by Larry Smith
My reading list recently has included two personal memoirs by individuals connected to the Bahamas.
Hermione Llewellyn was born to a wealthy Welsh family, which her father bankrupted by gambling when she was only 13. Leaving home in 1930, she got a job selling appliances, and later became a typist.
In 1937, she went to Australia to work as a secretary in the colonial administration (must not have been many typists in Oz back then), and met Daniel Knox, the 6th Earl of Ranfurly, who was an aide to the governor-general. They married two years later.
The Ranfurlys spent most of the Second World War in the Middle East and North Africa, where Dan - an officer in the 7th Armoured Division - was a prisoner of war for three years. In October 1953 he was appointed governor of the Bahamas for three years - on the aristocratic dole.
After he died in 1988, his wife published a memoir of their wartime experiences. And when she died in 2001 at the age of 87, their daughter, Caroline, published Hermione…the Continuing Diaries of the Countess of Ranfurly, which covers the three years that her husband was governor in Nassau. Part proceeds from the book go to the Ranfurly Home for Children, which Hermione helped to establish in 1956.
As one reviewer noted, "The day-to-day concerns of domestic life and the constant visits of the same circle of friends can seem banal”. However, there is much in this book to interest the general Bahamian reader. It is a fascinating snapshot of life seen from the top of the social food chain just before everything changed.
In his preface to the book, former British foreign secretary, Lord Carrington, describes Hermione as: ”one of the sharpest, most intelligent people I have ever met…full of stories of her experiences in the war and in the Bahamas.” And daughter Caroline’s introduction adds that the many fascinating “scribblings, letters, stories and rhymes...give a clear picture of a lost age.”
By her own account, Hermione and her husband were frequently at odds with the local white establishment: “At every turn one sees needs and knows the solution. But so often Dan sends the solution down to the House of Assembly, and it is passed but there is never any money released, so it is all cancelled and left…The risk of (the black majority) falling back on communism is very great…If they do, the slide will be sudden and very frightening."
The prime example is the stiff opposition she encountered to the seemingly innocuous establishment of an orphanage, particularly from the grand old dames of the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire, who she described as “the bony anti-colour diehards who are petitioning the House of Assembly against my children’s home because most of the children will be coloured."
It took almost a year from the time Hermione launched her first appeal for a children’s home before a three-an-a-half acre site was selected on Mackey Street next to the Dundas Civic Centre, a training centre which had been spearheaded by a previous governor’s wife.
In addition to a small government grant, money was contributed by waiters at the Royal Victoria Hotel, trade unions, wealthy visitors, and poor Bahamians in the out islands or working abroad on the Contract. The home was officially opened on November 13 1956.
In addition to the orphanage, Hermione touted two other personal achievements in the Bahamas. The first was a successful struggle to get the white ladies who made up the Queen Mary Needlework Guild to produce clothes for poor black Bahamians rather than sending their work to England. This guild was an imperial hangover launched in the 1880s to provide clothes for British orphans. It later supplied troops, with branches set up throughout the empire.
Her third legacy was the Ranfurly Library Service, which Hermione set up in Nassau to provide donated books to ill-equipped schools in the out islands. This eventually became known as Book-Aid International, which over the past 60 years has trained hundreds of librarians and sent over 30 million books to libraries in the developing world.
As for her husband, Dan Ranfurly, his legacies included the Hawksbill Creek Agreement, which gave rise to Freeport on Grand Bahama, and the affluent Lyford Cay enclave developed by Canadian E P Taylor. He also pushed through a major civil service reform bill (which included unprecedented pay raises), as well as much-needed infrastructure improvements in Nassau.
Perhaps the oddest item in Hermione’s diary was a passing reference to a top secret British military operation during the social chit-chat at Government House: "“We are talking about Indochina and the McCarthy trials in the US. Here we have an American submarine exercise going on and germ warfare experiments. Very hush hush.”
In fact, the British conducted several trials with biological warfare agents in the Bahamas, Antigua, Scotland and other places. Operation Ozone in 1954 and Operation Negation in 1955 experimented on animals on remote islands in the Bahamas, without the knowledge of local people. However, in 1957, the British abandoned offensive biological warfare research and destroyed their stockpiles.
For most of their time in the Bahamas the Ranfurlys participated in a whirlwind of island visits, social engagements and official events, the most prominent being the 1954 visit of the queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, who opened the newly built hospital on Shirley Street and spent a day on Rose Island. Dinner parties included elite investors or visitors like Axel Wenner-Gren, Wallace Groves, George Lyon, Lord Beaverbrook, Lord Dudley, and Richard Nixon.
