Reviews: The Adventures of a Black Edwardian Intellectual. The Story of James Arthur Harley

The Adventures of a Black Edwardian Intellectual. The Story of James Arthur Harley. By Pamela Roberts, (Signal Books, Oxford, 2022), pp xiii- 305., b/w illustrations. £19.99. ISBN 978 1 8384630 6 9.

Three decades later the parishioners of Chislet were probably surprised to see that [pg355]the new curate James Harley was an African American. Black clergy and preachers were not uncommon in Kent churches and chapels during the century after the1830s. However, it was rare for a man of African origin or descent to have charge of an English parish; I have identified 15 black Anglican incumbents in England and Wales in the years before 1950. Harley was an exceptional man. Born in Antigua, he had studied at US ivy-league colleges and at Oxford. From all accounts he was a good and popular preacher. And significantly he was his own man, outspoken and assertive, not given to being patronised. Pamela Roberts’ has assiduously tracked down her subject using standard primary and secondary sources, in the process discovering a box of Harley’s papers in a Leicestershire attic. Harley’s fortunes and misfortunes in several parishes, his brief marriage which earned him the sharp attention of Archbishop Davidson up the road in Canterbury, plus his subsequent life as a Labour party local politician in Leicestershire (he died in 1943) make this a very readable account. Most scholars working on the presence of black people in Britain have ignored their considerable active Christian contribution to British history, so this book is the more welcome.

DAVID KILLINGRAY