- FileDowntown Kingston in colonial times.
Louis Marriott, Contributor
This is the fifth in a series of articles reliving the years up to Independence by a journalist/broadcaster whose childhood and maturation coincided with Jamaica's.
BY MID-JUNE 1938, the worst of the disturbances in Jamaica were over. After the release on bail of Alexander Bustamante and St. William Grant on May 28, the charges of "sedition, incitement to riot, and disobeying the orders of Police Inspector W.A. Orrett" levelled against them were quietly dropped.
Besides, Bustamante and Manley were travelling all over the country pacifying the seething population. The New Deal for Jamaica announced by the Colonial Secretary, Charles Woolley, offered hope of better times, and both Manley and Bustamante endorsed it and commended it to the people.
Still, there was a great deal of suffering in the land. The economy was almost entirely dependent on two agricultural products sugar and bananas -- and rum, a by-product of the former. Any talk of diversifying the economy through industrialisation was stifled by the British imperial Government, which preferred to preserve the British export market for British industrialists while importing cheap primary commodities from colonies like Jamaica.
Jamaica was reeling from the combined effects of depressed sugar prices on the international market; banana leaf spot disease, and the Great Depression, which had ravaged North America and Europe for nearly a decade now.
The dead weight of unemployment was heaviest in the Corporate Area, whence came large numbers of idle, landless rural folk in search of their El Dorado. The colonial Government, although theoretically supporting the island, fell far short of maintaining acceptable social and economic standards. The administration was firmly in the hands of the British Governor and his coterie of officials who were accountable only to the Colonial Office in London.
The unicameral Legislative Council was a mockery of representative and responsible Government for three fundamental reasons. First, half of the seats in the Council were occupied by officials like the Directors of Education and Agriculture and members appointed by the Governor in his discretion. Secondly, because of the limited franchise, the elected half of the Council (one member from each of the 14 parishes) got their mandate from only five per cent of the population. And thirdly, on the rare occasions when the Legislative Council asserted itself the Governor would override it by invoking his "paramount importance" powers.
Illiteracy, malnutrition and infectious diseases were rampant. Infant mortality and perinatal mortality rates were high. It was not unusual to see barefoot men and women walking the street. They were not making a fashion statement or indulging in idiosyncratic self-expression. They were simply unable to afford the cost of shoes. Only a minority of people had such amenities as electricity, inside kitchen and bathroom, flush toilet or telephone.
Secondary education was available almost exclusively to children of the rich. Genuine scholarships, as against highly suspect 'half scholarships', were so rationed that only a few very brilliant poor children could gain access to high schools by that route. Worse, there was manipulation in some elementary schools to give unfair advantages to favoured pupils. The cost of tuition and boarding for a boy at Munro or Jamaica College exceeded the wages of most workers.
My family was by no means rich but was not the worst-off in 1938. In addition to his full-time job as carpentry foreman at Myers Wharf, Daddy was then a small building contractor and spent a good deal of time on weekends building for his clients. He was a jack of all trades, capable of erecting a house on his own. Although living in rented accommodation, he owned two modest houses of his own, on mortgages, in Jones Town and New Lincoln Road.
Mama cut short a budding career as an elementary school teacher when, at the age of 20, she married Daddy, then 24, and started a family. She was not only an excellent homemaker, wife and mother, but also a supplementary breadwinner. She had a wide range of housecraft skills, some of which she employed in income-generating enterprises.
She made the world's best guava jam, guava cheese, tamarind balls and ginger beer. She also made cut cake, grater cake, gizzada, asham, and a cubical coconut-based sweet called "jump and jive". She did fantastic crochet and hand embroidery for a discerning clientele. And, especially during the Christmas season, she made two varieties of paper flowers, her roses so accurate that they usually had to be sniffed to convince the beholder that they weren't the real thing.
Largely because my parents were so talented and worked so hard, I believe, we had one or two amenities at home that could then be classified as status symbols. There was the flush toilet with the cast iron tank near the ceiling and a chain that hung below it which the user pulled to activate the clumsy contraption into its noisy metallic flush.
That was far superior to the smelly outside pit latrine that most people had, with cockroaches living under the seat and sometimes crawling across the bare buttocks that sat upon it.
We had a bath tub inside our house, as against the outside shed that many others had, the lucky few with shower heads, the rest with a "foot pan" made of zinc, in which they bathed with water caught at the standpipe in the yard.
Mama cooked her food and made her culinary goodies in and on a cast iron stove, which most people called in awe an "American stove". It was fuelled by charcoal placed in a tray under the oven, the ash cleaned out after cooking.
Our clothes were washed with brown soap that was cut to order by the Chinese grocer from a long bar. The clothes were rinsed in a solution of "blue", a little blue tablet that miraculously enhanced the whiteness as the clothes dried on the line in the sun. Starch was applied to collars for prestigious stiffness.
Mama smoothed out the clothes with little irons that she heated, three or four at a time, on live coals in a coal pot. She would hold the hot handle of the iron with a rag doubled and redoubled into a pad and clean coal off the face of the iron with another rag pad before applying it to the garment. As the iron cooled and became ineffective, she would put it back on the coals to be reheated and continue the job with one of the hot irons.
My grandmother next door didn't have to go through that tedious changing of irons. She had a prestigious "self-heater" iron which was, to Mama's primitive little irons, like a cruise liner to a cottonwood canoe. Charcoal was lit in the bowels of the self-heater iron. One iron did all the laundry. It didn't need cleaning because its flat surface was not in contact with coal. It was also much heavier than the little irons and was therefore much more efficient.
Mammy's other status symbol was a telephone. There certainly would not have been many other persons on Waltham Park Road, (if any), who had telephones. Apart from the fact that it crackled then went dead whenever it rained, it was a very impressive device; much more effective than the two condensed milk tins and length of twine that we children rigged up for high-tech conversations between us.
Apart from rain, the only problem with Mammy's telephone was that, though black in colour, it was a bit of a white elephant because there was hardly anyone in our circle with a telephone and thus almost no one to converse with on it. It therefore lay in majestic silence most of the time.
Also, it was somewhat incongruous having something as luxurious as a telephone when the house was lit by kerosene lamps with "Home Sweet Home" shades.
As some semblance of peace and tranquility returned to the island, life became rather dull. But the very popular Mayor of Kingston, Dr. Oswald Anderson, would soon bring back life to the city, not in the way that mayors are expected to do but by inadvertently stirring up a hornet's nest around himself. And Daddy would cut his political teeth on the controversy surrounding the good Doctor.
Louis Marriott is a journalist and broadcaster, a former BBC producer/presenter and Press Secretary to the Prime Minister of Jamaica.
