Governor Fargo

A ‘fargo’ was a truck, a heavy duty British-built vehicle, used in the pitch lake at La Brea in the years before the last war. ‘Fargo’ was also a stevedore, a black Tobagonian. Tall, built large, a strong young man who could bend a shilling between his thumb and forefinger.

He had been born Alphonso Philbert Theophilus James at Patience Hill in Tobago in 1901. He went to the Roman Catholic School in the village and worked in his stepfather’s garden. The Tobago in which he grew up in still lingered in the 19th century twilight, and the bashful giant of a boy, in search of a little more education had to fit in as a ‘pupil teacher’, gleaning what he could in the fields of knowledge by being around the more educated, the more self-assured. Copies of the Port of Spain Gazette, sometimes weeks old, found their way into the hands of the young man at Patience Hill.

The year was 1919. Trinidad and Tobago’s contingents were returning from the wars in Europe. The air was full of stories of the adventurous tales of foreign travel, far away places with strange sounding names. With the money he had saved, the furthest James could travel was to Trinidad. Jobs such as they were, were in the oil belt, and he journeyed south to see what he could get. From tranquil Tobago he soon found himself in the turmoil of Trinidad of the 1920s. The men who had come home from the trenches had seen the great leveler of war at work. For them, the stereotype of master and servant in terms of skin colour was gone. The word ‘socialist’ had entered the lexicon of terms of the common man. The repatriation of men who had worked on the Panama Canal brought the flash and spending of ready cash to the eyes of some who had only known the large silver coins of the British empire, and the almost square low denominations of the Colonial Bank. The spread of Garvey’s ideas amongst the working class, the influence of the ‘Left Book Club’, and the emergence of the new papers such as ‘The Beacon’ and the ‘Teacher’s Journal;’ all made for the quickening of political consciousness.

A.P.T. James landed a job as a stevedore at Brighton Lake Asphalt. He lived at ‘quarters’ for government workers in the ‘New Jersey’ area. The iron grip of the Great Depression had found its way to Trinidad by the late 1920s.  There was generally a fall in wages, retrenchment and a steady rise in cost of living. ‘Black Pride’ was heightened by the news of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. In the boxing ring, Joe Lewis’ triumph over Max Baer and Primo Carnera in that year was seen as victories for the black man. James aligned himself first with Captain Arthur Cipriani and the Workingmen’s Association, and eventually with the Federated Workers Trade Union (F.W.T.U.) under the guidance of Albert Gomes and Quintin O’Connor. He worked for the union and established  branch office at La Brea.

James represented not only stevedores, but oilfield workers on the whole. His energy was tremendous, and his charisma attracted people to him.

He made money and spent it. Women loved him. His vanity was not his greatest charm. He had married his village sweetheart before leaving to seek his fortune, and did not fail to support her, but his life’s path now took him far afield. He got a divorce and subsequently remarried ‘a La Brea girl’.

James’ involvement with the labour movement of the time did not hinder his enterprising spirit. In 1941, he won a contract to supply labour to the oil fields. He became a stevedore contractor during the war years and worked from his office at 47 Henry Street in Port of Spain. The harbour of the city and at Brighton was the hub for all transatlantic shipping originating in the south Atlantic. The convoys of merchant men came and went despite the ongoing threat of submarine attacks. Port of Spain in the war years had assumed for the gentlefolk of the town, an astounding character. Thousands of American army personnel thronged its streets. Gangsterism, unknown before, dominated gambling and prostitution. Men like Boysie Singh controlled the city, our very own home-grown murder incorporated!

A.P.T. James made a fortune. He also made a lot of children. He limed in the Chinese shop at La Brea playing checkers. He often won back from his workers what he had only just paid them. But he was generous and as people said “His loans were very soft”. James bought property, houses, an estate, a hotel. He bought land in Tobago and his friends and relatives were allowed to build homes on it.

