52. Our man in Jamaica … and his brother: Adelaide’s land agents

I was surprised to find that Walter Woolliscroft had died as recently as 1956. He was 91. 1

He was Adelaide Watt’s ‘attorney’ (land agent) for her George’s Plain sugar plantation in Jamaica’s Westmoreland, and had been so for about thirty years until she sold the estate shortly before her death. You will know that George’s Plain was the Jamaican estate whose wealth, together with a few privateering and slaving expeditions, permitted Richard Watt I to buy Speke Hall. And yet we know nothing much of Walter Woolliscroft here at Speke. 1956? Some of us 29-year-old volunteers were about and doing in 1956 and remember it well. Interesting, isn’t it, to find that Adelaide need not be so very far away in history from us as we usually think, and is not just a creature of books and scholarly interest? Also interesting is to be reminded that Speke Hall is only one of the communities that might claim Adelaide as ‘theirs’. On her majority she also entered into ownership of the Watt estate in Jamaica, and she was also Adelaide Watt of Spott House, daughter of Richard Watt of Bishop Burton. Speke Hall was not the only place on her personal radar.

Local boy makes good

Walter Woolliscroft (1865-1956), Rock Ferry born, one of eight children in a professional middle-class family, spent almost all of his life in Jamaica and eventually died there. How did this happen, and how come he was working for Adelaide Watt? In the 1881 census, aged 16, he is in Birkenhead, clerk to a corn merchant. In the 1891-1892 Handbook and Almanac of Jamaica Planters’ list of sugar estates under cultivation in 1889-1890, there is George’s Plain, owned by Adelaide Watt and with Walter Woolliscroft as the attorney. Is 2

this a sudden and fortuitous rise in status? The answer will look easy when I present it to you, but believe me it has taken quite some searching/researching and has been one of the more difficult discoveries that I have so far undertaken into Speke Hall and its associated ghosts.

The quickest way to solve this conundrum is to begin by looking at his father.

Like father like son

A presentation at the Union Hotel in Clayton Square saw Walter’s father, William Woolliscroft, celebrated for his quarter century of loyal service as accountant to his grateful employer. It was a Saturday afternoon after work, 15 April 1871. As well as a gift of money, he was given a silver coffee tray and tea service, a claret jug, a centre-piece, a clock and a variety of smaller items. This is rather a large amount of loot to come away 3

with, it usually stops with just a clock, but William Woolliscroft was no ordinary accountant: he was the chief accountant for the solicitors Leigh and Whitley and he was the land agent for one of the partners, John Shaw Leigh (1791-1871), who he had helped

I am indebted to Jill Dixon for some of the information given here about the Woolliscroft family. 1

Cf. http://williscroft.one-name.net/familychart.php?personID=I1319&tree=1. Retrieved 30 August 2018.

https://www.geni.com/projects/British-West-Indies-Planters/6826. Retrieved 24 August 2018. The 2

name is (wrongly) spelt Wolliscroft. There are several variant spellings of this slightly uncommon name. For the rest of this article I shall silently correct mis-spellings to that given on his birth certificate. An ‘attorney’ in this Jamaican sense maintains local legal control over the estate but is probably not resident. He is not to be confused with the overseer, though he might also be the manager.

Liverpool Mercury, 17 April 1871, p. 6.3

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to make fabulously rich. The other partner, George Whitley (1798-1878), we know 4

already: since 1865 he had been trustee for Adelaide Watt’s Speke Hall estate. William 5

Woolliscroft did his accounts for him. 6

Adelaide was the third generation Watt to use the services of solicitors from George Whitley’s address, 5 Clayton Square, the site of the old Castle Inn. This was plainly the Watts’ family solicitors’ practice. William Woolliscroft, the father, was their chief 7

accountant, and his two sons, William Arthur and Walter both joined the business in their father’s footsteps. We do not need a full biography to acknowledge this, a couple of points will do.

William Arthur Woolliscroft, Walter’s brother, represented Adelaide at the funeral of John Hamilton Gair (1840-1915). Gair was senior partner of the solicitors Gair, Roberts & Co., the company that wound up Adelaide’s estate in 1921-1922. He died after completing only eight holes of a round of golf. The newspaper does not report the reason for this task but 8

William Woolliscroft’s own obituary, eight years later, describes him as “chairman of the junior Conservative Club, Liverpool, agent for the late Miss Adelaide Watt at Speke Hall and for the Leigh estate”. The 1881 census describes William Arthur as a ‘broker’s clerk’, 9

so he had plainly won quite some promotion under the same employer as his father.

