In 1940 Father Ralph Perry-Gore and his family moved from Tortola to Trinidad to better their children’s education, as described in my Oct. 30 commentary “More VI-Cornwall ties explored.” In 1945, they returned to Cornwall, where he served 14 years as rector of St. Dominic, East Cornwall and ten at St. Gluvia’s, Penryn. His wife Addice showed coloured lantern slides of Tortola all over Cornwall as the elected Mothers Union’s diocesan president.

 

After retiring in 1969, Mr. Perry-Gore asked the bishop of Antigua if any church in his diocese needed a priest. As a result, he looked after St. Ann’s at Sandypoint, St. Kitts, for eight months. While there, they arranged the sale to a Norwegian group of some land at Spratt Point on Beef Island facing Marina Cay they had bought in 1940, and returned to Tortola.

The only Anglican priest on Tortola welcomed Mr. Perry-Gore’s help. He was given charge of St. Paul’s in Sea Cows Bay, which he had rescued and rebuilt in 1937. The proceeds from the land bought them a two-bedroom condominium with a private dock at Pieces of Eight in Sea Cow Bay that they had watched being built, and enough with his United Kingdom pension to support them. All that the VI diocese could afford to pay him was a small monthly car allowance.

However, Addice died suddenly while visiting her father in Cornwall. The funeral service was held at St. Austell Parish Church, where they had worshipped while in England. The Bishop of Truro had been unable to attend the funeral but visited Mr. Perry-Gore to express his condolences beforehand, and a packed memorial service was held at St. George’s in Road Town.

In his memoirs, The World Adventures of Addice and Gore (1984), Mr. Perry-Gore pays tribute to his wife’s generous outgoing spirit, in contrast to his own more reserved nature. He erected a stained glass window of the crucified head of Christ (inherited from his father in England) over the altar at St. Paul’s as a memorial to Addice.

Expansion

Over 12 months during 1978 and 1979, $6,000 was raised towards the cost of an extension to St. Paul’s, estimated to cost $25,000-$30,000. The bishop attended a gift day at Pieces of Eight and during a pageant and fete in the parish hall the governor crowned Sybil Todman as queen of the fair for raising the most money.

Seeing Mr. Perry-Gore mowing the churchyard grass, painting the church, and so on inspired the men in the church to offer their services for free too, as the $6,000 already raised paid for the materials needed. The carpenters, masons and labourers worked according to plans that a good architect had drawn up for Mr. Perry-Gore some years before.

The extension to the church and vestry vastly improved their space and comfort. Meanwhile, men from a visiting Royal Navy ship gave a bell (to replace one borrowed from St. Philip’s in Kingstown). Its bell-rope came from St. Gluvia’s, Penryn.

The same 1916 hurricane that had hit St. Paul’s had destroyed St. Philip’s and St. James’, Kingstown (also known as “the Church of the Africans”), and it is said that its roof materials had been transferred to St. George’s. Its ruin had been so overgrown with bush as to be virtually invisible from the road to East End, until people from St. George’s had cleared the undergrowth from a path to it and inside it for an annual service held on St. James’ Day, May 1.

St. Philip’s work

Mr. Perry-Gore had the bush completely removed from around the church in about 1980, then mowed the grass around it. He painted its plaster inside and out and printed verses from the Bible and hymns on it, as a wayside pulpit on the road to the airport. St. Philip’s pretty red and white bricks, which had come from England as ships’ ballast, were also cleaned. The revitalised ruin attracted visits from both residents and tourists.

Mr. Perry-Gore re-hung the old bell at St. Philip’s. Paul Wattley’s photograph of it hanging in the window illustrates the cover of Verna Ernestine Penn’s The Essence of Life and Other Poems, but its current whereabouts is unknown.

Mr. Perry-Gore held services at St. Philip’s from time to time, and it was even licensed to hold weddings. An annual service is now held by the ruined shell to commemorate the abolition of slavery on Aug. 1, 1834, but Mr. Perry-Gore’s faded texts are often mistaken for disfiguring graffiti.

Mr. Perry-Gore was still helping at St. Paul’s in Sea Cow Bay. He died on May 23, 1986 and is buried in a box tomb in Sea Cows Bay Cemetery.

One of his sons, a member of the Friends of the National Archives, returned to Tortola in 2008 to present the Archives Unit with his father’s collection of slides of his life and work at St. George’s. Prints taken from them formed the core of the National Archives’ second Old Pictures Exhibition in 1989.

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