The Booker Prize Backstory. Part 1: Slavery, James Bond and an aristocratic Scottish hero

It’s Booker Prize time again, offering new debate material for the literary set and the chattering classes: who is she? is she that good? and so very young! never heard of her! I'm off to Waterstones/Amazon! And so on and so forth.

For me it’s a bit different. When this time comes around each year I remember the unsung hero who made it all happen; I remember the extraordinary story of how The Booker came to be, a story as original and as thrilling as all the great fiction we celebrate in its name. It’s a story of adventurers and pioneers, the Scottish Aristocracy and sugar; of slaves, slave owners, and hard labour in the broiling sun; of exploitation, cruelty, rebellion, revolution; and, finally, of reform and redemption and the triumph of good over evil, almost Disneyesque in its climax. It's even got James Bond.

And I lament the fact that hardly any non-Guyanese knows the whole amazing story, or that of the remarkable man at its centre.

 Trust me, you need to know. I'll tell you in a nutshell.

The setting is British Guiana, as Guyana was then known, nestling comfortably on South America's eastern shoulder.

A wild, dangerous, unexplored land, perfect for pioneers and young men eager to risk all to make a fortune in the New World. There was a perilous ocean to cross, jungles and swamps to overcome once they got there. But they did it.

In 1815, one such young man, Josias Booker, arrived in Guiana (not yet a colony) from Lancashire to work as company representative on Broom Hall estate in the district of Demerara. Within three years Josias had established himself as plantation manager of Broom Hall, growing cotton.


This estate had 155 African slaves.





























Over the years, production on Broom Hall increased three-fold. News of this success spread; soon other plantation owners began to copy Josias, sending their slaves to Broom Hall for training. Josias Booker thrived. He acquired his own plantation, then another, and another. When neighbouring plantations failed he stepped in and took over. His fortunes grew.


By this time Josias’s younger brother George Booker had followed him to the colony and had settled in the capital, Georgetown. George worked at building up a general merchandising and trading business, and acted as a shipping agent for the export of timber. A third Booker brother, William, joined them. All three brothers prospered.


By the early 1900’s, however, cotton production in Guiana was in decline; North America had overtaken it. The planters - first among them the Booker brothers - switched to another cash crop: sugar.

Before long the Booker Brothers owned most of the colony’s sugar plantations -- as well as most of the African slaves.


By now, British Guiana practically belonged to Booker Brothers and its partner company, McConnell. Booker Brothers, McConnell and Company held a tight stranglehold on the country's economy. The Booker ethic was "buy cheap, sell dear", and nothing else counted; certainly not the people who made their success possible.


Slavery had been abolished in 1838, but the freed African slaves had been replaced by imported indentured servants from India, whose lot was hardly better than that of slaves. They were kept in the most miserable conditions, worked from early morning till evening for a pittance. Work on a sugar estate is back-breaking labour; the sun was hot and the food was scarce and there was no chance at respite. Booker Bros did not care. All that mattered was profit.


The company held immense power over the colonial government. When Bookers snapped its fingers, the Government fell to its knees. It was the quintessential exploitative imperialist company. The sugar industry in particular, in the words of Ian McDonald, was a “run-down, unprofitable, inhuman, paternalistic” plantocracy, wringing every last drop of revenue from the colony. Bookers trampled through the land taking what it could. It watched while other companies failed, then snapped them up as bad debt, for a pittance. It sat like a giant spider ready to pounce, growing fatter, and uglier, by the day. It owned sugar estates, stores, shipping companies. It had a finger in everyone’s pie.


BG, as Guianese fondly called their homeland, stood not for British Guiana, the cynics murmured, but for Booker Guiana. Those who worked for the company loathed it with all their being. Those who didn’t work for it loathed it even more.


And then along came Jock.

To Be Continued...   The Booker Backstory, Part 2. Jock Campbell

(Source: Judy Slinn and Jennifer Tanburn, The Booker Story (Andover, Jarrold Publishing, 2003)

See also:

The Making of Demerara Gold