Wilfred Wild As mentioned in my Preface, the “Patchwork Quilt” of recent immigration to Tortola has been made up many different kinds of people and many different people. Some of these have become ‘household names’ within the expat community, and indeed within Virgin Islands (V.I.) society as a whole. Others, usually by choice, built smaller niches within the V.I., and are less well-known. But sticking with my patchwork quilt metaphor, each of these individuals has been made a contribution to the growth and present status of the country.
One of this latter collection of people is William Wild. He came to the V.I. in 1959, and was 92 years old when I interviewed him in Peebles hospital in 2012. He never craved the limelight and went about his business in a quiet way, but he clearly contributed to the recent building of the country, and helped to make it what it is today.
Although William Wild is now living in a nursing home back in England, he made his home for many years on his 36 foot yacht at Maya Cove/Hodges Creek on the eastern end of Tortola. William was born in 1920 in Eastbourne, East Sussex, England, a coastal town located between Hastings and Brighton. He grew up there, although also spending some time in the London suburb of Lewisham. After passing his “11+” exam (a critical stage in UK educational development at the time) William got a grant that enabled him to go to a secondary school in Brixton (in south London). He went there “every day until he was 17 years old”. At school, amongst other things, he learned his early trade of plumbing. But life was about to change quite dramatically for William Wild.
In 1939 William joined the Royal Air Force (RAF) at the start of the Second World War. He went to a trade school at Manston in the north east of the county of Kent, on the Isle of Thanet. He learned, in particular, sheet metal working, but also other things involved with aircraft maintenance. This part of England was, of course, heavily involved in the Battle of Britain at this time. Bombing was commonplace and there were many airfields for both fighters and bombers. One of William’s jobs was to be an “aircraft mover”, shifting fake aircraft around airfields in order to attract the attention of the German Luftwaffe away from the real thing. A static display of bogus aircraft would soon be noticed, so the British moved the fakes around to make them look more like real planes. After his time at Manston, William went all over the place with RAF. He spent time in India, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), West Africa and the Western Desert of north Africa with two years near the Great Bitter Lake near Cairo. He returned to the UK for a time in 1944, and was “demobbed” (demobilised) in 1948.
He was soon on the move again, going to South Africa with his wife, where his skills were in great demand. It was in South Africa that he really “got into” sailing –something that would dominate the rest of his life. Between 1949 and 1953 he built a 37 foot wooden sailboat, Diddikai, named for the semi-nomadic gypsies. In 1957 they sailed the yacht back to the UK from Cape Town, on a five-month long trip. He began living on his boat in 1956 and never again lived in a house until he moved into his English nursing home in 2012. For a time the Wilds earned some money -- and gained valuable experience -- running charters in the Mediterranean Sea. But in 1957 William Wild and his wife set sail from Lisbon for the Leeward Island of Antigua. They stayed here for two years and then sailed for the Virgin Islands where they hired an agent to find them charter traffic. They had planned to live in St. Thomas but quickly realised that the British Virgin Islands was a better home and operating base for charter sailing.
Although Tortola was clearly a better place for a charter boat operator, it just as clearly had some significant challenges in the late 1950s. There was no supply chain reaching the BVI for food, spare parts, or passengers. As William put it “you were lucky if you could find a chicken to buy”. At that time almost everything had to be brought ‘from elsewhere’, and in particular the end of the contemporary supply chain in St. Thomas.
For those of us coming to the Virgin Islands in the twenty-first century, when you can get “most things” (at a cost) in the BVI, it is almost impossible to visualize how different the country was fifty years ago. There were few roads of any description, few vehicles, a limited number of shops with limited stock, and many fewer people and buildings. Main Street saw more donkeys than vehicles. In order to live and work you had to learn from the locals and William set about doing this – learning about the various islands, different anchorages, and best and safest routes between these places. For some two decades he ran Diddikai, before selling it in 1977. (It is still reportedly floating, and although I couldn’t find its current location despite searching the WWW; it was spotted on the Great Lakes in 2005). He saw out his career on a fiberglass boat called Hyorky. William has lots of stories about his charters and his passengers, but unfortunately many cannot be recounted in these pages in order to protect the less-than-innocent. He does, however, distinctly remember travelling with Frances Scott (Scottie) Fitzgerald, daughter of American author F. Scott Fitzgerald, her first husband Samuel Jackson (Jack) Lanahan, and their children.
At the age of 69 (in 1989) the Wilds gave up chartering when William’s wife became ill and later died. He then ran Parts and Power in Roadtown for a time, before retiring in his 70s. Chartering is not an easy business. It is a “24 hours a day” occupation and is definitely “not money for old rope”. Chartering in the Virgin Islands has changed since the late 1950s with the addition of diving, parasailing (etc.) to the basic sailing vacation. In many ways it is now an easier business with reliable marker buoys, and more docking facilities. But the essentials have stayed the same, and it “can’t be better now because it was so good then”. William lived through some difficult times in the emerging Virgin Islands but he “wouldn’t have lived anywhere else”.
First draft of December 16th, of interview of November 15th 2012.
