Place name · 1920s
Image: Ilaro Court.jpg — Barbados National Trust, CC BY-SA 4.0 · source
The Prime Minister of Barbados lives in a house called Ilaro Court. The name comes from a small town in Ogun State.
Ilaro is the main town of Yewa South in Ogun State. It is not a huge city. So it is quite a surprise to learn that, on the Caribbean island of Barbados, the official home of the Prime Minister is called Ilaro Court. How did a Yewa town lend its name to a grand house across the Atlantic?
The answer is a British official named Sir Gilbert Carter. In the 1890s he was Governor of the Lagos Colony. In 1895 he made a long trip inland, and the town of Ilaro was one of the places that came under British protection during his time. Barbados records say he served as Governor of Ilaro, but that is a bit of a stretch. He governed the whole Lagos Colony, and Ilaro was one corner of it.
Carter was a man who moved around the empire. After Lagos he became Governor of Barbados from 1904 to 1911, and he liked the island so much that he stayed connected to it.
His second wife was an American, Gertrude Codman Parker, from a well-off Boston family. She designed the house herself in the early 1920s, on the site of an older house called Glenelg. She named it Ilaro Court, keeping a memory of her husband's time in Nigeria. The house had cool verandas, big gardens and something new for the island: the first private swimming pool in Barbados. In 1920 the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII, is said to have swum in it during a royal visit.
Later the government of Barbados bought the house. Barbados's own heritage body says this was in 1976; other accounts say the 1980s. Prime Minister Tom Adams moved in in 1984, and he died there in 1985. Since then it has been the Prime Minister's official home.
The same Gilbert Carter appears in another story on this site. In 1894 he presided at the opening of the Shitta-Bey Mosque in Lagos. One man, a mosque in Lagos and a house in Barbados: history has funny ways of tying places together. Barbados is also an island where many people have African roots, so a Yoruba place name there feels, in a way, like a name coming home.
Ilaro Court is a working home, so you cannot just walk in. The photo on this page shows the coral-stone house and its neat gardens. Back in Ogun State, Ilaro itself is a busy town, home to a federal polytechnic and an old palace, the Olu of Ilaro's. Most people there have no idea that their town's name is written on a gate in the Caribbean. Now you do.
