John Ystumllyn


John Ystumllyn, also colloquially known as Jac Du or Jack Black, was an 18th-century Welsh gardener and the first well-recorded black person of North Wales.
John was of uncertain origin, possibly a victim of the Atlantic slave trade, and from either West Africa or the West Indies. Early in his life, he was taken by the Wynn family to its Ystumllyn estate in Criccieth, where he was christened, and given the Welsh name John Ystumllyn. Here he was "domesticated", as he was taught English and Welsh by the locals. He learned horticulture and craftsmanship, at which he had some natural skill, in the estate garden. He worked as a gardener at the estate and eventually "grew into a handsome and vigorous young man", with his portrait painted at around this time. Doted upon by several local girls, he began a romance with the local maid Margaret Gruffydd.
As Margaret moved to different employments, Ystumllyn followed her, eventually running away from his job as gardener to marry in 1768. They had seven children, five of whom survived, with several of their descendants still living in the area. They initially worked as land stewards, but Ystumllyn eventually re-entered into the employment of the Wynn family. In recognition of his service, Ellis Wynn gave Ystumllyn a large, ancient garden and cottage at Y Nhyra Isa. Ystumllyn died in 1786, with his wife dying in 1828, over forty years later.
Ystumllyn was well-liked in his time, and met with little racial prejudice, though he often encountered surprise and ignorance from locals over his unfamiliar appearance. Several years after his death, a small monument was constructed in his place of burial, St Cynhaearn's Church. Over a hundred years after Ystumllyn's death, the Welsh writer Robert Isaac Jones published an account of Ystumllyn's life, compiled from various local oral records. This work, while also criticised for its "forgetfulness" and "racial stereotyping", serves as "the most informative" extant source of Ystumllyn's life. According to Jones, John Ystumllyn was "a very honest man, with no malice, and was respected by the gentry and the common people alike".

