Imperial Intimacies by Hazel V. Carby

Author:Hazel V. Carby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Alfred Jones arranged for the Kingston Choral Union to make three tours of the UK between 1906 and 1908. They travelled to and from Jamaica on his ships, which docked in Avonmouth. From there, the KCU travelled by train to tour cities and towns all over the country; in 1908 they performed in Wales and the West Country. Even if Beatrice and Maud did not go to the theatre, they would have seen posters and postcards announcing their performances.

The only photograph I ever saw of my grandmother showed a prim young woman. A studio image lost long ago, I believe it was taken in Bristol at about the same time as the photograph of the banana seller. I remember Beatrice’s hair was tied back tightly with ribbon, and that she wore a belted dress with long sleeves, a series of small buttons running up each of the long cuffs. The broad pleats of the skirt ended in ruffles falling over tightly laced ankle boots. To me my grandmother looked every inch a proper Edwardian miss. Confronted by a banana seller did Beatrice hesitate and furrow her brow in concentration, trying to imagine where such fruit, or such people, had come from? Would her curiosity have impelled her into a lantern slide show about Jamaica? My mother learnt to dream of Jamaica in her own way, but perhaps Beatrice also instilled in her daughter a particular form of English colonial dreaming. My grandfather would not have encouraged her to dream of far off places; he was too grounded, and placed his faith in hedgerows.

Chamberlain and Jones employed James Johnston, a Jamaican missionary, and Alfred Leader, an amateur photographer from Bristol, to photograph the landscape of Jamaica as a space of desire in the British imagination. The camera was a technology essential to colonial projects of modernization but in this project they imitated a photographic campaign by US businesses. In 1875, the English photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, had been employed by the American Pacific Mail Steamship Company to make a photographic tour of Central America. The shipping company wanted images to ‘stimulate Central and South American commerce’ with the aim of generating the interest of tourists and investors. Muybridge was instructed to photograph coffee plantations in Guatemala so that his images could be used to attract capital investment.

James Johnston was perfectly suited for this work. As a young boy growing up in Scotland in the 1860s, Johnston became enthralled by the writings of explorers like Robert Moffat and David Livingstone, and he dreamed of going to the ‘Dark Continent’ himself. He wished, he wrote, ‘to see for myself the actual condition of the African, that I might be better qualified to plead his cause among English-speaking people, who have … proven themselves above all other nations the pioneers of civilization, Christianity, and humane government’. These desires were thwarted by his ill health. In 1874, Johnston was told he had contracted tuberculosis and needed to move to ‘a more genial climate’: such a climate he found ‘in Jamaica, West Indies’.

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