One question haunts two land deals of April 15, 1935: Why didn’t H. G. Christie sell his 100 acres, in Caves, directly to Harry Oakes? Why sell for Pound Sterling in the morning, then demand U.S. dollars for the same property sold in the afternoon? What necessitated the curious arrangement of selling first to a shell company, which then promptly flipped the property to Oakes that same day?
Was fleecing Harry Oakes the plan all along?
Was uncovering this long-running game what truly sealed Harry’s fate—leading to his savage killing in his own bed on July 7, 1943?
Guy Robert Brookes Baxter
Guy Brooke Baxter met Harold George Christie sometime around 1921. A fortuitous meeting that would become a profitable partnership for both men. It would also set the template for how Bay Street extracted wealth from the Bahamas for decades to come.
The historical silence surrounding Guy Baxter is striking. Here was a man who once owned The Grove, Caves, and Delaport in their entirety, plus who knows what else—yet historians have seemingly never bothered to delve into his story.
Well, to begin with, he died in 1956 at the age of 61/62 and is buried in Nassau, New Providence, Bahamas.
Like countless others during The Bahamas’s 400 year colonial era, Guy Brooke Baxter was an Englishman who came to island paradise, to find a new life and fortune. Baxter began cultivating sisal for export. He soon found investing in land to be immensely more profitable.
Unlike the established Bay Street families who’d accumulated wealth and position over generations, Baxter was an outsider with ambition, capital, and—crucially—the social connections that opened doors in colonial Nassau’s small, insular world.
By 1927, Baxter owned a large parcel of land known as the Grove on New Providence which also included Saunders Beach. The area was marketed as Vista Marina—a name that captures the aspirational marketing already being applied to undeveloped Bahamian coastline destined for wealthy foreign buyers.
Baxter subdivided the Grove into lots to market to an American and Canadian market eager to escape the cold winters of the Americas. H. G. Christie became the real estate agent for Baxter around the time he formed his real estate company H. G. Christie in 1922.
By 1935 Guy Brooke Baxter was president of a shell company that owned all of the land known as Delaport and all of the land known as Caves except for 100 acres owned by H. G. Christie
On April 15, 1935, two conveyances executed in Nassau tell the oldest story in the colonial playbook: a rich outsider eager to buy his way in, local insiders ready to profit from his ambition, and land that somehow doubled in value between morning and afternoon.
The Morning Transaction
Harold George Christie sold 100 acres—described as “a portion of the land known as ‘the Caves’ situate in the Western District”—to a shell company called Ocean and Lakeview Limited.
H. G. sells his 100 acres in Caves for £800.
Stafford L. Sands, then student-at-law, was the witness to Harold Christie’s signature on the contract.
The Afternoon Transaction
Later on the same day, Ocean and Lakeview Limited sells to Harry Oakes, 886 acres which now include the 100 acres it has acquired that morning from H. G. Christie for £800. The conveyance described the contract for sale as “of the land known as ‘the Caves’ and ‘Delaporte’”—for $51,751 USD.
Bahamas Registry Reference: R13 pages 175-178
The vastness of the property sold to Harry Oakes, all 886 incredible acres, cannot be fathomed, even today. It ran from the sea to the lake. It ran from the sea that borders Caves to Blake Road (which still exists) to border both Lake Cunningham and Lake Killarney.
All the land from the sea to Lake Cunningham and Lake Killarney…
If one looks at the map included in the conveyance, Ocean and Lake View Ltd. a well placed shell company, with Guy Brooke Baxter as president and H. Newell Kelly as company secretary, owned all the land on the left from Blake Road to Orange Hill to beach front property called Sea Beach Subdivision and Addition extending to the right from Caves heading towards Delaporte.
Ocean and Lakeview Ltd – A Short Lived Shell Company
Ocean and Lakeview Ltd was incorporated in March 1935, just three weeks before the April 15, 1935 transaction and struck off 1941.
Ocean and Lakeview Ltd was represented by its president, Guy Robert Brooke Baxter and H. Newell Kelly, company secretary.
Ocean and Lakeview Ltd., a vehicle that became the primary economic business model for The Bahamas, a shell company, created to facilitate exactly this type of deal—inserting a corporate layer between original seller and final buyer, obscuring the markup, and providing legal cover for what would otherwise look like exactly what it was: Christie selling Oakes land at a spectacular premium over what Christie himself had paid for it.
H. Newell Kelly went to become Oakes’s property portfolio manager. The following is a photo of Newell Kelly outside of the courthouse in Nassau in November 1943 discussing Harry Oakes’s murder case. Kelly is on the left.
Photo of H. Newell Kelly in collection of Nicole Roberts
Same day. Same players. Radically different terms. And the largest land transaction in Nassau to that point.
Governor of The Bahamas in 1935 who ignored or was complicit in one of the biggest land grabs in mid-20th century Bahamian history.
History may well place Bahamas Governor Bede Clifford among a succession of ineffectual colonial administrators. He shared with many predecessors an inability—or unwillingness—to confront the entrenched Bay Street merchant class that monopolized political and economic power throughout the islands.