In March 1954 Hermione wrote that after Princess Margaret's exhausting official visit the Ranfurlys attended the funeral of Sidney Farrington, "one of our elder statesmen…It was all very gloomy except that someone sent me 500 pounds for my children’s home in memory of him.”
This brings me to the second memoir on my reading list— A Corkscrew Life by Richard Coulson.
Dick, a corporate lawyer and business writer, is the unlikely son of Sidney Farrington. His mother, Abby, was from Ohio, but moved to New York where she married a wealthy Wall Street lawyer named Robert Coulson in 1920. They became friendly with Charles Munson, of the New York to Nassau Munson steamship line, and began spending winters in Nassau.
“As so often the case, falling in love with a place leads to falling in love with a person and Abby fell for Sidney Cuthbert Farrington, a never-married man’s man with a booming voice,” Coulson wrote. "Sidney occupied as large a space in the small world of Nassau as (Abby’s husband) did in the wider scope of New York."
Farrington was a key member of the white oligarchy, general manager of Pan Am in Nassau, and chairman of the governor’s executive council. In 1928 Abby divorced her New York husband and married Farrington the following year - and Dick came along in 1931. Two years later she divorced Farrington and remarried Coulson, while continuing a close liaison with both Nassau and Sidney.
“Until 10 I led the unusual tripartite life (migrating between New York City, Nassau and Marblehead Massachusetts),” Coulson recalled. “Winter months in Nassau were spent first in rented premises, then in a modest but elegant house named the Folly built on a waterfront lot...My first schooling was instruction by two spinster ladies, Sidney’s unbending aunts…The rest of my early education comprised private instruction by an Anglican priest, various oh-so-english schools in Nassau, and an intense Germanic tutor during my passages through New York.”
Abby opened a dress shop downtown called Stewart’s, becoming part of the Bay Street establishment. “Her code gave me not the slightest qualms about the rigid segregation that prevailed in Nassau until the 1960s,” Coulson wrote. “It was unthinkable that social life would be shared with blacks except at a few official receptions. That was simply the order of the day.”
Dick passed every winter at the Folly, where Sidney continued to visit until his death in 1954, while Abby became a grand dame of Nassau society. “She never abandoned her yearly schedule of Nassau-New York-Marblehead until prevented by a final illness a year before her death in 1970.”
Dick went on to attain an Ivy League education, become an officer in the US Army, and an international corporate lawyer, making friendships along the way with celebrities like William F Buckley, Russian Prince Nikita Lebanov and star attorney Norbert Schlei before ending up back in Nassau where he lives today.
It is a well-written and very readable account of an unusual life.
My husband was employed by Navios and we lived on Dowdeswell Street from 1959 to 1965. I hope to find those two books and relive happy days.
Posted by: Amy McKay Core | September 29, 2014 at 09:41 AM
The names of those who dropped in on Government House or hosted the Ranfurlys during those three years are fascinating to look up. They included (but were not limited to):
Cyril Forster Garbett, Archbishop of York, who died in 1955.
Princess Radziwill, the younger sister of Jackie Kennedy Onassis, who had several marriages including one to a Polish prince.
Sir John Marriot, a celebrated British army officer in both world wars who married the daughter of Otto Herman Khan, the famous German banker and arts patron.
Lady Baden Powell, (who died in 1977 and who had become world chief guide in 1930). The scouts and guides were founded by her husband Robert Baden-Powell who was a Boer War hero.
Sir Victor Sassoon, a celebrated bon vivant from an Iraqi Jewish family which had huge business interests in China and India before WW2. He sold these interests in 1948 and moved to the Bahamas, where he lived on Cable Beach until his death in 1961.
Izaak Walton Killam, one of Canada’s top financiers. He had an estate on Hog Island. Roland Rose's father was brought in from the UK as the estate gardener. Killam died in 1955 and his wife followed in 1964.
Lady Jellicoe wife of WW1 admiral of the fleet and first sea lord Earl Jellicoe.
Henry David Reginald Margesson, 1st Viscount Margesson. A Conservative politician most popularly remembered for his tenure as government chief whip in the 1930s.
Sir Oliver Simmonds, British aviation pioneer, aircraft engineer and Conservative politician.He died in 1985.
