Some early Montserrat Company reports

These extracts come from records kept by JE Sturge - and many thanks to him . .

[Memorandum for the guidance of Mr Hamilton as he went out to his new post. Birmingham. Feb 8 1887. Morality came first on the list. Some period comments about keeping an eye on negroes. Request to diversify and develop, including into invalid recuperation:]
“The Directors wish Mr Hamilton in his management of their estates and business to have special regard to the maintenance of a high standard of morality among the officers of the Company and also to the improvement and civilisation of the negro work people and tenants. They do not wish to retain in their service any white Overseer who is guilty of dishonesty, immorality or of intoxication.
With regard to the coloured people, the Directors wish that in selecting Overseers and in choosing tenants for the cottages persons of moral life and respectable character should always be chosen, and overcrowding of the houses should be strictly forbidden.”
Could put more here

A Survey of the part played by the Montserrat Company Limited in the economic and social development of the island of Montserrat, West Indies. DF Browne. [prob 1968]
[Quotes 1888 report from son Joseph:]
“In Montserrat the cottages have distinctly improved and I am told on very good authority that the people take better care of their children than formerly. I do not believe that the Montserrat peasant need envy any in the world as to his material position. His money wages are small and have diminished but he has a decent house, a garden and provision ground, a horse to ride, a cow, sheep, pigs and fowls, so that even if work fails, he is in no danger of starvation. The unfortunate result is that he is satisfied to vegetate having no ambition that is not easily satisfied and no idea that there is a greater world beyond the narrow limits in which he lives.”

“Report of J Sturge’s [VII: son of famous one] visit to Montserrat
March 4th to 26th 1891
Drought . . There was a little rain in January but February and March have been almost rainless and now cattle are dying and people are reduced to great straits for ground provisions.
Blight. Hamilton might well say that we had not appreciated the extent to which the blights have been spreading latterly. The lime orchards at Olveston are pretty much destroyed
. . [more on various possibilities] . . There is a very capital opening just now in Montserrat for taking in American boarders for the winter months. They are coming down in crowds, 70 on one steamer and 26 on another called at Montserrat while I was there. The Leewards Islands Government is giving a heavy guarantee for the establishment of hotels on Antigua and St Kitts. Montserrat is a far more attractive island and I have suggested to James Hollings that if without incurring any fresh expenses he liked to take boarders at Richmond from Dec to April next he could almost certainly make far more than the rent we should charge him for the year . .
A Telephone has proved a great success in Antigua and it is in consideration whether one should be established in Montserrat . .
The increase in leprosy in Montserrat and the absence of means for dealing with it are serious evils to which I strongly called the Governors attention.
The cost of my journey for Kew, New York, Washington, Florida, Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua and 3 weeks in Montserrat (78 days) was £102 . 9 . 0”

A Survey of the part played by the Montserrat Company Limited in the economic and social development of the island of Montserrat, West Indies. DF Browne. [prob 1968]
[“In 1894 disease began to attack the limes. In a report on O Garra’s Estate in that year, Mr Henry DeCourcey Hamilton wrote:”]
I found three trees dying from a kind of canker just above the roots, so that when the trees were pulled down they broke off, I have never noticed this disease before in the lime trees, but it almost exactly resembles the canker that destroyed thousands of acres of cinchona in Ceylon.”

Elberton Estate
Details of Wilkins valuation 30 Sep 1895
[list and values]

Chattels on Elberton Estate June 30 1899
[one side foolscap list no values – surprisingly few: 2 sieves, 1 skimmer, 1 ladle, 1 thermometer, 4 citrometers, 2 copper 1 gallon measures, 1 gauging rod, 4 hurricane lanterns, 1 juice pump etc etc]
[Further scraps from 7 Aug and 1 Oct 1899 valuations of various machines and buildings]

“Report on a visit to Montserrat September 1899 [Joseph Sturge]
. . I met by appointment a few of the coloured people in order to point out to them that the animosity which has lately been shown towards the whites may help to decide the company against re-establishing its plantations.
. . It is difficult to guage the exact extent of the destruction of the lime orchards. At O Garas, large areas of orchards are blown clean away, into the ravines or out to sea. At the Grove and ILes Bay where the soil is stiffer, the roots of the trees are mostly broken off about a foot from the stem . . In the stiffest soil of all, some of the trunks are broken off above ground and these will doubtless shoot and bear again in a few years. . . estimate is that, against 24,000 barrels last crop, the surviving trees may yield 1000 barrels in 1900 . . eventually up to 5000 barrrels and that any further increase would have to come from fresh planting . . The beautiful nutmeg trees, some of them 20 feet high and just giving a profitable return, are all totally destroyed, and so is the vanilla. The cocoa trees are all wrecked . . Elberton estate house totally destroyed and blown clean away [and so it went on, including future prospects and suggestions]

