Newsletter
for alumni of The Abbey School, Mt. St. Benedict, Trinidad and Tobago, W.I.
Caracas, 14 December 2019 No. 945
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Dear Friends,
Instructions on how to operate the Blog spot
Abbey School - Finding an earlier Circular
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idmitch@anguillanet.com
06:03
Hi, Tim,
I just tried opening No 934 and had no difficulty.
Let me see.
I use Mozilla as my browser. When I go to the Blog, only No 935
(the most recent) appears on the page on my screen.
So, I know that I shall have to go to Blog Archives in the right-hand
column to find No 934 (Ladislao publishes each one on a Saturday, once a
week).
No 935 is dated 5 October. That means that No 934 was published in
the last week in September. In the right-hand column, I click on
September. All four of the September Circulars open up in a list. I
then select No 934 and it opens.
Hope that works for you. If not, let me know.
Best,
Don
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From:
Tim Mew MHC <tim-mew@bigpond.com>
Sent: Sunday, 17
November 2019 01:52
Hello Don,
Thanks for this new advice and I have a quick question for you.
I can open 935 but have tried with no luck to do the same for 934, what
am I doing wrong?
Cheers Tim.
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American Boys
From:
Nigel P. Boos <nigelboos@eagles-wings.ca>
Dear Elspeth and Richard,
Great idea.
Let's try.
I'm sending this msg to the OB's from the period 1945-1950.
We'll see what the seine hauls in.
All you Old OB's: Richard O'Connor
is posing you a question.
Can anyone help to throw some light on the matter for us?
1.
What was the family name of Tom, Dick and Harry, three American boys who
studied at the Mount while their dad was stationed at Ft. Reid in Wallerfield?
(I have photographs of a Tom Turner, but no
mention of a Richard or Harold Turner. There was also another American boy,
named Peter Tarr, whose father donated a lot of equipment from the U.S. base in
Chaguaramas, as I understand it, after WWII, when the soldiers were returning to the
States.)
I would also appreciate if you could answer these two additional
questions for me:
2.
Does anyone remember whether Harold La Borde was ever a student at MSB?
(Harold and his wife, Kwailan became famous as a result of their
circumnavigation of the planet a number of years ago, for which, I believe, he
was awarded the Trinity Cross. See:
3.
Does anyone remember whether Leo De Gale was ever a student at the
Mount? (He later became Governor General of Grenada, but has since died.)
R.I.P.
Nigel P. Boos
EAGLE'S WINGS LTD.,
95 Warwick Ave.,
Ajax, ON L1Z 1L5
CANADA
Ph: (905)
426-8999
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On 1-Oct-09, at 9:02 PM,
Elspeth O'Connor wrote:
Nigel,
I was wondering that now your subscription is so far and wide whether
you could ask if anyone knows the names of the three American Boys who were at Mount St. Benedict with Richard in the early
years.
All Richard can remember is that they were called Tom, Dick (Richard)
and Harry and their father was at the American Base in Wallerfield
The father took pictures of the College from an aeroplane, which were
among the first to be taken and published of the College.
Now with Facebook, Twitter etc. (none of which I understand or am a
member of) you may be able to find out some history about the Mount if you can
discover their surnames. Cheers.
Elspeth
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In carnival country (in memory of my
classmate)
A look at the history
Wayne Brown
Sunday, January 27, 2002
"THE 1990s have seen the
eruption of a global identity crisis.
Almost everywhere one looks, people have
been asking, 'Who are we?' 'Where do we belong?' and 'Who is not us?'
These questions are central not only to
peoples attempting to forge new nation states, as in the former Yugoslavia, but
also much more generally...
Identity issues are of course
particularly intense in cleft countries that have sizeable groups of people
from different civilisations."
(Samuel P Huntingdon: The Clash of
Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order)
In his nationalist and socialist heyday
in the '70s (national socialist would of course be something quite different),
Michael Manley was fond of drawing an
analogy between the nation and a family.
Like most proffered analogies, it was
false -- not least because the difference between personal acquaintance and
mere shared nationality is definitive -- and it was made, moreover, just at the
time when nationalism, after 500 years as the west's ruling 'ism', was
beginning to fail.
The world that Samuel P Huntingdon would
depict some 25 years later, a world defined by ethnic and cultural
solidarities, even where these might divide a given nation into two or more
mutually hostile groups or classes -- amid the "cleft countries" of
the Caribbean, at any rate, that world had already long dawned.
Those here who watched Rastafarians mob
the airport, for example, for the arrival of Haile Selassie back in the '60s,
while, even as this is being written, a different class of Jamaicans is quite
exciting itself over the imminent arrival of the Queen of England, should have
no difficulty recognising its existence in our midst.
It's a mysterious blessing that --
except in isolated cases -- such trenchantly opposed cultural orientations are
yet to find expression in violence (perhaps because Huntingdon's prescription,
of "two sizeable groups of people from different civilisations", has
not been met).
Likewise -- and even more so -- in
Trinidad.
In Trinidad, for example, in the 1971
Test series between India and the West Indies, the Indian opener Sunil Gavaskar
scored a century.
