Pictures of Port of Spain - Then And Now

In 2024, we republished Paria Publishing's iconic "A Photograph Album of Trinidad At the Turn of the 19th Century", which features highlights from the Paria Archives. 

We felt inspired one Sunday morning to drive around Port of Spain and to take some photos!

The book is available in local bookstores and on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

(Not all these photos are in it, we added a couple from our archives).

Frederick Street then and now

Red House then and now

Police HQ then and now

King Street (now Independence Square) looking East

Top of Frederick Street then and now

Chacon Street with Trinity Cathedral then and now

Queen's Park Hotel (now an office building) then and now

Government House (now President's House) then and now

Marine Square (now Independence Square) looking South then and now

Globe Theatre then and now

Frank Messervy

The unrelenting hail of shot, shell and fire stopped with the dawn. The rain that had been falling for the previous six weeks continued coursing, a weird syncopation of dropping sounds, a drip-splash-drop-drop-drip symphony that managed oriental quarter-tones, a lunatic cacophony through which the drifting mist made not merely the landscape, but the immediate surroundings take on the quality of Chinese mist paintings of the type seen on screens in restaurants.

It was typical of the Japanese to fill the night with terror and death, only to fall silent with the dawn leaving the enemy exhausted, shell-shocked and desperate with the certain knowledge that the ring had grown tighter. The fourth army corpse lay entrapped in the maze of mountain gorges, precipices, spectacular but unseen waterfalls in probably the world's thickest primeval tropical jungle, where only dynamite may be brought in to blast away gigantic trees so as to clear the way for lieutenant General Frank Messervy to remove his entrapped army from the heartland of Burma during the devastating days of the last war. he did. And with the 7th Indian Division and the reconstructed 4th Army Corps, he drove the Japanese Army through the Burmese mountains to take Rangoon.

That itself is a tale worth telling. For the last three hours, the Japanese Imperial Commander for Malaya, Sumatra, Java, Borneo and the Dutch East Indies, General Seishiro Itagaki, had been standing at attention with his ceremonial sword held out at arm's length, with his entire officer corps lined up behind him. His army of 100,000 men were drawn up without arms in parade in the open field adjacent to the city of Rangoon, now reduced to ashes. General Frank Messervy entered the open field accompanied by the pipes and drums of the Argyle & Sutherland Highlanders (Princess Louise's), and the entire 4th Army Corps for the purpose of taking the surrender. Detachment after detachment formed up and with the entire corps at present arms, General Itagaki handed his sword to Frank Messervy. It was just over 550 years old and had been made by Kanemoto, the most famous sword smith of his day.

Years later, I went to visit Sir Frank Messervy in his thatch-covered, large cottage not too far from London. Tall and gangly, and an older man by now, Frank recalled:

"In all my life, I have never seen a man so overwhelmed by emotion as was Itagaki when he handed his sword to me. He went ashen gray, just like a corpse, and the pupils of his eyes dwindled until there were no pupils at all. I know, because I looked straight and hard into his eyes as he surrendered his sword. It was as though he was surrendering his soul to me, and I though he would drop dead at my feet."

The said sword had killed many people in its time. When the heir of the house came of age, he would go into the family village where the tenants were kneeling on either side of the path. To prove his manhood, he would take a right-hand swipe and a left and so on, severing heads on his way.

Why this story? General Sir Frank Messervy, K.C.S.I., K.B.E., C.B., D.S.O, was the son of Myra de Boissière who married an Englishman by the name of Walter Messervy, who had come out to Trinidad to work in the Colonial Bank, later Barclays Bank, eventually becoming its manager. Myra was the daughter of Poleska de Boissière, who then lived with her husband, Dr. de Boissière, in Champs Elysées, which is now the Country Club. Frank in fact might have been born at Bagshot House, which went to the Bank when his original owner, Valleton de Boissière, got into financial difficulties.

