The Tribune

AS part of The Tribune’s ongoing celebrations of the 40th Anniversary of Independence, Rupert Missick Jr reflects on the past decades of tourism in The Bahamas.

“Tradition rich as vintage wine, a relaxed and leisurely tempo, sunny skies and soft moonlit nights. Laughter is here drifting across outdoor terraces of hotels and clubs… accenting your hours of active sport. Only Nassau in the Bahamas can offer so complete an embodiment of gracious living.”

There is a vintage ad from the Nassau, Bahamas Development Board, that typifies what travel to New Providence meant in the 1940s and 50s. It shows a man and a woman sitting on a balcony looking out over an immaculately clean pool deck, a pristine white covered dock and the magnificent turquoise Bahamian sea.

The man is dressed in a white dinner jacket, a crisp white shirt, black slacks and a black bow tie. With a cocktail in hand, he looks over to the woman with a pleased smile on his face. The woman leans wistfully against the balcony gazing out at two boats with snow white sails drifting lazily in the distance. The ad invited all travellers who were looking for “luxury and gay society” to consider ”cosmopolitan“ Nassau. This is what was expected of the destination in those days: luxury, class and sophistication.

“They were the glory years for Nassau, a time for sleek yachts and sleeker women, glittering diamonds flashing on the long-fingered hands of royalty, Gatsbyesque parities and nonstop rum and tonics.” (Reported The Telegraph-Herald 1985).

Along with its proximity to the United States and the colonial charm of “Old Nassau”, these “glory years” were made possible by the introduction of commercial jet travel in the early 1950s which gave birth to the “jet-set” – a term used to describe the members of the world’s wealthy who were able to travel wherever they wished in the world to party or just relax.

London, New York City, Paris, Rome, Los Angeles, Acapulco and Nassau were on the “jet-set” route. This made Nassau more attractive and accessible to the “beautiful people” of the world’s major affluent cities.

For decades, between December and March, American socialites escaped frigid New England for Nassau making it their exclusive winter playground. Seasonal tourism met its end, however, when the Development Board, the precursor to the Bahamas Ministry of Tourism, provided hotels with incentives to keep their doors open for the whole year.

“Nassau’s popularity as an all year-round resort began to climb when an agency of the Bahamas government – the Development Board – induced operators of swank resorts to remain open for most of the year. The results reads something like a ‘Jack and the Beanstalk story’.” (St Petersburg Times, 1952),

In the 40s and 50s, the Bahamas was still a colony of Great Britain. The value of the pound sterling suffered because of the tattered British economy post World War II and a lack of confidence in the pound (�) due to the proliferation of wartime counterfeiters.

After the war, the US dollar bought 30 per cent more sterling than before and new US customs regulations doubled the short-term customs exemptions for American citizens. This made the Bahamas an obvious choice for high-end American shoppers hungry for scarce British goods.

This quote from a 1949 article from the Pittsburg Press gives a good look into the interest of travelling American tourists at the time: “American tourists may now take back into the US $200 if they have been out of the US more than 24 hours. There is an additional exemption of $300 if they have been out of the US 12 days. Materials you can get in Nassau, in short supply in the US include angora, Shetland and Kashmir woollens and Paisley shawls.” (The Pittsburgh Press, 1949).

European porcelains, chinaware and haberdashery were also eagerly sought after. Nassau happily straddled the fence between being a balmy weather, exotic British island colony and, due to the strong influence of American culture, a perceived satellite of the United States.

“They are British enough to be different, American enough to make the visitor from the United States feel at home and near enough to the United States to be inexpensive to reach.” (Livingston, 1956).

These were the years when Nassau was, as the Chicago Daily Tribune described, the “nucleus of a vast growing island resort empire,” and Cable Beach was at the centre.

Only ten minutes west of the city of Nassau, Cable Beach was the epicentre of high society on New Providence before there was Paradise Island and the ultra-affluent, cloistered community of Lyford Cay.

“In the winter, the wealthy made their way to this lovely beach. They played golf and socialised at the Bahamas Country Club, wagered at the Hobby Horse Hall Race Track, and sipped cocktails at the then private Balmoral and Emerald Beach Clubs. Some of them liked the area so much they bought palatial homes on Prospect Ridge, overlooking Cable Beach. You still see walled estates there including the home of the US Ambassador.” (Clarke, 1983).

These decades saw the Bahamas begin the process of largely abandoning large scale agricultural and manufacturing exports to become a “high-priced tourist farm, selling sand and sea, sun and scenery – the enduring gold that Columbus missed.” (Boyle, 1947).

And there was little mystery as to why. For instance, in 1949 Nassau saw only 30,000 tourists annually. This number ballooned into 200,000 a year by 1959.

