British Windward Islands

The British Windward Islands were an administrative grouping of British colonies in the eastern Caribbean, created in 1833 to place the scattered islands under a single governor-in-chief. The group was never a single colony: each island kept its own legislature, laws and revenue, and only a few institutions, an audit office and later a common supreme court, were shared. Its members were Grenada, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent, the Grenadines, Barbados, Tobago and, from 1940, Dominica, which had previously belonged to the Leeward Islands. Bridgetown in Barbados was the seat of government from 1871 until 1885, when Barbados returned to the status of a separate colony and the governor moved to St George's on Grenada. Tobago was attached to Trinidad in 1889. A common court of appeal for the group was established in 1859, replaced in 1919 by the West Indian Court of Appeal; a Windward and Leeward Islands Supreme Court followed in 1939. In 1958 the islands joined the short-lived West Indies Federation, and the administrative union was dissolved on 3 January that year. Most of its members later became separate states: Grenada, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Dominica are now independent, while Barbados had already gone its own way.