Empire in the Air by Chandra D. Bhimull

Author:Chandra D. Bhimull [Bhimull, Chandra D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781479843473
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 2017-12-12T00:00:00+00:00

The Attempt

In June 1930, Archie de Pass launched one of the first local airlines in the British Caribbean: Caribbean Airways. A retired Royal Air Force captain from England, de Pass devised and registered his venture in colonial Jamaica. This meant that Caribbean Airways was a private British company. Its managing director and chairman was de Pass. Six other directors helped to administer the airline. Their professions, which included planter, merchant, and publisher, covered a wide range of areas and interests. All the directors resided in the Caribbean. Many of de Pass’s Jamaican peers felt like he was one of them: “He was really practically a Jamaican; and they were pleased to have him as a Jamaican.”18

When de Pass created Caribbean Airways, artificial flight was not unknown in the region. For more than a century, lighter-than-air craft such as sizable balloons hovered as scientific experiments over the islands. For decades, military fliers and other aviators maneuvered their heavier-than-air machines through the area. A few years before the airline began, Charles Lindbergh famously toured the territories, and the Trinidadian-born Hubert Fauntleroy Julian declared that he would be the first black aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic.19

By the 1930s, public interest in aviation was mounting in the Caribbean.20 As part of this developing enterprise, Caribbean Airways survived the first year. Like airline executives in other parts of the world, its directors tried to secure the company’s future by focusing primarily on the development of scheduled airfreight services. By the end of 1930, Caribbean Airways had flown an unknown amount of cargo from privately owned land in Kingston to nearby islands such as Cuba and Hispaniola with “great success” and had occasionally used a four-seater seaplane for local taxi and sightseeing work.21

Although Caribbean Airways endured its first year, it faced peculiar financial ruin in its second. In July 1931, de Pass wrote to the Secretary of State for the Colonies and declared that the company could not “run on private Capital.”22 To save the airline, de Pass and the other directors asked the Jamaican government to apply for an aviation advancement grant, which was a loan awarded and administered by the Colonial Development Fund in Britain. If granted, the imperial government in Britain would distribute funds directly to the colonial government in Jamaica, and Caribbean Airways would become a government-sponsored airline.

Support from the Jamaican government was not guaranteed. When twenty-six representatives from twelve Caribbean territories met in Barbados for “the contemplation of the idea of unified action” at the First West Indies Conference, the representative for Jamaica was most ambivalent about airlines. While some representatives thought a regional airline network was of “vital importance to the British Empire,” he was fine with local services and lukewarm toward this “big project which was in the air.”23 Short remarks made in the popular press and archives alluded to the administration refusing to sponsor Atlantic Airways, a company that might have been proposed, rejected, and aborted around the same time that de Pass started his airline.24

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