We have already said that in 1889, by the age of 24 we find Walter as Adelaide Watt’s ‘attorney’ of the George’s Plain estate. This is not a role one simply walks into with no experience; the likelihood is that he had spent a few years as book-keeper, and that the attorney’s job was a promotion. We find him on a passenger list of 1893 leaving Kingston for Liverpool via New York, so there must have been an earlier voyage to take him out there. This Atlantic crossing is on the White Star liner Majestic, and he plainly feels quite smug: he describes himself as a ‘gentleman’. A family member tells me he went out to Jamaica in 1888, but there is a belief that he was also out there sooner, perhaps in 1880 (at age 15?). These dates would work quite well: spending some time in the 1880s as 10

book-keeper on the sugar estate, then going out again, newly promoted to attorney. His 1893 visit to Britain was a nice five months long, and it also brought him some spoils. When he returned to Jamaica he was not only Adelaide’s attorney, he was also book-

Leigh’s father had had the foresight to buy land outside the city in various places and the son sold 4

off small parcels as the city expanded for housing, for new docks and for railways. He began by digging clay-pits and brickworks for the new buildings, to such an extent that the level of the land dropped by up to eight feet. John Shaw Leigh became Liverpool’s first Tory mayor in 1841. In 1846 he got £¼m for land by Edge Lane to accommodate the new railway. He had bought Edge Lane Hall in 1823. There were many other transactions. In 1847 he bought the house and estate of Luton Hoo in Bedfordshire. He was once described as ‘the richest commoner in England’.

The association between Leigh and Whitley began in the 1820s. Their first shared office was at 24 5

Basnett Street. Whitley was absent from Adelaide’s coming of age celebrations, perhaps due to illness.

His obituary appears in the Liverpool Mercury, 26 December 1887, p. 5. Walter was not present at 6

the funeral, but Thomas Shelmerdine was.

Thomas Shelmerdine (1845-1921) operated from this address. He was surveyor and architect for 7

the Corporation of Liverpool. Speke Hall’s North Lodge (1867-1868) was one of his earliest works.

Lakes Herald, 9 July 1915, p. 3. Under golfing rules he forfeited the match, without affecting his 8

handicap.

The Scotsman, 24 August 1923, p. 3.9

Jill Dixon by email, 19 August 2018. My thanks to her for kindly providing this additional 10

information.

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keeper for the Green Park sugar estate in Trelawny. It did not taken him long till he 11

became attorney for these absentee landlords too, and he ended up buying the estate off them in 1910. He had by then been ‘many years’ their attorney. 12 13

George Whitley died at Speke in 1878, just a few months after he had completed his duties as trustee and seen Adelaide Watt installed at Speke Hall. In 1870 he had bought a house called ‘The Slades’ (the former Speke vicarage), and this is where he died. He was buried where he had come from, at Bromborough, just over the water, not so far from 14

the Woolliscroft’s home at Rock Ferry. We know of his service to Adelaide, but his father’s service went back before her to the Norrises. In 1797, he had managed the conveyancing for Peel Hall (near Frodsham) and he still held the deeds as late as 1819. Peel Hall had 15

been a property of Richard Norris of Speke in 1706, and it was one of those properties that Mary Norris put into a trust and so out of the grasp of Topham Beauclerk before she married him in 1736.

By the last decade or so of the nineteenth century, we find both brothers, William Arthur and Walter Woolliscroft, working for Adelaide Watt in similar capacities. William is her land agent for Speke and is working from the same address (presumably the same practice) as had George Whitley. Walter is in Jamaica, probably living at first on the Watts’ George’s Plain estate (we find him more than once as a JP for Westmoreland) or else on the coast in Savanna-la-Mar, and he is fulfilling the role of ‘attorney’. He took over from William Ewen, who then pursued a role in Jamaican politics.

William Arthur Woolliscroft at Speke

We catch glimpses of William Woolliscroft, Walter’s big brother, from time to time, still working from the old premises at 5 Clayton Square. He is, for example, a regular recipient

Trelawny is most recently famous as being the birthplace of Dr. the Honourable Usain St. Leo 11

Bolt.

The Green Park estate was owned by the Atherton family of Prescot Hall (which they had bought 12

out of sugar income). They too were clients of the Whitley father and son, as well as being neighbours of Adelaide Watt. It is interesting to note that at this period the Governor of Jamaica was Sydney Olivier, Laurence Olivier’s uncle (in office 1907-1913). They probably met.

