How the Past Speaks: Uncovering the Roots of My Work with Child Domestic Workers

I have often wondered what first drew me to focus on working children and, in particular, the situation of child domestic workers - children who live and work in households beyond those in which they were born. 

Our experiences shape us, and my early exposure to a range of cultures, values and social inequalities from life in Nigeria as a toddler, to Indonesia, India, Türkiye, as well as in my home city of London may well have played a part. A more obvious link came from working as an educator with street-connected children in Mexico from the late 1980s, which introduced me to the lives and worlds of working children, and which propelled me towards working with Anti-Slavery International on child exploitation, and on to establishing Children Unite.

Lately, I’ve begun to wonder whether elements of my family history also played a subconscious role in shaping the path I’ve taken. While there is increasing recognition of intergenerational trauma—the transmission of trauma’s effects across generations—and the importance of passing down cultural knowledge, I find myself asking: is there also an intergenerational transfer of values that quietly guides us toward certain directions in life? Let me share a brief story from my family history that might help illustrate what I mean.

I am thinking here of my paternal family’s connection to Britain’s colonial and slave-owning and trading past, uncovered thanks to my father, David Blagbrough. It relates to Robert Wedderburn, a radical reformer and anti-slavery activist in the late 18th and early 19th century. Robert Wedderburn - my fifth great-grandfather - was born in Jamaica in 1762, to Rosanna (an enslaved housemaid) and her ‘owner’ James Wedderburn, his father. 

Following the execution of their father after the Battle of Culloden in 1746 , the teenage James Wedderburn and his older brother, John, fled Scotland for Jamaica. In this slave owning economy, demand for their medical services in keeping slaves healthy for work was high and well remunerated. Both brothers were so successful that within a relatively short period they were able to acquire their own sugar plantations, along with a large number of enslaved people, and considerable wealth.

When James Wedderburn realised that Rosanna was pregnant with his child, he sold her on, stipulating that the child, to be named Robert Wedderburn, be born as a free person. Rosanna was subsequently sold off to a series of owners and Robert was raised by his maternal grandmother, Amy (known as Talkee Amy), a market trader and smuggler’s agent. Throughout his childhood, Robert witnessed the cruelties of slavery, including punishments meted out to both his mother and grandmother. His account of these experiences is written in his book 'The Horrors of Slavery' (see McCalman, Iain. The Horrors of Slavery: And Other Writings by Robert Wedderburn. Markus Wiener Publishers, 2017).

Robert’s rejection by his father and the separation from his mother profoundly affected him and were something to which he would often refer in later life. Being unwanted was also mirrored by his position as a free ‘mulatto’ (a racial classification of the time used to describe people of mixed African and European ancestry) between the dominant white slave owners and their black slaves. When he was about 16, to escape this environment, he joined the Navy. On leaving the navy after 10 years, he found work as a jobbing tailor, married and set up home in St Giles in the Fields (a poor district near the Seven Dials in London). Robert was married twice, to Elizabeth Ryan and then to Mary Durham, and had eight children.

Towards the end of the 1770s both James (Robert’s father) and his brother John returned to Scotland as rich men. In the early 1790s, when Robert and his family were living in poverty, he travelled to Scotland to ask his father for help. James again refused to recognise Robert as his son and had him ejected from the house.

Robert’s transition to a charismatic, ultra radical and anti-slavery advocate can be dated to around 1786 when he heard a preacher speak about the evils of slavery and the power of redemption - leading him to convert to the Methodist cause. Subsequently abandoning Methodism due to his opposition to preaching passive obedience to plantation slaves, Robert became a licensed Unitarian minister and a charismatic speaker. A government spy at one of his speaking events claimed Robert had argued that slaves had the right to kill their masters, resulting in him being arrested and charged with sedition. In 1822, having argued about the contradictions in the Bible, Robert was tried for ‘blasphemous libel’ and sentenced to two years in Dorchester jail. Whilst there he was visited by William Wilberforce, a founding member of the abolitionist movement, to whom he dedicated his autobiography The Horrors of Slavery. Although barely literate, with the help of a friend, he became a prolific writer, pamphleteer and campaigner for social reforms. He died around 1834/5. (For more on Robert Wedderburn, see Hanley, Ryan. Robert Wedderburn: British Insurrectionary, Jamaican Abolitionist. Yale University Press, 2025.)

Although each story is unique, I believe we all carry experiences in our histories that - whether we realise it or not - have shaped who we are and what we do. This story, along with others that have guided my career journey and that I plan to share over the coming months, has influenced my identity and helped me understand my place in the world, both consciously and unconsciously. Recognising and making sense of our personal histories is important, especially those that hold uncomfortable or painful truths, which can be just as difficult to tell as they are to hear.