How Essex abolitionist Anne Knight fought to put an end to the global slave trade

Chelmsford’s iconic Anne Knight building is named in her honour as is an Essex University student accommodation block and even a town in Jamaica called “Knightsville”.

Anne is also one of the names on the “Clever Essex list” a campaign by Southend arts group Metal to promote the men and women from history who make Essex proud.

So who was this Quaker, social reformer, feminist and feisty Essex woman who spent her life trying to abolish slave trade and also laid the foundations for the Suffragette movement?

Anne was born in 1786, the third of the eight children born to Chelmsford wholesale grocer William Knight and his wife Priscilla née Allen. The Knights were related to several of the leading Quaker families in Britain.

Anne grew up in a Quaker household and family members took an active part in the temperance and anti-slavery movements.

The Religious Society of Friends (commonly known as Quakers) began as a movement in England in the seventeenth century, during the English Civil War.

Members strove for equality and peace and campaigned against all forms of cruelty. As early as 1758 the Quakers began campaigning to abolish slavery, brandishing the slave trade as ‘repugnant to Christian profession’ and ‘reproachful to society’. 

In 1824 Anne went with some Quaker companions on her first continental tour.

By this time she had acquired a good knowledge of French and German and made friendships with Quakers in France and Germany that lasted until her death.

By 1830 she was deeply involved in the attempt by Quakers to end slavery and spent much of her time arranging public meetings, distributing leaflets and organising petitions.

As a member of the Chelmsford Ladies Anti-Slavery Society she worked with famous abolitionists Thomas Clarkson, Joseph Sturge, Richard and Hanneah Webb and Elizabeth Pease.

Anne was part of the extreme wing of the abolitionism movement. She wanted an immediate end to the slave trade - not a gradual one - and was against compensation for slave plantation owners.

She attended The World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, in 1840, which gave her the opportunity to meet American abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips and Lucretia Mott.

However the convention was to be the turning point for another great reform movement – women’s suffrage.

The convention refused to seat the American female delegates and Anne was outraged at this.

The heated debates and discussion that resulted from that refusal, convinced Anne that there was a pressing need to campaign for women’s rights.

The movement for women’s suffrage in Britain has been dated from the exclusion of women from the floor of this conference.

It made Anne and others realise that they were marginalised themselves within the anti-slavery movement.

In the 1840s Anne began to publish her first fiercely feminist statements and pamphlets.

Although sympathetic to and active in the Chartist movement which wanted more rights for the working classes - she became disillusioned because of their lack of support for women’s suffrage and challenged them to include voting rights for women in the People’s Charter.

She was critical of the charter because it used the term “universal suffrage” when it meant the vote for men only.

She helped to inspire the Sheffield Female Reform Association, the first association for women’s suffrage, which had its inaugural meeting in Sheffield in 1851.

In the late 1850’s Anne moved to Waldersbach near Strasbourg in France.

Anne chose this village because it was the home of Pastor Jean-Fréderéric Oberlin, a philanthropist who worked to improve the living conditions of the people of his parish and whom she greatly admired.

She lodged in the home of his grandson where she died on November 4, 1862 at the age of 76.

Anne never married and her letters reveal a distaste for what she once called “these marriage contrarieties”. Several acquaintances remembered her as a woman “of singular appearance”.

Her contribution to the anti-slavery campaign was recognised when a village for Jamaican freed slaves was named after her - Knightsville.

Some of the new student accommodation at the University of Essex, is also named after her, as is Anne Knight House, which opened in January 2005 by the Colchester Quaker Housing Association as a hostel for young people.

Her birthplace- a Grade II listed building in Duke Street- opposite the railway station in Chelmsford was used as a Quaker Meeting House from 1823 until the 1950s.

It was named the Anne Knight Building in her memory. Today it is an American themed restaurant.

There are very few photographs of Anne Knight but the most famous is believed to have been taken in 1855.

It sees her sitting down and clutching a placard with the words: “By tortured millions. By the Divine Redeemeer. Enfranchise Humanity. Bid the Outraged World. BE FREE”