Cyril Duprey

Duprey was amongst those who benefitted as the result of reforms in the banking system in the period after the civil unrest of the 1920s. The reforms had seen the emergence of the ‘Penny Bank’, the Cooperative Bank, a saving institution, and the Building and Loan Association, a loan and property development organisation designed to help the small man. By the early 1960s, he was president of both. He also served as director on the board of E.P. Gibb, a local trading company

- Born on March 3rd, 1897, in Abercromby Street in St. Joseph. Named Cyril Lucius after Greek missionary in the 9th century and three popes of 3rd and 12th centuries. Third child of Joseph Francis Augustus Duprey and Leontine Garcia. Went to Nelson Street boys R.C. where he went by train. Worked in father’s cocoa estates for a couple years, then went with his brother Gilbert into ‘Duprey Bros, Commission Agents, in Henry Street, beer and stout, cotton and woollen goods and foodstuff.

(Describe economic, politic, social circumstances) Captain Cipriani was 23, Butler and Manley were children, grantley Adams born in 1898, C.L.R. James in 1901, Gomes in 1911, Eric WIlliams 1911

- Parents lost house, cocoa estates in Caura, Santa Cruz, Carapichaima and Talparo in depression of teh 1930s

- Migrated to US for 19 years, returned in 1936, lived in Belmont with father, brother, sister

- 1927: idea for CLICO started, when he was in Chicago and met with Trinidadian insurance man called Sobrian, who told him he wanted to return to Trinidad and start an insurance company. Plan: Sobrian goes to Jamaica, Duprey to Trinidad. Sobrian got killed in traffic accident in 1928. Plan continued in Duprey, “quit his job as assistant superintendent at United Mutual in Chicago, where he was earning $75 a week to start at the newly-formed Commonwealth Burial Association for $60, to get the esperience or running an office”

- 1931: quit Commonwealth, went to New York, his brother Gilbert got him a job at United Mutual Life of New York. Worked there until 1936

- Founded Colonial Life 15th December, 1936

- Duprey thrifty man, stingy, didn’t think loans were in the best interest of his employees

- Low wages - Leslie Brewster in 1937: 4 cents, but made $ 7 or 8 after a day’s selling insurance

- 1942: Publication of ‘The Clico News’

- Dream was to be present throughout the islands, hence the name

- contemporary of important people like Bertie Gomes, Eric Williams, but never wanted to get involved in politics

- First office: 75 Queen Street, occupied two rooms: one for Duprey and his secretary, one for the agents who had to share one table

- ‘Premiums ranged from 6 cents to 36 cents and were parid weekly, and it was the agents’ responsibility to collect them.’ CLICO was selling to the poorer classes - ‘the middle and upper classes were canvassed by the foreign companies’.

- Duprey drove green and white chevy, registration P2356. Went to oilfields deep south to sell policies.

- CLICO was sneered at because it was not run by ‘white people’, but their approach to go to the small man working in factories, behind the bridge, in stores worked

- In December 1937 company offered debenture of $25,000 at 6% per annum to gain revenue for expansion

 - October 1938: company has resolved its financial problems and goes into mortgage financing

- in 1937 competition: 330 Friendly Societies for death relief, sick relief, maternity benefits

- first death claim: $60 for Cliford Brewster who fell off the quarry in Laventille

- 1941: noone in the Port of Spain office earned more than $7 a month, a secretary would make $3 a week

Life Insurance continued

The growth of the insurance industry in Trinidad and Tobago in the opening decades of the 20th century did in truth reflect the overall prosperity of the islands. This isnot to say that there was not real poverty, both rural and urban. There was, however, a growing middle class, put upon by colonial prejudice, but developing a creole culture of its own, buttressed with education and guided by ambition and a desire for upward mobility, social and financial.

The island’s economy was unique for the region. Sugar cane was big business. British cartels, such as Taitt & Lyle, controlled tens of thousands of acres of sugar cane, employing thousands at starvation wages. Although the ‘salad days’ of the 1850s were over, when good West Indian white sugar fetched 30 shillings per C.W.T., the industry did well on 20 shilling per C.W.T.

