The Navy has links with Greenwich that go back centuries but it is usually only the retired and disabled sailors, The Greenwich Pensioners, and the officers who managed them that are remembered. Jacky presented a fascinating talk about some of the widows and children, the wives and sisters whose stories she has been discovering. Some lived close to the Hospital in extreme poverty and if living outside the parish of their birth, without access to Poor Relief. Jacky highlighted the gap between rich and poor by translating the salaries of the the Hospital Governor and others into modern day equivalents and also that local connections with the slave trade were not limited to the shipping and the sea – a local Greenwich iron works, for example, made chains and collars used by traders to hold the enslaved.
Jacky made the history come alive!