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William ‘Billy’ Waters was connected to Chatham Dockyard in Kent in 1811: he is celebrated as part of the Chatham Historic Dockyard permanent Disability Trailblazers trail. Once a famous Black busker in Regency London, born in America in the dying years of the eighteenth-century, Billy Waters has been largely overlooked by history until recent years. Sailor, immigrant, father, lover, and extraordinary talent, exploring the life of Billy Waters allows us to celebrate his creativity and to understand a diverse transatlantic Regency world.

Waters had a hit song, a famous street performance, a well-known costume and was depicted in a play that toured Britain and America. He was a Black, disabled, poor man in an era when to be any of those things was at best challenging, and usually downright dangerous. Yet Waters shaped his life on his own terms as far as he could – he joined the British Navy, got promoted to a petty officer, turned the accident which disabled him into the start of new career as a performer, and fought hard to defend his family and his livelihood. Waters was a versatile and skilful man.

Waters entered the British Navy in October 1811, when he appears in the muster book for HMS Ceres. He arrived on the Tower tender, which transported new recruits to the Ceres. HMS Ceres was moored permanently off the Noor as a floating barracks, alongside other similar ships such as HMS Namur. Waters was listed as a volunteer but it’s more than likely he was pressed: as an experienced American mariner just before the war of 1812, he would have been a prime target of a British press gang.

Waters was moved to HMS Namur (whose timbers are now on display at Chatham) and then to HMS Ganymede, which was heading to the Mediterranean and in need of crew. Waters was off to war: quickly promoted to quarter gunner and petty officer, he was a valued member of the ship’s company.

But disaster struck: Waters fell from the rigging of the Ganymede and had to have his leg amputated to save his life. His Navy career was ended. So Waters took to performing on the London streets to feed his family: he danced, sang, played the fiddle, and crated an eye-catching costume. He became not just a famous busker, but a transatlantic celebrity.

Unfortunately, he lost control of his own image when he was turned into a fictionalised character in a hit play based on Pierce Egan’s tale Life in London (1820-21). Depicted as the rascally ‘King of the Beggars’ on stage by a white able-bodied actor in blackface, Waters’ income dried up as people turned against him. Waters died in poverty, but his legend lived on in the decades after his death, as did his legacy to Black performers around the Atlantic world. This legacy lives on: with Dr Angeline Morrison and Dr Ben Marsh I am working to devise new music based on Waters’ life as an educational resource for schools. We can’t recapture Waters’ voice, or the lost performances of the past. But we can ensure that if we continue to explore his world, Billy Waters is dancing.

Free resources for teachers based on the life of Billy Waters.
For Mary Shannon’s biography of Billy Waters, see Billy Waters is Dancing
This article was published: 8 October 2024.