Chipman (d.1951) Chipman (d.1957) Chipman (d.1962) Chipman (d.2013) Chipman (d.2014) and the Court Case

There is a particular truth about The Bahamas that the official histories have long preferred to leave unspoken. It is not a comfortable truth, yet it is an honest one: families across every economic and social spectrum — families that gave priests, politicians, teachers, preachers, artists, entrepreneurs, the famous and the infamous, an entire economic class and generation to the nation, and families whose contributions were quieter but no less real — were born outside the formal bonds of marriage.

Bahamians had a name for them: outside children. A plain term for a common reality that the official record preferred not to count.

Were it not for the whispered secrets that outlive the principals by generations, such truths would remain buried in the memories of those who carried them in silence to their graves.

---

Howard Nelson Chipman (5th November 1881 – 29th January 1951) born Harbour Island, Eleuthera

By any measure, Howard Nelson Chipman was a Bay Street Boy through and through — a White Knight in the truest Bahamian sense of the word. Member of the Assembly. White man with connections, land, money, and means. And not to put too fine a point on it, the ladies loved him. In old Nassau, that was the whole of the qualification. Chipman sat in the House of Assembly in 1921 during the time of T. A. Toote, Ernest Lenkard Bowen and L. W. Young. Bowen and Chipman were neighbours as Chipman was building a house on Dean’s Lane where Ernest Bowen had lived for many years.

Chipman carried himself like he knew his worth. Six foot two, and not an inch of it wasted. You didn’t miss Howard Chipman when he walked into a room. The room adjusted to him.

The Assembly seat, the land, the means — those were the public Howard Chipman. But there was another side to the man, and Nassau knew it well. Etienne Dupuch captured it plainly in The Tribune in 1973: Chipman was, in his estimation, a real modern-day pirate. A man who seemed able to set himself apart from the law. Who did just about anything he wished. Everybody knew Howard Chipman, Dupuch wrote — they both liked and feared him — and so he lived a full and roistering life in an ordinarily quiet and well-disciplined society.

Poetry in Motion (the words of Howard Nelson Chipman) 1924

In 1924, Howard Nelson Chipman represented the Bahamas at an exhibition of British Empire Exhibition of culture and trade goods in London. Chipman had represented the colony on previous exhibitions. In 1913, he was the custodian for the Bahamas exhibition in Canada. On this trip to London in 1924, he brought six Bahamian women with him as part of the cultural display.

What he wrote about Bahamian women on the whole is priceless. He found them beautiful and strong — bodies made of the finest wood, strongest steel, and most precious gold. In short, Chipman observed the style of the Bahamian women in 1924, and what he saw moved him to poetry.

1930 – Howard Nelson Chipman and the First Radio Station Out of the Bahamas

On the 13th of December 1930, the Bahamas heard its first radio broadcast. The station was VIBAX. The frequency was 840 kilocycles. The location was the Lucayan Baths — space loaned, as the Miami Herald noted, by H. N. Chipman. The first voice the Bahamas ever put on the air went out from Howard Chipman’s property. His first born son, Harold Hastings Chipman was the announcer.

---

The Children… some of them!

According to a biographical ancestry post, Howard Nelson Chipman was said to have had eight children by four women.

Three of those women were:

1. Hilda Mary (Matthews) Chipman, whom a 19-year-old Howard Nelson married in 1901 in Nassau, New Providence, Bahamas — they had Harold Hastings Chipman (1903–1957).

2. Patricia Campbell, with whom he had a daughter, Shiela Chipman Guston (1 June 1926 – 20 March 1962). Shiela was left in Nassau to be raised by her father Howard Nelson Chipman and his second wife Mrs. Elsie Chipman.

3. Ethelyn Taylor, a Black woman, with whom Howard Nelson had five children — Howard (1924–2013), Alice (1st July 1926–14th July 1992), John (1928–2019), and twins Hubert (1930–2014), Cyril (1930–1939).

Howard Nelson “Chippie” Chipman Jr. (1924–2013), eldest of Ethelyn Taylor’s children, built his own inheritance from nothing. He left the Bahamas at eighteen on the Contract, broke it, enlisted in the US Army, boxed his way to the Colorado championship, and was demoted from Sergeant to Corporal for insubordination — a distinction he wore without apology. After the war he returned to Nassau and never stopped moving: nightclubs, horse racing, shrimp farming, a farm on Joe Farrington Road where he named his livestock after family members. It was considered an honour to be named after one of his pigs. He opened seven retail outlets, then built Chipman Enterprises Limited — the Caribbean’s largest silk-screening factory — with Pandora Christie. He promoted boxing, entered politics, and received the Medal of Honour from the Governor General. He died at Rand Memorial Hospital in Freeport on 25 November 2013, aged 89, still planning his next venture.

