Abolition Event

The Rothley Court Hotel

on Westfield Lane, Rothley, Leicester, was the stage for this event. Not only did it have a long history under the lordship of the Templar and Hospitaller orders of Knights before the reformation, it was later looked after by the Babington family for almost 300 years.

This event at the Court commemorated the effort given by the last Babington owner, Thomas, in the cause of the abolition of the iniquitous slave trade, all those 200 years ago.

As well as the programme, visitors were able to see the 13th century Templar Chapel, the room named after William Wilberforce, and the room where Rothley's very own Baron, Lord Macaulay, was born.

The pictures give a flavour of the afternoon, The finale was the Act of Commemoration by Rob Gladstone, Vicar of Rothley, when he symbolically undid the chains on the wrapping covering the monument at the Court to reveal a new plaque marking the bicentenary of the passing of the Act to Abolish the Slave Trade.

The inner wrapping was taken off by the Mayor of Charnwood, Cllr. Ken Pacey.

Read Rob Gladstone's words of Commemoration here

The re-created Abolitionists' Work Table featured at the event. In the Summer of 1790, Thomas Babington and his brother in law Thomas Gisborne hosted William Wilberforce at the Gisborne home, Yoxall Lodge, in the Needwood Forest.

There the trio worked 9-hr days for several weeks analysing 14 hundred folio pages of Select Committee evidence 'to detect the contradictions and to collect the answers which corroborate Mr Wilberforce’s assertions in his speeches'.

This was to be repeated in the following summer of 1791 here at Rothley Temple, as it was then known.

A 55-minute performance brought alive the voices of ex-slaves who made great contributions to the Abolition campaign, including David Spens, Olaudah Equiano, Ottobah Gugoano, and Ignatius Sancho. We heard stirring stuff from William Wilberforce, chilling stuff from ship's doctor Alexander Falconbridge and ex-slaver John Newton, and from the thick of the campaign in Wilberforce's London home, letters home from Rothley's own Thomas Babington. Zachary Macaulay's letters added to the sense of historical perspective.

The Kaine Gospel Choir from Leicester produced some stunning harmony in the Templar Suite at Rothley Court. Singing in what would have been the Babington Drawing Room in the 1790s, standing where Wilberforce and Babington would have sat and planned together, they rendered the signature song for the event:

Left: The Vicar of Rothley, Rob Gladstone, symbolically unlocks the chains securing the new plaques, with an iron key fashioned in the shape of a saxon Christian cross from iron recovered from the surrounding parkland, once Babington owned. [See what Rob Gladstone said]

Below: The Mayor of Charnwood, Cllr Ken Pacey, takes off the inner wrap.

Below: The new plaque marking the event, on the monument in front of the Rothley Court Hotel. The Humming Bird image is a pointer that slavery itself had yet to be abolished in 1807, the bird idea forming the rallying call for the campaign of the Leicester women abolitionists Susannah Watts and Elizabeth Heyrick.