[** Samuel Eusetius Hudson had an adventurous career. He was born into a lower middle-class background in Coleshill, Warwickshire, in 1764, baptised as plain "Samuel Hudson". Somehow he entered the service of Philip Yorke, the third Earl of Hardwicke, at Wimpole, and from there moved on to employment in late 1796 with Lady Anne Lindsay (Lady Hardwicke's sister) whose London salon was frequented by the cream of society from the Prince of Wales downwards. She had recently married a relatively unknown man, Andrew Barnard, whom she managed, through her political contacts, to find a job in 1796 as Secretary at the Cape, which the British had just grabbed from the Dutch.

The Barnards recruited Samuel Eusetius Hudson as a sort of general factotum to accompany them on the long voyage to Cape Town. Although he seems to have left the employment of the Barnards shortly after arriving at Cape Town, he remained there longer than they did, staying even after the Dutch grabbed the colony back in 1803 and returning to England only in 1807. During this time, he worked successively as customs officer and, in partnership with his younger brother Thomas who joined him at the Cape in 1799, property dealer, farmer, guest-house keeper, wine merchant and fine-art dealer. Prospering, he moved rapidly up the Anglo-Dutch social hierarchy in Cape Town. This social climb meant that, despite strong Evangelist leanings, he had to become a slave-owner, owning slaves being the norm among the Dutch settlers.

He remained in England - then in the midst of a powerful anti-slavery movement - until 1814, when he returned to the Cape. His business ventures were now less successful, and he ended up making ends meet as a teacher of drawing and painting until he died in Cape Town in 1828.

Samuel might have been forgotten like many another colonial adventurer, had he not been such a prolific writer. In addition to a journal of his voyage to the Cape, he kept a diary for much of his stay there, also writing essays on subjects that interested him, such as auctions, slavery, marriages, funerals, fruits, flowers, wines, brandies, buildings etc. He also managed to find time for a couple of (unpublished) novels and a seditiously (and therefore also unpublished) satirical comic opera as well as abundant notes on subjects ranging from astronomy to theology. These - now filling many volumes in the Cape Archives and the Library of South Africa - have recently become a main source for the social history of early nineteenth-century Cape Town and for the history of mentalities in the colony. Articles on his essays have been published at Princeton and his writings have been the subject of a thesis at Cape Town by K. McKenzie, summarised in 1993 in a book "The making of an English slave-owner: Samuel Eusebius Hudson at the Cape of Good Hope 1796-1807".

Unfortunately, all too little is known about his family background, the source of his vast but rather shallow education (he may have been self-taught, and the library at Wimpole Hall has been suggested as a possible element in this) and his activities before he set sail for the Cape. Much has to be deduced by surmise from oblique references in his writing. Now, thanks to your website, we can at least begin to date his presence at Wimpole. He may have been employed (possibly with his wife - perhaps called Hannah - and/or his mother, Lydia) as a senior servant. Your information has also demonstrated that he was using the middle name Eusebius before he left England. And you have even given us another unexpected clue: the reference in the 1796 marriage entry to "Richard Kyrwood". According to McKenzie's transcription, Samuel noted in his diary while at the Cape that he had "received a letter from my friend Hynwood that has reminded me of the pleasures I used to experience at Wimpole." No-one has been able to identify Hynwood, but there now seems a reasonable chance, given the similarity of spelling and the problems of transcription in both sources, that he is the same as your Richard Kyrwood (who, I see from your index, also appears as witness to two marriages in 1795).

Edward Hudson
December 2002