ABSTRACT
In the Caribbean, the nomenclature of Heads of State depends on the constitutional system over which they preside. In colonial times, the Governor was the official representative of the British Sovereign in the colonies of Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Grenada, St Vincent, St Lucia, Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, St Kitts/Nevis, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Turks and Caicos, Montserrat, and British Virgin Islands. In each colony, the Governor’s deputy was styled ‘Colonial Secretary’, a designation which, in time, was changed to ‘Chief Secretary’
in the larger colonies and ‘Administrator’ in the smaller ones in an apparent attempt to avoid the increasing unpopularity of the words ‘colony’ and ‘colonial’. Even at the present time the word ‘colony’ has become so odious that the British no longer speak of ‘colonies’ at all. Their colonies (wherever they still exist) are euphemistically referred to as ‘overseas territories’1
Until the late 1950s, a Governor, in what was then the British Caribbean, usually presided over the larger territories and where that territory had ‘dependencies’, the dependency would be headed by a warden, district officer or commissioner who would, in effect, be the Governor’s surrogate in the dependency. For example, warden was the term used to designate the Governor’s representative in Anguilla and Nevis while the Colony of St Kitts itself-the parent territory-was presided over by an administrator. In the case of the Leeward Islands, for example, the term ‘Governor’ was, up to 1960, reserved for the Queen’s representative of the group comprising St Kitts/Nevis/Anguilla, Antigua, Montserrat and the British Virgin Islands. His grandiloquent title was ‘Governor and Commander-in-Chief in and over the Leeward Islands’.