The Duke of Windsor, the former king of England who had been the Bahamas' wartime governor. He died in 1972.
Frederick Sigrist, British aviation pioneer and movie producer who died in 1956. His sumptuous Cable Beach mansion was used by the Duke of Windsor when he first arrived in Nassau during the war. Sigrist worked with Thomas Sopwith during WW1 and was one of the founders of Hawker Siddley Group. He moved to Nassau in 1940.
William Astor 2nd, Conservative MP and heir to the Astor estate and title.
Max Aitken, the Anglo-Canadian tycoon, politician, and press baron. Owner of the Daily Express and Evening Standard. British information minister during WW2. He spent the winters in Nassau after the war and died in 1964.
Tex McCrary, an American journalist and public relations specialist who invented the talk show genre for television and radio. He often appeared on radio and TV with his actress wife, Jinx Falkenburg. It was McCrary who helped to convince Eisenhower to run for president in 1952 on the Republican ticket by staging "I Like Ike" rallies.
Alexander Bustamante, Jamaican labour leader and founder of the Jamaica Labour Party. He was chief minister from 1953 to 1955. He died in 1977 and was named a national hero.
Rosita Forbes, a celebrated English travel writer and explorer who in 1939 carved out a 400-acre estate near Governor's Harbour Eleuthera called Unicorn Cay. She wrote a book for the Development Board called A Unicorn in the Bahamas. She left the Bahamas in 1966 and died the following year.
Arthur Vining Davis, the American head of Alcoa, who helped developed commercial aluminium smelting. Before retiring from Alcoa, he began a second career by investing in Bahamian and Florida real estate - including most of South Eleuthera and one-eighth of Dade County. He died in 1962.
Posted by: larry smith | September 29, 2014 at 10:37 AM
I have just read with great interest your article in regard to Lady Ranfurly and the establishment of the Ranfurly Home for Children.
For my sins, I was the last President of the IODE before we disbanded in 2005. This past year I have been attempting to write the history of the IODE Bahamas, from 1901 to 2005, from all the original minute books and documents which had been left to decay in the IODE archive at the Bahamas Historical Society, the IODE's original headquarters.
I was amused to read in your article the part about Lady Ranfurly encountering "stiff opposition" to the orphanage from the IODE because "most of the children will be coloured!" Whilst I agree that the IODE ladies in those early years were a pretty formidable bunch, I can confirm that the IODE were only opposed to the home being built on the site of a Bahamian landmark i.e. the grounds of Fort Charlotte.
I have found the original entry in the IODE's minutes of 1955 from which you will see the IODE were staunch advocates for preserving historical landmarks, thereby allowing Bahamians to enjoy their heritage. It's also interesting to note from other entries that the IODE greatly
assisted Lady Ranfurly in raising funds for the children's home, and later went on to contribute to the Ranfurly Library so there was most definitely no opposition on their part.
The IODE Bahamas always seems to be given bad press for their history and the fact that they were formed by a group of white and, for the most part, privileged women but, from my experience with the IODE from early 1991 to 2005, I can only state that they were a group of strong women who worked hard to raise much-needed funds for a wide range of Bahamian charities and without seeking any publicity for their actions.
Without the IODE, there would certainly be no Bahamas Red Cross since it was IODE members who were instrumental in forming the Bahamas Branch of the Society and, throughout the years, the IODE regularly raised funds to support the Stapledon School, Sandilands, PMH, Star of the Bahamas Summer Camp, Girl Guides, Family Island schools, Bahamas Branch of the Royal British Legion Veterans, RAF Cemetery, Cancer Society, Salvation Army, Historical Society, Humane Society, Hurricane Relief ..... to name but a few!
The IODE also provided scholarships for a number of Bahamians, including Brent Malone who
received an IODE scholarship to attend art school in England.
When the IODE disbanded in 2005, due mainly to the decrease in membership and the fact that the "daughters of the daughters" had no interest in carrying on the somewhat archaic traditions of the IODE, it was agreed that the IODE funds would be dispersed amongst all the main charities in The Bahamas - including the Ranfurly Children's Home!
Posted by: jane lloyd | October 02, 2014 at 03:07 PM
I am sure you realise that the comment about the IODE was a direct quote from Hermione’s book.
Unfortunately, as you suggest, the IODE Bahamas is tarnished in the contemporary context by its segregationist and arch conservative past. But my impression is that it did gradually change with the times.
Posted by: larry smith | October 02, 2014 at 03:09 PM