2003 poll results
Top 10
| Rank | Name | image | Notability |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mary Seacole (1805–1881) |  | Mary Jane Seacole (née Grant; 23 November 1805 – 14 May 1881) was a British-Jamaican businesswoman and nurse who set up the "British Hotel" behind the lines during the Crimean War. Coming from a tradition of Jamaican and West African "doctresses", Seacole used herbal remedies to nurse soldiers back to health. She was posthumously awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit in 1871. Her autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (1857), is one of the earliest autobiographies of a mixed-race woman. |
| 2 = | Bishop Wilfred Wood (born 1936) | Wilfred Denniston Wood KA (born 15 June 1936) was a Bishop of Croydon from 1985 to 2003 (and the first area bishop there from 1991), the first Black bishop in the Church of England. On 30 November 2000 – Barbados Independence Day – the Queen appointed Wood a Knight of St Andrew, the highest class within the Order of Barbados, "for his contribution to race relations in the United Kingdom and general contribution to the welfare of Barbadians living there". | |
| 2 = | Dr Oliver Lyseight (1919–2006) |  | Dr Oliver Lyseight (11 December 1919 – 28 February 2006), [17] who migrated to England from Jamaica in 1951, was the founder of one of Britain's largest black majority churches, and was a spiritual leader to the "Windrush generation", the first Caribbeans to emigrate in significant numbers to postwar Britain, notably in 1948 on the HMT Empire Windrush. [18] |
| 3 | Mary Prince (1788–1833) |  | Mary Prince (c. 1 October 1788 – after 1833) was a British abolitionist and autobiographer, born in Bermuda to an enslaved family of African descent. Subsequent to her escape, when she was living in London, England, she wrote her slave narrative The History of Mary Prince (1831), which was the first account of the life of a black woman to be published in the United Kingdom. This first-hand description of the brutalities of enslavement, released at a time when slavery was still legal in Bermuda and British Caribbean colonies, had a galvanising effect on the anti-slavery movement. It was reprinted twice in its first year. Prince had her account transcribed while living and working in England at the home of Thomas Pringle, a founder of the Anti-Slavery Society. She had gone from Antigua to London with her master and his family in 1828. |
| 4 | Olaudah Equiano (1745–1797) |  | Olaudah Equiano (c. 1745 – 31 March 1797), known for most of his life as Gustavus Vassa (/ˈvæsə/), was a writer and abolitionist from, according to his memoir, the Eboe region of the Kingdom of Benin (today southern Nigeria). Enslaved as a child, he was taken to the Caribbean and sold as a slave to a Royal Navy officer. He was sold twice more but purchased his freedom in 1766. As a freedman in London, Equiano supported the British abolitionist movement. He was part of the Sons of Africa, an abolitionist group composed of Africans living in Britain, and he was active among leaders of the anti-slave trade movement in the 1780s. He published his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789), which depicted the horrors of slavery. It went through nine editions in his lifetime and helped gain passage of the British Slave Trade Act 1807, which abolished the slave trade. Equiano married an English woman named Susannah Cullen in 1792 and they had two daughters. He died in 1797 in Westminster. Since the late 20th century, when his autobiography was published in a new edition, Equiano has been increasingly studied by a range of scholars, including from his homeland. |
| 5 | Philippa of Hainault (1310/15 – 1369) |  | Philippa of Hainault (Middle French: Philippe de Hainaut; 24 June c.1310/15 – 15 August 1369) was Queen of England as the wife of King Edward III. Edward promised in 1326 to marry her within the following two years. She was married to Edward, first by proxy, when Edward dispatched the Bishop of Coventry "to marry her in his name" in Valenciennes, the second city of the County of Hainaut, in October 1327. The marriage was celebrated formally in York Minster on 24 January 1328, some months after Edward's accession to the throne of England. In August 1328, he also fixed his wife's dower. Philippa acted as regent in 1346, when her husband was away from his kingdom, and she often accompanied him on his expeditions to Scotland, France, and Flanders. Philippa won much popularity with the English people for her kindness and compassion, which were demonstrated in 1347 when she successfully persuaded King Edward to spare the lives of the Burghers of Calais. This popularity helped maintain peace in England throughout Edward's long reign. The eldest of her thirteen children was Edward, the Black Prince, who became a renowned military leader. Philippa died at the age of 56 from an illness closely related to edema. The Queen's College, Oxford, was founded in her honour. Philippa's inclusion on the Black Britons list proved controversial, as historians dispute that she was "black" in any modern sense: see Criticism section above. |
