A Legal Luminary

The College archives recently acquired a metal tube containing a treasure trove of documents relating to an extraordinary nineteenth-century alum, Hector A Josephs KC. I first came across Josephs during my doctoral research as I investigated the racial contours of Jamaica’s colonial courtrooms. I was interested in how “whiteness” manifested itself through Jamaican legal systems but became intrigued by the prominence and high regard with which Hon Hector Archibald Josephs was held in his native island. Reportedly Jamaica’s first Black barrister, Josephs served as Acting Attorney General in Jamaica before being appointed Attorney General to British Guiana in 1921.

There is little written about Hector A Josephs’ early life. He was born in 1871 and lived in St Andrews parish, close to the island’s capital Kingston. He attended Collegiate School in Kingston followed by York Castle High School in St Ann’s parish, before winning the Jamaica Scholarship in 1891. Reporting on his success, Jamaica’s major daily newspaper the Gleaner (6 May 1891, pg. 2) congratulated Josephs and declared him ‘another evidence of the ability of Jamaica’s sons’. This scholarship of £200 for three years supported a Jamaican student to attend an English university. Recipients were typically ‘the sons of poor people’ who might not otherwise have the means to attend university at the imperial metropole (Daily Gleaner, 18 April 1891, pg. 3). However, this should be caveated with an understanding that secondary education was beyond the reach of most of Jamaica’s labouring Black population. While elite – primarily white – families sent their sons to school in England, a primary education emphasising discipline and productivity was the norm for the Black majority (Bryan, 1991). Josephs’ access to secondary education then likely located his family as members of a growing Black and “Brown” middle class.

Josephs matriculated at Trinity Hall in Michaelmas Term, 1891. There is not much information about his time at Trinity Hall in the College archives, but historian Joy Lumsden reports that Josephs kept a diary while at Cambridge. Josephs seems to have enjoyed his time at Trinity Hall, socialising with fellow students from the Caribbean and India, as well as going on holiday with English friends. A sense of the Cambridge student community at the turn of the century comes from a fellow Jamaican, writing from London in pg. 7 of the Daily Gleaner, 10 December 1901:

“Cambridge is the place to see faces of the darker hues […] Cambridge is emphatically the university for coloured men, and it prizes itself on the fact, for its traditions have always been as liberal as they have been honourable.”

In her reading of Josephs’ diary, Lumsden (1995a) similarly argues that Josephs appears to have fitted into College life, describing typical student worries with money, health, his studies, and talking to girls.

Josephs also attended the University of London, where he acquired an LLB, and entered Lincoln’s Inn where he was called to the bar in 1896. The legal profession was popular among Jamaica’s middle-class Black and Brown population, offering an opportunity to progress within island society. Jamaica’s social hierarchy was stratified by class and colour. The minority white elite continued to dominate the island’s politics and wealth, but there was an increasingly influential middle class, largely comprising “Brown” Jamaicans of mixed heritage. Brown, or “coloured”,  Jamaicans occupied a middling position in Jamaican society, benefiting from both economic wealth, social and cultural capital, and a “light” complexion. Social stratification, however, is never that straightforward. As the late great cultural theorist Stuart Hall explained in his memoir about his Jamaican childhood:

“markers of social position were “traded” as identifiably different social goods in the complex marketplace of Jamaica’s social system. Thus, for example, black men could achieve social mobility through marriage, or by offsetting the negative attributes of wiry hair or dark skin colour against the positive virtues of being well educated or having a professional job.” (Hall & Schwarz, 2018, pg. 64)

We can see the influence of this in Josephs’ personal and professional trajectory. On returning to Jamaica, he quickly became involved in several prominent legal cases and garnered influence across society. In 1907 he was appointed as Acting Assistant Attorney General and appointed to Assistant Attorney General in 1912. The previous year, Josephs had worked alongside the English Counsel Travers Humphreys to defend Arthur Verley, a member of a prominent Jamaican family, from the charge of murder. That same year he took silk and became a King’s Counsel, likely the first Black Jamaican to do so (Lumsden, 1995b).

Josephs legal career continued to soar as he was appointed as Attorney General of British Guiana in 1924. A mark of Josephs’ talents and status, Ann Spackman (1973) notes that his appointment was opposed by the then Governor of British Guiana, Sir Graeme Thomson, who wanted the new Attorney General to be a man ‘of pure European origin’. This was supposedly to counteract what Thomson perceived as the growing power of Guiana’s Brown lawyers, combined with a belief that the Black Josephs would not be accepted by the white community in British Guiana. The Colonial Office countered that Josephs possessed an ‘exceptional moral character’ and ‘apart from an accident of birth’ he was otherwise ‘white all through’.

As the documents recently acquired by the College attest to, Josephs was indeed able to move within Jamaica’s elite circles and would continue to hold a prominent position in British Guiana. Prior to taking his post as Attorney General, Josephs was President of the Kingston Citizens’ Association, District Grand Registrar of the District Grand Lodge of England, and committee member of the exclusive Royal Jamaica Yacht Club (Daily Gleaner, 10 December 1901, pg. 7). In British Guiana, he was the President of the Young Men’s Christian Association, a position from which he ‘preached indefatigably the gospel of good citizenship’. On his homecoming to Jamaica in 1933, he was met at the pier by several notable members of Jamaican society, including the Hon S R Cargill and Mr J H Cargill, leading members of the prominent legal family. However, it appears that Josephs continued to be side-lined despite his clear personal and professional achievements, as the Guianese Daily Chronicle in 18 August 1926 (pgs. 1 & 6) questioned:

“Why decorations from the King such as were awarded his predecessors should have so sedulously avoided him while lesser persons have been honoured, we cannot of course speak with any authority; and perhaps it is improper to inquire.”

Nevertheless, Josephs was an incredibly well-respected and celebrated ‘legal luminary’. Hopefully we can continue to highlight and explore stories of other Trinity Hall students who, like Josephs, travelled from across the globe to study in Cambridge. Nico Bell-Romero’s new book (2025) sheds new light on Cambridge’s connections to transatlantic enslavement, but these are not the only stories to tell – as essential as they are. A wealth of scholarship challenges the still popular Windrush “myth” that Black British history began in 1948 (Hammond Perry, 2016; Adi, 2022). Foregrounding individuals like Josephs remains important if we are to affirm the interconnectedness of Britain and empire and keep striving for a more inclusive present.