{"id":1654,"date":"2022-04-07T09:31:12","date_gmt":"2022-04-07T09:31:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.sunderland.ac.uk\/seagullcity\/?page_id=1654"},"modified":"2022-04-07T09:31:12","modified_gmt":"2022-04-07T09:31:12","slug":"katharine-backhouse","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/wp.sunderland.ac.uk\/seagullcity\/katharine-backhouse\/","title":{"rendered":"Katharine Backhouse"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Born: 5 October, 1831<\/p>\n<p>Died: 22 May, 1879<\/p>\n<p>Katharine was from the Mounsy family of Quakers who lived in Darlington.\u00a0 She married another Quaker, Edward Backhouse of Sunderland in 1856 (he would have been 48 and his first wife had died).\u00a0 They had no children.\u00a0 Backhouse is one of the large Quaker families of bankers who lived in the area.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Quakers and anti-slavery<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>There is a long history of Quakers being involved in the anti-slavery movement in the UK.\u00a0 Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade Committee was formed in 1787.\u00a0 Nine of the twelve members were Quakers, including printer James Phillips and three were Anglicans including Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp (secretary).\u00a0 The Quakers were particularly active in the anti-slavery movement in the North East.\u00a0 The Richardsons are notable leaders in this, although most of the other families in the region were related to them by marriage.\u00a0 Anna and Ellen Richardson of Newcastle, for example, paid \u00a3150 to purchase the freedom of Frederick Douglass in 1846.<\/p>\n<p>In the list of subscribers to Anti-Slavery Monthly Reporter 1825 \u2013 1829, there are large sums of money recorded from the Sunderland branch.\u00a0 For example, in 1828, \u00a35 1\/6 comes from proceeds from publication sales in Sunderland.<\/p>\n<p><em>\u00a0<\/em>The Richardsons of Newcastle formed the Ladies\u2019 Free Labour Produce Association in 1846.\u00a0 This was inspired by a pamphlet by William Fox (1793), whose \u2018An address to the people of Great Britain on the consumption of West Indian produce\u2019 aimed at applying economic pressure on the market through abstinence of slave-produced goods such as cotton and sugar.\u00a0 He used particularly graphic metaphors:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;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 \u2026 in every pound of sugar used, the produce of slaves imported from Africa, we may be considered as consuming two ounces of human flesh.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Sunderland is listed as one of 26 Ladies\u2019 Free Labour Produce Associations 1840s-50s.<\/p>\n<p>The women used the name \u2018blood\u2013sugar\u2019 to emphasise that the sugar was gained with the blood of those enslaved. \u00a0They 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 \u2018tainted\u2019 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 \u201cFreeman\u2019s\u201d sugar (from the East Indies rather than the West Indies) as a direct result of the actions of these women.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Born: 5 October, 1831 Died: 22 May, 1879 Katharine was from the Mounsy family of Quakers who lived in Darlington.\u00a0 She married another Quaker, Edward Backhouse of Sunderland in 1856 (he would have been 48 and his first wife had died).\u00a0 They had no children.\u00a0 Backhouse is one of the large Quaker families of bankers [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1654","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.sunderland.ac.uk\/seagullcity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.sunderland.ac.uk\/seagullcity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.sunderland.ac.uk\/seagullcity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.sunderland.ac.uk\/seagullcity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.sunderland.ac.uk\/seagullcity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1654"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wp.sunderland.ac.uk\/seagullcity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1654\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1655,"href":"https:\/\/wp.sunderland.ac.uk\/seagullcity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1654\/revisions\/1655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.sunderland.ac.uk\/seagullcity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}