The changing fortunes of ‘Red House’
-- From elitist living quarters, to near ruins, to cultural mecca
By Linda Rutherford
SHE ranks among some of our oldest and most historic buildings, is rated a national monument by the National Trust of Guyana, and, if all goes well, is soon to become a World Heritage Site as part of Historic Georgetown.
She is the famous ‘Red House’, custodian of some of the most intimate and treasured of secrets of some of the most distinguished and influential of men and women to have traversed this land - from colonial secretaries, said to be equal in stature to the governor and responsible for the day to day running of the government back in the old colonial days; to former Speaker of the House, the late Sir Eustace Woolford; and most renowned of all its occupants, the late Dr Cheddi Jagan, whom it is alleged deliberately chose to live there because its colour was reflective of his Communist ideals.
Not so, says his widow and former President, Mrs Janet Jagan.
“I don’t think there was anything else available at the time… I think it was felt that since he was Premier, we shouldn’t continue to live where we were in Queenstown. We had a rented house there,” she told the Sunday Chronicle.
The property at reference is an elegant distinctive red three-storey edifice on upper High Street in up-market, ‘old-money’ Kingston, just across the way from Austin House, another national relic and home to the head of the Anglican Diocese here, Bishop Randolph George and his family.
Dr Jagan, co-founder and leader of the governing People’s Progressive Party (PPP), and his family lived there from 1961 to 1964 during his tenure as elected Premier, the first ever in the annals of then British Guiana.
At the time, Mrs Jagan recalls, Joey, the older of their two children, must have been around 13 or 14, as he’d already started high school. He attended Queen’s College, then one of the country’s premier secondary schools for boys. Their daughter, Nadira, she said, “must have been about six or so.”
Asked what it was like living there as a young mother and housewife, Mrs Jagan, a veteran politician as well as a seasoned journalist, countered that she didn’t think the latter term rightly applied to her since most of her time was spent at ‘Freedom House’, as the party headquarters is called.
“During this period, I wasn’t really a housewife, you see…I was at ‘Freedom House’ every day. And then, during one period for a year I was a minister. So I wasn’t exactly a housewife.”
Mr and Mrs Cheddi Jagan
Responding to the question nevertheless, she said:
“Of course, it was huge. It had three floors. We slept on the top floor… and the middle floor we ate…and there was a reception room too. The bottom floor was used partly by guards and partly as a playroom for my son.”She fondly remembers the grand old time he had down there playing with the train set he’d gotten as a present one Christmas.
Luckily for her, she said, she had in her employ two of the best domestic helps one could ever hope to find, one of whom was a Surinamese woman who had previously worked for a doctor she knew.
“She was a very good cook. She just came to Red House and asked for a job…and the minute I found out who she was, I employed her…she was fantastic…, Mrs Jagan said, adding: “She’s probably one of the best chefs this country’s ever had, and I was just lucky to have her.”
When they had guests over, she said, it was this woman who oversaw everything. “She took over and she was very capable.” She lived in the little matching red cottage aback the premises -- the servants quarters they were called in those days. Between she and the other woman, a local who had been with the family for a number of years, they took care of the day to day running of the house. “So that part of the running of the place was quite comfortable,” the former First Lady said.
Looking back on the four years she and her family spent at the ‘Red House’, she said: “I think my children enjoyed it because it had a big yard. We also had a dog and a monkey.”
Dr. Cheddi Jagan in his office at home
The thing she liked most about living there, she said, was the quietude. “It was very pleasant…but plain. Plain -- because we didn’t have an awful lot of furniture. What I liked, however, was the beauty of the place …the simplicity of it…it’s a beautiful building. It’s a nice area…a beautiful part of Guyana, Kingston …”
There were also certain other features about the house that she found quite intriguing - like the secret stairway that led to a bedroom she and her husband shared to the floor below.The tower, which was a favourite haunt of hers and is still intact after all these years, was another place she found to be equally as interesting as the hidden stairwell in her bedroom.
“The tower had steps going up. I put a table up there, because I used to love to go up there and write or read…it had a beautiful view…but this one …the bedroom…I don’t think it exists any more…but it had steps going down to what was a little office. But the bedroom was massive…but that’s how things were in the old days. That little tower is still there also.”
In all, there were four bedrooms, she said. “One we kept for guests…my son had one…my daughter had one…and my husband and I had one.”
Archivist/Librarian Dudley Kishore holds a pencil portrait of Red House done by an Indian artist.
Since the restoration of the house, however, courtesy of the multinational logging firm, Barama Company Limited, those rooms have now been converted into a museum, one of three components of the Cheddi Jagan Research Centre, which is being housed there, albeit temporarily.
In those rooms, Mrs Jagan said, is where all the gifts her husband received during his tenure as President (1992–1997) are displayed. The area also serves as a repository for a number of photographs and paintings, going all the way back to 1940s, among a host of other memorabilia belonging to Dr Jagan, right down to a scaled-down version of the office from which he worked while he lived at State House.
According to Mrs Jagan, the audio/visual recordings of his select speeches and various aspects of his life are particularly popular with the public, especially the younger generation, as they go there regularly, either as a group or individually, to make use of this facility.
Meanwhile, the middle floor is where all the archiving and documentation takes place, while the ground floor has been reserved for hosting conferences, workshops, training programmes, and the occasional book launch among other related activities.
It’s capacious and well-appointed lawns, however, have been used from time to time to host such social events as wedding receptions, fashion shows, and just recently a novelty pet show and fair, courtesy of the Tourism and Hospitality Association of Guyana (THAG).
“So, it’s a very busy place…people are in and out,” Mrs Jagan said, in obvious reference to the goings on these days at ‘Red House’.
According to Dr James Rose, who is not only a part of the management committee but a historian by profession, while much of its architectural history is shrouded in obscurity, there is every indication that ‘Red House’ was built somewhere in the latter half of the 19th century, many of its features are obviously 20th century.
Dr. Jagan's office is preserved in its original form at Red House
And while he does not elaborate on this latter comment of his, he does concur that its name was derived from the colour of the shingles used in its construction, which is of red wallaba, a type of hardwood native to Guyana.
Both the use of shingles and the incorporation of a tower into the building’s architecture, it is said, are a dead giveaway that it had to have been constructed during the late 19th century since either feature was quite fashionable at the time. It is also said that many ‘tower’ homes, as they are called, belonged to people with shipping connections or those merchants who wanted advance warning of when their vessels were due.
Though Sir Eustace, who was Speaker from 1953 to 1957, fell into neither category, he was reportedly one of the previous owners of ‘Red House’, which had to have been before 1925, when, according to the National Trust, it became the official residence of whoever the Colonial Secretary happened to be at the time, right up until 1953.
Dr Rose, however, seems to think that at some point during the 1940s, the building was acquired by the Colonial Development and Welfare Division since while it could not be confirmed that the first ever appointed Colonial Economic Development Officer, one Mr Spencer, lived there, he was “reasonably certain” that his successor, a Mr Fletcher, did.
Following the departure of Dr Jagan and his family in the wake of the 1964 polls, Dr Rose said, ‘Red House’ “fell upon increasingly hard times,” largely because of a reluctance on the part of his successor, the late Forbes Burnham, to take up residence there.
As such, he said, the property, which by this time was acquired by the State, was used to house firstly the Department of External Affairs, and subsequently the Training Division of the Public Service Ministry.
It was, for reasons unknown, abandoned in the early 90s.
