I concluded Part 44 of this series, which was published on Dec. 11, by noting that Mabel Wagner never describes her Polish husband Wladek Wagner as a property developer. However, most of her memoir — Lest I Forget: The Wagner Family, Pioneers of Trellis Bay, Beef Island, BVI — describes how he fulfilled his dream to construct Trellis Bay marina and the Virgin Islands’ first airfield on formerly bush-covered land.
He also built a home for his family there, but I had noticed ways that an article published in The New York Times on Sept. 8, 1957, throws unexpected light on his activities. In Jeanene Harman’s article “Primitive tropics: The advent of telephone fails to disturb seclusion of British Virgin Islands” — which was based on notes she’d written several months earlier — Mr. Wagner appears to have revealed an association with speculative property developers seeking to benefit from the colony’s opening up to the world.
Ms. Harman had reported that Road Town had only one small hotel, run by a former London stockbroker and his American wife. She didn’t name either them or the hotel, but she commended its fine wines and cooking. I understand that Christopher Hammersley, a retired British naval officer, and his American wife built Tortola’s first hotel at Fort Burt in 1953, but by 1957 its original cottage structure had been expanded and included a restaurant.
Beef Island
Ms. Harman also wrote that Beef Island had six guest rooms and a cottage belonging to the owner of the shipyard, and she urged tourists to stop off at the clubhouse for a cold drink. She did not name Mr. Wagner, but she wrote that her host planned to sell plots of land on long-term leases, with options to build cottages on them, near the new government airfield — from which flights connecting with British airlines were being proposed.
Ms. Wagner wrote that her husband installed a Frigidaire ice cube maker at the clubhouse that his business partner, Herbert Lee, had shipped from New York for its grand opening. She also mentioned that Leeward Air Transport (LIAT), a new airline at the time, wanted to use the new Beef Island airport to connect with British West Indies Airways flights to London. I wondered where she was when the journalist visited Trellis Bay.
Governor meeting
After Mr. Wagner built the clubhouse, he had agreed at a meeting with the governor’s police chief from Antigua and the VI’s new administrator to advance the government the cost of building the policeman’s cottage so he could start work on the airstrip. Clearing its site proceeded slowly due to the Public Works Department’s failure to supply its men with suitable equipment, so he started his own team on the cottages on the beach.
According to Ms. Wagner, her husband and his business friends had leased various plots of nearby land since they bought Trellis Bay, but she does not say in her memoir how they intended to profit from them. However, she remarked that she typed seemingly endless documents on her tiny typewriter in March 1956, while finalising the partnership with Herbert Lee which catapulted their dreams into reality.
Nervous breakdown
In Part 40 of this series, published on Sept. 25, I commented on Ms. Wagner ’s recovery from a nervous breakdown at her mother’s home in Bristol, England. In her memoir, she blamed the episode on having to host a film company at Trellis Bay without any training or professional staff to help her. But having to conceal those business agreements must have weighed on her mind too.
She also wrote that she vowed to change the lifestyle which had damaged her health but felt sorry for Mr. Wagner when he told her he was selling Trellis Bay. However, she was glad that her children were able to meet their relatives at last.
They returned to Tamarind House to collect a few belongings, helped by their housekeeper Myrtle Penn, my future sister-in-law, while Mr. Wagner finalised business arrangements with Mr. Lee, Alan Hickock, Sir Anthony Nutting and others. They had lost interest in developing their land in the Virgin Islands without the “anchor” of the Wagner family.
Puerto Rico failure
Ms. Wagner confessed at the end of her book that life was not easy for her family after they sold Trellis Bay. They invested the proceeds in Wagner Shipyard and Marine in San Juan, Puerto Rico but it failed financially. Meanwhile, their yacht Rubicon was invaded by thieves and other uninvited guests: first while anchored off Isleta Marina in Fajardo, Puerto Rico, and later in Simson Bay lagoon off St. Maarten.
She wrote that Mr. Wagner visualised a project for St. Maarten that he called “Buccaneer Isles,” but its launch was delayed by seemingly endless red tape and financial controls. Then one evening, just as she arrived home from work in Puerto Rico, she encountered a neighbour urging her to rush to the hospital, as her husband had collapsed and been taken away in an ambulance, unable to speak or walk.
Almost simultaneously, a caller from St. Maarten asked Mr. Wagner to come at once, as Rubicon had drifted in a storm and sunk in the bay. Ms. Wagner wrote that she felt stunned but just managed to gasp out that the captain couldn’t come because he was in the hospital!