Marriott
Louis Marriott, Contributor
This is the 37th in a series of articles reliving the years up to Independence by a journalist/broadcaster whose childhood and maturation coincided with Jamaica's.
THERE WERE only 216 students - 120 boarders and 96 day boys - enrolled in Jamaica College when I entered the school in January 1947. We marvelled at institutions like Kingston College, which was reputed to have more than 900 boys.
Of the five grant-aided secondary boys' schools in the Corporate Area, KC had the only black headmaster, Percival William Gibson, the Anglican Bishop Suffragan of Kingston.
JC, KC, St. George's College, Wolmer's Boys' School, and Calabar High School, then located at the corner of Slipe Pen Road and Studley Park Road in Kingston, were the only schools that played Manning Cup football. In Sunlight Cup cricket, the Corporate Area five were joined by Beckford & Smith's School, of 33 Monk Street, Spanish Town. The boys' track and field athletics championship at Sabina Park was contested by more schools as rural institutions were also involved.
JC had no first form. The entry level was Lower 2. Above us was Upper 2.
I soon learnt that it was a grave offence for a Lower 2 boy to glance in the direction of the Upper 2 form room when walking past it. On the occasion that I erred in that regard, during a recess, I was hauled into the form room, charged with looking into it, found guilty, and given a sound thrashing by all the occupants.
I never made that mistake again when passing Upper 2, either of the two third forms or fourth forms, fifth form, 6B (the lower of the two sixth forms), or 6A (the highest form in the school). During the second term, when cricket was the compulsory sport, I was discovered as a batsman with sound technique. In one match, playing for Musgrave Boarders against Murray Boarders, I opened the innings and made top score of two not out. One of three English brothers in the house was out for two. All of the other nine batsmen made ducks. There were two byes. Our total was six all out. The principal destroyer was a left arm medium pace bowler named Rodney Moody, who hailed from Spanish Town. Moody took six wickets for two runs. He was a very talented and lissom all-round sportsman, and he was said to have received cricket coaching from George Mudie, also of Spanish Town, who once played Test cricket for the West Indies.
When I was not playing cricket, I was almost always the scorer. It was a way of indulging my penchant for figures. There was a tradition whereby the school's mathematicians tended to be put in charge of the scorebook, and I was heading in that direction.
The scorebook
One afternoon, towards the end of the second term, when Musgrave boarders had a day off and two other teams were engaged in matches on the "bottom fields", the lowly grounds on which the junior houses played, I was asked to score. I had already got into the rhythm of the game when an Upper 2 boy named Binns demanded that I hand over the scorebook to him. I defied him. He struck me in the head with the knuckles of his right hand and moved on to the next field, where he had better luck with the scorebook.
Such was my concentration that I was totally unaware of a momentous event that followed. Two oversized and over-aged junior boys who were close friends were romping just beyond the boundary of the ground where Binns was scoring. One of them shouted "Duck!" and playfully threw a stone towards the head of the other. The targeted boy ducked under the stone, which then struck Binns' temple.
The following morning, at about 2:30, I awakened to the sound of the Headmaster, Hugo Chambers, summoning Binns' older brother, Trevor Binns, who was deputy head boy and my dormitory prefect. The younger Binns was dead.
It was a devastating moment for JC and for Hugo Chambers, who was relatively new in the position of Headmaster. JC was the elite school in the Corporate Area and liked to think of itself as superior. And there we were, cast in a horrible light by an incident that resonated throughout Jamaica. Not surprisingly, perhaps, it was construed in the most unfavourable ways.
When the news broke, no names were called. Parents panicked. The only telephone line at the school was hopelessly jammed. My mother did not for one moment think that I might have been the victim. But she was almost certain that I must have flung the stone.
Inquisition
During the inquisition that followed, boys who witnessed the incident were very reluctant to say anything. The school's anti-tale-bearing culture, zealously promoted by the Headmaster and his staff, had backfired. Eventually, there was enough evidence for a sombre Hugo Chambers to outline in the chapel what had happened, to remind us that stone-throwing was a violation of the school's rules, and to tell the hapless stone-thrower,"You are expelled."
The latter, the son of a Kingston merchant with Middle Eastern antecedents, was later successfully defended by Norman Manley when the matter came to court.
In the third term, there was big excitement on the home front. My father, E.A. Marriott, who had done so much to put the People's National Party (PNP) on the map in Western St Andrew, was selected as the party's candidate for the Western St. Andrew Number 1 division of the Kingston & St. Andrew Corporation in the first municipal elections to be held under Universal Adult Suffrage. Despite Daddy's popularity, it would not be easy, for the rival Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), had beaten the PNP handsomely in the Western St Andrew constituency in the 1944 general election.
Michaelmas
Unfortunately, I missed most of the campaign, as the elections were held on Thursday October 23, 1947, in the middle of the Michaelmas (Christmas) term. It was close, but Daddy prevailed, with 2,346 votes against the 2,126 polled for V.H. Brown of the JLP.
Daddy now ceased to be "Mr. Marriott" or just plain "Bertie". Everyone - even close relatives - called him "Councillor". He didn't like it. He insisted that they address him as they always did. They ignored him. There were a number of notables in the KSAC Council. Some of the PNP candidates defeated in the 1944 general election chose the more favourable divisions in their constituencies and won.
Nationwide, the PNP turned the tables on the JLP, chalking up 67,713 votes to 63,883. In terms of the seat tally, independent candidates won 45, the PNP 40, and the JLP 33. The PNP won seven of the 13 seats in the KSAC Council, but the JLP controlled the Council, because its six seats were supplemented by the
ex officio status of its five Corporate Area Members of the House of Representatives (MHRs) against the PNP's sole MHR, Florizel Glasspole.
While I missed out on the campaign for the KSAC elections, through some extraordinary negotiation between Daddy and Edith Dalton James on one hand and Hugo Chambers on the other, I found myself on the evening of Monday September 8, 1947, marching through the streets of West Kingston with a lighted candle in hand and wending my way with 30,000 comrades up to the Kingston Race Course to hear speeches in support of the establishment of a federation of the British West Indies.
The federalists of the region arrived for a meeting in Montego Bay the following weekend with the British Secretary of State for the Colonies, Arthur Creech Jones, to take the first steps in forging a Closer Association of the West Indian states. Among the delegates were such founding fathers as Albert T. Marryshow of Grenada; Albert "Two Ton Bertie" Gomes of Trinidad; Uriah "Buzz" Butler of St. Vincent; Vere Bird of Antigua; Grantley Adams of Barbados and Robert Bradshaw of St. Kitts.
Before the Closer Association Conference in Montego Bay, the socialist Caribbean leaders met in a Caribbean Labour Congress in Kingston; hence the march. The chairman of the Race Course meeting, Ken Hill, told the gathering that their coming-together was a symbol of "unity which, once established, no force or forces can destroy". Norman Manley, Adams and Gomes electrified the crowd at the Race Course.
After Creech Jones told the Montego Bay conference that "we should get along this road of federation as rapidly as we can", the head of the Jamaica delegation, Alexander Bustamante, retorted that the Secretary of State had come to the conference not with an open mind but to "pitchfork Federation down the throats of the delegates". Bustamante declared: "I have come from the gutter, and I use plain language."
Louis Marriott is a journalist and broadcaster, a former BBC producer/presenter and Press Secretary to the Prime Minister of Jamaica.
