The Obstinacy of Fowell Buxton
Fatherless teenage tearaway Fowell Buxton was not a promising boy, but the Gurney family changed all that.
1818-1834
King George III 1760-1820
From Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.
Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton (1786-1845) in Jamaica. Like William Wilberforce, Thomas Gibson and Thomas Clarkson, Buxton was a Christian, and his conviction that slavery’s worst enemies were Christianity, the spread of Western civilisation and the opening up of Africa to free trade inspired the career of another remarkable Christian missionary and campaigner, David Livingstone.
Introduction
William Wilberforce’s retirement in 1825 left a vacancy for the Commons’ leading anti-slavery campaigner. The man who stepped into his shoes, decrying slavery as ‘repugnant to the principles of the British constitution and of the Christian religion’, was Fowell Buxton (1786-1845), and few who knew him as a child could have believed it.
AT fifteen, Fowell Buxton was illiterate, idle and self-willed. Yet his mother always insisted, ‘You will see it will turn out well in the end’, and after he was befriended by the family of banker John Gurney, Fowell justified her faith.
He graduated from Dublin University, took a job in his uncle’s brewery, and married Hannah Gurney. In 1818, he was elected MP for Weymouth, and campaigned alongside Hannah’s sister Elizabeth Fry for prison reform. He saw the death penalty cut from over two hundred offences, leaving just eight. In 1824, he became founding Chairman of the RSPCA.*
But his life’s work had been settled in 1821, when his sister-in-law Priscilla had spent her last breath begging Fowell to free the Empire’s remaining slaves. On 1st August, 1834, the day that Fowell’s daughter Priscilla was married, Parliament’s Act emancipating all slaves came into force.
“The bride is just gone”, he wrote to a friend; “and there is not a slave in the British colonies!”
Based on ‘Self-Help; with Illustrations of Conduct and Perseverance’, by Samuel Smiles.
Strictly speaking, Buxton, Wilberforce and others founded the SPCA, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. ‘R’ for ‘Royal’ was added by Queen Victoria in 1840.
