A Ride on the Bus

A hundred or more people rushed to get the bus. It is supposed to carry 28 and no more according to law, but nobody on that bus seems to have much regard for the law.

The seats go to the victors in the battle of the doorway; though a couple have, as usual, cheated and scrambled through the window. Then the aisle fills up, while those seated have to keep ducking their heads lest they get decapitated by the bags and boxes being slung about as if it were an empty warehouse instead of a public conveyance full of seated passengers.

At last, there are 35 people in the bus and it is a physical impossibility for anyone else to get in without bursting the steep side of the body. Then the conductor arrives on the scene with a palet in his mouth, to announce that the bus they are in is no longer going. All out! And take the bus behind. Irate, having fought and won a battle to be robbed as easily of the fruits of victory, the passengers abuse the government, the railway, the driver, the conductor and then each other and each other's parents.

Now the scramble to get out instead of getting in takes place. While this is going on, the seats and windows get damaged and the passengers emerge to find their clothes torn. The other bus is already nearly full, so only ten out of the thirty-five get a passage to their home, thirty miles away.

At last, the bus starts. In the aisle, there is a woman who has settled herself on the floor, clucking like a hen as she does so. She gradually diverts herself of clothing as if she were home and prepared for bed; first comes off the stocking and shoe. Then she loosens her bodice and pulls her skirt up around her waist.

As she makes herself "comfortable", she naturally encroaches upon the space occupied by her tightly packed fellow passengers. When they try to assert their rights to the few inches they are sitting, lying or standing on, she rises, clucking furiously. She looks so formidable that everyone is silenced and she subdues, bristling her feathers as she does so.

She is the terror of the trip, that is, until two urchins get in and take up position on either side of her. They lean on her, press on her head and step on her outstretched nude legs. When she starts to cackle, they giggle and pay her no mind. At last, she can bear it no longer, rises with a titanic effort and throws them off, exclaiming, "Crise! You all want to stifle me!"

As the bus approaches within five miles of her destination, she starts to re-dress and make her toilet for arrival. Her stockings are pulled on and then begins the hunt between everybody's legs for the missing shoe that has got shoved around in the mêlées until it has found itself behind the tool box next to the chauffeur's seat. She makes such a noise and accuses so many people of stealing her almost heel-less shoe that everyone joins the search until it is recovered. The chauffeur, who eventually picks it up and returns it to her, gets roundly abused for his pains. But he is the only person in the bus that is her match. In fact, he surpasses her. In the city's tramcar is written: "It is forbidden for the chauffeur to talk to the passengers while the bus is in motion", for from the time the bus has left its starting place, the chauffeur has harangued the bus. Not for a moment has he let up from telling us about his private life, how he'd been to jail and how he liked it there.

At one part of his story, he was describing how he beat a fellow. To lend emphasis to the tale, he would let go the wheel and turn around to describe to the passengers with his hands how he did it. In the middle of one of his gestures, a jitney swung around a corner unexpectedly, and the chauffeur just missed having to describe to the court how it happened, with or without gesture.

Gradually, the passengers thinned out somewhat, as each village passed claimed a few, until there is actually a seat vacant. But to the amazement of the uninitiated, women waiting at the roadside are ignored when they frantically signal the bus. The chauffeur explains to his audience: "She alright, oui, let she get the next one."

The next one, as everyone knows, is four hours away. But the real explanation comes when on approaching the terminus at the other end, the chauffeur starts stopping every few hundred yards to pick up one or two men, who, from their conversation, are obviously friends. Together they sit and stand in the front of the bus, smoking away with their friend, the chauffeur, while the passengers behind look cynically at the sign right over the chauffeur's head, which warns that smoking, except on the rear seat, is strictly forbidden.

At last, the bus arrives at the last stop. The conductor, who has no further business, as the chauffeur is supposed to collect the tickets, now stands astride the doorway, making it difficult for passengers to leave. The passengers themselves have by now become so much a part of the environment created by the chauffeur and his conductor that they fight one another to get out of the bus, into the village, which is devoid of anything except for a few stray pouches slinking around the empty butcher's stall. The bus then turns around and begins another of its reluctant efforts to transport people.

Where the Belmont Tram went

The Belmont tram was probably the most important of the Port of Spain tram lines, as Belmont was the city's first suburb, densely populated. Belmont was initially an area of coffee and sugar estates, but, like most other estates surrounding the capital, those at Belmont had to be abandoned after the emancipation of the slaves, when the former labourers turned to find work in the city and shunned the estates. However, people still had to live somewhere, and soon shacks and settlements began to spring up on the no longer cultivated fields. Town planning was completely absent, and many of the curving streets criss-crossing Belmont and the narrow little lanes where hardly a car can pass date from the mid-19th century.

The boundaries of Belmont are the Circular Road in the north, Observatory Street and the East Dry River in the south, the Laventille hills in the east, and the Queen's Park Savannah and St. Ann's River on the west.

