave ship, orphaned by the age of two and sent to live with three women in Greenwich, south-east London, made to stand as a silent pet, an ornament, in order to show how rich, exotic and powerful his mistresses were, who became an actor, writer, composer and musician, finally earning enough status and financial means to purchase a grocery store in a street adjacent to Downing Street in Westminster, well … I was almost compelled to pursue his unlikely and extraordinary story above all others.
I have only regretted venturing down this twenty-four-year cul-de-sac once. It was in the spring of 2021. I had sold the manuscript to Dialogue Books and my editor there, the extraordinarily perceptive Sharmaine Lovegrove, had asked me to whittle the story down from my planned – overly grand – three volumes to one and cut the word count to a slim eighty five thousand words. The average length, apparently, of a first novel. In fact, I had twenty years more of life to tell and had reached nearly one-hundred and ten thousand words, already. The task seemed beyond me. Sancho’s life, at least the fragments that we could be reasonably sure of, had not yet begun. I knew that squeezing it all in to fewer words than I had used, on top of finishing his life story was going to be difficult. The greater issue, however, proved to be his compromised position as a man who sold goods produced by captured
Africans …
I spent some days worried that I had backed the wrong historical horse, and that I was merely justifying the unjustifiable in a man who had been ignored by White historians and shunned by Black historians. I wondered if they may have both been correct in consigning Ignatius Sancho to the dustbin of history as a either too-slight or too-compromised a figure.
Most of us would probably prefer our idols to be ‘better’ than we are – we imagine our heroines and heroes to have overcome their obstacles in life with a degree of integrity and by sheer force of moral nature. I have a deep mistrust of that model of mythologising, but I am also attracted to it as a man in need of Black heroes I can hold up as shining examples of the best that ‘we’ can be.
When put this starkly, it appears a rather childish desire. Who but the very shallow can pretend to perfection in their life? Who could reasonably claim to have known all along where they needed to accept their circumstances and compromise and where to fight tooth and nail for change? Perhaps some. But none who I could ever hope to emulate. It remains beyond my ability or disposition to be that self-aware and flawless.
It turned out that those dark nights and days of the soul paid dividends. For in sending Sancho to the interrogation room of my imagination and forcing him to honestly confront his ‘sins’, I found understanding of his choices and even, grand to say but true, forgiveness for his flaws and foibles. Flaubert wrote in his novel Madame Bovary when the heroine of the story finds herself disparaging an Abbé whom she had longed admired and had placed on a pedestal, that ‘idols must not be touched, the gilt wears off in our hands.’ In the case of Sancho, stripping him of the ‘gilt’ of idolatry, had allowed me to see the performance behind Gainsborough’s portrait and forced me, gently but relentlessly, to confront my own performance of a ‘good’ self with a ‘pure’ heart.
And hard as that is, I prefer to live here, in the real world than behind the shiny glass of a captured snapshot of the person I might want to be, but who does not really exist. I chose Sancho, but in the end he taught me more about myself than I could ever have known without him.
Portrait of Ignatius Sancho by Thomas Gainsborough
Joshua Phillip
His personal website is
rorschacharchives.blogspot.com