How Benedict Cumberbatch's family made a fortune from slavery (And why his roles in films like 12 Years A Slave are a bid to atone for their sins)

High above Bridgetown, the capital of Barbados, is a range of hills known locally as the ‘Scotland District’ on account of its uncanny resemblance to the Highlands.

Here, roughly 45 minutes’ drive along a Tarmac road and then a dusty track, past endless acres of sugar cane swaying gently in the breeze, is a weather-beaten white stone archway announcing that you have arrived at the Cleland Plantation.

The owner, 66-year-old Stephen Tempro, has lived here since 1985, eking out a modest living from the small herds of cattle and goats that graze his 150-odd acres, along with a smattering of small fruit and vegetable plots.

Benedict is currently treading red carpets in support of the Oscar campaign for 12 Years A Slave, the harrowing hit film which depicts the ugly reality of the slave trade

‘This is a very difficult place to work,’ he says, from the seat of a rusty tractor. ‘It’s very hilly and rocky, as you can see, and a lot of hard work has to go each year into maintaining the plantation.’

Mr Tempro and his wife, Jessie, also 66, eat and sleep in a four-bedroom colonial villa at the centre of the property, where they raised two grown-up children.

The one-storey building, believed to be almost 400 years old, is filled with antique furniture and fading photographs. With its high ceilings, wooden floors, and walls covered with peeling paint, it has what estate agents might describe as rustic charm.

Yet these four walls also harbour a terrible secret. During almost half of its long history, the Cleland Plantation was home to 250 slaves, who lived and died in conditions of unimaginable brutality.

Their so-called home, throughout the 18th and early 19th century, was a giant bunk-house on a now-vacant plot fewer than 100 yards from Mr Tempro’s front door.

'Sherlock' actor Benedict Cumberbatch's ancestors' plantation house in Barbados

You can still see a set of circular red steps, where Cleland’s owners would stand as they barked out orders to men forced to labour on the surrounding sugar plantation, which at its peak extended to 400 acres.

Mr Tempro’s dusty garden, nowadays inhabited by nothing more threatening than Sabaeus monkeys, was once the scene of daily beatings, floggings, and occasionally hangings.

It was home to a community of disenfranchised men, women and children who — in one of history’s most shameful passages — were treated as property, and often worked to death, in service of the British Empire.

‘I sometimes think about what went on here, and it brings a tear to my eye,’ says Mr Tempro. ‘Thinking of the struggles of the people who occupied the place can be very emotional.’

Intriguingly, almost every single one of the brutal slave masters who held sway here boasted the same, highly-distinctive surname: Cumberbatch.

His role as a slave owner in the new film, as well as his part as William Pitt the Younger in Amazing Grace, a movie about slavery abolitionist William Wilberforce, attest to his sense of shame

For Cleland was, for a great many years, owned by the forefathers of the actor Benedict Cumberbatch — star of the TV series Sherlock.

In an irony which even a Hollywood screenwriter couldn’t make up, Benedict is currently treading red carpets in support of the Oscar campaign for 12 Years A Slave, the harrowing hit film which depicts the ugly reality of the slave trade.

The plantation was purchased in 1728 by Abraham Cumberbatch, Benedict’s seventh-great-grandfather. It remained in the family until slavery was abolished in the 1830s, when it was owned by Benedict’s great-great- great-grandfather, Abraham Parry Cumberbatch. Slavery built the Cumberbatch fortune, which at its height in the mid-18th century made them one of Britain’s wealthiest families, owning at least seven Barbados sugar plantations and a stately home near Taunton, Somerset.

Its proceeds, trickling down through generations, helped Benedict attend Harrow, the £33,000-a-year boarding school which has produced no fewer than seven British prime ministers.

Today, Cumberbatch, 37, is rightly horrified by his family’s dark history.

He said at the time of making Amazing Grace that the role was a 'sort of apology' for his ancestry

His role as a slave owner in the new film, as well as his part as William Pitt the Younger in Amazing Grace, a movie about slavery abolitionist William Wilberforce, attest to his sense of shame. Indeed, he said at the time of making Amazing Grace that the role was a ‘sort of apology’ for his ancestry.