After Myra and Walter had had several other children, and Walter was posted to Jamaica to work in the bank, Frank had the good fortune of being "adopted" by wealthy, childless relatives of his father. They educated him at Eaton and made him their heir. From them, Frank inherited the Twining tea estates in Sri Lanka. He had an exceptionally brilliant military career. Graduating from Sandhurst in 1913, from where he was posted as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Indian Army, joining the 9th Hodsonshorse in 1914. During the First World War he served in France, Palestine, Syria and Kurdistan. His experience in this war was, as for most of the soldiers, a horrible one. After the Treaty of Versailles, Frank came back to his home country for prolonged visits, staying with his beloved grandmother in Champs Elysées. His uncle Arneaud was Lieut.-Col., the  most senior officer serving on the western front in the war, spent much time with him as well.

Back to England, where Frank passed the staff college course at Chamberley in 1926, going on to become a brevet major in 1929 and a brevet lieutenant-colonel in 1933. During the Second World War, he first served in Eritrea and then in North Africa. Captured by the Germans, he escaped. He rose rapidly in rank, ending the war as  Lieutenant General. Appointed G.O.C. in C. and Governor of Malaysia. He later became C. in C. of the army of independent Pakistan, and served there at the time when India achieved her independence.

Messervy was deputy chief scout to Lord Rowallan.

In his military career, Messervy was known as the "spearhead general". He went into battle with his men, and did not stay behind to direct battle strategies over a map. In most pictures, he is dirty, unshaven, and probably missed his lunch. A deeply religious man, in the last years of his life, he went regularly to Lourdes, where he acted as stretcher-bearer for sick pilgrims. He died in 1974 - a Trinidadian at heart and in genes, decorated with the highest military honours of the British Empire, celebrated in many international publications, a brave hero who our soldiers can be proud of.

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.

The History of Banking Part Two

The experiment of setting up banks in the Caribbean, carried out by the principals in the city of London to take advantage of the changing economic scene, had paid off. There had been some calls, but careful and cautious handling of the Colonial Bank’s affairs by its managers had saved the day.

In post-emancipation Trinidad in the 1840s, there was great dislocation in the society. As Lord Harris, the island’s governor, remarked in a dispatch to London:

“A race has been freed, but a society has not been formed, liberty has been given to a heterogenous mass of individuals who can only comprehend license. A participation in the rights and priviledges and duties of a civilised society has been granted to them, but they are only capable of enjoying the vices.”

White planter society was also in disarray in the 1840s, as thousands of former slaves left the estates. The question of labour was becoming a terrifying issue. Compensation had been paid to them upon the freeing of the slaves by the British government. Some of the planters took their compensation and left for the French islands, where they had connection and in some cases owned property.

Those who remained had no financial resources to tide them over the violent transition period that took place after emancipation. It was felt that the local agents of the London Bank, the Colonial Bank, took care to see that they did not get it either. Most of them went bankrupt and London-promoted stock companies took over the estates. Governor Harris remarked in his report:

“The European and upper classes have been ruined by a succession of blows, which followed so rapidly one on the other that no foresight could have provided against them under the circumstances in which they are placed. Bankrupt in pocket and crushed in spirit.”

Notwithstanding these setbacks, the planters were reluctant to leave their adopted homeland. The dispossessed planters hewed their way into the interior forest of the island and by the dint of their hard work laid the foundation for a first class cocoa economy, whose real successes were to come some fifty years later.

The introduction of Indian indentured labour was regarded by those who now controlled the economy as the saving grace. Not everyone held this view, however. Lord Harris himself remarked that “the habits which they [the Indians] introduce are commonly pernicious, and morally and socially they tend to deteriorate if left at liberty.”

For the Colonial Bank, bad debts were accumulating on their books. First the bank had estimated £100,000, but as the plantation system failed and the newly imported labour from India was slow to revive it, it became obvious that a new figure, perhaps in excess of £200,000, would have to be provided for. The period 1843 to 1853 would test the management capabilities of this fledgling institution to its limits.

The real desicion came when the original charter, authorising the bank to carry on business, came due to expire in May 1856. The Court, as the Colonial Bank’s principals called themselves, decided to continue operations in the West Indies, but with a revised charter.

During the period of the late 1850s and into the 1860s, the Colonial Bank was challenged by the opening of the London & Colonial Bank. This new bank sought refuge in amalgamation with the American Exchange Bank, styling itself the International Bank. This new arrangement possessed an authorised capital of £3 million, and a paid up capital of £450,000.

