Born: 5 October, 1831
Died: 22 May, 1879
Katharine was from the Mounsy family of Quakers who lived in Darlington. She married another Quaker, Edward Backhouse of Sunderland in 1856 (he would have been 48 and his first wife had died). They had no children. Backhouse is one of the large Quaker families of bankers who lived in the area. In Sunderland, they lived in Ashburn House, which still stands in Backhouse Park. They were closely related by marriage to the Binns family, who became well-known grocers in Sunderland.
Quakers and anti-slavery
There is a long history of Quakers being involved in the anti-slavery movement in the UK. Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade Committee was formed in 1787. Nine of the twelve members were Quakers, including printer James Phillips and three were Anglicans including Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp (secretary). The Quakers were particularly active in the anti-slavery movement in the North East. The Richardsons are notable leaders in this, although most of the other families in the region were related to them by marriage. Anna and Ellen Richardson of Newcastle, for example, paid £150 to purchase the freedom of Frederick Douglass in 1846.
In the list of subscribers to Anti-Slavery Monthly Reporter 1825 – 1829, there are large sums of money recorded from the Sunderland branch. For example, in 1828, £5 1/6 comes from proceeds from publication sales in Sunderland.
The Richardsons of Newcastle formed the Ladies’ Free Labour Produce Association in 1846. This was inspired by a pamphlet by William Fox (1793), whose ‘An address to the people of Great Britain on the consumption of West Indian produce’ aimed at applying economic pressure on the market through abstinence of slave-produced goods such as cotton and sugar. He used particularly graphic metaphors:
- “A family that uses only 5lb. of sugar per week, with the proportion of rum, will, by abstaining from the consumption 21 months, prevent the slavery or murder of one fellow creature … in every pound of sugar used, the produce of slaves imported from Africa, we may be considered as consuming two ounces of human flesh.”
Sunderland is listed as one of 26 Ladies’ Free Labour Produce Associations 1840s-50s.
The women used the name ‘blood–sugar’ to emphasise that the sugar was gained with the blood of those enslaved. They were quietly active over a long period of time, getting people to sign petitions, distributing leaflets and handbills, going from door to door to persuade people to abstain from ‘tainted’ sugar and sellers to refuse to sell it. Women continued to encourage people to stop buying these goods but in addition to refuse to buy anything from shops that sold them. Sunderland became well-known as a town where the majority of grocers stocked only “Freeman’s” sugar (from the East Indies rather than the West Indies) as a direct result of the actions of these women.