{"id":43062,"date":"2018-05-29T15:51:06","date_gmt":"2018-05-29T13:51:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/2018\/05\/29\/paterson-joseph-on-sancho-the-first-black-briton-to-vote\/"},"modified":"2018-05-29T15:51:06","modified_gmt":"2018-05-29T13:51:06","slug":"paterson-joseph-on-sancho-the-first-black-briton-to-vote","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/?p=43062","title":{"rendered":"Paterson Joseph on Sancho: the first black Briton to vote"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I\u2019ve always wanted to be in a costume drama but not as a background figure. So the life of Charles Ignatius Sancho was an extraordinary discovery for me \u2013 as both an actor and a black BritonHeard the one about the black guy born on a slave ship in the early 18th century? He ended his days running a grocery store in Westminster. That was after a career as a famous musician, composer, author and actor. And in 1774 he became the first black Briton to vote. Never heard of him? Neither had I, until I discovered Thomas Gainsborough\u2019s portrait of the extraordinary Charles Ignatius Sancho, in 2007, in a book by historian Gretchen Gerzina called Black England.The remarkable thing about this discovery is not that most people hadn\u2019t a clue about such an amazing pioneer of multi-ethnic Britain, but that I, a black Briton, had no clue either. Truth is, I had presumed that the presence of black people in Britain began in 1948 with the 492 passengers (plus a stowaway), on board the ship HMT Empire Windrush when it docked at Tilbury from Montego Bay, Jamaica. Any previous dealings black people had had with the UK would have been remote, I imagined: African slavery, Caribbean plantations, etc. But was that right? Continue reading&#8230;<br \/>\nVia: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/stage\/2015\/sep\/14\/paterson-joseph-sancho-18th-century-black-british-author-actor\" target=\"_blank\">Paterson Joseph on Sancho: the first black Briton to vote<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I\u2019ve always wanted to be in a costume drama but not as a background figure. So the life of Charles Ignatius Sancho was an extraordinary discovery for me \u2013 as both an actor and a black BritonHeard the one about the black guy born on a slave ship in the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43062"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43062\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theworldwidejournal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}