A couple years ago one of my younger brothers, Colin Bartlett Hyde, published an autobiographical work entitled, Growing up in Old Belize. I think the work is an important one insofar as it gives a different view of the Hyde family from the one you may have developed after reading my material for four and a half decades.
In the mid-1980s, an American lady by the name of Karen Judd came to Belize to do research for a doctoral thesis. She was a candidate for a Ph. D. at a university in New York, and she had decided to write about “Creole elite” families in Belize, amongst which she decided to include the Hydes. Other families which were prominent in her thesis were the Hunters, the Ushers, the Fairweathers, the Haylocks, and so on.
Between 1790 and 1840, say, the Hydes were indeed “Creole elite,” because the Belizean version of this family began with a Scotsman, James Bartlett Hyde, who fathered a son, George, with a “colored” lady named Adney Broaster. George, born in 1795, fathered a son named David, who, in turn, fathered a son by the name of Absalom Bartlett Hyde.
Even though he was the grandson of a former Mandingo slave from West Africa on his mother’s side, George Hyde was raised as if he were a white man, educated in England, and he was a merchant/businessman who owned slaves, as his European father did. Karen Judd’s dissertation does not give details, but it is evident that something went wrong with the Hyde “fortune” in Belize during the time of David Hyde, George’s son and heir. Absalom Bartlett, born in 1853, became a blacksmith and machinist/mechanic. In other words, he had to live by the sweat of his brow, unlike the case with his grandfather, George, and his great grandfather, James Bartlett, who had married a white Canadian lady and sailed back to England around 1830.
By the time of Absalom Bartlett Hyde, who was my paternal grandfather’s father, the Hyde family had fallen from “grace to grass,” as we say in Creole. My paternal grandfather, James Bartlett Hyde, was a machinist and seaman who worked for a long time with Belize’s millionaire native, Robert Sydney Turton. Turton was anti-British and was the one who sponsored the entry of his employee, George Cadle Price, a former Roman Catholic seminarian, into the electoral politics of British Honduras in the middle 1940’s. My paternal grandfather was a supporter of the People’s United Party (PUP), which George Price helped to found in 1950 and which he began leading in 1956.
My grandfather had a half-brother named Oliver Cromwell Hyde, who fathered many children, which included Wallace Hyde. Wallace Hyde, who spent many years travelling abroad as a merchant seaman, was more vociferously PUP than my grandfather, and he often referred to Mr. Price as “Moses.” Jim Hyde, my grandfather, and his nephew, Wallace Hyde, were descended from “Creole elite,” but in 1950 they were no longer “Creole elite:” they were supporters of a rebellious, anti-colonial political organization.
(I don’t know the story, but both Jim Hyde and Wallace Hyde became supporters of Dean Lindo’s United Democratic Party (UDP) sometime in the middle 1970s.)
I was always much closer to my mother’s family, the Belisles, than I was to the Hydes. I was raised until I was 7 on Church Street, between Albert and East Canal, in a house “owned” by my maternal grandmother, Eva Lindo Belisle. During that time, I became close to my grandfather, Wilfred “Pa Bill” Belisle, who died in 1957 when I was 10 and after I had moved to the Hyde family home in 1954.
My younger brother Colin, the sixth son in our family, was born in 1957, the same year Pa Bill died. So he knew absolutely nothing of the grandfather who had left such an early impression on me. Not only that, Colin became the favorite grandchild of Jim Hyde, and it is clear that he himself developed a special affection for “Grampa Jim,” with whom, incidentally, I never enjoyed any kind of fond relationship.
When we were children, our mother taught us about the African side of her, and our, family. She did not mince words, describing her great grandmother on her father’s side as being “coal black.” In those days fifty and sixty years ago, this was not something that brown Creole people did. In fact, some such families actually hid their dark grandmothers in the attic. So then, our mother was revolutionary in that respect.
Yet, my mother was orthodox Methodist NIP (National Independence Party) where her church and party political views were concerned. Meanwhile, on the Hyde side, which I knew very little about when I was growing up, prominent people on that side were supporting the revolutionary PUP.
If you dig deeper, matters can become even more confusing amongst the Hydes. Two of Wallace Hyde’s sisters, Carrie and Olive, were married to two of British Honduras’ richest Creoles – Richard Seymour Vernon and Alden “Swaapy” Tillett, respectively. Seymour Vernon was hard core anti-PUP, while Swaapy Tillett and the anti-PUP Belize Estate and Produce Company (BEC) were the best of friends.
This is Belize, a small place where the families are all mixed up and the socio-politics can become almost labyrinthine. Colin Hyde and I, for example, are always looking at the same phenomena and realities, and we are always seeing different things. Same father, same mother – different vibes. As it is said, to each is own.