Newsletter for alumni of The
Abbey School, Mt. St. Benedict, Trinidad and Tobago, W.I.
Caracas, 30 of August 2014 No. 669
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Dear Friends
----------------------------------------------------
Don Mitchell
Aug 10
Hello,
Otto,
It is
good to hear from Ladislao that you have been in contact.
I see
that there are no details of you in the database we are keeping of the alumni.
The database
was originally prepared by Nigel Boos, and is now kept by Kazim Abasali.
May I ask
you to help us to locate you in time and space, so to say?
It would
be wonderful if you could let us have a photo of you as a schoolboy at Mount,
and one or two of you now.
Ladislao
will be happy to put your photos and news up on one of the Circulars that he
publishes every week.
You can
see several years of them at: http://abbeyschool2014circulars.blogspot.com/
I am sure
that he would particularly like it if you could write a few paragraphs on what
years you attended Mount, whether you completed Form 5, and, if you did not,
what year would have been your Form 5.
We locate
all of us on the database by our Form 5 year, whether we completed our
schooling at Mount or not.
It would
also be wonderful to hear what you did with yourself after you left Mount,
where else you studied and worked, and whether you married and had children.
Meanwhile,
I have added your name and email address to my address folder for sending out
the occasional group message.
The
Circulars are not circulated by email.
They are
posted on the Website above as I receive them from Ladislao.
(Spam
blocking features in the various email servers prevent the Circulars from going
out to a large number of addresses, so we have found it less laborious to post
them on the web, and leave it to the Old Boys to access them at their
convenience.)
Please
add the address of the website to your “favourites” or whatever it is called,
so you can check for new Circulars from time to time.
Looking
forward to hearing from you.
Don
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Don Mitchell
Aug 5
Hello,
Lawrence,
If anyone
knows it will be “the Bandit” David de Castro.
So, I am
copying him with your query in the certainty that he will reply.
On further
reflection, I am also copying Ladislao, Kazim, and Nigel, our historians and
record-keepers, who will all want to know the answer as well.
All the
best,
Don
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From: kathleen macaulay
Sent: Tuesday, August 5, 2014 11:40 AM
Subject: Re: Abbey School, Mt St Benedict Circulars
Dear Don,
I wonder
if any of the "old" old boys can find a photo of the Mount Marinas
Steel Band, which I am sure was the first college steel band in Trinidad.
Here are
some of the names.....Delano de Castro, David de Castro, Trevor Mathews, Rodney
de Pass, myself (Lawrence Macaulay)
Ellie
Manette used to come to Mt. To tune our pans!
Just
wondering if there is anyone around who remembers these good times?
Regards
Lawrence
Macaulay
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On Aug 5, 2014, at 4:14 AM,
"Don Mitchell" <idmitch@anguillanet.com>
wrote:
Dear All,
Ladislao
has posted 3 new Circulars since my last memo:
He posts
his Circulars normally on a Saturday, or a day or two later.
Please
put a note in your diary to visit the web site every Monday.
Keep
well.
Don
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Reunion 2015
Don Mitchell
Jul 8
Dear All,
Things
have not come together for the planned Grand Reunion in October.
We have
been let down by two Event Organisers, who have not helped us do the organising
in time.
It is now
too late to make the final arrangements and to give you enough time to plan for
travel to Trinidad and to register for the event in October.
We will
have to consider rearranging the Grand Reunion for another time.
If you
have the time, take a look at the attached PowerPoint presentation made by Tony
Vieira to show what was planned.
Meanwhile,
the Trinidad Organising Committee are still considering putting on a more impromptu,
informal Reunion this year, and I shall attend it.
I’ll keep
you informed as news comes to hand, and hopefully, you may be able to make it
to Trinidad as well.
So sorry
for the dashing of hopes and plans.
Don
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Tim Mew MHC
May 2
To Nigel
& Ladislao,
Thank you
so much for all you have done over the years.
Alas it
is the way all things end with the passing of time.
Ladislao and
you have been the key figures in keeping the MSB “old boys” network alive and
for that you have our grateful appreciation and sincere thanks.
May God
bless you both and may the years ahead be filled with a safe life, happiness
and good health.