The undoubted star performer, however, was cocoa, which climbed off the chart in 1900 with exports well in excess of 30 million pounds, making the turn of phrase ‘the price of cocoa’ gain great currency in the local parlance.

But of even greater significance, particularly for the future, was the petrochemical industry. For if Trinidad could boast of the largest sugar refining complex in the world, seccond only later to Puerto Rico, we could then also boast of possessing the most modern oil refinery in the Caribbean, if not the world.

Economically, we were very well set up. This meant that there was a need to protect financially the significant investments. Property, industrial installations, goods, warehouses and transport were to be insured.

Life insurance as a means of saving and as an investment was a new idea at the time which was rapidly gaining ground, significantly so in the emerging middle class. This was especially the case in that the banking system did not accommodate the ‘small man’. Life insurance as a saving mechanism which paid interest and could be used to secure loans, and which produced endowments, sums that came to hand after retirement, all this secured futures at a time when there were virtually no opportunities for ordinary people to possess investment portfolios.

The Standard Life Company had established itself in the Caribbean in the late 1850s and become increasingly entrenched as a result of advancing capital for the development of plantations, especially in the cocoa industry. This offered quite a spread of potential clients from the owner and his family on to managers; and downstream to the commission agents and their office staff, seein ghtat many ofthe planters were also shippers and commission agents.

It is of interest that this firm, chosen as and example, commenced its operation in 1858 as the Colonial Insurance Company in the Caribbean with offices in Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago. It was able to successfully diversify its risks in the Caribbean’s several economies. It grew with these economies, merging with other companies such as the Jamaica Mutual Insurance, to position itself just short of 150 years later to become Guardian Life of the Caribbean, and a local Trinidadian company by the 1970s. This move to localise was not one that was neccessarily sought, but was a political reality. The catalyst of this mandate was the Black Power uprising of 1970. Essentially, the brains to carry all this forward were home-grown. Individuals such as Ian McBride had grown up in the company. The same could be said of the several heads of companies who emerged in the insurance industry by the early 1960s. Their names give a sense of the evolution of the children of the educated Afro-Franco creole culture of the 1900s. Insurance was one of the few areas of financial enterprise in colonial Trinidad open to them, where prudence met keen business acumen. For a coloured person in that period, the challenge was ultimately to overcome the stereotype role that was imposed by colonial prejudice. One had to re-invent oneself on a very profound level and be possessed of vision.

Who’s Who in Insurance in the 1950s

- William Montgomery Date, known to his friends as Pat, manager for Trinidad Barbados, Leeward & Windward Islands of Confederation Life Association.

- Louis Edmond Ganteaume, A.C.C.S., Secretary, British Guiana and Trinidad Mutual Fire insurance Co. Ltd.

- John Vincent Gonsalves, General Manager, National Life Assurance Company of Canada

- Desmond Gerard Jobity, Secretary, Trinidad Motor Insurance Co. Ltd.

- Bertram Godfrey Warner, District Manager, Sun Life Assurance Co. of Canada

- John Elton Newbold, Secretary-in-charge, Trinidad Branch, Standard Life Insurance Co.

- Louis Eugene Fisher, Branch Manager Manufacturer’s Life Insurance

- Kashi Nath Kaul, A.C.I.S., Divisional Resident Officer for the British Caribbean New Asiatic Insurance Co. Ltd.

- Garnet Johnson McCarthy, Chairman, Colonial Life Insurance Co. Ltd.

- Cyril Oswald Monsanto, Superintendent of agencies, Colonial Life Insurance Co. Ltd.

- Lyndon O. Schuler, Branch Manager of Imperial Life Assurance Co.

Cyril Lucius Duprey, Founder, Director and Secretary-Manager, Colonial Life Insurance Ltd.

