Order and Place in a Colonial City: Patterns of Struggle and Resistance in Georgetown, British Guiana,1889-1924 9780773570696

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Order and Place in a Colonial City

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Order and Place in a Colonial City Patterns of Struggle and Resistance in Georgetown, British Guiana, 1889-1924 j ua n i t a d e b a r r o s

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2002 isbn 0-7735-2455-x Legal deposit first quarter 2003 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec

Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing activities.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication De Barros, Juanita Order and place in a colonial city: patterns of struggle and resistance in Georgetown, British Guiana, 1889-1924/Juanita De Barros. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-7735-2455-x 1. Georgetown (Guyana) – Ethnic relations. 2. Social conflict – Guyana – Georgetown – History. 3. Public spaces – Guyana – Georgetown – History. 4. Georgetown (Guyana) – History. i. Title. 988.1′5 f2389.g3d42 2003 c2002-903232-6

This book was typeset by Dynagram Inc. in 10/12 Palatino.

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For Michael And in memory of Gerald De Barros (1925–87), whose stories of Georgetown’s streets enlivened my childhood and inspired this book.

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Contents

Acknowledgments xi 1 Introduction

3

2 The Garden City of the West Indies

16

3 Cesspool City: Sanitarianism in Colonial Georgetown 4 Order and Festivity in Georgetown 68 5 Hucksters, Markets, and the Struggle to Control Public Space 96 6 Hawkers and the Milk Industry

114

7 Riot and the Struggle to Control the Street 8 Conclusion

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Notes 173 Bibliography Index

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Tables, Maps, and Illustrations

ta b l e s 2.1 Distribution of British Guiana’s population

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2.2 Population of Georgetown and environs 29 2.3 Ethnic breakdown of British Guiana population 32 2.4 Percentage of ethnic groups living in Georgetown 2.5 The population of Georgetown, by ethnicity

34

34

2.6 Ward by ward distribution of Georgetown’s population, 1891 35 2.7 Ward by ward distribution of Georgetown’s population, 1911 36 2.8 Ward by ward distribution of Georgetown’s population, 1921 37 2.9 Ward by ward distribution of Georgetown’s population, 1931 38 2.10 Gender in British Guiana

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2.11 Gender in Georgetown (including environs and shipping) 39 2.12 Population of Georgetown by ward, gender

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x Tables, Maps, and Illustrations

2.13 Ethnicity and gender in Georgetown 41 2.14 Population of Georgetown by ward, 1891–1931

42

2.15 Nationality of non-commissioned officers and men in the British Guiana police Force 45 4.1 Domestic servants in Georgetown and its environs 5.1 Merchants, shopkeepers, and agents in Georgetown

81 102

5.2 Indo-Guianese merchants, agents, and shopkeers in Georgetown and its environs 102 5.3 Indo-Guianese hucksters/pedlars in Georgetown and its environs 102

maps 1 British Guiana, 1910 2 Stabroek, 1804

2

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3 City of Georgetown, 1886

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illustrations 1 Flower-filled canal in Georgetown, c. 1912 2 Georgetown, c. 1912

5

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3 High Street, Georgetown

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4 Public buildings, 1860s 18 5 Street corner, Georgetown, c. 1912 6 Sea Wall, Georgetown, c. 1912

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7 Water Street, with Stabroek Market in the distance, c. 1913 71 8 View of Georgetown from Lighthouse Tower, c. 1913 9 Georgetown Docks, c. 1912 10 Stabroek Market, c. 1912

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11 “Little Fishes in the Milk!”

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12 “To Milk, or Not to Milk?”

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13 Water Street 141

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Acknowledgments

A number of people and organizations have provided the financial, intellectual, and emotional support needed to see this work through to completion. Much of the research was funded by York University (through the Faculty of Arts), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Nigerian Hinterland Project (York University), and the Rockefeller Foundation Archives. A fellowship at the Center for Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Michigan provided the time and resources to complete the final revisions of the manuscript. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I also appreciate the assistance provided by the staff at the various archives and libraries where I conducted the research, including the National Archives of Guyana (and its head, Ivar Rodrigues), the Caribbean Research Library at the University of Guyana, the Public Record Office at Kew, the British Library, the Library of Congress, and the interlibrary loan departments at Scott Library at York University and the Hatcher Graduate Library at the University of Michigan. I am also grateful to Mary Noel Menezes (Sister Noel) for sending sources and documents my way and whose generosity and kindness I much appreciated while in Guyana. Likewise, I am indebted to Paul Craven and Douglas Hay for allowing me to work with the Master and Servant Project (at York University) and to use the rich materials they collected, notably vast numbers of British Guiana ordinances.

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Acknowledgments

Robert Hill kindly allowed me to read the unpublished volume of British Guiana documents (part of the Marcus Garvey and unia Papers series). Rosemarijn Hoefte and Teresita Martinez Vergne generously sent me chapters of their books, both or which helped me conceptualize key issues in my own work. For crucial assistance in the preparation of the manuscript, I would like to thank Sugi Sumali at the Instructor’s Technology Lab at the University of Michigan and Kyla Madden and Joan McGilvray at McGill-Queen’s University Press. This book owes its existence to a great many people. David Trotman, as thesis supervisor and ongoing mentor, has kept me on course throughout this project, with his unfailing good humour, tranquillity, and, perhaps most important, his intellectual rigour. Bettina Bradbury and Patrick Taylor read the book in an early form and offered helpful comments. Franklin Knight, Paul Lovejoy, Elinor Melville, and Nicholas Rogers also read an early version of the manuscript; I want to thank them not only for their comments but for their ongoing enthusiasm for and interest in my work. The detailed comments and suggestions of the anonymous reviewers for the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme (Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada) were also extremely helpful. In addition, Nigel Bolland and Jack Kerkering kindly read the introduction and provided incisive comments. Earlier versions of some chapters were presented at various conferences, and I appreciated the comments and encouragement elicited there, in particular by the members of York University’s Tubman Seminar and my colleagues at the Association of Caribbean Historians (especially Nigel Bolland and Brinsley Samaroo). For a Caribbean historian so long resident in Canada, the intellectual community of friends and colleagues at the ach has been particularly important. My friends and family have also provided support and encouragement and listened to (or ignored, as seemed appropriate) various non sequiturs on dirt and riot in Georgetown. In particular, I want to thank Audra Diptee, Stuart McCook, Sean Stilwell, Winfried Siemerling, Silke Strickrodt, Karen Green, Tony Hanik, Gary Hopkinson, Michael Redhill, Ann Simard, Lynda Shorten, and Marcia Wallace. I also want to thank my extended family – of the De Barros, Rigby, Keefe, Helm, and McKeown branches. In particular, I owe more than I can ever express to my mother, Gwenyth De Barros, who continues to inspire me daily. Finally, this book would not have been completed without the loving support and encouragement of Michael Helm.

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Order and Place in a Colonial City

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British Guiana, 1910 (Timehri, vol. 3, 1915)

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1 Introduction

Guyana1 is the fabled El Dorado, the mythical land between the Amazon and Orinoco Rivers that drew Walter Raleigh and other stalwart English explorers to look for riches that never materialized. It has exercised the imaginations of Europeans for centuries, attracting adventurers anxious to chart the land and discover its hidden wealth. Part impenetrable jungle and part cultivated coastal lowlands, Guyana defies simple definition, its identity divided between the West Indies and South America, Africa and India. Even the lines marking Guyana’s international boundary (signifiers of modern statehood) are variously drawn, depending on the provenance of the map in question. Understanding Guyana means accepting ambiguity. The domestication and settlement of the once inhospitable and swampy coast imposed a false certainty on British Guiana’s land and history. The construction of plantations and the production of sugar provided both geographical order and the wealth that had seemed so elusive. Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that Guyanese historians have looked to the plantations to make sense of the country’s history and to provide answers for the questions of the present. But this historiography has largely neglected a highly important aspect of the country’s history – its capital city of Georgetown. This study hopes to uncover new, urban paradigms that, at the same time, reflect wider Guyanese and West Indian patterns. Georgetown is an enigma. By some accounts, late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Georgetown was beautiful. Located where the Demerara River meets the Atlantic Ocean, it was a city of steadily

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4 Order and Place in a Colonial City

blowing ocean breezes; flower-filled canals; wide, tree-lined boulevards; and white-washed wooden houses on stilts surrounded by flowering gardens. However, contemporaries described another Georgetown, this one crime-ridden and dirty, where unemployed men, dangerous youths, and uncontrollable women filled the streets with disorder, chaos, and filth. The sources show yet a third Georgetown, one not so explicitly drawn. This city was a place of festivity, of bridges and streets where one could gamble by the hour, of street-corner rum shops where friends gathered to pass the time. This Georgetown was a place of hard-won but uncertain livelihoods, its streets and its marketplaces offering work to would-be porters, dock workers, and vendors. These conflicting views of colonial Georgetown were held variously by the city’s diverse social groups. The poor and quasi-criminal classes saw Georgetown’s public spaces as sites of “play” and livelihood, while the local elites – in place of the orderly, uncongested spaces they valued – saw dirty streets in need of control.2 Focusing on the years between the riot of 1889 and that of 1924, this study examines the struggle for cultural hegemony in Georgetown’s public spaces – a battle over which vision would triumph in the post-emancipation period, that of the city’s poor or that of the local elites. It argues that the city’s subordinate classes, composed of petty criminals, casual and marginally employed labourers, and small traders, imposed their own vision of order. These ethnically and occupationally diverse groups described Georgetown’s streets and markets as places of recreation and livelihood, and they defended this view, at times violently. The violence, though, could be double-edged, and victory equivocal, for these common areas also saw implosive struggles as members of the subordinate and superordinate classes fought amongst themselves and, at times, undermined their fellows’ attempts to order the city’s streets and markets. Yet intra-group disputes among the former, at times turning on ethnic difference, did not lead them to question the role of public spaces as places within which they could recreate and earn a living. Although Georgetown’s population was mostly Afro-Guianese, it also included Indo-, Portuguese-, and Chinese-Guianese; thus crowds in the city’s streets and marketplaces were ethnically diverse, the various groups contributing to the creation of a popular Creole vision of the function of these public areas. Although this vision was peculiarly Guianese – informed by that colony’s history, geography, and culture – at its root lay a West Indian understanding of the streets and markets as the repositories of the values of reputation as opposed to the values of house-bound respectability.

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5 Introduction

Flower-filled canal in Georgetown, c. 1912. (Rodway, Guiana, n.p.)

“Creole” has several meanings, depending on one’s vantage point. In the Americas generally, it is used to describe populations of Old World origins born in the New World. In the Caribbean, though, it also refers to the new culture that developed in the region as a result of “creolization,” which Edward Brathwaite defines as “the cultural action or social process” that saw natives and newcomers interact creatively within the Caribbean environment.3 The cross-cultural adoptions and adaptations among Africans, Europeans, and, later, Indians resulted in the creation of new, peculiarly West Indian, cultural forms. In particular, the “little traditions”– cultural activities mainly practised by “the rural and urban working-class and folk” – constituted a rich source for these exchanges.4 But, as Nigel Bolland usefully reminds us, creolization was a “process of contention.” 5 Order and Place in a Colonial City is informed by a similar understanding of creolization and argues that the “little traditions“ of Georgetown’s multiracial and multiethnic urban poor contributed to the construction of a particular view of the role and significance of public spaces – one that was articulated in the course of struggle. The kind of cultural miscegenation permitted by the daily exchanges that marked urban life in Georgetown stood in contrast to the degree of ethnic segregation that existed in British Guiana’s plantation sector, where Indo- and Afro-Guianese often lived in separate

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6 Order and Place in a Colonial City

villages and performed different kinds of labour on the estates.6 Thus, non-elite urban social and cultural life in British Guiana contradicts the conclusions of those who ascribe to the theory of cultural pluralism, a theory that has informed the work of a number of Guyanese historians and social scientists who have described an ethnically separate post-slavery British Guiana peopled by diverse groups that are unable to cohere.7 The work of M.G. Smith, pace J.S. Furnivall, has been singularly influential in this respect. He argues that plural societies, such as those found in the Caribbean, are unable to develop unified “cultural, social, and ideational patterns” largely due to incompatible “core” institutions and, thus, are marked by instability and ethnic separation.8 Scholars who have critized the application of this theory to Guyana have argued that its adherents have been unduly influenced by more recent tensions between Afro- and IndoGuyanese, particularly the ethnic violence of the early 1960s, which resulted in hundred of deaths.9 Although this ethnic-based social unrest has most notably marked Guyana’s modern history, there were ethnic tensions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well. Yet these took a different form and were largely expressed by Afro- and Portuguese-Creoles fighting over livelihood strategies. As historians have noted for other colonies in the post-slavery British Caribbean, class conflict also defined this period. For British Guiana, Walter Rodney’s work is seminal in this regard. These tensions, though, were entangled with culture and, specifically, with ideas about appropriate behaviour. Diverse groups controlled British Guiana’s post-slavery political and economic life. At the senior administrative levels most were white, British-born, and in British Guiana as temporary administrators. Included here were the governor, government officials, senior members of the police force, and many missionaries, particularly from the London Missionary Society. In the late nineteenth century, much of British Guiana’s plantocracy was similarly positioned: British-born and resident long enough to manage the estates for which they were responsible. Indeed, there were relatively few resident estate proprietors – fourteen or fifteen in 1870 out of perhaps 136; of the remainder, some eighty-five were owned by absentees and thirty-six by individuals doubling as merchants or estate attorneys or managers. (By 1904 thirty-five of the forty-six functioning plantations were limited liability companies.)10 Although these individuals were predominantly white and of British origin, they were increasingly joined by representatives of other groups – Portuguese merchants and black and coloured professionals by the late nineteenth century and their Indo-Guianese counterparts by the early twentieth century.11 As this

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7 Introduction

new non-British middle and professional class gained access to political and economic power, many of its members acquired a commitment to “elite” culture, largely because such acculturation was necessary for social mobility and the appearance of respectability. This was the case not only in British Guiana but also throughout the Anglophone Caribbean, as the work of Bridget Brereton and Patrick Bryan demonstrates.12 Thus, as Brian Moore argues for British Guiana, “elite Victorian culture [was not in] the exclusive possession of the white population.”13 Although the views articulated by these groups were not by any means homogeneous, there was considerable agreement with regard to their positions on key cultural questions. This is particularly apparent when one examines the editorial stances of the various newspapers. Despite the differences in their political stances (the Argosy articulated a pro-planter perspective, the Chronicle a more liberal view, while the Creole spoke for the middle and labouring classes) and the social position of their editors (sometime Argosy editor James Thomson was part owner of a sugar estate, whereas Chronicle and Creole editors C.K. Jardine and Patrick Dargan, respectively, were lawyers, the latter of mixed black and white descent), there was a uniformity in the cultural positions expressed, particularly when it came to questions of public order.14 This hegemonic process was not unique to the colonial British Caribbean, of course. As scholars of colonial Indian and African history have amply demonstrated, European/Western values appealed to local “colonized middle classes.”15 These scholars look to Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony to explain these groups’ acceptance of “colonial perceptions”16 and their “consent or acquiescence” to the rule of another class.17 Raymond Williams defines hegemony as “describ[ing] a more general predominance which includes, as one of its key features, a particular way of seeing the world and human nature and relationships.”18 Its achievement, though, is never permanent; hegemony must be “continually ... defended.”19 That this notion of hegemony is, in the words of Terry Eagleton, “inseparable from overtones of struggle” is relevant to British Guiana.20 There, according to Moore, “all sections of the cultural elite, both white and educated brown/black” participated in the attempt to “civilize” the non-white masses.21 In particular, the former’s “way of seeing the world” – notably that section of it encompassing Georgetown’s public spaces – set the stage for cultural conflict. Inspired by the work of Jurgen Habermas, historians have begun to explore the significance of public spaces – such as taverns, coffee houses, meeting halls, and the like – as arenas for discussion and debate and, therefore, as key to the development of the “public sphere.”22

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8 Order and Place in a Colonial City

Although Habermas based his work on examples from European history, some historians have demonstrated that interactions in public areas played a central role in the emergence of a public sphere in the non-European, colonized world. Sandria Freitag, for example, argues that “collectivities in open spaces constituted a fundamental form of expression of the polity,” and, in particular, “enactments,” such as processions through important urban areas, not only “claimed and tamed” these places but also transmitted “important messages about the significance of the cultural event.”23 The places in which these “enactments” and other kinds of cultural and social events occurred were not incidental. Their specificity and their meaning (the images and myths surrounding them) – acquired through use and history – made them significant.24 As E. Relph argues, a place is more than “just the ’where’ of something.” It includes “physical setting ... activities ... and meanings,” the latter the result of “human intentions and experiences.”25 Places, according to David Harvey, “are constructed and experienced as material ecological artefacts and intricate networks of social relations,” drawing “much of their distinctive character from the collective activities of people who dwell there.”26 First slaves and then free labourers built British Guiana, rescuing it from the sea and erecting the plantations from which its wealth was derived. They also constructed Georgetown’s public spaces – its market buildings, parks, and streets – putting mortar to brick, fitting plank to plank. They were “place[s] that [had] been laboured on.”27 They were also places upon which meaning had been inscribed. Through use, tradition, and the weight of collective activity, these places became significant to the urban poor who congregated in them. They were also disputed sites. The city’s heterogeneous elites attempted to order these places in accordance with their own cultural vision, informed by a common Victorian fear of urban filth and danger. For Britons, as Peter Stallybrass and Allon White argue, the “nineteenth-century city was produced as the locus of fear, disgust, and fascination.”28 Such sentiments seemed particularly acute for Europeans overseas. Dipesh Chakrabarty has demonstrated that they saw nineteenth-century Indian cities as filled with “dirt and disorder.”29 The presence of the urban poor, though, made cities even more frightening. Gareth Stedman Jones describes Victorian fears of the “dangerous” classes – the criminal and the unrespectable poor – sentiments captured in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, which clearly represents these terrors and their ready representation in the language of sanitation and disease.30 Early Victorian explanations of disease identified both environment and social behaviour as causes, leading to attacks on obviously sanitary problems as well as to the en-

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9 Introduction

couragement of “good” behaviour, such as cleanliness and orderliness.31 In the popular mind of Victorian Britain, the poor were associated with dirt, making filth itself a moral issue; but for Britons in the colonies, such attitudes incorporated current ideas about race and racism.32 Contemporaneous discourse delineated an intimate relationship between disease, sanitation, race, and the colonial enterprise, particularly in Africa and India.33 Crowded urban areas filled Europeans with “political and medical” fears, leaving them terrified of the conspiracies that could be hatched as well as of the germs that could be spread. Thus, in Chakrabarty’s words, the “imperialist” reaction was to “make the bazaar [and] the street ... regulated places, clean and healthy, incapable of producing either disease or disorder.”34 Colonial administrators and medical practitioners believed that European medical and sanitary practices contributed to the growth of civilization, European-style.35 Mark Harrison argues that “many sanitary officers perceived themselves to be in the vanguard not only of western medicine but of western culture in general.”36 Yet, as David Arnold points out, “medicine was a part of the ideology as well as the accountancy of empire.” Both inside and outside colonial cities, authorities were motivated by a fear of disease transmitted by non-whites and a concern for labour efficiency.37 Although similar ideas informed policy decisions in the postemancipation British Caribbean, its historians have been slow to address its significance; only recently have they begun to examine the development of sanitarianism and public health in the region.38 The neglect on the part of Guyanese historians (with the exceptions of Jay Mandle and Clem Seecharan) is particularly striking as these concerns at times seemed to dominate late nineteenth- and early twentieth century discourse.39 In British Guiana, high mortality and morbidity rates were believed to aggravate the chronic labour shortage. Although plantocracies throughout the region complained about a deficit of labourers in the post-slavery years, in British Guiana – where the relatively late development of plantation slavery had resulted in a comparatively smaller labouring population – planters and government officials articulated this complaint with particular force, insisting that the sugar estates needed many more workers than were available. Though Georgetown, like many colonial cities, saw high rates of death and infectious disease, concern about both was intensified by the city’s peculiar environment. Several feet below sea level, Georgetown was tenuously protected from the sea by sluice-gates, canals, and a granite breakwater and sea wall.40 The city’s geography (and, indeed, that of the entire colony) facilitated the

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Order and Place in a Colonial City

spread of disease and constituted an obstacle to the easy introduction of sanitation systems. Concern about public health and evolving conceptions of sanitary practices provided legal and moral weapons for colonial authorities, who could then exert control over public spaces in the name of attempting to rid them of filth and refuse. Franklin Knight argues that the individual territories of the Caribbean “pass through the same general experiences, [although] ... at different times.”41 The history of Guyana, despite its differences from other parts of the Caribbean, lends weight to this point. Although some scholars omit Guyana from the Caribbean, as though its mainland status disqualifies it from membership in a region comprised mostly of islands, its history places it squarely within the Caribbean. As was the case with the rest of the Caribbean, new European arrivals reconstituted the Amerindian-inhabited Guianas as colonies. Originally Dutch possessions, Berbice, Demerara, and Essequibo (the last two of which were united in 1813 as Demerara-Essequibo, which subsequently joined Berbice in 1831 to form British Guiana) changed hands with dizzying rapidity during the fighting of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, passing between the Dutch, the French, and the British before finally becoming a permanent British possession in 1803.42 The Dutch initiated plantation agriculture in the three colonies (Alvin Thompson locates the “gradual elaboration of the plantation system” in the period between the 1730s and 1800)43 and the production of sugar, coffee, and cotton. In the process, they (and their slaves) undertook the first major empoldering of the low-lying coastal lands. Sugar cultivation expanded with the arrival of British planters and enslaved Africans and Afro-Creoles from Britain’s other Caribbean colonies. They quickly transformed the new colony into a major exporter of cotton, coffee, and, after 1810, sugar. So successful were they that, between 1810 and 1834, sugar production in British Guiana outpaced that of Britain’s other West Indian possessions.44 Slavery ended in British Guiana in the 1830s, as it did in the rest of the British-controlled Caribbean. Historians of the region consider the post-slavery years to be marked by a series of battles to define the new political, economic, and cultural order, as plantocracies throughout the region responded to the new challenges of freedom with a mindset that had been developed during the time of slavery. As David Trotman argues, “the production of sugar by a large labour force tied to large plantations and ... run by either resident European owners or the representatives of absentees” was much more than an economic arrangement: in the eyes of the plantocracy, it represented “civilization.” Thus, “despite all the moral clamorings, this concept

