The London hospital funded by donors who invested in the slave trade

The London hospital known as St Bartholomew’s (Barts) was funded in part by a network of wealthy donors who profited from Britain’s trans‑Atlantic slave trade, a fact now documented by the Register of British Slave Traders. The register, a collaborative database compiled by Lancaster University, the University of Manchester and University College London, lists at least fifty individuals with direct financial ties to Barts who invested in the Royal African Company (RAC) and other slave‑trading ventures. Among them was Sir Jeffrey Jeffreys, a London merchant whose 1694 ship Hannibal carried 700 enslaved Africans from Whydah to Barbados, with only 372 surviving the voyage—a mortality rate of roughly fifty percent. Jeffreys, a director of the RAC during the period when its royal monopoly ended, also backed twelve other slave voyages, and his name appears on commemorative boards in the hospital’s Great Hall alongside other benefactors.

The register’s broader research shows that the wealth generated from enslaved labour underwrote a wide swathe of British civil society, funding churches, schools, hospitals and charities across the country. Professor William Pettigrew, who leads the project, estimates that around nine hundred organisations benefited from such donations, most of which were intended to improve the lives of ordinary Britons. In addition to Jeffreys, the database links other prominent figures commemorated at Barts to the slave trade: Edward Colston, whose Bristol statue was toppled in 2020; William Prichard, a former Barts president who bought £600 of RAC stock in 1678; and Sir Robert Geffrye, who sold £1,600 of RAC shares in 1692—equivalent to roughly £350,000 today. Several lord mayors of London, including Sir William Humphreys and Samuel Stanier, also appear on the boards, having served on the RAC’s court of assistants or sold substantial holdings in the company, thereby intertwining municipal authority with the profits of slavery.

The revelation of these historic connections has sparked renewed calls for reassessment of public memorials and institutional legacies. MP Diane Abbott has urged the removal of Geffrye’s statue from the Museum of the Home in Hoxton, reflecting a growing political pressure to confront the slave‑trade roots of charitable endowments. The presence of the donors’ names, rendered in acrylic gold paint on the Great Hall’s boards, now serves as a visual reminder of how philanthropy was entangled with exploitation. As scholars and activists continue to map the extent of slave‑derived wealth in Britain, institutions like Barts face the challenge of reconciling their celebrated medical heritage with the moral implications of their funding origins, prompting debates over reparative measures, reinterpretation of commemorative spaces, and broader public education about the nation’s colonial past.

⚡ Effects Interpreter