The glow of the Street Lanterns

 For the generation born after emancipation, life in Port of Spain was possessed of great contrast. The economic collapse brought on by the demise of free labour drove many French Creoles  from the countryside to the eastern extremities of the city streets. Later to be known as the “French Shores”, these streets had names that recalled the provincial towns of France whence their ancestors hailed, like Besson Street, and had French names that persisted way into English times: Rue des Trois Chandelles (Duncan Street, named after the three candles burning outside the Mason's Lodge), Rue d'Eglise (Nelson Street), Rue de la Place (George Street), Rue de Sainte Anne (Charlotte Street), Rue Neuve (Henry Street), and Rue des Anglais (Frederick Street).

The wooden mansions they built when they moved to east Port-of-Spain are now all gone. Old-timers, however, recall that the town had about it an air not dissimilar to Fort-de-France or Pointe-à-Pitre in the French Antilles. The land over the dry river known as Piccadilly was then called “Grand Jardin” (Big Garden), and further north was Mango Rose and Lacou Harp. The large central area, stretching from Argyle Street to St. Paul Street, was called Sorzanoville, with large parts covered with sugar cane. The entire are to the north and east was bounded with high woods, ancient forest that had never been cut.

Former slaves who had escaped in previous times and the newly emancipated encamped in the forest, to be later joined by an increasing population of former slaves from the other West Indian islands. As a consequence, many African customs and usage's were maintained in east Port-of-Spain form many decades. Several yards, divided along tribal lines, were established, along with  gangs or bands which originated in the secret societies of West Africa. There were “malongues”, special groupings of people how had shared the experience of the slave ship or the barrack room.

Smart town houses, lived in by the now somewhat impoverished French gentry, existed side by side with amazingly squalid yards, peopled by the city’s poor, who were mostly black, but also contained in their number many destitute Europeans, some Spanish, some French, some of indeterminable origin. There were wakes, dances and religious ceremonies. The sheer volume of noise emitted by these astounded the visitor of Port-of-Spain. C.W. Day, English traveler, describes such a dance with astonishment (note his ignorance of how drums are made):
“One night, hearing a horrible drumming, I followed the sounds and in the suburbs of the town came to a Negro ladies’ ball. A narrow entry led to a spacious shed, rudely thatched with palm branches. Standing in the four corners of this dingy salon de dance were well-muscled young men holding aloft wooden candelabras with tallow candles casting a fearful glare over the place. There were five huge Negroes thumping might and main on casks, the tops of which were covered with parchment. Ranged along the side were twenty negresses roaring a chorus. These dingy damsels, of whose features nothing but their rolling eyeballs and brilliant teeth were visible, raised their voices to a pitch that would have satisfied the King of Ahanti.”

Another man, C.H. Eckstein, had the following to say about this period:

“At this period of history of our experimental island, the town society could not yet boast of sufficient stock of elegance to assume a ‘bon ton’ and the ‘haut ton’, to which it has since so rapidly aspired, was scarcely suspected. The seductive soirees at Mademoiselle Annie’s - the fascinating Ninon of Trinidad, collected at this time, the male beau-monde round her sofa or the harpsichord satiated with the ordinary indulgences of human appetite, relish of higher society became so exquisite nothing less will now soothe the modern ear than Parisian-tuned harps. None must touch the bosom of the finished school miss except the pedal lyre.”

Against this contrast the city fathers struggled to establish a semblance of modernity. One such was the introduction of street lighting. The Port of Spain Gazette reported in 1878 (as reported in the Guardian Centenary Issue):

First Lighting On The Streets

The inauguration of the lighting of the lamps placed by the Municipality in Marine square and from the square northwards to the gaol, took place, as announced on Christmas Eve. The lamp was lit by His Excellency the Governor; and among those present we notice the Hon. the Attorney General, The Hon. T.A. Finlayson, The Hon. L. Guiseppi, John Agostini Esq., L. Mathieu Esq., Oliver Warner Esq., R.D. Mayne Esq., John Fanning Esq., J.F. Rat Esq., (Town Clerk). We also noticed that, His Worship the Mayor’s published program notwithstanding the Borough Councilors were conspicuous by their absence. We were ourselves unable to be present at the display of fireworks offered to the population, (at the cost of the population), by His Worship the Mayor. (28th Dec., 1878)”

These lamps like most elsewhere were imported from England. Made of cast iron, they were shaded by glass and burned whale oil. They were placed on street corners and were lit at dusk by the lamp lighter who made his way in a ceremonious style, accompanied by a boy carrying a ladder and another ringing a bell signaling the close of day as dusk settled on the little town.

