Cathedral Church of Saint Michael and All Angels, Bridgetown: destroyed by the Great Hurricane of 1780, rebuilt to bury two prime ministers

On St Michael’s Row, two blocks from National Heroes Square, in the heart of Bridgetown, the Anglican cathedral of Saint Michael and All Angels has occupied a site of worship since 1665. In that year a second stone church, seating three thousand, was given by Colonel William Sharpe and dedicated on the feast day of Saint Michael. The Great Hurricane of 1780, among the deadliest in Atlantic history, destroyed the building completely. The rebuilding in local coral stone, paid for largely with the proceeds of a lottery, ended with the reconsecration of 29 September 1789, the date of the building seen today, though the architect’s name is documented in no source found. The tower clock was installed in 1787. A second great hurricane, in 1831, damaged but did not destroy the structure. The Anglican diocese of Barbados, among the oldest in the Caribbean, was set up in 1824, paired with that of Jamaica, covering at first Barbados, Trinidad, British Guiana and the Windward and Leeward Islands. The first bishop, William Hart Coleridge, was consecrated the following year, when the parish church was raised to a cathedral. Before 1824 Barbados fell nominally under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of London, from 1660. A clergy document of 5 August 1823, on the eve of the diocese’s creation, openly acknowledged the limits of evangelising the enslaved «where the master’s right over the slave is absolute». It reflects how deeply the Anglican Church was bound up with the sugar-cane plantation economy built on forced labour, which between 1627 and 1807 brought to Barbados some three hundred and eighty-seven thousand enslaved Africans. The enslaved were for the most part excluded from membership of the Anglican Church until the emancipation of 1838. In the cathedral churchyard are buried Sir Grantley Adams, the first head of government of Barbados and the only prime minister of the West Indies Federation, together with his son John Michael Geoffrey Manningham «Tom» Adams, the second prime minister of Barbados, from 1976 to 1985. No direct link is documented between this cathedral and the ceremony at which Barbados became a republic on 30 November 2021, which was held in the nearby but distinct National Heroes Square. The present bishop of Barbados is Michael Bruce St John Maxwell, consecrated on 26 January 2019. Anglicans are today the largest single Christian group in Barbados, about twenty-four per cent of the population according to the census of 2010, in a country historically and predominantly Protestant.