Biography

Robert Isaac Jones begins his account of Ystumllyn's life, admitting his uncertain origins, and tracing three narratives of his arrival in Wales.
, Welsh biographer of Ystumllyn
The first he sources to his mother, claiming that a member of the Wynn family of Ystumllyn, possibly Ellis Wynn, "who had a Yacht, caught the boy in a wood in Africa and brought him home to Ystumllyn", where "they judged him to be about eight years old, and they took him to the Church in Criccieth, or Ynys, to be christened, and called him John Ystumllyn". Ystumllyn's true birth name is unknown. Another narrative, derived from Ystumllyn's descendants, "stated that a number of black boys arrived in London, and that Ellis Wynne of Ystumllyn's sister, who lived in London, sent him as a gift to her brother". Green notes that Wynn's sister, Mary, married a William Hollier, possibly the same Hollier who was the first secretary of the African Company of Merchants, integral in the Gold Coast's slave trade. The third account, from John himself, asserted that he was captured by white men while "on the banks of a stream amid woodland attempting to catch a moorhen" and taken to their ship, to the "frightful howls" of his mother. Green is more skeptical of these stories, stating that, while it was "not inconceivable that Wynne was directly implicated in the slave trade", "it's much likelier that John came from a slave family in the West Indies", citing the reference to an Indian origin on his gravestone.
John's arrival in Ystumllyn was marked by his knowledge of "no language other than sounds similar to the howling of a dog", in Jones' words; this was most likely a West African language, unfamiliar to the Welsh locals. Jones speaks of the locals "domesticating" Ystumllyn, meeting with "considerable difficulty for a long time", first keeping him indoors, and – with the help of local women – teaching him to be fluent and literate in both Welsh and English. Ystumllyn was then put in the garden, where he showed a gift for crafts and horticulture, and developed a fondness for floristry. According to Tom Morris, "it was remarked that this very black skin had very green fingers". He found employment on the Ystumllyn estate as a gardener, for what Morris reported was very low pay, his upkeep being "less costly than that of a racehorse". On 11 May 1754, he sat for his oil painting, at which time Jones estimated he was aged around sixteen.
Here, Ystumllyn "grew into a handsome and vigorous young man", according to Jones, and "there was much rivalry between in order to get John as a suitor." One unmarried maid from Hendre Mur, Trawsfynydd, Margaret Gruffydd, was tasked with bringing John "some bread, cheese and ale from the ". She was initially terrified of John and ran away upon the sight of him, but over time she grew more comfortable around him, and a romance developed. When Margaret moved to her relatives' nearby mansion, Ynysgain Bach, Criccieth, for domestic work available there, Ystumllyn continued his courtship of her. Jones recounts the shock of the house's master at Ystumllyn, stumbling across Ystumllyn in the kitchen, assured that he must be "the Black Devil" because of his dark skin. Margaret moved once again to Dolgellau, where Ystumllyn followed her. To pursue her further, Ystumllyn ran away from his job at Ystumllyn estate, with Margaret following him the next morning. The two were married on 9 April 1768, in Dolgellau, with Griffith Williams, son of the local vicar, as Ystumllyn's best man.
After their marriage, John and Margaret lived in Ynysgain Fawr, west of Criccieth, where they were employed as land stewards. They had seven children, with the first two dying while young, and the other five living to adulthood. As of 2019, several descendants of the Ystumllyn family still live in the area. John later worked at the home of Maesyneuadd, near Talsarnau, another estate of the Wynn family. Near the end of his life, in "recognition for his service", Ellis Wynn gave Ystumllyn the house of "Y Nhyra Isa" or "Nanhyran", a small thatched cottage surrounded by a large, ancient garden.
Ystumllyn died of unknown causes and was buried in St Cynhaearn's Church on 2 July 1786. Jones recounts that, on his deathbed, Ystumllyn told a neighbour "his main regret was that he played the crwth on Sundays at Ystumllyn and Masyneuoedd". Margaret died in 1828, at Y Nhyra Isa at the age of eighty-one, outliving John by over forty years. She was apparently in good health up to this point, being able to "see to sew and knit up until a few months before her death", and "was a quiet and cheerful old lady". The couple's only son, Richard Jones, is covered in detail in Jones' pamphlet; he lived until ninety-two, served under Spencer Bulkeley Wynn, 3rd Baron Newborough for fifty-eight years as his huntsman, and received a pension from the Baron in old age.

Character and reputation

Jones concludes his account of Ystumllyn with several anecdotes of his character. He was, by all accounts, a "very honest man, with no malice, and was respected by the gentry and the common people alike". "He was considered by the old folk as a very moral man. The colour of his skin drew a lot of attention in those days, and his position with the most important gentry of the area, drew more of the attention of the common people, than anyone else."
The locals held many "strange ideas" about Ystumllyn because of his black skin, which Jones duly documented; two maids had wondered out loud if "that man's blood is red like the blood of white men", meeting with a sharp retort from Ystumllyn: "Silly fool, you kill a black hen and a white hen, and you'll see the blood of both is red". The local children apparently feared him, "because they had not seen a black man before". "Although the presence of a black man in Gwynedd inevitably aroused surprise and even shock", according to Green, "there's no suggestion that anyone held racist attitudes towards John". Green quotes one of Jones' anecdotes at length that, he claims, "reveals much about at least one person's 'blindness' to ethnicity:"

Legacy

Writing in 1962, Tom Morris described the story of Ystumllyn and Margaret surviving in Wales as "something of a legend; the memory of their courage – which braved the barriers of colour and class in 18th-century Wales – still lingers on". In 2018, commemorating Black History Month in the United Kingdom, John Ystumllyn was included on a list of 100 "Brilliant, Black and Welsh" people, featured on WalesOnline. In October 2019, again to celebrate Black History Month, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography introduced 23 new biographies of black British people, curated by historians Miranda Kaufmann and Anders Ingram. This selection included Ystumllyn, who Ingram cited as "the most emblematic of the theme of this release", a man "whose settled life existence in rural Wales reminds us of the persity of the historical experience of black people in Britain".