The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

Anyone who reads The Tribune’s Weekend magazine will probably know of my interest in Bahamian history and the preservation thereof.

I was surprised to see the old, wooden Cable Beach Police Station has been demolished.

I have always assumed that the lot on which it was built was government property because, behind the police station the old Telecommunications Department had a substation and, behind that was Governor’s Beach.

What happened to the telephone station I do not know, but I do remember going there several times, always at night, in the late 1940s, with my then-brother-in-law, Carl M Bethel.

Carl was a technician with ‘Telecoms’ and got called out when there was a fault that had to be fixed. I believe that building was the site where the underwater telephone cable came ashore.

That, in itself, is historic but it is also the reason why the name Cable Beach was coined, by J S Johnson. Strictly speaking, Mr Johnson chose Cable Beach as the name of a stretch of waterfront property that he was subdividing. It extended from (what is now) Sandals, eastward to the Police Station.

The name of the beach to the east of the station was Emerald Beach (not Cable Beach) and that’s how the Emerald Beach Hotel got its name, in 1954. It was built on the site of the old Emerald Beach Club, where Bahamians could go swimming. I remember playing in the ‘ghostly’ ruins of that entity, when friends and I ventured that far, on our bicycles.

PAUL C ARANHA

Nassau,

November 10, 2022.