Brett Ashmeade-Hawkins as quoted by Raul A. Mosley at https://13

thelastgreatgreathouseblog.wordpress.com/2015/04/06/green-park-sugar-estate-the-history/. Retrieved 25 August 2018. Brett Ashmeade-Hawkins, among other things, writes on Jamaican history.

He had his garden at Dibbinsdale Bank, Bromborough, designed by none other than Edward Kemp 14

(1817-1891). Cf. Edward Kemp. How to Lay Out a Garden. 2nd edition. New York: Wiley and Halsted, 1858. Here, p. 256. The building survives and is now called ‘Kinders’. It is the offices of Ernest Griffiths, an engineering consultancy, and the gardens are long gone. The Dobson family (Everton mints) lived there for a while.

George Ormerod. The History of the County Palatinate and City of Chester &c., vol. II. London: 15

Nichols, Son & Bentley, 1819. Here page 47. The relationship between the Whitleys as solicitors and the Watts, perhaps even the Norrises, needs further unpicking and might prove to be extremely interesting. George Whitley already had a West Indian connection through his younger brother, Fletcher Whitley (1808-1862). A Liverpool merchant with company links to Mexico, he became secretary of the Royal West India Mining Company (1856), and was subsequently appointed Receiver General and Treasurer of the Bahamas (The Standard, 7 June 1856, p. 1) and later a Member of the Executive Council of the Bahama Islands (T. L. Behan. Bulletins and Other State Intelligence for the Year 1860, part 1: January to June. London: Harrison and Sons, 1860. Here, page 229). He died at Nassau in 1862. One of George’s cousins, Charles Thomas Whitley (1808-1895), was a personal friend of Charles Darwin, who he had met at university in Cambridge.

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of a share of the bag from the seasonal shoots on the Speke estate. As the years 16

progress, Adelaide includes him in increasingly higher positions on her usually hierarchical lists of recipients, and, presumably as she comes to rely on him more, she also separately includes his wife at Rock Ferry. Her listings seem to be arranged according to what she 17

saw as social standing, perhaps also with an element of memory as to who to include depending on the size of the bag. Certainly, her dress-maker and her milliner, the De Jong sisters, are always lower down the list, though they are above her tenants. William and 18

brother George are both in attendance at Adelaide’s arrival party at Speke Hall in 1878. 19

We only have a small number of personal touches. So William, for example, kept fox terriers and coursed them competitively; brother George was once charged with 20

assaulting a police officer while drunk and belligerent. 21

Walter Woolliscroft in Jamaica

http://spekearchiveonline.co.uk/hunting_on_the_estate.htm. Retrieved 27 August 2018.16

It looks like William was resident in town through the week, returning to Rock Ferry at weekends. 17

This would explain their two differing addresses. William had an addressd in Toxteth Park, and is buried in the churchyard at Wavertree’s Holy Trinity Church. I have not been able to locate his grave marker.

Constance and Sophie De Jong, spinsters from Bolsward in The Netherlands, operated as De Jong 18

and Company and had premises at 78 Bold Street (the premises are now STA travel). They employed numerous staff and in 1880, and for two decades more were the ladies’ tailors of choice for the upper middle classes. They moved into ‘The Slades’ at Speke where George Whitley had lived, and so were also Adelaide’s neighbours. We last see them in the 1911 census, retired to West Kirby.

Liverpool Mercury, 21 May 1878, p. 6. George Frederick Woolliscroft was a valuer and auctioneer. 19

He was probably there because, apart from celebrations, there was business to be done in winding up the trust and making a final statement before passing Adelaide her inheritance.

Liverpool Mercury, 2 November 1885, p. 7. Another fox terrier fancier was William Sandbach, 20

who we have met previously. It may have been the acquaintanceship with the Woolliscrofts that gave Sandbach permission to escort Queen Sophie round Speke Hall some years earlier.

Liverpool Mercury, 3 March 1887, p. 8. The case was dismissed, but with all costs awarded 21

against George. Out on the ale with him that evening was Edward Williams, member of the Liberal party, member of the School Board, councillor and later magistrate. Drunk and hitting a copper? Easily done, I’m sure you’ll agree. George was thirty. Still, not for us to judge, eh? And it would certainly be scurrilous speculation to suppose a link between the status of Edward Williams and the dismissal of George’s trial. Be reasonable!

