Thomas Buxton
Turn over a £5 note and you will see Thomas Fowell Buxton - he’s the bespectacled on the far left, behind Elizabeth Fry - the world-famous prison reformer who has the starring role on our current fivers. It’s a rather appropriate role for Sir Thomas, who has faded into the background while those he worked with, such as Fry and William Wilberforce are known to this day. The oversight will be corrected a little on 11:30am, Wednesday 26 September, when a blue plaque to Buxton is unveiled at The Directors’ House, at the Old Truman Brewery, 91 Brick Lane. But … who was he?
Abolitionist, MP social reformer and brewing magnate, the tireless Thomas Buxton was born at Castle Hedingham in Essex in 1786. Father Thomas was Church of England, while mother Anna Hanbury was a Quaker (the Society of Friends), and it was this noncomformist tradition that was to shape young Thomas’s life and career. Family friends included the Gurney family from Norwich, a rich Quaker family which part-owned Gurney’s bank. Catherine Gurney was a Barclay, of Barclays Bank fame. A rich family then but one with a highly developed social conscience. Two of Catherine’s children, Joseph and Elizabeth, became firm friends of Thomas - a third sibling, Hannah, became his wife. Elizabeth meanwhile had married Joseph Fry and threw herself into working for the poor, becoming ordained as a Quaker Minister and working for prison reform, opening a training school for nurses and - in her spare moments - raising 11 children.
In 1808, the Hanbury family link saw Thomas Buxton getting a job at the Truman, Hanbury and Co brewery in Brick Lane. By 1811 he was a partner of the renamed Truman, Hanbury and Buxton, and he would subsequently become sole owner. And the Church of England going Thomas was becoming more immersed in the Society of Friends, attending meetings and battling for social causes. An early interest was the lot of impoverished weavers, the old home workers being forced into poverty by the new manufactories; in Spitalfields, once home to the silk industry, the problem was on his very doorstep. Thomas put money into Elizabeth Fry’s constantly cash-strapped prison reform campaign (Fry’s Bank was particularly rocky and Joseph Fry went bankrupt in 1828), and he was a member of Elizabeth’s Association for the Improvement of the Female Prisoners in Newgate. Fry had been shocked into action when taken to view the prison by a friend: female prisoners, some imprisoned without trial, were kept in appalling conditions along with their (obviously innocent) children.
In 1818, Fry got an ally in Parliament, with Thomas winning Weymouth and Melcombe Regis. The campaigning MP immediately began fighting for improvements in prison conditions, changes in the law and (extraordinary for the time) the abolition of capital punishment. This wouldn’t come for another 150 years or so, but Buxton, Fry, Joseph Gurney et al pushed things forward impressively. Having been stonewalled by successive Home Secretaries, they finally got the ear of the new incumbent, Sir Robert Peel, who brought in a number of penal reforms. The number of capital offences was cut from more than 200 to just eight.
Personal tragedy was to strike Thomas and Hannah around this time, losing four of their eight children to whooping cough in a five-week period in spring 1820. Another would die of consumption a little later. Perhaps he channelled his grief and anger into his work - certainly Thomas’s energy never seemed to flag, though his health began to fail. Buxton’s big project was the abolition of slavery. Although the slave trade had been officially abolished in 1807, slavery itself still existed. At first the aims were equivocal (the title of Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery is a bit of a shocker to modern eyes, with the campaigners seeking to soften the economic impact on the slave owners of an immediate abolition); the organisation would subsequently be renamed the Anti-Slavery Society. Taking over as leader of the abolitionists in the House of Commons following the retirement of William Wilberforce, Buxton would soon see slavery officially abolished in Britain. In 1832, Lord Grey’s government passed Buxton’s private bill, and the abolition of slavery in British dominions was given royal assent in August 1833. The law came into force on 1 August 1834 and has been described by Buxton’s most recent biographer as ‘a victory of moral principle over economic power’.
But the slave trade wasn’t dead, and Buxton realised the evil must be tackled at its source. He engineered a British government mission to the Niger River Delta in 1841, beginning negotiations with local leaders to dismantle the business. The mission foundered with many of the party dying from disease - it was a bitter blow for the ailing Buxton, whose health was swiftly declining. Created Baronet for his work in 1840, he wouldn’t live to see 60, dying on 19 February 1845. Never the star of the show, Buxton once modestly observed that ‘with ordinary talents and extraordinary perseverance, all things are attainable’.