Electric City Part 3

As the end of the 19th century neared, the social fabric of Trinidad began to show a move towards modernity. This was demonstrated in several ways, for example, a notice was published in the newspapers on the 25th January, 1895, that "all transvestite dressing was prohibited". This was, of course, directed at masqueraders, but it also reflected what the "better-thinking people" had taken up arms about.

The city's streets had also been given a thorough face lift. Asphalt was used for the very first time in 1890. Mr. Tanner, the town superintendent, put a paving on Clarence Street (upper Frederick Street) and Oxford Street. He carefully made them convex for the rainwater to run off. This, however, upset a lot of people, especially people with horse-drawn buggies and caps. It would appear that the paving caused horses to slip and fall, and buggies to tip over? Sounds familiar for those who try to drive up Cascade main road after the recent paving exercise without sacrificing their car axles in foot-deep crevices on the either side of the road?

Be that as it may, Tobago had recently (1889) been joined to Trinidad in a somewhat arbitrary manner. In so doing, the colony of Trinidad and Tobago had come into being. Already, there was the telephone which was regarded as plain miraculous. The island's economy was sound - at least for those with access to it. The middle classes were buttressed to a degree, with an access to funds derived from small and medium cocoa estates. Repeatability was the order of the day, and in looking at old photographs, what strikes on first is that everybody is wearing a hat! All men wore suits and ladies' dresses were at ankle length. It was still a charcoal-burning society. Everybody cooked on coal pots, and although there was pipe-borne water for many, very few possessed indoor toilets called W.C., water closets.

Into this scene, the marvel of electricity was introduced by the young American entrepreneur, Edgar Tripp. In 1892, Tripp leased a parcel of land from the Port of Spain Borough Council. What he had in mind was the setting up of an electricity plant. The land he leased was the southernmost end of the old Ariapita Estate. The area was known as Shine's Pasture and already produced a type of energy and generated fuel: grass. As a grass market, it supplied fodder to the city's hundreds of horses. For $100 a year, paid to the Council, Edgar Tripp set about setting up his plant. The Council was in support of his plan to light the town, as an ordinance had been put into place since 1887 to facilitate this event. There was, however, one problem. It had to do with the removal of the city's rubbish dump. In typical style, which has not changed much over the years, there was much wrangling and elaborate bureaucracy. Tripp was made of other stuff and commenced planting poles in Port of Spain and stringing up wires over the existing telephone lines. The limited liability company he formed was called "The Electric Light and Power Company". He registered it at the Red House, which was not red yet, on 5th July, 1894. His board of directors were William Gordon Gordon, chairman, W.S. Robertson, Eugene Cipriani and Lucien Ambard. Tripp was the company's secretary.

The contract with the Borough Council was signed by George Grant, who was not a member of the board, but who was soon to go into business with William Gordon Gordon and form the firm Gordon Grant & Co. Ltd. The contract stipulated that by the end of August 1894, the town was to be lit up by electric power.

The officials of the telephone company began to be alarmed by the work being done by Tripp's workmen. They took objection to the electric wires being strung above their own. They felt that if the wires were to come into contact, a fire would be started which could damage their telephone exchange.

Council member Mzumbo Lazare felt that electric wires should be run underground, but his suggestion, a good one, had come too late in the day. The electric engines arrived at the docks, accompanied by Mr. Kuhn, an engineer. There also were dynamos. No one had ever seen a dynamo; it was a very modern term. Part of the installations was also a huge boiler with a tall smoke stack. To facilitate the stringing of the wires, the city's trees had to be trimmed. T

here were questions asked in the Legislative Council: "Is the government satisfied that all precautions have been taken against the risk of accident to life in the erection of overhead wires in the streets of Port of Spain?" This was raised by Conrad Stollmeyer, chairman of the Commercial Telephone Company. Walsh Wrtightson, the newly arrived director of Public Works, put everyone at ease by saying that overhead wires were not at all a problem, inasmuch as they existed all over the world.

Edgar Tripp had done his work remarkably well, and was, in fact, ahead of schedule by a week. Great excitement swept the town on Tuesday 25 February, 1895. As the sun set, instead of the dim kerosene lamps that had previously lit the town, the much brighter electric light appeared. "There was a great deal of enthusiasm shown by the crowds on the streets when the lights shone forth and great crowds collected under each lamp and discussed the characteristics of this new agency by which night is to be made more like day." 

Edgar Tripp had turned night into day. The wife of the governor, Lady Napier Broome, took a cricket team visiting from England on a tour of the town, especially kept alight on her bequest. Tripp rode through the town on his buggy, inspecting the new facilities wherever he went. He was received with much applause.

Government House was, of course, electrified and so too the Queen's Park hotel in which Edgar Tripp had a major interest. Times had really changed.

Well, next time you put on your computer to surf the internet, fully aware that you are part of the future, spare a thought for the young American who first put power into place to take you there.

William Gordon Gordon

William Gordon Gordon was a hard man. She knew that, sitting in the mist of her grief in the formal, austere foreign-seeming office. Her hands appeared to her too thin, too white, too care-worn. Her black dress wasn’t black enough. Suddenly, the enormous door opened and a thin-faced man appeared. She saw nothing but his gold-rimmed spectacles and his insipid blue eyes.

