I began these commentaries on July 20, 2023, to celebrate the construction of the original airfield on Beef Island by Wladek Wagner, a Polish sea captain, as recorded in the book Lest I Forget by his English wife Mabel.
In part 30, published on Feb. 27, I reported Ms. Wagner’s comment that the first plane to land on the airfield was flown by a pilot testing its safety for ferrying a film company based at the clubhouse at Trellis Bay, on Sept. 1, 1957.
Mr. Wagner decided to resign his post after hearing that businessmen in the Legislative Council had complained that he had imported fuel that should have been bought on Tortola, when in fact he was building the airfield as cheaply as possible for the government.
However, when the legislature received his letter of resignation, they immediately asked him to build the airport terminal building, so the VI’s then administrator, Geoffrey Allsebrook, must have told them it was needed by the airline LIAT.
According to Ms. Wagner, her husband officially resigned from the airport project on Nov. 18, 1957, with his last action being to recommend the airfield be covered with a coat of tar to stop the gravel being blown away by wind or air traffic. He then asked Alberto Bachman to arrange for the return of the Caterpillar bulldozer he had used for the project to Puerto Rico (see part 26 of this series, published on Nov. 26, 2024).
The same United States Navy landing craft that had delivered the bulldozer to Trellis Bay beach collected it from there after it had been thoroughly cleaned. Ms. Wagner remarks that the legislature may have forgotten that Mr. Wagner had got them the bulldozer so vitally needed, suggesting perhaps that the Public Works Department had employed a driver capable of driving it.
She knew Mr. Wagner had enjoyed the challenge of building the airfield, but she thought it a pity that the PWD and others in charge of the project had not shared the same enthusiasm and pride in doing it as their workers from East End.
Jealousy?
Mr. Wagner felt he had enough to do at Trellis Bay, and Ms. Wagner was used to his innate resilience, but she noticed a change in his behaviour that she attributed to a jealousy of her contacts with the filmmakers.
During their early years at Trellis Bay, they had always worked closely together, and they had only a few occasional visitors. Mr. Wagner involved her in most everything he did, even if just to recount how he’d spent the day. She admits she didn’t understand all his technicalities, but she welcomed a chance to listen and learn, making it easier to discuss things in the evenings.
All that involvement with Mr. Wagner’s work left little time for her to develop and enjoy any personal interests, but she didn’t think he had even considered this. She may have later underestimated the emotional bruising he suffered from the clash between both his habitual drive and sense of justice and his naïve disregard for the legislators’ commercial conflicts of interest.
Tensions mount
Ms. Wagner believes that he was so unaccustomed to sharing her time with others, except their two children, that he considered that the time she spent with guests should have been devoted to him. But as the business grew, so did its demands. She could not always stop what she was doing and run with the children to the dock to wave him off or back, and she thought that he should understand and accept those changes.
She comments that they were spread too thinly, trying to move in several different directions at the same time, but she assumed such pressures were normal in developing and running a business without any experienced staff to help. Ms. Wagner muses in her book that she had been trained to play the piano but found herself running a guesthouse. She was more sociable and outgoing than Mr. Wagner, who was very reserved and preferred to stay to himself except with her and their children. He was uncomfortable in most social situations unless he was in control of them.
She comments that the film people came to Trellis Bay to have their needs met while they worked. However, she welcomed the influx of new people and found interacting with different personalities and backgrounds very refreshing, while she thought her husband felt he was being invaded by a group of people he did not know, with different interests, different ambitions, and different outlooks.
In a footnote, Ms. Wagner quotes from correspondence with the Virgin Islands administrator stating that the then-governor of the Leeward Islands, Sir Alexander Williams, sent a dispatch to the secretary of state for the colonies in 1957 greatly crediting Mr. Wagner’s work in the construction of the airfield.
She also quotes the director of civil aviation of the Windward and Leeward Islands, who stated in December 1957 that he considered that Mr. Wagner had done a magnificent job on the airfield at a remarkably low cost.
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