Name Phyllis Allfrey Role Writer | Died 1986, Roseau, Dominica | |
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Books The Orchid House, It falls into place Similar People Patrick John, Rosie Douglas, Roosevelt Skerrit, Pierre Charles, Eliud Williams | ||
Phyllis Byam Shand Allfrey (24 October 1908 – February 4, 1986) was a West Indian writer, socialist activist, newspaper editor and politician of the island of Dominica in the Caribbean. She is best known for her first novel, The Orchid House (1953), based on her own early life, which in 1991 was turned into a Channel 4 television miniseries in the United Kingdom.
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Early life and family background
Born in Roseau, Dominica, West Indies, in 1908 into an elite family, she was the daughter of Francis Byam Berkeley Shand and Elfreda (née Nicholls), and was baptized Phyllis Byam. Her father's settler family was long established in Roseau as their family dominated Dominica for centuries. With roots in the West Indies going back to the 17th century, Phyllis later described herself as "a West Indian of over 300 years' standing, despite my pale face." Shand Allfrey's family included Henry Spencer Berkeley and Sir Thomas Warner. On her father's side, Shand Allfrey's ancestor was Dorothy Knollys (great-great-great granddaughter of Mary Boleyn, Anne's sister to the Royal Family in England.
Her mother Elfreda, was one of the daughters of Sir Henry Alfred Alford Nicholls, a famed doctor and botanist who during his career had been connected with almost every public activity on the island. His family boasted of distant connections to royalty: Phyllis's Martinican maternal grandmother, Marianne Felicite was related to Napoleon's Empress Josephine. Empress Josephine's grandfather Gaspard Joseph de Tascher and Uncle Robert-Marguerite Tascher, baron de La Pagerie were direct ancestors of Shand Allfrey. Through Empress Josephine's Uncle, Shand Allfrey was a direct descendant of Jean-Henri Robert Tascher de La Pagerie, (Count Tascher de La Pagerie et de l'Empire) cousin of Josephine's. He married Marcelle Clary, the Swedish Queen's Désirée Clary's niece and had a daughter Rose Amable Julie Joséphine. Her maternal family made her related to anyone descended from or related to Joséphine. Additionally, the Belgian, Luxembourg, Swedish, Monégasque and former Romanian monarchs are all descended from a cousin of Joséphine's first husband Alexandre de Beauharnais, as was Vittorio Emanuele, senior-line claimant to Italy. The claimant family of Baden are also Joséphine descendants. On her mother's side of the family through the Empress Josephine connection, her family are closely related to anyone descended from her from Belgium, Denmark, Greece, Russia, Brazil and Luxembourg.
As a teenager, she lived in New York as well as London where she met her husband. In the 1920's visitors in great yachts dropped anchor in Roseau to pay respects to the white ruling class and enjoy dances on tropical nights. It was with the Morgan family, that of J. P. Morgan, Jr. that Phyllis left Dominica on the Morgans' yacht, the Corsair. She became engaged to one of JP Morgan' nephews but the romance had to be kept secret since he had no independent income. Her friends also included Adele Hammond Olyphant and Emily Vanderbilt Sloane. Shand Allfrey was also a friend of Naomi Mitchison who invited the Allfreys for her annual Cambridge-Oxford boat race party known for bringing together an explosive mixture of people such as Wyndham Lewis, Michael Foot, Margaret Cole, W. H. Auden, Victor Gollancz, Stafford Cripps and Aneurin Bevan. She appears to have had an affair with Henning Bernd von Arnim Schlagenthin, the son of Mary Annette Beauchamp Russell also known as Elizabeth von Arnim.
Life and career
Phyllis Shand married Robert Edward Allfrey, an English Oxford University engineer who also graduated from Tonbridge School, and they had five children, including their adopted sons, Robbie and David, from a Carib reservation. Robert Allfrey worked for the Niagara Hudson Power Corporation that later became Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation. Their daughter Phina, another Oxford University graduate was killed in a motor accident in Botswana. In 1935, Phyllis had a second child Mowbray Philip also known as Philip Allfrey.
In politics, Allfrey founded the Dominica Labour Party. On the formation of the West Indies Federation, this was affiliated to the West Indies Federal Labour Party, and in 1958 she was elected to the new West Indies legislature, representing Dominica. Within weeks she was serving in the government of Sir Grantley Adams as Minister of Labour and Social Affairs and was the only woman minister of the new Federation. In 1941 Allfrey established a connection with Tribune, the newspaper of the left wing of the British Labour Party where from 1941 to 1944 her reviews, poems and short stories appeared regularly alongside those of regular contributors like Naomi Mitchison, Stevie Smith, Julian Symons, Elizabeth Taylor, Inez Holden and George Orwell who became its literary editor in 1943. Phyllis Shand came second place in an international poetry competition judged by Vita Sackville-West.
She edited the Dominica Herald and also published and wrote for another newspaper, The Dominica Star, which was in being between 1965 and 1982.
The British painter Lindy Allfrey is the grand-niece of Phyllis Shand Allfrey.
Death
Allfrey died in Dominica in 1986, aged 77. A posthumous collection of her short stories, It Falls Into Place, was published in 2004. She left behind an unpublished novel, In the Cabinet. A collection of her poems, Love for an Island: the Collected Poems of Phyllis Shand Allfrey, was published in 2014