Hubert (1930–2014), the youngest, entered the world as one of identical twins, preceded by Cyril by five minutes. Cyril died in a tragic accident in 1939. Hubert carried that loss quietly for the rest of his life. Where Nelson combusted, Hubert endured: thirty-four years at the Water and Sewer Corporation, a marriage to Hazel Sargent he boasted about until his final breath, and a battle with alcohol that he won in 1985 and never lost again. He became a surrogate father to nieces and nephews, a fixture at St. Agnes every Sunday, a man who greeted the world with a smile and two or three mints. His greatest joy was watching his son Hubert Anthony take a seat in Parliament. He died on 29 March 2014 wearing his red FNM t-shirt. The court appeal bearing his name was still alive.

John “Chippie” Chipman (1928-2019) is a legend of Bahamian entertainment — saxophonist, drummer, bandleader, and globe-trotting ambassador for a nation whose music he helped define. He began in the 1950s as a waiter at the legendary Paul Meeres Club, where he taught himself to drum and worked his way from taking orders to commanding stages. The career that followed spanned more than sixty years and carried him around the world. He was at the airport with Nelson and the band when sprinter Tommy Robinson came home victorious from Canada. He travelled to Cuba with his brother in old age and played beside him one last time. He was also there at the beginning of something larger: Chippie and the Boys were among the pioneers of modern Junkanoo, the first group to use crêpe paper costumes and the first to include women. He survived all his brothers. His full story awaits its own telling.

4. And then there was a fourth mother whose name is not known, who bore, Margaret Chipman Sinclair (b. 1919, date of death unknown), was also among his children.

---

The Court Case 2006 and the Appeal 2014

Nearly half a century after the escheat that moved what remained of the Howard Nelson Chipman estate to the Crown, Howard Nelson Chipman Jr., Hubert Chipman, and their niece Mitzie Chipman — a grandchild of the patriarch through one of the other siblings — brought an appeal in 2014 seeking recognition that the Chipman blood in their veins entitled them to a portion of the Chipman Estate.

Both brothers died before it was resolved.

The appeal failed.

The law recognised the chain of bequests and the escheat. It did not recognise the moral claim of outside children whose father had chosen not to name them in his will.

The land on West Bay Street and Chippingham Road had a name once — Pieces of Eight. Howard Nelson Chipman called it home. He shared it with Elsie May Key (whom he possibly married as she was known as Mrs. Chipman), and when he died on the 29th of January 1951, he left her everything.

When Elsie May Key died in 1960, she left everything to Sheila Chipman Guston — Howard’s illegitimate daughter by Patricia Campbell, a woman who had left the Bahamas shortly after Sheila’s birth in 1926, leaving the child behind in her father’s household.

Sheila Chipman Guston died intestate on the 20th of March 1962. She left a husband, James Guston, but no heirs. Three years later, in 1965, the then Acting Attorney General Gerald Collett made application to escheat all of Sheila’s real estate to the Crown. The application was granted.

In 1974, the Crown granted the land to the Broadcasting Corporation of the Bahamas.

That should have been the end of it. It was not.

Mitzi Chipman — daughter of John Arthur Chipman, himself an illegitimate child of Howard Nelson Chipman — argued that the escheat was wrong from the start. The property, she contended, had never properly passed to Sheila Chipman Guston. It remained vested in Howard Nelson Chipman’s estate, and under the Status of Children Act, both legitimate and illegitimate Chipman heirs were entitled to share in it. John Arthur, Howard Nelson, Hubert, and Alice Louise Chipman had petitioned on precisely that basis.

The Court of Appeal was not persuaded. Both appeals — Chipman’s and that of a separate claimant, Cunningham, who argued possessory title since 1981 — were dismissed. BCB’s Crown Grant held.

Pieces of Eight stayed lost.

Bahamian lives are complicated and complex. Families arose from relationships not wedded in law but in passion. How we come to reconcile all of it as the future unfolds is yet to be negotiated. We only know that life is what it is and the human condition is complicated.

---

Bahamian Lives, Bahamian Legacies is dedicated to remembering the men and women who made this archipelago what it is — the celebrated and the forgotten, the documented and the unrecorded, those who sat in assemblies and those who sat in the back pews. Their stories are the story of the Bahamas. Their voyage complete. Their legacy eternal.