3. Francis Byam Berkeley² Shand (Charles Arthur¹) was born 11 August 1879. Francis died 1938 at 58 years of age.

He married Elfreda Millicent Nicholls in St George's, Roseau, Dominica, West Indies, 27 March 1905.

of Roseau, Dominica The island's Crown Attorney

"Phyllis Shand Allfrey: A Caribbean Life", Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Rut gersUniversity Press. 1996 - "Francis arrived in Dominica in the early 1900's to work as an attorn ey - a handsome, clean-shaven, pale and unsmiling man with sad, penetrati ng eyes... he immediately became one of Dominica's most eleigbile batchelo rs and a favourite of the Nicholls girls."

Attended Derby School ? born 17/8/1879

He educated his daughters at home because the school son the isaldn were C atholic and the Byam Shand were of the Anglican faith.

Francis Byam Berkeley Shand and Elfreda Millicent Nicholls had the following children:

5 i. Alice Marion³ Shand was born in Dominica, West Indies 1906. Alice died 1959 in Trinidad, West Indies, at 53 years of age. She married twice. She married Wilfred Bradshaw. (See Wilfred Bradshaw for the continuation of this line.) She married Edward Carlyon Eliot 1927. Edward was born about 1875. Edward died 1 January 1940 in Beverley, St Lawrence, Barbados, at 64 years of age. (See Edward Carlyon Eliot for the continuation of this line.)

6 ii. Phyllis Byam Shand was born in Dominica, West Indies 1908. Phyllis died 4 February 1986 in Princess Margaret Hopsital, Dominica, West Indies, at 77 years of age. 2nd daughter In 1927, Phyllis went to the United States and worked as a governess f or a wealthy New York family. She had become acquainted with the fami ly of J.P. Morgan II on one of the Morgans's Caribbean yachting trips a nd become friends with J.P.'s daughter and sister. She was thus well-conne cted to New York society when she emigrated, and also enjoyed the financi al patronage of her two friends. She became engaged to one of J.P.'s nephe ws but the romance had to be kept secret since he had no independent incom e. Then, in 1929, one of Phyllis's sisters got married and Phyllis fe ll in love with the groom's brother, Robert Allfrey, and they were marri ed a year later. According to the biography, he was a bad choice, with a n otable talent for losing jobs through sheer obnoxiousness of character. Al though they remained married for their entire lives, separating only on ce for any lengthy period, Phyllis had at least two known affairs, and pro bably a few others which remained undocumented.

