Charles Padie Lamb

Britain ran the slave trade. Britain sent seven-year-olds into the mills. And Britain ended both. 🇬🇧 How can one country be the villain and the hero? It can't. There were two Britains. One owned people. The other did the work. When slavery ended, historians counted every slave owner living in Britain. About three thousand, in a country of sixteen million. 📜 Bankers, merchants, lords and MPs. The other Britain couldn't vote them out: most men had no vote, and no woman had one. 🗳️ Take Samuel Greg. In 1784 he built Quarry Bank Mill at Styal, in Cheshire. By the time he retired, it was the biggest cotton mill in the country. More than half his workers were children. Many were orphans from the workhouse. 🧵 Four thousand miles away, the Greg family owned the Hillsborough sugar plantation on Dominica, worked by enslaved Africans. 🌴 The blankets they slept under were made at his mill. Orphan children here. Enslaved Africans there. Making money for the same family. So who stood up to them? In 1787 a young campaigner called Thomas Clarkson went to Bristol. ⚓ Thompson, landlord of the Seven Stars pub, refused to help trick sailors onto the slave ships. Instead he took Clarkson round the dockside pubs at night, at real risk to himself. The crew lists showed two slave ships to Africa had killed more British sailors than eighty-three ships to Newfoundland. Their stories helped turn the country against the trade. Manchester didn't even have an MP. So more than ten thousand people, about one in five in the town, signed a petition to end it. ✍️ In 1830 Richard Oastler heard about Bradford's mills. One boy of about ten worked from six in the morning till ten at night. Oastler wrote to the Leeds Mercury. He called it Yorkshire Slavery. 📰 In April 1832, thousands of mill workers walked to York to fight for their children. They called it the Pilgrimage of Mercy. 🚶 Against slavery, women went door to door. One petition in May 1833 carried 187,000 women's names. Not one of them could vote. 👩 Then came two dates. 28 August 1833: Britain signs the law to end slavery across most of the Empire. 🇬🇧 29 August 1833: the very next day, it signs the Factory Act. No child under nine in most textile mills. 🏛️ Neither law was a gift from the slave owners. Both were won by people with no vote, no money and no power. So next time someone tells you "Britain did this", ask them: which Britain? Odds are five thousand to one you come from the side that won. Watch the full story. 🎥 Be part of us. 🧵👈🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧

Chinese Gordon rode into a slave traders' camp ALMOST ALONE. 🐪 Inside, an army. ⚔️ He had come to tell them the slave trade was over. 🇬🇧 China's Emperor had once offered him a fortune. He refused it. 💰 Egypt offered him ten thousand pounds a year. He took two thousand. In less than a year, he caught sixty-three slave caravans. ⛓️ Britain remembers how he died at Khartoum. It forgot what he did there. His statue stands on the Embankment in London. Most people walk straight past. 🏛️ The other half of his story has waited a hundred and forty years. Help us tell stories like his: proudofus.co.uk/support Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧

Nelson got a column. These men got nothing. ⚓ 1808 to 1867: the West Africa Squadron. 🇬🇧 Sixty years hunting slave ships. ⛵ 1,600 ships taken. 150,000 people freed. ⛓️ Two thousand British sailors died doing it. 🪦 Malaria. Yellow fever. Sewn into their own hammocks. 🌊 There is no national monument. 🏛️ Not one. ❌ Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