“He will see you now,” the effeminate voice piped. From the street came the clatter of donkey hooves, the sound of iron wheeled traffic and the smell of cocoa beans.

She rose, the black taffeta dress stiff about her, and walked to the door. The dim room was not unpleasant, but she knew that its comforts were not for her. The interview was short, but unhurried.

Joachim was dead. The estate had failed. He, Gordon Gordon, foreclosed. There was still money due to him.

“What else you have?” His manner was mild. For a moment, she remembered the reflection of her thin, pale body that she had tried not to notice, reflected in the bathroom mirror. A sort of laugh escaped her. She noticed that he had grown ever more sever.

“Only these.”

“Put them on the desk.”

She drew off the gold band from her finger and removed the two gold bracelets with their large cocoa pod rondelles and placed them on the mahogany desk. Their eyes met. He nodded slightly. She rose and left.

William Gordon Gordon had come to Trinidad in 1868.  He was 17 years old and had ‘come out’ as a clerk to the Colonial Bank at a salary of £150 per annum. He was the second son of a Scottish squire.

During the five years he spent at the bank, he was able to acquire the skills of assessing and taking risks. He also got the feel of the island’s merchant community and an understanding of the French planter class. This was a period of relative prosperity. Indian indentureship had saved the sugarcane industry, and despite the problems arising from the beet sugar, there was money to be made in sugarcane, if only at the expense of the Indian field labour.

On the other hand, cocoa, grown in the lush valleys of north and central Trinidad by French Creoles, yielded sizable fortunes for a fortunate few.

In 1872, Gordon left the bank to join the firm Campbell Hannay , an import-export house. He was able to buy out Hannay in four years and form a partnership with George Grant, creating the firm Gordon, Grant & Co.

They maintained the import-export business. The experience, however, that he had gained at Colonial Bank, enabled him to commence another business: that of lending money to the firm’s clients. As the majority of them were in the cocoa estate business, and with the fluctuations of that market often affecting the unwary, this activity led inevitably to the acquisition of property and estates all over the island.

It was from this humble beginning that Gordon Grant conducted a vigorous private merchant banking business. Gordon, in fact, pioneered this line of business in the Caribbean. The production of sugar and cocoa were other significant areas of the company’s business. George Grant retired in 1886 and William brought in his younger brother John Arthur Gordon, as well as George Boos and Robert Reid.

William Gordon Gordon was a major player in the business world of his time. Gordon Plantations owned some 50 estates. He owned a London-based financial house by the turn of the century. Together with Leon Agostini, Gordon was one of the founding members of the Trinidad and Tobago Chamber of Industry and Commerce, which held its first meeting in 1879. In Franklin’s yearbook of 1916, he is listed as the president of that organisation, whose vice-presidents in that year comprised the illustrious names J.H. Smith, Randolph Rust, Hon. A. Fraser, Edgar Tripp, T. Boyd, A.H. Cipriani, A. Cory Davies and Hon Adam Smith.

In 1904, he erected a large and imposing building at the corner of the Savannah and Chancery Lane. It comprised an entire block. He named it “Knowsley”, perhaps after a property owned by Lord Derby in Cheshire, England, with whom he had connections. It cost $ 100,000 to build Knowsley - an enormous sum at the time. The yellow bricks were imported and limestone from the Laventille quarry were hand-hewn. The marble on the gallery which surrounds the ground floor was imported from Italy. The wood for the beautiful staircase of purple heart came from Guyana. The ceilings on the ground floor are of plaster of Paris and the engraved gesso work is that of an Italian craftsman, who also did the work on the ceiling in the council chamber in the Red House. Architect John Newel Lewis thought that Knowsley and the other large houses around the Savannah looked like Queens of Carnival Bands, and said that they couldn't really be explained. He thought them all originals.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, an English visitor, thought it looked like the witch’s house in ‘Hansel and Gretel’. He wrote:

“Georgian bow windows, roofed like Chinese pagodas, suddenly bulge from the walls and the steep roofs grow the spires of Hohenschwangau, the turrets of Azay-le-Rideau and the domes and cupolas of Kiev.” Words almost fail these visitors when they see the magnificent follies built by the cocoa barons of Trinidad’s boom years. These extravagant men rode the road to fortune on the backs of many. Their wealth reflected itself in the houses they built, their own dreams of glory. These houses now truly belong to us all and that is why they must be preserved. They have been paid for.

William Gordon Gordon died in 1923 at the age of 75. He had become something of a legend by that time. During his lifetime, he had been prominent. He had been a member of the Legislative Council. Interestingly, he supported ‘the people’ in the notorious water riots of 1903. In June of 1956, Knowsley was purchased by the Trinidad and Tobago government for $ 250,000, and today houses the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Banking Part Three

Trinidad, with its frontier town elan, hetergeneous population, and despite its confusion and the wars of the early 19th century, the dislocation of people during emancipation in the late 1830s, and the arrival of a whole new culture from the Indian sub-continent shortly after, was doing very well commercially by the 1880s.

