ROBIN Ragg remembers standing in the humidity of Korolevu, shuffled into a group photograph with a tribe of other boisterous cousins and “dying for a swim”.
It was 1947 and just several days after the knighthood of Sir Hugh Hall Ragg, a doting grandfather who wanted the occasion captured with the multitude of his Ragg, Chalmers, Sykes, French, Irving and Clark offspring.
“Grandpa was a wonderful man,” recalled Robin, a Nadi-based business woman whose father David was Sir Hugh’s oldest son.
Standing alongside Sir Hugh in the photo was Adrienne (Rene) McMillian, the Australian-born governess of his seven children. He married her in 1920 after losing his first wife, Emma Dora Petrie to the 1918 influenza epidemic.
Holding up a baby, Rene was fondly referred to as Gargie by the grandchildren.
“I have no idea how it came to be but the name Gargie stuck. My grandmother, Emma died when my father was 14-years-old.”
Like her husband, Emma was also the daughter of a settler. Her father, Captain William Petrie was a master mariner from Arbroath Angus in Scotland and arrived in Fiji around 1860.
Emma and Sir Hugh’s eight children all bore the middle name Petrie and it was in Ba where she was buried at the Colonial Sugar Refinery’s (CSR) old European cemetery in Rarawai.
“Emma was buried next to her baby Dickie, who died young,” Robin confirmed.
The family, she explained, was large, spread-out but close, and often recouped each Christmas at Korolevu along the Coral Coast, where Sir Hugh operated the country’s first bonafide resort.
“My father’s younger sister Kathleen and her husband Bill Clark stayed at Korolevu and managed the hotel,” Robin recalled.
The Korolevu Beach Resort wasn’t the only property acquired, and the Beachcomber Hotel in Deuba and Club House in Suva joined the ranks. Sir Hugh had also founded the Northern Hotels chain, which included properties in Ba, Lautoka, Tavua, Rakiraki and Nadi.
A visionary, he seemed to live ahead of his time, as tourism was basically unheard of in the first half of last century.
It was in Ba where he built its first hotel, and ran a grocery business that was eventually taken over by Morris Headstrom near the river.
Robin herself spent formative years in Ba and was born in Namosau, where Sir Hugh moved after his appointment to Fiji’s Legislative Council.
“He had a big bure in Namosau and I was born in the Ba Cottage Hospital in 1942. Then we moved to Lautoka, so my dad could manage the Lautoka Hotel, which was part of the Northern Hotels.”
It was here in the growing sugar town where her father David found a posting as Lautoka’s first mayor and Robin remembers him planting palm trees along Vitogo Parade in what is now the city’s central business district.
Robin also recalled the joy of holidays spent in the freezing temperatures of Nadarivatu, where a summer home was built and where her father David set up a swimming pool watered by a nearby creek.
“The house had a lawn and tennis court and its frames are still visible today.”
David lost his mother young and such as his father, adopted a stringent work ethic that saw him drop out of school aged 14 to help Sir Hugh with business.
“Sir Hugh always had two shillings behind his back and would hand it out to the grandchildren. He was very generous and a loving grandparent. He lived in Tamavua, Suva and was then knighted.”
Sir Hugh and Adrienne
Ninety-five years ago, the dreamy wedding setting of Sir Hugh Rene was cause for celebration in Ba.
The wedding service took place at the Colonial Sugar Refinery (CSR) Company’s chapel in Rarawai. And as mentioned by the bride’s then four-year-old train-bearer Betty Freeman (neel Cradik) in her memoir Memory Hold The Door, the event “gave the district something to talk about and provided lively reminiscences for years to come.”
The role of fellow train-bearer fell to Edna Southey while a French priest with a “villainous black beard “presided as marriage celebrant.
Trails of pink antigonan and leafy pink and white bridal veil, traditional for Fiji weddings were arranged around pews and lectern, white violetina, eucharist lilies and fern filled the altar vases, Freeman wrote.
Flowers galore, the wedding décor seemed a contrast to the humid, agricultural background of Ba. But with his occupation as a hotelier in the primitive, colonial-era year of 1920, Sir Hugh himself seemed to live ahead of his time. And as newspaper mentions, several businesses to oversee and Legislative Council commitments gave credence to his schedule would have been anything but ordinary.
A sporting enthusiast, he sat on several boards that included the Ba Amateur Turf Club and particularly keen for horse-racing, which at the time commanded huge interest around the country.
Robin noted that following her grandfather’s marriage to Rene, he converted to Catholicism from Presbyterianism.
A large tract of land he owned at Namosau during the 1940s was later given to the Catholic Church, for which the then Archbishop Foley started a seminary that housed students relocated from Cawaci, Ovalau. The building is now Xavier College and sits on the former site of a race course that drew regular bystanders.
Robin distinctly recalls that though he was best known to them as a loving grandfather, they were not unaware of his role in public life, particularly as he was driven around by a chauffeur, a novelty adopted during his tenure in Legislative Council and as a prominent hotelier.
Hailed for his vision, media reports referred to him as the “father” of Fiji’s tourist trade and one of the colony’s leading commercial men when he died in Tamavua in 1964.
As articles noted, he had continued to actively manage the Northern Hotels Ltd but suffered a series of mild heart attacks when he passed away on May 24, 1963.
