Website navigation
Katharine Backhouse & the Quaker Women
Katharine Backhouse lived in the stately Ashburn House in Backhouse Park, resplendent in the shade of chestnut trees, blazing orange at the turn of the seasons. She was a Quaker involved in the anti-slavery movement, raising awareness of the human cost of sugar, cotton and rum, shipped from slave plantations in the West Indies and sold in Sunderland grocery shops beside apples and oranges stacked in gleaming rows.
The Quaker community in the north-east used the wealth they made through banking to buy the freedom of individual slaves. Katharine had close links to the Richardson family in Newcastle, prominent Quakers who formed the Ladies’ Free Labour Produce Association in 1846. The association campaigned to raise awareness of the lives being lost in sugar and cotton plantations across the ocean. Determined women braved the cold streets year after year, handing out leaflets, rustling petitions and knocking on front doors with frozen fingers, persuading locals to stop buying ‘blood sugar’ imported from the West Indies; heavy with the ‘blood’ of enslaved people.
The women were persuasive with their inky fingertips, aching feet and bold persistence. The people of Sunderland began to boycott shops selling sugar from the West Indies and the city became known for stocking only ‘Freeman’s sugar,’ which came from the East Indies and did not cost human lives. They were inspired by the writing of William Fox, who said, ‘In every pound of sugar used, the produce of slaves imported from Africa, we may be considered as consuming two ounces of human flesh.’
During a time when millions of black and brown people were sold into slavery, Quaker women in the north-east extended their campaign to the sale of cotton and rum. They wanted to reveal the truth about the crushing conditions of the strangers who picked cotton leaves and sugarcane, demanding freedom and equality for all.