The New Winthorpes Story

Much of area chosen for the Army base was canefield, scrub, and mango marsh, but it also included within its boundaries the village of Winthorpes and the estate house at High Point, occupied by the MacDonalds.

Top: This map shows the plan for the layout of the roads on the base at Coolidge and the site of the new village. Note that it was at first called "New Gunthorpes Village."

Bottom: This map, created after the war, shows the airport runway, the nearby roads as they were then, and the new village, now called New Winthorpes. [Map courtesy of Agnes and Robert Meeker.]

The Americans insisted that the villagers had to leave, although they agreed to let the MacDonalds stay. The stated reason was that they were elderly and infirm—Clytie was blind and his wife was deaf—but the fact that they were white and from Antigua’s planter class was undoubtedly also a factor. In fact, social life for the MacDonalds (and many other white families) quickly included the American officers, and one of the MacDonald daughters married an American officer.

Above: High Point estate house looking up from the dock.
Left: The MacDonald's daughter at her wedding to an American officer. [Photos courtesy of Agnes Meeker.]

The villagers at first resisted any suggestions that they move—even though the Americans promised them a model village, with well laid-out roads, a school, a cemetery, and a good water supply (Quinn nd: 4)—and insisted that the Americans should find another site for the base. After a while, however, the village elders decided it would be in their best interests to begin negotiations with the government.

The problem became where to move them. The Anglican minister at St. George’s Church, not wanting to lose a large portion of his flock, suggested Fitches Creek, but the villagers maintained that it was too swampy. The government suggested land in other parts of the island, but the villagers were adamant that they were “northerners” and had to stay in the north.

As the negotiations dragged on, the Americans, anxious to begin construction and increasingly impatient with the villagers, went ahead and built a perimeter fence around the entire base. All the villagers, including children, were issued passes, which they had to show whenever they wanted to leave or return. As Mary Geo. Quinn put it, “We were prisoners in our own land."

The villagers chaffed under the restrictions and relations became increasingly tense. The Americans tried intimidation, sending bulldozers to drive through the villagers’ front yards and mow down their gardens. The villagers, whose only form of transport was one horse and cart, were terrified by such a huge noisy instrument of destruction.

Finally they agreed to move to an area just west of Barnes Hill, onto the cotton estates of Blizzards and Thibou-Jarvis that the government bought from the Shouls.

Left: Judges mill. Above: The flat stone that marked the western edge of the village. [Photos from 2004.]

Now the struggle became what to name the village. The black-and-white map (above) had rather presumptuously named it New Gunthorpes, possibly under the influence of Moody-Stuart, since Gunthorpes was the site of the Antigua Sugar Factory. The government for its part had a number of suggestions, mostly old English village names, and was rudely dismissive of the villagers’ suggestion that it be called, it seems entirely appropriately, New Winthorpes. In the end, however, New Winthorpes it was.

The Americans offered to build new houses in the new village, but the Colonial government insisted that they were better builders, so instead the Americans paid the government (not the villagers) compensation. Some new houses were built—and can be seen today—but many of the villagers preferred to move their existing houses. The houses were moved by the village’s one horse and cart, and many broke down in the process.

Above: One of the few original houses remaining in New Winthorpes in 2004. Left: Mary Geo Quinn, whose father was a village elder at the time, has written many stories about New Winthorpes and provided some of the details included here.

The village elders planned the layout of the new village and allocated the plots by lottery—each head of family “pulled a ticket” from a bag--the ticket having a number on it--and chose a plot, the size depending on the size of their plot in the old village. Some traded plots if they did not like the ones allocated to them. Not surprisingly, the entire process was tedious and time-consuming and was not completed until April 2, 1942—the date the villagers consider that the village was officially founded.

In the end, many of the villagers felt betrayed by the entire process. They had been promised more land and bigger houses, but did not get them. The new village was on a hill and far from everyday necessities: there was no water in the village itself, so the villagers had to make long treks to fetch water from a spring in Cedar Valley, as well as to the garden plots that had been allocated to them in Cassada Garden. They were far from the sea, so they could no longer fish. Village children had always had a long walk to school, in Piggots or Cedar Grove, but now the way home was up a steep hill. The Americans offered to build a school in the village, but it was a long time in coming, not finished until 1946.

In part because of the protracted process of moving the village, and the villagers, construction on the base was not completed until the spring of 1942, although both bases had immediately begun to operate out of temporary facilities — the first planes landed at Coolidge on June 6, 1941, and the first seaplane arrived at Crabbs on June 25.