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Green Park Great House (which Walter bought in 1910) pre-2013 – photo Jamaica National 22

Heritage Trust

So, William was doing alright out of Adelaide – but what of our kid Walter? Walter did not just sit back and let the money flow in while someone else did the work. Walter was very much a hands-on attorney, and had best be seen as an estate manager for Adelaide for a decade or so, before he bought his own plantation at Green Park, Trelawny, in 1910 from the Athertons he had also been working for. Like other planters, he experimented with introducing rice cultivation on Adelaide’s land, and even published on the topic. Rice cultivation was a thorny issue. Planters would typically bring in ‘coolies’ from India, China or the southern United States who had the rice-growing experience and were lured with the promise of good wages. Planters would lease plots to them for rice cultivation, but the plots would vary in size, year on year, depending on whether the market was favourable for growing sugar cane, which took precedence. The rice would be bought by the planters at prices they fixed. This had the effect of leaving most of the risk and only slight profit for the coolies. The locally-available workforce, the descendants of the slaves, were not included in this part of the economy at all, thereby forcing them deeper into unemployment and penury. If we add to this the fact that the top wage paid on a plantation was 1/6d per day – a rate fixed in 1838 and which was only increased a century later – and it is not surprising that labour discontent rumbled on for decades and erupted in the 1930s. Even the Chinese labourers who were tempted to Jamaica on the promise 23

of $4 for a 12-hour day found that the planters simply welched on the offer. Walter’s predecessor, William Ewen, was roundly defeated by George’s Plain’s Church of England minister, Henry Clarke, in the 1894 legislative elections. Clarke’s repeated public exposures from the pulpit of destitution, hardship and the travesty of ‘post-slavery’ Jamaica not only got him into occasional trouble with his bishop (which he didn’t really mind), but it was also surely a constant noisy background to Walter’s stewardship of Adelaide’s Jamaican estate. It was within this context that Walter nevertheless introduced rice paddies and imported the labour to farm them.

Adelaide’s estate

Attempts to vary the crop were not just limited to rice. In 1899 Walter also introduced an orange grove and set up an apiary. We do not know if this was successful. Machinery, too, was improved in order to better the yield, contributing even more greatly to unemployment. 1918 saw him install electricity (Speke only benefitted from this after Adelaide’s death). Ultimately, economies of scale meant that sugar processing became consolidated at the new (1938) Tate and Lyle sugar refinery at the neighbouring Frome estate. Predictably, the swollen pool of available labour meant that promises of $1 a day turned into the less pleasant reality of 15¢ for men and 10¢ for women. The factory had only operated a few weeks before riots, originating at the Frome factory, swept Jamaica and led to some degree of reform. But by then Adelaide had sold up and died, and Walter, who had bought the Green Park plantation in 1910, also no longer owned an estate.

Adelaide was an absentee, but she did not just pocket the cash without taking an interest in the people who created the wealth. She seems to have exercised toward Jamaica the paternalistic attitude that we can recognise in how she treated her tenants at Speke, filtered, of course, through the lens provided by Walter. Elizabeth Pigou-Dennis, who has researched this topic in connection with her interest in architecture, tells us that “Adelaide seems to have directed a number of patriotic celebrations for the residents of the Georges Plain. She seemed keen to have a “brand” that provided benevolent care for

Adelaide Watt’s George’s Plain was one of those estates with no ‘great house’ associated with it.22

Swithin Wilmot, review of: James Walvin. The Life and Times of Henry Clarke of Jamaica, 23

1828-1907. Ilford: Frank Cass & Co., Ltd., 1994. In: Social and Economic Studies 46/1 (1997): 149-151.

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“her” labourers, and Walter definitely executed this mandate.” This would be a very 24

interesting area to explore further.

Walter at large

A 1921 Rolls Royce Silver Ghost, similar to the one owned by Walter Woolliscroft 25

The ballooning world market for sugar, the ‘Dance of the Millions’ of 1920, made Walter a very rich man. The roaring 20s reached Jamaica with a thump and it was a decade of parties, excess, and unabashed luxury – for some. Walter did not shirk it. He was appointed to Jamaica’s Sugar Board in 1921. In 1922 he imported a Rolls Royce and swanked about the island in it. He had been a JP since the 1890s, he joined the 26

Freemasons around that time, and he spent some of his money on a variety of good deeds. Walter seemed always ready to support a good cause – or at least, a good cause 27

where the term ‘good’ could be regarded as such by the privileged white élite. In 1911 he donated a silver cup for the five-mile bicycle race at Savanna-la-Mar; in 1916/1917 he

