Annette Brock Davis, Sailor

I came across a picture of the sailing barque L'Avenir:

The comments with the picture mentioned a Canadian woman called Annette Brock Davis who, in 1933, became an apprentice on the ship and learned to sail.
There were several hurdles she had to overcome that male apprentices did not, though. To start with, she had to pay double the amount that a male apprentice paid and her contract did not guarantee her a job at the end of the apprenticeship, as it did for the male apprentices. Also, she had to get her father's permission, even though she was 23.
By the end of the training voyage, though, she was offered the position of ordinary seaman with the Erikson Line, which owned the ship. This offer was withdrawn when they discovered that she had got married
She wrote about her experiences in My Year Before the Mast.

Trowelblazers: Dr Sada Mire

I'm still looking for British women archaeologists who are black. I haven't succeeded yet, but I have found someone with a local connection.

Dr Sada Mire was chosen by Hay Festival in 2017 as one of their Hay 30 international thinkers and writers. Onstage at the Festival she talked to Rageh Omaar and Mary Harper (who was the Africa Editor at the BBC World Service) on Somaliland: the African miracle you've never heard about. Also in 2017, New Scientist magazine chose her as one of their list of Inspiring Women in Science.
Dr Mire is the only working Somali archaeologist, and she is described in the programme notes as Swedish-Somali, as she was an asylum seeker who ended up in Sweden after fleeing Somalia with her twin sister Sohur as unaccompanied child refugees. Sohur went on to become a medical doctor. Their father was a police criminal investigator who was murdered when they were twelve.
She is an art historian as well as an archaeologist, and she is a visiting professor in the department of archaeology at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. She also holds a PhD from UCL's Institute of Archaeology, London.
In 2007 she led a team of fifty people to Somaliland, where they discovered prehistoric rock art at almost one hundred locations. At least ten of these are likely to receive World Heritage status, according to her Wikipedia entry.
As a result of her work on the rock art, she founded the Horn Heritage, a non-profit organisation to fund her work. She was also involved with the establishment of Somalia's Department of Tourism and Archaeology. She is also active in campaigns to protect Somali archaeological sites from looting and destruction.
Her latest book came out this year, and is called Divine Fertility: the continuity in transformation of an Ideology of Sacred Kinship in North-East Africa.

Trowelblazers: Tabitha Kabora

I found it quite difficult to find details about any black British women archaeologists. American women archaeologists are much easier to find online - Black archaeologists in the United States have formed the Society of Black Archaeologists, but there's no similar body in the UK.
Then I found an article about a seminar on racism in archaeology, and the chair of the debate was Tabitha Kabora.
Dr. Kabora did her doctoral thesis at the University of York on the utility of the long-term perspectives of archaeological and environmental studies, in order to understand the effects of human-environment interactions on agricultural systems. Her research formed part of the Archaeology of Agricultural Resilience in Eastern Africa Project (AAREA).
Her BSc and MSc degrees were from the University of Nairobi, in Environmental Sciences and Conservation Biology. So she's actually Kenyan, and came to the UK for further study.
At the moment she's working on the Europe's Lost Frontiers project while employed by the University of Bradford as an Environmental Modelling Research Assistant. Her work is on Doggerland, the sunken area in the North Sea which used to be a land bridge between the British Isles and the Continent. She has been developing palaeo-ecological models of Doggerland during the early Holocene period to incorporate into computer simulations.

Roma Archaeologists: John Henry Phillips

I was following a Twitter conversation the other day about types of racism, prompted by the Black Lives Matter campaign. Someone mentioned an academic journal in which an article stated that there were no Roma archaeologists. At least three Roma archaeologists commented on the thread, so there are probably more out there.

This is John Henry Phillips, who specialises in Second World War archaeology, though he's also dug on sites of many different periods across Europe. He appeared in the TV documentary No Roses for a Sailor's Grave, and has been a guest on various BBC programmes. He's also a diver.

Scipio Africanus

In St Mary's churchyard in Henbury, near Bristol, is the grave of an enslaved eighteen year old African, who was named Scipio Africanus by his owners - he was born into the household of the Earl of Suffolk. The original Scipio was a Roman general who won victories against the Carthaginians.
He died in 1720, and the two gravestones that mark his grave are beautifully decorated, brightly painted and with black cherubs. That is, they were beautiful, until someone came along and smashed them a few days ago. A message was left in chalk nearby: "Look at what you made me do. Put Colston's statue back or things will really heat up."
So there seems to be no doubt that the vandal who smashed the headstones is a supporter of Edward Colston the slave trader, whose statue was toppled during the recent protests in Bristol. The statue has since been fished out of the river, and will be installed in a local museum, along with placards from the protest.
An archaeologist, Richard Osgood, set up a JustGiving page to raise £1,000 towards repairing Scipio Africanus' grave, and has actually raised more than £3,400.

The inscription on the footstone reads:

I who was Born a PAGAN and a SLAVE
Now Sweetly Sleep a CHRISTIAN in my Grave
What tho' my hue was dark my SAVIORS sight
Shall Change this darkness into radiant light
Such grace to me my Lord on earth has given
To recommend me to my Lord in heaven
Whose glorious second coming here I wait
With saints and Angels Him to celebrate

Bilbo Baggins has Sailed into the West

I was sorry to hear of the death of Sir Ian Holm, aged 88. His death was related to Parkinson's disease.