But even before the abolition of slavery in 1834, Belmont had an interesting history of African settlement—here for once the term "African" is to be taken literally and not as the lowest common denominator for political purposes. As described in the article about the Company Villages in this edition of the Digest, the British had abolished the slave trade in 1807. What ensued was that the British Royal Navy proceded to patrol the west coast of Africa to prevent slaves being taken to the New World by other nations or by illegal British ships. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Africans were freed by these patrols on the high seas, and some of them were brought to Trinidad. Coming from various tribes—Yoruba, Rada, Mandingo, Ibo, Krumen and others—they were given land at Belmont to settle. These Africans had never known slavery, were free people and came with the whole cultural spectrm of village life, priests, chiefs, tribal leaders, and often families. For a while, an area in Belmont became known as Freetown, named for these African settlers, and street names still commemorate those first men who lived there: Sampty Lande, La Rue Rada, Mayock Place. Freetown extended from the East Dry River, at the north end of Circular Road, and up into the Belmont Valley Road. In 1852 and 1866, other liberated Africans were given land to settle beyond Erthig Road, and many of the families living there are descendants of those.

In his "Reminiscences of Old Trinidad", written by L.O. Innis in 1932, he says about Belmont:

"In the 1860s, Belmont was mostly unoccupied land, belonging to white Warner and black Warner. The land over the Dry river known as Piccadilloy was called Grand Jardin (great garden); further north in teh same direction was Mango Rose; and more north, Belle Eau Road was known as Shapotie. The sugar factory stoo on lands now occupied by St. Margaret's Church and a house of Erthig Road, still existing and occupied, is thought to have been the estate manager's house. This area, known as lands of White Warner, was bounded on the north and east by Circular Road, on the west by the St. Ann's River, and on the south by Erthig Road, with the exception of a small area around Industry Lane which was known as black Warner's land. The old building of Mike's Taxi and Car Rentals is thought to have been the house of black Warner."

Olga Mavrogordato, in her book "Voices in the Street", quotes Sir Pelham Warner from his book 'Long Innings':

"In the fifties of the last cnetury, my father bought some twenty acres of land at Belmont—within a quarter of a mile from Government House—and he left four acres of these on which to build a church."

In fact, the church records of St. Margaret's show that Mr. Charles W. Warner, the then Attorney General of the island, gave two lots of land to build the church. These two lots of land are on what is now the eastern part of the church property. The Warner family was immortalised in the street names of that area, e.g. Cadiz Road (Mr. Warner's wife was Ellen Rose Cadiz); Archer Street (which should be Aucher, named after Aucher Warner, another Attorney General of the island); and Pelham Street (after Sir Pelham Warner, the distinguished cricketer quoted above). Charles W. Warner, whose grave you can visit in the Botanical Gardens cemetery, was the person instrumental in making Angostura Trinidadian: he facilitated the move of the Siegert family from Angostura in Venezuela to Trinidad.

Before 1904, there existed the Belmont Asylum, which now has moved to St. Ann's and became the "Mental Hospital". The Belmont Asylum had been founded in 1851 on the Circular Road, opposite to where the secondary school is now. Some of the street names around where the asylum most likely was commemorate planation owners of long ago, such as Smart Place and Weir Street.

Belmont in the latter part of the 19th century also saw a large influx of West Indian immigrants, namely from Barbados. Olga Mavrogordato links the wave of immigration after 1879 to the failure of the French Panama canal scheme. Belmont started to become a part of Port of Spain, which in those years was very overcrowded. The suburb's streets were straightened and widened as much as possible, but their winding character often remained. They were properly paved. The old shacks were replaced by proper little wooden houses. Only very few of these still stand in their quaint, picturesque gingerbread style; most of them have been replaced by more or less ugly concrete structures (yours truly was born and raised in one of the nostalgic wooden ones on Hermitage Road, which probably had been built around the 1860s, when there were only two houses in our street, the de Boissière's and the Henderson's).

In connection with the Belmont tram, mention should be made of a Belmont character named "Arthur Tramcar". The Belmont or blue tram started from the railway station, went up Almond Walk, along Frederick Street, turning east at Keate Street, up Charlotte Street and Queen’s Park East as far as the café and the big silk cotton tree (which fell this year) at the corner of Belmont Circular Road to return by the same route.

The fare for each journey was 5 cents. Tickets could be purchased at six for one shilling (24 cents). In 1895, the mules went into retirement and the trams were electrified. The new trams, imported from Philadelphia, were painted red, blue and green. They had seats that could be reversed by swinging round their backs. It was forbidden to speak to the motorman, and one was warned to wait until the car stopped before getting on or off. This did not prevent the famous city personality ‘Arthur Tramcar’ from performing spectacular feats of acrobatics on, in and around tramcars. He, to the delight of both passengers and onlookers, would rush a tram, leap on to the running board, and perform several cartwheels along the board that ran the length of the car, to jump off with the flourish of an Olympic star.

A lunatic rivalry commenced between Arthur and the motormen. Arthur took a bet one time that he could run right through a tram as it passed the crossroads of Erthig Road and Norfolk Street in Belmont, waited poised on Erthig Road, facing east. His brand-new, white watchekongs gleamed in the sunlight. The tram, traveling south on Norfolk, had picked up maximum speed from as far away north as Clifford Street. Arthur pounced as the tram bolted past and emerged triumphant on the other side of Erthig Road. For those of you who wondered, the word ‘watchekongs’ is derived from an advertisement that described canvas shoes as “Watch Your Corns”.