Many of the Inglis family and their relatives are buried in Chapel Yard, Inverness, and I was curious to note a small slab recorded as number 1948 in the HFHS list of Monumental Inscriptions at Chapel Yard. The transcription reads “J. Inglis and P H Inglis and their children: 1811”. I would like to suggest that this is the grave of one or more infant children of James and Phoebe Inglis, two servants of the extended Inglis family. James was certainly black or mixed-race and it is probable that Phoebe was also.
After the death of Alexander Inglis (1743-91) following a duel in Charleston, South Carolina, Provost William Inglis arranged for his orphaned nieces Mary, Katherine and Betsey to travel to Inverness where he and his wife took care of them. In a notebook now in the Inverness Museum and Gallery, he set out the account of his expenditure on their behalf – and for their brother David Deas Inglis, whose education he had been overseeing in Scotland since 1793. He must have hoped that this money could be reclaimed once his late brother’s estate had been settled in Carolina – a hope which was never realised, as Alexander Inglis had left many debts.
Three entries in William Inglis’s account book must refer to two black servants – Phoebe and William – who accompanied the Inglis girls on their journey.
- On 28 November 1793 William paid £9.13.0 cash to a Captain Rey for the girls’ sea passage from South Carolina to Britain, and the passage of “Phoebe and William.”
- On 11 December 1793 he paid £6 cash to Mary Inglis “to pay Black William”
- July 1794 and March 1795 he bought gowns for Betsey (Elizabeth Inglis) and Katie (Katherine Inglis), and a “cloke and gown” for Phoebe
Among the 74 enslaved people listed in the inventory of Alexander Inglis’s property in Charleston after his death in 1791 are a man called Will, and two women called Phoebe, one of whom is described as a “washer” in the Inglis family’s town house. Phoebe was a name frequently given to enslaved women in the Americas (as an approximation of the African name Phibba or Fiba, traditionally given to a girl born on a Friday). There is no way of proving whether the Phoebe and William who sailed with Alexander’s daughters were their father’s slaves, but it seems highly probably that a house-slave – especially a girl or young woman who might already have cared for the young girls following the death of their mother (Mary ‘Polly’ Deas Inglis had died in Charleston in 1785) – would have accompanied the orphaned children as their servant on the sea voyage.
The cash payment to “Black William” may have marked the end of his association with the Inglis family, or perhaps both he and Phoebe remained as servants. They might have worked for Provost William at Kingsmills or at Aultnaskiach House near Inverness, where Katherine Inglis lived after her 1794 marriage to Dr James Robertson. Mary (1774-1850) and Elizabeth ‘Betsey’ Inglis (1781-1845) never married and lived together at various addresses in Inverness, including Aultnaskiach, maintaining close ties with the Robertsons at for the rest of their lives.
In Mary Inglis’s will, written at Inverness in 1846[iii] she refers to “a small India chest of drawers given by our dear Brother [i.e. David Deas Inglis] to our faithful good old friend Phebe.” This gift must have been made during the period from 1797 to 1811 when David Inglis was working as a clerk for the East India Company in Bombay. It seems to suggest an enduring close and affectionate relationship between the Inglis siblings and Phoebe, who is described as “faithful”, surely a term applied to a servant. In letters from Mary to David towards the end of their lives, she frequently recalls events of their early years in Charleston and alludes to people they knew there during their parents’ lifetimes: having been orphaned they must have retained few links to their childhood home and those which survived were precious to them.
There is evidence that this Phoebe moved on to establish a family of her own. A woman named Phoebe James married a man named James Inglis at the church of St Mary-le-Port in Bristol in 1808. Following the death by suicide of Provost William Inglis in 1801, his only surviving brother George Inglis took his wife and their children to live at Clifton in Bristol for some years before returning to settle at Kingsmills. It is possible that in 1808 James Inglis was already living in Bristol as part of a relatively large Black population there at the time, and it is mere coincidence that he shared a surname with George Inglis, who became his employer. Alternatively, he could have come to Inverness as a servant (or slave) from Demerara with George Inglis in 1798. It was not uncommon for freed slaves to take the surname of person who had previously held them.
