A campaign update
Thanks to our alumni and friends, we’ve raised over £18k to commemorate the legacy of Charles Ignatius Sancho, and work has started on the new memorial in Greenwich Park.
To meet our £26,000 target, all new donations will be matched pound for pound. This is possible thanks to two generous donors who wish to remain anonymous.
Ignatius Sancho was celebrated in his lifetime, and you can ensure a new generation remembers him today. Celebrating Black excellence inspires us all to address continuing racial injustice and disadvantage in society today.
Please join us in reaching our final target of £26k and donate today to the Sancho Memorial Appeal – for every £1 you donate, £1 will be matched by our anonymous donors.
Please note that the Sancho Memorial Unveiling has been postponed.
Visit the appeal website.
About Ignatius Sancho
African and Caribbean people have shaped British history for centuries. However, their contributions are often neglected. As the writer and broadcaster David Olusoga said, "Black history is a series of missing chapters from British history."
Charles Ignatius Sancho is an important chapter in our shared history.
Sancho was born on a ship carrying enslaved Africans across the Atlantic in around 1729. As a toddler, still enslaved, he moved to Greenwich to work for three sisters near Dartmouth Row, where he met the Duke of Montagu, through whom he learnt to read. At the Duke's death in 1749, he fled from the sisters to the duchess, was freed, and became her butler, head of a large household close to Greenwich Park.
In the last six years of his life, his celebrity took off. He opened a grocery shop in Charles Street, Westminster, where the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office now stands. He composed 100 dances and minuets played by fashionable Londoners and wrote two plays and a book of composition, now lost.
He was known for conducting lively correspondence with his friends, including aristocrats, artists, actors, bankers, and booksellers.
As a literate man of property, Sancho was able to vote. He was the first recorded Black voter in a Westminster election when he voted for Charles James Fox, the abolitionist who proposed the successful bill in 1807, who wrote to thank him. Like Sancho, Fox would not live to see the bill pass.
Sancho died in 1780 and was the first Black man to have an obituary in the British press. His letters were published posthumously in two volumes, raising the large sum of £500 for his widow and surviving children.
We ask for your help to continue Sancho's legacy.
Visit the appeal website.
Remembering Sancho
Although Thomas Gainsborough, a founding member of the Royal Academy, painted his portrait, few would recognise Ignatius Sancho today. We want to change that.
In the wake of the Windrush generation and the Black Lives Matter movement, the Mayor of London has launched the Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm to challenge the under-representation of persons of black and ethnic minority origin in London.
Work is underway to establish a new memorial by Christy Symington MRSS, the well-known sculptor who created a sculpture of Olaudah Equiano displayed at the Queen's House, Greenwich, Parliament's Portcullis House, and the International Slavery Museum, Liverpool.
The Ignatius Sancho relief sculpture memorial will be erected by permission of the Trustees of the Royal Parks.
Visit the appeal website.
Why we need your support
Black history is British history. It belongs to all of us, and by donating, you can ensure a new generation learns about Ignatius Sancho – a man who was celebrated in his lifetime and who existed within, and not outside, society's margins. Please help us to remember his legacy by donating today and sharing with your community of family and friends.
Sancho is an important chapter in British history and earlier this month, we launched a fundraising appeal to celebrate his legacy with a memorial – a relief sculpture in colour on the wall of Greenwich Park based on Thomas Gainsborough’s portrait of Sancho. The Sancho Memorial Appeal embarks on its final phase because Black history is British history; it belongs to all of us and should be celebrated, taught, and learned all year round.
If you are a trust and foundation, charity, or business who would like to discuss making a donation on behalf of your organisation, please email fundraising@gre.ac.uk for more information.