THE WARD NAME is legendary in agriculture in Barbados and Le Roy “Roy” Ward has earned a place in history through his contribution.
The Barbadian, who is coursing towards his 100th birthday in six months’ time, has been plantation overseer, sugar factory manager, and plantation manager and chaired the Barbados Agricultural Development Corporation in the early 1960s.
Reflecting on his life at his Friendly Hall, St Lucy home last week, Ward spoke of a proud heritage and inheritance in a family once considered the largest landowners in Barbados.
The Ward genealogy and estate ownership is indeed a fascinating story. Some of Barbados’ housing developments such as Canevale, Maxwell, Adams Castle and Warner’s in Christ Church were all once sugar plantations owned by the Ward family.
“I was born at Oxford Plantation where my grandmother used to work,” Ward told the SUNDAY SUN, and went on to relate how his grandmother had worked as a labourer on one of the plantations owned by his grandfather while he said his mother initially worked as a maid in his father’s house.
“The ‘old man” [his father] liked her and she started to have children . . . . I was the second child. After I was born the ‘old man’ then built a nice house for her,” he said.
Having two children, his father gave them a maid, he gave them a yard man and he gave them stock. He made them comfortable. Roy was one of six children, but he lost his mother early. He acknowledges being one of several brothers and sisters fathered by his dad whom he believes may have had as many as 40 children.
Little wonder there still appears to be lingering disappointment at his inability to pursue the career in medicine to which he aspired. His father told him with another child already studying abroad, he could not afford to send yet another at the time.
So at age 16 when Ward completed school at the Coleridge School which he had attended from age 12, he was given a job on one of the Ward estates, and paid a salary of $14 a month.
Promotion followed promotion as he moved from estate to estate, learning the rudiments of sugar production and agriculture in general in the process. Eventually he too would become an estate owner, taking his father’s advice to his children to “buy any estates that go up for sale in St Lucy”.
Today Roy owns over 100 acres of Husbands Plantation as well as the small Friendly Hall Estate, both in St Lucy.
Sugar cane blades and arrows no longer wave over this estate’s landscape however. Instead Ward has surrendered a part of his land to housing development.
“When I saw that the estates were providing a better living in jobs for the young fellows that used to have to go in the cane fields and work, and they brought in the mechanical equipment like ploughs and so on, and how things changed, I felt it was time to cut up Friendly Hall and that is being developed with houses now.”
He had been part of the development of the sugar industry in Barbados, but from early his interest extended to food crop and livestock farming. Today’s decline in the sugar industry and the move to develop a sugar cane industry is therefore not a disappointment to him. “My interest in agricultural diversification began in 1930 when as a boy at school I started a small market garden and the rearing of sheep, goats and rabbits.”
In addition, in the 1960s he successfully ventured into growing cotton, an undertaking that saw him being asked subsequently to spearhead and revive the cotton industry in the Caribbean.
Ward looks with regret at those once productive acres of Barbados’ agricultural land now overrun with bush. But he concedes housing development is perhaps the best way to utilise some of that acreage.
In nearly ten decades, he has seen Barbados change from the agrarian society he knew. He recalls the days when women walked from St Lucy to Bridgetown, starting out as early as three o’clock in the morning, with loaded trays of ground provisions and fruit. Some returned home on foot late at night while others boarded the schooner that sailed between the northern parishes and the city in those days.
He was working in Christ Church on the morning of the 1937 riots. One of the privileged few who owned a car, he drove to St Lucy, his shotgun loaded, to see what riot conditions were in that part of the island. But his father wisely advised the people wanted food, not shots. Ward senior opened his potato fields and allowed the poor people to dig their own potatoes. This remains one of Ward’s indelible images and impressions.
Regarded as an outstanding public figure in St Lucy, Ward was selected to serve in the Senate by Prime Minister Errol Barrow.
“Barrow was my good friend, born in this parish and we got along well,” Ward said. “Nowadays you have different quality people running for the House. In those days you had to get the best. You had to know the people, you had to go around them regularly and see what they want and you had to help them.”
The 99-year old walks with the aid of a walker, but remains active with his gardening and serving the St Lucy Parish Church of which he is a benefactor. He maintains a role in the home for the elderly which is located in the complex of his home.
“Although we are having a better standard of life, we are not as comfortable in our living as we should be,” Ward said.
But of himself he assured: “I can say that I had a good life.”