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Introduction

inherited from the days of slavery was still dominant in the nineteenth century.”45 These colonial concerns were expressed within an imperial ideological matrix. After the 1840s views of Afro-Creoles as idle and savage, existing within an Eden-like setting that made work unnecessary, dominated colonial and imperial discourse. They were also expressed in more popular works. Thomas Carlyle’s 1849 “Discourses on the Nigger Question,” though one of the more infamous examples, was hardly unique. Carlyle described idle “Quashee” eating pumpkin “while the sugar-crops rot[ted] ... uncut, because labour [could not] be hired or so cheap [were] the pumpkins.”46 Colonial politicians and planters (often one and the same) attempted to force the freed population to continue to work on the sugar estates. Yet, although these efforts enjoyed some measure of success, former slaves stubbornly used their new freedom to, among other things, leave the plantations for villages and urban centres. In doing so they threatened planter control over estate labour. Caribbean sugar production had long depended on cheap, dependent labour, but the industry’s decline after the 1840s – due to British trade policies and the competition of cane sugar from Latin America and beet sugar from Europe – made such a workforce even more necessary. Yet this urban Afro-Creole population also, in the eyes of the plantocracies, posed a threat to public order: local political and economic elites throughout the region represented the men and women congregating in the streets as idle and criminal. These former slaves joined those men and women who had lived in the region’s cities before the end of slavery. The range of economic, political, and social functions long fulfilled by Caribbean cities – some were simultaneously colonial capitals and ports – meant that they were home to government officials, merchants, and planters desirous (for health or social reasons) of time away from the plantations. As Barry Higman’s work demonstrates, during the period of slavery, they were also home to significant numbers of enslaved and free Afro-Creoles, seeming to offer them a refuge from the plantations; during slavery, slaves sometimes escaped to the towns, hoping to hide themselves among a free black and coloured population.47 When slavery ended, former slaves left the plantations for urban areas, and, in some territories, their numbers were augmented by former indentureds, as Colin Clarke and Verene Shepherd demonstrate.48 Higman’s description of West Indian capital cities during the late slave period as “overwhelming in [their] dominance”49 remains relevant in parts of the region for the post-slavery years; in some colonies, these cities constituted the only major urban centre (this was the case with Port-of-Spain and Georgetown) and acquired ever-larger proportions

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Order and Place in a Colonial City

of the overall population. Thus, by 1901, just over 20 per cent of Trinidad’s population lived in Port-of-Spain, and about the same percentage of British Guiana’s population inhabited Georgetown.50 Urban areas were also sites of remarkable cultural fertility in the Anglophone Caribbean. Most notably, carnival and its related festivities emerged in the social and economic context of colonial Port-ofSpain, Trinidad. Yet public spaces were particularly crucial to these cultural developments. A rich body of work explores the creation of a Creole cultural tradition that emphasizes the significance of urban public areas in this respect. For example, Peter Wilson, Roger Abrahams, and Richard Burton brilliantly delineate a West Indian carnival complex that they locate in public space.51 The sparse historical literature on Georgetown uncovers similar developments. Brian Moore identifies its urban streets and yards as a “breeding ground of a dynamic and vibrant folk culture of the Afro-Creole working people.”52 The tendency of poor urban dwellers to gather in the streets and other open areas allowed for these developments. The unemployed and casually employed congregated there, waiting to be offered work or just passing the time. Indeed, in Georgetown, where homes for working people were generally small (often rooms or apartments in rectangular buildings, or “ranges”) and frequently dirty (due to overcrowding and inadequate sanitary facilities), the street provided one of the few locales for recreation and socializing.53 Yet urban areas were sites of potential violence and unrest. As Alvin Magid argues, the strategic location of colonial cities meant that “urban rather than rural areas were apt to be the first – or at least the main – places where political discontent was channeled into organizations of protest against one or more aspects of colonial rule and imperial policy.” Thus, Trinidad’s capital, Port-of-Spain, was a locus for “anticolonial nationalism.”54 Indeed, many of the riots that swept the region in the post-emancipation period – as former slaves and former masters struggled to establish a new, post-slavery dispensation – were sparked in urban areas before developing into wider conflagrations. These included the Jonkannu Christmas riots in Kingston, Jamaica, 1840 and 1841; the Angel Gabriel riots in Georgetown, British Guiana, 1856; the carnival riots in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, 1881, 1883, and 1884; and the Guy Fawkes riots in St George’s, Grenada, 1885. Although the sheer number of riots in the post-slavery British West Indies preclude easy generalizations, both these urban-based struggles – and those originating in rural areas – emerged out of the inequitable economic and political structures that continued to oppress local populations, much as they had during the period of slavery. The

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Introduction

power of the sugar industry and the unrepresentative political system – a non-democratic assembly system in most of the Anglophone Caribbean before 1865 and an even less democratic and less responsive Crown colony system after 1865 – excluded most of the population from formal political life and, thus, from legally improving the conditions under which they lived as well as from protecting key popular institutions. Economic factors invariably underlay these riots: the decline of the sugar industry, combined with peculiarly local conditions, had a disastrous impact on colonial economies and working people’s lives;55 in particular, the sugar depression of the late nineteenth century provided the context for a cluster of riots in the 1890s in places such as Dominica, St Kitts, Montseratt, and British Guiana.56 Yet the riots were more than responses to hunger, low wages, and high prices. Emancipated populations frequently rioted to protect the cultural and economic institutions and rights they had developed during the period of slavery – institutions that defined freedom and that continued to provide autonomous space after slavery’s end.57 The nature of these riots changed during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as attempts to defend and define freedom forced the emancipated population to grapple with other issues, bringing the disenfranchized into contact with a largely unresponsive and, at times, discriminatory legal system, which, in turn, provoked more riots, these now being explicitly concerned with demanding equal access to the legal system. If many early post-emancipation riots were animated by popular concerns about protecting freedom, then many of the later ones, starting with Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion, can be seen as having been animated by the attempt to establish new rights, to gain equality rather than to protect freedom. Indeed, popular concerns about justice, political rights, and workers rights impelled many of the later post-emancipation riots.58 As disputes sparked by wage demands spread, they frequently became violent and disorganized, reflecting the region’s generally weak trade union movement.59 This study places Georgetown within this wider regional context while also attempting to fill several gaps in the historical literature not only of British Guiana but also of the post-slavery Anglophone Caribbean. Examining the tensions in urban public spaces expands our understanding of the kinds of cultural struggles in which freed peoples engaged in their efforts to establish a new, post-slavery dispensation in the British West Indies. It also demonstrates that Afro-Creole cultural practices apparent elsewhere in the Anglophone Caribbean, particularly those of festivity and carnival, can be seen in British Guiana during the same

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Order and Place in a Colonial City

period.60 Finally, it highlights the influence of sanitarian discourse on colonial policy and its impact on the lives of working people in the region. Order and Place in a Colonial City first examines the competing visions of public space in Georgetown. It sets out the superordinate and subordinate classes’ respective views of the sanitary order of the streets and markets in the city, revealing their congruencies and contradictions and the readiness with which support for metropolitan-defined ideas of cleanliness was undermined. This chapter argues that the elites’ concerns with disease and sanitation informed their understanding of public space and contributed to their representation of the city’s poor as unclean and in need of regulation. These two groups also held competing visions of the role and significance of the city’s public areas. The superordinate classes saw them as chaotic and disorderly, whereas the urban poor viewed them as places of play and livelihood. The petty retail sector as a whole was particularly important in this respect as it provided a refuge from the plantations and made a livelihood possible. Control over Georgetown’s markets, though, was contested by vendors, market officials, town constables, and representatives of the city’s medical/scientific bureaucracy. Although disputes were part of daily life in Georgetown’s public spaces, at times these erupted in widespread riots. Such riots were configured by a series of repertoires, ranging from traditional cultural practices to the rituals of trade unionism and demonstrating the kinds of festive behaviour seen in popular attempts to order public spaces.

a n o t e o n l a n g ua g e The language of race has long bedevilled Caribbean scholars. Indeed, the term “race” itself is particularly vexing. Although it has become a truism to maintain that race is a social or mental construct, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was readily used to describe a complex of physical and cultural traits, this use gaining scientific justification as the nineteenth century progressed.61 In British Guiana, the terms “black,” “Portuguese,” and “Indian” were used in this fashion. The words doubtless referred to physical attributes (e.g., skin colour and hair texture); but, for the most part, they described perceived social traits and thus functioned as a kind of shorthand. Raymond T. Smith argues that these “categories reflect distinctions made by Guianese in everyday life,” but they can also be seen, to an extent, as elite-generated, disseminated through census reports and other kinds of official documents.62 Given this lack of precision, I have generally opted to employ the term “ethnic group” (or its variants) in this work

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Introduction

rather than “race” to refer to the different Guianese population groups; according to M.G. Smith, the former can be defined as populations “that identify themselves and are distinguished by others by their distinct common ancestry and provenience, real or putative.”63 I have used several terms to denote ethnicity. Members of particular groups who were born abroad have been described as “African,” “(East) Indian,” “Portuguese,” and so on. I have used the suffixes “Creole” or “Guianese” to describe those born in British Guiana (e.g., “Afro-Creole” and “Afro-Guianese”). Contemporaneous accounts frequently characterize Afro-Creoles as “Creole”; where they do so, I have tried to add “Afro-” for the sake of clarification.

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2 The Garden City of the West Indies A certain amount of increased criminal activity was noticeable during the Christmas holidays, but this is usual and is no doubt due to the large numbers which annually return to Georgetown and the coastlands from the diamond and balata fields at that season.1 Inspector General of Police

Georgetown played an important role in the political, economic, and social life of British Guiana. Founded considerably later than many West Indian capitals, it grew in size and significance throughout the nineteenth century. Established as a military base in 1781 and carved out of plantations, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Georgetown was simultaneously the colony’s most important port and its political and administrative centre, the locus of elite cultural and intellectual life and a magnet for working people from throughout the colony. Georgetown can be seen as the hub of British Guiana, its spokes radiating to the rest of the colony. The seat of the colonial government, Georgetown was home to the Government Buildings and the governor’s residence. The colony’s growing financial infrastructure was located in Georgetown, where banks and insurance companies established offices – the Colonial Bank and the British Guiana Bank, the Hand-in-Hand Company and the B.G. Mutual Company.2 Georgetown was also the centre for the colony’s repressive apparatus. Before the withdrawal of British troops in the early 1890s, the city had been the headquarters of the 2nd West India Regiment.3 Afterwards, although police were posted in individual villages throughout the colony, Georgetown retained many police stations as well as the Eve Leary Barracks (the police officers residence). Consequently, Georgetown continued to be the nucleus for the colony’s forces.4 Georgetown was also the heart of elite cultural, intellectual, and social life. Although the institutions associated with this life were not numerous, they provided places for locals and foreigners to gather and socialize, furnishing small areas of colonial “civilization.” The Georgetown

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Garden City of the West Indies

Georgetown, c. 1912. (Rodway, Guiana, n.p.)

High Street, Georgetown (Author’s collection)

Club, the Carnegie free lending library, a museum, and the reading room and library of the Royal Agricultural and Commercial Society of British Guiana were all located in Georgetown.5 Founded in 1844, the society was one of the few intellectual institutions in the colony; it published a journal, Timehri, and gave members the opportunity to read papers on agricultural and commercial matters as well as on the colony’s

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Public Buildings, 1860s (Bennett, Illustrated History, n.p.)

history and social problems.6 Georgetown also played a significant role in elite social and recreational life. Although estate managers gave parties and dinners, members of local government, civil servants, managers of large firms, and the militia found much to amuse themselves within Georgetown. They attended balls, garden parties, and “swizzle parties” at Government House, the Assembly Rooms, the Eve Leary Barracks, and private homes – dancing to music provided by the militia band – and socialized at weddings and church services.7 They also whiled away their time at the city’s lawn tennis and shooting clubs. Some of these events attracted a wider range of participants. Georgetown was home to the Georgetown Cricket Club and its “excellent cricket ground.” According to Henry Kirke, former sheriff of Demerara, contests between Trinidad, Barbados, and British Guiana for possession of the Challenge Cup “produce[d] good cricket and much local enthusiasm.” Horse racing at Georgetown’s Durban Racecourse was also popular. Its two annual meetings, in the spring and fall, were widely attended and saw “gambling, cheating, drinking, and fighting go[ing] on in a most cheerful way [which] ... no one seem[ed] much the worse for.”8

georgetown and british gui ana Georgetown was a nexus for the people and products of British Guiana. It attracted East Coast and East Bank suburban and village producers of foodstuffs who sold their products in its markets and streets. It also drew labourers who were searching for work both locally and in the interior. Here porters plied their trade, dock workers loaded sugar sent from the estates up the rivers and along the coasts and unloaded imported food and luxuries. Here, also, workers who wanted to work in the interior offered their labour at the steamer stelling (from which steamers left daily for Bartica, the jumping off point for the gold diggings), registered themselves at the police magistrate’s office (and, later, at the Institute of Mines and Forests), and

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Garden City of the West Indies

bought gear with their cash advances.9 Walter Rodney writes of a post-emancipation British Guiana where labourers worked at different jobs, alternating these with periods of unemployment – a pattern that was apparent in Georgetown between the late 1880s and the mid-1920s. The same individual could work part of the year in the coastal sugar industry and part of the year in the interior digging gold or harvesting timber or balata, moving in and out of Georgetown as needed.10 Yet the sheer number of labourers in Georgetown concerned the colony’s political leaders; they contrasted the apparent labour shortage in the countryside with the labour surplus in Georgetown and worried that the unneeded urban workers could metamorphose into an unemployed and criminal residuum.11 The relationship between Georgetown and the colony’s littoral strip and its interior was intimate and interdependent, involving an exchange of people and goods. For much of British Guiana’s history, though, the coastal region had predominated, being the site of the sugar industry that powered the colony’s economy (rice, coconuts, coffee, and limes were also grown). Under the Dutch and then the British, enslaved, indentured, and free Africans, East Indians, Portuguese, and Chinese cultivated a narrow strip of land along the coast and the rivers. This fertile area is constantly in danger of flooding and requires an extensive and costly network of dams, sluice-gates (“kokers”), and canals. Although at one time the responsibility of individual estates, sea defence was taken over by the colonial government in the late 1910s.12 Rodney describes the impact of British Guiana’s peculiar geography on its working population as well as the expense and exertion to which they were subject in trying to protect their land and crops from the always encroaching sea.

th e c o a s t a n d s u g a r For much of its history, British Guiana’s economy has been based upon resource extraction, primarily sugar cultivation. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it did have industrial enterprises, but most of them refined agricultural products, producing sugar, rum, and molasses and milling rice. Apart from that, there were steam sawmills in Georgetown, New Amsterdam, and a few other parts of the colony; two foundries in Georgetown and one in New Amsterdam; and two match factories and a coconut oil soap factory near Georgetown. The colony also possessed a tannery and factories for the production of biscuits, boots, and chocolate.13 Agricultural production in British Guiana depended upon mastery of the coast. Estates along the Essequibo and Demerara Rivers (established in the eighteenth century) and along the Atlantic (constructed in

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Order and Place in a Colonial City

the early nineteenth century) required extensive sea defences and drainage. Thin rectangular estates, stretching lengthways from the shore, had front seawalls, “backdams,” and long canals irrigating and draining the whole through kokers at either dam. Eventually, over 100 miles of coastline was protected from the ocean. Before 1838 slaves kept the canals clear of silt and weeds, and afterwards the emancipated population and indentured immigrants continued this task for the proprietors of large estates as well as for their own lands and villages.14 The expected collapse of the sugar industry following the end of slavery in 1838 did not materialize; however, a crisis did hit in the mid-1880s, fuelled primarily by the emergence of cheap, subsidized European beet sugar, which forced prices down. In 1884 a surplus of beet sugar flooded the British market and began entering the United States market; this resulted in a price fall that, according to Adamson, was exceeded only by the one that followed the passage of the Sugar Duties Act in the 1840s. Heavily dependent upon sugar, British Guiana’s entire economy was affected by this crop’s decline.15 By the late 1880s prices stabilized somewhat, remaining relatively level for five or six years. After 1893 prices began to fall sharply again and continued to do so for the next ten years. The mid-1890s’ drop was caused by two developments in the international sugar market. The first was the introduction of an artificially coloured yellow beet sugar that undercut the value of British Guiana’s Demerara sugar. The second was the 40 per cent tariff the United States government placed on all sugars in 1894. In the early 1890s British Guiana had benefited from agreements with the United States to end tariffs on refined sugar and to institute charges on beet sugar.16 The annual reports of the 1890s noted the decline in the value of sugar, its deleterious effect on rum and molasses exports, and the frequent abandonment of estates.17 Planters cut their production costs, but conditions did not really improve until the Brussels Sugar Convention of 1902 and the easing of bounties for beet sugar.18 The fortunes of the sugar industry improved in the new century, although prices continued to fluctuate. According to Michael Moohr, between 1903 and 1910 prices for British Guiana’s sugar remained “fairly stable,” primarily due to the Brussels Convention.19 The drought of August 1911 to April 1912 resulted in the biggest decrease in the value of sugar exports since 1893–94, affecting production for 1913 as well.20 The start of the First World War witnessed a rise in sugar prices and an increase in rum exports; and, in general, the government secretary considered the war years to be prosperous ones for the sugar industry.21 An economic slump followed the war’s end as sugar prices fell to a nineteen-year low and the demand for rum declined, the war itself having constricted German markets and pro-

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Garden City of the West Indies

hibition the us ones. The wartime profits went to pay debts and to buy machinery at inflated prices, leaving many planters unable to repay their advances on the prices anticipated for the 1920 crop and, consequently, heavily indebted.22 In 1922 British Guiana’s economy was in a depression.23

l a b o u r i n g m e n a n d wo m e n As was true for the rest of the sugar-producing territories of the Caribbean, in British Guiana the fortunes of the sugar industry depended upon cheap, plentiful labour. However, the composition of this labour force changed following the end of slavery. On the eve of emancipation, the vast majority of British Guiana’s population was composed of enslaved Africans and Afro-Creoles. Their numbers grew rapidly from the late eighteenth century, increasing from 8,296 in 1762 to 90,169 in 1825.24 The end of the British slave trade was responsible for some of the population growth as, between 1808 and 1825, planters transported approximately 7,500 slaves from elsewhere in the British Caribbean to the newly acquired colonies of Berbice and Demerara-Essequibo. African-born men and women made up a large proportion of this enslaved population. According to Higman, in 1807 about 75 per cent of Demerara-Essequibo’s slave population was African-born, a percentage that dropped to 34.5 per cent by 1832.25 In 1832 the vast majority of these enslaved Africans and Afro-Creoles resided on sugar estates.26 Following emancipation, although some former slaves continued to work exclusively for the estates, others began cultivating their own land, and still more lived in villages, working on the estates for wages and farming plots of land for themselves.27 The colonial government, like those elsewhere in the Caribbean, attempted to compel former slaves to remain on the estates. The short-lived apprenticeship system (1834 to 1838) forced former slaves (now called apprentices) in the British West Indies to provide their former owners with forty-five hours of free labour each week. After the premature end of the apprenticeship system in 1838, local oligarchies – by exploiting tenancy arrangements, introducing discriminatory taxes, and establishing prohibitively high prices for Crown land – attempted to compel the freed population to continue to labour on the sugar plantations. In British Guiana the colonial government, as well as instituting similar policies, neglected the small farms and villages established after 1838 and discouraged Afro-Guianese from exploiting the gold and timber industry.28 West Indian planters, including those in British Guiana, also began importing contract labourers from abroad. Bound to the plantations for up to five years and liable to harsh penalties for violating their

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Order and Place in a Colonial City

contracts, these workers were to provide the inexpensive, plentiful estate labour the planters craved.29 Immigrants – mostly indentured labourers from India, Portugal, China, Java, and Africa – migrated to French, Spanish, Dutch, and British territories in the Caribbean; in the British West Indies, of the approximately 536,000 immigrants who arrived between 1834 and 1918, about 56 per cent went to British Guiana. This included close to 80 per cent (or 32,216) of the 40,971 Portuguese migrants to the British West Indies; 55 per cent (or 238,909) of the 429,623 Indians; 75 per cent (or 13,533) of the 17,904 Chinese; and about 35 per cent (or 14,060) of the 39,332 Africans,30 most of whom were from West or West Central Africa.31 In British Guiana, indentured immigrants – Portuguese, Chinese, African, but mostly Indian – dominated plantation work, while the emancipated population continued to work on the estates for wages.32 Although work on sugar estates had always been seasonal, Alan Adamson argues that it became more so after the mid-1880s when it was increasingly restricted to the months between October and December. Non-indentured plantation labourers lived in villages, which allowed them to combine wage labour on the estates with subsistence agriculture, whereas others were allowed additional privileges to ensure their continued presence on the estates (many were permitted to cultivate rice and to raise cattle).33 Yet the result was still periods of unemployment that were intensified by the crisis in the sugar industry, which lasted for much of the latter half of the 1880s and most of the 1890s. The industry’s improvement after the turn of the century was never consistent, occasionally retracting during times of drought or international crisis. Not all imported labourers remained on the estates once their indentures expired. The Portuguese left the sugar estates relatively quickly, many moving to the retail sector where some became major entrepreneurs. Chinese immigrants left the estates to become small farmers, while some, like the Portuguese, became shopkeepers. Significant numbers of Indo-Guianese continued to work for the plantations once their contracts expired, either remaining on the estates or residing in nearby villages. Both off and on the plantations, nonindentured Indian labourers combined estate labour with other agricultural activities: villagers engaged in subsistence agriculture and estate residents were occasionally permitted to use estate land to cultivate rice and raise cattle.34

minor industries As a consequence of the 1890s sugar industry crisis, British Guiana’s political and economic leaders began diversifying the economy; rice