The very diversification of its population itself spoke of people who had come for one or the other economic reason. The people of African descent, brought by the French and other catholics for opening up the forest and planting the first agricultural crops of cotton and sugar, had after the British conquest been added to by Scottish merchants, importing sugar factory and plantation equipment, as well as a range of household furnishings and fashionable objects.

The cultivation of cocoa was another industry that stimulated the export sector in the 1890s. The French creoles had bounced back after fifty years and had become both cocoa planters and exporters-importers.

The insurance industry took root at this time. Together with other crops, cane and cocoa gave Trinidad a two-tier economy: one worked mainly by the arriving Indians, increasingly attached to British interest in the canefields, and the other operating on the level of artisans and tradespeople like shoemakers, pot solders, ice salesmen, knife sharpeners (remember? “Sharpening knives and scissoooooors!”), all the way through to to ubiquitous clerks in the Frederick Street stores, to real ‘big shots’ like William Gordon Gordon, who built ‘Knowsley’ around the Savannah, and Leon Agostini, who built White Hall and started the Chamber of Commerce.

In that time of economic growth, the Colonial Bank’s old way of doing business in the West Indies was challenged by the West Indian Royal Commission for their excessively restrictive lending policies. The commission was told by several peasant witnesses, black people and ‘cocoa pagnols’, of the necessity for loans to expand their small operations.

René de Verteuil, one of the larger planters, recommended the setting up of an agricultural bank. The embryonic working class was also unhappy about the lending practices of the Colonial Bank. Walter Mills, a spokesman of the Trinidad Workingman’s Association, made a plea for the establishment of a government savings bank. Obviously, business was good.

The savings bank, or Penny Bank, as it was called, came into existence and attracted thousands of small deposits. However, it was not a lending agency. This badly needed service was attended to by the growing phenomenon of the ‘sou-sou’ in the Afro-Franco community. The more chancy ‘whe whe’ was there for the ‘investor’, while the Indian village life possessed ‘chaitey’, a form of sou-sou.

The Colonial Bank, limited by its charter, could not expand its modus operandi, and other banks which were not so restricted reaped the benefits.

Around the turn of the 20th century, the Royal Bank of Canada had made a successful entry into the West Indian economic arena. It opened a branch in Port of Spain in 1910, acquiring the Union Bank of Halifax which had come to Trinidad in 1902. Royal Bank of Canada quickly developed a good customer base in Trinidad, consisting especially of the importers of goods from Canadian trading companies, and others who opened savings accounts or accessed loans under the bank’s cautious lending policies.

In 1911, C.E. Neill of the Royal Bank of Canada in London proposed the acquisition of the Colonial Bank’s assets in the West Indies. The ‘Court’, Colonial Bank’s board of governors, considered the idea. Some welcomed it, but nothing came of it. However, this state of affairs was the truest indicator of a need for change.

During this period, another Canadian Bank, the Bank of Nova Scotia, attempted to establish itself, but the endeavour was burdened with distress. The death of two of their senior people, not to mention the aggressive techniques employed by the two other institutions, elbowed the Bank of Nova Scotia out of Port of Spain again.

Recognising the potential of San Fernando, Royal Bank of Canada established a branch there in 1912. Small farmers, cane farmers amongst the freshly un-indentured Indians, public servants and teachers became an important source of deposits. Apart from the good banking techniques displayed, it is obvious that the island’s economy was becoming substantial, varied, stable and underpinned by a growing and thrifty middle class. Especially in the south, the natural resources of asphalt and petroleum would bring greater prosperity to the people, which reflected itself in the banking business. It is also conceivable that many coloured customers felt more comfortable with Canadian clerks, who were themselves colonial subjects of the British crown, and with whom many small depositors might have felt more at ease than in the august halls of the British Colonial Bank.

The Colonial Bank act of 1916 extended the institution’s powers. “It meant that British corporations could carry on business as a banker in the United Kingdom or in any state, colony or dependency in the British Empire,” writes Richard Fry in his authoritative ‘Bankers in West Africa’ (quoted in ‘From Colonial to Republic’). “We have one clue to the riddle why the Colonial Bank suddenly felt, after eighty years of reasonably profitable work in the Caribbean and in the middle of a world war (1914 - 1918), that it must seek wider horizons. Its chairman in 1916 was Sir W. Maxwell Aitken M.P. (soon to become famous as Lord Beaverbrook), the Canadian who came to England to launch a crusade for the rebirth of the British Empire.”

He was not alone. F.C. Goodenough, chairman of Barclays Bank Limited, shared his expansionist views. ‘A close working arrangement’ was sought with the Colonial Bank, and talks between the two banks commenced in late 1917.

Over the next eight years, a world system of association in the form mostly of assimilation and merging, together with the organisation of corresponding banks, was created. At a special meeting of the proprietors of the Colonial Bank after the rearranging of its share capital it was decided to change its name to Barclays Bank (Dominion Colonial and Overseas) D.C.O. A new dispensation in world banking had been inaugurated, one that had its roots right here in Trinidad.