Ralph Woodford

Sir Ralph Woodford, 2nd Baronet

Sir Ralph James Woodford, 2nd Baronet (* July 21, 1784 , † May 17, 1828 at sea) was the longest-serving governor in the British colonial history of the Caribbean island of Trinidad with a term of office lasting from 1813 to 1828 . A significant economic and infrastructural upturn on the island is attributed to it.

Life

Woodford's parents belonged to the lower British nobility . His father, the diplomat and politician Ralph Woodford (* 1748, † 1810), was given the hereditary title of Baronet , of Carleby in the County of Lincoln , in 1791 . His mother Gertrude Reessen (* 1748, † 1800) was of Dutch descent. In addition to Ralph James, the two had another child, Elizabeth (* 1779; † 1833). When his father died on August 26, 1810, he inherited his title of nobility.

Ralph James Woodford was a captain in the Royal Navy when he was appointed governor of Trinidad in June 1813. He was the successor to Hector William Munro , who had carried out the office rather unsuccessfully and not very energetically. Woodford arrived in Trinidad on June 14, 1813. In 1808, Port of Spain was hit by the Great Fire , a devastating conflagration that destroyed much of the then wooden town. Munro had done little to rebuild; Woodford immediately took on the task, had a grid-shaped road network built and taxed the residents for the paving. In the same year he introduced the "Trinidad Steamboat Company" line of steamers , which served the coastal cities of Trinidad with the first steamship in the West Indies and enabled a regular exchange of goods. He himself held shares in the company. In 1814 he declared English the second official language of the colony's jurisdiction, which until then had been exclusively Spanish. In 1815 Woodford intervened deeply in the Trinidadian social order when he restricted the allocation of land by ordinance and linked it to agricultural use in order to boost economic output and ordered the return of unused land to state ownership. While he successfully suppressed protests against the ordinance in Trinidad, Trinidadian landowners in London sued the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies , but only achieved exemptions from the taxation of real estate. Between 1815 and 1821 Woodford resettled former slaves and soldiers in underdeveloped areas, for example in the area of ​​the later cities of Princes Town and Manzanilla . A road between Manzanilla and Mayaro commissioned by him opened up almost the entire east coast for goods traffic. In 1817, Woodford was forced to give up his residence (Government House) in Belmont due to a legal dispute . For a new residence, he had the city council buy two abandoned sugar cane plantations. Woodford built a new residence (the predecessor of today's President's House) from the house of the former owner family Peschier and had the later Queen's Park laid out on the other part of the area , Port of Spain's first public green space, which was initially used as pastureland open to the general public . An administrative achievement of Woodford was the transfer of previously autonomous religious schools under state supervision. He commissioned the reconstruction of the two most important churches in Trinidad, which were destroyed in the Great Fire of 1808: the Anglican Holy Trinity Cathedral and the Catholic Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception . Both church buildings were designed by Woodford's secretary Philip Reinagle, the son of Philip Reinagle . At Woodford's instigation, the British government held talks with the Vatican to remove the Catholics of Trinidad from Spanish influence, which resulted in the Vatican removing Trinidad from the diocese of Santo Tomás de Guayana and assigning it its own territorial abbey . Woodford showed ties to the Anglican Church; He donated six bells to the new church building from his own resources , but they were never used because initially nobody could be found in the whole of Trinidad to serve them, and they were then badly damaged in an earthquake in 1825. Woodford experimented with innovative gas lighting for the church interior, but produced "more smoke than light". The construction of the Botanical Garden of Port of Spain goes back to Woodford, where he first introduced the useful plants clove tree , nutmeg tree and cinnamon tree (variety unknown) to Trinidad as part of the establishment of the area originally belonging to his private residence . In 1820 Woodford professionalized the island's health care system by banning the practice of medical activities without proper training. In 1824 he worked with the British Colonial Minister Henry Bathurst to develop the Amelioration Order in Council , a cabinet order that significantly improved the legal situation and living conditions of Trinidadian slaves, although Woodford acted primarily as a braking force. In 1826 he was the first census ( census ) in the history of Trinidad perform; previously, the number of people in Trinidad and their nationalities and legal status were only recorded at irregular intervals.