Cumberbatch has also revealed that his mother, the actress Wanda Ventham, had urged him not to use his real surname professionally, in case it made him a target for reparation claims by the descendants of slaves.

Yet every so often the subject rears its ugly head. This week, for example, New York’s newly-appointed transport commissioner, an African-American lawyer named Wanda Cumberbatch, was asked at a press conference about her distinctive surname.

She said that she and Benedict were ‘related, but not by blood,’ since her ancestors had taken the name of their former masters after being freed.

Delve rather deeper into the Cumberbatch family history, and you find an epic tale of greed, swashbuckling bravery, incredible luck and, at times, appalling cruelty.

At least one chapter also revolves around a darkly-intriguing sex scandal. For one of Benedict’s wealthy ancestors, a plantation owner called Lawrence Trent Cumberbatch, ended up fathering a child through an extra-marital affair with one of his female slaves.

This revelation — which we shall explore later — is particularly ironic given the plot of 12 Years A Slave, based on the memoir of Solomon Northup, a 19th-century black musician who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the Deep South.

After all, much of the film details an abusive relationship between slave master Edwin Epps (played by Michael Fassbender) and a slave called Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o).

A plantation was purchased in 1728 by Abraham Cumberbatch, the Sherlock actor's seventh-great-grandfather

The Cumberbatch family first arrived in Barbados in the 1690s, when Joshua Cumberbatch, Benedict’s eighth-great-grandfather, left the family home near Bristol and emigrated to the island with his wife, Ann, and three children.

He was following a well-trodden path. At the time, younger sons of wealthy families (who did not typically stand to inherit vast riches), would often decide to venture to the New World in search of a fortune.

It was a perilous move. Roughly half of those who set sail to the Caribbean would either perish during the journey or die from disease during their first three years overseas.

Cumberbatch has revealed that his mother, the actress Wanda Ventham, had urged him not to use his real surname professionally

But for those fortunate enough to survive, extreme riches beckoned. ‘Sugar was the engine of the British economy and British Empire, and plantation owners grew incredibly wealthy very quickly,’ is how Joshua Newton, the curator of World History at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, puts it.

‘They were not just the wealthiest one per cent, but the one per cent of the one per cent. They also tended to be rough, uncouth and vulgar.’

Sugar money would build some of Britain’s most famous (and ornate) stately homes, from Harewood House, near Leeds, to Danson House, in Kent, and the vast Gothic folly of Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire.

Joshua Cumberbatch was not one of the lucky few. Shortly after arriving on Barbados, which was first occupied by Britain in 1625, he died, leaving the lion’s share of his assets to his teenage son Abraham, who was born in 1685.

Abraham, however, would prosper spectacularly. After learning the basics of sugar farming (and earning some capital) by working as a salaried plantation foreman, he began buying up property in the 1720s.

In addition to Cleland, bought in 1728, he acquired the Breedy, Lammings and Farm plantations in 1730, building refineries on each property that would turn raw cane into sugar and make him one of the island’s wealthiest men.

A book called The Geneaologies Of Barbados Families records that, upon his death in 1750, Abraham ‘had a considerable fortune, and no son to carry on his name’.

In his will, the hugely valuable estate was therefore left to Abraham Carleton (born in 1726 to his daughter Ann, and Benedict’s fifth-great-grandfather) — but only on the condition that he agreed to change his surname to Cumberbatch. Of course, like any colonial sugar fortune of the era, the family wealth derived squarely from the brutal and exploitative system of slavery.

The trade, which peaked in the 18th century, saw millions of men, women and children captured and shipped from West Africa to the Caribbean, where they were forced to spend their lives toiling on plantations.

Delve rather deeper into the Cumberbatch family history, and you find an epic tale of greed, swashbuckling bravery, incredible luck and, at times, appalling cruelty

During the 200 years from when Barbados was first occupied, to the abolition of slavery there in 1838, an estimated 610,000 slaves were taken to the island.

‘It was a system of unimaginable violence, founded by violence and sustained by violence,’ adds Newton. ‘At the museum, we have whips designed to be as painful as possible, chains, manacles, and bracelets which identified you as a person’s property.

‘For most of the period, the rates of death among slaves outnumbered birth rates. These people were literally worked to death.’

