Elma Napier
Elma Napier was the grandmother of historian Lennox Honychurch and the first woman to be elected to a Caribbean parliament. She was born Elma Gordon-Cumming in 1892 in Scotland, the daughter of Sir William Gordon-Cumming and Florence Josephine Gordon-Cumming.
Sir William Gordon-Cumming was a Lieutenant-Colonel in the 4th Battalion of The Scots Guards who fell out of favour with Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) and Queen Victoria in 1891 for the Royal Baccarat Scandal and was subsequently dismissed from the army. The family’s fortune dwindled following the ordeal and the estate of his heiress wife slumped in the marriage.
Elma married Captain Maurice Anthony Crutchley Gibbs in 1912 and they had two children – Ronald and Daphne. The couple moved to Australia where they lived for 9 years. Elma sued to divorce her husband when she met and fell in love with another Englishman, Lennox Pelham Napier. She got her divorce and lost custody of her two children before marrying Napier in 1924 and had two other children – Patricia and Michael.
Elma and Napier visited Dominica on a Caribbean cruise ship in 1931 but returned to the island and settled near the village of Calibishie in 1932. The named the house they built Pointe Baptiste. Lennox Napier died in 1940 and Elma later joined politics. She won an election to Dominica’s Legislative Council and worked to develop local government and grassroots politics. She also worked on forest conservation while several foreign guests such as Princess Margaret, Somerset Maugham, Patrick Leigh Fermor, and Noel Coward visited her residence at Pointe Baptiste.
At different times of her life, Elma Napier came to be known as Elma Gibbs and Elizabeth Garner. In the 1930s, she wrote two novels – Duet in Discord (1936) and A Flying Fish Whispered (1938). She also wrote three memoirs – Youth is a Blunder (1948), Winter is in July (1949), and Black and White Sands (written in 1962 but published in 2009). She had earlier written Nothing So Blue (1927) and Carnival in Martinique (1951).
Elma Napier died in 1973, aged 81, in Calibishie. She was buried beside her late husband in Pointe Baptiste. The Dominican government honoured her posthumously by putting her portrait on a postage stamp.