Allan Gaisyer Minns

Area of Achievement

Politics and Leadership
Allan Glaisyer 1

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Allan Glaisyer Minns was the elected mayor of Thetford, Norfolk which made him the first black man to become mayor in Britain. He also played an important part in his community as a respected physician before his election. Richard Maguire concluded on an article about Allan in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography in 2016 that ‘Allan Glaisyer Minns was born in the Bahamas a quarter of a century after the Caribbean system of slavery had ended. His grandmother had been enslaved, and his uncles had been born into slavery and manumitted as children. Access to a good education in the Bahamas and then medical training in England, allied with his own hard work, allowed him to build an important role in Victorian and Edwardian society, becoming a respected physician, a leader of his community, and the first black mayor of an English town.’

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