The Milk Jug Was A Goat

Born in St Kitts, Birch is a product of the "plantocracy" that ruled the region for over three centuries.

Yet he rejected exploitation and domination, joined the Communist Party when he came to Britain as a student and later worked as a journalist, including a stint in the early 1980s at the Morning Star.

His fascination with the history of his birthplace along with neighbouring islands Nevis and Antigua has enabled him to catalogue two threads of his family tree - the Burts and Berridges - and to locate them in regional developments.

It is the same family that produced Emile Burns, the leading British communist best remembered for his Introduction to Marxism.

Both sides of the family migrated from Britain in search of wealth and found it through the spectacularly profitable crop of sugar and its offshoots, especially rum, by dint of slave labour.

One ancestor William Mathew Burt became MP for Marlow in 1761 and, typical of the West Indies lobby, devoted most of his speeches to bewailing the supposedly low price of sugar and the high cost of slaves.

This economic hardship did not prevent him from buying a 304-acre estate in Kent with a massive and opulent villa and a luxurious lifestyle to be envied.

Sugar was not the only source of income for the elite in the West Indian colonies.

Each declaration of hostilities between England/Britain and its European competitors Holland, France and Spain marked an opportunity for booty through capture of merchant ships or colonial settlements.

William Mathew Burt was fully involved, using the outbreak of the Seven Years War in 1756 to attack the French colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe, where he became Crown Agent when the latter was captured.

Birch's is a fascinating record and much more than a family history. It illustrates the bloody nature of imperial expansion in the Caribbean while shedding light on daily life, attitudes and governance of the colonists.

And the book's title? All is revealed in the comment of visitor Janet Schaw to Antigua in 1776, who discovered how fresh milk was made available at meal times.

She noted in her diary that on coming down to breakfast visitors "were not a little surprised to see a goat attending to supply us with milk, which she did in great abundance."