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Garden City of the West Indies

and gold, balata, and timber from the interior became increasingly significant.35 Indo-Guianese had grown rice for subsistence since the 1860s, and its cultivation increased in the 1870s as they left the sugar estates upon the expiration of their indentures. However, with the drop in sugar prices in the 1890s, the cultivation of rice was sanctioned by planters who permitted indentured Indo-Guianese to grow it on estate property and by colonial politicians who settled their time-expired countrymen on abandoned estates.36 By 1900 the industry was well established and expanding in acreage. By the 1910s rice, along with sugar, had become one of British Guiana’s main products, its exports increasing during the war years.37 In the 1890s more attention was paid to other minor industries, particularly those in the colony’s interior. They cushioned the economic fallout of sugar’s decline and provided work for British Guiana’s labourers, primarily for male Afro-Creoles. Of these products, gold was initially the most important. In the 1880s significant quantities of gold were discovered throughout British Guiana’s interior.38 The colony’s gold industry grew in the last years of the 1880s and the first years of the 1890s as more of the precious metal was produced annually; by 1893 gold was British Guiana’s second most important export.39 Yet, in the midst of this optimism, gold production went into a decline that became pronounced before the 1910s and continued for the whole decade.40 However, during this period, other valuable natural resources were exploited. Balata gum and timber had been gathered since the last few decades of the nineteenth century. Balata was tapped from bulletwood trees and was used to make telegraph wires; although its production began in 1860, its value soon dropped, recovering only in the early 1880s. This industry was well established by the late 1880s, its exports increasing in the 1890s and the first years of the 1900s and the early 1910s. During the same period, the timber industry expanded as exports grew during the first years of the 1910s. The First World War forced a contraction in both industries, drying up demand for timber and balata. Although the timber industry remained dormant during the war, the balata industry picked up by 1915 and continued to produce during these years.41 The early 1900s also saw discoveries of bauxite deposits and the emergence of the diamond industry. The first diamond exports were made in 1901, with the industry growing in importance after the war, reaching a value of more than one million pounds by 1922 and attracting more and more labourers.42

c o n s t i t u t i o na l c h a n g e s The role of British Guiana’s secondary industries became a political issue in the 1880s, impelled by a largely middle-class reform movement

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that wanted fewer obstacles in the path of non-estate economic activities. Afro-Creoles and Portuguese interested in such ventures – particularly in the expanding gold industry – wanted easier access to the interior and to Crown land, more government support for minor industries, reduced public expenditure on immigration, and a speedy resolution of the boundary dispute with Venezuela, which was an impediment to exploiting the interior. The Political Reform Club (organized in 1887) and its successor, the Reform Association (formed in 1889), provided a platform from which these men could demand political change.43 To a significant degree, the reformers were based in the world of Georgetown commerce and had business interests outside the city. Georgetown businesspeople regarded a prosperous peasantry and the new industries as potential markets, and some Georgetown merchants had invested in the gold industry. Thus economic diversification seemed to require a reduction in the planters’ political power.44 Following several years of agitation, British Guiana received a new constitution in 1891. The electoral college (College of Kiezers), through which members of the Court of Policy had been elected, was abolished, and elected members of the Combined Court were chosen by an electorate determined by a property qualification.45 Under the old constitution, high property and income qualifications for membership in the Combined Court and the Court of Policy allowed the planters and attorneys of sugar estates to dominate both bodies – a situation to which the existence of the electoral college, whose members were elected for life and needed to meet a high property qualification, contributed. The new constitution, along with other political changes, helped end the planters’ monopoly of the Combined Court. It instituted lower property qualifications for members of the Combined Court and for voters. In the late 1890s ballots were introduced, and in 1909 the franchise was lowered even further, from $480 to $300. Thus, by 1926, only one sugar planter sat in the Combined Court. The planters had been replaced by middle-class Afro-Creoles, Portuguese, and some Indo-Guianese.46 How much of a change the new constitution allowed is disputed, particularly as sugar and allied interests retained considerable influence. Harold Lutchman, for example, argues that the governor chose such men to sit on his advisory executive council.47 Yet the constitutional changes permitted the election of opposition politicians who voiced goals similar to those of the reformers of the 1890s. Some of the successful candidates were affiliated with the People’s Association – successor to the Reform Association – which was founded in 1903. It supported a range of national goals: an expansion of the franchise, a reduced property qualification for elected members, a more Guianese civil service, an end to government-supported immigra-

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tion, expanded drainage and irrigation, and the establishment of a peasantry. The association also advocated improved access to the interior for commercial purposes and increased economic diversification, goals suggestive of the continuing interest Georgetown businesspeople took in the interior and the non-plantation sector.48 The People’s Association achieved a measure of political success. In the 1906 election, seven of its candidates were elected, making a total of ten reform candidates; similar results were seen in the elections of 1911 and 1916.49 The 1916 election was something of a watershed, indicating the arrival of a new, non-British/non-white political class. Only three “white” men were elected – two of the “British race” and a British-born man of German origin – six if the three Portuguese are counted as white (they were not), five blacks, one mixed race individual, and one Indo-Guianese. Equally striking is the fact that five IndoGuianese had stood for election. Governor Clementi perceived the new Combined Court as ideologically opposed to the kinds of governments he was used to facing. He characterized the members of this new court as the sort of men who were “looked at askance by the planters and merchants of repute and generally by those who [had] considerable stake in the welfare of the colony.”50

georgetown In a period marked by the decreasing importance of the sugar industry, both to the colony’s economy and to its political life, Georgetown gained in importance. Its businesspeople had interests in the expanding industries of the interior, and the constitutional changes gave them a political voice. Georgetown was originally established on an island in the Demerara River. In 1782, during a brief French occupation, it was moved and rebuilt at Stabroek, a government reservation lying between Plantations Werk-en-Rust and Vlissengen.51 Originally consisting of no more than two mile-long rows of houses following a single brick road, Georgetown expanded out along the river and the ocean from what became Stabroek Ward, encompassing the surrounding estates.52 By 1812 (when it was renamed Georgetown) it had grown to eight wards (Kingston, Cumingsburg, Robb Town, New Town, Stabroek, Werk-en-Rust, Charles Town, and Lacy Town), all carved from the Plantations Vlissengen, La Bourgade, Werk-en-Rust, Le Repentir, and Eve Leary. By 1898 the city was comprised of fourteen wards as new ones were added and old ones were divided or combined, reflecting changes in the city’s population.53 Georgetown expands outwards from the Demerara River and the Atlantic Ocean. Kingston Ward is nestled between the two and extends

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Stabroek, 1804 (Reprinted with the permission of the British Library)

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east to the Thomas Lands, encompassing the Eve Leary Barracks. In the central part of the city, extending west to the river – containing the Promenade Gardens and the Parade Ground – is the huge Cumingsburg Ward. It was divided into four separate wards until the 1931 census, when it was reduced to two. Further south, along the Demerara River, were the small wards of Robbstown and Newtown. On their eastern side, across High Street, are the rectangular wards of Lacytown and, further east, Bourda. To the south is Stabroek, home of Stabroek Market and the seat of government, the Public Buildings. The city gradually stretched south and east from this core. East of Cumingsburg and on Bourda’s northern side is Queenstown. Alongside Stabroek are Werk-en-Rust and Wortmanville, which were considered as one ward until the 1931 census. Farther south, still following the river, is Charlestown. Beyond these wards lay the environs, the villages ringing Georgetown. Following the sea coast, beyond the Thomas Lands, are Kitty and Bel Air, east of Wortmanville is the Lodge, and south of Charlestown is Albouystown (which joined Georgetown in 1913). The environs shared some administrative links with the city – Kitty, the Lodge Village, and Albouystown prior to its 1913 union were included with Georgetown for the purposes of policing54 – and were intimately connected with it, supplying some of its agricultural produce and labourers. Beyond the environs were more plantations, stretching along the Atlantic and the Demerara.55 Georgetown grew rapidly in the years after slavery’s end, as former slaves and then indentureds left the estates and villages for the city. Near the end of the eighteenth century Georgetown had 780 souls (238 whites, 76 free coloureds, and 466 enslaved).56 In 1830 the population stood at 12,600; in 1891 it was 53,176; in 1911, 57,577; in 1921, 59,624; and in 1931, 69,663. Georgetown was by far the largest urban centre in the colony, home to approximately 20 per cent of the total population and, in 1891, was some six times more populous than was the only other town of any size, New Amsterdam.57 For most of British Guiana’s history, the population has been restricted to the narrow coastal strip, distributed among the plantations, small villages, and towns that line the shores of the Atlantic Ocean and the river and creek banks. Although a majority of the population continued to reside in these smaller settlements, the numbers fell as more people migrated to Georgetown. Indeed, according to the 1931 Census Report, there was a “general tendency for the people to reside in the principal town of the Colony.”58 (See Tables 2.1 and 2.2.) As the city grew, its population shifted among the various wards. After 1807 Robbstown, Newtown, and Stabroek Wards became Georgetown’s commercial and administrative centre and, by 1812, home to many of its inhabitants. Gradually, the population in these wards

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City of Georgetown (Public Record Office [pro], London co 700/36 s44 pro. Reprinted with the permission of the pro)

fell, increasing, meanwhile, in the surrounding residential districts of Kingston, Cumingsburg, and Charlestown. The city’s core became a commercial area, filled with warehouses and shops, and the site of most public buildings.59 Slum clearance, both deliberate and accidental, resulted in further population movements.60 In the late nineteenth century, tenement buildings in the older wards were destroyed. Cumingsburg Ward lost housing to expand the Promenade Gardens, as

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Table 2.1 Distribution of British Guiana's population (%) Location

1891

1911

1921

1931

Georgetown

19.72

19.44

20.03

22.40

3.19

2.90

2.81

2.57

32.51

23.95

22.22

21.69

NewAmsterdam Sugar Estates Rice and Coconut Estates

2.86

Villages Farms and Settlements* Forest Districts

38.82

37.71

33.00

42.09

11.42

14.41

18.28

2.48

3.46

2.82

1.69

Source: Report on the Census Results, 1921, vi; Report on the Census Results, 1931. * In 1891 Farms and Settlements included villages.

Table 2.2 Population of Georgetown and environs Year

Population

1861

29,174

1871

36,562

1881

47,175

1891

53,176

1911

57,577

1921

59,624

1931

69,663

Source: Report on the Census Results, 1921, vii; Report on the Census Results 1931, vii, ix. See also Khayum, “The Labour Force in Georgetown, 1781-1881,” 12.

did the grounds near Government House and around Queen’s College. Houses were demolished in Stabroek and Lacytown Wards to widen the streets and to construct the law courts and the town hall. Those displaced likely moved to the outlying wards of Albert Town,

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Order and Place in a Colonial City

Street Corner, Georgetown, c. 1912 (Rodway, Guiana, n.p.)

Queenstown, Werk-en-Rust, Charlestown, and Bourda as well as to the environs of the Lodge, Wortmanville, and Albouystown.61 Frequent fires, fuelled by Georgetown’s wooden buildings, allowed further reorganization. According to the long-serving municipal civil servant Luke Hill, Georgetown’s “chief structural improvements ... followed on disastrous fires.” After the 1828 Newtown fire, town councillors banned “spirit shops, cooperages, and other dangerous trades” in the reconstructed ward – prohibitions that were not rescinded until 1898. The Robbstown fire of 1864 and the South and North Cumingsburg fires of 1866 and 1867 permitted the widening of Water Street from Newtown to the Railway Line and the introduction “of other important improvements in town planning.”62 The Werk-enRust fire in the middle years of the 1910s destroyed the city’s Chinese district, considered a slum by some contemporaries, and, according to Town Superintendent Luke Hill, provided an opportunity to construct better streets, houses, and sanitary facilities.63 As the commentary around the Werk-en-Rust fire suggests, Georgetown’s geography was divided by social class. The city’s long-time medical officer of health, W. de W. Wishart, believed that Georgetown lacked “a better class residential ward” – indeed, even the nice properties of Kingston, Cumingsburg, and Stabroek Wards were intermixed with smaller, meaner buildings.64 Yet it is possible to identify

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such areas as well as those considered disorderly and crime-ridden. The wards of Kingston, Cumingsburg, and Stabroek contained “upper class residential areas,” particularly along Main and Camp Streets and the Brickdam, where “the finest tropical residences” could be found.65 Likewise, clearly defined “disorderly” areas can be distinguished. “Tiger Bay,” adjacent to the western part of Cummingsburg and located by the docks, is infamous even today. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was represented as the home of disorder and lawlwessness. In 1888 the former sheriff of Demerara, Henry Kirke, described the riverside areas of Robbstown, Werk-enRust, and Charlestown – specifically the area around Lower Regent Street, Lombard Street, and Leopold Street – in similar terms.66 This area remained unsavoury into the next century – Regent, Lombard, and Queen Streets the site of “notorious yards ... whose existence [was] an eyesore and a blot.”67 The western portion of Werk-en-Rust was also considered a slum – old, unsanitary, and congested.68 Ethnicity also divided Georgetown’s geography. The city, like the colony as a whole, was multi-ethnic. According to the census reports, seven groups inhabited British Guiana: Europeans, Portuguese, East Indians, Chinese, Africans, Aboriginals, and mixed race individuals. Indo- and Afro-Guianese (either born locally or abroad) dominated, both making up approximately 40 per cent of the total population. All other groups were tiny by comparison and, in the case of Europeans and Portuguese, shrinking.69 (See Table 2.3.) Social class and ethnicity overlapped to a large extent; however, as in the rest of the Caribbean, this began to lessen in the post-slavery period as Afro-Creoles (and former indentureds) gained improved access to education and as some members of these groups began their social ascent. In Georgetown, as in the rest of the colony, the upper class was largely European, primarily of Scottish, English, and Irish origin. Although individuals of European origin managed the plantations and controlled the bulk of the colony’s money and power, this group also included plantation overseers – mostly young Scotsmen who contracted to labour for several years – as well as professionals,civil servants, and senior-ranked police and military personnel. Moore notes that most were from the middle and lower classes in the United Kingdom and aimed to return home to more luxurious lives. In addition, the white/European population included locals who, according to Moore, made up approximately 40 per cent of this group.70 Yet not all those who were phenotypically white were of the upper class, as the example of the Portuguese in British Guiana demonstrates. They were divided from the Europeans; and the census reports, as well as virtually all of the contemporaneous accounts, maintain this distinction,71 the origin of which was class-based. The Portuguese were

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Table 2.3 Ethnic breakdown of British Guiana's population (%) 1891

1911

1921

1931

European

1.64

1.33

1.11

0.69

Portuguese

4.40

3.40

3.08

2.77

East Indian

37.90

42.75

41.97

41.98

1.30

0.89

0.91

0.95

Black

40.80

39.01

39.36

39.95

Mixed Race

10.40

10.22

10.28

10.87

Aboriginal

2.70

2.33

3.07

2.68

Races Not Stated

0.10

.08

0.22

0.11

Chinese

Source: Report on the Census Results 1891, 1911, 1921, and 1931.

imported en masse to labour as contract workers on the sugar estates. As Moore points out, earlier Portuguese migrants “lived in working class urban and rural communities, in small wooden houses and yards very similar to the [Afro-]Creoles.”72 Yet, this group began a slow, social ascent as some of its members became merchants and professionals and began to amass wealth. A similar process was apparent among the Afro-Creole population. Mostly former slaves (though augmented, after 1838, by African and West Indian migrants, particularly Barbadians), they continued to work in agriculture, some as small peasant farmers and others as wage-earning agricultural labourers; they also worked as labourers or artisans (dominating, for example, the mining industry). Some gradually moved into the middle class, where they worked as teachers, and eventually moved into the civil service and the professions.73 This development led Moore to argue that, by the 1870s, “occupational specialization by ethnicity was lessening”; the relationship between ethnicity and social class became more complex in post-emancipation British Guiana (as it did throughout the Caribbean).74 Similarly, although at a much slower rate, Indians began to move into the middle class. Seecharan notes that, by 1914, an Indian middle class was “well established” in rural areas and that, by the 1920s, it included individuals involved in a range of industries, including rice milling, shopkeeping, cattle rearing, and transportation. In the 1920s an urban Indian

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middle class had become established, consisting of a few families made up primarily of professionals and those owning large general stores.75 Georgetown was not typical of the colony as a whole (see Tables 2.4 and 2.5). The European and Portuguese populations were larger in the capital than in the rest of British Guiana, whereas the number of East Indians was considerably smaller. The economic and political role of Georgetown explains these numbers: as the colony’s capital city, it was home to the Europeans who administered not only Georgetown but also the entire colony and dominated its political and financial life. East Indians, imported to British Guiana to labour on the sugar estates, resided on the plantations or in rural villages once their indentures expired. Yet, as Table 2.5 shows, increasing numbers of East Indians migrated to Georgetown, particularly following the end of indentureship in 1917. As Seecharan suggests, Indians responded to the “opportunities for a good livelihood” available in urban areas.76 Georgetown’s diverse ethnic groups, although spread throughout the city, tended to cluster in particular wards. Most Europeans resided in Stabroek, Charlestown, and Bourda Wards, and a large percentage of the city’s Portuguese population lived in Cumingsburg, Lacytown, Werk-en-Rust, and Charlestown. The vast majority of the Chinese population resided in Werk-en-Rust, although, by 1911, growing numbers could be found in Lacytown and Charlestown. In the 1890s a significant percentage of Indo-Guianese lived in Bourda. Information culled from town council records about the neighbourhoods inhabited by the city’s Indo-Guianese scavengers supports this conclusion. Most lived within the city limits, the majority in Bourda Ward and relatively few in the central wards of Kingston, Stabroek, Lacytown, Albert Town, North Cumingsburg, and South Cumingsburg. Large numbers lived in the outlying districts of Wortmanville and Queenstown and in the environs and Plantations La Penitence and Ruimveldt. By the time of the 1911 census the number of Indo-Guianese residing in Bourda had fallen dramatically as increasing numbers settled in the environs and Albouystown. Few Europeans, on the other hand, lived in the environs, most residing in Cumingsburg and Stabroek, with significant pockets in Kingston and Charlestown.77 One constant was the ubiquitous presence of Afro-Guianese; generally, in most wards they were the largest group. Yet, just as even the more prosperous areas of Georgetown contained poorer homes, so ethnic groups were not strictly segregated. Most ethnic groups in the city lived, in greater or smaller numbers, in most wards.78 In the environs the picture was a little different. There, although Afro-Creoles outnumbered other ethnic groups, IndoGuianese came a not too distant second. The exceptions were Kingston and the Thomas Lands, where Indo-Guianese dominated the population.79 (See Tables 2.6, 2.7, 2.8, 2.9.)

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Table 2.4 Percentage of ethnic groups living in Georgetown as compared to the rest of the colony 1891

1911

1921

1931

Europeans

63.8

65.8

67.1

69.5

Portuguese

49.8

57.8

60.8

66.8

East Indian

3.8

4.8

5.1

6.3

Chinese

16.6

24.8

30.6

40.8

African

21.6

23.9

28.6

29.6

Mixed Race

51.8

48.9

47.9

47.7

Race Not Stated

43.5

55.8

39.4

70.8

1.8

1.3

4.6

1.8

Aboriginal

Source: Report on the Census Results 1891, 1911, 1921, and 1931.

Table 2.5 The population of Georgetown according to ethnicity (%) 1891

1911

1921

1931

5.40

5.00

3.70

2.10

Portuguese

11.20

10.00

9.30

8.20

East Indian

7.50

7.00

11.00

11.70

Chinese

1.20

1.10

1.40

1.70

African

46.20

47.80

56.20

52.70

Aboriginal

0.25

0.23

0.10

0.17

Mixed Race

28.00

26.00

25.00

23.00

0.28

.23

0.29

0.25

European

Race Not Stated/Other

Source: Report on the Census Results for 1891, 1911, 1921, and 1931. Note: Although I have included the percentage of Aboriginals in Georgetown, it should be noted that, according to the authors of the census reports, these figures are unreliable.

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Table 2.6 Ward by Ward Distribution of Georgetown's Population, 1891 (%) Ward

European

Portuguese

Indian

Chinese

African

Mixed Race

Ward City Ward City Ward City Ward City Ward City Ward City Kingston

6.5

2.7

6.9

3.3

.07

.3 51.0 5.90 29.4

N. Cumingsburg

5.7 12.4 15.8 16.6

3.0

4.9

.03

.3 44.7 11.40 30.7 12.90

S. Cumingsburg

6.2 17.0 13.6 18.0

3.1

6.1

.01

.2 44.4 14.30 33.0 17.60

.7

1.7

.1

0.03

8.4 15.8 16.5

2.5

4.0

.30

1.6 40.6

2.1

.2

0.03

0.0 22.4 11.26 18.0

.34

1.5 .02.8

1.0

.10

.2 41.5 3.20 29.5

3.74

Robbstown

6.4

25.3 .03.0

Lacytown*

3.8

Newtown

16.7

Stabroek

18.8 12.2

5.6

11.9

4.7

1.9

0.0 26.7

4.4

34.6

5.60

.80

3.1 43.0 10.90 34.3 14.40

Werk-en-Rust

3.1

8.6 10.6 14.4

2.3

4.7

Charlestown

4.7

9.8 12.2 12.1

1.4

2.0

.30

3.1 53.4 12.90 27.2 39.70

Bourda

4.2

7.3

5.8

4.9 16.9 21.3

.10

.7 41.9 8.50 29.9 10,.0

--

--

--

Queenstown

2.4

.1

2.3

Albouystown

--

--

--

1.8

3.8

9.7

Albertown

Environs

--

5.64 69.0 47.6 15.60 30.6 16.50

--

--

--

.1 14.8

.5

0.03

--

--

--

9.7 24.9 37.4

.60

--

--

--

--

--

--

0.0 41.0 4.22 39.8 00.34 --

--

--

--

--

5.7 49.5 1244 13.0

5.30

* In 1891 Lacytown included Columbia. Note: In 1911 West Indians were not included as a separate category.