- Tim
& Gail Mew.
- Australia.
- Class
of 1958.
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From: Nigel Boos [mailto:nigelboos@eagles-wings.ca]
Sent: Saturday, May 03, 2014 2:12 AM
Subject: MSB Old Boys Database - Final Report
Gentlemen,
I have
received no indication of interest from anyone, to continue the maintenance of
the MSB Old Boys' database.
I am
therefore ceasing all activity on this project, effective immediately.
Wishing
everyone all success in everything that you do.
May God
bless us all.
Over and
out.
Nigel
(Luckily this did not happen and
the Database is being kept by Abalasi, Kazim)
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IN OUR TIME - Wayne Brown
'Way back in 1995'
'Way back in 1995'
Wayne Brown
Sunday, April 01, 2001
Sunday, April 01, 2001
A foreign
friend in her 30s, teaching high school in Jamaica for the first time, was
dismayed. "They don't know anything about the past," she said with
hurt wonder. "And what's more, they couldn't care less!"
Sent to
teach an A' level General Paper class, and given neither syllabus nor
direction, she told them about the Dalai Lama. They thought it was a big joke.
And they wondered why she was wasting their time with "stories" which
had nothing to do with them and their lives. At her school, A' level History
had attracted a grand total of three students, and often none of them showed
up: the history teacher would set off for class punctually each morning, laden
with books and notes, and be back in the staff room 10 minutes later, looking
sheepish and glum.
She
wasn't telling me anything I didn't know, of course. In a class of UWI
undergraduates, I have discovered, you can usually elicit the imp of
recognition with names like Hitler and Stalin, but don't try Goebbels or
Molotov. JFK, yes; Eisenhower, no. Maurice Bishop, maybe; Bernard Coard, no.
Martin Luther King (pronounced Martinloota-king) yes; but the Black Panthers
--- the Black Panthers! -- no. (Well, serves them right, I say. All that
theatrical fist-clenching, which elided so smoothly into bible-thumping and
insurance-selling when the money ran out!)
We live
in an age in which sports commentators routinely express amazement if something
happens that hasn't happened in five years. ("The last time the
Redskins" -- did something or the other, won here or lost there --
"was way back in '95!")
Not long
ago, a Stone poll found that most Jamaicans thought Michael Manley the best (or
the "most influential", I forget which) of this country's leaders in
modern times. Michael's father, NW Manley, attracted a miniscule two per cent
of the vote.
This hurt
their daughter/grandaughter, Rachel Manley. How could Jamaica have so scanted
the giant, if relatively undemonstrative, contributions of her grandfather?
I told
her not to take the poll seriously; that, never mind the airport, most
Jamaicans under 30 wouldn't even know who NW Manley was. When she professed
disbelief, I told her this story.
Back in
'84 -- "Way back in '84" -- as the Editor-in-waiting of a Trinidad
newsmagazine, I interviewed a young woman for the job of cartoonist. Turned out
she could caricature pretty well; and so, much encouraged, I showed her photos
of various ministers in the then-PNM government, growing alarmed, however, as
it became clear she didn't recognise any of them. Finally, in desperation, I
showed her another photo.
She was
16, and newly emerged from one of Trinidad's better schools. She looked hard
and long at the photo, and then her face lit up. "I know that face!"
she said triumphantly. Turned out she just couldn't at the moment attach a name
to it -- the name, that is, of Dr Eric Williams, Founder of the Nation and
Prime Minister of Trinidad & Tobago for a quarter of a century until his
death, a mere four years before our interview.
It's no
surprise in this environment that most history teachers have given up -- though
who gave up first, teachers or students, I can't say. At UWI St Augustine in
the late '80s, eg -- way back in the late '80s -- while teaching some Eng Lit
courses, I went down to the Arts Faculty's photocopying room. Before me, Dr X,
the History lecturer, had just finished running off his BA History exam paper;
the copies stood in a pile next to the machine. My younger daughter was at the
time doing London A' level history privately (ie, with my help); and so I had
no trouble recognising the professor's exam questions.
They
were, question for question, word for word, one of the London A' level History
exam papers of a few years earlier.