Email correspondence of 17 September 2018.24

I have been unable to locate a copy of a photograph of Walter in his Rolls Royce at the gates to 25

his Green Park estate. This image is mentioned on a motoring blog but is no longer present: http://www.wheelsjamaica.com/wheels_forum/index.php?topic=188473.0. Retrieved 8 September 2018.

http://www.wheelsjamaica.com/wheels_forum/index.php?topic=188473.0. Retrieved 30 August 26

2018. Note that some parts of Walter’s biography given here are incorrect.

He was also well known in the island’s legislature for his views on the legal strength of rum. In a 27

debate on the 1934 Rum Control Act, a contributor commented: “Now Sir, I am not interested in any Long or Short Pond, neither am I interested in Myers, Flyers or Suppliers, in Wooliscraft or any other kind of craft. I know nothing about them. What I am interested in – and I think Your Excellency should know it – is that there is a most unpleasant feeling in this country about this Rum Bill.” The Daily Gleaner, 24 December 1936, p. 68. The comment puns: Long Pond is an estate with a large rum distillery; Myers is a brand of rum produced since 1879. A solicitor makes contributions on behalf of ‘Walter Wooliscroft, Sheriff and Co. (Jamaica) Ltd.’ There was a further hearing into the Rum Control Act in 1937, where Walter was accused of monopolising his links to such an extent that his ‘Green Park Rum’ dominated the market in the north of England to the exclusion of most other local suppliers. Walter’s argument was that he had done no such thing, but that even if he had, there was no regulation which forbade him. Cf. The Daily Gleaner, 16 February 1937, p. 56. In fact, Walter sold his rum exclusively to Liverpool-based buyers because that was the market which he knew. Green Park Rum was indeed sold in northern England. Out of seventy adverts for it found in British newspapers, sixty-five of those are found in 1894 in the Wigan Observer. Walter was at that time attorney for but not owner of the Green Park estate. The Wigan adverts are all for a distributor named George Munro (Deansgate, Bolton and Old Market Place, Wigan). Munro was nephew to James Hall of Jamaica’s Hyde Hall estate in Trelawny County, and so a neighbour to the Green Park estate. Munro had set up in business in 1860, and so we suppose that when Walter bought Green Park in 1910, he bought an estate together with its already-existing goodwill and contacts.

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contributed to causes associated with the Red Cross; in 1918 he presented a central stained glass window to the chapel at Munro College, St. Elizabeth, Jamaica – and he had enough change that he could still spare 4 guineas for the Salvation Army; in 1920 Falmouth Parish Church scored a processional cross from him; in 1919 he presented prizes at his local school (Mannings, in Savanna-la-Mar); from 1916 he was a prime mover in the ‘Star and Garter’ committee, helping to fund a rehabilitation centre for soldiers returning to Britain crippled from the trenches. The Great Depression lost him his fortune, and he 28

sold his own sugar estate in 1937. Among the great and good, Walter was a big cheese … 29

for a while. 30

One wonders if there is a further family association? The ‘Star and Garter’ Association was 28

started in Richmond, Surrey, by a group of auctioneers. His younger sister, Mabel, lived in Richmond and brother George was an auctioneer. The association is still going and pioneered recuperative treatment for many disabilities caused through injury. It helped to establish treatments now offered at Stoke Mandeville Hospital and got many disabled ex-soldiers into competitive sports.

Walter sold his estate in 1937, a few months after the hearing into the Rum Control Act. He also 29

seems to have disappeared from public life. There are no more social appearances reported, no more attendances at prize-givings, no more charitable work. But then, he was 72.

It wasn’t all partying. In 1924 he gave a present of a silver ink stand to the newly married couple 30

Aubrey Stephenson and Lucy Taylor (cf. The Daily Gleaner, 7 August 1924, p. 10). He also went to the pictures. We find him on the weekend of 16/17 November 1935 going to see Roberta, the big Astaire/Rogers hit at Kingston’s Arcadia Theatre (it had taken eight months to reach the Jamaican cinema screen). Cf. The Daily Gleaner, 23 November 1935, p. 35. So he was known enough socially that his comings and goings were noted in the press.

