Inside a sprawling, bright home in West Bay, the memory of the late Ardyth Smith lives on, not just with the framed photo of her on the living room table, but through the use of her former house as a place of shelter for abandoned animals and a home for Cayman Islands Humane Society staffers.
Smith, who died on New Year’s Eve in 2016 and who would have turned 95 on 4 April, is a heroine to the Humane Society, having left in trust a large amount of funds and land to be used to build a new shelter for the animal charity.
Samantha Cooper, the operations manager at the Humane Society, recently gave the Compass a tour of the site of the eagerly awaited new shelter, as well as Smith’s home, which sits immediately beside it.
The house is currently being rented to Humane Society staff, and also acts at times as an overflow shelter, with some cats and dogs being kept there when there is no room at the George Town premises.
“One of the things we often hear people say about the Humane Society is that we’re all a bunch of expats, but Ardyth Smith was a seventh-generation Caymanian, and her father was a sailor, so she was a native Caymanian who was one of the co-founders of the Humane Society,” Cooper said.
The construction of the new shelter is on hold at the moment, awaiting the sale of a neighbouring 11-acre plot of land, which has an asking price of $5.5 million. Once that land is sold, the proceeds will be spent on building the shelter. Both plots of land, located near Smith’s house, belonged to her.
Natasha Rocha, one of the directors of the Humane Society, described Smith as a “long-term animal welfare champion” and philanthropist.
Rocha said Smith’s love of animals and her support of the Humane Society had prompted her to put money in the trust to enable the charity to “put this dream in place, which is to have a better place for all our animals”.
Inside the spacious living room of the home, in pride of place on the table sits a framed photograph of Smith, taken in her younger days.
In the patio at the back of the house, hammock hooks are still in place. Cooper says Smith apparently often preferred to sleep on the porch.
Voice from the past
In 2012, Smith, then 82, recorded an oral history of her life with the Cayman Islands National Archive.
In those tapes, she told tales of growing up in George Town with her brother Gaylord, her seafaring father’s adventures and life with her husband Irvin.
Her dad, Audley Naaman Bodden, was the mate, manager and co-owner of the Hustler, a schooner that sank at sea in a hurricane in 1940 while returning from Colón, Panama, with all the crew and passengers on board lost. In her 2012 chat with archive transcriber Elizabeth Scholefield, she said that last voyage was the only trip the Hustler had made without her father. His brother Laurie, Ardyth’s uncle, was lost in that shipwreck.
She recalled going on a trip to sea with her father on board the Hustler when she was just 6 years old.
“He took me out there with him and I was out to the cays and everything with him for several months. And also to Colón,” she said. He left her in Panama with relatives while he went on another trip, and then she sailed home with him and spent her seventh birthday on the schooner.
She was brought up on Bodden Road, which, she said, her father built himself and where many of the Bodden family members lived.
“He built a road from [North Church Street] to his gate so that he could get truckloads of sand and wood and whatever he wanted … in there,” she said.
Audley Bodden became Cayman’s first dock foreman at the port in George Town.
After Ardyth left Miss Una’s school in George Town at the age of 13, the following year her father took her to New York to get medical treatment for digestive issues, and she attended school there for two years, returning to Cayman in 1946.
At age 16, she began working at Orrie Merren’s shop for about a year before going to work for Dr. Roy McTaggart, who ran his dental clinic and store from the same building. While working there, she met her future husband, Irvin, who was a seafarer, like her father.
The couple married at Elmslie Memorial United Church with seven bridesmaids, dressed in lime green, and seven groomsmen in attendance. From 1955 until 1999, they lived in a house they built as newlyweds before moving to their new home on Captain Reginald Parsons Drive.
She and Willie Farrington set up an organisation called the West Bay Civic and Cultural Society, to promote traditional activities such as thatchmaking.
She was also for a time interested in politics and ran for office, unsuccessfully seeking a seat in West Bay after deciding to get involved in politics over land issues in Cayman, which eventually led to the Cadastral Survey in the 1970s.
Among her many interests, which included helping to organise the annual flower show where she won prizes for her own flowers, being a member of the Women’s Guild and teaching first aid to divers, airline staff and police officers as part of her work with the Red Cross, Smith was also a correspondent for West Bay happenings in the Compass in the 1970s.
Smith’s depth and breadth of knowledge of ships, seafaring and the history of Cayman is obvious from reading the transcript of her oral history. In it, she lists the exact locations of homes of people long passed, and the names of every person who lived in them.
Her historical knowledge was commented on in a heartwarming story that featured in the Cayman Compass in 2015, when the family of a pen pal Smith had written to for decades came to visit from England.
“Ardyth is a phenomenal historian,” visitor Rod Wilding said at the time. “She knows everything about the Cayman Islands.”
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