Parents across the West Midlands are questioning why teenagers are spending so long in the shower and what those extra minutes mean for water consumption. Share There is a genuinely strong family-life story here because it takes something happening behind bathroom doors every day and asks what those extra minutes are actually costing households. I’d frame your West Midlands findings as your own investigation, while using national evidence to show that the concern is bigger than a few frustrated parents. “Are you STILL in the shower?” It is the shout many parents will instantly recognise. Your teenager went into the bathroom half an hour ago, the music is still blasting, the water is still running and everyone else in the house is wondering when they are finally going to come out. Across our investigation in the West Midlands, parents have complained of teenagers spending 30 to 45 minutes in the shower, often with music playing throughout....
From Slave Ship Massacre to House of Lords: The Family Line of Lord Camoys
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Records spanning more than two centuries connect a deadly slave-trading voyage to the family line of a peer sitting in the House of Lords today.
Eight Africans were shot dead after rising against the men holding them captive aboard the slave ship Sally. More than 260 years later, the surviving records of that brutal voyage lead through generations of one family and into the upper chamber of the British Parliament, where a descendant of one of the ship’s owners, Lord Camoys, sits today.
The massacre survives not in the testimony of those who resisted, but in the cold handwriting of those who controlled them. On 28 August 1765, the Sally’s account book recorded that the enslaved Africans had risen against their captors and that the crew fired on them, killing eight and badly wounding others. It was an extraordinary act of resistance reduced to a line in a commercial ledger. The people who died had been bought, confined and transported as property, and even their deaths became entries in the machinery of a business.
The Sally carried goods including 17,274 gallons of rum, candles and onions to Africa, where cargo was exchanged for enslaved human beings. Esek Hopkins acquired 196 Africans on the 1764–65 voyage, and at least 109 died. Records show the ship had previously sailed to Jamaica, but the surviving sources here do not establish an exact lifetime number of voyages.
They were among 196 Africans acquired by Esek Hopkins, captain of the Sally, during a voyage commissioned by Nicholas Brown & Company. According to Brown University’s reconstruction of the voyage, at least 109 of those 196 people died. Some perished during the failed uprising, while others died through suicide, starvation and disease. It was one of the deadliest of the roughly 1,000 transatlantic slave-trading ventures launched by Rhode Islanders during the colonial and early national period.
Behind that voyage stood a commercial enterprise. The Sally was owned by Nicholas Brown & Company, operated by brothers Nicholas Brown, John Brown, Joseph Brown and Moses Brown. When the ship left Providence for West Africa in 1764, its cargo included 17,274 gallons of New England rum, 1,800 bunches of onions and 30 boxes of spermaceti candles. But what its owners wanted brought back was devastatingly clear: enslaved human beings.
The Sally’s bill of lading, dated 11 September 1764, naming Nicholas Brown and Company. Brown Family Business Records, John Carter Brown Library / Brown University. Photo/document credit: JAM Radio investigation.
The instructions given to Esek Hopkins directed him towards the African coast to exchange cargo for enslaved people who could then be sold in the Americas. The commercial nature of the operation is laid bare in the surviving documents. Hopkins himself was promised a commission that included ten enslaved Africans to sell on his own account. Human lives were not incidental to the venture. They were the commodity around which it was organised.
The records become more disturbing because they allow modern readers to follow the voyage in unusual detail. Brown University says Hopkins kept a running tally of the Africans he acquired. By the time the Sally left Africa in August 1765, 196 had been purchased. At least 21 had already been sold to other traders, 19 had died and another person was left for dead on the day the vessel departed. Dozens more would die during the Atlantic crossing or after the ship reached Antigua. Altogether, the account book records the loss of 109 enslaved Africans.
More than two and a half centuries later, the Brown family line can be traced to William Stonor, the present Lord Camoys. Published genealogical records set out the descent through Nicholas Brown Sr, his son Nicholas Brown Jr, John Carter Brown, Sophia Augusta Brown and Mildred Constance Sherman, who married Ralph Francis Julian Stonor, the 5th Baron Camoys, in 1911. Their descendants carried the Camoys title through successive generations to the present Lord Camoys.
JAM Radio traced a documented line from the deadly slave ship Sally to the family of a peer sitting in the House of Lords today. Read the full investigation here
That distinction matters. The evidence establishes a family connection to one of the owners of the Sally. It does not, by itself, establish that Lord Camoys’s present wealth or investments were financed by the profits of that particular slave voyage. To claim that would go further than the evidence presented here supports. What the documentation does establish is a striking historical line between a family involved in an 18th-century slave-trading venture and a descendant who holds a seat in Britain’s legislature today.
And that modern political connection is particularly significant. Lord Camoys lost his hereditary right to sit in the House of Lords on 29 April 2026, but returned as a life peer weeks later. Official parliamentary records show that on 17 June 2026, Ralph William Robert Thomas Lord Camoys was created Baron Stonor, of Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire, for life. He took the oath and signed an undertaking to abide by the House of Lords Code of Conduct that same day.
Historic Lord Camoys pictured during the era in which the Camoys family line had already been joined through marriage to descendants of the Brown family, whose earlier generations owned the slave ship Sally...read full investigation here
The documented trail therefore stretches across centuries: from a ship carrying rum to Africa to acquire human beings, through an uprising met with gunfire, through generations of a prominent family, and ultimately to a man sitting in the House of Lords in 2026. It is a connection preserved not by speculation, but by account books, business papers, genealogical records and parliamentary documents.
Yet the most powerful names in this story are arguably the ones history failed to preserve. The ledger records owners, merchants and captains, but the 109 Africans who died are overwhelmingly remembered through numbers and commercial entries. Men, women and children were bought and sold, families and identities were stripped away, and resistance aboard the Sally ended with eight people being shot dead.
That is what gives these centuries-old documents their force today. This is not simply the story of an aristocratic family tree, nor should the crimes of an ancestor automatically become the personal guilt of a descendant. It is about what survives when the paperwork of slavery is placed alongside the institutions and family histories that survived it. The Sally disappeared into history. Its account book did not. And neither did the questions raised by what it records.
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