Nothing particularly noteworthy about
that:
Gavaskar was a great batsman.
What was noteworthy, though, was that at
that point (and with the West Indies prospects looking increasingly dim) a
crowd of Trinidadian Indians rushed onto the field and managed triumphantly to
hang a garland of flowers around Gavaskar's neck.
In the mainly Creole-occupied stands,
you could have cut the tension with a knife.
And that was fully 30 years before, in
the wake of September 11, a prominent British Muslim announced that he was a
Muslim first and a Briton second.
This by way of slight but telling
background to the current 18-18 stalemate in Trinidad (one whose simplest
lesson is that, under the Westminster system, it really is unwise to have an
even number of constituencies).
Last month's general elections might
have been dismissed in advance by this columnist as "a battle between evil
and vacuity" (an assessment neatly echoed by Trinidad Express columnist
Donna Yawching, who saw the recent contest as one "between a crook and a
fool"), but its outcome has been disastrous – more so because of the
absolute lack of moral stature on the part of the three men involved.
The third man, President ANR Robinson,
has been perhaps the most culpable, in that in dead-heated situations the
constitution gives him the uncontestable right to appoint a prime minister of
his choice.
In the current situation that power was
essentially arbitrary: there was no politically meaningful basis on which he
could possibly choose.
Robinson had a duty, therefore, to go
before the country and acknowledge this; to invite (as he did) Messrs Panday
and Manning to meet and "work it out" -- but then to warn that, if
they failed to do so, he was going to stand in front of the television cameras
and spin a coin.
Trinidadians are natural gamblers.
They would have understood that; and
they would have understood also both the essential hopelessness, and the fey
fairness of it.
Instead, Mr Robinson muttered something
about morality (which immediately antagonised Indo-Trinidad), on the express
basis of which he appointed as prime minister Mr Manning -- who promptly
appointed his own wife a cabinet minister, leaving the president to try to
extricate his foot from his mouth.
Beyond that, Mr Manning broke with
tradition and appointed nearly twice as many ministers as a Trinidad government
normally makes do with -- behaving in effect like someone who had come to
office in a riotous landslide, not like someone with no political basis
whatsoever to his power.
In the meantime, Mr Panday --
misreading, curiously for someone whose political muse has always been
paranoia, the fervour of the president's dislike of him -- had come to all
sorts of agreements with Mr Manning, including that he, Panday, would abide by
Mr Robinson's choice of prime minister:
this clearly in the complacent belief
that he himself was going to be reappointed.
When that didn't happen (well, of
course, Baz! You really thought Robinson was going to appoint you?),
Mr Panday promptly disowned all his
solemn agreements and began denouncing everybody.
To me, on the phone, such exemplars of
Trinidad as I happen to know have since expressed their utter despair.
It seems that a choice between evil and
vacuity -- between a crook and a fool -- is really no choice at all, after all.
The situation as it stands is that the
new Manning government cannot govern.
It can't appoint a speaker of the House,
because for that it would need a majority; and therefore it can't convene
Parliament.
Indeed, without a speaker, Parliament
cannot nominate a new president (Mr Robinson's tenure is almost up) which means
that very soon the members of parliament, of both parties, won't have anyone to
stand in front of and take the oath of allegiance.
And that means (as the dour Trinidad
bureaucracy has wasted no time in pointing out) that they can't start receiving
their salaries.
Which, come to think of it, is probably
the one bright note in the whole mess.
Follow the money, as Deep Throat used to
tell the Watergate journalists.
It may yet force a compromise upon two
thoroughly debased political parties.
What's confusing about all this is
Trinidad: Trinidad itself.
Trinidad is a country which prides
itself in not believing in anything; in "not taking on" anybody; in
"not digging no horrors"; in "not holding strain".
Four times in the past century, Trinidad
-- as opposed to famously violent Jamaica -- went berserk and "mashed up
the place": with the 1903 Water Riots (in the course of which this
columnist's grandfather, who was attorney-general at the time, was hit in the
back with a brick, and died soon afterwards); with the 1937 labour riots; with
the 1970 army mutiny and Black Power marches; and with the 1990 Muslimeen
uprising.
And each time the dominant emotion on
the part of the citizenry was shock. How could such a thing happen in carnival
country?
So, from Jamaica, I watch now the
extraordinary sangfroid of the Trinidad media -- not ignoring the horrific and
shameful political debacle in their midst, but trying to keep the country calm,
and to give an impression of business as usual -- look, Carnival coming, all
yuh check out these costumes!
And, sitting here, I have no way of
knowing whether it really is carnival country, nobody caring, nobody giving a
damn who rules...
Or whether Trinidad is preparing to
shock itself once again
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EDITED by Ladislao Kertesz, kertesz11@yahoo.com, if you would like to be in the circular’s
mailing list please collaborate with a subscription
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Photos:
12LK4099FBGEV, Glen
Evelyn
15LK5296FBIHA, Ian
Haynes
18LK4744FBAKAWFE,
Avalon Kallo and wife
07WK0010REUNION2007,
Bro Rupert and Manuel Prada
