These photographs were discovered in the archives at Paxton in 2021. Mr Nanton was the Superintendent of Agriculture in Grenada at the time and took the photographs. His wife is in the images. These show the then un-named owners and their employees at Waltham estate growing and processing crops including bananas, coconuts, copra, nutmeg, cocoa, and oranges.

The young cocoa plants, planted in ‘August 1953’, were grown below ‘bluggoes’ a type of banana for protection. Another photograph shows a cocoa plant with large cocoa beans almost ready to harvest. One photograph depicts;

‘View looking down Cabier field showing the Coconuts. This is the first field that we irrigated from the canal. The trees have improved considerably in health and I hope to produce twice as much copra [dried coconut kernel] this year as we did last year’.

The canal at Waltham was designed by French engineers and built by enslaved African people by 1763. One of the images shows a small house with a horse outside. The horse was called ‘Paxton’.

These photographs were conserved and framed in 2022 with a grant from the Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund.