Ignatius Sancho

Ignatius Sancho was born in 1729 aboard a slave ship in the Middle Passage, in transit from West Africa to the Spanish colony of New Granada. His mother died on the voyage; his father took his own life rather than continue in slavery. The Bishop of Cartagena baptized the orphaned infant Ignatius. He was brought to England in 1731 at approximately two years of age, the property of three sisters in Greenwich.

He escaped the Greenwich household in his late teens and found refuge at the Montagu family seat. John Montagu, the Second Duke of Montagu, gave him books and time to read; the duchess made him butler of the household after Montagu's death in 1749. He served as butler for the next two decades.

He retired from service in 1773 and opened a small grocery shop on Charles Street in Westminster — the trade selling tea, sugar, tobacco, and snuff. The shop's location near Parliament made it a meeting place for the literary and political circles of late-Georgian London. Sancho corresponded with Laurence Sterne, David Garrick, Samuel Johnson, and Charles James Fox. The published Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African (1782) — issued two years after his death — sold over twelve hundred copies in its first run and went through five further editions in the following decade. It is the founding work of Black British letters.

As a male property-owning householder under the eighteenth-century franchise, Sancho voted in the 1774 and 1780 British parliamentary elections — the first Black Briton on record to do so. He died of complications from gout at his Westminster home on the fourteenth of December 1780, age approximately fifty-one.

He is honored here as the first Black Briton to vote in a British parliamentary election and the founder of Black British letters.