Bede Clifford, after leaving colonial administrative office, came back to The Bahamas to work for the Bay Street Boys and was property manager for a resort in Grand Bahama.
Why the currency switch? Why sell for Pound Sterling in the morning, then demand U.S. dollars for the same property sold in the afternoon?
Harold Christie’s currency switch is revealing. While he accepted pounds sterling from Guy Baxter, he demanded US dollars from Harry Oakes for the same property on the same day.
By 1935, US dollars carried premium value in the Bahamas—the currency was more stable than the pound (which had left the gold standard in 1931), and critically, it was the currency of American wealth flooding into the islands. Christie wasn’t just choosing a currency; he was ensuring maximum value from the final sale while potentially obscuring the true markup through exchange rate complexity.
The Mathematics of the Markup
Let’s examine the numbers that Harry Oakes probably wasn’t aware of:
Christie sells 100 acres for £800 (approximately $4,000 USD at 1935 exchange rates). That’s roughly $40 per acre.
Hours later, Ocean and Lakeview sells 886 acres for $51,751—approximately $58 per acre.
But the real question is structural: Where did Ocean and Lakeview acquire the other 786 acres? If they already owned Delaporte and the remainder of the Caves, why did Christie sell them just 100 additional acres that morning? And if they didn’t own the rest, how did they sell 886 acres they didn’t possess?
The most plausible explanation: Christie and Baxter were working in concert. Christie assembled or controlled the land. Baxter provided the corporate vehicle. Together they extracted maximum value from Oakes while obscuring the actual cost basis through the intermediary company structure.
If Ocean and Lakeview acquired those 100 acres from Christie for $4,000 that morning and sold them hours later as part of an 886-acre package for $51,751, the same-day profit was approximately $47,751—equivalent to roughly $1 million today. Even accounting for the other 786 acres in the deal, the markup remains extraordinary.
This wasn’t a real estate transaction. It was a masterclass in information asymmetry.
Guy Baxter: From Land Speculation to Nazi Castles
Guy Robert Brooke Baxter served as company president. He wasn’t merely a name on paper. He was a man with capital, ambition, and connections—and, as would become clear, politics that aligned him with some of the darkest currents of the 1930s.
Three years after the Oakes transaction, in 1938, Guy Brooke Baxter purchased Darby Island in the Exumas. There he constructed a stone castle—not a villa, not an estate house, but an actual medieval-style fortress—that stands to this day as one of the Bahamas’ more bizarre architectural relics.
Baxter was a Nazi sympathizer. As Europe moved toward war, he was among those in the Bahamas’ expatriate community who regarded Hitler not as a threat but as a bulwark against communism and disorder. The Bahamas in this period attracted British and American exiles whose politics ranged from merely conservative to openly fascist. The Duke of Windsor—the former King Edward VIII—would arrive as Governor in 1940 with his own well-documented Nazi sympathies, finding a social circle that included men like Baxter.
Baxter’s castle on Darby Island wasn’t architectural whimsy. It was ideological statement: a physical manifestation of feudal hierarchy, built by a man who imagined himself lord of a private domain, accountable to no one. That he funded it partly with profits from the Oakes deal—profiting off a deal with a man whose fortune came partly from Jewish investors, then building a castle while sympathizing with a regime murdering Jews—adds a particularly grotesque irony to the transaction.
The castle still stands. Tourists occasionally visit it, usually unaware that it was built with money extracted from one of the 20th century’s wealthiest men by a Nazi sympathizer working in partnership with Nassau’s premier land broker.
Harold Christie: The Indispensable Middleman
By 1935, Harold George Christie had already established himself as Nassau’s preeminent real estate dealer. He understood Bahamian land values better than anyone—what properties were worth, what they could be sold for, and crucially, the gap between the two.
His partnership with Baxter and H. Newell Kelly in the Ocean and Lakeview transaction reveals Christie’s essential method: assemble land quietly and cheaply, insert a corporate intermediary to obscure the cost basis, then sell to wealthy foreigners at maximum markup justified by “potential” and “exclusivity.”
Christie would go on to become one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the Bahamas—knighted, politically influential, socially prominent. He would also become forever associated with the 1943 murder of Harry Oakes, found bludgeoned and burned in his bed at Westbourne, with Christie the last person to admit seeing him alive.
Whether Christie had anything to do with Oakes’s death remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of Bahamian history. What’s beyond dispute is that Christie had everything to do with Oakes paying far more than necessary for Bahamian land in 1935. That wasn’t murder. It was just business.
Harry Oakes arrived in the Bahamas as one of the richest men on earth. He’d struck gold in Canada—literally—amassing a fortune estimated at $200 million (over $4 billion in today’s terms). He was looking for sunshine, social standing, and most importantly, a tax haven that would allow him to keep his wealth rather than surrendering it to governments in Canada, Britain, or the United States.
