Memories of British Guiana, specifically from 1959 to 1961, are forever cherished in timeless photos by Philip Llyn-Jones, a contactor from England who came to work here in Guyana. The photos tell of a time when Georgetown was a “Garden City” and people enjoyed the simplicity of life.
Llyn-Jones’s daughter Pauline Grimshaw generously shares his photos with Sunday Times Magazine.
In an interview with this publication, Grimshaw recalled that her father worked for a small British construction company near London; he was a quantity surveyor. The company he worked for in London was contracted by Sprostons Ltd of Georgetown (she presumes) to help with the aluminium smelter construction, which may have been completed in March 1961.
“We would have arrived approximately two years before that, in 1959. On completion of the work we went back to England where my father spent the rest of his working life. My mum, dad, my younger brother and I came to British Guiana. My father enjoyed the experience of living and working in another country. He had been overseas during World War 2 and he worked in the merchant navy immediately after the war for about two years. He loved the bush and borrowing a Land Rover sometimes at weekends to explore. He also liked the river and the RH Carr,” Grimshaw recollected.
Grimshaw and her family lived at Watooka. She had her first trip on the RH Carr (a British-built steamboat) when she was eight years old. Her father had taken several photos of the steamboat as it worked on the river.
“I was eight years old when we arrived and ten years old when we returned to England. I went to a Canadian school in Watooka, now part of Linden. We travelled on the RH Carr from Georgetown down to Linden (which we called Mackenzie) as there was no road then,” Grimshaw reminisced.
While in British Guiana, Grimshaw enjoyed travelling on the RH Carr. Although she cannot remember much about the steamboat, she relies on her father’s photos to help jog her memory.
Reminiscing on life in British Guiana, Grimshaw said she remembers the “tropical flowers, swimming, kiskadee birds, the sun, blue sky, fabulous clouds, the bauxite trains behind our house and the Cannonball trees”.
Grimshaw returned to Guyana with her husband, John, and took many photos of the now derelict RH Carr on the Demerara River in Linden, which have sparked interest overseas to “save and preserve” the vessel.
Philip Llyn-Jones died in 2005 at the age of 85. Grimshaw remembers her father to be a “keen photographer” who even developed and printed his own photographs (though not while he was in British Guiana). (Guyana Times Sunday Magazine)
