The rich history of the Bookers Group

Dear Editor,

Across generations there have been personal accounts of life in the sugar industry of Guyana and the communities it created. But possibly, apart from Professor Clem Seecharan’s ‘Sweetening Bitter Sugar’, there is perhaps insufficient coordinated account of the management legacy of the largest employer of workers in the Caribbean.

Bookers Sugar Estates (BSE), out of the United Kingdom, sponsored in British Guiana other related companies: Bookers Stores, Bookers Demerara Shipping. Bookers Rum Company, British Guiana Lithographic Company, Pharmaceuticals, B.G Balata Company all operated in the same compound at La Penitence, South Georgetown, next door to another of the Group’s printing initiative – The Guiana Graphic – a newspaper whose philosophy sought to compete with, and even confront, those of the historic Daily Argosy and Daily Chronicle.

Bookers Drug Stores were strategically located across the relatively small city of Georgetown at the time.

Meanwhile, as the only importers of the British Morris Oxford and Morris Minor, Bookers Stores through its Garage Department provided almost a monopoly taxi service; while as the single importer of the item, it sold all the Hubbucks white paint in which Georgetown’s wooden buildings (including Government House) were almost exclusively covered.

Resurrection from Fire

Then there was the fire which on February 23, 1945 engulfed the downtown business district – from Church and Main Streets across into Water Street, it diminished both sides until it was halted just before it reached Stabroek Market on the eastern bank of the Demerara River. The only surviving (concrete) building was Barclays Bank, Dominion, Colonial & Overseas (now Guyana Bank for Trade & Industry - GBTI).

The Great Fire, as it came to be known, devastated the commercial heart of the capital, and consumed a host of historical and architectural gems which had given the city its aesthetic flair. In addition, it laid waste to the Royal Agricultural and Commercial Society (RA&CS) building and its unique collection of books and papers pertaining to the past of this country.

The fire raged virtually unimpeded for five hours.

Buildings of companies which turned to ashes included Sandbach Parker, Royal Bank of Canada, J.P Santos, Brodie & Rainer, Fogarty’s Geddes Grant, other branches of Bookers Stores and the General Post Office.

Meanwhile the Assembly Rooms, which along with RA&CS, accommodated the existing expatriate upper class, was also obliterated. In its place since, stands the Bank of Guyana.

The revived Bookers Stores, now Guyana Stores, at once the most prominent address in the city – 22 Church Street, Georgetown – was constructed to provide substantial modern accommodation for the headquarters of Bookers Sugar Estates on the two upper floors.

Interestingly, it was always seen as a contradiction in terms that BSE, who owned vast acreages of land never sought to establish its own office space; but remained a virtual tenant of a colleague company up to the time the Booker Group was nationalised.

It was the later Booker Tate management who transformed the residential GuySuCo Training Centre at Ogle, East Coast Demerara, into its Head Office.

Herdmanston – an unfulfilled vision

One of the bequeathals of the Booker legacy, however unintended, was Herdmanston House. It enjoyed the historical reputation of hosting British Royalty, Caribbean and Commonwealth Heads of State.

It remains located at Lamaha & Peter Rose streets as Herdmanston Lodge, where hospitality still abounds, albeit on a more commercial basis.

It was at the Herdmanston House one night, that sitting alongside Ian McDonald (as Directors at the time) we discussed with Barry Newton, a visiting Booker United Kingdom Director, not only the prospect of Herdmanston House being offered by its principals as a heritage facility, where not only the records of Bookers Sugar could be stored for easy public examination, but the vision of it becoming a research centre (for University of Guyana students for example), where volumes of all the various agricultural specialisations of study could be accessed – as a bequeathal to the nation.

Unfortunately, my optimism never received the majority support it so obviously needed.

A partially redeeming circumstance is that current ownership of Herdmanston is with a former BSE Executive, who appreciates its relevance.

Sugar Industry Rescue Operation – St. Kitts & Nevis

For some unknown reason neither Caribbean academics nor trade unionists ever appeared to be inspired by the exceptional political construct whereby in St. Kitts & Nevis, the all Island Trade Union transformed itself into the Government of the day, with its executive, led by its President Robert Bradshaw, becoming exactly the Cabinet.

Interestingly, following the failure of the only industry existing in the twin island – the sugar industry – Premier Bradshaw resorted to the Sugar Industry Rescue Operation (SIRO), by which his Government sought the technical and financial assistance of the British Government to restore the only substantive economic activity at the time, having removed it from private ownership.

The latter’s positive response resulted in Guyana’s Bookers Sugar Estates providing the technical assistance needed through a team of one Barbadian and one Guyanese – myself.

Bookers Sugar Estates was later congratulated on the timely restoration of the sugar industry of St. Kitts & Nevis.

(Sugar) – Free Education

Perhaps there may still be Union leaders who recall a direct tax being imposed on the local sugar industry. However, there could not be many around who could tell why and how it was initiated.

As must be better known the local sugar industry survived, more often than not, on marginal profits. It was simply considered too big to fail. Certainly there were major social implications to be considered.

Then when in the mid-1970s Bookers Sugar Estates found itself faced with the prospect of unaccustomed windfall profits, it had to strategise that given the aggressive industrial relations environment at the time, the management may have to concede higher wage rates that would be unsustainable in the later ‘normal’ years of less financial returns.

The executive management decided on the daring manoeuvre of approaching then Prime Minister Forbes Burnham with a novel idea, discussion of which crystallised with the agreement to impose what became the ‘Sugar Levy’.

One immediate result was that BSE could negotiate with union’s rates of pay that were more sustainable in the foreseeable future.

But the decision informed a much more fundamental, even though hasty, incentive on the part of the Government. The returns on the levy inspired the implementation of the concept of funding free education (the terminology used somewhat precipitously, was: ‘from the cradle to the grave’).

A programme of ‘free education’ was undertaken even though against the Company’s warning of the relative brevity of its sustainability. The records have shown that this prediction was accurate.

Yours faithfully, E.B. John