Hartley Neita, ContributorThe sign on the road on which I reside reads, 'Washinton Close'. Actually, it is really Washington Close, but the sign painter could not spell. It was the road on which Michael Manley lived during the 1980s, and had the road been wrongly spelt then, and if he were alive today, I can well
imagine him telephoning Mayor Desmond McKenzie.
"I cannot believe, Mr. Mayor," he would begin, his voice rising note by note up the scale, "that your officers could disrespect my father Norman Washington Manley, for whom this road was named, by spelling his name incorrectly. I find it unforgivable. I am appalled."
This misspelling has given me the problem of having to describe in detail the route on which to travel when someone asks how to find my home. I have to emphasise every time that 'Washinton' is really 'Washington', in the same way that the gap on the Newcastle road is Hardwar Gap and not Hardware Gap, that Ocho Rios in St. Ann does not have eight rivers, and that the river in Trelawny is simply named Martha Brae and not Martha Brae River.
serious problems
The spelling and the correct names of people, places and things are very important and can cause serious problems. For example, the artistic creativity of a sign painter employed by
the Kingston and St. Andrew Corporation some time before the early 1940s caused faces to be flushed red in the police force and the Corporation Council.
The sign painter was commissioned to repaint the stop signs in the Corporate Area between 400 and 500 of them. Now, the regulations prescribing what a stop sign should look like stated that the word STOP should be in white letters against a background of red. The sign painter, however, decided that he would paint a white border on the edge of the stop signs.
It so happened that the then Editor of this newspaper, Michael DeCordova, drove through one of these signs and he was given a ticket summoning him before the court. He chose to have N.N. Ashenheim, a solicitor, and Norman Manley, a barrister, defend him.
Norman Manley brought the description of a stop sign as defined by the regulations to the attention of the court, and questioned the policeman, Constable W.H. Smart, and other witnesses who described the stop sign which was broken by DeCordova as being different from what it should have been. The judge accepted Manley's submission.
The decision created a problem for the municipality. It was faced with two alternatives to either repaint all of the 400 to 500 signs in the Corporate Area, so that they conformed strictly with the law, or else seek to have amended the regulations made by the Governor in Privy Council so that this regulation would prescribe exactly the signs then existing, i.e., with a red and white background.
expenditure
To repaint the signs would not only have entailed an appreciable expenditure, but would take some time during which motorists could break every stop sign in Kingston and St. Andrew with impunity.
It was therefore thought desirable that the matter should be set right at the earliest possible moment.
The decision was to amend the regulations. As a result, the stop signs in Kingston and St. Andrew are edged with a white border.
Now, because of this I wonder whether if I should commit a crime on my road and the police officer should identify it in his statement as Washington Close, would I not have reason for the case to be thrown out of court, setting me a free man? And if I break the stop sign on my road and hit a car on Washington Drive, and a policeman identifies the sign as being at the end of Washington (with a G) Close, would I not be able to plead that Washington Close does not exist. Would I not be found innocent of the misdemeanour?
Worse yet. If I am asked by a police officer to state the name of the road on which I live, and I should tell him Washington Drive, would he not be justified in locking me up and throwing away the key for lying?