He owned thoroughbred race horses and financially supported many trade unions, paying their bills and the salaries of the executive. His contribution to the Democratic Labour Party was such that it was rumoured that he had financed their campaign in 1961. Andre Philips, who wrote a short biography on A.P.T. James in 1993, recounts that James in the company of his friends attended a ‘social’ fete in Port of Spain when the barman refused his ‘black friends’ at the bar. James bought the whole bar for them. His hard work and common touch in Tobago earned him a seat on the Legislative Council in 1946. He would be returned in two subsequent elections in 1950 and 1956, until in 1961, when he lost to the P.N.M.

In the Legislative Council, he acted as deputy leader of the opposition, when Bhadase Sagan Maraj was away. He served the Butler Party, the Caribbean Socialist Party, the Trinidad Labour Party and the D.L.P.

It was under the banner of the Butler Party that Fargo along with Timothy Roodal and Chanka Maraj sat in the expanded legislature of 12 elected members. James became a deputy leader of the party during Butler’s incarceration in the 1940s. Their relationship, however, soured, and James allied himself with Dr. Patrick Solomon’s Caribbean Socialist Party. His contemporaries were ... Victor Bryan, ... Norman James, musician Raymond Quevedo (‘Attila the Hun’), .. Ray Joseph and ... Dr. David Pitt.

James worked for Tobago like no one had ever done before. Carlton Ottley wrote:

“Tobago neglect was halted to a minor extent when there appeared on the scene a Tobagonian who deserves honour in the island’s hall of fame.”

Andre Phillips concludes his paper on A.P.T.:

“Alphonso P.T. James died of a stroke on January 5, 1962, after a seven hour long struggle for survival, only a month after the elections. As he lived, so did he die - a fighter to the end.”

Fargo A.P.T. James is today, like so many others in this country that is made up of people with incredible short memories, an almost unknown figure. Ridiculed by those who came later, his memory is maintained only by a handful of friends and relatives. This is a great shame, because now, at this time, we are in need of heroes, role models to point the way, to say to young people: “Watch me, I did this, all this, my way.”

Head first through the Wall

Born March 25th, 1911 in Port-of-Spain, Albert ‘Bertie’ Maria Gomes, politician, writer and publisher, was an Aries who lived up to the stereotype of his horoscope: never afraid to go head first through the wall!

Bertie Gomes was one of those ‘born Trinidadians’ who fitted in everywhere in the 1940s and 50s, but somehow didn’t. Perhaps because he was of Portuguese descent: in those times, this population minority was generally poor, and even though they were European, they were not socially accepted by the British elements of society, and the French (creoles) ostracised the Portuguese because they were not catholic. Until a Portuguese became very rich, and his son would come back from schooling in England with a British accent, looking like a sort of Italian to the ‘aristocracy’, few British or French would have allowed their daughter to marry him.

Bertie, however, was one of those personalities who made the stereotyping work for him. Dr. Brinsley samaroo understands him well in saying:

“Gomes is the man caught between two worlds - the attraction of the cocktail circuit on the one hand and on the other, the Portuguese who, as a result of his experience of segregation in the U.S. (1928 - 1930) and his Belmont boyhood, identifies with the ‘black soul’. This identification made him the defender of baptists, shouters, panmen and calypsonians [and of the folk art, particularly dance expressed by Beryl MdBurnie].

Wenzel Brown, an American who visited Trinidad in the late 40s, reports in his book ‘Angry Men, Laughing Men’ that Gomes was the ‘idol of the calypsonians’ and also ‘one of the principal butts for their tease’ and he quotes Lion:

“Oh what an awful thing

to see Gomes in a lion skin.”

Having grown up in Belmont, and educated at Pamphylian High School and City College in New York, Bertie could ‘talk the talk’ as one would say today. In colonial times, good rhetoric abilities were considered ‘the armoury of the human mind’, and while people paid very close attention to the degree of acculturation to European/British cultural values that was expressed in language, they also appreciated boisterous talk in politicians and calypsonians. For ordinary people to take you seriously, you had to talk big. And you had to make sense to them, too.

Bertie was able to do this, and his manner of speech struck home. Like many Trinidadians between the wars, his heart and mind was close to the working class.

