The Seaford Story

The story of my ancestors

My ancestors in the 16th and 17th centuries were among the world’s richest and most powerful men. The first Peter Beck ford, according to his contemporaries, considered himself “the greatest man in the world.” Originally, he was a nobody, or possibly a pirate or buccaneer. But when Charles II became King of Jamaica, the Beck fords received enormous favors from the new monarch, no doubt a debt repayment for shrewd political support. The sources of the immense wealth of the Beck ford family were real estate, sugar, slave trading, and Atlantic commerce. Some of the land they owned is so fertile it has been producing sugar cane continuously for 350 years. It is written of the Beck fords that their “surplus energy found notable expression in the number of illegitimate children” which they produced with the eager help of their most beautiful slave girls. The result has been a lot of Beck fords like me in the “illegitimate line.” Very many people in Jamaica carry Beck ford genes today, even if they do not bear the name as I do.

One historian has this comment on the first Peter Beck ford. “In this Jamaican we see manifest certain of the less attractive characteristics which were to be passed on to his descendants. He was a man of violent temper, ruthless and not over-scrupulous in the conduct of his affairs, and given to exaggerations of a very misleading sort.” The second Peter, son of the first, who might have been my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, inherited a vast fortune. His father’s cash chest, when opened, is said to have revealed £250 million in modern currency equivalent. He became Speaker of the Jamaican House of Assembly. He was also above the law, as when he brutally murdered a senior judge and escaped prosecution. By 1700 he was reputed to be the richest man in Europe and the Americas, and possibly in the world. Certainly in 1735 his son, William, inherited the largest legacy in history, anywhere, and his fabulous wealth was said to be the envy of the crowned monarchs of Europe. The Beck ford mercantile fleet was the largest in the American-Caribbean trade.

William studied at Balliol College, Oxford, and became Lord Mayor of London (twice), the only Jamaican ever to reach such eminence. He soon became the richest land baron and real estate speculator in the western hemisphere, and probably the greatest individual slave owner in the entire history of mankind. Another historian has this to say of William. “His family’s position in Jamaica was at least as important as that of any of the great titled families in England, and he was wealthier than any of them. But as a ‘colonial’ with an ‘ugly’ Jamaican accent, he was cold-shouldered and regarded as an upstart. Proud himself, he felt their insolent hauteur.” Nevertheless, this upstart Jamaican, though rebuffed by British aristocracy, was most determined to take the Beck ford genes to the very top of human society. Through various marriages over the next four generations, I am genetically related to the royal families of Monaco and Hungary, and more distantly to those of Germany, France, and Scotland, as well as to numerous dukes and counts.

Lord Mayor William’s son, also William, built or rebuilt several magnificent great houses in Jamaica, including Fonthill in St. Elizabeth close to where I was born. He also personally designed by far the biggest palace in the world ever built by a commoner, Fonthill Abbey in the west of England. In the 1840’s, when slavery in Jamaica had been officially abolished and when his sugar fortune had crumbled, the gigantic and “impossible Abbey” literally crumbled too, in fulfilment of Psalm 49:14-20 and Ecclesiastes 5:13-15. However, one of William’s biographers insists that “in his eighties he was as mentally alert, astute and untiring as ever.”

My story

My father was Vernon Beck ford. He died when I was young, so I hardly remember him. I don’t recall my grandfather either, but in those days wherever Beck fords were born, there were the plantations which some of our ancestors owned and where others had slaved. I was born at Lacovia in St. Elizabeth, with cane fields all around.

After my family moved to Kingston, I met Larry and Enid Henry and they invited us to Sunday school at the Christadelphian meeting hall, which was then in a back street in Allman Town. I and my brothers used to attend. My brothers didn’t stay long. Perhaps because I am disabled in body, my mind is extra clear. I followed the Light, and I do know that from the first time I went, I never looked back.

Not very long after the Six Day War, when Jerusalem fell to the Jews, I rose to newness of life, on March 10, 1968. Four years later, in 1972, I met Bro. Eddie Johnson. He worked to establish training centres for the disabled. He was a great believer in being self-reliant. Perhaps God-reliant would be more accurate, because he was a great believer in the power of prayer. He recruited me for one of his workshops, and I worked there for many years.

I have never been famous as some of my ancestors. But God led me to treasures they never dreamed of. I am far richer than they ever were. Over the years, I have been a great reader, hungry for divine wisdom. I cannot buy books, but any magazines or books on the truth I can lay my hands on, I will devour them.

Wisdom, that is what you need. The wisdom that is foolishness with men. Life is in her right hand. In her left are riches and honour. She is a tree of life to those who embrace her; those who lay hold of her will be blessed (Prov. 3:13-18).