The International Bank, however, had little impact on the Colonial bank. Their main concern seemed to be the legality of the bank notes of the International Bank. But with the collapse of the new bank’s chairman’s personal fortune, the Colonial Bank was by 1865 acting as the International Bank’s agents to collect outstanding receivables.

The Carpenter Report

By 1877, the Colonial Bank found it necessary to seriously review its operatives. This review was undertaken by Edward Carpenter, the younger son of WIlliam Hooker Carpenter, keeper of prints in the British Museum in London. Edward Carpenter began his career in the Barbados branch of the Colonial Bank in 1853 as assistant and secretary. Before leaving for London in 1886, to become the bank’s secretary, he produced a report of some 91 pages entitled ‘Facts and figures collected from the records of the Colonial Bank’, now called the ‘Carpenter Report’. This document records the losses and the gains made by the bank in its 40 years of business. Carpenter remarks:

“So far as my 25 years of experience go, even after the heaviest commercial disasters, the bank has always rapidly recovered; for hitherto they have been confined to one or two of our colonies at any one time, and the falling off threat has been made up elsewhere.”

Carpenter suggested that greater supervision may affect the profits even by as much as £10,000, but would reduce significant losses in the long run. He also remarked that in Trinidad a large proportion of the bank’s losses had arisen from estates’ accounts, such losses being unknown in Barbados. William Rennie, the manager in Trinidad, attributed this to the great strength of the British mercantile houses which owned or ran the Barbados estates. Carpenter did not agree. His view was that the problem was “in a great measure due to the predilection the Trinidad merchants have for becoming estate owners. The result is that when a few bad years come in succession, the profits of the business is inadequate to carry on the estates; disasters follow and the bank suffers doubly.” The Barbados investors would be supported by their London partners. At the end of the day, the French planters had no ‘home land principles’ to fall back on. The French Revolution had severed not only the heads of their relatives, but also their links to France.

The Canadian Banks

Changing social and political realities, together with economic pressures in Canada, started a process which forced the Canadian banks to look increasingly abroad. The Caribbean was a natural choice, for close to 100 years trade between these British territories had been building . Canadian firms shipped timber, fish, flour, even ice to the Caribbean ports and in return received molasses, rum, pitch, cocoa and coffe from the islands.

With the maritime provinces in recession in the 1880s, the banks looked south with a view to establishing links with their customers and trading partners.

The Bank of Nova Scotia was the first to impact in the Caribbean, opening in Kingston, Jamaica in 1889. By 1906, it had become the banker for the Jamaican government. It made a move to establish itself in Trinidad. The Colonial Bank, caught off guard in Jamaica, was however more territorial in Trinidad. The Bank of Nova Scotia closed in Port-of-Spain in 1907.

The Royal Bank of Canada, under an aggressive expansion management, established itself in Cuba in 1889. It moved to acquire the Union Bank of Halifax, which had started in Trinidad in 1902. As the result of that acquisition the Royal Bank of Canada was well established by 1910. So confident was Royal that it attempted to buy the Colonial Bank in 1911, albeit without success. Royal went on to acquire the Bank of Honduras and the Bank of British Guiana by 1914.

At that time, the Bank of Nova Scotia had 12 branches in the Caribbean; Royal had 37. The Canadian banks were successfully challenging the Colonial Bank’s way of doing business. The caution and discretion displayed by the Colonial Bank as a result of it being burned more than once, together with a hardened attitude towards its customers, had created a situation where it was pressed to keep up with changing times, in fact with the changing world order. For it to grow it had to start looking behond the Caribbean. This journey would cause a change of name.

Part 3 to follow

The History of Banking Part One

The first bank in Trinidad and Tobago

In the plantation system as it obtained in the colonies prior to the abolition of slavery, there was little need for money. Food, shelter and clothing were provided by the plantation. The existence of the plantation also meant that there was little room for the development oƒ a service or retail trade sector. Since there was no paid labour force on the plantation, there were no wages to be paid and transactions were mainly in kind.

Transactions between plantations and Europe were handled in the main by Bills of Exchange and book entries. The merchant-banker in London or Marseilles would provide ships to bring for example sugar from Trinidad, then sell the cargo in the foreign market. From the proceeds, he would pay the planter’s commitments like pensions and mortgages in Europe, buy goods for him and send it back on a ship to Trinidad. No cash was involved in the transaction at all.