Duprey was amongst those who benefitted as the result of reforms in the banking system in the period after the civil unrest of the 1920s. The reforms had seen the emergence of the ‘Penny Bank’, the Cooperative Bank, a saving institution, and the Building and Loan Association, a loan and property development organisation designed to help the small man. By the early 1960s, he was president of both. He also served as director on the board of E.P. Gibbs Ltd., a local trading company. born in Trinidad in 1897, he went to St. Joseph Government School and later to colleges in the United States. He left Trinidad in 1920 and entered the insurance business in Chicago and New York., where he organised the United Mutual Benefit Association in 1933. In 1936, Duprey returned to Trinidad and founded Colonial Life. He became a member of the Economic Advisory Board and the Political Progress Group. 

The Insurance Industry, Parts One and Two

The generation who grew up between the wars produced significant personalities and locally-grown entrepreneurs, for example Ray Dieffenthaler or Cyril Duprey, who pioneered the oilfield supply business and the insurance industry respectively. In this generation, and from this milieu, were also born people like Mikey Hamel-Smith and Dr. Eric Williams, who would later take the islands of Trinidad and Tobago into independence.

Looking back, those personalities came out of what historian and writer Dr. Alfred Toynbee calls the ‘dominant creative minority’. They had their roots in the non-white people of pre-emancipation days. Buttressed by the ex-slaves and their descendants, who after emancipation became highly motivated and increasingly vocal, a newly emerging coloured middle class was seeking to take advantage of education for their children and a respectable life style.

The assimilation of European - or rather, English Victorian - values, and the acculturisation formalised by religious principles, made them, as Vidia Naipaul remarked “not white but very plite and acceptable”.

Increasingly supported by the cocoa economy’s trickle-down effect, they were not by and large wealthy people. However, amongst their ranks appeared increasingly individuals who could afford to educate their sons, who became often scholarship winners at the best universities in England and Scotland.

The products of excellent schoolmasters, they were the finest that the island had produced in 100 years of British rule. True to thir roots, they spoke up against the pressure of Crown Colony rule, with its prejudice, nepotism and the ongoing deprivation of opportunities for the locals.

Many were professionals, lawyers and doctors, schoolteachers and civil servants. This class of thinking, aware and upright citizens produced several institutions, such as the Workingman’s Association, the Cooperative Bank and the Building and Loan Association. They were at the core of the Friendly Societies and the various masonic orders and quasi-masonic organisations, all in pursuit of consensus and anti-colonial sentiment.

Some of them agitated for the recognition of Emancipation Day. They republished Jean Baptiste Philippe’s ‘Free Mulatto’, an account of the landmark civil rights case that had been upheld by the House of Lords in London.

“The Beaubruns were ‘one of the oldest and most respected families of Naparima’,” writes Dr. Bridget Brereton in her book ‘Race Relations in Colonial Trinidad’.

Trinidad’s frontier town atmosphere of fly-by-night operators, slight of hand artistes and snakeoil salesmen still dies hard. In the period after the conquest by the British (1797), it was indeed the order of the day. Governor Picton did not hesitate to hang would-be offenders, many a time in advance of the crime, or so it has been alleged.

More than a quarter of a century later, in the Woodford years, things were somewhat calmer. Several British firms set up business in the pre-emancipation period (before 1834), importing all manner of merchandise for sale in the growing town. Many of these traders were Scotsmen. They also served as exporters, shipping out of Port of Spain in 1820 more than 30 million pounds of sugar, 1.7 million pounds of cocoa, 211,555 pounds of coffee, 96,545 pounds of cotton, 524,316 gallons of rum and 471,001 gallons of syrup. In 1850, the value of imports were £476,910 and exports £319,394.

As far as population was concerned in 1832, there were 3,683 whites, 16,302 mixed, about 700 Amerindians, 20,265 slaves and 4,615 ‘Aliens and Strangers’.