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Walter abroad

Walter committed his life to Jamaica from an early point. On one voyage of 1895 he described himself as a Jamaican citizen (the status did not then exist), and where a passenger manifest asked you to detail your intended country of permanent residence, he invariably gave Jamaica. With the understandable interruption of the Great War, we find him returning to Britain every 2 or 3 years. Very often he gives his kid sister Mabel’s address, but we know he also stayed with elder brother William or big sister Gertrude. 31

The visits home would be at least two months, often more – plenty of time to visit the brothers and sisters and to report back to Adelaide at Speke Hall. The war did not limit his travel, just the destination. In 1916 he took a trip to America, and spent a while at the exclusive Battle Creek Sanitarium. He still travelled back to Britain between the wars, 32

visiting family. Visiting friends? We do not know. Surely there will have been none from his Rock Ferry days, so perhaps there were some with Jamaica experience who had returned ‘home’. But this is speculation. Passenger manifests show him travelling quite consistently by banana boat or sometimes mail steamer – the only time he took a liner, 1935, he had to go to New York for it, and he took the opportunity to have two months in the US for a change and only one month in Britain.

The end

Inevitably, travel was ruled out during the WW2 years. But who to visit anyway? He was already 74 on the invasion of Poland. Brother George had died in 1916, William had died in 1923. Sisters Gertrude and Laura died in 1931 and 1934, John in 1939, Marian in 1940, and finally Mabel in 1946. He had outlived them all.

There is one final voyage (no, not that one, that comes later). In July 1952 he took a banana boat to Britain for the last time. He cannot now give a sibling as his destination, so he gives a hotel: Berners Hotel in W1. As now, so it was in 1952 – we have not heard of Berners Hotel because you and I can’t afford it. Walter must still have had money. He stayed in Britain for a year, returning to Jamaica aged 88 on his last banana boat, in July 1953. The address he left from was 2 Gordon Cottages, a private address in Kensington (posh, then). We don’t know what he was doing for that year. Had he hoped to return ‘home’ all along, and then found too late that post-war Britain was too foreign for him?

His death certificate from 1956 may hold a clue. He died in Mandeville Hospital, Manchester, Jamaica. The chief cause of death is given as uraemia, with a contributing factor being haemorrhage (papilloma) bladder. This is typical of bladder cancer, and London’s Kensington would be an ideal place of residence for someone seeking cancer treatment at what in 1954 became the Royal Marsden Hospital and the Institute of Cancer Research. Speculation again, of course, and he still had three more years to live in his adoptive Jamaica. He was 91 when he died.

Mabel had married Herbert St. Clair Jones (1864-1937) at Tranmere in 1890 who had co-31

incidentally (?) been born at Savanna-la-Mar. He was a ‘merchant’, and they were both in Kingston, staying at the Myrtle Bank Hotel, for the Great Exhibition of 1891 (The Daily Gleaner, 22 April 1891, p. 2). They left Jamaica in May, and Herbert was declared bankrupt in a Kingston court by the end of that year. We meet Herbert as early as 1887 in Aberystwyth. The local paper gives him as a guest staying at the Lion Royal Hotel on three dates, the first two of which we also find a ‘Wollescroft’ of Liverpool listed as resident (The Aberystwith Observer, 24 August 1887 (p. 3), 27 August 1887 (p. 5) and 3 September 1887 (p. 5)). We do not know which Woolliscroft this is, but it is less likely to be the father, who had had his first stroke the October before. It seems that there is a previously unsuspected business arrangement here which it would be useful to know more of and might throw light on the date of Walter’s first arrival on the island.

Run by John Harvey Kellogg, inventor of all cardboard-based, nutrition-free breakfast cereals. 32

Johnny Weissmuller went there, as did Henry Ford, G. B. Shaw, Amelia Earhart and J. C. Penney. The more savoury of their treatments involved nutrition and hydrotherapy, others would get me, for one, backed into a corner.

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Gone, but not quite forgotten

In 1980, after hearing nothing of Walter for a quarter century, this appeared in a retrospective article in The Daily Gleaner: “only a half a century has passed since Walter Wool[l]iscroft and his manager at Green Park, Gilbert Adams, stopped calling in at Hodges House for their customary tea with Mrs. Henry Griffiths, niece of the Archbishop of Canterbury.” Walter was among the last, maybe he was the last of the white expatriate 33

Victorian planters. The entire lifestyle is gone and exists nowadays only in academic study and in literature.

St. Barnabas’ Church of England church, George’s Plain

Picture courtesy of Jamaican Ancestral Records

A couple more concrete items survive. The Anglican church of St. Barnabas at George’s Plain was completed in May 1913 (construction began in the previous November) on five acres of land donated from the estate with £2,500 of Adelaide Watt’s money. Design and 34

Ray Fremmer, ‘The Cost of Comfort’ in The Daily Gleaner, 30 March 1980, p. 40. The article looks 33

back to the last days of the old sugar plantations. Henry William Griffith (correct spelling) of Hodge’s Pen imported Jamaica’s first ever motor car in 1903. He married Alice Maud Lang, whose uncle was Cosmo Gordon Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1928 to 1942. The author was a later owner and occupant of Green Park Great House, which Walter had sold with the estate in 1937. Fremmer was murdered in the house by an intruder in the early 1990s. The property was then given to Jamaica’s National Trust, now the National Heritage Trust.

