Annie Jane Elwin aka Mumu

A detail of a group portrait taken circa 1860 in Epping Forest on a children's outing organised by the Church Missionary College in Islington, North London.

Several of the photographs taken on the excursion show a Black woman who has been identified as Annie Jane Elwin. In 1846, when she was about five years old, she was rescued from slavery by a ship of the British Navy’s West Africa Squadron and was placed with a school in Sierra Leone run by the Church Missionary Society. Since both her hearing and her speech were severely impaired, she eventually came to the attention of the recently established Blind, Deaf and Dumb Institution in Bath, who in 1853 offered to receive her free of charge. Mumu, as she was then known, ‘was accordingly sent to England, and very soon made rapid progress in her lessons. She was of a very amiable, teachable, and affectionate disposition, and her health, too, was remarkably good. The instruction she gained in a period of about five years was attended with the happiest results. After due preparation, and at her own earnest desire, she was admitted by Baptism into the Christian Church and received the Christian names of Annie Jane. […] She was afterwards, for a short time, in service of the Church Missionary College at Islington, but, subsequently, she returned to Bath, and remained in the Institution until her death, which occurred, after a short illness, in May, 1866. […] Certain marks on her forehead proved on inquiry that she was a princess in her own country.’ (Quarterly Review of Deaf Mute Education, October 1892).

From 1839 to 1858 the principal of the Church Missionary College in Islington was Reverend Charles Childe, who in 1858 became the Rector of Holbrook in Suffolk. He was away in Bath on the night the 1861 census was taken, but one of the servants at the Rectory in Holbrook was Annie J. Elwin, born in Africa, ‘deaf and dumb from birth.’ The Institution for the Blind, Deaf and Dumb in Bath had been founded by Reverend Fountain Elwin, hence Annie’s surname. She subsequently returned to Bath, where she died on 16 May 1866.

Her gravestone in Lockbrook Cemetery reads: ‘In memory of Mumu, a deaf and dumb African girl. She was rescued in childhood from a slave vessel and taken to the Church Missionary School at Charlotte, Sierra Leone, from whence she was sent to England for education and remained 11 years in the Bath Institution for the Blind and Deaf and Dumb. She was baptized Dec.r 28th 1857 and received the Christian names of Annie Jane Elwin. After a short illness she fell asleep in Jesus May 16th 1866, aged 25 years.’ The inscription goes on to mention several other people who are in the same grave, namely George Spear, ‘a blind boy, a native of Cape Palmas, W. Africa,’ Annie Toone, ‘a deaf and dumb pupil in the same institution,’ Eliza Feldwick, who died in 1872, and Mary Emma Pearce, who died in the same year [capitalization and some punctuation added].

Photographer unidentified.

From an album presented to Annie F. Childe by her father Reverend Charles Frederick Childe on 19 August 1862, according to a hand-painted dedication on the first page.