Moves To Bahamas
Oakes took British citizenship and for tax reasons lived in the Bahamas from 1935. He was invited to the British colony by Harold Christie, a prominent Bahamian real estate developer and legislator, who became a close business associate and friend. Oakes was created a baronet in 1939 as a reward for his philanthropic endeavours in the Bahamas, in Canada, and in Britain. For example, he donated $500,000 in two bequests to St. George's Hospital in London, England, and gave a million dollars to charities in the Bahamas. He became a member of the colony's House of Assembly.
Oakes soon proved to be a dynamic investor, entrepreneur and developer in the Bahamas. He had a major role in expanding the airport, Oakes Field, in the capital city Nassau, bought the British Colonial Hilton Nassau, built a golf course and country club, and developed farming and new housing. All this activity greatly stimulated the struggling economy in what had been a sleepy backwater, with only about 70,000 inhabitants in the early 1940s. This activity took place mainly on the principal island of New Providence; it was estimated that Oakes owned about one-third of that island by the early 1940s. Oakes had become the colony's wealthiest, most powerful, and most important resident by the early 1940s.
Read more about this topic: Harry Oakes
Famous quotes containing the word moves:
“The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist’s way of scribbling “Kilroy was here” on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.”
—William Faulkner (1897–1962)