The Booker Prize Backstory. Part 2: Jock Campbell moves into the Booker stronghold

By the 1930s the majority of British Guiana’s sugar estates belonged to Bookers. One of these two was the Campbell estate, at Albion in the Corentyne district. This estate belonged to a Scottish family, the Campbells. The Campbells were of aristocratic stock; William Middleton Campbell was Governor of the Bank of England between 1907 and 1909, a man of great prestige. The Campbells had been in Guyana for many decades; they too had owned slaves, they too had grown rich through sugar.

In 1934 a young Campbell, Jock, came to British Guiana for the first time to take charge of the family estates.

Jock was born in 1912, and grew up in great privilege in Scotland and Ireland. He attended Eton and Oxford; he enjoyed the good life, liked fast cars and even faster women.
Neither of those were to be found in British Guiana.
This new world was to prove his Damascus.

Raised on romantic myths of the pleasant life to be had on a sugar estate, Jock received the shock of his life on being confronted with the reality: his family had been slave-owners. His family's fortune was founded on the blood, sweat and tears of African slaves and, more recently on Indian indentured servants. This stark truth shook him out of his hedonism forever.

There is an anecdote that perfectly illustrates the mentality he found as he arrived at Albion and was shown around the family estate by the manager, Mr. James Bee; here it is, in a dramatized version, just as I wrote it for a novel:

Jock stopped and stared, frowning. There in front of him stood several long, low, ramshackle buildings, rough constructions made of coarse wooden planks haphazardly hammered together, black holes for windows and doors. They were like piles of rotting wood set aside for burning, and they stood in a shallow lake of sinking black mud. A miasma of wretched despair hung over the site, a cloud of squalor that wafted through the air along with the stench of human excreta and rotting refuse. It was a scene in sharp comtrast to the clean green of the canefields behind them, and the crisp white houses of the white estate managers and foremen. 

‘What on earth are those?’ he asked Mr Bee, ‘pig sties?’

For indeed, pigs roamed the area, grunting in excitement at the dubious treasures they found in the mud.

Mr Bee waved his hand in dismissal. ‘Oh, those are the logies where our coolies live.’

‘You mean people live there? The stench is appalling. How can they stand it?’

‘They’re used to it – they don’t mind in the least. These people are not like you and me, you know. The standards are much lower.’

Jock swallowed the words on the tip  of his tongue, and said instead, ‘But why don’t the have proper homes?’

‘Well, we already had the logies when the slaves were freed so it was logical and cheaper to put the coolies here. It saved money. Why build new homes when we had perfectly good accommodation still standing? Bookers is a business, not a charity!’

Leaving the logies behind them, Jock and Mr Bee approached a freshly painted building, simple but palatial in comparison to the hovels they had just seen, and scrubbed clean. Mr Bee pointed to it in passing and said: ‘That’s the stable for our mules.’

Jock finally found his voice. ‘Why don’t you let the coolies live here and put the mules in the logies?’

Bee looked at him as if he were mad.

‘Mules cost money to replace!’

The shock sank deep, and turned his life around. From the very start, Jock determined to CHANGE the way the estate was run, and he set his sights high: the Booker Empire. His plans were quite clear.



His father and uncle owned the company Curtis Campbell, which consisted of two sugar estates, Ogle and Albion. But two estates would not be enough for Jock; his vision for King Sugar meant that structural and social changes had to encompass the entire sugar industry. Booker was the embodiment of King Sugar; that throne must be usurped. Jock convinced his father and uncle that a merger between Curtis Campbell and Booker Bros, McConnell and Co was necessary for the survival of the family concern.

Those two were on the Board of Booker, and helped negotiate a take-over of their own company in 1939. Shares were exchanged; Jock became a Director himself, the youngest ever, and moved into the Booker stronghold.

Jock spent the war years in England, working in the Colonial Office. There he prepared the groundwork for his vision. In 1947, aged 35, he became Booker’s Vice-Chairman. In 1952 he became Chairman, aged only 40: he had reached the very top. In fact, to all intents and purposes he had been running the company since 1945.

His standard line was, People are more important than ships, shops and sugar estates, and that was the basis of everything he did.

To be Continued...   Part 3: Reform

Part 1: Slavery, James Bond, and an Aristocratic Scottish hero

Part 4: The Charisma of Jock Campbell

Source: Sweetening Bitter Sugar  Jock Campbell  The Booker Reformer in British Guiana 1934-1966    Clem Seecharan  Randle Publishers 2005

Acknowledgments: all photos reproduced here with kind permission of Clem Seecharan, author, Sweetening Bitter Sugar

See also:

The Making of Demerara Gold