The Blood-Sweeten'd Beverage

The Blood-Sweeten’d Beverage

Bristol Tea Parties 1778

So many words desperate and tumbling

but failing to achieve any clear meaning

in a city of slaves and of teatime protesting

telling the horrors of of savage dogs hunting.

Rust sailed galleys and black hearts pounding,

shackles clanking and brain shattered yearning

for freedom ebbing away on the tide lapping

on shingle and shell and never returning.

Gown black preacher earnestly preaching

pleading for freedom but the wrack is turning

its iron cold hands in the ache of an evening

to smother the shame of a master’s objecting.

But still the tea party’s challenge is thriving

in the cold dark of a city’s feigned weeping. 

                                                                                    Naomi

Bristol traders were at the heart of the C18 slave-trade, 

as were the many fierce Bristol objectors to the hated trade.  

In 1778 Hannah Moore a Bristol teacher and passionate anti slaver, 

a friend of both William Wilberforce and  Thomas Clarkson, 

joined  the organised boycott of slave-produced West Indian sugar, 

thus avoiding any contact with what the poet Robert Southey 

later described as “…the blood-sweeten’d beverage…”