This territory’s official name has always been simply “Virgin Islands,” while an anonymous online article (privately attributed to a prominent VI lawyer) states that the use of “British Virgin Islands” had only arisen since the 1940s. I refuted that in my Dec. 1 Beacon commentary, “Overseas archives used to probe VI history,” by giving several examples of its use in United Kingdom newspapers carrying news of the 1867 hurricane and, significantly, the description of Colonel John Chads as having been “president of the British Virgin Islands” in an obituary for his brother in The Times of April 9, 1869.
I had once been inclined to accept a linkage between the renaming of the Danish West Indies and the first use of “British” to distinguish our VI from the United States VI and also from the Spanish Virgin Islands until I read that in the 1990s a Puerto Rican tourism campaign gave that name to the Passage Islands, including Culebra and Vieques, which lie between Puerto Rico and St. Thomas.
However, that changed when a correspondent about the Copper Mine on Virgin Gorda studying Cornish migration sent me a death notice from the West Briton of Aug. 7, 1857: “At the Island of Tortola, on the 13th ult., aged 39 years, Anna, wife of Thomas PRICE, Esq., President administering the Government of the British Virgin Islands, and youngest son of the late Sir Rose PRICE, Bart., of Trengwainton, [Cornwall].”
He wondered if Thomas Price had “left any footsteps in our part of the world.”
Trust property
Having confirmed for myself the accuracy of the notice’s transcription from a digitised copy of the newspaper archived online, I Googled its contents. I learned that Thomas Price’s father had made his fortune in Jamaica and then devoted his time and money to constructing in the grounds of a house near Penzance a beautiful garden, now a popular English National Trust property. I also found in the Irish Freemans Journal of May 26, 1845 that Thomas had married Anna in London the previous month, after leaving the 60th Royal Rifle Regiment.
However, I was startled to discover that while Thomas Price’s name followed that of Cornelius Hendricksen Kortright (1854-1857) on lists of the presidents of the council in the VI in Old Government House Museum and elsewhere online, his dates in office were given as 1859-1861 with nobody at the helm for two years.
By a strange quirk of fate, the Hampshire Advertiser of Feb. 21, 1857 reported that Thomas Price and his family left for the West Indies on the La Plata following his claim against a boarding-house keeper in a magistrate’s court that he had been overcharged for his lodgings. However, he had to settle his debt promptly rather than risk missing his ship. The way in which he had taken advantage of a poor boarding-house keeper by hosting a farewell party for friends reflected poorly on his both his finances and character.
When I searched for other examples of the use of “British Virgin Islands” in Victorian London and provincial newspapers, I found a legal notice in the Times concerning the estate of Sir Carlo Arthur Henry Rumbold, president of the “British Virgin Islands” and “commonly called Sir Arthur Rumbold,” who had died on June 12, 1869 on St. Thomas.
Revisiting the online “List of Governors” in Old Government House Museum, I noticed that the subhead for the first group was “Presidents of the British Virgin Islands,” hinting at possible continuity in the use of the title since William Rogers Isaacs assumed that office in 1833, not reflecting its amendment in modern times.
On stamps
The word “British” first appeared on stamps issued in 1951 to celebrate the restoration of the constitution and Legislative Council. The length of time between the USVI’s Transfer Day and a 1968 UK government memorandum decreeing that “British” should be included on VI stamps more likely reflects possible confusion after the US dollar became the VI’s official legal tender in 1959. The only subsequent issues carrying the simple “Virgin Islands” inscription have been stamps commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. (1968) and USVI and BVI Friendship Day (1976).
Major Herbert Walter Peebles (1919-1922) or a close confidante revealed his first impressions of the colony in a letter to The [London] Times published on Sept. 12, 1919: “A little known and consequently needy and neglected part of the British Empire are the British Virgin Islands. … Some of the islands in the archipelago now belong to the United States (they were recently sold her by Denmark), but the largest British islands are Tortola (the Land of the Turtle Dove), Virgin Garden [sic] and Anegada. Administered by a Commissioner, they are politically part of the Leeward Islands Federation. They are, in addition to being very beautiful and romantic in appearance, fertile and can point to a prosperous past … but they have lately been neglected and the Commissioner … has found re-establishment of industry a hard and an uphill task. Efforts are being made to maintain cotton, lime and cocoa-tree industries and thus to assure for the Virgin Islands a new era of commercial prosperity. … At present the islanders [they are mostly Wesleyan Methodists] possess neither a hospital nor a club. The Commissioner is endeavouring to raise funds to start and maintain these institutions. All who are interested may send gifts, either in money or in kind, or communicate with the Commissioner, Tortola, Virgin Islands.”
History book
Norwell Harrigan and Pearl Varlack’s History of the British Virgin Islands, 1672–1970: The Virgin Islands Story” (1975) quoted a commissioner’s note appended to an agricultural report of 1906-7: “The history of the British Virgin Islands since 1815 has been one almost uninterrupted record of retrogression and decay. … The Virgin Islands during these years were almost forgotten and no interest was taken in their inhabitants either in England or elsewhere.” The book also commented that the colony’s comparatively low infant mortality rate might be ascribed to a diet of milk and fish, but as late as 1923 a common cause of adult death, tuberculosis, was sleeping in stuffy overcrowded homes with a fear of breathing the night air. There was no public health institution prior to Peebles opening a two-room hospital in 1922, and there was a lack of sanitary and water storage facilities.
The churches had organised social activities for years and cricket clubs had existed in the VI since 1905, but a new social club of the kind beloved by British expatriates was also patronised by all the local notables
This commentary is based on an unpublished paper prepared for the Fourth Caribbean Symposium on Genealogy and History, Nov. 20-24, 2014 on St. Croix.
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