John Gladstone used the compensation to diversify, investing in the booming railways. The heart of their slave empire was in British Guiana, at that time the most profitable of the British Caribbean colonies. John Gladstone: the prime minister’s fatherīy 1834, John Gladstone and his family had acquired 2,039 slaves for which they were awarded £93,526 by the Slave Compensation Commission.
People from very different backgrounds benefited from ‘property’ they owned in the Caribbean The last name in that alphabetical list is that of the man who became the moral lodestar around which the Clapham Sect orbited: William Wilberforce. It proudly lists the names of Clapham’s abolitionist heroes – men who, we are told, “laboured… until the curse of slavery was swept away from all parts of the British Dominions”. On the southern wall of Holy Trinity is a grey marble plaque, set into the red Georgian brickwork. This loose affiliation of friends and like-minded men committed their considerable energies to bringing to an end first the British slave trade then slavery itself. They depict the lives of saints – not biblical saints, but the ‘saints’ of the abolition movement.įrom the late 18th century, Holy Trinity Clapham was the parish church of the Clapham Sect – the ‘Clapham Saints’, as they are sometimes called. Inside, above the ornate mosaic floor and the neat rows of pews, are three stained-glass windows.
Tucked away under the trees in a shady corner of Clapham Common, south-west London, stands Holy Trinity church.
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