Saturday January 22, 2005 The Guardian

Read Phyllis Shand Allfrey's short story "A Real Person", and you are imme diately convinced that you are in the presence of a literary talent. It 's a magnificent tale of a white West Indian teenager, two bizarre cat s, a black watchman, a goat-girl and her black Buddhist master, the myste ry and enchantment of their encounters set in a landscape of crotons, trop ical fruit and crick-crick beetles. Its ending is vintage Allfrey, a Lawre ntian assertion of the triumph of beauty over death. "Walter might never r esolve the doubt, but at least he was certain that he was blissfully aliv e, that he was capable of practically anything, and that in spite of the m ysterious and inexplicable conflict of faiths and races in the world, it w as still a world in which miracles happen." So why is Allfrey virtually unknown or ignored in Dominica and in the wid er literary world? What went wrong with her life and writing career? The a nswer has partly to do with Hurricane David, which in 1979 devastated h er home and left her destitute. It is also because two years earlier, h er beloved daughter Phina had been killed in a car crash. Her friend Lenn ox Honeychurch wrote: "I can never forget the howl of anguish as I arriv ed at her house after hearing of the death of Phina." However, the substan tial reason for her invisibility is her whiteness. Allfrey was born in 1908 into a white elite family which had dominated Dom inica for centuries. Her ancestors included Napoleon's Empress Josephine a nd a descendant of Anne Boleyn's sister. Allfrey's father was Crown Attorn ey, and the family were considered as royalty. The emancipation of slav es (the source of their ancestral wealth) in 1838 began the long and painf ul process whereby the white grip on the island was loosened. By the 195 0s and 60s, when the struggle for independence and the black power moveme nt were taking root, the whites were in retreat, many fleeing from the pro spect of black government by emigrating to England. Allfrey's father, by her own account, was hostile to black Dominicans. " He kept his family apart from other races," she wrote, and Allfrey was den ied formal schooling to prevent encounters with Catholics or people of col our who would soil her purity. She was taught privately at home, reading w orks such as the Oxford Book of English Verse , Rupert Brooke's poetry, a nd English Pastorals. The lush Dominican landscape, loud with Creole voice s, was shut out from literary appreciation. Her father's house was a pie ce of foreign fields that was forever England. There was nothing in Allfrey's childhood and youth to suggest the trail-bl azing radicalism of her later life. She was a scion of privilege, moving w ith the wealthy white visitors who anchored their yachts in Dominican wate rs. The American millionaire banker JP Morgan was a family friend, and thr ough his patronage Allfrey was able to leave Dominica as a teenager and li ve in New York and then London, where she met and married an Oxford gradua te. It was her encounter, in her transatlantic travels, with the depressi on in America, and then with the emerging Labour party in 1930s Britain, t hat changed the course of her life, awakening her to socialist struggl e. In the London of the 1930s and 40s she engaged in welfare and grassroo ts work (including giving sup port to her fellow Dominican Jean Rhys ), as well as the international campaign on behalf of the Spanish Republic an cause. She wrote copiously, short stories and poetry which rediscover ed the island of her childhood, striving to capture the flavour of creo le life that had been denied to her. George Orwell, editor of the left-wi ng Tribune, published some of her work. So did the Manchester Guardian. Vi ta Sackville-West awarded her a literary prize and in 1953 she published h er major work, The Orchid House, a novel exploring the racial situati on in Dominica, and about the emergence of feminism as well as the beginni ngs of the political agitation that would put an end to the old orde r. In the novel the black person is given a central voice, black aspiratio ns are given rare expression. The irony of course was that the shaking-off of the shackles of coloniali sm would also mean the shaking-off of Allfrey herself, but she still embra ced the cause of nationalism. In 1954, she returned to Dominica and found ed its first political party, the Dominica Labour party, whose motto wa s: "No-one is truly free who does not work for the freedom of others." "I campaigned all over the island, walking or riding on a donkey," she sai d, describing her travels through mountainous terrain to meet isolated bla ck communities whom she addressed in the local patois. Her party won the 1 958 elections by a landslide and Allfrey was appointed minister of heal th and social affairs in the newly formed Federation of the West Indies. T

hree years later the federation collapsed, and race politics saw her event ually expelled from the Dominica Labour party. She fell victim to wh at VS Naipaul once described as the black and coloured instinct for raci al revenge. Her whiteness was now a liability. She would be shoved into t he margins of society in an attempt to make her invisible. Allfrey, howeve r, fought back, setting up a newspaper, in her words "an artistic and poli tical weapon", and she continued to campaign tirelessly against social inj ustices, until the death of her daughter and the hurricane sapped her stre ngth. She died practically penniless in 1986, having dedicated whatever mo ney she had to social causes over 40 years of political struggle. The la st 20 years of her life were lived in acute poverty. If politics sapped her resources, it wrecked her writing. Her short stori es and poems dried up. "Oh yes, politics ruined me as a writer," she on ce said bluntly. But sufficient work remains to allow us to appreciate h er talent and her contribution to West Indian literature. The 14 short sto ries now gathered together under the title It Falls Into Place exemplify w hat the writer Olive Senior calls "her delicate touch, discerning eye a nd heart wise to the human condition". Her true virtue, however, lies in h er intense, almost overpowering feeling for the West Indian landscape, rem iniscent of the qualities of Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea . Derek Walcott once said that at the beginning of his career he was shy abo ut putting mangoes or breadfruit in his poetry since respectable litera ry landscapes were populated by oak trees and the like. Allfrey's true rad icalism, which will outlast her political work, is a fearless descripti on of local landscape, her naming of it. And it is within this sensational ly beautiful landscape that her characters of all races exist in strife a nd idealism. It is the landscape which is their potential benediction.

7 iii. Celia Berkeley Shand (still alive).

8 iv. Rosalind Shand was born in Dominica, West Indies 2 July 1912. Rosalind died 1994 at 81 years of age. She married Lieutenant George Burton Leslie Smith in Holy Trinity, Sloane Square, London, 26 October 1940. (See Lieutenant George Burton Leslie Smith for the continuation of this line.)

youngest daughter of Hon F. B. B. Shand

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