The name of a brave Rothwell missionary was etched in the annals of history after his tragic death in British Guyana aged just 34.

John Smith, born an orphan boy in 1790, was a staunch abolitionist whose outspoken views and attempts to help negro slaves in Demerara were to cost him his life.

This son of a soldier born in Egypt, whose only education was from a Sunday School in Rothwell, went to London at the age of 14 to work for a biscuit baker. There he joined the London Missionary Society, which sent him to Demerara in 1817.

On arrival with his young wife, Smith was greeted by the Governor with the that any-teaching of the negroes would lead to immediate banishment. Undaunted, he took charge of a little chapel at Le Resouvenir in the midst of slave plantations around Georgetowm.

Slaves toiled for 12 hours a day among the sugar canes, spending each evening supplying fodder to their masters' stables. Even Sunday was a working day and flogging was an every day occurrence, yet Smith attracted large congregations and began reading classes for the freed negroes (and some of the slaves). In 1823 an orderly demonstration by the negroes was met with brutal oppression, with hundreds shot, 47 hanged and many receiving 1,000 lashes each. After refusing to take up arms against them, Smith was arrested on a charge of "conspiracy and rebellion", although the real reason was hatred of his work and his defiant attempts to give slaves some elementary education.

After seven weeks' detention and a court martial lasting 28 days, he was condemned to death In November of that year. But his feeble body was unable to withstand the rigours of his trial and he died in his damp and rotten cell on February 6, 1824 - just three days before Instructions arrived from the British government that he Was to be sent home.

The storm raised in the House of Commons by his treatment was an important factor leading to the final abolition of slavery. His cruel sentence was, in the words of Lord Morley, "an event as fatal to slavery in the West Indies as the execution of John Brown was its death- blow in the United States". A portrait of Smith and a memorial plaque to his martyrdom can be found today at the United Reformed Church in Rothwell, where he was a member as a child. A town avenue is also named after him.

From an article in the Evening Telegraph 1/12/00

top