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London hospital St Bartholomew’s linked to at least 50 slave-trade investors, research finds

A registry of British slave traders has identified at least 50 people with financial ties to St Bartholomew’s Hospital, including donors commemorated in its Great Hall, The Guardian reports.

AI News Feed · 2026-09-14 22:59

The Register of British Slave Traders, a joint venture between Lancaster University, the University of Manchester and University College London, includes biographical data on every known investor in Britain’s transatlantic trafficking of enslaved African people from the 16th to 19th centuries, The Guardian reported. Prof William Pettigrew, who led the project, said the register had established connections with roughly 900 organisations. “Most of those organisations sought to improve the lives of ordinary Britons,” he said.

At St Bartholomew’s, the register reveals at least 50 people with deep financial ties to the hospital who are directly linked to that history. In the Great Hall of St Bartholomew’s North Wing, commemorative boards in acrylic gold paint list donors alongside portraits of the apostle from whom the hospital takes its name and King Henry VIII. The Guardian reported that the hall was a grand formal space where governors weighed their philanthropic donations and drafted their wills.

Among those named is Sir Jeffrey Jeffreys, a London merchant who left an unspecified sum to the hospital in his will. In 1694, the Jeffreys-funded ship Hannibal, commanded by Capt Thomas Phillips, docked in Barbados. The Guardian reported that only 372 of the 700 enslaved African people bought at Whydah, now Ouidah in Benin, survived the Atlantic crossing.

Phillips’s journal, described as one of the few surviving records of the voyage, details the horrors onboard. “Then we marked the slaves we had bought in the breast or shoulder, with a hot iron, having the letter of the ship’s name on it,” he wrote. He recorded that the Africans on his ship held “a more dreadful apprehension of Barbadoes than we have of hell.” Phillips recalled using African overseers, who were themselves enslaved, to keep order and whipping any plotters of mutiny. Many who died on the Hannibal were killed by smallpox, dysentery, starvation and suicide, according to the journal. Some were thrown overboard when dead or dying to prevent the spread of disease and to protect profits. The voyage’s mortality rate was close to 50%, making it one of the deadliest crossings in the history of the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans.

Jeffreys was financially linked to 13 crossings, including the 1694 Hannibal voyage. He was a director of the Royal African Company from 1684 to 1686 and from 1692 to 1698. His latter term coincided with the end of the company’s royal monopoly on trading enslaved Africans, from which he profited handsomely, The Guardian reported. He also inherited a fortune from his tobacco-trading uncle, John Jeffreys, in 1688. During Jeffreys’s time with the Royal African Company, the organisation made 170 crossings.

Others commemorated at St Bartholomew’s also have links to the trafficking of enslaved Africans. Edward Colston, whose statue was toppled by Black Lives Matter protesters in Bristol in June 2020, appears in the register. William Prichard, once president of St Bartholomew’s and a leading City merchant, bought £600 of Royal African Company stock in January 1678. Sir Robert Geffrye, who left money to the hospital and other philanthropic causes in his will, was a substantial investor in the trafficking of enslaved Africans, selling £1,600 of Royal African Company stock on 5 January 1692 alone, equivalent to £350,000 today. Diane Abbott, the MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, has called for the removal of Geffrye’s statue at the Museum of the Home in Hoxton.

The connections extend into the City of London’s political structure, with several lord mayors commemorated in the Great Hall. Sir William Humphreys, who left legacies to three London hospitals including St Bartholomew’s, sat on the Royal African Company’s court of assistants from 1683 to 1685 and from 1688 to 1690. In 1711, he attended Board of Trade hearings on the company’s operations on the west African coast, three years before he became lord mayor. His predecessor, Samuel Stanier, who also left money to St Bartholomew’s in his will, sold off most of his substantial £4,000 holding in the Royal African Company in February 1698, before his lord mayoralty started in 1713.

The Guardian reported that after the British crown was restored in 1660, the trafficking of enslaved Africans became more formalised and was a lucrative source of funds for merchants. The private banker Sir Robert Vyner, also known as Viner, became a central figure in the City and was lord mayor of London from 1674 to 1675. He first invested in the Company of Royal Adventurers in January 1663.