So when,
one morning last week at UWI, Mona, where I currently teach a Carimac course, I
walked into the empty classroom 10 minutes early, I was intrigued to see that
whoever had used the room before me had left behind a copy of his (or her)
lecture outlines for 'H 34G: The Holocaust in History.'
I have
long been interested in the Holocaust and the war which permitted it -- not
merely as things that happened way back in the 40s, nor because in '44, the
year I was born, the Third Reich contrived to murder more innocent civilians
than the combined populations of Trinidad and Jamaica, but also because, on
dark mornings, I fear that we, the world in the 21st Century, have not heard
the last of that rough beast. Besides, I had recently discovered that among the
things my own students (two years away from becoming journalists themselves)
had never heard of, was something called The Final Solution.
So now I
scanned this spectral professor's lecture outlines.
They were
pretty exhaustive, I have to say, and up to date: about half of the 14 lectures
promised to worry over the "intentionalist-functionalist" debate, the
current bone of contention among scholars of Nazi Germany.
("Intentionalist": a capitalist's point of view -- with Nietzche's
"superman" behind it -- which holds that Hitler was the "evil
genius" who more or less single-handedly perpetrated the Holocaust.
"Functionalist": the Marxian counter-perspective, which argues that
the decay of Germany's political culture, institutions and decision-making
processes combined with the increasing radicalisation of National Socialism to
lead inexorably to genocide: to a Holocaust which Hitler encouraged, but which
he neither created nor orchestrated.)
Trying to
deduce from his "outlines" which side the lecturer himself (or
herself) was on, I found (under "Lecture 7: The Genesis of the Final
Solution"): "...the goals of Barbarossa...the barbarisation of
warfare..." and guessed from this that the unknown lecturer and I might
indeed share the same view of how the Holocaust came to pass.
Briefly,
that view (and I hope I'm not misrepresenting you, sir, ma'am) is as follows.
By the
1920s, the virus of anti-Semitism was embedded deep in the German imagination,
or at least in the gothic, blood-&-soil, mumbo-jumbo part; and Hitler was
particularly diseased with it. He wanted the Jews out of Germany, out of Europe
-- but beyond that he was incapable of going, even in his own mind, for the
time being.
His
astonishing diplomatic-military successes between '38 and '40, however,
achieved in the face of opposition by his advisors and generals, drove him over
the edge of megalomania -- in which state, the irrational, continuing defiance
of puny Britain nearly sent him mad. Already planning the invasion of the
Soviet Union, he put it off by three weeks (three fatal weeks, it turned out,
in view of the waiting Russian winter) in order to savage little Czechoslovakia
first. And by the time he launched Barbarossa -- three million men crashing
across the Soviet border in the greatest invasion the world had ever known --
his moral character had degenerated to the point where he was entirely a
creature of what psychiatrists would call his Id.
Hitler
had long hankered after the conquest of "living space" to the East, a
necessary prerequisite, as he saw it, for the expansion of the German
population. But there's evidence a-plenty that, when he thought about how to
dispose of the people who were already there, so to speak, he had originally
envisaged nothing worse (w-e-l-l) than their deportation to Asian Russia,
beyond the Urals.
Now,
however, to his Id-ridden character, deportation was not enough. The armies of
the Reich were to have fallen upon the Soviet Union like a plague, murdering,
pillaging, razing, enslaving.
So
Barbarossa was not just to be a war. It was to be nothing like the Third
Reich's earlier, Western battlefield engagements; nothing like anything the
world had ever seen.
Out of
that savagery -- which, since Germany's traditional political structures were
by now all down, quickly infected and debased not only the infamous SS, but the
Nazi party and the much-vaunted "Prussian" German High Command --
would come, almost impromptu, and very much in the spirit of improvisation, the
monstrosity that would sober up, and profoundly demoralise, thinking men and
women, no doubt "to the end of time": the Holocaust.
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Photos:
56KA0020SCOUTS, Kenneth Austin
13LK0448GRP, dinner in Caracas
12RF0368RFABGO, Richard Farrah and Brian Goddard
08KA2041KABGRP, Kazim Abalasi and Clergy
