An essential part of a tour of Independent Samoa’s main island, Upolu, is a trip to Aggie Grey’s…Samoa’s historic hotel in Beach Road on the western bank of the Vaisigano River. The place is a South Pacific institution, as was its legendary eponymous founder.
Aggie Grey’s Hotel (#77) ⍗
The ‘Aggie’ of Aggie Grey’s was born Agnes Genevieve Swann✲, the offspring of an English pharmacist from Lincolnshire and his Samoan wife, a local taupou (a ceremonial maiden). Business seemed to be in Miss Swann’s DNA – in her early twenties she opened her first club in Apia, the Cosmopolitan Club, and in 1933 started a Samoan private tourism company, Grey Investments (later called the Grey Investments Group).
No luck with ‘Kiwi’ spouses
The early death of Aggie’s first New Zealand husband left her without support and with four children to care for…the addictive gambling of her second husband squandered what money they had. In addition Aggie now had three more children and desperately needed to find a way to revive and consolidate her precarious financial situation.
With the advent of the Pacific War and American involvement, the resourceful and inventive Aggie eventually found the solution in 1942. She had earlier borrowed US$180 to purchase a colonial home which previously had been the “British Club”. As New Zealand’s prohibition laws were in force in Western Samoa⊡, Aggie started ‘Aggie Grey’s’ as a snack bar selling hamburgers and coffee to US servicemen on their tours of duty [Lonely Planet Samoan Islands, (M Bennett, D Talbot & D Swaney) (4th Ed 2003)].
The Hotel, 2006 ⍐
The American GIs in the South Pacific had plenty of money to splash around on their R & R activities, but the prohibition on liquor was a hand-brake on Aggie’s capacity to grow her business. Aggie found a inventive method of circumventing the ban…although serving alcohol was illegal, Aggie got round it by dispensing “medical permit doses” of booze to the American servicemen [‘Aggie Grey: West Point Hotelier, Legend – Apia, Upolu, Samoa’, in The Samoans: A Global Family, Frederic Koehler Sutter, (1989)].
⍗ Aggie Grey: on the maiden Pan Am flight from Pago Pago (American Samoa) to Sydney International Airport, 1962 (photo: John Mulligan)
From a backwater-town bar to a tourist hub
Beyond the war, over the following years, Mrs Grey turned the Apia hotel from a modest “drinking club” to a 200-room international hotel (arguably vying with Suva’s Grand Pacific Hotel for the mantle of the South Pacific’s premier international hotel) [‘Memories of the incomparable Aggie Grey’, Samoa Observer, (Terry Dunleavy), 26-Apr-2016, www.samoaobserver.com].
An ‘aiga welcome
The key to this success can be found largely in Aggie’s management style – her warm interpersonal skills, authentic, convivial personality, and her innate “understanding of the human condition”. Through her personal example of showing hospitality she imbued “Aggie Grey’s” with an atmosphere of “laid back Samoan friendly fa’aaloalo” (‘respect), conveying to each guest a sense that they were ‘aiga (‘family’) [Dunleavy].
In the formative days the hotel thrived as a result of Aggie’s ability to network… forging business links with the world outside Samoa – with the management and crews of TEAL (forerunner of Air New Zealand), and in encouraging celebrity A-listers (especially from the US) to make Samoa and Abbie Grey’s a regular stopover on route to film assignments in French Polynesia [ibid.]. Accordingly, the likes of Hollywood stars Marlon Brando, Dorothy Lamour, William Holden and Gary Cooper✥ et al would be regular AG guests. Aggie sought to capitalise on the celebrity aura by naming each of the hotel’s fales (rooms) and bungalows after visiting movie celebs.
The Marlon Brando fale (№ 93) at AGs ⍗
The hotel’s postwar success rested on a number of contributing factors. The arrival of trans-Pacific airlines (TEAL/Air NZ, Pan Am, QANTAS, then later Virgin’s Polynesian Blue) brought increasing numbers of tourists to replace the WWII servicemen. Aggie also had the right people behind her…a son with a good head for business, and a irreplaceable and devoted handiman, a “Mr Fixit” by the name of Fred Fairman, who Aggie could always rely on to keep the ‘wheels’ of the hotel running smoothly [ibid.; Sutter, loc.cit.].
Aggie Grey’s made it’s owner very wealthy…Aggie, a stalwart of the Samoan hospitality industry, continued at the hotel’s helm into her old age. In 1988 she died age 91, having long been one of the most respected members of the Apia business community.
Footnote: In December 2012 Cyclone Evan severely damaged Aggie Grey’s, closing it down for over three years. In August of the following year, management of the hotel complex, still under repairs, passed to the Sheraton’s hotel chain. Aggie Grey’s reopened in 2016, now operating under the name Sheraton Samoa Aggie Grey’s Hotel & Bungalows. A second Aggie Grey’s complex in Upolu, Aggie Grey’s Lagoon Resort, was opened in 2005 off a coral reef in the west of the island (a joint venture between the Grey family, the governments of Samoa and New Zealand and Virgin Samoa). 🇼🇸
PostScript: Prototype for Bloody Mary?
One of the US servicemen who frequented Aggie Grey’s during the War was travel adventure author James A Michener. Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific was later adapted into the hit Broadway musical South Pacific. One of it’s main characters, the loud and formidably forceful “Bloody Mary”, was widely thought to have been modelled on Aggie Grey, a comparison that didn’t endear itself to the Apia hotelier! [‘Lonely Planet’, op.cit.].
⍐ ‘Return to Paradise’ – Samoan film set & resources of ‘Aggie Grey’s’ 🇼🇸 (see below)
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✲ ‘Grey’ was the surname of Aggie’s second husband from New Zealand
⊡ New Zealand administered Western Samoa as it was called at this time, under a League of Nations mandate
✥ Cooper in fact made a movie in Samoa, Return to Paradise in 1953 (pretty stock standard South Seas adventure stuff), and of course Aggie came on board to contribute to the production …Aggie Grey’s hotel providing logistical support and a base for the project’s accommodation, and the indefatigable hotelier personally supervised the catering unit for the film [Dunleavy]
