The Tribune

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 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, Hermione, published a memoir of their wartime experiences. And when she died in 2001 at 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 for the years 1945 to 2000 ... 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.”

As an example, she encountered stiff opposition 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-and-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.

As well as 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 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, 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 ten, 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.

• What do you think? Send comments to lsmith@tribunemedia.net or visit www.bahamapundit.com.