Georgetown’s population composition also differed in its ratio of males to females. Although males outnumbered females in the colony as a whole, in Georgetown they did not. Late developing plantation colonies like British Guiana and Trinidad, which continued to receive relatively large numbers of slaves into the early nineteenth century, had more males than females in their population in the 1830s.80 After slavery’s abolition, local oligarchies began importing indentured immigrant labour, but it too was overwhelmingly male. Relatively few Indian women, and even fewer Chinese women, migrated to the Caribbean. Historians have cited factors ranging from custom to the

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Order and Place in a Colonial City

Table 2.7 Ward by ward distribution of Georgetown's population, 1911 (%) Ward

European

Portuguese

Indian

Chinese

African

Mixed Race

Ward City Ward City Ward City Ward City Ward City Ward City Kingston

8.0

8.4

7.0 3.10 15.0 7.00

N. Cumingsburg

8.5 15.0 14.5 11.40 11.0 8.10

.16 45.9

4.5 24,0

8,0

.30 1.90 41.7

6.8 24,0

8.5

.02

.16 40,0

8,0 33,0 12,0

.13 1.90

.64 36.5

.3 34.1 14.7

S. Cumingsburg

12.0 26.0 12.0 11.30

2.4 2.20

Robbstown

14.7

3.8

1.2

9.0

.33

9.4 12.6 13.50

Lacytown

3.9

Newtown

4.6

.5

Stabroek

7.7

7.8

9.3 4.20

9.5 4.10 2.30 9.40 46.3

Werk-en-Rust

1.5

6.2

Charlestown

7.0

3.8 3.90

.04

4.4 24.3

7.7

8.5 15.70

5.8 10.20 3.20 5500 54.3 21.1 26.3

1.5

3.1

6.8 14.9 14.50

1.2 1.10 1.20 10.50 50.1 10.3 28.5

3.1

Bourda

4.2

7.8

9.0 7.30

8.9 7.00

.11

Albertown

4.2

6.1

5.5 3.60

6.5 4.10

Queenstown

1.4

1.1

6.2 2...0 28.8 9.00

Albouystown

--

--

Environs

.9

3.0

--

--

000

000 48.3

430

7.4 34,0

4.2

000

000 51.8

7.1 32.7

4.2

.16

.50 33.2

2.3 28.9

1.4

--

.80

.5

3.9 4.6

--

.95

11.5 27.4 8,0

--

.34 20.0

.60 5.70 51.6

--

--

--

--

--

8.1 12.0 29.0 42.60 1.10 1500 48.5 15.4 12,0

7.1

“sojourner attitude” as being responsible for discouraging female migration. So low were the numbers that the British government attempted to impose quotas of female Indian immigrants. The ratio fluctuated but eventually stabilized at forty women per 100 men.81 In contrast, Georgetown, like other cities in the British Caribbean during the last years of slavery, had more females than males. Higman attributes this imbalance to the “demand for females in domestic employment,” the continued relevance of which Trotman notes for postslavery Trinidad.82 In British Guiana the rural-urban migration that swelled Georgetown’s population increased its female population overall as well as in most city wards. For most census years, women outnumbered men in every ward but the riverside ones, which offered

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Table 2.8 Ward by ward distribution of Georgetown's population, 1921 (%) Ward

European

Portuguese

Indian

Chinese

African

Mixed Race

Ward City Ward City Ward City Ward City Ward City Ward City Kingston

6.5

8.60

6.60

3.50

14.8

6.80

1.00

3.6

47.9

4.70

22.9

4.60

N. Cumingsburg

7.1 15.00

6.50

5.20

16.0 11.30

1.20

6.7

48.2

7.30

28.7

8.90

S. Cumingsburg

8.6 21.90 14.90 15.10

30.0 11.60

2.5

2.20

.50

3.4

43.3

8.20

.38

14.7

.25

2.80

.4

39.4

.14

Lacytown

3.9 10.10 10.60 10.90

2.7

2.40

2.30

15.9

Newtown

5.1

Stabroek

16.5

Robbstown

.80 19.30

.10

52.7 10.00

27.1 10.60

2.90

.14

23.8

1.00 10.90

3.6

37.7

.35

23.0

.43

8.1

8.80 13.90

6.00

10.5

3.90

1.50

4.2

40.2

3.20

25.2

40.0

Werk-en-Rust

1.5

7.30

15.2

4.9

8.10

2.40

31.0

56.5 20.00

26.2 19.10

Charlestown

1.9

5.10 12.20 12.90

3.5

3.30

2.70

23.0

56.5 11.30

22.6

Bourda

3.1

7.10

7.40

6.70

7.1

5.50

.44

2.6

47.3

8.00

34.0 11.80

Albertown

1.5

2.70

.62

4.40

6.2

3.80

.30

1.4

57.6

7.80

28.0

7.60

Queenstown

5.3

5.30

4.20

1.70

20.0

6.90

0.00

0.0

41.0

3.10

28.0

4.20

Albouystown

.4

.72 1100

8.10

26.6 16.70

1.40

6.8

47.4

6.40

12.9

3.60

3.40

34.0 27.80

.20

1.0

48.5

8.50

10.7

3.80

Environs

1.7

.63

7.3

4.00

8.00

3.60

9.10

employment to primarily male dock workers. This female preponderance occurred largely among the Afro-Guianese population and, thus, reflected the sex ratio imbalance among Chinese and Indian immigrants. (See Tables 2.10, 2.11, 2.12, 2.13, 2.14.)

th e l o c a l a p p a r a t u s o f c o n t r o l Georgetown, like the colony as a whole, was ruled by a few wealthy men. In its early days the city was administered by a board of police that was chosen by the governor and the Court of Policy. In 1837 the city’s voters elected Georgetown’s first mayor and town council, each of the eleven wards electing a councillor and the councillors themselves

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Order and Place in a Colonial City

Table 2.9 Ward by ward distribution of Georgetown's population, 1931 (%) Ward

European

Portuguese

Indian

Chinese

African

Mixed Race

Ward City Ward City Ward City Ward City Ward City Ward City Kingston

6.1 12.3

N. Cumingsburg

4.5 14.8 13.1 11.33

S. Cumingsburg

7.3 28.5 12.6 12.83

Robbstown

--

Lacytown

1.5

Newtown and Robbstown

3.8

Stabroek

4.6

--

8.5 4.53 19.3

.59

1.4 42.3 3.50 22.9

4.3

9.2

5.5 1.99

4.9 49.1 6.50 22.6

6.9

3.1

2.2 1.00

5.1 48.5 7.60

270

9.7

--

--

--

--

6.6 12.9 14.43

4.6

3.6 1.89

.33 21.0

.8 12.00

8.1 12.0 5.53 10.3

3.3 2.19

.8

--

.7

5.8

--

--

--

--

--

9.8 51.5 4.75 27.4 10.8

3.3 38.4

.30 20.8

.4

4.7 43.9 3.10 25.8

4.1

Werk-en-Rust

.6

3.2

6.4 9.63

4.2

4.4 3.49 25.0 59.3 13.90 24.9 13.2

Charlestown

.2

1.0

9.4 113.3

4.3

3.5 3.29 18.0 60.5 10.90 21.8

8.9

2.3

8.6

7.3 6.93

6.9

4.6

.98

4.5 52.8 7.80 29.6

100

.5

1.7

7.3 6.23

6.9

4.1

.71

2.9 55.9 7.30 28.6

8.5

Queenstown

2.5

5.3

4.4 2.43 16.8

6.5 1.39

3.6 42.0 3.60 32.7

6.4

Albouystown

.2

.8

6.7 7.53 23.4

183 2.19 11.0 55.3 9.60 12.2

4.8

Environs

.5

2.4

Bourda Albertown

3.7 5.13 34.3 32.8

.79

5.2 49.9 9.90 13.6

6.6

Source: For Tables 2.6, 2.7, 2.8, and 2.9, see Report on the Census Results for 1891, 1911, 1921, 1931. Note: Aboriginals have not been included in these tables for two reasons: (1) the colony-wide numbers for the Aboriginal population are somewhat unreliable, and (2) their presence in Georgetown was generally temporary. According to the author of the 1891 census report, a “considerable proportion of the Aborigines taken in the Census were visiting the City to sell their wares and curiosities.” For a discussion of the uncertain enumeration of the Aboriginal population, see Report on the Census Results, 1921, iv. Note that “Mixed Race” refers to individuals of mixed black and white ancestry.

electing one of their number to serve as mayor for a year. Voters were required to possess property in the city worth 3,500 guilders, and councillors were required to possess property worth at least 8,000 guilders.83 Low wages meant that the franchise remained out of the reach of most working people. For example, casual wharf labourers earned 48 to

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Garden City of the West Indies

Table 2.10 Gender in British Guiana (%) Year

Female

Male

1891

45.5

54.5

1911

48.5

51.9

1921

49.5

50.8

1931

50.5

50.5

Source: Report on the Census Results, 1921, iv; Report on the Census Results, 1931, iv.

Table 2.11 Gender in Georgetown, including environs and shipping (%) Year

Females

Males

1891

54.9

48.3

1911

57.9

45.9

1921

56.5

43.4

1931

55.9

44.9

Source: Report on the Census Results , 1911, table 1; Report on the Census Results, 1921, table 1; Report on the Census Results, 1931, table 1.

64 cents per day in 1905 and 84 cents to $1.80 per day in 1922; gold diggers earned between 36 and 72 cents per day in the mid-1920s.84 Property, gender, and residency qualifications that were established in 1860 changed little in the early twentieth century. Under the ordinances of 1860, 1898, and 1918, councillors and voters had to be male British citizens or males who had lived in British Guiana for at least three years before the election.85 The 1898 and 1918 ordinances retained these residency and gender requirements for councillors and voters but disqualified those sentenced to penal servitude or long jail terms, those who had been on relief for the past three months, and those unable to read and write English.86 In 1860 property restrictions were established at a minimum of $1,500 worth of Georgetown holdings for councillors and $250 for voters.87 Under the 1898 ordinance, occupiers or tenants of rental property (renting for at least forty dollars per month and occupied or rented for at least six months before the election) could vote.88 This provision was retained under the 1918 ordinance, which also

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Order and Place in a Colonial City

Table 2.12 Population of Georgetown by ward and gender (%) Ward

1891

1911

1921

1931

F

M

F

M

F

M

F

M

Kingston

54

46

57

43

55

45

58

48

N. Cumingsburg

52

48

57

43

56

44

56

44

S. Cumingsburg

57

43

60

40

60

40

59

41

Robbstown

41

59

44

54

30

70

--

--

Lacytown

58

42

62

38

59

41

58

42

Newtown

49

51

38

62

32

68

--

--

--

--

--

--

--

--

36

64

Stabroek

51

49

46

54

49

51

47

53

Werk-en-Rust*

54

46

59

41

58

42

--

--

Werk-en-Rust

--

--

--

--

--

--

58

42

Wortmanville

--

--

--

--

--

--

58

42

Charlestown

57

43

60

40

58

42

57

43

Bourda

53

47

60

40

59

41

59

41

Albertown

55

45

59

41

59

44

57

43

Queenstown

55

45

57

43

56

44

57

43

54

46

55

45

54

46

51

49

54

46

Newtown and Robbstown

Albouystown Environs

46

54

* Including Wortmanville. Source: Census of the Population, 1911, table 1; Report of the Results of the Census of the Population, 1921, viii; Report on the Results of the Census of the Population, 1931, x. Note: The census does not specify the environs for 1891. By the time of the 1921 census, Albouystown had been incorporated into Georgetown; prior to 1913, Albouystown was part of Georgetown's environs.

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Table 2.13 Ethnicity and gender in Georgetown (%) 1891 F

1911 M

1921

1931

F

M

F

M

F

M

Europeans

44.9

55.11

41.8

55.1

50.8

49.2

48.3

51.7

Portuguese

53.3

46.71

53.3

46.7

56.4

43.6

56.7

43.3

E. Indians

34.2

65.91

34.2

68.9

45.3

54.6

46.5

53.5

Chinese

28.2

.01

28.2

72.1

44.6

55.4

44.2

56.2

Africans

55.2

44.91

55.1

44.9

58.3

41.7

57.5

42.5

Aboriginals

53.2

47.01

53.1

47.1

67.2

34.4

62.2

38.2

Mixed Race

58.1

41.91

58.1

41.9

59.3

40.7

58.4

41.6

Source: Report on the Census Results, 1891, table 2; Report on the Census Results, 1911, table 4; Report on the Census Results, 1921, table 4; Report on the Census Results, 1931, table 4.

extended the right to stand as councillors to thosewho occupied or let – for at least six months before the election – property renting at a minimum of thirty dollars per month and expanded the franchise to include those who occupied or let property renting for at least fifteen dollars per month. This ordinance extended residency qualifications to include directors or lawyers for limited liability companies owning property in Georgetown.89 The town councillors had a few crucial duties. Under the 1837 town council ordinance, they had to superintend and direct the collection and appropriation of the Town Taxes, to direct, order, and enforce the Cleanliness and Repairing of the several public Streets, roads, Dams, Sluices, Kokers, Stellings, and Bridges of Georgetown, to Superintend the Public Markets, and to cause the Regulations for the Government thereof to be enforced, to have the directions of the Public Fire Engines ... and for the aforesaid purposes to frame such Regulations and ByLaws as they may deem fit and necessary.90

Under subsequent town council ordinances (in 1860, 1898, and 1918), the municipal government, by and large, retained these duties. A range of public officials helped the municipal government carry out its duties. Local police enforced municipal bylaws and colonial

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Table 2.14 Population of Georgetown by ward, 1891-1931 (%) Ward

1891

1911

1921

1931

Kingston

15.4

14.7

14.9

14.3

N. Cumingsburg

11.8

17.9

17.6

17

S. Cumingsburg

14.9

19.5

19.5

18.3

Robbstown

11.6

11.4

11.2

1--

Lacytown*

11.7

10.7

19.7

19.2

New Town

11.5

15

11.5

1--

Robbstown and Newtown

1--

--

1 --

1.1.5

Stabroek

13.5

14.5

14

13.7

Werk-en-Rust**

15.2

18.6

17.9

12.3

Wortmanville

--

1--

--

15.2

Charlestown

11.1

19.7

19.9

19.5

Bourda

19.4

18.2

18.5

17.9

Alberttown

--

16.7

16.7

16.9

Queenstown

11.24

13.2

13.7

14.5

Environs

11.2

15.2

18.7

11.1

--

1--

16.8

19.1

Albouystown

Source: Report on the Census Results, 1891, table 1; Report on the Census Results, 1911, table 1; Report of the Census Results, 1921, viii; Report on the Census Results, 1931, x, table 1. Note: Where the totals listed in the 1891 census for that year differ from those listed in the 1911 census for 1891, I have used the 1911 figures. This is because some the wards had changed in the interim * In 1891 Lacytown included Columbia. ** In 1891, 1911, and 1921 Werk-en-Rust included Wortmanville.

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laws. Georgetown received its first police force in 1837, when each town councillor was told to appoint one person who lived in his ward as a constable.91 Two years later this right was removed and legislation was passed providing Georgetown with a police magistrate.92 British Guiana’s police force, commanded by Europeans, was part of an Empire-wide body of men. British Guiana and other colonies obtained their senior police officials from each other, and officers of the British Guiana police force trained at the Royal Irish Constabulary at Dublin.93 As elsewhere in the Anglophone Caribbean, in British Guiana the police force was a semi-military body. The withdrawal of British troops transformed it into an organization that not only prevented and detected crime but that also acted as a primary defence against civil disturbance.94 The chain of command began with the governor, who appointed the inspector general of police and to whom the latter remained subject. The inspector general of police commanded the rural constabulary, and the governor appointed county inspectors of police for Georgetown, Demerara, Essequibo, and Berbice.95 As in much of the Empire, the police lived apart from the community, residing in barracks.96 In 1891 the members of the police force stationed in Georgetown were divided among six districts – Kingston, Town Hall, Bourda, Brickdam, Charlestown, and Albert Town – and patrolled the city (which was itself divided into beats) and the “out-lying parts” of Albouystown, Lodge Village, Queenstown, and Kitty. They also had other duties: they were firefighters, guards, and orderlies at the magistrate’s courts and the stations as well as escorts for convicts, “Lepers, Lunatics[,] and Immigrants.” Financially and administratively, the colonial government and the town council shared responsibility, a long-standing division that dated to at least the 1870s.97 A town constabulary, appointed by the town council, also carried out policing duties in Georgetown.98 Although in 1922 the mayor described their duties as “regulat[ing] traffic and see[ing] that people [did] not throw mango skins and such things on the pavements,” they were more important than this: they were bound to enforce the town council’s bylaws and, along with the members of the British Guiana Police Force, to “enforce the moral and political imperatives of the state.”99 The town constables were relatively few in number. In 1888 there were just ten constables and one sergeant, although by 1890 three more had been hired. By 1922 the town constabulary consisted of a sergeant-major (who was in charge and was responsible to the city engineer “for the discipline of the department”), one sergeant (who worked full time at the abattoir), a corporal who assisted the sergeant-major and was stationed at the town hall, and twenty-two

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men. The constables were assigned to different parts of the city, some to Stabroek Market and Water Street, one to the Promenade Gardens and the cemetery, and the remainder to the city.100 Although overwhelmingly black for most of its history, the composition of the Guianese police force altered through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During this time, it became increasingly “Creolized” as Guianese-born officers and rank and file members gradually came to outnumber all other nationalities, including Barbadians (who had enjoyed a majority in the 1880s). In 1881, among non-commissioned officers, there were about four times as many Barbadians as “Creoles,” and, in 1883, there were about three times as many. Among privates, Barbadians also outnumbered other nationalities: in 1881 there were about 1.3 times as many Barbadians as Guianese; in 1883 that proportion increased to about 1.5. Those not from Barbados or British Guiana were from European countries, India, or other West Indian colonies.101 By 1908–09 Guianese-born noncommissioned officers and men in the Guianese police force outnumbered all others (including Barbadians, by three times), and by 1914 the number of Barbadian police dropped even further, to about onesixth of the number of Guianese police.102 (See Table 2.15.) Public attitudes towards the police may have been influenced by perceptions of them as an “alien” presence, imported from elsewhere. Yet there was also a sense, articulated by some correspondents to local newspapers, of the police as allied with the “dangerous” classes. In 1884 a new arrival to the British Guiana police force from the Royal Irish Constabulary discovered some police officers were consorting with prostitutes and thieves, informing them of police “ambushes.” Some fifty or sixty were dismissed as a consequence of this.103 In 1885 the Daily Chronicle suggested the origins of individual policemen resulted in their indifference to social crime; namely, foul language. Recruited “from a class in which filthy language [was] an ordinary vehicle for expressing ideas,” they grew up “with the sound of such language constantly ringing in their ears and used without sense of the wickedness of it, and they insensibly acquire[d] the habit themselves.” The editors wondered if some of the police realized what was “fit and proper and what [was] indecent and objectionable.”104 Around the time of the 1905 riot, the city’s residents complained about police indifference to quasi-criminal groups, implying an intimacy between policemen and the city’s dangerous masses, descriptions of which became more fervent shortly after the Georgetown riots. Correspondents to local newspapers condemned the police for joining with the city’s masses in their festivities and noted the frequency with which the police stood on the street corners “gossiping”

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Table 2.15 Nationality of non-commissioned officers and men in the British Guiana police force Year

Barbadian

Guianese

East Indian

West Indian

English

1908-09

135

507

17

23

2

1909-10

130

514

15

25

1

1914-15

85

560

25

19

1

1918

64

593

9

14

--

1919

59

601

11

24

--

1920

62

585

15

29

--

1923

44

653

6

29

--

1926

38

708*

4

30

--

Source: Report of the Inspector General of Police for the years 1907-08, 1908-09, 1909-10, 1914-15, 1918, 1919, 1920, 1923, and 1926. * including thirty-one East Indians born in British Guiana.

with the unrespectable.105 At least one correspondent blamed a kind of racial unity for the “commraderie” police seemed to share with “passersby of their own complexion.” Such friendliness was worrisome in the event of civil unrest; where would the loyalties of the police lie?106 Some historians believe the largely black police force was alienated from another class of law-breakers, the mostly Indo-Guianese milk sellers.107 It is uncertain, though, whether interactions between the two groups, which were the result of occupation, inevitably reflected racial and ethnic tensions. A 1902 petition of forty-one Georgetown cowkeepers (a group that often sold milk and was targeted by milk legislation), suggesting that police prosecutions could be “malicious,” indicates some tension; however, the origins of this antipathy are ambiguous because the identity of the cowkeepers is unclear, all but two neglecting to sign their names.108 Sanitary Officials Besides town constables, the town council appointed other officials responsible for the smooth running of the city. The 1860 town council ordinance gave it the responsibility to appoint a town clerk, a town superintendent, a clerk of the markets, a health officer, one or more

