At the start of 1811, Humphry Davy was Professor of Chemistry to both the Royal Institution and the Board of Agriculture and a Secretary of the Royal Society of London. All of these were paid positions from which he derived his entire income, for Davy, the son of a bankrupt yeoman farmer, had very little family money to rely on. By the end of the following year, Davy, now knighted, had resigned all these paid roles. He had married, on 11 April 1812, a wealthy widow, Jane Apreece. Although the details of the marriage settlement have not (yet) been found, her money allowed Davy to effectively retire and pursue his career in whatever directions he wished without financial worries. At the time it was rumoured that she had an income of £4000 annually and a capital of £60,000. To put that in context, Mrs Bennet was very happy with Mr Bingley’s annual income of £5000. As Davy’s marriage had such a profound effect on the course of his life and career, I became curious about where Lady Davy’s money came from, little thinking that the question would lead me to explore how non-plantation owners made large fortunes in the late eighteenth-century British Caribbean, and provide yet another example of the legacies of slavery.

Until now the source of her fortune has not been known, though there exists an implication in much of the secondary literature relating to Davy that it came from her first husband, Shuckburgh Apreece, whom she married in 1798. He died in 1807 before he inherited his father’s baronetcy. Missing out on that title led Mrs Apreece to ensure that the Prince Regent knighted Davy two days before they married, so she immediately became Lady Davy. When I found, in the course of researching Lady Davy, that most of the Apreece estate was entailed and so he could only leave his widow a relatively small amount, I turned my attention to her father.

She was born in the early 1780s on Antigua, a British sugar colony in the Caribbean. Her father Charles Kerr had arrived on the island sometime in the 1770s from his native Scotland. During the 1780s and early 1790s, he had made his fortune as a merchant, provider of credit and as a prize agent for the Royal Navy. In that role he withheld (illegally) large amounts of money which, despite prolonged legal actions, never reached those entitled to it. He also leased enslaved people to the Royal Navy’s dockyard, the English Harbour (now the UNESCO World Heritage Site, Nelson’s Dockyard), on the island’s southern coast. Following his death in 1795, around forty enslaved people were leased by his estate to the dockyard, and although the numbers reduced in the following five years, it was not until the early nineteenth century that the estate was completely wound up.

Kerr divided his estate equally between his widow and daughter making them both attractively wealthy. Now in London, both married in 1798, his widow to a rich Antiguan planter and his daughter to Apreece. Following Apreece’s death, his widow established a very successful salon in Edinburgh and then tried to do the same, somewhat less successfully, in London. But there she met Davy and after a fairly short courtship they married.

Quite what either of them knew about the precise means by which her father had acquired his money is not clear. Had Lady Davy been educated in Britain (which is not known, but was usual practice for children of British colonists born in the Caribbean), she may well have known very little about where her wealth came from. On the other hand, her mother was familiar with the legal actions taken against her husband. So far, no evidence has been found in which Lady Davy discussed any aspect of her origins whatsoever. Whether this lacuna was due to ignorance or to a deliberate determination not to refer to what would be highly embarrassing matters, has, for now, to be a matter for conjecture.

Professor James’s new article, looking at the life and career of Jane Davy’s father Charles Kerr, is available online here.