Making a Labour Shortage in Post-Abolition British Guyana

On 4 January 1836, less than two and a half years after Parliament abolished slavery in British colonies, John Gladstone, Liverpool merchant and father of William Ewart Gladstone, dictated a letter to his nephew at the Calcutta shipping agency Gillanders, Arbuthnot & Co. Gladstone explained that he had heard that the firm had recently sent ‘a considerable number of a certain class of Bengalees, to be employed as labourers, to the Mauritius’, and that he was interested in exploring the possibility of making similar arrangements for certain colonies in the West Indies, where he himself owned sugar plantations.

Reginald George Stapledon, 1882-1960

Reginald George Stapledon, born 22 September 1882, at Lakenham, Northam, near Bideford, came of a long line of North Devon landowners and farmers; a family tradition linked them with Walter de Stapeldon (1261-1326), Bishop of Exeter and founder of Exeter College, Oxford. His grandfather, James Stapledon, of Bideford, had, however, like many other men of Devon, broken away from the land and became a master mariner; his father, William (1829-1902), did likewise, sailing his own barque from Appledore and included among other enterprises much gun running to South America. The log survives of an adventurous voyage in 1852 to Australia where most of the crew deserted to take part in the gold rush. He was capable and forceful, vehement in condemning the bad conditions under which shipowners expected their captains and crews to sail, very observant and with an almost poetic appreciation of nature—traits which reappeared markedly in young George. Shortly after the Suez Canal was opened in 1869 he set up a shipping agency in Suez and Port Said; it prospered and brought him wealth, the friendship of de Lesseps, and the confidence of the Canal community. All this necessitated long absences from home, and when finally he returned he was smitten by a stroke which kept him bed-ridden for some years before he died in 1902. Perhaps for these reasons he seems to have little direct influence on George’s development. The outstanding influence of George’s childhood was his mother, Mary, daughter of William Clibbett, the last builder of wooden ships in Appledore; a man of pronounced literary tastes and strong character who obstinately refused to abandon wood for iron or to turn off his workpeople—and he died penniless, but owing nothing.