I have uncovered no evidence that this James Inglis and Phoebe James worked as servants to the Inglis family in Bristol, but in 1810, two years after their marriage a daughter, Hellen Inglis was baptised in Inverness to James Inglis who is described as “servant at Kingsmills”. Interestingly, the baptism of Hellen Inglis was witnessed by Hugh Inglis and John Inglis. The only adults in the family bearing those names whom I can identify as plausibly living in Inverness in 1810 are Hugh Inglis, the black son of George Inglis of Kingsmills and Susanne Kerr, and John Inglis the ‘natural son’ of the late John Inglis of Savannah.
A second daughter of James Inglis and Phoebe James, Elisabeth was baptised in Inverness in 1811, when James Inglis was described as a “vintner”. The Inglis family had been in the wine trade in Inverness for at least two generations and George Inglis had become a partner – with Katherine Inglis’s husband James Robertson – in the Bridge Street wine shop of Mackintosh, Inglis, Robertson and Co. The baptism of Elisabeth Inglis was witnessed by Hugh Inglis and John Colvin.
The baby Hellen Inglis died in infancy – her death is recorded on 17 May 1811 and I assume it is she who is buried at Chapel Yard, perhaps with her baby sister Elizabeth, for whom I have found no further information. In May 1814 “James Ingles a man of colour and his spouse Phebie James had a child baptised by Rev Alex. Fraser named Alexander David Ingles. Witnesses John Fergusson and Hugh Innes.” Was this child named after the father and son of the Charleston Inglis family?
James and Phoebe Inglis seem to have moved to London after 1814 and became servants to David Deas Inglis who had set up home with his wife and children in Walthamstow, following their return from Bombay in 1812. James appears again in the archive in 1820, when at the age of 33, and described as a “Negro” servant of Mr D. Inglis, he joined the East India Company as a labourer in their London. He was nominated to the post by David Inglis’s friend and brother-in-law William Taylor Money. Margaret Makepeace, curator of the EIC archives at the British Library writes that “In 1820 James was living at 3 Rose and Crown Court, Moorfields. He served as a private soldier in the Royal East India Volunteers, a corps first formed in 1796 to protect East India House and the Company warehouses ‘against hazard from insurrections and tumults’ and to assist the City government in times of disorder. James was discharged from the Volunteers in February 1828 but the reason is not given. He then seems to disappear from the surviving Company records.”[iv]
A third daughter of James and Phoebe Inglis, named Phoebe Isabella or Isabella Phoebe was born on 24th November 1820 and baptised on 24th December 1820 at the Presbyterian Chapel at London Wall. This child died infancy and was buried at Bunhill Fields in the City of London on 12 March 1822.
A man named James Inglis aged 43 (which would fit with his assumed age at marriage and the birth of his children) was buried at St John’s Church, Wapping in 1830. I have found no further trace of Phoebe Inglis née James or of her children Alexander David and Elizabeth.
[i] Alston, David. “A Forgotten Diaspora: The Children of Enslaved and ‘Free Coloured’ Women and Highland Scots in Guyana Before Emancipation.” Northern Scotland 6.1 (2015): 49-69.
[ii][ii] Private notes made by Rev. R.S. Macnicol in the 1960s; a privately published memoir by Amy Maddox (2002); typescript notes on The Inglis Family of Inverness by W.A. Inglis (ca. 1932), Inglis Family Papers at Inverness Museum and Art Gallery.
[iii] Miss Mary Inglis 1850, Wills and Testaments Reference SC29/44/7, Inverness Sheriff Court)
[iv][iv] https://blogs.bl.uk/untoldlives/2012/10/black-labourers-in-london.html
Inglis of Inverness 