Abstract
Billy Waters was one of the best-known of the black London ‘beggars’ — ‘popular entertainers’ might be a far better way of describing many of them. He was a busker outside the Adelphi Theatre in the Strand, living as most of them did in the Parish of St Giles, ‘the Holy Land’, one of the St Giles’ Blackbirds, as they were called. His companion was African Sal, and the two of them were sufficiently famous to be immortalized in Staffordshire pottery figures.1
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Notes and References
John Hall, Staffordshire Portrait Figures (London, 1972), pp. 34–5.
Folarin Shyllon, Black People in Britain 1555–1833 (O.U.P. 1977), 159–65.
James Grant, Sketches in London (London, 1838), p. 44.
Pierce Egan, Tom, Jerry, and Logic: or, Life in London… performed with the most enthusiastic applause at the Caledonian Theatre, Edinburgh (n.p. 1823), pp. 42–3; pp. 51–3.
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Communicated by Christopher Fyfe: the letter is in the Macaulay Papers in the Huntingdon. Library, California. See also Viscountess Knutsford, Life and Letters of Zachary Macaulay (London, 1900), pp. 35–6.
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Tom Morris, ‘An Elopement in 18th-Century Wales: Jack Black of Ystumllyn’, Country Life, 6 September 1962, p. 518.
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Henry Angelo, Angelo’s Pic Nic (London, 1834).
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© 1983 Paul Edwards and James Walvin
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Edwards, P., Walvin, J. (1983). Contemporary Accounts of Popular Black Personalities. In: Black Personalities in the Era of the Slave Trade. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-04043-8_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-04043-8_7
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