William Sharp

William Sharp treated a boy beaten blind in the street, and his brother spent the next forty years on what followed. He was a surgeon, eventually surgeon to George III, with a practice in Mincing Lane where he gave free treatment to the poor one day a week - which is how, in 1765, Jonathan Strong came to be waiting outside it. The free day was not charity in the modern sense but a normal arrangement for a fashionable surgeon: it built a reputation, it supplied cases to learn from, and it meant that a man with no money and a serious injury had somewhere to queue. Strong was one of a line of people waiting on the pavement. Strong had been brought from Barbados by a lawyer named David Lisle, who had pistol-whipped him about the head until he was blind in one eye and could barely walk, and then turned him out as useless. The brothers had him admitted to St Bartholomew's, paid for four months of treatment, and found him work when he recovered. Two years later Lisle saw him in the street, recognised property he had discarded now that it had value again, and had him seized and sold to a Jamaica planter. It was the younger brother, Granville, a clerk in the Ordnance Office with no legal training at all, who went to the Lord Mayor and got Strong discharged - and who then read his way into the law of slavery in England and spent the following decades bringing the cases that led to the Somerset judgment of 1772. William's part is smaller and worth recording anyway. He was the one with the surgery and the money, he kept a household that supported Granville's unpaid legal campaigning for years, and the family is otherwise remembered for a Zoffany group portrait of them all making music on a barge. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and died in 1810.

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