Caribelle Batik works out of Romney Manor in St. Kitts, on ground that held a sugar estate for three centuries. The old samaan at the centre of the garden is one of the oldest trees in the Caribbean, put at around four hundred years. It was already vast when the Romney Estate freed the people it had enslaved in 1834, ahead of Parliament's instruction and ahead of every other estate on the island. Maurice Widdowson came to St. Kitts in 1974, bought the rundown estate, and founded Caribelle in 1976, having learned the wax in Zambia.
The process is batik, which is wax-resist dyeing. Hot wax is drawn or stamped onto sea island cotton wherever the colour must not reach, with a tjanting pen for line work or a copper tjapp for repeated pattern. The cloth goes into the dye, often more than once for the deeper shades. Where the wax sat, the original cloth shows through. After the last bath the wax is boiled out and the pattern is fixed for good.
Inside the workshop, cloth is waxed, dyed, and hung to dry in the rooms it has dried in for decades. Every step is a matter of timing: wax temperature, brush speed, the exact moment of the lift. Miss one and the piece starts again. Caribelle employs thirty-six people, many of them for more than twenty years and a few since the first intake.
None of it is quick, which is the point. The shirts, scarves, and wall hangings that leave Romney Manor were not made in a hurry. The samaan above the garden has watched several thousand of them dry in the sun.
The same family began digging up the buried distillery down the hill at Wingfield in 2010. Maurice's son Jack runs Old Road Rum there now.
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