The British government was disinclined to so rely. In the face of the labour unrest which had beset the Caribbean over the previous two years, laying bare the risks posed to imperial control by mass unemployment and poverty, the Colonial Office wished to accelerate its new strategy of development and welfare. And so, at the end of 1936 Paterson was despatched from England to visit and report on the penal and reformatory establishments of the British colonies in the West Indies and South America. Frances accompanied him on this opportunity for a holiday, albeit a working one for Alec. Their voyage over the Christmas and New Year period was pleasant and relaxing, one of cocktail parties, deck games, dinners at the captain's table, and much opportunity for reading. There was one curious incident when two flying fish landed aboard and were duly skinned and hung up to dry. Alec named them ‘Hitler’ and ‘Mussolini’.

On 6th January 1937 they docked in Kingston, Jamaica, their first port of call. The next day Alec was off to Spanish Town to inspect St Catherine's prison and its ‘juvenile-adult’ section. Thereafter he went to Port Royal, and to Stony Hill on the outskirts of Kingston to see a juvenile reformatory. To Alec's surprise there were very few adolescent offenders in either. He also visited country police stations and a vocational training school. In between there was the usual round of dinner parties, tennis matches (‘poor show on our part’), and rubbers of bridge (‘lose heavily’). Bizarrely, Alec and Frank were invited to a dance in the yard of Kingston penitentiary. Frank also attended a ‘priceless’ meeting of a committee which organised the sewing class in the women's block, during which she was asked if she was ‘High Class Anglican’. Unperturbed, she accepted an invitation to look round the prison herself, where she saw ‘sixty not very prepossessing women’, one of whom was in the hospital wing having been ‘terribly burnt by boiling water thrown over her by a “bad girl”’.