The Bahamas offered all three. What it also offered was a small, insular real estate market dominated by men like Christie who knew every parcel, every owner, every transaction, and every opportunity to profit from wealthy foreigners who knew none of those things.
Oakes had money but not local knowledge. He had ambition but not information. He was precisely the kind of buyer who could be convinced to pay $51,751 for land that had cost dramatically less—because he had no way of knowing what it had actually cost, and because the men selling it to him had every incentive to ensure he never found out.
Oakes would go on to invest heavily in the Bahamas—building projects, making donations, becoming one of the colony’s most prominent benefactors.
He was also, on April 15, 1935, fleeced.
Why use Ocean and Lakeview Limited as an intermediary? Why not simply have Christie sell directly to Oakes?
Because direct sale invites direct questions:“What did you pay for this land, Mr. Christie?”“How long have you owned it?”“What improvements justify this price?”
With a corporate intermediary, those questions become awkward and inappropriate:“Ocean and Lakeview owns the property, Mr. Oakes. We’re selling it to you at the current market rate for premium Western District land with extraordinary development potential.”
The fact that Ocean and Lakeview acquired a portion of that land from Christie that very morning becomes a detail buried in registry records that no one examines unless they’re specifically looking for irregularities. And in 1935 Nassau, who was looking?
The Pattern and the Profits
The Oakes transaction wasn’t unique. It was exemplary—the model applied hundreds of times across decades:
1. Identify wealthy foreigner seeking tax advantages and tropical paradise
2. Assemble land quietly from Bahamian owners at modest prices
3. Insert corporate intermediary to obscure actual acquisition costs
4. Market land to foreigner emphasizing “potential,” “exclusivity,” “investment opportunity”
5. Close sale at maximum price the market will bear (which is to say, whatever the wealthy foreigner will pay)
6. Dissolve corporate vehicle once transaction complete
7. Repeat with next wealthy foreigner
Christie built an empire on this model, as did the other Bay Street Boys. Guy Baxter made enough from his role in these transactions to obtain an entire island and build a castle on it. The system worked brilliantly—for them.
For the Bahamas as a whole, it created an economic structure dependent on attracting and extracting value from wealthy foreigners rather than building productive capacity. For individual Bahamians whose land was purchased cheaply and resold expensively, it meant watching local elites profit from the difference. For buyers like Oakes, it meant paying substantially more than land was worth—though whether that mattered to a man worth $200 million is debatable.
The Aftermath
Ocean and Lakeview Limited was struck off on March 3, 1941—the same year the United States entered World War II, making Guy Baxter’s Nazi sympathies considerably more awkward than they’d been in 1935.
Christie continued his real estate career, accumulating wealth and power that would eventually earn him a knighthood and make him one of the most influential figures in Bahamian history. His association with Oakes would end tragically in 1943 with Oakes’s still-unsolved murder—a mystery that has generated endless speculation about Christie’s possible involvement but no definitive answers.
Baxter retreated to his castle on Darby Island, where the stone walls he’d built with profits from colonial land speculation still stand today as an accidental monument to the intersection of wealth, politics, and moral bankruptcy.
Did Harry Oakes die because he discovered he had been the mark all along in a long running scheme orchestrated by H. G. Christie and his shadowy cabal of associates?
The Legacy
The April 1935 Oakes land deal wasn’t fraud in any legal sense. No laws were broken. No false representations were made (that we know of). Christie owned or controlled land. Oakes wanted to buy land. They agreed on a price. Transaction complete.
But it was extraction nonetheless—systematic, calculated extraction of value from someone with money but without information by people with information designed to maximize their advantage.
That this was how fortunes were made in colonial Bahamas doesn’t make it admirable. That it was legal doesn’t make it just. That Oakes could afford it doesn’t mean he should have paid it.
And that Guy Baxter used his profits to build a castle while sympathizing with Nazis, while Christie built an empire that would eventually entangle him in one of history’s great unsolved murders, suggests that the moral accounting of the April 15, 1935 transaction extends well beyond the ledgers of Ocean and Lakeview Limited.
History has many ironies. That’s one of the stranger ones.
Disenfranchised Black Masses
Once these vast swathes of Bahamian land were subdivided and sold to wealthy foreigners, they invariably contained restrictive covenants that the land could only be conveyed to whites.
These massive land deals systematically excluded Black Bahamians from wealth accumulation and economic participation. When white elites like Christie and Baxter and Newell flipped properties to wealthy foreigners like Oakes at enormous markups, the profits flowed exclusively within white networks.
Black Bahamians—who comprised the vast majority of the population—were shut out as buyers, sellers, and beneficiaries. They could neither afford to purchase land at these inflated prices nor access the capital networks that enabled such transactions.
Meanwhile, as prime coastal and agricultural lands were consolidated into foreign hands, Black Bahamians lost access to traditional fishing grounds, farmland, and economic opportunities. The deals created a dual economy: one where white Bahamians and foreigners traded valuable assets among themselves, and another where Black Bahamians were confined to wage labor, subsistence, and economic marginality.