“Interim report 1903 [Joseph Sturge VII 1847-1934]
Absent 4 March 9 May. 19 days Montserrat 3 New York 1 each Halifax, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington
On approaching the Montserrat coast a strong and offensive sulphurous smell reminds you that the subterranean forces are more active than they used to be. On the 22nd of March the explosions in St Vincent and Martinique were heard, and I myself saw the great clouds of volcanic dust therefrom. It seems to be the feeling on Montserrat that the worst earthquake shocks there were more terrifying than the hurricane of 1899.
In revisiting the orchards after an interval of two years, one sees a very satisfactory growth in most places . . There is blight everywhere; on every tree and almost every fruit, but not at present to a very harmful result. In looking back on the large sums we have spent on spraying and fumigating Driver says that he believes it did more harm than good . . [Bellars / Bellans? Probably Bellas from another source] is very strong on cultivation he says that to spray or fumigate blighted lime trees until you have first thoroughly cultivated the land they grow in is like treating a typhoid patient without removing the bad drains which caused the attack.
This however is at variance with Hamilton’s observations that blighted lime trees recovered when the bush was allowed to grow up around them.
. . With regard to new cultures, I went carefully into the question of pine growing which Hamilton now suggests. I find that the practical difficulty is that the steamers come only fortnightly and that in the season a great deal of fruit that was unfit for shipment by one mail would be overripe before the next [remember tomatoes].
Very great interest has been aroused in the West Indies in the revival of the cotton cultivation which was given up after the American War because sugar was so much more lucrative. Conditions have now totally changed. The cotton seed which was then a waste product has become only second in importance to the lint. This enormous increase of the demand for cotton has made Lancashire anxious for its supplies. And £25,000 has been raised there to stimulate production in the West Indies and elsewhere. Sandall and Wades [?] the only remaining sugar planters on Montserrat have put 100 acres into cotton in our island and a larger area in St Kitts. The first crop has been gathered but not sold; but the results appear to satisfy their local agent. As they will be willing to gin and bale an experimental crop from us, I have arranged to plant about 25 acres at the North as an experiment. This will not I think risk more than £50 and is not likely to result in much loss. If the directors think well to make a really serious experiment we will not I think be too late to arrange to do so when I come home.”

A Survey of the part played by the Montserrat Company Limited in the economic and social development of the island of Montserrat, West Indies. DF Browne. [prob 1968]
[Quotes Report to the Imperial Commissioner of Agriculture, 1905, Hon – later Sir Francis Watts:]
“. . During the past twenty years, sugar has been a decadent industry in Montserrat . . The traditions of Montserrat are based on sugar and its peasantry still adhere to its cultivation in preference to anything else”

A Survey of the part played by the Montserrat Company Limited in the economic and social development of the island of Montserrat, West Indies. DF Browne. [prob 1968]
[Quotes 17 Nov, 1906 Joseph Sturge wrote to Alexander Duncan who had applied for and was granted the job of Assistant Manager in Montserrat:]
If you were to hit a workman in the West Indies you would soon find yourself before the Magistrate; and the best and most successful managers even avoid fines and trust to tact and reasoning . . When I have watched Mr Bellas [Duncan’s predecessor] paying wages in Montserrat, I have been struck by the extraordinary patience he showed in explaining over and over again to a man anything in the reckoning which he did not quite understand thinking it better to keep a hundred people waiting five minutes than let one man go away with a sense of injustice; and it was to this fairness and patience that he owed his success with the people”

1909 Friends Tract: Joseph Sturge. The Christian Merchant.
Friends Ancient and Modern No 12
“’During the short period of two years,’ wrote Rev JF Phillippo, from the West Indies ’60,000 apprenctices received in the aggregate one quarter of a million of lashes and 50,000 other punishments with the tread-wheel, the chain gangs and other means of legal torture ; so that, instead of a diminution, there was a frightful addition to the miseries of the negro population’
. . The Government took no public action, but privately influenced the colonial legislatures, so that they did away with the apprenticeship system by Acts of their own . . “

1911 coloured map – red is S estates – very pretty – prob on Birmingham website.

[Lots of MCo Annual reports: at least 1917 to 1954 and 1956 – which latter is very depressing reading for both limes and cotton.]

A Survey of the part played by the Montserrat Company Limited in the economic and social development of the island of Montserrat, West Indies. DF Browne. [prob 1968]
[From / related to annual report 1917:]
“The difficulty in obtaining freight packages and, still more, the scarcity of labour have proved serious problems during the year. The exodus from Montserrat has now greatly reduced the working population.”
[Then Dora goes on:] The ‘exodus’ spoken of here was to the United States mainly.

[Dora doc: Appendix 1: Letter to JS on his visit in 1922]

[Letter from Mr Shand, Montserrat. 29 Aug 1924:
“I cabled you today as follows: ‘Severe hurricane twenty two lives lost ninety per cent cotton and lime crops destroyed one thousand pounds damage building. All well.’
I do not think I have overestimated the destruction and damage . .

“TA Twyman’s Report on visit to USA and Montserrat. September 1924 – January 1925 [post 1924 hurricane.
Much on the business and botany. Thomas Twyman was MD after JS7]
I am very glad indeed that it was possible for me to see something of educational institutions for coloured people in the States . .
While being motored along, asking questions of, and discussing agricultural problems with, the Agent, or sitting in a delightfully furnished sitting room drinking creamy fresh milk, or being shown by a proud housewife stores of bottled fruit, in a cellar recently constructed by her husband, it was difficult to realise that their parents were born in slavery. What I saw seemed ample justification for the work of those who had faith in the future of the coloured people. The County agents are nearly all Hampton or Tuskegee trained.
[In Montserrat] . . in the early years of their school life, between five and seven, a great many of the children lose time due to their being infected with yaws. I discussed this latter with Doctor Coulter, the Senior Medical Officer, whom I found very much alive to this and similar problems. The Government has made provision for free treatment in case of yaws from which good results are anticipated.”

[Cables on “Memorandum from The Montserrat Co Ltd, 2 Gas Street, Birmingham”.] “To AL Wilson Esq,
Cable received from Montserrat 17.9.28
Olveston House and Works Iles Bay Works Ginnery Refinery Richmond Grove Houses much damaged other houses and buildings down stored cotton heavy loss lime trees uprooted staff all well”
[Three more for later days that month]