In the distance the bells of the towns two cathedrals tolled the hour. It would be another generation that would see the marvels of the introduction of electricity.

Interview with the last lamplighter

“Me mudda, she da make me de year de cholera be so bad. Dat be so long time and look how I get, I must be well old.”

He may have been born in 1855, he may have had no idea really, black people seldom knew how old they were or when they were born.

“Yes, I be dey de day de govener light the first street light.”

He could also remember the small pox epidemic, when no precaution was taken to isolate cases to prevent infection. People said that if you were brave, and you visited all your friends that had it you were safe but if you tried to run away you’d inevitably catch it or it would catch you. In order to combat the “disease in the air” they burnt pitch on the street corners under the newly installed oil burning lights.

Mosquitoes carried the fever and to drive them out of the house a Wood-ants nest was burnt in a coal pot. The smell of smoke pervaded the town. The streets were swept and the drains flushed once a week by a gang of short time prisoners and the corbeaux saw after them in the interval. Carnival, well, no descent person would attempt to go about the streets on Carnival days as the masqueraders had a free hand and the opportunity to settle old scores. The confrontations between Baker and his bobbies (policemen) and the stickmen reached a high point in 1881. The Cannes Brulées broke every lampshade in the city. He remembered that the lamps remained unlit for a long time until new glass shades could be imported from England. Creole patois was prevalent he said, and it was the habit that when “you had a dead” you hired a Patois speaking person, preferably a woman in a Martiniquan dress: chemise, jupe, foulard, a pair of "zano cylendre" in her ears, a string of "grain d'or" round her neck and a stiff "canlanday" head kerchief tied turban wise. It was important that she had a good voice for she would pause at every street corner under the new lamp post and proclaim “Ladies and gentlemen Pierre Jean Modeste has died. His funeral will leave the house at the back of the grass market this afternoon at 4 o’clock for the cathedral. His wife Marie Louis the seamstress, his mother is Mrs. Murphy who sells chutney by the cab stand, his aunt is Mrs. Chantall who lives at the back of the Black Lion Bar on Park Street, his uncle is the baker from Venezuela, who in jail for stabbing “Doudouts“ the carterman.

A Question of Self-Respect

Unlike other colonies, Trinidad saw after the abolition of slavery in 1837 the emergence of a black and coloured middle class

A look at the composition of post-emancipation society in Trinidad reveals that black didn’t just mean black. As a person with African ancestry, you could have found yourself in different strata of the society, with different challenges and opportunities. The black and coloured middle class rose from several groups:

Firstly, from the small group of families of mixed African and European descent, who were the descendants of the free, slave-owning and land-owning people of colour, and who had settled after 1783 mainly in the Naparimas according to the terms and conditions of the Cedula of Population.

Secondly, from the group of descendants of ex-slaves, or of freed African immigrants, that is Africans taken by the British on the high seas from Portuguese slavers, bound for Brazil, and set free in Trinidad and Tobago. This group also comprised descendants of immigrants from other Caribbean territories and of Venezuelan immigrants with Spanish-African-Amerindian ancestry. Those people were self-made, that is, they worked in white-collar jobs which they got mainly through their command of the dominant British culture. Members of this group were both coloured and black.

In the fifteen years after the settlement of Trinidad by both white and coloured French Creole settlers in 1783, the whites and the free coloureds entertained much more cordial relationships than after the British conquest of the island in 1797. In their retention of culture, in their nostalgic cherishing of the past, in their manners and customs and in their catholicism, white and coloured French Creoles were very similar. When the British imposed their rule, however, white French Creoles tended to distance themselves from their coloured countrymen and -women, many of whom they were related to by blood. They stuck with the new rulers and tried to form the exclusive local white landed upper class. Notwithstanding that, many positions were closed to even the whitest of locals: only the English could hold the highest offices like governor, colonial secretary or chief of police. This concept of the foreign master was bitterly felt by all Trinidadians and Tobagonians up to the very last days of Crown Colony rule, as a speech from the 1930s by Captain A.A. Cipriani shows:

“A little country like ours would never become a piece of American territory either by sale or by barter; we will never become a Canadian provice, and thirdly and lastly, but by no means least, we are not going to carry on as at present under this iniquitous and mischievous form of administration known by Crown Colony Government.”

Middle-class status was reached when members of the family - men, to be specific, since women had no prospects of a professional career in the 19th century - started to work in white-collar occupations, such as in the law, in the teaching service, as a clerk in trade or in the government. The path to that was education, and schools were mostly to be found in the towns. Unlike other tropical colonies, over a quarter of Trinidad’s population were urban-dwelling by the 1870s.

