Museum to be built for Worrell

The boyhood home of the late Sir Frank Worrell was torn down to make way for a museum for the West Indies cricket great.

Bostonville, as the house was named, was demolished at the weekend after being in a state of disrepair for several years. It was built just outside the gate of the historic Empire Club in the suburb of Bank Hall, on the outskirts of Bridgetown.

The government decided to tear down the house after it became a home for vagrants and drug dealers. The Ministry of Works was leading a project to rebuild the home into a tribute to Worrell, who died in 1967.

"The centre will be restored as it was before to become a faithful reproduction of Bostonville," ministry spokesman Lionel Weekes said yesterday. "It was necessary to demolish the old house which had become a litter-infested drug den after being abandoned since the early 1990s. We felt that the house could not be salvaged at all because it was structurally unsound."

Work on the new building will start soon, Weekes added, and will be a fitting tribute to the life and efforts of Worrell. It is expected that the new house will have a museum displaying some of Worrell's memorabilia.

Worrell, the first black captain of West Indies, played 51 Test matches from 1948 to 1963, averaging nearly 50. He was knighted in 1964. He was a senator in Jamaica when he died at age 42 of leukemia, and was buried at the Cave Hill campus of the University of the West Indies, outside Bridgetown.