Billy Waters is Dancing: Or, How a Black Sailor Found Fame in Regency England

For those of us who have been long-term Billy Waters watchers, Mary L. Shannon’s, Billy Waters is Dancing, is not just a delight but also a book no one would ever have imagined possible. William Waters was of Black or mixed-race parentage, born c. 1776–78, probably in New York. He died on an unknown day between 17 and 23 March 1823 in a London workhouse. On 5 October 1811, William Waters of New York joined (or was pressed into) the Royal Navy and served on HMS Ceres, anchored off the Nore anchorage in the Thames estuary. By March 1812 he was on HMS Ganymede off Cádiz, Spain. On the 3rd of that month, Captain John Brett Purvis of the Ganymede entered into the ship’s logbook, “Wm. Waters fell from the main yard and broke both his legs and otherwise severely wounded him.” None of this information was available before Shannon found it. It is a tribute to her amazing sleuthing in diligently locating and checking parish poor registers, burial records, muster books, and ships’ logs, that the life of this remarkable London Black man is now in the public domain.Why is Billy Waters of interest to RECTR readers? The short answer is that a role in his name was written into William Thomas Moncrieff’s burletta, Tom and Jerry (1821), for the Adelphi Theatre in the Strand, London. The Tom and Jerry shows, and there were many versions even preceding Moncrieff’s hit, gave Waters exponentially large exposure even though he probably never stepped onto a stage himself. Before the Adelphi, the Olympic Theatre on Wych Street had fielded a Tom and Jerry burletta but one without Billy Waters. Pairing Waters with a wife, African Sal, Moncrieff’s play engendered dozens of spin-offs. The storyline itself was founded on sporting journalist Pierce Egan’s Life in London (1821), an episodic prose narrative of the exploits of two Regency “flash” young men following their escapades into London’s gambling, horse racing, and boxing underworlds, women in tow. Long before he was written into Moncrieff’s play, after the accident ending his naval career, Waters had become a street musician, by all accounts a common figure around London’s parish of St. Giles at the eastern end of Oxford Street, working southward down to theatreland where the massive nightly audiences he entertained converged. In later life, Waters was forced to resort to street crossing sweeping. Much of the book is devoted to tracing the visual iconography of Waters’s life as a street musician, extravagantly dressed, dancing on his wooden leg, and playing the fiddle. Indeed, a major achievement is the scouring of the archives for illustrations depicting Billy Waters or, rather, people who looked like him. Perhaps paradoxically, Waters’s reproducibility as generic London Black poor quickly drained him of individuality in the prolific sequence of songs, poems, tall tales, etchings, woodcuts, and lithographs that followed his death. Shannon’s task has been to dignify his individuality while at the same time explaining and exploring his genuine popularity. Waters and Waters-like characters proliferated in the visual culture. Magnificently supporting Shannon’s research are sixteen full-color photographs (two to a side) and sixty-nine halftone pictures. The illustrations are exemplary and, for anyone who has ever tried, very difficult to find. You might want to look up Charles McGee’s series of watercolors of figures drawn from contemporary London street life (the one in the book is the Black crossing sweeper, John Dempsey, pictured in 1824).Billy Waters is Dancing is an academic/general market crossover book, so the chapter titles are a bit gnomic: “Hat: In Which Waters Begins,” “Sailor Jacket: In Which Waters Goes to Sea,” “Wooden Leg: In Which Waters Becomes a Disabled Sailor,” “Fiddle: In Which Waters Arrives on the Streets,” “Wig: In Which Waters Appears on Stage,” “Performance: In Which Waters Leaves a Legacy,” and “Epilogue: Who Tells Your Story?” Some may find Shannon’s style, like the chapter titles, occasionally rather breezy. The likening of Waters’s cultural replication to a digital meme may not work for everyone. But this is a book of great substance. There are twenty-nine pages of endnotes followed by eighteen pages of bibliography (including those muster books and parish registers). It would have been good to know more about the pension Waters received from the navy (the last installment was issued to his widow, Elizabeth). The receipt of a government pension, however small, provokes a different perspective on a life otherwise apparently dependent on street performance and crossing sweeping.The Tom and Jerry shows exponentially expanded his presence in popular consciousness. Cumulatively, audiences would easily have reached tens of thousands even by the mid-1820s. Most versions incorporated Billy Waters and African Sal characters, played, of course, in blackface. However, Shannon’s account of the theatricalization of Billy Waters in the 1820s’ Tom and Jerry dramas includes some reinvention of the wheel. My research on the Tom and Jerry adaptations is not cited even though The Politics of Romantic Theatricality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) has three chapters about them. The significance of the African Company of New York’s Tom and Jerry of June 1823 was covered (as it is in Shannon) in my Harlequin Empire (Pickering & Chatto, 2007) along with contemporary blackface stage techniques. Moncrieff’s phenomenal output as a dramatist of plebeian life was discussed as far back as my essay in Studies in Romanticism in 2000.1 Much toil could have been avoided.A paradox of many contemporary Black lives, and which Billy Waters exemplifies, is that their authenticated voices have not survived. Waters never wrote anything and never said anything recorded by others. A kind of conceptual collision takes place when Shannon passes over George Cruikshank’s print, The New Union Club, published 19 July 1819, calling it a “nasty example” of racism, which it is (fig. 33). However, while Billy Waters is unmistakably present, the Black man haranguing the crowd next to him is the Jamaican son of a slave, Robert Wedderburn. Referring to him in passing, Shannon describes Wedderburn as an “abolitionist,” but he was also a Spencean agrarianist, a physical force, and a revolutionary (69, 86, 231). That is, a Black leader of London’s White radical working class. The date is important because it is exactly a month before the Peterloo Massacre. From 1817 onward Home Office spies had kept Wedderburn under close surveillance, writing down his speeches verbatim.2 He was acquitted of sedition in September 1819 but rearrested for blasphemy and, under a government policy of dispersal, confined in Dorchester prison, Dorset. Incarcerated there, he missed having a role in the Cato Street Conspiracy of February 1820, a five man plot to assassinate the British Cabinet, for which the Black man, William Davidson, was hanged (and decapitated) for treason.Meanwhile, Billy Waters was busking. It will be for others to decide the relative merit of Waters and Wedderburn, if such a judgement is necessary. Mary L. Shannon’s amazing book brings to our attention the extraordinary life and afterlife of a fugitive figure from Regency London’s streets.