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inspector of nuisances, and any other officers it thought necessary.109 Under the 1898 and 1918 ordinances the town council could hire several additional officers: a managing engineer of the water works, a sexton, a superintendent of the fire brigade, an inspector of hackney carriages, sanitary inspectors, and town overseers.110 Elsewhere in the Empire, local officials included the colonial “preventative practitioner,” or medical officer of health. These people were medical doctors interested in sanitary matters and public health. In India they were responsible for increased concern with sanitary issues. Mark Harrison argues that these practitioners differed from earlier “Chadwickian sanitary engineers” and (slightly later) part-time health officers. Distinct from traditional doctors, these practitioners – drawing on bacteriology – advocated action against unsanitary practices.111 Public health doctors with similar goals and similar education worked in Georgetown, but their role was slow to become established. In 1870 Dr Hubert Whitlock was the city’s sanitary superintendent and Dr Dalton the “consultant health officer”; however, with Whitlock’s death in the 1870s, the sanitary staff passed over to Luke Hill, the town superintendent (who ran the “affairs of the whole city”), until his retirement in 1910. In 1879, with the passage of the Public Health Act, a chief sanitary inspector was appointed, and he assisted the town superintendent. He was not replaced following his death in 1884, even though, in 1886, British Guiana’s government established a medical service consisting of a surgeon general, a medical inspector, and a number of government medical officers. In 1910 the arrival of Sir Rupert Boyce (an expert on mosquitoes and mosquitoborne diseases who was sent by the secretary of state for the colonies) hastened the establishment of a separate department of public health for Georgetown under a full-time medical officer of health, Dr W. de W. Wishart. This department was responsible for the city’s “sanitary administration” and was separate from the town superintendent’s department (which was limited to “engineering and general constructions”).112 Public health doctors also worked for the colonial government. In the early 1910s, Dr Wise was the government bacteriologist and Dr Minett the assistant government bacteriologist; both were designated as medical officers of health, following their request to the surgeon general, J.E. Godrey.113 Both Wise and Minett worked for the Government Medical Service, which was established by the Guianese government in 1886. They were two members of a medical service that consisted of approximately thirty medical officers who treated villagers and estate dwellers and who were attached to the colony’s medical institutions

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(including the public hospitals in Georgetown, New Amsterdam, Suddie, Bartica, Mabaruma, and Kamakusa as well as the lunatic asylum, the leper asylum, and the almshouse).114 Government medical officers outnumbered private practitioners, of whom there were seventeen in 1917.115 From its inception, the Government Medical Service tended to hire white British and British-trained doctors (including Wise and Minett). Of the twelve doctors appointed between 1885 and 1892, seven were from Great Britain, two from India, one from the West Indies, and two from British Guiana.116 However, the First World War and the dire state of colonial finances combined to create a shortage of the preferred white doctors and forced the Guianese government to hire Afro- and Indo-Guianese physicians. Between 1903 and 1916 there were five non-white doctors, three black, one coloured, and one East Indian.117 By 1919 these numbers had increased: the colony had ten coloured medical officers, not including the government bacteriologist F.G. Rose (who had been appointed in 1914), one Chinese, and one East Indian.118 These non-white doctors tended to be local men. Between 1903 and 1916, 60 per cent of those doctors hired between 1903 and 1916 had been born in British Guiana, compared to the 30 per cent who originated in Great Britain (the remaining 10 per cent were West Indian).119 The three black and coloured doctors appointed in 1917 had been born in the colony,120 as were the Indian doctors appointed in 1920 and later. In Georgetown, sanitary officers assisted in the effort to maintain public health. Those hired in the early days of public health enthusiasm did not seem to have been trained in recognized institutions; a 1924 source described the two who had been in the service the longest as “unqualified.” However, employees taken on later had more formal professional qualifications, which, in some cases, were acquired in the United Kingdom. In 1924 Georgetown’s chief sanitary inspector held a sanitary inspector’s certificate from the Royal Sanitary Institute (as well as certificates in sanitary science and municipal sanitary engineering from the Heriott-Watt College in Edinburgh) and had previously worked for the Edinburgh Public Health Department. Four of the city’s ten district sanitary inspectors held local sanitary inspector’s certificates; four others had sanitary inspector’s certificates from the Royal Sanitary Institute, as did the meat and food inspector (who had also been awarded a meat inspector’s certificate from the same institution). Similarly, over time the local health visitors also had to possess more stringent qualifications. The longest-serving member had no “recognisable qualification,” but, of the other four, one held a certificate from the National Health Society and three held the local health visitor’s certificate.121

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Georgetown was British Guiana’s primary city, a place whose population reflected the social and ethnic diversity of the rest of the colony yet whose limited size compelled disparate groups to live in relatively close proximity. Consequently, the social interests in the city were diverse and discordant. As elsewhere in the colony, men and women struggled both collectively and among themselves. Yet in Georgetown the exigencies of urban life intensified these struggles and ensured that, in part, they would be waged in public spaces.

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3 Cesspool City: Sanitarianism in Colonial Georgetown Ode to Demerara Demerara, land of trenches, Giving out most awful stenches; Land of every biting beast Making human flesh its feast; Land of swizzles, land of gin, Land of every kind of sin! Why have I been doomed to roam Far, so far, away from home? Anonymous1

In 1920 one of British Guiana’s leading historians published a history of Georgetown. James Rodway’s The Story of Georgetown describes the city’s growth from a lone wooden fort sitting at the mouth of the Demerara River to a large, modern urban centre. For Rodway, sanitary improvements were a fundamental component of this modernity. By the 1920s Guianese considered these improvements key to maintaining the population’s health not just in Georgetown but also in the colony as a whole. Yet sanitarian sentiment in Georgetown and the goal of achieving a cleaner, healthier city were undermined by the indifference and greed of some city officials and property owners. Thus they condemned many Georgetowners, primarily Indo- and AfroGuianese, to an unsanitary and, consequently, an uncivilized existence. The sanitarian rhetoric that dominated elite discourse lent itself to a condemnation of Georgetown’s non-white masses, particularly those living in “native” dwellings and constituting the “corrupt” class of sanitary workers.

th e “ c h a r n e l h o u s e ” Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Georgetown was widely regarded as unhealthy, a “cesspool city.” Its rubbish-filled streets and drains and frequent epidemics inspired fear in locals and foreigners alike. Despite changing ideas about the origins and transmission of disease, local politicians, officials, and contemporaneous

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observers continued to agree that poor sanitation contributed to the diseases that plagued the city. As historians have amply demonstrated, ideas about the origins of disease changed significantly during the nineteenth century. In the mid-years of the century, a belief that “miasmas” produced by filth contributed to the spread of disease was widely held.2 Charles Amory, in The Conquest of Epidemic Disease: A Chapter in the History of Ideas, argues that, when the “sanitary reformers cleaned up the masses of putrefying filth ... the epidemics of typhoid and cholera and typhus and dysentery actually ceased,” which seemed to prove that filth alone caused many diseases.3 In the second half of the century, though, medical researchers found that individual micro-organisms caused particular diseases. The work of Robert Koch in the early 1880s was crucial in this respect. His discovery of the micro-organisms causing tuberculosis and cholera led to the development of the “germ theory” of medicine.4 During the same period, bacteriological discoveries paved the way for a greater understanding of two major tropical diseases – malaria and yellow fever. In the 1870s Patrick Manson and Carlos Finlay began separately exploring the role of insects in filariasis and yellow fever, respectively. The link was conclusively proven at the end of the century when Ronald Ross demonstrated that mosquitoes transmitted the micro-organism causing malaria. Anti-mosquito campaigns in occupied Cuba and Panama carried out by the American military provided a practical demonstration of this.5 Yet, as many historians have demonstrated, these new theories co-existed, at times awkwardly, with older ideas about disease causation.6 Environmental sanitation and the desire for pure air, water, and soil continued to dominate both popular and scientific thinking.7 Medical practitioners around the British Empire articulated a belief in “contingent-contagionism” – the idea that, although disease was transmitted from person to person either directly or indirectly, environmental factors remained significant.8 Similarly, in early twentieth-century British Guiana, local doctors and medical authorities accepted the importance of contagion and germs in disease causation while continuing to emphasize the role of the environment and the importance of keeping it clean. Georgetown had long been regarded as unhealthy. In large measure this reputation was due to frequent epidemics of yellow fever, news of which was carried back to Europe by travellers. In the 1840s Richard Schomburgk declared that yellow fever “[stood] at the head of the diseases prevailing in Georgetown and its immediate environs as well as generally the whole coast-line.”9 Some years later, George Des Voeux informed his readers that he had had the misfortune to ar-

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Cesspool City

rive in Georgetown just before a “severe epidemic” struck the city and the coastal region.10 Their characterization was not entirely inaccurate: yellow fever appeared intermittently throughout the nineteenth century – in 1822, 1837, 1852, 1861, 1879, and 1881.11 According to James Rodway, these deadly conditions would, if “not removed and checked by some most salutary and prompt alterations ... soon affect the vital interests of the colony.” He argued that sailors were reluctant to come to the colony and that merchants had a hard time “persuading youths from Europe to trust themselves to a charnelhouse.”12 Temporary sojourners such as Robert Schomburgk and long-time residents like Rodway blamed the epidemics on poor sanitation. Schomburgk attributed the 1837 yellow fever epidemic to “the neglected state of the sewers and the filth accumulated between the wharfs.”13 Similarly, Rodway contended that the “defective drainage, joined to the obstruction of the stellings to the full course and effect of the tide ... caused deadly miasmata to arise,” thus resulting in yellow fever. He suggested that the city’s inhabitants and lawmakers were to blame as they did not consider “sanitary arrangements” a priority. “Bathrooms [and] water closets” were not seen as “necessaries” and were ignored in early legislation.14 Indeed, the governor believed that many of the city’s residents “neglected to weed and cleanse their lots of land and the trenches that surround[ed] them, which [could] finally prove extremely hurtful to their own health.”15 By the late nineteenth century, many contemporaries agreed that yellow fever had become less of a public health menace than it had been. An 1878 government report claimed that, due in large measure to the growing infrequency of yellow fever attacks, “the port of Georgetown ought to be placed at the head of the list of seaports with regard to healthiness.” The authors of the 1891 British Guiana Directory and Almanack described such attacks as “occasional” and separated by long intervals.16 Alleyne Leechman, author of the 1913 The British Guiana Handbook, characterized yellow fever as an “ancient bugbear,” observing that it had never been “endemic in the colony” and had not struck since 1884.17 Demographic changes (notably fewer individuals born in Europe and Africa) may have contributed to the reduced incidence of yellow fever in British Guiana well before the bacteriological discoveries of the late nineteenth century.18 Yet, although yellow fever may have become less of a threat, the dirt believed to have given rise to it had not. When James Rodway first arrived in Georgetown in 1870, he discovered a city of “dirty streets,” “stinking pools” of water, and houses with “sordid open yards.”19 And by the early twentieth century little

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seemed to have changed. To many residents and visitors, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Georgetown was a “cesspool city.” According to the former sheriff of Demerara, Henry Kirke, it was “a mass of cesspools.”20 The former surgeon general of British Guiana agreed, declaring that Georgetown veritably “float[ed] on sewage,” and Town Superintendent Luke Hill claimed that the city was “built upon a huge cesspit” and that the “whole area of Georgetown [was] saturated with sewerage.”21 These characterizations, albeit excessive, reflect a common assessment. Accounts of Georgetown in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries describe a polluted city. The narrow city streets were chronically untidy, filled with yard refuse. The canals that bisected the city – necessary to drain the low-lying coastal plain upon which Georgetown is located – and the drains running alongside the streets were rubbish-filled and odorous, the smell inescapable.22 In 1899 seven clerks of the High Street Police Magistrate’s Court complained about the foul smells emanating from the trench beside their office. Acting Police Magistrate R. Swan agreed and, echoing a complaint he had made years earlier, noted that “disgusting odours” often filled the court room and that, in such an “atmosphere ... one’s health [was] bound to suffer sooner or later.”23 These odours emanated from drains and trenches that were conduits for filth of all descriptions, from dirty washing water to excreta. The Georgetown Gaol spewed out sewage into the surrounding environment, as did the Colonial Hospital, located not far from the city’s centre and adjacent to one of Georgetown’s main water sources, the Lamaha Canal.24 For the most part, the drains were of earthen construction and so allowed seepage into surrounding soil. Work to line them with impermeable material, such as stones, began in 1885, but the process remained incomplete as late as the 1910s. Refuse and waste moved through the drains in part because Georgetown’s system of sewage removal remained inadequate well into the 1920s. At times, either deliberately or accidentally, sewage from institutions such as the jail washed out through the drains.25 Although human waste was supposed to be deposited in cesspits, its presence in the city’s open trenches was frequent enough to invite comment. Indeed, the commissioners to the 1905 enquiry into Georgetown’s mortality rate suspected that “actual deposits of excreta [were] made” in the city’s drains.26 Georgetown’s geography prevented the easy introduction of a system that used water to move sewage (such as the one that had been instituted in England). All of British Guiana’s sea coast, including Georgetown, is below sea level. A succession of Africans enslaved by Dutch and British colonial mas-

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ters laboured to drain the coastal plain and to construct dams and drainage canals to keep the water out. Even today drainage canals and kokers combine with a sea wall to try to keep the land dry, the wall itself being the last barrier against tides that can be over four feet high. The system, though, is often frustrated by the heavy rains to which British Guiana is subject. A downpour during high tide, when the kokers are closed, results in overflowing canals and flooding in parts of the city.27 In 1921 a heavy rainstorm, lasting over twenty-four hours, flooded some city streets and swept away bridges.28 Streets and yards in five city wards were flooded, the water rising above the floors of houses. The high waters washed “any foul matters,” which ranged from “objectionable kitchen drainage, [to] refuse food, [to] garbage,” to human waste, to the ground.29 Until a sewage system was constructed in the late 1920s, Georgetowners used a combination of methods to deal with human waste: a nightly pail system in a few areas and cesspits in the rest. The pail system was used until the 1920s and, although considered to be preferable to cesspits, was deemed too expensive. As a result cesspits remained widely used, and excreta was buried in the yards of Georgetown until the practice was declared illegal in 1906. Most cesspits lacked impermeable bottoms (thereby saturating surrounding soil and often, during heavy rains, overflowing) and were cleaned only irregularly.30 Poorly built cesspools and privies were widely used until the early 1920s. Several other methods of sewage removal were also employed but were not entirely satisfactory. In the late 1890s the town council introduced “odourless excavators,” which used hoses to empty cesspits into vans that then transported the sewage to the Demerara River, but these were not widely used.31 In 1905 septic tanks were introduced, and during the 1910s hotels, the homes of the wealthy, and the Georgetown Public Hospital were outfitted with them.32 But these tended to leak and to exude foul odours.33 This widespread pollution was more than unpleasant: it was downright dangerous. Throughout the Empire, colonial authorities directly related poor sanitation to poor health, particularly to “dirt” diseases.34 In British Guiana, high rates of mortality and morbidity were the subject of great concern and were frequently attributed to unsanitary practices.35 In 1921 the Daily Chronicle expressed horror at recently released mortality figures for Georgetown, its editors blaming the deaths on poor sanitation. Of the 154 deaths reported in Georgetown at the end of March that year, thirty-eight were from enteric fever and diarrhoea, “two complaints which in a tropical city form[ed] a ghastly indictment of [the] sanitary arrangements.” These two “dirt diseases” originated in rubbish and filth.36 Local politicians and

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medical practitioners linked these high death rates to poor sanitation. For example, in the early 1890s, the register general argued that Georgetown’s “excessive” rate was clearly linked to the “state of the drainage and the general sanitary condition of the City.”37 In 1905 a government enquiry into the causes of the high rates of death and illness in the city was more specific, citing contaminated water and milk; overcrowded, unventilated rooms; and the cesspit system.38 Yet Georgetown’s mortality rate was even higher than that for the colony as a whole. According to the annual reports of the registers general, the death rate for the city and its environs was greater than that of the rest of the colony for the twenty-two years between 1895 and 1926. The reports also noted that, for most years between 1890 and 1926, deaths in Georgetown outnumbered births (migration from the country districts contributed to Georgetown’s consistently increasing population during this period).39 As elsewhere in the Empire, political and economic elites worried about the consequences of high rates of mortality and morbidity. Inadequate numbers of healthy labourers constituted a threat to a colony’s economic viability. In British Guiana, planters and politicians had agonized over the size of the colony’s labour force for decades, and this perennial concern contributed to worries about high mortality rates.40 They also fretted about the efficiency of the labouring population. Howard Humphreys, author of a 1921 report on Georgetown’s system of drainage, noted the “direct influence that good sanitary conditions [had] upon the general working capacity of individuals,” a point repeated by other contemporaries and government officials.41 Government reports identified a number of “environmental” diseases as contributing to the high mortality rate in both British Guiana and Georgetown. Dysentery and diarrhoea were cited as leading killers and were considered responsible for a significant proportion of the deaths in Georgetown.42 Government sanitary officials argued that these intestinal diseases were contracted through the city’s water supply. Georgetown’s drinking water consisted of rain water collected from roofs and stored in large cisterns.43 Although this water was believed to be polluted by “decaying vegetable matter,” bird droppings, and deposits built up in the cisterns themselves, few of the city’s inhabitants filtered or boiled it.44 Water for other purposes was obtained some distance outside Georgetown, flowing into the city through the Lamaha Canal, and was delivered by pumps.45 This “bush water” was “brown [and] peaty” and by 1891 was piped under Georgetown’s main streets; most city streets had “stand pipes,” or pumps, where the poor could obtain water.46 Although not potable, this water was apparently consumed by “large numbers of the native population.”47

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Contaminated water and milk contributed to the incidence of another dirt disease – enteric fever (typhoid).48 The city’s water supply was considered to be at risk from faecal matter in cesspits and elsewhere, particularly if these pits were close to water containers.49 Local health professionals became increasingly concerned with the incidence of typhoid in the 1910s, particularly since a high proportion of the colony’s cases occurred in Georgetown. Although its incidence decreased as prevention and treatment took effect, in the early 1920s typhoid was still considered a major contributor to the colony’s high death rate. In fact its notoriety was so complete that a 1922 advertisement for Dr Park’s Liver Pills could simply ask whether the reader knew “that biliousness kill[ed] as easily as Typhoid fever.”50 As well, Georgetown’s poor drainage and the prevalence of open cesspits and pools of stagnant water contributed to the incidence of such mosquito-borne diseases as malaria and yellow fever, both of which were considered to be major contributors to the colony’s high mortality rate. The city reportedly “swarm[ed] with mosquitos [sic].” Houses were not “mosquitoproof,” and many contained places where mosquitoes could breed – “rain gutters on the eaves” and empty cans and other trash in the yards (especially those located “about the native dwellings”).51

a l eg i s l at i v e r es p o n s e In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, contemporaneous accounts – municipal and colonial government reports, ratepayers petitions, newspaper editorials and letters – describe a passionate interest in sanitation and a conviction of its relationship to health. For example, in 1906 nine petitioners to the Georgetown Town Council described the overflowing “privy pits” in their neighbourhood during the heavy rains, characterizing “sanitary improvement ... as absolutely necessary throughout the district as food for the preservation of health.”52 This sanitarian concern was encapsulated in local legislation. Constructed by colonial legislators who were influenced by British public health policies and ideologies, these laws demonstrated the determination of local governments to play a more active role in sanitary matters. In the early nineteenth century, Georgetown was one of the few British West Indian towns to consider sanitation a public matter. According to Barry Higman, only Grenada’s St George and Trinidad’s Port-ofSpain did likewise. Elsewhere, sanitation was essentially a “private matter,” and town governments did little beyond offer the “occasional exhortation.”53 The reason for this is uncertain. Both Trinidad and British Guiana were late acquisitions of the British government – 1797 and

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1803, respectively – and neither had the representative governments of the older colonies. Just as direct British rule in these colonies enabled the Colonial Office to introduce ameliorative policies governing the treatment of slaves, so, perhaps, it also facilitated the passage of sanitary legislation. Yet the “public” nature of Georgetown’s early legislation was limited. As did all nineteenth- and early twentieth-century public health legislation, Georgetown’s laws demanded that the city’s inhabitants assume some responsibility for sanitary order in public and private areas.54 Not until the 1850s was the government’s role made explicit. Thus, an 1828 act, although implying that government officials oversaw sanitary matters in Georgetown, only spelled out the duties placed in the hands of local inhabitants: they were to keep their grounds clear of brush and their dams free from rubbish. This act also provided a clear sanitarian rationale: adjoining streets, dams, and drains filled with vegetation, rubbish, or the like could “create effluvia, which might tend to the injury of the health of the inhabitants.”55 It was not until the 1830s that the colonial government in British Guiana began to establish for itself a truly public role. Higman demonstrates that the great cholera pandemics of the nineteenth century forced the British West Indian colonial governments to institute sanitary measures (albeit at the recommendation of the British government), much as their counterparts had in North America and Great Britain. With the arrival of cholera in Great Britain in 1831, the imperial government advised colonial governments in the West Indies to institute boards of health, make arrangements for quarantine, and clean streets and drains. British Guiana, Grenada, Trinidad, and Barbados co-operated to varying degrees. The Guianese government established boards of health in 1832, and these advised that trenches be cleaned and buildings lime-washed.56 Yet in British Guiana these measures seem to have been temporary; more lasting arrangements were not made until the 1850s.57 In 1850, 1852, and 1853 the colonial government passed a series of laws establishing boards of health and instituting public health measures. The arrival of Medical Inspector Hector Gavin, who was sent to the British West Indies by the British government, appeared to have been the catalyst for the passage of this legislation, some of which closely followed similar British legislation; namely, the Public Health Act and the Nuisance Removal and Contagious Diseases Act.58 Although this legislation continued to demand that the city’s inhabitants keep their property and adjoining public areas clean, it also began to explicitly delineate a role for government. An 1850 act established a central board of health and provided for local “commissioners” who were

