Circular No 669

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

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubH6BnTqKQ8&feature=youtu.be

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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:

http://abbeyschool2014circulars.blogspot.com/

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'

Wayne Brown
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