The need for the creation of some type of banking institution in the British Caribbean colonies became increasingly evident following the emancipation of the slaves. Emancipation had the effect of requiring the planter to pay for many of the services which were hitherto rendered by slaves. The full economic impact of emancipation was, however, cushioned by the fact that it was accompanied by a six-year apprenticeship scheme which provided that the ex-slaves were only to be paid wages for work done in excess of 40 hours a week.

But in 1838, when Trinidad’s 20,656 apprentices (ex-slaves) were finally freed, the planters lost control of the labour force. Planters and their merchant bankers in London were aware that full emancipation, when it came, would increase the number of transactions for which they would have to pay in cash. Cash was needed to pay wages for services which had to be bought, thus the need for working capital which it was felt would best be met by the establishment of a bank.

Also, the expansion of bureaucracy and a consequent need for funds to pay the civil servants as well as for public sector projects were evident after emancipation. The former slave owners in the colonies had been given £20 million by way of compensation for the loss of their unpaid labour. All of a sudden, there was a significant increase in the money supply both in Britain and the colonies. Entrepreneurs started to realise that it would be good business to establish a bank to absorb some of this excess liquidity.

On the 1st June, 1836, the Colonial Bank was the first to be incorporated with an authorised capital of £2 million, divided into shares of £100 each. Subscriptions were sought from UK residents to the extent of £1.5 million, while the remaining half million was allocated to subscribers in the colonies in which the bank was to be established. The Colonial Bank was to be established exclusively in the British West Indies and British Guiana, but not elsewhere, not even in London! Its currency were dollars. The bank’s notes would be widely acceptable throughout the West Indies.

In Trinidad, Mr. John Shine was appointed to assume control of the Trinidad branch when it should open, but he died only 60 years of age just months before the bank was opened. The man actually appointed to be the first manager at a salary of £800 a year was Anthony Cumming, Esq., a merchant and plantation owner.

The Colonial Bank finally opened its doors on St. Vincent Wharf and King Street (now Independence Square) on May 15th, 1837, the same day as its principal (controlling) office opened in Barbados and in eleven other places in the islands and British Guiana. Four days before the official opening, Mr. C.A. Calvert, the secretary of the bank, had written to the Trinidad manager advising that seventy boxes of dollars had been shipped on board the ‘Harriet’. Each box contained from 3,000 to 5,000 coins, the total being $250,738.50. The Barbados branch received on 24th April, 1837 the first consignment of notes over $13,125,000 (£2,735,275). These notes would be the first and for many years the only examples of paper money freely to circulate in the West Indies. They were much needed to bring some order into the otherwise chaotic jumble of monetary systems in the Caribbean, where French, Spanish and American coins were used alongside British pieces.

(Pictures and lists of money)

In the early years of the Colonial Bank’s operations, the sugar cane industry was the mainstay of the economy. Quite naturally, therefore most of the bank’s transactions involved operations in that industry. In the post-emancipation era, the sugar industry came under severe pressure, and the bank’s fortunes rose and fell. One of the major problems which the industry faced was the shortage of cheap and steady labour. Freed slaves were naturally unwilling to work on the estates, preferring instead either to buy small plots of land or to squat on crown lands which were in abundant supply.

In 1846, the British government introduced the Sugar Duties Act, which called for the gradual equalisation of all duties on sugar. Thus West Indian sugar lost the advantage it had previously enjoyed over foreign sugar on the British market, having to compete with cheaper sugar from Cuba, Puerto and Brazil. The elimination of the preferential duty on sugar produced in the British colonies led to the virtual collapse of the colonial economy.

Many planters were seriously affected by the crisis. Several had borrowed heavily from merchants and from the banks to tide them over the period of difficulty. As money dried up, some planters were forced to borrow at rates which were as high as 45 percent. Many did not survive and went bankrupt, causing losses for the Bank. Also, many merchant houses collapsed.

The economic crisis led to the failure of one of the two banks then operating in the colonies: the West India Bank, which had been established in 1840, with head offices in Barbados, did not survive. The collapse of the West India Bank in December 1847, which had provided good competition for the Colonial Bank, ruined many of the newly freed slaves who had placed their faith in its viability.

To be continued!