Richard Bathurst

Colonel Richard Bathurst owned a failing Jamaican plantation and freed the boy who became Samuel Johnson's heir. He is not the Richard Bathurst who was Johnson's close friend - that was his son, a physician, and the two are constantly confused. This is the father. He was a planter in Jamaica whose estate did not prosper. Among the people enslaved on it was a woman whose son was born about 1742, and when Bathurst returned to England around 1750 he brought the boy with him, had him baptised Francis Barber, and sent him to school in Yorkshire. By his will of 1754 he freed Barber and left him twelve pounds, which is the fact the rest depends on: manumission in a will was legally effective in a way that a promise made in life often was not, and Barber's later liberty was never seriously challenged. It was through the son that Barber then entered Johnson's household, where he stayed for more than thirty years as servant, companion and eventually the residuary legatee of Johnson's estate - a bequest that scandalised Johnson's friends and that he refused to reconsider. Nothing here makes the colonel admirable. He owned people, he profited from it as far as he could, and the freedom he granted was granted at his own death and cost him nothing. The record exists because the chain does: a plantation in Jamaica, a will in England, a servant in Fleet Street, and an estate left to a black man in 1784 by the most famous writer in London.

• Lived: 1690 CE – 1754 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: other