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The Old Newry Society will launch its new season with a talk examining the city's links to the transatlantic slave trade through the story of Newry merchant James Blair. Geraldine Foley's talk, entitled "From Canal Street to the Caribbean: James Blair; merchant, planter and slave owner", takes place at Ballybot House on Tuesday 15 September at 7.30pm.
Foley's research has found that when slavery was abolished, Blair, who owned nearly 1,600 enslaved people, received the largest single compensation award made to any individual, making him one of the wealthiest men in Britain and Ireland. Although no slave ships sailed on the Clanrye or on Newry Canal, Foley said Blair's story forced people to confront Newry's deeper connections to the Atlantic slave economy, and to acknowledge that the city's prosperity in the early nineteenth century, reflected in the naming of Sugar Island, was entwined with slavery.
Foley's study of shipping records has shown that the Blair family, whose origins lay in Canal Street, owned at least two vessels that made repeated voyages transporting enslaved men, women and children from Barbados to Demerara. A plaque in St Mary's Church, meanwhile, praises the Blair family's benevolence.
Foley has been described as a Newry Canal revival enthusiast. Away from the canal, she has also sailed deep blue water, and between 1996 and 2002 she and Peter Maxwell rounded Cape Horn as they circumnavigated the globe in a 50 foot steel ketch which they built themselves.
