By Jen Wright, Hidden Histories Researcher
Thomas Harvey was born in 1812, to a prominent Quaker family in Barnsley. After leaving school aged around 14, he was apprenticed to chemists in Sheffield and Birmingham, spending around eight years learning a trade that would become his lifelong career.
Returning to Leeds, Harvey began a chemist and druggist business at 5 Commercial Street, moving to 13 Briggate in 1841. During his career, Harvey took on many assistants, including fellow Quaker Richard Reynolds, who would become a partner in the firm, Harvey & Reynolds. They would go on to manufacture the first commercially available small clinical thermometers, designed by celebrated physician Sir Thomas Clifford Allbutt.
Alongside a long and successful career in this country, Thomas Harvey might best be remembered for his remarkable works of charity, and a life devoted to campaigning for the rights of the oppressed across the world. Undertaking long, arduous trips, often at the expense of his health, and despite family tragedies, Harvey felt it was his duty to help those in need, wherever they were.
Although the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 ended slavery across most of the British Empire, only children under six were immediately freed. Outside Britain, all formerly enslaved people over six years old were reclassed as “apprenticed Labourers”, bound to serve their former owners for up to six more years, working 45 hours per week for the basic provisions of food, clothing, shelter and medical care.
Harvey was invited by fellow Quaker Joseph Sturge on was a mission to the West Indies, to investigate the reality of this controversial ‘apprenticeship’ scheme. As a Quaker, Harvey had a strong belief in peace, equality, and the responsibility to help those suffering injustice, and didn’t feel he could turn down this opportunity. So, in October of 1836, he departed from Falmouth for Barbados.
Back in England, Harvey and Sturge compiled the findings of their trip, publishing a damning report entitled The West Indies in 1837. It concluded “that the Apprenticeship is vicious in its principle, and most cruel and oppressive in its practical operation, and that it admits no remedy short of its utter extinction.” Thanks to this report, and much support from the Society of Friends (Quakers) encouraging public interest in the matter, the apprenticeship scheme was ended and full emancipation was granted two years earlier than planned, in 1838.
In 1856, Harvey and Sturge visited Finland (then Russian territory), following the end of the Crimean War. British and French allies had sent fleets to attack Russian naval bases, destroying coastal forts and blockading vital trade routes. Whilst these actions did hasten the end of the war, they also had a huge impact on impoverished local inhabitants caught in the crossfire. This led to international criticism, and upon their return, the Quakers raised funds for the relief and rebuilding effort.
In 1866 Harvey returned to Jamaica following the Morant Bay rebellion, a violently supressed uprising where hundreds of Black Jamaicans were killed by the colonial militia. His observations of conditions there were published as Jamaica in 1866. Whilst his language sits within the context of standard perspectives from that time, and would not be used today, he documented what he saw with detail and sympathy.
Just a year later, in the Summer of 1867, only a few months after the deaths of his son Thomas and his brother William, Harvey accompanied Quaker minister Isaac Robson on a trip to Russia visiting the Mennonites, a persecuted Christian group who had much in common with the Quakers, especially in their opposition to war. Many thousands emigrated to the US and Canada when faced with the prospect of being subjected to military service, and the Quakers provided financial assistance to help them settle into new lands.
In 1884, Harvey attended the Quakers’ annual meeting in Canada, but the journey proved too strenuous, and he suffered several attacks of illness whilst away. Back home, on the morning of 19th December, Harvey visited W. Hanson’s photography studio to have this photograph taken for his Canadian friends. The weather was extremely bad, and returning home, Harvey fell ill with pneumonia. He was nursed at home by his family over the following days, dying peacefully in his bed on Christmas Day.
His funeral was so well attended that many could not gain admittance to the small chapel, and an additional event was that evening. Many letters of sympathy were received by the family following Harvey’s death, one of which stated: “There are thousands in England, the West Indes, and other parts of the world, who have lost a true friend, who lived for the benefit of the ignorant, the oppressed, the helpless, and the needy, wherever they met his view.”