For me he was the perfect Frodo Baggins, in the BBC radio series of Lord of the Rings, and he was also the perfect Bilbo Baggins in the Peter Jackson films.
But there was far more to his career than that - I think I first became aware of him as an actor in Jesus of Nazareth in the mid 1970s, where he played one of the Sadducees.
He also had a busy and varied film career. He played Ash in the first Alien film, Jonathan Pryce's boss in Brazil, King John in Robin and Marion, and many more. His last film role was as the older Bilbo in The Battle of Five Armies, in 2014.
He did a lot of Shakespeare on stage and on film, including Polonius in Mel Gibson's film of Hamlet and Fluellen in Kenneth Branagh's Henry V.
He was knighted in 1998 for his services to drama.
He was married four times, and had five children.

Black Archaeologists: John Wesley Gilbert

It's been quite a long time since I did a post about archaeologists. Usually I've been looking for women archaeologists, but other minorities get overlooked too. So this time I thought I'd take a look at John Wesley Gilbert.

His archaeological career was short, but he was the first black man to attend the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, where he worked on the dig at Eritrea with John Pickard, and helped to produce the first map of the ancient city. He won a scholarship from Brown University to go, and the work he did there contributed to his Master's degree - the first awarded by Brown University to a black student.
There's a fascinating and detailed account of his time in Greece at https://nataliavogeikoff.com
He was also one of the first ten black students to attend Brown University, and the first black professor at the Paine Institute, which he had also attended as a student. He taught Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French and German.
In 1911, he went to the Congo with a Methodist mission, where he spent time translating the Gospels into the local Bantu language, Tetela. He also contracted an illness from which he never really recovered.
He was born in 1863 to enslaved parents in Georgia, and died in 1923 as a respected educator. During the early 20th century he was focused on improving the education of African Americans. He was critical of textbooks that were written for white students, without considering the contributions of black people throughout history. He also advocated for interracial co-operation and harmony, though his ideas were criticised by some other black intellectuals of the day.
His wife Osceola was also a teacher, and they had four children.

Few African Americans have followed a career in archaeology, but in 2011 the Society of Black Archaeologists was formed to address the treatment of African material culture and to encourage African Americans to enter the field.

Women Warriors: La Mulâtresse Solitude

This is Solitude. Her mother was brought from Africa, possibly Sierra Leone, and she was born in Guadeloupe in around 1772 as the result of her mother's rape on the slave ship. I've found several different accounts of her life, but most of them seem to agree on this.
In 1794, the French abolished slavery in their colonies after the Haitian slave revolt, and she joined the Maroon community of La Goyave on Guadeloupe. This was a group of free Africans, from the French word meaning "fugitive".
In 1802, Napoleon Bonaparte re-enstated the institution of slavery in the French colonies. Solitude and her followers from the Maroon community joined Louis Delgrès, who had been a military officer in the Revolutionary Army, to fight for freedom. Their last battle against the French Napoleonic Army was on 28th May at Matouba, where the remaining freedom fighters ignited their gunpowder supplies, committing suicide while taking as many of the French with them as they could.
Solitude survived the battle. She was pregnant at the time, so was imprisoned by the French until she had her baby. In November 1802, a day after she had given birth, she was hanged.
Slavery was finally abolished on the island in 1848.
Solitude is now remembered as a heroine on Guadeloupe.

Women Warriors: Faye Schulman, Jewish Partisan and Photographer

I haven't done one of these for a while, but I came across the story of this fascinating woman recently.
Faye Lazabnik was born in 1919, and when the Germans arrived at the village where she lived in the Lenin ghetto in Poland in 1942, all of her family were killed, along with most of the rest of the inhabitants. She was spared because of her photographic skills - the Germans wanted her to develop their photos of the massacre. She had helped her brother Moishe with his photographic business before the War.
She managed to escape during a partisan raid, and joined the Molotava Brigade, a group of mainly Soviet Red Army escaped prisoners of war. She had some knowledge of medicine because another brother had been a doctor, and she served the group as a nurse for two years, along with a vet who was their doctor.
She managed to retrieve her photographic equipment during a raid on Lenin, and documented the partisan group with her photographs. She wanted to show that the Jews had not gone passively to their deaths, but had fought back.

Here she is with some of the Russian partisans - the picture has been colourised.

After the War, she married Morris Schulman, another partisan, and they emigrated to Canada in 1948, where she still lives in Toronto. She wrote a book about her experiences called A Partisan's Memoir: Woman of the Holocaust.

James Arrowsmith, Publisher and Erector of a Certain Notorious Statue

I almost never see my surname mentioned in history, so it was a bit of a surprise to be reading down a Twitter thread about the Colston statue in Bristol to find out who had been responsible for erecting it - a local publisher called James Arrowsmith!
JW Arrowsmith Ltd. was the company responsible for publishing famous works like Three Men in a Boat, Diary of a Nobody and Rupert of Hentzau. James was a friend of WG Grace. The company also published a lot of books on Bristol history.
And James was almost single-handedly responsible for the erection of the statue to Edward Colston, which he tried at first to fund by subscription. With a lot of effort, the committee eventually managed to raise only half of the cost of the statue, but it was put up anyway, and unveiled on "Colston Day", a local public holiday.
In 1920, Arrowsmith published a book on Edward Colston by HJ Wilkins, which detailed Colston's involvement with the Royal Africa Company, which transported slaves to the Americas. Colston was the Deputy Governor of the company.

NASA recruitment film with Star Trek's Nichelle Nichols and astronaut Al...

Ravens Fly South

I've just uploaded my latest story onto Smashwords - it's quite short, at just over 18,000 words, but it finishes off Owain's story from Raven's Heirs.
It should be available tomorrow.