Abolition

For 200 years Cannon Hall was home to the Spencer-Stanhope family who made their fortune in the local iron industry. Much of the collection of fine furniture, Old Master paintings, stunning glassware and colourful pottery on show at the museum has been built up by Barnsley Council since the 1950s.

Cannon Hall, Cawthorne, Barnsley

But in the mid-18th century the owner's brother found himself in financial trouble and turned to the slave trade. Just twenty years later the Hall was inherited by someone who was to become an anti-slavery sympathiser and friend of William Wilberforce.

Benjamin Spencer - brother of then-owner John Spencer - turned to the slave trade for a get-rich-quick scheme.

"Because he knew he would never inherit Cannon Hall he would never have a secure financial future," explains the museum's researcher Gareth Brettell. "So he turned to gambling and speculating in the slave trade.

"He paid for a ship, the 'Cannon Hall', in the hope that he'd make a huge profit from it. But at that time, around 1756, slavery wasn't the most profitable of ventures."

There's evidence that Benjamin Spencer's slaves couldn't be sold at their destination Antigua because a ship had arrived from France with a cargo of cheaper slave labourers.

Walter Spencer-Stanhope

Instead, they were taken to Charlestown in South Carolina and sold there. The ship returned to Britain with a cargo of rice and indigo and Gareth points out that it was in this way that slavery indirectly contributing to the whole of the British economy.

Alison Twells, lecturer in History at Sheffield Hallam University, points out that Benjamin Spencer's papers which are held in Sheffield Archives, outline different legs of the triangular trade.

They show the sailors recruited to serve on the sloop Cannon Hall; the merchandise - including Sheffield edge tools - which was taken to exchange for slaves on the west African coast; the poor treatment of the African people forced into slavery; the ‘glut’ in the market as French vessels arrived in Antigua at the same time; and the goods bought with the profit from the slaves to send to Britain for sale: rice, indigo, rum and sugar.

So Benjamin Spencer didn't make the fortune he hoped for. His twin brother William drunk himself to death, and Benjamin followed him to the grave two months later.

But the family's interests in slavery took a sharp u-turn when Walter Spencer-Stanhope inherited the Hall from his uncle John in 1775 at the age of 26.

As an adult, Walter - a Tory MP - was friends with William Wilberforce, the Hull-born Member of Parliament and vocal anti-slavery campaigner. According to Gareth Brettell's sources the pair corresponded on humanitarian issues, and Walter gave money to William Wilberforce who visited Cannon Hall on several occasions.

Children from local primary schools investigated Barnsley's historical links to the transatlantic slave trade in a recent citizenship and diversity project called Hidden Stories.

As well as looking into Cannon Hall's history the children deciphered documents of the Crossley family based at Oxspring in the 1770s. These included a deed of ownership - including a clause "to have and to hold" - for a number of enslaved West Indians owned by the Crossley family.

:: For more information on opening times, tickets and how to get there, contact Cannon Hall on 01226 790270 or visit the website on the right of this page.