The story of the Black Flower Seller brought bang up to date for Black History Month

In 2014, Claudine Eccleston was browsing a local history page on Facebook when she saw a photograph of a black flower seller outside 44 Marina on St Leonards seafront from around 1900. She was fascinated by the image and started sharing it in the hope of finding more about the woman. This week, after ten years of research, she was proud to present her findings to a packed audience at Hastings Museum. Erica Smith attended the talk – along with some very special guests.

When Claudine first shared the image of the woman outside the arcade on Facebook and other social media, there were very few useful responses. In 2018, she discovered that the original glass plate photographic negative was in the East Sussex County Council archive and she identified the flower seller as standing outside a branch of Lloyds insurance brokers exactly where the zebra crossing is located now.

The pandemic gave Claudine the opportunity to really get stuck in to researching the mystery woman and she joined Ancestry, My Heritage, Family Search, 23 and Me, and regularly searched through Historymap.info and HastingsHistory.net. The Hastings History House and local historians like Ian Shiner and the Hastings Museum staff helped her search through online documents and publications like WT Pike’s Directory which lists everyone who lived in or had a business, street by street.

The 1911 census showed that there were 13 flower sellers registered in Hastings – 12 of whom were women. Careful combing through the street directories and the census information narrowed down the search to prove that the black flower seller was a Mrs Margaret Sullivan, aged 68 at the time, born in Barbados and living at 7 Bourne Passage with a daughter, Julia Mary Sullivan, and a lodger called Alfred Prior. Margaret was married to a ‘glass and china riveter’ called William Sullivan but they were not living under the same roof. By this time, William was in the workhouse in Frederick Road, where he remained until he died in 1922.

A turbulent relationship

Claudine’s research showed that Margaret and William had five children, but only two daughters reached adulthood. Multiple newspaper reports from 1896–97 recorded serious domestic assaults by William on Margaret. She proved to be a feisty woman who gave as good as she got – including biting her husband through his clothes, throwing pokers and landing a chair over his head in self-defence. There were also newspaper reports from this time recording a serious fight with a neighbouring woman which led to a short spell in jail!

In Margaret’s defence, being a flower seller in the time of Robert Tressell’s Mugsborough was a harrowing existence – and on top of the challenge of providing for a family on a tiny income and dealing with an abusive husband, she would have run the additional gauntlet of racism – who knows what retorts her neighbour made to her to make her see red?

It is clear from the census and street directory information that whilst Margaret moved address regularly, she was based within a tiny area of Hastings old town. All of the addresses where she lived have since been redeveloped as part of the 1930s slum clearance, which reflects the level of poverty in which she lived. Claudine was delighted to discover that one of the cottages where Margaret lived – 3 Winding Street – is now the Isabel Blackman Centre!

Margaret was almost definitely illiterate – she signed the census with an X, and Claudine believes that the census form was probably filled in for her by William Balding – the man who ran the Lloyds Agency where her flower stall was pitched.

‘Where was she really from’?

Whilst the 1911 census gives Margaret’s place of birth as Barbados, confusingly, the earlier censuses of 1901, 1891 and 1881 all record her as being born in Cheltenham – suggesting she was born in Gloucestershire. If William Balding did help Margaret fill out the 1911 census, I wondered if he was more careful about providing accurate information about her place of birth – or maybe it was an early case of making assumptions about where a black woman was ‘really from’?

Local historian Ian Shiner says, “There is a Cheltenham in Barbados. It’s in the St Andrew’s district, so the censuses were probably correct. I suspect that no one told the earlier enumerators that the Cheltenham was in Barbados. Before 1911 the census was completed by door-to-door enquiries from the enumerators, who just wrote down what they were told or thought they had heard. The 1911 census returns were completed by the head of the household, or an official if they could not write.”

Claudine’s research into the lives of Margaret’s two daughters revealed that one, Mary Julia Hunt, stayed in Hastings whilst the other daughter, Elizabeth, married William Philcox and they emigrated to Ontario, Canada in 1914.

Meanwhile in Vancouver, Cindy Richardson had been researching her family history. Her father had been adopted, but she tracked down records for his blood parents including a family photograph where she thought his mother looked like she could be Caribbean.

When Claudine reached out to her by email, and sent her the photograph of Margaret Sullivan with her flower stall, the jigsaw pieces dropped into place.

The most moving element of Claudine’s presentation was that Cindy, her daughter Chelsea and her sister Shelley all flew from Canada to hear the story of the Black Flower Seller.

Also in: Hastings People

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