The Founding Father
The older Hugh Ragg was an Englishman from Birmingham, which had been in the midst of an industrial revolution and as published family accounts reveal, migrated to Melbourne, Australia, from where he was dispatched to Fiji.
“The American Civil War disrupted cotton growing in America and there was for a short time, a boom in “sea island” cotton, some of which was being grown in Fiji,” family records noted.
Hugh (Sr) was engaged by a firm to erect a cotton mill at Dulewalu, Navua and supposedly arrived in 1869, at the height of Fiji’s cotton production. As family notes point out, it was probable that records of actual arrival dates and names of ships were not overseen as a properly constituted government was not entirely established at the time.
Hugh’s wife, Margaret Bridget Byrne joined him in Navua two years later and they settled in Suva between 1870 and 1880, setting up a general engineering business. He also delved into sawmilling, and via the Rewa River, would travel to Ovalau to procure supplies from Levuka, which was then still the Fijian capital.
As family records relate, business would have him leaving his wife and children at home alone for various stretches of time.
“On one occasion, according to one account Margaret was washing her hair, which was very long and red, and when a raiding party of Fijians arrived unexpectedly, their intentions were diverted by their chief’s curiosity and amazement at her hair — the likes of which they had never imagined let alone seen, and the party left without molesting anyone.”
Creative, it was also noted that Hugh showed keen interest in various experiments.
“One of these is said to have been a kind of water ski driven by paddles operated by a man through pedals and chain drive.
“Another was a type of agitator installed in a copper clothes boiler and which seemed to function fairly satisfactory but was of no commercial value.”
By 1980 Margaret and Hugh (Sr) had five children, with Sir Hugh arriving in 1882, and youngest child, Wilfred Ragg in 1883.
As Robin’s older brother David Ragg confirmed, Hugh Sr passed away in Suva in September 1842.
“He came to Fiji from Melbourne to supervise the building of the first sugar mill in Fiji at Navua,” David said.
” Cupit’s house on the bank of the Navua River was the site of the first sugar mill with the surrounding fields the first sugar plantations.”
Formative years
Family records noted that Hugh Sr was not a big believer in education and put his children to work in whatever capacity they were of use to.
His namesake son, Sir Hugh received schooling at Marist Brother’s School in Suva and at the age of 12 years, was briefly employed before becoming a “manual boy” with a Mr TP Nicholson. A teenage Sir Hugh eventually joined the firm, AM Brodziak and Co before joining a general store in Lautoka that was managed by his brother-in-law John Cleary.
Accounts note that Sir Hugh returned to the Brodziak firm, where he oversaw the men’s clothing department before joining the Navua Trading Company. In 1905 he moved again to Lautoka to manage a general business before partnering with James Morgan as general merchants. This firm, which changed from James Morgan and Co to Hugh Ragg and Co, was taken over by Morris Headstrom in Suva in 1920 and Sir Hugh became its senior director in Lautoka.
Sir Hugh though, wasn’t the only one with an entrepreneurial streak. His oldest brother William (Willie) Byrne Ragg ventured into a store operation in the Nadarivatu highlands, where its cooling temperatures had become a retreat for expatriates from the hot plains of the Western Divison.
After becoming a Labasa branch manager of the AM Brodziak & Company and starting his own business in Nadi in 1910, Willie took advantage of the bustling stream of business in the pine-covered mountains of Nadarivatu. His wife was Julia Alexandrina Storck, a member of another of the country’s notable immigrant families, and the mother of his five children.
The Ba Hotel
Accounts from Betty Freeman memoir noted that Sir Hugh lived by the Ba River in a large house next to his general store, which was soon taken over by Morris Headstrom before the Raggs moved to their Ba Hotel and eventually to Namosau, where the government station was located.
As described by Freeman, Ba’s population in the 1920s included a pool of CSR expatriates from Australia (such as her own father, George Cradik) and local white settlers who were privy to various amusement centres such as the tennis and lawn bowling club in Namosau.
A primary school for white children was mostly made up of young members of the Rounds, Eyre, Underwood, Murray and Campbell families.
Freeman remained close to the Raggs and notes that it was at the Ba Hotel where Adrienne, who was also called Rene, found her forte and unleashed her creative flair.
“Walls were removed, rooms rearranged, verandahs added, furniture painted, bright curtains and cushions appeared and huge bowls of hibiscus become a feature in public areas.”
The couple’s chivalry added to the hotel’s charm, and it was here that wedding receptions were held and where local bachelors milled about, while bridge was hosted in the afternoons with ice-cream — then a novelty, served for guests.
Freeman’s detailed, vivid account also notes the couple eventual moved to Namosau, where they built a new home on the site of the District Commissioner’s former residence.
Sir Hugh personally held a passion for sports and he oversaw the establishment of horse racing, spending 14 years as secretary of the Ba Amateur Turf Club.
The family today
The family today is spread far and wide in Fiji and abroad, springing from the seven children of Hugh and Margaret. From Suva to Ba and the hinterlands of Nadarivatu, members dispersed to seek their fortunes and establish themselves over several generations since the Birmingham ancestor arrived in Navua.
Ties to the Raggs now included members of the Irving, Syke, Clark, French and Storck families, amongst a larger pool of local families.