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given the power to inspect all property in the district and to issue orders that property owners or renters eradicate a variety of “nuisances” and sanitary problems. Two years later it was repealed by another ordinance. Like its predecessor, it established a central board of health; however, it also instituted a local board of health for Georgetown. This local board was responsible for implementing the rules of the central board of health and passing sanitary bylaws. As well as inspecting private property and enforcing sanitary regulations, it was to ensure that streets and other public areas were kept clean and that refuse was removed.59 At least some of this legislation seemed to provide the local government with the tools to deal with the cholera epidemic of the 1850s. As the Creole newspaper noted, the “Town Council [and] the Local Board “adopt[ed] ... measures ... deemed to be immediately necessary by way of prevention.”60 After 1860 the colonial government detailed more clearly the responsibilities of the Georgetown Town Council. Legislation passed in that year required that the council make sure that the city’s streets and other public areas were scavenged and that cesspools and privies were emptied.61 These responsibilities were made more explicit and were extended in the consolidated public health ordinances of 1878 and 1907. As well as stipulating that towns and villages be responsible for removing “house refuse” and cleaning latrines, these acts insisted that local government “maintain in good order” dams, drains, and trenches.62

a wav e r i n g c o m m i t m e n t t o sa n i ta ri an is m This flurry of legislative activity convinced James Rodway that Georgetown’s sanitation had improved by the early twentieth century.63 The rhetoric was certainly pervasive. Indeed, in 1924 an editorial in the Daily Argosy noted that “matters of health [were] very much ’in the air.›64 Yet political indifference undermined the effectiveness of this legislation and ensured that the concern with matters of health would remain mere rhetoric. Politicians and city officials often ignored their own policies and allowed property owners (notably landlords) to circumvent the laws. The impact of this negligence was uneven, seeming to hit the city’s non-white masses with particular force and to ensure that they were blamed for the city’s unsanitary state. Compelled to live in unsanitary conditions, the Indo- and AfroGuianese masses found themselves defined as dirty and disease-ridden and, consequently, as uncivilized. Local sanitary officials attempted to move beyond legislation by putting into effect current ideas about disease causation. This was

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particularly apparent in the anti-mosquito campaigns of the early twentieth century. The discovery that mosquitoes were the vector for diseases such as malaria and yellow fever convinced officials to target their breeding areas. The 1909 arrival of the respected Rupert Boyce quickened the introduction of anti-mosquito measures: trees were cut down and canals and trenches filled in, and public health authorities tried to ensure that the city’s residents screened their water vats and tanks.65 In 1913 city sanitary inspectors were told to search for mosquito larvae and to warn property owners and occupiers if any were found.66 Further measures were implemented in the early 1920s: city officials oiled cesspits, removed vegetation and rubbish, and screened water receptacles.67 The sources are silent about whether these measures were carried out city-wide and about the general distribution of sanitary facilities throughout the city. This makes it difficult to draw definitive conclusions concerning the impact of social or racial/ethnic factors. This is, in large part, due to the sparse information contained in the census reports. Although the reports for Georgetown indicate how many members of various ethnic and racial groups lived in each city ward, they do not break down the numbers by social class. Yet it is possible to come to at least some conclusions. Sources demonstrate that some parts of Georgetown were more affluent than others; these appear to have been those with large “European” populations (i.e., mostly Britons and those of British ancestry), particularly Kingston, Stabroek, and Cumingsburg. The sources indicate that these wards were not homogenous, containing both “very good class properties” and “small and insanitary [sic] houses and huts.” The degree of this proximity between rich and poor is uncertain. Although Georgetown’s medical officer of health, W. de W. Wishart, argued that these two “classes” of homes were somewhat intermixed, an earlier account implied that a greater distance obtained. The editor of the Daily Chronicle, when describing the findings of Acting Superintendent Menzies and Town Councillor Gibson as they toured the unsanitary parts of town, declared that “only when these places [were] pointed out [was] ... their existence ... brought within the knowledge of those who live[d] in happier locations.”68 (It is possible, though, that the editor was influenced by mid-century British accounts of the “discovery” of urban dirt.)69 Whether or not these relatively affluent neighbourhoods benefited from superior sanitary facilities is uncertain. Reports that only Cumingsburg had concrete-lined drains by 1912 is tantalizing and may imply that a close ward-by-ward examination will reveal the influence of such factors as class, race, and ethnicity on sanitary policy.70 Reports of “special” campaigns being implemented in particular wards is simi-

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larly intriguing. When an anti-mosquito campaign in South Cumingsburg was launched to discover whether mosquito breeding places could “be significantly reduced in a particular location,” four extra sanitary inspectors were hired, every yard was visited weekly, and “larvae and potential breeding places” were searched for; the apparent drop in the number of mosquitoes gratified Chief Sanitary Inspector Hoban.71 Several years later, another anti-mosquito campaign was undertaken in several central wards – Lacytown, Robbstown, Newtown, Cumingsburg, and parts of Bourda and Stabroek. Each lot was examined for mosquito-breeding areas and public officials engaged in “intensive scavenging.”72 The selection of wards seems to have been due to several factors, and “practical” considerations may well have played a role. Cumingsburg, for example, was apparently chosen because it was centrally located and was the site of the city’s public health department; Robbstown, Newtown, and Lacytown were doubtless appealing choices because they were relatively small, centrally located wards. Those not targeted were larger, outlying wards – Charlestown, Albouystown, Albert Town, Queenstown, and Werk-enrust. Yet the fact that the favoured wards tended to possess relatively large European populations and “upper class residential areas”73 is also likely significant. Two case studies imply that race/ethnicity and social class may have played a role in the disbursement of sanitary services. The neighbourhood of the Railway Line and the ward of Albouystown were both unsanitary and home to large numbers of poor non-whites. Europeans made up fewer than half of 1 per cent of Albouystown’s population, and, although the census reports do not indicate their numbers in the Railway Line Lands, petitions and government reports suggest that no non-Portuguese Europeans resided there. Running alongside the railway line, the Railway Line Lands had originally been home to squatters and market gardeners. By the mid1920s the 675 inhabitants could carry out little gardening on the exhausted soil; only thirty-three “kitchen gardens” existed, and these employed around 100 persons.74 Interviews with a number of residents – some of whom had been tenants for over twenty or thirty years – reveal that the men and women living in the area were barely able to subsist. The widowed Caroline Ford, for example, supported her six fatherless children by doing a “little washing.” Mary Ramsing and Mary Vieira, both widows as well, were virtually penniless; with little or no money put aside in the bank, Vieira was forced to depend upon her daughter for food. Manoel Khan, a relative newcomer who had lived in the Railway Line Lands for some six years, was forced to share his four-room house with fifteen people.75 Khan was not the

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only resident who lived in overcrowded conditions. One report noted that there was “marked congestion” in a number of the buildings, several of which were shared by over twenty persons. Some of the ninety-three residences were described as “hovels,” and most lacked latrines; those facilities that did exist were “in a dilapidated condition, unsightly and a disgrace to the district.”76 The fault doubtless lay with the owners of the houses themselves (which were rented out to the tenants) and the colonial transport department, which owned the land. The dire straits of the district convinced the committee to solve the problem by recommending that the residents be evicted.77 Albouystown, located on the edge of Georgetown, seemed to suffer from similar neglect. Originally a village, it joined Georgetown in 1913 and was home to large numbers of East Indians and many tenement dwellers. Most houses, especially the tenements, were built low, and the district itself was so “poorly drained” that it flooded after a heavy rain.78 Its inhabitants complained about poor sanitary conditions. “J.M.F.” asked the editor of the Daily Chronicle whether someone in authority would “listen to the cry of the poor inhabitants of La Penitence, district of Albouys-Town, who had been continually crying out for better sanitation.”79 “Taxpayer” characterized conditions as “shameful,” pointing to the “nuisance of the drains and the yards in front of Sussex St”; and “Not a Resident” noted that he had to hold his handkerchief to his nose while walking on the main road in Albouystown.80 In 1912 the Daily Argosy claimed that in the “trenches was stagnant, abominable liquid that contaminated the air, and [that] in front of some of the houses ...[was] a large and nauseating heap of garbage.”81 Once Albouystown became part of Georgetown, the town council aimed to introduce improvements. For example, in 1924 the drainage committee of the Georgetown Town Council planned to erect a pump in Albouystown to assist in draining the district. Yet this plan does not seem to have been carried out. Some four years later, Georgetown town councillor Crane observed that Albouystown was “deluged whenever the canal overflowed” and proposed that pumps be installed. In the late 1920s, the residents of Albouystown complained about the poor state of street drains and alleys and the lack of a water service. Members of the Georgetown Town Council agreed. During an inspection of Albouystown, Town Councillor Phillips and Earle had discovered “an accumulation of garbage and filth” and concluded its poor sanitary conditions “made it imperative that an intensive sanitary campaign should immediately be carried out.” Although much of Georgetown was rubbish-strewn in the 1910s and 1920s, conditions in Albouystown were worse, at least according to Georgetown’s chief sanitary inspector. Official neglect seemed largely

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to blame. According to Councillor Shankland, there were fewer sanitary inspections in Albouystown than anywhere else in the city, and scavenging was carried out with less care than in the other wards.82 The sanitary problems that plagued the inhabitants of these districts were the fault of two groups: the town council and local property owners. Acting in concert, they tended to support each other’s negligence. Town councillors and officials often ignored the city’s elaborate policies and bylaws regulating sanitary matters. Thus streets, trenches, and canals remained rubbish-filled, and latrines continued to be inadequate and so overfull that they polluted the surrounding area. Scavenging, for example, was conducted considerably less frequently than was required. In 1912 the Daily Argosy characterized the bouts of cleaning as “spasms of sanitary activity.”83 In the late 1890s scavenging was conducted so seldom that carts were unable to pick up all the garbage when they finally did make their tours.84 By the 1920s, after some thirty years of sanitary rhetoric and the passage of wide-ranging sanitary legislation, little seemed to have changed. Alleyways and canals were described as neglected and as in need of cleaning,85 and scavengers required anywhere from six weeks to two months to get around individual wards.86 Yet property owners, especially tenement owners, were also to blame. Sometimes city officials condemned their dereliction of duty but at other times they abetted it. Tenement owners often refused to provide refuse containers, and this resulted in garbage-strewn yards, streets, and alleys. Municipal sanitary officials sometimes responded by launching prosecutions. In 1918, for example, the chief sanitary inspector suggested that his staff “take the necessary steps under section 5 of the scavenging bylaws to ensure compliance”; and, in 1922, some landlords were prosecuted for refusing to provide “proper refuse receptacles.”87 Landlords also failed to maintain and provide adequate latrines. An 1886 letter to the editor of the Daily Chronicle, in which “Tenant” detailed the problems he encountered in attempting to have the tanks of his water closet emptied, describes a common occurrence. “Tenant” complained fruitlessly to his landlord for several months and was finally forced to appeal to the inspector of nuisances, who ordered the landlord to have the work done.88 Although the city inspector was there as a last resort, city policy contributed to “Tenant’s” problems. Before 1912 property owners paidto have their cesspits emptied – a demand that contributed to the infrequency with which this procedure was carried out and the frequently with which the pits overflowed. According to one source, owners and tenants tended to postpone this task until a sanitary inspector visited and issued them a notice. In 1912 the town council assumed the responsibility for cleaning cesspits,89 but

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this new regulation did not solve all the problems. In particular, it did not compel landlords to provide adequate numbers of latrines. Salvation Army staff-captain Tucker testified before the 1905 inquiry into the high rates of mortality in the city that most tenement yards had only a “single or double latrine.”90 The extent to which city officials and landlords colluded can be seen in the 1922 sanitary crusade launched by Georgetown’s acting medical officer of health, Dr J.S. Nedd. He was horrified at the “condition of many of the cesspits of the city,” primarily in the “houses of tenement yards.”91 According to Nedd, tenants “complain[ed] and clamour[ed] most bitterly for better conditions.”92 The response of landlords and the town council to Nedd’s campaign demonstrates their limited adherence to sanitarianism. Nedd argued that one solution to the “disgraceful” state of the city’s cesspits was to force landlords to build better ones. In particular, he called for the enforcement of bylaws calling for bottomless cesspit boxes to be replaced by those with bottoms.93 Property owners opposed Nedd’s proposal, complaining that being forced to adapt to these regulations would result in personal hardship. Nedd’s campaign, however, did receive some support. The Daily Chronicle applauded his efforts and the Court of Policy agreedwith his conclusions about landlords’ tendencies to ignore the sanitary conditions of their rental properties.94 The landlords, though, lobbied on their own behalf. The Georgetown Ratepayers Association petitioned the mayor and town council, asking that the bylaws not be made retroactive, that notices cease to be issued for non-regulation cesspits, and that proceedings already begun be halted. Their appeal was generally successful: Mayor Nelson Cannon decided that the bylaw really meant that those cesspits needing repairs should be rebuilt and that other cesspits in good repair (albeit with no bottoms) did not need rebuilding.95 The editors of the Daily Chronicle attacked this decision. Although they blamed the ineffectiveness of Wishart, Georgetown’s medical officer of health, they also condemned the town council for giving in to the “reactionary demands of the landlords.” Wishart, doubtless in an attempt to defend himself, agreed and castigated the council, saying that it was under the thumb of the city’s property owners.96 This debate demonstrated the coincidence of interests between town councillors and property owners in Georgetown. Both groups came from the same class (the property qualification for sitting as a town councillor ensured this), and, although this fact alone did not inevitably ensure that they held the same views, it certainly played a role. Something of this correspondence is indicated by the observa-

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tion of Deputy Mayor A.A. Thorne that the town council had to represent landlords as well as tenants and that, really, the “landlords were not so bad.”97 The 1924 inquiry into the future of the Railway Line Lands suggests that this “sympathy” influenced town council policies. As has been shown, the investigating committee concluded that the unsanitary conditions of the area necessitated the removal of the tenants; it recommended that they be encouraged to rent land on Plantation Bel Air, property owned by Mayor Nelson Cannon.98 The town council agreed to purchase the land for $62,500. The editors of the Daily Argosy condemned what they saw as Cannon’s greed and claimed that he was neither “unbiased [nor] ... unprejudiced.”99 Although the indifference of city officials and the neglect of landlords were responsible for unsanitary conditions in much of the city, most of the blame was laid at the feet of those labouring at the lowest level of the sanitary hierarchy: Indo-Guianese sanitation workers. The criticism of these labourers can be seen as part of the same discourse of blame that castigated the city’s population for the conditions in which they lived. Colonial legislation gave the Georgetown Town Council the right to employ scavengers to perform a variety of functions: to sweep, dust, and water the city’s streets; to remove dust and rubbish from the streets, houses, and tenements; and to empty privies and cesspools.100 Scavenging had been included in the town superintendent’s bailiwick, but, with the establishment of a public health department (under a full-time medical officer of health), it was transferred to the latter. The task of overseeing the work of the independent contractors seems to have moved back and forth between the medical officer of health and the city engineer at least until the early 1920s.101 In the early 1870s prisoners were responsible for cleaning Georgetown’s streets; eventually, however, it became the purview of East Indian immigrants and Indo-Guianese.102 These Indo-Guianese sanitary workers were responsible for keeping the city clean, scavenging its streets (i.e., removing refuse from streets and cleaning out street drains, stables, and cow-pens) and removing “night soil.”103 The sources suggest that, for much of the period between the late 1890s and early 1920s, Indo-Guianese dominated the ranks of the sanitary workers.104 Although a detailed breakdown of the ethnic composition of the town gangs is available for only one year (1897), accounts for the period between roughly 1905 and 1924 suggest that this monopoly was of long-standing. Municipal records for 1897 show that all nine of the gangs’ foremen and 125 of the 145 workers were Indo-Guianese. As Indo-Guianese made up some 6 per cent of

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the total population of Georgetown and its environs in 1891, their domination of this particular economic niche was disproportionate.105 Although, to date, no other records have been discovered that provide a similarly detailed breakdown of the gangs’ composition, other sources indicate that the predominance continued well into the first two decades of the early twentieth century.106 Indeed, in 1924 Indo-Guianese alone made up the gangs building the city’s sewerage works.107 In the late 1890s, at least, the gangs were notable for the heavy participation of Madrasis. Labourers and foremen from Madras outnumbered those from Calcutta by about three to two. Madras and Calcutta were the ports from which Indians embarked for the Caribbean; South Indians, mostly Tamils, departed India via Madras, whereas North Indians (largely from the United Provinces, Bihar, and Bengal) left through Calcutta.108 The preponderance of Madrasis in the scavenging gangs is particularly striking in light of the fact that Madrasis made up less than 1 per cent of Georgetown’s total population and just over 12 per cent of its Indo-Guianese population in 1891. Indeed, they comprised only about 6 per cent of the total number of Indian migrants to the colony as a whole.109 The reason for the disproportionate number of Madrasis on the city’s scavenging gangs is uncertain, and, indeed, their presence raises questions about the origins of the gangs’ composition. Look Lai argues that, before 1870, “plantation officials” in British Guiana tended to hire mostly Madrasis as sirdars, or estate foremen and drivers, thereby exploiting the “regional-cultural frictions” between Madrasis and Calcuttas. But it is not clear whether such concerns influenced hiring decisions in the case of Georgetown’s scavenging gangs.110 The role of caste in determining occupation choice is likewise ambiguous. Did low-caste status peculiarly qualify these individuals for work on Georgetown’s scavenging gangs? Although historians have sketched a general picture of the caste make-up of migrants arriving in British Guiana (about 31 per cent of these were low castes and “outcastes”), the system’s relevance in the colonial setting seems limited. As Seecharan argues, “every stage of the indentureship system ... was subversive of the caste system.”111 Perhaps more relevant was the negative view of Madrasis that colonial authorities seemed to hold. Considered to be “rough and dark-skinned,” Madrasis were the target of official condemnation.112 In an 1848 report on indentured labour, Dr Bunyon, a member of the British Guiana Medical Service, claimed that Madrasi immigrants were “very much given to vagabondage and [were] extremely filthy in their persons and habits, eating every species of garbage even to the extent of picking up the

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putrid bodies of animals from the nastiest trenches, cooking them and eating them mixed with currie.” Indeed, Bunyon maintained that Madrasis seemed to be of lower caste than those from Calcutta. Look Lai suggests that Bunyon was not alone in holding this view, citing a Trinidadian commentator who noted that migrants from Madras “appear[ed] to be, with few exceptions, the scum and refuse of the city of Madras.”113 Whether this attitude influenced municipal hiring policies in Georgetown is uncertain; yet it raises the intriguing possibility that such decisions may have been informed by colonial views of the Indian caste system. Or perhaps the reasoning was more pragmatic: in 1906 the new town superintendent of New Amsterdam began employing “cheap coolie labour” that was, apparently, much less expensive than was that provided by the “local residents” who had been carrying out this work.114 Yet in attempting to “unpack” the origins of this ethnic occupational monopoly, the role of the workers themselves must also be considered. Indo-Guianese exploitation of this economic niche was likely facilitated by a range of networks. It is possible that shared Madrasi origins in India were relevant; perhaps personal connections forged in India or associations (based on a shared background and a shared use of the Tamil language) developed in British Guiana allowed individual Madrasis to help their compatriots find work in the gangs. It is also conceivable that other connections may also have been important. The 1897 report on Georgetown’s sanitation workers noted the existence of family ties, hinting at the possibility that individuals were eased into this occupation by kinship links. For example, in one gang, at least two groups of family members worked together – a father and one or two of his sons. The importance of family members is borne out in an anonymous pamphlet, Our Local Moneylenders, which claimed that Indo-Guianese milk sellers tried to help their relatives gain employment as city scavengers and night soil conservancy overseers by lending money to town council employees.115 Spatial proximity may also have facilitated Indo-Guianese exploitation of the sanitation industry. Many members of individual gangs lived in the same district or area, sometimes in the same buildings and occasionally in buildings owned by their foremen. Gang members who did not share accommodation with their foremen often lived with their co-workers in buildings owned by other gang members or in what seemed to be rooming houses. In 1897 fifty-two gang members shared some kind of accommodation. Those not living with other gang members, in either rental accommodation or their own cottages, lived in the vicinity of their fellow gang members, either on the same street or in the same district.116 And finally, Indo-Guianese may have been attracted to this sector

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because it was potentially lucrative, or at least sufficiently so to facilitate the acquisition of property. According to the 1897 breakdown of gang membership, six foremen of the town gangs owned property, three of whom rented accommodation to others. Eight gang members owned buildings, one with his wife; one owned a house and land; and fourteen owned cottages on leased land.117 This ethnic monopoly was controversial. Municipal politicians and at least one local newspaper opposed the Indo-Guianese dominance of Georgetown’s scavenging gangs. Their opposition was rooted in an awareness of the high rates of Afro-Guianese unemployment. In 1906 a group of Georgetown town councillors expressed their objection to this monopoly.118 Some advocated excluding Indo-Guianese from sanitation employment on the grounds that they had been brought to British Guiana as plantation labourers, whereas others called for establishing ethnically segregated gangs.119 According to Town Superintendent Luke Hill, Afro-Guianese were well represented among city employees and made up all of its artisans and most of its “porters, watchmen, [and] stonebreakers.” He maintained that Afro-Guianese workers did not want to work as scavengers and generally preferred to “be employed as Town constables, foremen, porters, or watchmen.”120 Although Hill was willing, if directed by the mayor, to order that vacancies in the town gangs be filled by AfroGuianese, he criticized the “drastic measure” of firing foremen and their “entire East Indian gangs” without good reason.121 The editor of the Creole supported the politicians’ position. And, like the town councillors, he cited an additional reason for his opposition to Indo-Guianese sanitation workers: corruption. Indo-Guianese sanitation workers were condemned for “corrupt” practices, for bribing their way onto the town gangs. An editorial in the Creole suggested that the “arbitrariness” of firing a “coolie” gang in order to employ other labourers was mitigated by widespread corruption: A system of graft and bribery [was] involved in the time-honoured practice of employing coolies exclusively to do certain municipal work. The subtlety of the Bengalee and the acquisitiveness of some of the drivers and overseers have conspired to create a scandal. It [was] reported that large sums of money large sums of money change[d] hands so that certain positions should be secured.122