Political Career

In the 1930s, when Bertie was a young, fiery voice, the colonial government was allowing a modification in politics. Gomes demanded workers’ rights, more pay, and criticised the colonial power structure with revolutionary arguments. Being the presidnet of the Federated Workers Trade Union, he eventually got elected into the Port-of-Spain City Council in 1938, in which he served for nine years. In 1945, he was elected a member of the Legislative Council, and made a member of the Executive Council in 1946. From 1950 - 1956, Gomes was re-elected to the Legislative Council and served as the pre-Independence Minister of Labour, Industry and Commerce. He was leader of the conservative Party of Political Progress Groups (POPPG).

From 1958, he served as a member of the West Indies Federal House of Representatives, which dissolved with the break-down of the federation in 1962.

When the POPPG was defeated by the only nine-month old People’s National Movement (PNM) in the 1956 election by winning 13 out of the 24 seats (that is, 1,458 votes more than the POPPG), Gomes took the defeat very hard and left Trinidad to live in England.

Literary Career

Bertie was the charismatic centre around which the truly brilliant and literary-minded West Indians gathered. He was the co-editor of ‘The Beacon’ from 1931 - 1933, and in the 1940s assumed editorship of ‘The People’. Both magazines were important literary developments which had spun out of the people. Everything that was not libelous was printed - from an interview with Joseph Staling by an American member of the socialist international, to biting short stories, written by Raoul Pantin’s father and Alfred Mendes. Out of Bertiee’s milieu arose such literary figures as C.L.R. James and Gertrude Craig. As one critic put it, they designed “the decisive establishment of social realism in the West Indian novel” as in Ralph de Boissière’s ‘Crown Jewel’ or in C.L.R. James’ lambasting of Dr. Sydney Horland, a geneticist at I.C.T.A. in the Beacon’s pages for making racist remarks.

A true lover of good literature, Bertie was there to publish fledgling Trinidadian writers. He was also the chairman of the Management Committee of the Public Library. A poet and author himself (and the owner of a pharmacy), Gomes was a columnist in the Sunday Guardian in the late 1940s and early 1950s, writing columns of social commentary, arts and literature. Other writers were invited to publish in his columns. Two books ‘All Papa’s Children’ and his autobiography ‘Through a Maze of Colour’ reveal his wll-informed, analytical, albeit aggressive and very subjective writing style, and in some passages make the reader whinny with laughter.

“The Second World War saw the birth of the ‘steel band’. It was both an innovation in musical expression and a social explosion in Trinidad. It also provided an unparalleled instance of Puritan humbug. It would be impossible to trace the origins of the steel bands. These must always remain shrouded in mystery and a subject of endless speculation - all things considered, a not surprising genesis for this musical aberration and gimcrack orchestration, whose romantic odyssey spans an arc of picaresque adventure that began in the slum areas in Port of Spain, recently reached Cape Kennedy, and is still orbiting.” (Excerpt from ‘Through a Maze of Colour’)

Albert Gomes, bigger-than-life, carrying more than 300 pounds in his days, lived in England until his death in 1978.

Name Changing

Poor immigrants often experienced name changes upon arrival in the colonies. Like the Chinese Scotts or the Chinese Bessons, the Gomes’ also experienced a name change. Bertie’s name changed from d’Abreau to Gomes because of extenuating circumstances. Listen to this colonial story.

“My paternal grandmother was previously married to a gentleman named Gomes; and when he died, she met and married my paternal grandfather whose name was d’Abreau. Antonio Gomes, her son of the first marriage, migrated from Madeira to Trinidad and achieved some success in business. He sent for his half-brother, my father, who took up employment in Antonio’s shop. The fact that he carried a different name - d’Abreau - left him open to suspicion of illegitimacy. When this anomaly became the subject of vulgar taunts hurled at him accros the counter of the shop by customers, my father decided that the solution was to adopt his half-brother’s name. Thus it was that d’Abreau, our proper name, was abandoned, and we got stuck with the name of Gomes. This would not have happened to ‘white people’!”