Islands Colony of 1871 meant the end of elected Assemblies, but were instead appointed. In 1883, the governments of St Kitts, Nevis and Anguilla were combined into the St. Kitts Assembly. Of the ten seats in the Assembly, Nevis had two while Anguilla had one. Saint Kitts and Nevis, 1883 to present Subsidized beet sugar production put wage pressures on the islands, which resulted in the Portuguese Riots of 1896. It took marines from to restore order. By 1900 there were 61 estates on Nevis utilizing the sharecropping system, while St. Kitts only had 2. The 1899 San Ciriaco hurricane left 27 dead on Nevis and 2 on St. Kitts. The Nevis hospital was destroyed and 8,000 left homeless. The St. Kitts Sugar Producers Association built a central factory for sugar refining and a railway for transportation in 1912. The London Electric Theatre opened on St. Kitts in 1917. A telephone system was built on St. Kitts in 1896 and included Nevis by 1913. Nevis' first automobile arrived in 1912, a Ford Model T. Theodore Roosevelt and wife visited St. Kitts in 1916. Cotton production supplemented sugar during World War I, but declined in 1922 after the boll weevil appeared. The Great Depression meant the government became the largest landowner on Nevis as estates were abandoned or were requisitioned for failure to pay taxes. From 1900 to 1929, the population on St. Kitts declined by 43%, while on Nevis it declined by 9%. In 1951, the islands were granted the right to vote, with the first election held in 1952. Sugar production continued to dominate the lives of the islanders. The dominance by estate owners of the island's only and extremely limited natural resource, the land, and the single-minded application of that resource to one industry precluded the development of a stable peasant class. Instead, the system produced a large class of wage labourers generally resentful of foreign influence. The nature of the sugar industry itself—the production of a nonstaple and essentially nonnutritive commodity for a widely fluctuating world market—only served to deepen this hostility and to motivate Kittitian labourers to seek greater control over their working lives and their political situation. The collapse of sugar prices brought on by the Great Depression precipitated the birth of the organized labour movement in St Kitts and Nevis. The Workers League, organized by Thomas Manchester of Sandy Point in 1932, tapped the