That local politicians and the Creole should hold similar positions on this issue was not surprising. This debate occurred barely four months after the 1905 riot, which had been precipitated by the wage demands of Afro-Guianese workers and which, at its peak, saw the

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non-white masses conquer the city’s streets, terrifying the colony’s political and economic elites. Town councillors were aware that their mostly black constituents, although unable to vote, were willing to violently press their demands. Their willingness to support hiring black sanitation workers was echoed by Patrick Dargan, editor of the Creole, who led the attack on the colonial government’s response to the riot.123 The predominantly Indo-Guianese sanitation workers were condemned for more than their corruption: city officials also blamed them for poor work. In 1909 Town Councillor Davis attributed the “insanitary [sic]” state of the city’s yards to the “carelessness of the town overseers and drivers,” and Councillor Thorne blamed the “rubbish cart attendants” for neglecting to remove rubbish from yards and from street parapets.124 Over a decade later, similar comments were still being made. While government pathologist Dr F.G. Rose was lecturing in England, he was reported to have claimed that the sanitary inspectors were recruited from “an undesirable class” and were ignorant and corrupt.125 (Whether knowingly or not, Rose echoed earlier views of Madrasi immigrants). In the late 1920s sanitary workers continued to provide an easy target and were blamed for Georgetown’s filth and its high mortality rate. The series of articles run by the Daily Chronicle in 1928 on the poor sanitary conditions in Georgetown suggested to Town Councillor Shankland that the sanitary staff was not doing its job.126 These representations of the city’s inhabitants and sanitary workers as dirty and disease-ridden echoed a wider racist denigration of nonwhites. When James Rodway blamed the diseases that plagued midcentury Georgetown on former slaves – “idlers from the estates, who thought emancipation meant that they could tramp about where they pleased” – he was taking his place in a Guianese discursive tradition that condemned the colony’s masses as unclean.127 In 1889, for example, Acting Town Superintendent Menzies described the people of Georgetown as “living in sinks of filth and without the least idea of cleanliness.”128 The following year, a town council debate over whether or not to introduce the “dry-earth” system into a city ward demonstrated the same attitudes at work. Town Superintendent Luke Hill, in arguing for its introduction, described the tenants as “irresponsible,” with “no sense whatever of sanitary cleanliness in their personal habits or closet surroundings.”129 The Railway Line Land tenants were likewise blamed for “unsanitary” practices: officials testifying before the committee argued that many if not most of the tenants disposed of their excreta in the nearby Lamaha Street Trench,

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a practice that city officials argued contributed to its “offensive” condition and posed a public health risk to local residents.130 Thus the housing committee hoped that sanitary officers would ensure that residents followed “ordinary sanitary habits” rather than “customs which [were] opposed to the amenities of civilised life.”131 The link between elite-determined sanitary practices and notions of civilization was central to this concern and is demonstrated by the aforementioned comment by the members of the housing committee. Police Magistrate J. Brummell made a similar point in 1921 when he fined tenants for failing to keep their outhouses clean; he condemned their determination to persist in their “unclean way” despite “the efforts of the sanitary inspectors and others to teach them to be clean.” Nedd emphasized the relationship between sanitation and civilization when he characterized privies used by tenants as “a disgrace to sanitation, civilisation and morality.”132 As scholars of Indian and African history have demonstrated, in Britain’s colonies sanitarian discourse delineated an intimate relationship between disease, sanitation, and racist perceptions.133 The same is true for colonial Georgetown. There, poor sanitary conditions were considered major threats to the health of the city’s inhabitants and were perceived as contributing to the high mortality levels that sapped British Guiana of its labouring population. Local and colonial governments determined to attack pollution in Georgetown’s public spaces designed a series of sanitary regulations to rid the streets and adjoining trenches of dirt and disease. Yet local elites wavered in their commitment to putting these ideas into practice. Their neglect created the unsanitary conditions in which many poor Georgetowners lived and provided the rationale for constructing an image of the city’s poor as filthy and uncivilized. The clustering of many of the city’s poor in identifiably dirty neighbourhoods, and the domination of one particular group – Indo-Guianese – over Georgetown’s sanitary industries no doubt contributed to the tendency of local elites to link the poor with filth. Indeed, the equation of “proper” sanitary customs with civilization and morality prepared the colonial political and economic authorities to clean the streets of another kind of “matter out of place”: unwanted people.134

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4 Order and Festivity in Georgetown

Georgetown’s public spaces were particularly significant in the lives of the urban poor. They were places of recreation, where festivities often echoed traditional cultural practices and resonated with Afro-Creole rituals of “play.” The city’s streets, specifically, were also sites of livelihood, where men and women could earn a living, both licitly and illicitly. There, vendors, porters, domestics, and dock workers were joined by their unemployed compatriots, who gathered daily waiting for work. Disputes were frequent: the unemployed, the marginally employed, and the criminal at times fought with each other and with superordinate groups, violating metropolitan-derived codes governing appropriate uses of public spaces. Just as local political and economic elites wanted these areas clean, so they desired them orderly and uncongested. Conflating cleanliness and morality, dirt and immorality, they represented the city’s poor in the same sanitarian terms used to describe dirty neighbourhoods and public spaces, discursively dehumanizing those using these spaces “improperly” and depicting the vast numbers of unemployed on Georgetown’s streets as criminal. The city’s “respectable” classes distilled their fears of the unemployed, non-white masses into Georgetown’s criminal gangs, who – while sharing the chronic unemployment and destitution of the rest of the urban poor – helped shape public spaces as places of Afro-creole festivity.

a p o p u l a r vi s i o n o f p u b l i c s p a c e Following the lead of Peter Wilson, author of Crab Antics, students of culture in the Anglophone Caribbean have identified two competing

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Seawall, Georgetown, c. 1912 (Rodway, Guiana, n.p.)

value systems – respectability and reputation. To Wilson, respectability’s origins were external and lay in British values; reputation, on the other hand, was indigenous, and, “in a sense ... a reaction to respectability.”1 Richard Burton, in Afro-Creole, builds upon Wilson’s oppositions, arguing that respectability is represented by such traits as order, work, decorum, and quiet, while reputation is represented by such “counter-values” as chaos, play, rudeness, and noise. He uses the term “play” – a word employed by slaves to describe non-work festivities incorporating feasting, drinking, dancing, and music-making – to “refer to all nonutilitarian activities in the Caribbean,” from religious to festive through to “the more narrowly ludic,” such as cricket and stick-fighting, and notes its opposition to respectability.2 Scholars have established a further dichotomy: where respectability is home-centred, reputation and play are street-centred. In the British Caribbean, public spaces have traditionally been the locus of a street culture characterized by play and the values of reputation. The same oppositions were apparent in British Guiana. There, as elsewhere in the British West Indies, a “respectability” that connoted such “elite Victorian moral values” as “modesty, dignity, orderliness, civility, [and] decorum” was confronted by the “counter-values” of “gregariousness, bravado, loudness, ribaldry, rowdyism, aggression and ... coarse vulgarity.” As Brian Moore argues, post-emancipation British Guiana was marked by cultural conflict as local elites encouraged the

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Water Street, with Stabroek Market in the distance (Hardy, Life and Adventure, n.p.)

colony’s non-white masses to abandon the values of reputation for those of respectability.3 These cultural battles were fought in Georgetown’s public spaces. The city’s streets and parks were sites for cultural displays as well as places for recreation and socializing. As such, they were important to all the city’s classes. Large open spaces such as Nonpareil Park, the Botanic Gardens, the Promenade Gardens, and the sea wall were used by members of all the city’s diverse groups for informal recreation. They were favourite places for walking and driving, holding impromptu cricket matches, and listening to weekly concerts, especially after the work day and on Sundays and holidays.4 Thus, they can be considered as public spaces – open to all. Yet these spots could also be private. The Georgetown Town Council often rented them to “responsible bodies” – such as religious, sporting, or charitable organizations – or private persons.5 Both charged entrance fees, thereby restricting admittance.6 In both their public and private incarnations, though, Georgetowners valued these places as recreational spots. The city’s streets were used for organized gatherings, particularly processions sponsored by the colonial government and designed to recognize key moments in the life of the colony. Both government and popular groups participated in these. In 1897 the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee was celebrated by processions of school children and friendly societies that marched along streets lined with a “continuous double row of Chinese lanterns.”7 Similarly, the 1920 visit of the Prince of Wales was marked with a royal procession through the

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streets of Georgetown. Crowds were a necessary component of these official spectacles. They watched the Jubilee processions in 1897 and “lined the streets through which the Royal party passed” in 1920.8 Indeed, the very presence of crowds announced the significance of the event being marked. Thus, the end of the First World War was commemorated by men, women, and children who congregated in the city’s decorated and illuminated streets.9 Streets were also the setting for play and informal activity. As Brian Moore observes, a “dynamic and vibrant folk culture of the Afro-Creole working people” emerged in urban streets.10 On bridges, the sides of roads, and street corners people gathered with their friends, visiting, eating coconuts. They “squatt[ed] ... or loung[ed] about the bridges or spirit shops,” “composing new verses to the celebrated ’Badgee’ songs” and throwing dominoes.11 They often gambled as well: a correspondent to the Daily Chronicle noted that some “lads” in Alberttown’s Lamaha street held a nightly “gambling club” on the road.12 Boisterous recreation in public spaces frequently violated elite-defined social conventions and legislation as those congregating on the streets engaged in petty criminal activities, attacking and robbing passers-by.13 Noise defined play on the streets and in public areas.14 Sometimes it was musical, produced by singing and traditional instruments: the Portuguese played the guitar and accordion and the Indo-Guianese and Afro-Guianese the drums. The diverse musical traditions that accompanied these groups from their homelands provided comfort and familiarity in a new country. Africans had brought drum playing and singing with them to British Guiana and to the rest of the Caribbean, and these activities formed the core of festivities during the period of slavery.15 For Indo-Guianese as well, drum-playing was a customary cultural practice and one that they were determined to maintain. In 1896 fourteen Indo-Guianese living in Georgetown complained about legislation demanding that they obtain the permission of a magistrate (which was generally denied) to beat the “dholuk,” or small drum, during ceremonies. They argued that this provision violated the 1891 Immigration Ordinance, which gave Indian immigrants the right to marry according to their customs, one of which was beating the dholuk. When an Indo-Guianese woman, Elizabeth Alfred, allowed drum playing during marriage festivities in her Regent Street yard, she was fined two shillings.16 (Subsequently, though, the governor decided that Indian immigrants should be permitted to use the dholuk during marriage ceremonies.)17 Popular gatherings, whether in the course of private parties held in the city’s parks or during private balls and dances, were likewise

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considered “most unruly and boisterous.”18 At a party in the Promenade Gardens in 1918 drunken men and boys “shout[ed] obscene expressions and songs,” uniformed boy scouts behaved badly, and a number of people picked flowers.19 Several months later, those attending Mr E.A. Blackmore’s fete at the Promenade Gardens committed similar mischief: four garden seats and one flowerbed were destroyed and the “rain gauge used as a urinal.”20 “Dignity balls” and “dancing dens,” which were held in private residences, “polluted” nearby private areas; the sound they generated was audible to passers-by, the loud music often continuing until dawn and the noisy merrymaking trailing departing party-goers. Georgetown’s multi-ethnic “respectable” classes used local newspapers to condemn the dances not only for the attendant noise but also for the concomitant “immorality.” “A Disgusted Hearer,” for example, noted the presence of the “Anti-men” (i.e., “auntie-men,” or homosexuals) of De Rooy Street at these dances, claiming that they engaged in the “most abominable displays of vulgarity ever witnessed in the name of dancing.”21

c o n f l i c t s o v e r l a n g ua g e Non-standard language invariably accompanied these festive and rambunctious activities. Such language took several forms, from “trashy,” “filthy, prurient ballads composed in the most wretched doggerel” to spoken language.22 “Respectable” commentators invariably associated the use of invective with Georgetown’s “unrespectable” classes and wholly condemned its practitioners. However, such language reflected more than the gulf between elite and non-elite culture: it also demonstrated tensions among the urban poor. Contemporaneous accounts represented Georgetown’s poor as employing profane and abusive language more frequently than other classes. Henry Kirke, for example, believed that profanity was most common in the city’s overcrowded tenement rooms.23 An editorial in the Daily Chronicle agreed, arguing that the “degraded condition” of the “lower classes” made their tendency to use “foul and obscene language” almost inevitable.24 Many contemporaries – some identifiably members of the local political and economic elites, others ratepayers and residents – also objected to verbal profanity in the streets and markets, and they used the daily newspapers as a forum within which to vent their outrage and to call for repression. As with overflowing cesspits and rubbish-strewn streets, this pollution was believed to contaminate public areas. The editors at the Daily Chronicle worried about passers-by catching “the echoes of a tirade issuing

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from the lips of some specimen of humanity,” noting that foul language was “patent more or less to every one who passe[d] along the public road or traverse[d] the streets of the city, either on foot or in a vehicle.”25 Its very existence seemed to pose a threat to “respectable” people.26 The language characterized by the “respectable” as disgusting was, in fact, a highly inventive complex of African and European syntax and words, its origins reflecting African cultural practices. Scholars of Caribbean culture note the importance of language and verbal ability among the region’s African descendants – an importance that is rooted partly in the primacy given spoken language in African cultures and partly in the exigencies of slave life, which demanded that Africans communicate with heterogeneous linguistic groups from Africa and Europe.27 The enslaved population in British Guiana developed its own Creole language, a blend of European and African languages. Guianese Creole was created by Dutch- and Englishspeaking planters; Creole-speaking slaves from Antigua, Barbados, and St Kitts; and slaves and free people from West and West Central Africa who spoke African languages.28 Frequent “stylized slanging matches” – in which insults and invective were bandied about – demonstrated the dexterity with which Georgetowners manipulated language.29 Legislation was one tool employed to eradicate such language. Laws passed following the 1856 and the 1889 riots provided fines of up to $100 or jail terms as long as six months for anyone using “abusive or insulting or provoking language.” Both ordinances also regulated language in non-riotous times. Anyone insulting another in a public place or using “threatening, abusive, insulting, [profane] or obscene language, gesture[s], or behaviour ... [and] insulting song[s] or ballad[s]” was liable to a fifty-dollar fine.30 The overwhelming majority of correspondents to the Daily Chronicle declared that the legislation was not enforced and condemned police for their inaction and for sympathizing with the miscreants. The letter-writers claimed that the police ignored the “vulgar scenes” in Charlestown, where drunken women swore and misbehaved; foul language was used in “the very face of the police ... [and] the offenders [were] left unrestrained.”31 Although sparse, official reports tell a different story. In 1883 at least 30 per cent of imprisoned women had been committed for using “indecent and abusive language.” The few years for which figures on indecent language convictions exist likewise indicate some enforcement: there were 33 reports in 1918, 27 in 1919, 67 in 1920, and 32 in 1923.32 Records of the Georgetown police magistrate for several years in the 1890s offer similar numbers.

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As David Trotman demonstrates for post-emancipation Trinidad, charges of obscene language “reflected the cultural gap between the elite and the working-class.”33 Indeed, inter-class disputes over language reveal contradictory views concerning the appropriate use of public areas. Yet police were not alone in laying charges of improper language use. Of the two kinds of language offences brought before the Georgetown police magistrate – obscene language and insulting or abusive language – police pressed the first kind of charge and civilians the second. The willingness of ordinary men and women to press language charges – and the frequency with which they did so – can be interpreted in a number of ways. It may hint at a popular acceptance of elite-defined standards of language use. Or it may indicate a recognition of the reigning proprieties. The fact that some 22 per cent of those charged with indecent language offences in Georgetown between 1890 and 1893 admitted their “guilt” in the court room is suggestive in this regard. However, the large number of civilianpressed charges may also imply a popular determination to exploit these elite standards by incorporating them into the ritual of verbal abuse and to use legislation as a weapon.34 Although the sources indicate that relatively few individuals identified as Indo-Guianese or Chinese pressed charges, all the city’s ethnic groups were represented among those who did so, demonstrating that this activity crossed ethnic lines.35 An editorial in the Daily Chronicle, which argued that the large number of such charges could be attributed to the “singular hyper-sensitiveness in regard to libels, [the] remarkable readiness to take offence when adverse criticism [was] offered,”36 suggests a popular willingness to defend oneself in this fashion. George William Des Voeux declared that “words contemptuous of race [were] usually more galling than the foulest aspersion of morals” and constructed a kind of taxonomy of insults; thus, epithets such as “liar” and “thief” were generally “received with comparative equanimity,” whereas “niggar” often led to a physical confrontation.37 Although the sparse sources do not conclusively prove (or disprove) the accuracy of Des Voeux’s statement, they do demonstrate that insults often flew in the course of daily interactions in workplaces and public markets. For example, Harriet Allen charged Antonio Teixeira with using insulting language during a business transaction. She claimed that Teixeira had refused to pay for food he ordered in her cookshop and that, in the ensuing row, he insulted her.38 Language disputes demonstrate the kinds of verbal contests and competitions that scholars have observed throughout the Anglophone Caribbean. Participants frequently laid charges against each other following inventive verbal battles. Elizabeth Pompey charged Francis

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Tait with calling her, among other things, “a waterish pumpkin and a brackish beverage.” Outraged, Tait pressed a cross-charge.39 The fact that these adversaries were women was not unusual and supports Trotman’s findings for Trinidad, which demonstrate that a significant proportion of language charges were laid against women.40 Indeed, although the Guianese sources show that most of the insulting exchanges appeared to have occurred between women or between men (suggesting that rituals of abusive language emerged out of those situations where women and men gathered with others of their sex, perhaps at work),41 the records indicate that, overall, more women than men used (or were charged with using) insulting and abusive language. Bronkhurst, for example, maintained that women, both Indoand Afro-Guianese, “excel[led] the men in curs[ing] and swear[ing].”42 In the Caribbean, as Burton argues, “these [verbal] skills [were] just as prized among women as among men.“43

sa n i ta ri an m eta p ho r s This noisy, rambunctious, and profane culture was expressed by men and women represented as polluting public and private spaces. The “respectable” classes, seeing this confluence, described this urban folk culture and the urban poor themselves in sanitarian terms. Associated with dirt and disorder and forced – through economic circumstances – to congregate on the streets, the poor were consequently identified as vagrant and, thus, as even more palpably out of place. Henry Kirke described the environment within which criminals were raised as “moral cesspools,” citing as examples the yards in Lower Regent Street, Lombard Street, and Leopold Street. He believed that the great majority of criminals came from the “lowest stratum of society,” the products of “want, poverty, ignorance, and moral and material filth,” from which escape was impossible.44 His contemporaries held that popular culture and the masses themselves were “unclean.” In 1885 the editors at the Daily Chronicle characterized foul language as a “pestilent contagion” and those who used it as “moral sewerage.”45 When, in February 1889, the Chronicle reported an “unusually large number of charges [laid] against rowdy women of the lowest class,” the reporter expressed the hope that the “crusade of the police in the interests of order and decency [would] be the means of cleansing the streets of much of the moral filth which [was] now to be found.”46 In portraying crowds in general and the poor in particular in sanitary terms, British Guiana’s “respectable” groups were, to an extent, echoing attitudes prevalent in Great Britain. Scholars argue that

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Victorians saw uncleanness as an essentially “moral category” and associated it with the poor.47 Their desire to rid the city of dirt suggested a corollary: a desire to empty the city of poor labourers.48 In Britain’s colonies, where largely white elites ruled brown and black labouring populations, a class-based discourse evolved into a racebased one. In Fiji an 1896 report on mortality suggests that its authors saw an association between Fijian character traits and mortality, which allowed for a “constant slippage ... between interests in reducing mortality and other agendas; political, moral and cultural impositions were justified by their association or conflation with the programme of sanitation.”49 In the Cape Colony, local turn-of-thecentury officials “were imbued with the imagery of infectious disease as a societal metaphor,” associating “‘coolies’ with urban poverty and disease.”50 And, in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India, local medical practitioners believed that sanitary reform would lead to moral reform and, hence, to civilization.51 In colonial Georgetown, local elites shared this ideology, and it powerfully affected their efforts to organize public spaces. They too conflated culture, poverty, mortality rates, and sanitation.52 In 1885 the Chronicle declared that the “story” of Guianese immorality was attested to by mortality statistics.53 Some six years later, the register general in part attributed Georgetown’s mortality rates to “the number of persons who spen[t] the greater part of the week in Idleness or pleasure, lounging about the streets or roads, playing games or hanging about the Magistrates courts all of which must [have led] ... to poverty vice and want and be followed by disease and death.”54 Several who testified at the 1905 Combined Court hearings into the colony’s high rates of infant mortality posed similar arguments. In the “experience” of Reverend W.B. Ritchie, “the wages of sin [was] death” (emphasis in original).55 To “respectable” Guianese, “dirt [was] essentially disorder,” “matter out of place.”56 Vagrants, loiterers, petty criminals, and the like were “out of place“when they congregated in public areas. They congested and made disorderly the public spaces local elites wanted uncongested and orderly. This view was summed up by Herbert Barclay, a frequent correspondent to the Daily Chronicle. He argued that”there [was] a place for everything and [that] everything [should be] in its place.“Georgetown’s streets were the wrong place for crowds; instead, they belonged in places such as the Parade Ground, where those who wanted to gather should pay for a licence and hold the gathering under the watchful eye of a policeman. Barclay believed the”public streets and thoroughfares should be schools of pub-

