Let's talk history
By Vanessa Woolf
Background by Amara Thornton
“Island Song” is a story about a piece of ancient Jamaican pottery, and the woman who presented it to the world. It’s based on facts, but it’s a creative interpretation of them. It’s been created by a storyteller called Vanessa Woolf, and is part of a project called Beyond Notability.
An article called “The Norbrook Kitchen Midden” was published in Kingston in October 1890. Its author was Edith Blake, the wife of Jamaica’s then-governor. In it, she charted the discovery of an Indigenous midden site, six miles from Kingston, near the site of an old sugar plantation, in “a little table-land” off a path strewn with sweet potatoes. Seashells were scattered over the surface. Among them were pieces of ancient pottery.
Edith Blake was an avid collector of ancient artefacts. That’s the main reason the Beyond Notability team collected her (so to speak) to add to our database charting women’s work in archaeology, history and heritage between 1870 and 1950. Our database has entries for over 900 women – some long, some short. Some women in our database have no first name, no date of birth, no date of death, no residence. They are fragments, all we know of some them is one moment in time, when their names suddenly appear in the minute of a meeting, for example, or when we come across a single letter in an archive.
Edith Blake is one woman about whom we know a fair amount. Although she had had some challenges in life (mainly because her family did not approve of her choice of husband) she was a deeply privileged person – educated, articulate, wealthy, well-travelled, and able to take advantage of what opportunities were open to her.
As the wife of a colonial governor, before arriving in Jamaica she had already been through the Bahamas and Newfoundland. She collected objects from both places: stone axes, celts, pieces of pottery, spear heads. She made art – botanical illustrations mainly but also, for example, sketches of petroglyphs from caves in the Bahamas, and Beothuck
Edith Blake and her family arrived in Jamaica in 1888. She had a personal connection to the island – at the abolition of slavery her grandfather, Ralph Bernal, received over £10,000 in compensation for the enslaved people who worked on the family estates in St Ann’s and St Dorothy’s parishes. The Blakes lived at King’s House, and Edith Blake became immersed in a variety of activities, including within the Institute of Jamaica. In 1890, the same year that Edith Blake’s article on the Norbrook midden appeared, the Blakes were involved in the organisation of the International Exhibition in Jamaica. The Exhibition sought to include the material remains of Jamaica’s ancient past as part of it.
“Island Song” tells a story of Jamaica through one artefact – a piece of a pot, with a faint “effigy” – now held in the Smithsonian Institution, part of the collection of the Museum of the American Indian. It’s there because in 1916, having left Jamaica and returned to Ireland (via stints in Hong Kong and Sri Lanka), Edith Blake sold her collection of antiquities to an American museum director, George Heye, for his Museum of the American Indian in New York. That collection was later merged into the National Museum of the American Indian.
The story Vanessa has created is only partly about Edith Blake. That’s because we wanted to create a story that wouldn’t centre her privilege, but rather would highlight the complex and extractive nature of colonial collecting. Edith Blake was in no way unusual, and indeed her own collection absorbed the collections of other people in Jamaica and other islands in the Caribbean. And we want to situate her within the long history of Jamaica – from the ancient Indigenous context through the colonial period, marking the transportation of African enslaved people to Jamaica, the plantations and sugar cane, and Edith, collector. These are all part of the Norbrook midden’s story.
Amara Thornton is a Co-Investigator on the 3-year UK Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project “Beyond Notability: Re-Evaluating the History of Women’s Work in Archaeology, History and Heritage in Britain 1870-1950”.
Vanessa Woolf is the founder and lead storyteller of London Dreamtime. For further information, please check out her blog https://londondreamtime.
Further Reading/References
Beyond Notability Database (https://beyond-notability.wikibase.cloud/wiki/Item:Q462, 12 July 2024), Edith Blake, Q462.
Blake, Edith, 1890. The Norbrook Kitchen Midden, Victoria Quarterly, October.
Cockburn, Patricia, 1985. Figure of Eight. Chatto & Windus.
Woolf, Vanessa, 2024. Beyond Notability: Edith Blake. London Dreamtime [Blog]: https://londondreamtime.com/beyond-notability-edith-blake/ Accessed 12 July 2024.