It is fairly typical of both the woman and her times that when the locals needed secure 34

employment, liveable wages, sanitation, a clinic, Adelaide instead gave them a church. Even the primary school was only built in 1972, though that was nothing to do with her. Perhaps partly because of being denied a tradition of educational attainment, the school is not yet particularly successful? Cf. https://jis.gov.jm/estp/docs/Financial%20Inspection%20Reports/Region%204/George%27s%20Plain%20Primary%20School%20Final%20Inspection%20Report.pdf. Retrieved 29 August 2018. The architect was George Hastwell Grayson (1871-1951). Rock Ferry born, Grayson did not visit Jamaica, but made the design from his practice in Liverpool’s Royal Liver Building. At the time of the commission he was living at ‘Greenbank’, Egerton Park, Rock Ferry, then a gated community. Over the garden wall at ‘Shanklin Villa’ (partly destroyed by a bomb in November 1941) was his immediate next-door-neighbour, William Arthur Woolliscroft. The commission was plainly an outcome of the collusion of the two brothers, acting on Adelaide’s instruction. The planning probably went back to late 1910, when Walter was visiting his brother at Rock Ferry. My thanks to Elizabeth Pigou-Dennis of the University of Technology, Jamaica, for the name of the architect. Note in the picture of the interior the crucifix above the altar. Is St. Barnabas a church in the ‘high’ Anglican tradition? Adelaide would surely have at least raised an eyebrow … if she had been told about it.

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materials acknowledged the earthquake of 1907. The month after the completion Walter returned on holiday to Britain. One assumes he reported to Adelaide on her new church. It took a few years before the church was consecrated (on 3 June 1919). As part of the ceremony, Walter responded to the knocks on the door made by the bishop (George Frederick Cecil de Carteret) and presented him with the keys. He also read the ‘Sentence of Consecration’ in memory of the Watt family. In other words, he was the most prominent non-clergyman to participate, as one might expect from someone representing the patron, Adelaide. In 1930 Walter used his own money to have a plaque placed inside dedicated 35

to Adelaide.

The church of St. Barnabas, George’s Plain – picture courtesy Jamaican National Archive

The plaque to Adelaide is probably to the right, below the hymn-board

Walter’s funeral was held at Mandeville Parish Church (St. Mark’s) on 2 April 1956, the day after he died. He is buried at the Mandeville Public Cemetery. 36

Even in death they spell his name wrong

Appendix 1: The name ‘Woolliscroft’ in Jamaica

The name ‘Woolliscroft’ is not a particularly common one in Britain, and during Walter’s time in Jamaica, he seems to have been the only Woolliscroft permanently resident on the

The Daily Gleaner, 7 June 1919, p. 45.35

Thanks to Ann Lazarus of Kingston for this information, received by email on 31 August 2018.36

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island. It is curious then, as I am sure you will agree, that so many children should have been born with ‘Woolliscroft’ (or some slight variant spelling) as a middle name during his time there. Here they are:

1. Walter Wooliscroft James. Born 29 September 1881 at Beaufort, Westmoreland. 2. Dudley Van Wolliscroft Grant. Born 4 July 1901 at 59 Matthew’s Lane, Kingston. 37

3. Norman Wooliscroft Owen. Born 15 May 1906, Williamsfield, Westmoreland. 4. Edward Woodward Wooliscraft Rickets. Born 7 November 1906 at Pellington, St.

Elizabeth. 5. Assly Williscraff Allwood Gentle. Born 14 November 1911 at New Market, St.

Elizabeth. 6. Kerlen Wiliscraft Kelly. Born 1914 at Salters Hill, St. James. 7. Allan Wooliscroft Locke. Born 26 May 1914 at Riverside, Hanover. 8. Vivian Van Woolscroft Graham. Born 16 December 1915 at Kingston. 9. Samuel Williscroft Morris. Born 28 January 1920 at Maldon, St. James. 10. Hartwell Wilscroft Kelly. Born 12 June 1922 at Springfield, St. James. 11. Mendes Whilliscroft Alexander. Born 6 December 1923 at Green Island, Hanover.