Among the families of French free coloured origin, there were the Romains, who produced the first Mayor of San Fernando, and the Philips, whose Jean-Baptiste won the first human rights case in the New World for the free coloureds in 1829. St. Luce Philip became the first coloured unofficial member of the Legislative Council. Michel Maxwell Philip became Solicitor-General from 1869 - 1888. He also was the first non-white Mayor of Port-of-Spain. The Saturnins were another prominent middle class family. They produced a doctor as early as 1838, when they were able to send one of their sons to the University of Paris. The Maresse family produced vocal, anti-clerical men and women who wrote letters in French and English to the newspapers, condemning the churches’ influence in schools.

The Angeron and Montrichard families, the Beaubruns and the Regis families - all of those were respected and educated coloured families of the Naparimas. Many of them faced economic desaster after 1838 and much like many of the white planters, were squeezed out of the sugar production.

For the second group within the black and coloured middle-class, upward mobility began after the removal of slavery.

“Numbers of ex-slaves and their children became petty traders and artisans after 1838,” writes Dr. Bridget Brereton in ‘Race Relations in Colonial Trinidad’. “They were better off than estate labourers, more mobile, and more ambitious for their children to go to school. They formed a ‘respectable’, ambitious, potentially mobile working class, and their children might well achieve the climb to middle class status. Most of these men were professionals, teachers, civil servants or clerks; a few were planters: even fewer were in business.”

The Brown family, descendant from a Vincentian coloured immigrant, Joseph, who was a merchant, was one of those exceptions. Joseph’s three sons all became professional members of the black and coloured middle-class: Vincent and Lionel were barristers (with Vincent even rising to the office of Attorney-General), Leopold was a surveyor. Another lone coloured merchant was H.B. Phillips, coloured native of Barbados, who served as Mayor of Port of Spain. But other than that, the large commercial firms were dominated by white families at that time. Black and coloured men owned only small businesses: W.B. Laurence had a bookshop, L.O. Innis ran a pharmacy, and Joseph Lewis, William Herbert and Samuel Carter owned printeries and produced newspapers.

Access to capital was difficult for black and coloured people. If one had not inherited land or wealth, it was almost impossible to become a planter. Amongst the few coloured planters were Nicholas Brunton of Diego Martin, who ran successful sugar and cocoa estates. M.M. Philip bought Phillipines sugar estate, and Joseph Brooks, son of a black soldier of the West India regiment, owned at the time of his death several cocoa estates in the Arima and Guanapo district.

“Most middle-class and coloureds, then, were employed in white-collar jobs; the majority were involved neither in agriculture nor in commerce. They were teachers, journalists and editors, lawyers, doctors, civil servants and clerks.” (Bridget Brereton)

To become a primary school teacher was the ultimate goal for many black middle-class aspirants. This respectable occupation gave one the status of an authority, but it required no university education like becoming a lawyer or a doctor. J.J. Thomas was probably the most outstanding self-made teacher of the last century. Others were H.A. Nurse, the son of a Barbadian ex-slave, as was Henry Sylvester Williams, who also became a succesful teacher and later founded the Pan-African Association in London.

For those who were black but could somehow get a tertiary education at a British university, medicine and law became the favoured professions. Brilliant Stephen Laurence won a scholarship to QRC and an island scholarship to Edinburgh University, where he qualified as a medical doctor in 1888.

But, as the list shows, the legal profession was the one most open to black and coloured middle-class men.

“John Joseph and Jean Pierre, said to be ‘of pure African descent’, were among the first three men to qualify as solicitors under a new Ordinance permitting solicitors to qualify in Trinidad instead of having to go to Britain.” writes Brereton. “Increasingly, America came to be seen as a land of opportunity for young blacks, because it was far easier to support themselves while at a university there than in Britain, and because it was easier to enter an American university.”

Only one or two men became clergymen. P.H. Douglin, for example, was ordained in 1887. There was a common prejudice, however, against people of colour from both the side of the churches and the side of the congregations, who preferred white priests.

Trinidadians of the black and coloured middle class adhered feverishly to European values, that is, they were often better mannered and educated than their white counterparts or the black lower classes. As Brereton puts it:

“They attached so much importance to culture because they had no other valuable and valued possession to hold on to. (...) But they possessed one attribute which the mass of the population did not have, and which the society, as a whole, valued: and that was cultural and intellectual skills. It is not surprising, therefore, that members of the coloured and black middle class often took the lead in literary or intellectual activities.”