Following the Reformation they sided with the Protestant cause. Tobias Frere’s son Thomas Frere of Occold (who in turn was grandson of another Thomas Frere of Occold– we really will have to get Barry to unravel this tortuous family tree) was twice Member for Norfolk in Cromwell’s Commonwealth Parliament. Other family members were rectors of local churches.

But this outwardly pious family found a new & more lucrative direction when the trade of slaves from West Africa to the New World began. The Freres established massive plantations in Barbados powered by bought in ‘Negroes’.

Later other family members, calling themselves Freer, set up further plantations in Carolina. Marriage into the Crispe family who had established the first permanent slave trading colony in West Africa, must have served their purpose well. John Frere’s three daughters were very ‘enterprising’ women, managing to marry eight rich and influential men between them, accumulating vast estates in the process.

The airport in Southern Barbados ‘Frere Pilgrim’ is testimony to one of their conquests.

Given the arbitrary & callous way in which the ordinary working people were treated at that time & the omnipotent power of the local squirarchy it would not have been such a great step to becoming a slave master. The treatment of English labourers in the seventeenth century was often cruel & invariably indifferent to their suffering. And often inflicted by the same slave owning families!

Thousands of English people laboured, & died, to fill their factories with the new fashionable luxury goods in these instances the brightly & fast dyed clothing.

What this illustrates is that the Afro–American slave trade by Europeans was not the unique one-off event which the current media frenzy would have us believe. Probably a similar number of slaves were taken from East Africa (& southern Europe including the English South Coast) for sex/service industries of Arabia, North Africa & Turkey. Long after abolition, Scottish Miners were being sold with the mines they worked in. Also serfs were being sold in Central Europe.

The Christian exploiters of their fellow man were made to feel comfortable in what they were doing by a particular reading of the Old Testament (Genesis 9:25-27) which branded Negroes as a cast out people. Hundreds of years later the Dutch Reform Church did something similar with Genesis 11: 1-9, to justify Apartheid in South Africa. The Islamic exploiters took similar comfort from their interpretations of the Holy Recitations. As slavery continues in the Islamic Sahel region of Africa they presumably still take this comfort.

The current PC view that most bad things have emanated from White Heterosexual Adult Males isn’t historically justified. All races, genders, sexual dispositions, age groups, religions, classes etc are clearly equally capable of being the victims & perpetrators of gross inhumanity.

We cannot change history but we can learn from it. Instead of hollow apologies, we need a new William Wilberforce to take on today’s slavery.

Andy Andrews