You can still see, in Abraham senior’s 1750 will, a hint of the degree to which human beings were treated as beasts of burden. One paragraph stipulates: ‘My plantation be kept staffed with 250 negro slaves and 150 head of cattle.’

The slaves didn’t always accept their fate. They would occasionally feign illness to avoid work, attempt to sabotage sugar production and, in extremis, poison their masters.

In 1816, by which time the plantations had passed through the hands of Abraham Carleton and his son, also Abraham (1754-96), and were owned by Abraham Parry Cumberbatch (born 1794), a slave called Bussa led a bloody rebellion.

‘Furniture of every description, rum, sugar, wine, corn, and every species of food which had been stored were promiscuously scattered in the roads and fields near to dwelling houses,’ recalled Edward Codd, a British soldier, in a letter home to London. ‘The rapidity and destruction evinced the fury of the insurgents.’

In the two months the uprising lasted, Bussa and an estimated 1,000 of his fellow slaves were killed. A further 214 were executed after the rebellion had been put down, and 123 slaves shipped off the island.

Shortly afterwards, the Cumberbatch clan had another headache. By 1820, Abraham Parry Cumberbatch had acquired sufficient wealth to return to Britain to live in some splendour at Fairwater House, in a stately home which is now the site of Taunton School.

Back in Barbados, meanwhile, his uncles, Lawrence Trent Cumberbatch and Edward Carlton Cumberbatch, had acquired St Nicholas, one of the island’s grandest plantations, with about 300 slaves.

One of those was a woman known only as Elizabeth, described in family documents as a ‘mulatto’, meaning that she was the light-skinned daughter of a white plantation owner and a black female slave. She would become the unmarried Lawrence’s lover and produce his only son, John Edward Cumberbatch, who was born in 1800 when his father was 46.

Among the extended family back in Britain, the affair caused acute embarrassment. But according to historians, relationships between slaves and their male masters were relatively commonplace.

‘It happened wherever there was slavery,’ says Newton. ‘It was even true of [former U.S. President] Thomas Jefferson. ‘Sometimes the relationships involved sexual exploitation. Sometimes it was a genuine match, though there was always a power differentiation.’

Dr Nicholas Draper, of the University of London’s Legacies of British Slave Ownership project, describes sugar plantations as a ‘sexual playground’ for owners such as the Cumberbatches.

‘If Lawrence had a relationship with a slave called Elizabeth, that would be no surprise at all,’ he says. ‘I can guarantee that he didn’t marry her; she would have been called his “housekeeper” or similar. The children of these unions were known as “reputed” or “natural” children in legal contexts such as wills.’

Lawrence’s will, signed in 1829, instructed that Elizabeth and John Edward be ‘manumitted’ (or set free). To help his ‘bastard’ son survive, he gave him a smallholding, and six slaves of his own.

John Edward Cumberbatch would, in turn, become the patriarch of another noteworthy Cumberbatch clan. His (pale-skinned) grandson Alphonso emigrated to the UK, where he became an eminent Harley Street surgeon. Alphonso’s son, Hugh, was a wealthy bachelor who bequeathed his fortune to Trinity College, Oxford. It was used to build the college’s Cumberbatch building, completed in 1966.

As for actor Benedict’s line of the family, they would dispose of their Barbados land holdings in the years that followed the abolition of slavery after receiving more than £6,000 — a relative fortune — in government compensation for the loss of their human ‘property’.

By the time of a 1913 census of the island, not a single plantation was owned by a Cumberbatch.

Abraham Parry Cumberbatch’s son, Robert, and grandson Henry would set their sights on a different corner of the Empire, becoming British consuls in Turkey. Henry’s eldest son, also Henry, became a famous naval commander whose own son, Timothy, is Benedict’s father.

Last summer, Caricom, the Caribbean version of the European Union, announced that it was launching legal action against Britain, the Netherlands and France, seeking reparations for citizens of the 14 countries whose ancestors were victims of slavery.

Whatever the outcome, the Cumberbatch family’s history will never be forgotten in at least one hilly corner of Barbados.

This week, Stephen Tempro showed off old maps of the Cumberbatch-era Cleland Plantation, which still hang in the hallway of his farmhouse in Barbados.

‘It’s fascinating to think that a movie star, in a film about slavery, descends from ancestors of this particular plot,’ he said.