About two decades prior, Nassau and the Bahamas saw significant investment from persons outside of the colony. These investments would come primarily in the form of real-estate development. In Nassau, permits for building totalled a whopping $6,600,000 between September 1947 and September 1948 with actual construction cost totalling more than $12 million. This was ten times more than what occurred before World War II.

Whole islands and acreage in the Abacos which today – depending on the location – would cost in the region of several hundreds of thousands of dollars to a few million were being listed at prices starting from $5,000 to $100 an acre respectively.

These land prices would bring in an influx of wealthy investors who would leave an indelible mark on the island of New Providence.

Canadian tycoon Edward Taylor would found Lyford Cay in 1959. Pan American World Airways founder, Juan Trippe, businessman and hotelier from the Sassoon banking family Sir Ellice “Victor” Sassoon, and American industrialist Arthur Vining “Art” Davis would also invest, make their home and transfer their money to the Bahamas.

Perhaps that era’s poster child for foreign investments in the Bahamas would be a man who by the early 1940s owned more than one third of the entire island of New Providence. Sir Harry Oakes, a Canadian gold magnet who escaped to the Bahamas to avoid taxes, did more to assist with Nassau’s transformation from a sleepy backwater colony of the British Empire than any investor of that time. Oakes played a major part in expanding the island’s airport at Oakes Field, purchased the British Colonial Hotel, invested in farming and a golf course and country club.

Although Nassau’s reputation as a haven for fashionable winter tourists had been primarily established by North Americans, the Bahamas also began to attract an “unusual number” of wealthy persons from the United Kingdom after the war. They came to Nassau seeking a sunny climate and beautiful scenery and also relief from burdensome income tax and austerity.

These visitors brought with them a significant amount of capital to buy land and joined their counterparts from the United States and Canada in becoming investors in the Bahamian economy. “A lot of English people are investing here. We’ve had more lords and ladies than you can shake a lorgnette at. These people are convinced that the Bahamas has a good future.” (Boyle, 1947).

As the decades passed, travel, especially by air, would become cheaper and more accessible. The Bahamas like many other destinations around the world opted for the quantity of guest over quality.

“This winter (1971) the hotels (on New Providence) are scrambling to cater for a mass migration of middle and lower income groups. These customers will, in some cases, pay less than $200 for their charted flight and week’s accommodation and food. The Balmoral’s former customers would pay as much as that on a day’s stay, not counting the transportation to get there.” (Anderson, 1971).

These realities made the 1970s a watershed decade for the Bahamian tourism industry. In addition, the great social upheaval within the Bahamas, starting with the advent of majority rule in 1967 and ending with independence in 1973, would force the government of the day to step in and take the reins of the country’s number one revenue generator to not only maintain and create jobs, but to ensure the stability of the young nation’s economy.

By the time the 80s rolled in, Nassau had all but lost its claim on the rich and famous and there was a desperate attempt to reclaim her lost prestige.

“The people who loved… the old Nassau fled. They went to the Windermere Island Club, or Little Dix Bay in The British Virgin Islands, or to Petite St Vincent. Nassau, her hotels battered by low occupancy, her streets and harbour cluttered with the refuse of a dozen cruise ships limped into the 1980s with a broken spirit and a broken heart.” (The Telegraph-Herald, 1985).

In 1992, after 25 years as Prime Minister, Sir Lynden Pindling and his Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) lost the general election to Hubert Ingraham and the Free National Movement (FNM). One of the FNM’s plans to revive the flailing Bahamian economy involved breathing new life into the country’s major industry, tourism.

Over its two and a half decades in power, the PLP had acquired eight resorts. In New Providence, the government owned the 690-room Radisson Cable Beach Hotel, the 390-room Ambassador Beach Hotel, the 175-room Balmoral Club, (since renamed the Royal Bahamian Hotel). In Grand Bahama, the government owned the 175-room Lucayan Beach Hotel and Casino and 550-room Lucayan Holiday Inn and in the Family Islands, the government owned two small hotels in Andros and one small hotel at Winding Bay, Eleuthera.

When the Ingraham administration came into power, the hotels were a burden on the public purse and couldn’t improve the reputation of the Bahamas as a destination. A part of the new administration’s plan was the divestiture of the government owned hotels on New Providence and Grand Bahama. Sir Oliver’s Balmoral was one of them.

“In 1992, the Ministry of Tourism was revamped with a new minister, Brent Symonette, who came from the private sector, and a new Director-General, Vincent Vanderpool-Wallace, who also came from the private sector, in fact from Resorts International’s hotel on Paradise Island. Their joint view was that no improvement could come to the tourism industry until there was a transformation in the quality of the product and this could only come as a result of new investment and new ownership of the plant.” (Tourism Today, 2011).

• In Friday’s Tribune: When The Beatles came to town.