Due to illness, Woodford went to Jamaica in 1828 to seek medical help there. His condition worsened and he embarked on the Duke of York parcel ship for London in the hope of better care . After a few days he died while crossing at sea. For hygienic reasons, the body was sunk in the sea a few days later . Since he remained unmarried and childless, his title of nobility expired on his death.

classification

When Woodford took office in Trinidad, the island was economically insignificant and hardly developed. The wars of independence in Venezuela , which led to massive piracy in the Gulf of Pariah and thus made interaction with the main trading partner Venezuela more difficult, were a formative event in the Trinidad area . In addition, refugees poured into Trinidad from Venezuela. The island was used by the British Crown as an experimental field for administrative concepts and had gone through an administrative debacle ten years earlier when the violence over the island was divided between three people who (partly for personal reasons) were unable to come to a common line communicate: Civil Governor William Fullarton and Military Governor Thomas Picton fought to the blood in 1803 and tried to drag Navy Governor Samuel Hood into their conflict. After these experiences Ralph Woodford was endowed with a great deal of power and was civil governor, commander in chief of the troops, vice admiral and chief judge all rolled into one. His infrastructural measures were groundbreaking, so the steamship line he introduced had z. B. existed until the 1930s. From a cultural point of view, he left the island its peculiarities. The former Spanish Trinidad was conquered by the Anglican British in 1797 , but the island was predominantly inhabited by Catholic French and Spaniards, which is why the new colonial rulers of the island left the Spanish language, the Spanish legal system and the Catholic religion. The Anglican Woodford found himself head of the Catholic Church in Trinidad, but met this office conscientiously. Politically, Woodford found himself in a society where slavery was polarizing. On the one hand, the opponents of slavery in the mother country Great Britain visibly strengthened; A few years after Woodford's death, slavery was abolished in Great Britain in 1833, which was also enforced in Trinidad by 1840. On the other hand, in Woodford's time, the Trinidadian economy was based on the exploitation of slave labor. The plantation owners were by far the most influential social class on the island, and an issue that preoccupied this group during Woodford's tenure was the fear of change triggered by the Haitian Revolution of 1791 and the occupation of Eastern Hispaniola by Haiti in 1822 and the gradual abolition of slavery there.

Posthumous Effect and Evaluation

The Boston author James Henry Stark ruled in 1897 that under Governor Woodford the British colony of Trinidad had undergone a "complete transformation" in terms of agriculture, trade, infrastructure and communications, and that Woodford was inspired by a "progressive spirit". Stark was generally uncritical about Woodford. The Trinidadian historian Michael Anthony , however, shows that Woodford's popularity was limited to certain sections of the population. While he enjoyed enormous popularity among the white Trinidadian upper class, as he efficiently improved the island's infrastructure and enriched the social life of Port of Spains with receptions and balls, he secured the position of the mostly white plantation owners with restrictive laws against slaves and their rigorous enforcement. Free blacks and mixed race also suffered from Woodford's administration. The Trinidadian historian Gertrude Carmichael shows on the basis of correspondence between Woodford and the Trinidadian Governing Council on the one hand and between Woodford and the Colonial Ministry in London on the other hand that Woodford tried to mediate between the vested interests in Trinidad and the increasingly abolitionist position of the British government on the slave issue ultimately was crowned with no success. Carmichael assesses that Trinidad needed a “strong man” in 1813 to address the colony's evident political, economic and social problems, and that Woodford had successfully tackled these issues in the 15 years of his service and laid the foundation for the island's successful future have laid. Historians Gérard Besson and Bridget Brereton argue that the three previous British governors Picton, Hislop and Munro were primarily concerned with securing Trinidad against real and perceived enemies inside and outside, while Woodford embarked on long overdue social reform. You also mention the world's first civil law dispute about discrimination against people of color, which the multiracial ("free colored") Trinidadian plantation owner Jean-Baptiste Philippe brought to the House of Lords in London in 1823 and in which he complained about the policies of Woodford and his predecessors. Woodford discriminated against the free colored to the best of his ability by discriminating against whites under civil and criminal law and making marriages between whites and free colored more difficult. Brereton also points out that Woodford's advocacy of the plantation owners led him to break UK law. After a cabinet order was issued in March 1812, the Registration Order , slaves had to be officially registered, which, in the opinion of the abolitionists, should lead to an immediate stop to uncontrolled slave imports and an improvement in their living conditions, since owners who treated their slaves badly at the annual The slave census would be conspicuous by a high number of deaths. Woodford thwarted cabinet orders and tolerated illegal imports of slaves on a large scale.

