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St. Vincent stands apart from its immediate neighbours being Grenada, St. Lucia, and Barbados in that when havoc took its toll during the Queen Victoria and early King Edward VII reigns some post offices could only function with temporary manuscripts or use of obsolete instruments, whilst her neighbouring island post offices seem unscathed. This short article shows the activity of the then functioning St. Vincent and Grenadine islands post offices post the May 7 1902 eruption of the Soufriere volcano in the north of the island which killed over 2,000 people. When there are unaccounted activity periods (unknown periods) one can speculate as to what instrument, if any, was being used in the absence of further earlier dated examples, and in the case of Georgetown (8 weeks unknown period) one could fully understand if a re-introduced "G" abbreviate turned up!!
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Preparation of 175,000 First Day Covers - each cancellation had to be near perfect and covers were piled up in the centre of the table as they could not be boxed until cancelling ink dry, and more importantly that there was absolutely no chance that moisture from the reverse flaps would connect with the souvenir sheets affixed to face of each envelope if boxed too early.
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The three members are Annette (?), Lizbe Gonsalves (centre) and Sharon Fairburn (right). The final count of the Bureau staff at the time of my leaving was 126 girls and 3 guys manually servicing some 30,000 collector accounts worldwide in the days prior computers. Wonderful times!
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Two IMPERFORATE PROOF error souvenir sheets sent to the Bureau, but long forgotten about by me, were recently acquired from Dauwalder's stamp shop in Salisbury and are currently available in the POSTAL HISTORY SECTION of this shop. All incoming proofs from the printers were carefully stored under lock and key at the Bureau, but these, and other proofs, came onto the market probably through the activities of the agency handling the dreadful St. Vincent mass productions in later years.
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During the construction of the Panama Canal much of the work was done in the Culebra Cut and many little villages including Las Cascadas were constructed along the west bank to house the thousands of contract workers, mostly from the Caribbean, who built the Culebra Cut, known to them as "Hell's Gorge" in temperatures mostly over 86 degrees Fahrenheit. The Cut was a trench 295 feet wide, 10 storeys deep, with a length of over 130 football fields, over 60 million pounds of dynamite was used. In 1908 Las Cascadas had 2,425 inhabitants - 957 whites, 1,424 blacks and 44 others.
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