With an increasingly properous plantation and commercial sector emerging, producing a middle strata now more secure and free from the fears of the depredations of war and revolt. Individuals with households sought to plan a more secure future for their dependents. Apart from saving money in the vaults of the Colonial Bank, there was a somewhat new and supposedly secure way to save and benefit, known as life assurance. Modern life insurance in the British Empire dates from the foundation of the old Equitable Society, founded in 1762. The application for a charter for the Equitable, however, was firt opposed in the City of London by various vested interests:

“The success of the scheme must depend upon the truth of certain calculation taken upon tables for life and death, whereby the chance of mortality is attempted to be reduced to a certain standard - this is more speculation, never yeat tried in practice, and consequently subject like all other experiments to various chances in teh execution.”

This was of course challenged by the principles of the Equitable, and the charter was established. In other parts of Britain, this ‘experiment’ was soon followed. The Standard life Assurance Company of Scotland was started in 1825. Scotland, known for the thrifty nature of its inhabitants, proved a successful source for the sale of policies. ... The Scottish Widows’ Fund, for example, was a mutual office. ...

Britain’s expanding empire meant more and more of their own nationals living abroad, doing business and administrating colonies all over the world. In 1840, under the guidance of William Thomas Thompson, manager and actuary at Standard Life, who became one of the founders of the Institute of Actuaries of Great Britain, it was decided to establish a new company called the Colonial Life Assurance Company. It would operate in England’s far-flung colonies. In 1846, the Colonial was established in Trinidad. The purpose of this sibling company was to reduce the risk to the parent company. After all, the West Indian colonies had about them something of the unknown.

Within twenty years, the Colonial no longer existed. In the 1860s, Standard Life Assurance was, however, well established in the Caribbean.

Trinidad’s prosperity during this period was significant. In 1865, imports totaled £810,347. Its exports were £820,109. The colony could boast a revenue of £194,087. Its expenditure that year stood at £195,991. The ‘Standard Quarterly’ of 1937 records:

“Business began to open up under Mr. W.E. Hunter’s management, and soon we found ourselves advancing loans on cocoa mortgages. in Trinidad. The late Mr. G. Bruce Austin (Stiggs to his intimates) was the agent at Trinidad. He was one of the most popular men in the West Indies. When loans were advanced to cocoa property owners, one of the conditions of the loan was that a collateral policy had to be taken out, and the great bulk of the West Indies business at the time was obtained in this way. We advanced loans in Trinidad up to £300,000 on porperty, and quite a considerable amount on personal security. It is worthy of remark that the latter, due to Austin’s careful selection, never involved the Company in the loss of a penny.”

The Standard Life Assurance Company, through its offshoot, was amongst the first of its kind, if not actually the first life office, but it would soon have many competitors.

Other firms of insurance established themselves. Both fire and general firms found a footing in this growing economy. Recorded in Daniel Hart’s book ‘The island of Trinidad’ were:

Barbados Mutual Life Assurance Society - Agents, Turnbull, Stewart & Co.

City of Glasgow Assurance Company - Agents, Henry Watts & Co.

Colonial Life Assurance Company - Agents, John Cumming.

Commercial Union Assurance Company - Agents, L. Labastide & Co.

Home & Colonial Life Assurance Company - Agents, Scott, Julyan & Co.

Imperial Fire Insurance Company - Agents, M. Burnett.

La Tutelar Mutual Life Insurance Company of Madrid - Agents, O’Connor Bros.

Liverpool and London Insurance Company - Agents, Henry Watts & Co.

Mercantile Fire Insurance Company - Agents, Turnbull, Stewart & Co.

Northern Fire Insurance Company - Agents, O’Connor Bros.

Phoenix Fire Insurance Company - Agents, John Fuller.

Queen Insurance Company - Agents, A. Campbell & Co.

Royal Insurance Company (Fire & Life) - Agents, T.A. Finlayson.

Scottish Amicable Life Assurance Company - Agent, J.C. Alston.

Sun Fire Office - Agents, Hume, Bernard & Co.

Victoria Life Assurance Company - Agents, Charles Fabien.

Lloyd’s Agents - Hume ,Bernard & Co.