| 6 | Courtney Pine (born 1964) |  | Courtney Pine, CBE (born 18 March 1964 in London) is a British jazz musician, who was the principal founder in the 1980s of the black British band the Jazz Warriors. Although known primarily for his saxophone playing, Pine is a multi-instrumentalist, also playing the flute, clarinet, bass clarinet and keyboards. On his 2011 album, Europa, he plays almost exclusively bass clarinet. Pine's parents were Jamaican immigrants, his father a carpenter and his mother a housing manager. As a child, Pine wanted to be an astronaut. Born in London, he went to Kingsbury High School, where he studied classical clarinet, teaching himself the saxophone from the age of 14. He began his music career playing reggae, touring in 1981 with Clint Eastwood & General Saint. |
| 7 = | Sir Bill Morris (born 1938) |  | William Manuel Morris, Baron Morris of Handsworth, OJ, DL (born 19 October 1938), generally known as Bill Morris, is a former British trade union leader. He was General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union from 1992 to 2003, and the first black leader of a major British trade union. Morris sits in the House of Lords, taking the Labour Party whip. |
| 7 = | Sir Trevor McDonald (born 1939) | British newsreader and journalist | Sir Trevor McDonald, OBE (born George McDonald; 16 August 1939) is a Trinidadian-British newsreader and journalist, best known for his career as a news presenter with ITN. Trevor McDonald was born in San Fernando, Trinidad and Tobago, to Josephine and Lawson McDonald. McDonald is of Dougla heritage, his mother being of African descent and his father being of Indian descent. McDonald was knighted in 1999 for his services to journalism. |
| 8 | Shirley Bassey (born 1937) |  | Dame Shirley Veronica Bassey, DBE (/ˈbæsi/; born 8 January 1937) is a Welsh singer whose career began in the mid-1950s, and is well known both for her powerful voice and for recording the theme songs to the James Bond films Goldfinger (1964), Diamonds Are Forever (1971), and Moonraker (1979). In January 1959, Bassey became the first Welsh person to gain a No. 1 single. In 2000, Bassey was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) for services to the performing arts. In 1977, she received the Brit Award for Best British Female Solo Artist in the previous 25 years. Bassey is considered one of the most popular female vocalists in Britain during the second half of the 20th century. |
| 9 | Bernie Grant (1944–2000) | Bernard Alexander Montgomery Grant (17 February 1944 – 8 April 2000), known as Bernie Grant, was a British Labour Party politician who was the Member of Parliament for Tottenham from 1987 to his death in 2000. Grant was born in Georgetown, British Guiana, to schoolteacher parents, who in 1963 took up the UK Government's offer to people from the crown colonies to settle in the UK. Grant attended Tottenham Technical College, and went on to take a degree course in Mining Engineering at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland. In the mid-1960s, he was, for a period, a member of the Socialist Labour League, led by Gerry Healy. This later became known as the Workers Revolutionary Party. He quickly became a trade union official, and moved into politics, becoming a Labour councillor in the London Borough of Haringey in 1978. He was elected as the MP for Tottenham at the 1987 general election, one of the UK's first Black British MPs, being elected at the same time as Diane Abbott and Paul Boateng, as well as Britain's first British South Asian MP Keith Vaz. In September 2007, in Tottenham, London, Haringey Council opened the Bernie Grant Arts Centre in his name. | |
| 10 | Professor Stuart Hall (1932–2014) |  | Stuart McPhail Hall FBA (3 February 1932 – 10 February 2014) was a Jamaican-born British Marxist sociologist, cultural theorist and political activist. Hall, along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, was one of the founding figures of the school of thought that is now known as British Cultural Studies or The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies. In the 1950s Hall was a founder of the influential New Left Review . At Hoggart's invitation, he joined the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in 1964. Hall took over from Hoggart as acting director of the Centre in 1968, became its director in 1972, and remained there until 1979. While at the centre, Hall is credited with playing a role in expanding the scope of cultural studies to deal with race and gender, and with helping to incorporate new ideas derived from the work of French theorists such as Michel Foucault. Hall left the centre in 1979 to become a professor of sociology at the Open University. He was President of the British Sociological Association, 1995–97. He retired from the Open University in 1997 and was a professor emeritus. British newspaper The Observer called him "one of the country's leading cultural theorists". Hall was also involved in the Black Arts Movement. Film directors such as John Akomfrah and Isaac Julien also see him as one of their heroes. Hall was married to Catherine Hall, a feminist professor of modern British history at University College London, with whom he had two children. |
