Black Boy pubs: Who was the boy in the Swansea sign?

The image of a child on a pub sign left such an impression on a young writer that decades later he is still trying to figure out his identity.

Darren Chetty, who grew up in Swansea, said the portrait of a boy in a brightly colored turban outside the Black Boy pub was “only the third dark-skinned boy he had seen in Killay” in the late 1970s.

“The first time I saw this sign…I was sitting in my dad’s blue Mini in the [pub] parking lot,” Darren writes in his essay, “What happened to the black boy from Killay?

“I remember wondering: Who is that boy? Did he use to live here? Was he black in the sense of being African, as the name and his face suggested? Or Indian, as his clothes suggested? What was his connection? with the area? ?”.

Born to a Dutch mother and a South African-Indian father, Darren was the first member of his family to be born in Wales.

Growing up in a white suburb, he said his heritage “wasn’t something that was constantly on my mind…but there were certainly times when it would become something I would think about.”

In his essay, which appears in Welsh Plural: Essays on the Future of Wales, he recalls first considering whether he was black at age seven after a neighbor used racist language when reprimanding him.

He recalls another story passed down from his parents, where a nurse used a racial slur when commenting on his appearance after he was born.

Aside from his older brother, his brother’s classmate and the odd footballer from opposing teams while watching Swansea City – where he saw a banana being thrown onto the pitch – the boy depicted on the pub sign was the only other person dark-skinned from his childhood.

“I was very interested [the pub sign] when I was a kid and it stayed with me as I grew up,” he said.

“It wasn’t one of several images of black and colored people I was seeing in Swansea, it was the only one.”

Today the name of the pub remains, but the sign has disappeared, replaced by the image of a white boy in Victorian clothes, but it is an image firmly imprinted on the writer’s mind.

There are dozens of other Black Boy pubs across the UK, the origins of which are often attributed to a local African slave or King Charles II, who was often said to have a dark complexion.

But who was the particular black boy pictured in Killay’s pub?

A book discovered in the Swansea library gave Darren something to think about.

“In Wales during the eighteenth century, it was fashionable to employ a black servant,” writes David Morris in Black Presence in Eighteenth Century Wales.

“In the popular mind, Africa and the West Indies conjured up images of ivory, Guinea gold, sugar, coffee…a black domestic servant allows the owner to associate with all that was fashionable in the New World. He also brought a touch of African exoticism to the living rooms of rural Wales”.

Darren also discovered that Swansea’s copper industry, which in 1823 supported 10,000 of the city’s 15,000 residents, saw imported copper and brass items as trade goods on the African coast of Guinea and eventually acted as African currency.

“Black children were bought with molten copper at White Rock [copper works in Swansea]Darren said.

Historian Chris Evans of the University of South Wales also told him that Welsh industrialists put hundreds of slaves to work in appalling conditions in Cuba’s El Cobre copper mines, decades after the abolition of the slave trade. slaves in Britain.

For Darren, the investigation brings “black history and Swansea into closer contact than I ever imagined” but still does not reveal the identity of the black boy from his childhood.

“Why was this boy dressed so, so regally?” he asked.

“He didn’t seem downtrodden and downtrodden, he seemed potentially rich, but then he found out that that wealth would probably have been his masters’ wealth and that he would have been in some kind of servant, if not in a position of actual slavery, changes the story again .”

The mystery remains unsolved.

“I couldn’t get to the bottom of why the pub was named after that, no one seems to have figured that out,” said Darren, who isn’t the only person fascinated by the old Killay sign.

Artist Daniel Trivedy exhibited a piece of art called Sign of the Times, which features a replica of the original Killay pub sign along with the image currently hanging outside the pub.

Writing about the sign change, he said: “Occasionally people find it necessary to alter the accounts of history to give a more palatable version of events – perhaps this was the case with the Black Boy pub sign.”

He said he originally thought depicting a white child on the pub sign was “to deprive Wales of some of its history and was an advocate of going back to a sign that better reflected its historical relevance”, but has since changed his mind.

“Along with the statues of Colston, Picton and other imperialists, I currently feel there can be no other option but to remove the sign and change the name of the pub,” he said.

Another artist, Ingrid Pollard, wrote Hidden in a Public Place after 20 years of research on Black Boy pubs.

She writes: “I think pub signs can be used to uncover hidden stories and heritage stories.”

In a BBC Radio 4 documentary, The Mystery of the Black Boy, the poet Lemn Sissay visits several Black Boy pubs in England.

He concludes the show by saying, “Personally, I wouldn’t go into a pub called The Black Boy again. I’m a black man and I find the title a bit derogatory and disparaging.”

Marstons, who now runs Killay’s Black Boy, was asked to comment.

There are scores of Black Boy pubs across the UK.

Some other Black Boy pubs have chosen to change names, such as the one in Shinfield which was renamed The Shinfield Arms in September.

Wales has at least two other Black Boy pubs.

There are currently no plans to rename The Black Boy in Newtown, Powys, whose owner, JD Wetherspoon, said he takes his name from “a historical chimney sweep name”.

A spokesperson said: “To date we have not received any complaints regarding the name and therefore at this time we have no intention of changing it, but we will keep matters under review.”

There is also the Black Boy Inn in Caernarfon, Gwynedd.

Pub owner John Evans said he believed the pub was named after John Ystumllyn, an 18th-century gardener who was kidnapped as an eight-year-old from West Africa and taken to Gwynedd, where he became a servant in the house of the Wynns. Ystumlyn family.

He was the first black person in the region whose life was well documented and married a local white woman, Margaret Gruffydd.

He is also the first black person in the UK to have a rose named after him: the John Ystumllyn rose.

Other theories include the pub being named after Charles II or a black buoy from the nearby harbour.

John said: “We’re custodians of a 500 year old pub and I wouldn’t want to change anything unless the consensus of the town as a whole said that’s what they want.”

He said he had received “very few” complaints, adding, “In fact, the number of black people who stay here and stay here regularly think it’s great.”

“I remember a guy coming down the street and saying ‘I have a pub named after me’. They don’t see anything racist in him.”

He acknowledged that some of the many images of a black child around the inn “must be looked at.”

“We’re looking at that right now, but the name is important because it’s part of the story,” he said.

For Darren, the issue isn’t whether pub signs should be changed or pubs renamed, though he said he believed the Black Boy pubs were probably “an anachronism that needs to move on”.

He said: “I’m intrigued by the arguments to justify keeping the names, which is sort of ‘it’s our heritage’ and yet people don’t really know what that heritage is, no one knows why the sign is there.”

He said that “it would give a very different connotation to the image of a black child if the people of Swansea knew the history of the city”.

“I think there is now a kind of confusion about what the name of the pub means,” he said.

“For me, when I leave East London, where I live, which is a very multicultural place, and go to Swansea and hear people talking about the black boy, it feels strange.”