the Wedding That Stopped brighton
Queen’s ward and protégée
Brighton did not just witness Sarah Forbes Bonetta. For a brief moment, it held one of the most remarkable turns in her life.
By the time she arrived in the town, Sarah had already lived through violence, loss and rescue on a scale most Victorians could scarcely imagine. Born Aina in the Yoruba states of West Africa, she was captured as a child after an attack on her community, then taken from Dahomey to Britain by Captain Frederick Forbes. Renamed Sarah Forbes Bonetta, she came under the protection of Queen Victoria, who took a close interest in her education, health and future. When Sarah’s story reached Brighton in the early 1860s, she was no longer simply a child under royal care. She was a young woman whose life was being steered towards marriage, public respectability and a future shaped as much by empire as by choice.
The goddaughter
There is a common misconception that Sarah herself was Queen Victoria’s goddaughter. The records point to something more careful than that. Sarah was clearly the Queen’s ward and protégée, supported through the royal household and kept within the Queen’s circle of patronage. The firmer evidence of official goddaughter status belongs to Sarah’s daughter, Victoria Davies. That distinction matters, not because it makes Sarah’s story smaller, but because it makes it truer.
Brighton as a turning point
Sarah’s connection to Brighton was not casual. When James Pinson Labulo Davies proposed marriage, she did not at first welcome the match. She wrote that she did not feel “a particle of love” for him. In response, she was sent to Brighton to stay under supervision while those around her tried to persuade her that the marriage would be suitable and secure. It was not a holiday by the sea. It was a carefully managed pause in which her future was being settled by others.
One of the most vivid details from this period is Sarah’s own description of her Brighton lodgings. She called the place a “desolate little pig sty”. Whatever the exact state of the house, the phrase tells us a good deal about how she felt. It suggests loneliness, confinement and a sharp sense that her life was being directed from outside. Local accounts place her in Clifton Street before the wedding, which gives this part of her story a real place in the town. Sarah was not only moving through royal circles. For a time, she was living in the ordinary streets of Brighton, waiting for a decision that would shape the rest of her life.
The wedding that stopped the town
On 14 August 1862, Brighton turned out to watch Sarah Forbes Bonetta marry James Pinson Labulo Davies at St Nicholas Church on Dyke Road. The wedding was treated as a major social event. The party set out from West Hill Lodge in a procession of ten horse-drawn carriages, and the crowds were so large that a constable had to clear a way into the church. People climbed trees and stood on walls just to catch a glimpse of the bride.
What drew such attention was not only the scale of the occasion, but who Sarah was. Victorian Brighton was not used to seeing a Black woman at the centre of such a public and high-status ceremony, especially one so closely linked to the Queen’s household. Reports described a striking mix of guests, with Black and white members of the wedding party appearing together in a way that many onlookers would have found unusual. Her sixteen bridesmaids were divided evenly between Black and white women, making the whole event appear both carefully arranged and impossible to ignore.
The wedding also survives in photographs, where Sarah and James appear as a fashionable, self-possessed Victorian couple. That matters. They were not just being looked at. They were also shaping how they wished to be seen. Even in a society that often treated Black lives as curiosities, these images present them with dignity, style and social confidence.
One detail from the marriage record still feels especially powerful. Sarah signed her first name as “Ina”, echoing the name Aina she had carried before Britain, before royal protection and before Victorian society tried to rename her. It is only a small mark on the page, but it suggests that even at this highly managed moment, something of her earlier self remained firmly her own.
A brief home in Brighton, a larger life beyond it
After the wedding, Sarah and James lived for a short time at 17 Clifton Hill in the Seven Dials area. This brief stay is easy to miss, but it matters because it shows that Sarah’s connection to Brighton did not end at the church door. For a little while, she was part of the domestic life of the town as well as its public drama. The address also works as a hinge in the story. From Clifton Hill, their lives opened out towards Sierra Leone, Lagos, Windsor and, later, Cheltenham.
James Pinson Labulo Davies was not simply the man Sarah married. He was an important figure in his own right. Born in Sierra Leone to Yoruba parents who had been freed by the British West Africa Squadron, he was educated in the Church Missionary Society world, served with the Royal Navy, and later became a merchant, ship owner and philanthropist in Lagos. Later accounts also stress his support for free labour, education and public debate, and his role as an early cocoa pioneer. When Sarah married him in Brighton, she was entering not a vague future but a household tied to commerce, religion, learning and public life on the West African coast.
Sarah, Victoria and the family that followed
Sarah and James had three children: Victoria, Arthur and Stella. The surviving records tell us most about the eldest, Victoria, and through her the story becomes even richer. Born in 1863, not long after the Brighton wedding, Victoria Matilda Davies carried forward the family’s connection with Queen Victoria in a way that is much more clearly documented than in her mother’s case. It was Victoria, not Sarah, for whom the evidence of official goddaughter status is strongest. References to an inscribed gold christening set, later financial support and the Queen’s continuing interest all point firmly in that direction.
Victoria was educated in England, including at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, and later married Dr John K. Randle, a Scottish-trained doctor and leading figure in Lagos. In her life, the line between Britain and West Africa remained open. She moved between those worlds in a way that echoed her mother’s story while also belonging to a new generation. Later accounts place her in Lagos society and link her with musical and cultural circles in Britain too. Through Victoria, the Brighton wedding of 1862 no longer looks like an ending. It becomes the start of a longer family history.
Arthur and Stella are less fully documented, but their presence still matters. They remind us that Sarah’s life was not only public and symbolic. It was also domestic. It involved motherhood, family life and the building of a new Anglo-African household whose story continued after her own life ended.
Sarah died in 1880, still young, but by then her life had already stretched across worlds: from Yoruba royal lineage to Dahomean captivity, from royal patronage in Britain to marriage in Brighton, and from there into the commercial and social life of Lagos. That is why her place in Brighton matters. The town was not the whole of her story, but it was where one chapter closed and another began in full public view.
Why Brighton should remember her
Sarah Forbes Bonetta belongs in Brighton’s history because her life reveals how closely the town was connected to larger histories of empire, race, family and power. She was housed here, watched here, married here and briefly made a home here. The crowds that gathered for her wedding may have come for spectacle, but what they were really seeing was Brighton’s place in a much wider story.
Today, Sarah’s story deserves to be remembered not as a curiosity from the Victorian age, but as part of the real fabric of the town. In Brighton, her life touched streets, houses and a church that still stand. From those places, her story reached out to Lagos, Windsor, Cheltenham and beyond. It is that combination of the local and the far-reaching that makes her so compelling still. Brighton did not simply host her wedding. It briefly held the turning point of a life that linked Sussex to a far larger world.
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