Image of the Month for June: Picnic at the Wilberforce Oak

This image shows a summer picnic which took place on 21 June 1873 at the ‘Wilberforce Oak’, at Keston in Kent, so named because the anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce (1759-1833) often visited the Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger (1759-1806), owner of the Holwood estate at Keston.

In the rear centre is Samuel Crowther (c.1807-1891), the first black Anglican bishop, consecrated Bishop of Western Africa in 1864.

The Life published by Wilberforce's son, Samuel, Bishop of Oxford and Winchester (1805-1873), states that his resolution to give notice in the House of Commons of his intention to bring forward the abolition of the slave trade, came ‘after a conversation in the open air at the root of an old tree at Holwood just above the steep descent into the vale of Keston’, and the occasion was commemorated on a memorial seat beneath the tree. The slave trade in the British empire was eventually abolished in 1807. The bill for the abolition of slavery itself was passed shortly before William Wilberforce’s death in 1833.

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