Woodford Square in Port of Spain is named after the governor. There and in Arima there are also streets named after him. After Woodford's death, a life-size stone statue of the former governor was erected in Holy Trinity Cathedral by the British sculptor Richard Chantrey.

Web links

• Profile in the NALIS database

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Baronetage: WOODFORD of Carleby, Lincs at Leigh Rayment's Peerage
2. ↑ Kindred.Stanford.edu: The family of Sir Ralph James Woodford. Retrieved February 12, 2018 . 
3. ^ Olga J. Mavrogordato: Voices in the Street . Inprint Caribbean, Port of Spain 1977, pp. 48 .
4. ↑ ^{a b c} Michael Anthony: Historical Dictionary of Trinidad and Tobago . Scarecrow Press, London 1997, ISBN 0-8108-3173-2 , pp. 618 .
5. ^ Gerlinde Carmichael: The History of the West Indian Islands of Trinidad and Tobago . Alvin Redman, London 1961, p. 117 .
6. ↑ Michael Anthony: Historical Dictionary of Trinidad and Tobago . Scarecrow Press, London 1997, ISBN 0-8108-3173-2 , pp. 254 .
7. ↑ ^{a b} James Henry Stark: Stark's guide-book and history of Trinidad: including Tobago, Granada, and St. Vincent; Also a trip up the Orinoco and a description of the great Venezuelan pitch lake . JH Stark, Boston 1897, p. 18 ( utoronto.ca [PDF]).
8. ^ Gerlinde Carmichael: The History of the West Indian Islands of Trinidad and Tobago . Alvin Redman, London 1961, p. 128 .
9. ^ Gerlinde Carmichael: The History of the West Indian Islands of Trinidad and Tobago . Alvin Redman, London 1961, p. 133 .
10. ^ Gérard A. Besson & Bridget Brereton: The Book of Trinidad . Paria Publishing, Port of Spain 2010, ISBN 978-976-8054-36-4 , pp. 153 .
11. ↑ Bridget Brereton: A History of Modern Trinidad 1783--1962 . 4th edition. Terra Verde Resource Center, Champs Fleurs 2009, ISBN 0-435-98116-1 , pp. 59 .
12. ↑ RJW-Data.info: The Dumfries Weekly Journal 1828. Retrieved February 13, 2018 .  (PDF, 900 KB)
13. ^ Gerlinde Carmichael: The History of the West Indian Islands of Trinidad and Tobago . Alvin Redman, London 1961, p. 107 .
14. ^ Gerlinde Carmichael: The History of the West Indian Islands of Trinidad and Tobago . Alvin Redman, London 1961, p. 105 .
15. ^ Gerlinde Carmichael: The History of the West Indian Islands of Trinidad and Tobago . Alvin Redman, London 1961, p. 124 .
16. ^ Gérard A. Besson & Bridget Brereton: The Book of Trinidad . Paria Publishing, Port of Spain 2010, ISBN 978-976-8054-36-4 , pp. 177 .
17. ↑ Bridget Brereton: A History of Modern Trinidad 1783--1962 . 4th edition. Terra Verde Resource Center, Champs Fleurs 2009, ISBN 0-435-98116-1 , pp. 59 .
18. ↑ Bridget Brereton: A History of Modern Trinidad 1783--1962 . 4th edition. Terra Verde Resource Center, Champs Fleurs 2009, ISBN 0-435-98116-1 , pp. 54 .
19. ↑ Angelo Bissessarsingh: Last trace of a violent chapter of Caribbean history . In: Trinidad Guardian . January 25, 2015.

predecessor	Office	successor
Ralph Woodford	Baronet (of Carleby) 1810-1828	Title expired