The Lord Moyne Commission (part 4)

C. Roy Reynolds

THERE WAS no doubt that Lord Moyne and the members of his Commission had been depressed by what they observed in the slums of Kingston at the end of their first week. They had seen the standard housing in those areas: what The Gleaner described as "wattle and daub wappembappems, eight by seven with earth floors and insufficient ventilation, and rented for one shilling and sixpence to two shillings per week", and they had been revolted. No wonder that they turned their attention next to a trip to Portland.

As mentioned in the previous instalment one set of commission members would motor across the island while the other would go by sea and the arrangement would be reversed on the return leg. But the party had scarcely gaped and marvelled at the natural beauty they saw, before they again came face to face with squalor and wrenching poverty. The Gleaner report of Monday, November 7 1938 opened:

"Scenes of poverty and squalor, the type that abounds in rural Jamaica, were witnessed by the chairman and three members of the Royal Commission at Orange Bay, Portland, yesterday evening. This is the district where the threatened eviction of a number of tenants from their little homes on the properties has aroused much local feeling and the members of the commission were taken there from Port Antonio by the Hon. H.E. Allan, MLC for Portland, to see for themselves the dwellings from which these people have been given notice to quit."

According to the report the first house visited was an eight by seven wattle and daub structure, divided into two compartments with a bed in each. It housed eight persons. Lord Moyne is reported to have asked, hopefully, if that was the worst. Whereupon he was informed: "No sir, there is worse than this!"

The growing depression with what they had seen in the city and now this remote rural region must have been somewhat relieved by the opportunity the team had to raft down the Rio Grande and bathe in cooling pools on the river. On Monday, November 7 at the Constant Spring Hotel witnesses heard that day included Director of Prisons, Shillingford; Colonial Secretary A.W. Grantham and his deputy Frank Brown.

But it was on agriculture that the first question turned. Members enquired of the Colonial Secretary why the agricultural training centres were under the Department of Education and not the Department of Agriculture and why land settlements and marketing were not under this department as well. They were informed that these were "matters for adjustment."

Regarding the prison system one commissioner, Dame Rachael Crowdy, was particularly interested in how women prisoners were treated. When she enquired of Prison Director Shillingford if "you send them back to the world with something in their pockets to keep them from temptation?" he admitted that "next to nothing" was being done in this regard. Shillingford agreed with the proposition that a Juvenile Court was needed to deal with youthful offenders.

Other questions examined at this session included the diet of prisoners reported to cost an average four and a half pence per day, and described as above that of the labouring classes; inadequacy of police station lockups in both size, ventilation and lighting. Regarding practices in the prison system, one member of the commission expressed surprise that while boys leaving juvenile detention were reported to have been receiving as much as three pounds at discharge no such provision existed for adult men.

Director of Prisons Shillingford conceded the necessity to establish training programmes for the prisoners, particularly in agriculture, but maintained that the present level of staffing did not make this possible. The Colonial Secretary and his deputy were questioned at length about several areas including how government departments interact or fail to interact; policy on land acquisition and housing. At one stage they grumbled about apparent discrepancy between the evidence the officials were giving and what had been contained in advance memoranda they had been provided with one the same subjects.

The commission was curious as to why, if regulations existed concerning housing construction, the slums were allowed to remain. Deputy Colonial Secretary Brown attributed the anomaly to inadequate resources to regulate the sector.

The Commission was later to go into areas such as health and a number of other social issues which a Gleaner report of November 11 classified under the banner of: "Illegitimacy, Obeah and Birth Control!" and subtitled: "Commissioner heard plenty yesterday about grave problems with which this island is battling; natives would like better homes but cost of erection is out of their reach."

C.Roy Reynolds is a freelance journalist.

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