With the exception of two born in the capital, all others were born in the western part of the island, pretty much on Walter’s patch. Perhaps they were named in gratitude for his benevolence? Make of it what you will.

Appendix 2: Monuments

Four of the Woolliscrofts served George Whitley and Adelaide Watt. William senior was instrumental in the family trust; William junior was latterly Adelaide’s land agent for the Speke Estate; Walter was the equivalent of a land agent and perhaps also manager for Adelaide’s property in Jamaica; George was on occasion valuer for George Whitley and appears to have had a role in closing down the trust when Adelaide took up her inheritance.

Walter is buried in Jamaica, as previously mentioned. He seems not to have a monument, the grave is locatable but unmarked. Had he run out of money? Certainly, there was no-one of his own generation left to provide one, and we know of no family locally. Much of the Mandeville Public Cemetery, where he was laid to rest, is currently under scrub.

At that time a sailor’s brothel. Even now the area and neighbouring ‘Tel Aviv’ and Tivoli Gardens 37

are centres for Kingston gang rivalries.

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William Woolliscroft (†1887) and son George (†1916) — photos AG

Brother William Arthur is buried, as mentioned, in the churchyard at Wavertree’s Holy Trinity. As of this date I have not found a marker. It may be one of a good many which are present but no longer standing.

Brother George is buried in the same grave as his wife (Mary Maude née Hillier, 1857-1901) in Bebington Cemetery. The burial records give him as a ‘commercial traveller’, resident at 35 Shamrock Road. The house is still there, a 3-bedroomed terrace. He was listed as an unemployed auctioneer in the 1881 census and we know that in 1887 he appeared in court for assaulting a police officer while drunk. He is the only one of the eight siblings not to have inherited in his mother’s will of 1904. For whatever reason, he seems to have come down in the world. His marker is nowadays propped up, the surface-mounted lead lettering largely decayed and missing, but enough is left to identify him and to read ‘In loving memory of’ at the base of the cross. Well, someone missed him. Some people don’t even get that much.

The father is described in the cemetery records as an ‘estate agent’. His grave marker, also in Bebington Cemetery, can be readily found (the cemetery records are meticulous and the map is quite precise). It is no longer standing and lies flat on its face, no inscription legible unless one were to raise it (which, of course, I did not attempt).

Adelaide Watt, as most of us will know, was cremated in 1921 and her ashes interred by the altar of Speke’s All Saints’ church. In the 1960s her stone (set in the floor) was becoming worn and the inscription deteriorating. The altar area was remodelled and raised to include a step, concealing her memorial. Unfortunately no photograph seems to have been taken and there is no transcription, so the inscription is now no longer known. A wooden plaque on the wall nearby is modern. 38

Adelaide’s plaque inside Speke All Saints’ church. Photo Lynne Moneypenny, with permission.

A further memorial to Adelaide is present at her ‘other’ church, St. Barnabas at George’s Plain. Walter Woolliscroft had it placed there in 1930.

Lynne Moneypenny, ‘Speke Liverpool’ at www.spekeliverpool.co.uk/page43.html. Retrieved 17 38

September 2018.

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Adelaide’s plaque at George’s Plain. Photo courtesy of Eizabeth Pigou-Dennis.

In case it is not readily legible, the inset reads:

“This Building was erected through the untiring interest of Walter Woolliscroft, Attorney for Miss Watt. It was consecrated by Cecil Lord Bishop of Jamaica on 3rd of June, 1919: Henry William Cope, Rector of the Parish Church, Savanna-la-Mar, being Priest in Charge.”

The wording is interesting. Adelaide is, of course, already nine years dead. The text of the inset makes it look almost as if most credit should go to the ‘untiring’ arranger rather than the sponsor. It surely was hard work to manage the local end, and Walter had a position in society to consider: he was not known to fight shy of praise. The fact that a space has been deliberately left in the design to accommodate a later inset does rather suggest a minor hijacking of the praise and thanks. It is a monument to Adelaide, but the inset makes it a monument also to Walter: he’s taking a piggy-back. It may be a co-incidence, but the cross is the bifurcated cross of the Molyneuxs and several other south Lancashire families. Walter may have remembered it from his youth or from his several visits back. George’s Plain is not on the beaten tourist path, and few visitors are likely to stop at the church. So apart from Walter, this image is one probably never before seen at Speke. 39

© Angus Graham, Aigburth, 18 September 2018

angus.graham@virgin.net

My effusive thanks for this image and for her wise comments on Walter must go to my colleague, 39

Professor Elizabeth Pigou-Dennis of Jamaica’s University of Technology.

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