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lic order, [and] [a]nything tending to vulgarity or disorder should be an offence in law,“subject to harsh penalties.57 Those condemning the presence of unwanted people on Georgetown’s streets often characterized them as “nuisances,” a word denoting something unwanted and often connoting refuse and filth. The 1904 comments of “Observer,” a Daily Chronicle correspondent, demonstrate the attitudes of some contemporaneous Georgetowners towards out-of-place poor people. “Observer” objected to the presence of newly arrived indentured Indians on the sea wall, describing them as “infest[ing]” the area. They were dirty, offensive-looking people who were allowed “to walk up and down and to sit and loll upon benches” that others – “little children, their nurses, and other frequenters of and visitors to the prettiest and healthiest spot about Georgetown” – had to use afterwards. “Sight and smell as well as decency and sanitation [were] outraged by them in their all but nude state with their horrid rags fluttering in the breeze.” “Observer” assumed that, in their native lands, these people “would only have be[en] found in the slums of the native quarters” and objected to the fact that, on the sea wall, they had “the best of the situation, keep[ing] up loud jabbering, and star[ing] insolently out of countenance [at] any one whose eye happen[ed] to rest upon them.” They should have been contained to the stretch of beach south of the roundhouse, an area frequented by no one. “Observer” distinguished between these people, “who really should be kept in the quarters suited to them,” and a “respectable East Indian in his clean draperies no one could object to.”58 The former were often referred to as nuisances. British Guiana’s legislation used the word “nuisance” in the same manner as did contemporaries: it referred to garbage in the streets and overflowing cesspits as well as to persons not wanted on the streets (vagrants, criminals, and the like). Georgetown’s poor thus stood doubly condemned: their poverty and criminality associated them with filth, as did their location. They did not belong on the streets. Anyone blocking Georgetown’s streets was described as a nuisance. Though the term was used to describe individuals whose work brought them into the street – fare-searching, slow-moving cabs (known as “crawlers”) and “unlicensed coolie porters loafing about the streets” – the term was more commonly used to describe the unemployed, who were nowhere more in evidence than on Water Street.59 For example, in 1906 the police told a “large” group of wharf porters standing by a store to move along even though they were merely applying for work at the local stores, which occasionally hired during the day. The Daily Chronicle reporter suggested that no doubt the police had moved the porters because “their presence on the pavement in such large numbers ha[d] proved to be nothing short of a public nuisance.”60

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Those out of place included women. Georgetown’s streets and markets were filled with women working and relaxing, indeed, using these areas in the same manner as did their male counterparts. They too were loud and boisterous. Bronkhurst, for example, claimed that “bands of dissolute men and women rum-laden ... quarrel[led] and [fought] around and in the shops, and ren[t] their air with their shockingly profane conversation.”61 These women were a notable presence on the street, taking up space audibly and physically. Thus a 1910 travel account described Afro-Guianese women as “striding along, with bedraggled skirts gathered up in a roll around their massive waists ... full of loud laughter and talk and song.”62 Although this source used conventionally negative terms – loud, large, and illkempt – the women so characterized clearly dominated the space they inhabited. As David Trotman argues for Trinidad, “the behaviour of lower-class women” (which, like that of their male counterparts, “seemed to emphasize noise, turmoil and lack of sobriety”) was opposed to “ruling-class notions of respectability.”63 Yet it was their location as much as their behaviour that was considered inappropriate. In the Caribbean, as scholars have pointed out, “the exigencies of daily life mean that ‘some women of the lower class share street life with men.› According to Richard Burton, for example, women of the working class “live[d] a more public life” and “roam[ed] [about] because their lives and their work require[d] knowledge of the streets and freedom of mobility.”64 But the presence of women on the street violated elite norms that considered public areas and city centres to be out of bounds to “respectable” women. As Judith Walkowitz argues for Victorian Britain, women who entered urban public spaces arrived in “a place ... symbolically opposed to orderly domestic life.”65

wo r k e r s a n d va g r a n t s Georgetown was a port city and British Guiana’s entrepot. Subject to fluctuations in employment (due to the seasonal nature of the sugar and thus of the shipping industry, the temporary nature of work in the interior, and repeated economic crises) large numbers of unemployed men and women regularly gathered in the city’s streets looking for work. They were joined by the marginally and the irregularly employed. To the “respectable,” though, these crowds were comprised of vagrants and criminals. Many men and women in Georgetown were unemployed. Of the adult population over fifteen years of age, some 16 per cent were unemployed in 1891, 17.6 per cent in 1911, and 22.8 per cent in 1921.66

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The large percentage of unemployed in 1921 was coincident with a downturn in the colony’s economy and with a perceived increase in petty crime. It is possible that a similar increase in the jobless figures would have been seen for the early years of the twentieth century, but the colonial government refused to take a census in 1901, citing “financial reasons.” This rationale itself suggests that the economy was in dire straits.67 Unemployment was also comparatively high among Georgetown’s young people. Although most children between the ages of five and fifteen attended school – 69.6 per cent in 1891, 72 per cent in 1911, and 70 per cent in 1921 – a significant proportion were listed as unemployed: 19.3 per cent in 1891, 18.6 per cent in 1911, and 22 per cent in 1921. Children attending school were often poor and needy, as proposals to distribute free meals to school children demonstrate. Of those who worked (and this included fewer children for each census year), most were employed as domestics or artisans/mechanics.68 The presence of children among Georgetown’s unemployed was significant because of the sheer size of the city’s youthful population. Between 1891 and 1921, roughly 40 per cent of the population of Georgetown and its environs was twenty years old or younger, split more or less equally between those above and below the age of ten. (Of those in Georgetown who were over twenty years of age, about 20 per cent were between 20 and 30; just over 25 per cent were between 30 and 50; and some 8 to 11 per cent were between 50 and 70.)69 Of those who were employed, many worked at jobs that paid little or irregularly. Most employed men worked as labourers or “mechanics and artisans” and most women as domestics. In 1891 just over 23 per cent of the employed male population were listed as labourers and 22 per cent as mechanics and artisans; in 1911 the number of labourers fell to 19 per cent and that of mechanics and artisans to 21 per cent; in 1921 25 per cent of employed men worked as labourers and 28 per cent as mechanics and artisans. The census reports listed much smaller numbers of men as being connected with gold digging and wood cutting – the ones who were likely in Georgetown temporarily, before or after stints in the interior.70 Workers contracted for these jobs in Georgetown itself and spent their advances in the city, buying the gear needed to sustain them for months in the bush. A significant proportion of Georgetown’s female population found work as domestics (see Table 4.1). In 1891 and 1911 close to 38 per cent of employed women worked as domestics; the percentage rose to 44 per cent in 1921. Smaller numbers worked as mechanics and artisans (10 per cent in 1891, 14 per cent in 1911, and 12 per cent in 1921), and some worked as non-agricultural labourers (26 per cent in

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Table 4.1 Domestic servants in Georgetown and its environs Year

Females

Males

Total

1881

4,655

1,264

5,919

1891

7,432

1,397

8,829

1911

10,847

1,026

11,873

1921

10,488

794

11,280

1931

8,324

318

8,642

Source: Report on the Census Results of 1891, table 3; Report on the Census Results of 1911, table 3; Census Report of British Guiana, 1921, table 3; Census Report of British Guiana, 1931, table 3.

1891 and 5 per cent in 1911 and 1921).71 The census reports are sketchy and the vagueness of the occupational categories makes it difficult to identify with any specificity the nature of the occupations listed. Other sources are slightly more informative, revealing, for example, the large number of seamstresses in Georgetown and the fact that some labouring jobs seemed to have belonged mostly to women, such as unloading coal from ships docked at the wharves or distributing water from the city’s water tanks.72 These sources detail the hazards of such employment (one female coal carrier fell down a hatch on a ship’s deck, sustaining “severe” injuries) as well as their low pay (the “tank-keepers,” mostly widows of council employees who had died pensionless, complained about efforts to reduce their wages). The presence of so many working women was not unusual in the British Caribbean. During the period of slavery, enslaved African and Afro-Creole women worked from early in the day until late at night in the great houses and in the fields.73 The number of female estate labourers declined after 1838 as many women chose to assist in the post-slavery reconstruction of families and family life and to concentrate on domestic labour and peasant agriculture. Bridget Brereton has argued that, although the concerns of emancipated people themselves resulted in the post-1838 movement of women away from plantation work, the “coercive force of hegemonic gender ideologies” played a part. Diverse social actors, ranging from missionaries to British officials, believed that former slaves “should model their domestic lives on the middle class Western family.” Women, it was held, belonged in the home, the private sphere, whereas men should properly monopolize the public sphere.74 Yet poor women, particularly poor urban women, defied these ideological and familial strictures. As marketwomen, hucksters, domestics,

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View of Georgetown from Lighthouse Tower, showing river and shipping, c. 1913 (Hardy, Life and Adventure, n.p.)

and labourers, they comprised a noticeable and audible presence in the street; indeed, as Rhoda Reddock has pointed out, the street “was their arena of activity” as they “struggle[d] for survival in situations of extreme poverty.” It was the site of their employment and their route to and from their places of livelihood; however, their presence there clashed with the doctrine of “separate spheres.”75 Women and men, both unemployed and employed, were drawn to Water Street, the city’s main retail thoroughfare. It contained most of Georgetown’s large merchant houses as well as many small stores, the post office, and the reading rooms and museum of the Royal Agricultural and Commercial Society.76 A wide street, it paralleled the docks, and most of its buildings and lots were attached to wharves.77 Water Street businesses employed many Guianese; thus Water Street was filled with the clerks employed at the merchant houses, dock workers labouring at the wharves, and hucksters and stallkeepers selling their wares in and around Stabroek Market, which was located at one end of the street. It offered the promise of employment and thus became a temporary home to the unemployed who gathered there looking for work. Many of those standing on Water Street during the day were dock workers whose hopes for work were contingent upon the number of ships arriving at the docks.78 “When steamers c[a]me in, head men of

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Georgetown Docks, c. 1912 (Rodway, Guiana, n.p.)

[had] to get at the gate and close it as there [was] a rush of hundreds of men to get in. As soon as a certain number ha[d] been admitted the gate [was] closed and the remainder walk[ed] away and loiter[ed] practically the whole day up and down the street.”79 Dock labourers’ employment depended on the arrival and departure of steamers, so their hours of work were uncertain. What Edward Jenkins, William Des Voeux, and other observers of late nineteenth-century British Guiana characterized as the “mild despotism of sugar” was the reason dock work was seasonal. Although “mild” might have been an understatement, “despotism” was not. The demands of the sugar industry determined when workers worked, and its labour needs fluctuated according to the seasons and to international pressures. When the cane was ready to be harvested, it had to be cut, ground, and shipped in short order, which demanded more workers in the fields and the factories and on the docks. Almost invariably, dock workers were employed as task workers. They were divided into “regular” and “extra,” the labour of the regulars – who were hired routinely when ships arrived – supplemented, if necessary, by that of the extras.80 Demand for dock labourers was largely seasonal. During “crop” (i.e., the sugar harvest) there was employment for almost everyone who wanted it, but during the “slack” season there was little work, and many labourers only worked two days per week. In 1924 labourers averaged two to four days of work per week, depending on the number of ships arriving.81

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Despite the absence of steady work, enough dock labourers were always present to meet the employers’ labour needs. A 1924 committee struck to investigate working conditions among dock workers blamed high wages for attracting labourers to the docks and, thus, causing them to neglect other employment opportunities. It therefore proposed limiting the number of casual labourers employed as stevedores and wharfmen to the maximum number needed “at any one time to satisfy the needs of any two or more Shipping Firms.”82 The more draconian solutions proposed implied a view of unemployed and irregularly employed labourers as deliberately idle, as vagrants. Several commissioners suggested the men be compelled (or encouraged) to leave Georgetown altogether, a few advising employing vagrancy legislation and others recommending that “surplus” workers be encouraged to settle in the country and take up husbandry. Commissioner W.J. Gilchrist suggested the implementation of legislation similar to Trinidad’s “Habitual Idlers’ Ordinance,” with those caught by the legislation to be settled on land at Onderneeming Industrial School. Fellow Commissioner J.B. Cassels believed the vagrancy law should be used to deal with surplus workers “who [were] unable to prove that they [had] endeavoured to obtain work and failed.” Those who wanted work but could not find any should be encouraged to look in the country districts. Commissioner Francis Dias agreed that there were too many labourers and believed that ridding Georgetown of some of its “excess” population would solve the “supply and demand” problem. He proposed that the government acquire land not too distant from Georgetown, where “model cottages” could be built, people given land to cultivate, and cottages rented to them on reasonable terms. Yet even the sympathetic Dias considered the idle to be criminally culpable: “every effort should be made to compel idle people to work, and those who refuse[d] to do so without having a good excuse to give, should be dealt with firmly by the law.”83 Gilchrist’s proposed solution to the problem of surplus labour on the docks elicited a favourable response from the Daily Argosy. The editor described the “vagrants ... some cripples, some able-bodied, but all undeniably filthy and unsavoury” filling the street between the post office and the Argosy stationery store. Such people – “life’s failures” – belonged in the almshouse or another such institution, not on the streets. The editor, like Gilchrist and the other commissioners, saw the unemployed as vagrants: “Georgetown – it must be apparent to the most casual observer – has far more than its fair share of hooligans and wastrels, youths and men who have never done an honest day’s work in their lives and do not intend to do so unless they are

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compelled.”84 This perceived link between the number of vagrants in Georgetown and the shortage of labourers in the rest of the colony was long-standing. In 1885 the inspector general of police characterized British Guiana’s high vagrancy rate as a “curse” and an impediment to its prosperity, and he advocated enforcing and strengthening vagrancy legislation, compelling the unemployed to work outside the city as agricultural labourers.85 Such a problem required a solution, and British Guiana’s political leaders found several. In 1893 vagrancy legislation was passed, and it allowed anyone charged with having committed an offence against the provisions of any ordinance relating to vagrants, rogues, and vagabonds to be sent to the almshouse until released by a magistrate’s order.86 For several years during the 1890s, the reports of the Georgetown Police Court indicate that relatively few individuals were charged with vagrancy and loitering in Georgetown (considerably fewer than were charged in the colony as a whole), suggesting that either enforcement or incidence was much lower in Georgetown than it was in the rest of British Guiana. As vagrancy legislation largely targeted plantation labourers, of whom Georgetown had few, perhaps the city saw both lower enforcement and lower incidence.87 British Guiana contained a number of institutions dedicated to keeping unwanted persons off the streets of not only Georgetown but also of New Amsterdam and other towns and villages in the colony. The almshouse sheltered vagrants who were sent there by magistrates, as did the Onderneeming Industrial School and the Girls’ Reformatory, both of which also accepted boys and girls convicted of indictable offences.88 Onderneeming was founded in 1879 to educate and train “vagrant boys and ... youthful male offenders.” (In 1907 it became the Government Industrial School.)89 The city’s public hospital also received people found on the streets by the police, and, although the hospital was supposed to send them to the almshouse, lack of space at the latter forced the former to keep them.90

“ c e n t i p e d e s , “ p u b l i c s pa c e , a n d po pu la r c u ltu r e A series of “moral panics” sparked by the activities of urban gangs in early twentieth-century Georgetown illuminate the depth of “respectable” concerns about the unclean and vagrant poor. The socalled “centipede” gangs seemed to embody the danger that the nonwhite masses were believed to pose.91 In many ways, their identity and interests were similar to those of the rest of Georgetown’s poor: both suffered bouts of joblessness (victimized by repeated crises in

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British Guiana’s sugar-dominated economy) and both found refuge in the same urban neighbourhoods. Yet the festive, carnival-like activities of the centipede gangs and the manner in which they used public spaces distinguished them from the larger social class to which they belonged.92 The characteristics contemporaries attributed to the members of centipede gangs were summed up in “The Growth of Centipedism in British Guiana.”93 Its anonymous author, E.N.N., declared that they originated in the poor but respectable classes and that lack of preparation for the job market drove them to lives of crime. As young boys, they were “wharf rats,” thieving and scavenging on the docks. After a stint at Onderneeming School, they emerged as “callous” and “hardened centipedes” whose hand “was against every man, woman, and child.” As members of the “order of centipedes,” they lived together in tenements and worked only occasionally on the docks or in the gold fields.94 Centipede gangs, however, were not solely male associations.95 Indeed, the very definition of the term “centipede” (santapee) suggests the presence of women; according to the Dictionary of Caribbean English, a “santapee” was a “brawling and fighting” woman or a “foulmouthed prostitute.” Though E.N.N. described these women as victims, they appeared to control their own destinies. E.N.N. characterized them as the products of a “vicious, immoral atmosphere,” their ruin completed by male attention and exploitation, their short, tragic lives concluding in the almshouse. Yet their independence and selfreliance are clear. These women earned their own living, whether illegally (through thieving) or by exploiting the male gold diggers, seamen, or country rubes who crossed their paths. The discursive debts of “The Growth of Centipedism” are obvious and range from Hogarth’s “The Rake’s Progress” to the vast number of nineteenth-century works on prostitution that, in the words of Eric Trudghill, repeated “the old image of the prostitute’s short, diseaseridden, gin-soaked life.”96 The violent image of female gang members drawn by E.N.N., however, was repeated in contemporaneous Guianese accounts of poor, non-white women. Henry Kirke, for example, described them as “ready for a fight at any time.” He recalled the Tigress of Tiger Bay, who “was a match for any three policemen and ... a terror to the neighbourhood,” and Tim Sugar, who, whenever she was released from prison, “celebrated ... by getting drunk, stripping off her clothes, and in her nudity dancing a wild can-can on the pavement.”97 Literate contemporaries echoed E.N.N. by representing these men and women as either wilfully or inadvertently unemployed. In 1921,

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the Chronicle ran a story about centipede gangs (entitled “City Vagrants”) that described them as “gangs of lawless youths” who were averse to work and were responsible for “pester[ing]” Georgetown. They congregated on the city’s bridges and streets, gambling and picking pockets – in short, doing anything but work.98 The police must have agreed, for they charged twelve of these men with vagrancy.99 One Daily Chronicle correspondent recommended that vagrant centipedes be sent to some kind of a penal colony where they would earn a livelihood through agricultural labour. Their apparent vagrancy was perceived as threatening. While they were loafing, there was no telling what kind of trouble they could get up to. Georgetown’s police magistrate believed the “loafers, vagabonds, prostitutes and disorderly persons” who “throng[ed] the thoroughfares ... [were] prepared at any time to become a source of danger and expense to the community.”100 A labouring class divided between those who worked and those who did not, the popular equation of vagrancy with unemployment – these were common features of economies elsewhere in the Caribbean and in Victorian Britain. Historians of British history have demonstrated that late nineteenth-century Victorians constructed a divided working class, split between the “respectable” and “unrespectable” (or “residuum”), and scholars of Caribbean history have argued that acceptance of this distinction was not restricted to Britain. In the Caribbean, elites feared the non-white masses – a fear that originated during the period of slavery when the enslaved population repeatedly rebelled and engaged in frequent acts of resistance (a “200 years’ war,” according to Hilary Beckles). In the post-emancipation period, the Afro-Creole and, in some places, Indo-Creole populations continued to resist colonial authority. The newly strengthened and weighted ideology of race contributed to a bifurcated perception of the working population that saw those who rejected the market redefined into “a different kind of human being.”101 In British Guiana this unemployed residuum was thought to include petty criminals, and these people were characterized in other than human terms. “Respectable” contemporaries characterized those belonging to this class as “centipedes,” seemingly using this term to describe anyone who was apparently unemployed and either “playing” in public areas (sitting on a bridge, standing by a rumshop, playing dominoes on the street) or engaged in petty criminal activities (robbing and beating passers-by, carrying sticks and weapons). The term “centipede” denoted the characteristics attributed to this class (not human, indistinguishable from one another, and difficult to capture) and the fear with which it was regarded (like

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centipedes, it could sting).102 The dehumanization of the city’s residuum can also be seen in references to this class as “scum” and “vermin” emitting “howls and cries” and as “intolerable nuisance[s]” “infest[ing]” the city’s streets.103 Fears of the unemployed and the criminal coalesced in the moral panics around centipede gangs.104 In 1907 George Garnett, a hopeful candidate for the Court of Policy, declared that the only solution to the centipede problem was to put a twenty-eight-pound shot around them and throw them into the sea.105 Although his response was extreme (and possibly intended to serve his political ambitions), it reflected the depth of contemporaneous fears of centipedes and was echoed in a series of moral panics. In 1902 the Daily Chronicle asserted that British Guiana was without “hooligans, cowardly scoundrel[s] who lived by robbery and who would not hesitate at murder if it suited [their] plans.” It was, concluded the Chronicle, “infinitely safer for the average colonist to travel through the poorest and richest parts of the city than to attempt to traverse some of the darker alleys of the East London of the British metropolis.”106 Not long afterwards, however, the mood changed. In the early years of the century and in the 1920s, both periods of high unemployment and depression in the sugar industry, contemporaries considered centipedism a serious problem in Georgetown. Newspapers were an important medium through which the city’s “respectable” groups could express their concerns about gang activity.107 In 1904 “Hard, Dry Facts” wrote the editor of the Daily Chronicle complaining about the “rowdy bands of so-called ’centipede’ boys and loafers who infest[ed]” the city’s streets and were becoming an “intolerable nuisance,” citing an example of a “gang going along Water Street singing at the top of their voices.”108 In May 1905 Alexander A. Hector complained about the centipede gang that occasionally bothered him between the La Penitance and Great Eastern Bridges as he rode his bike from Agricola to his school on Regent Street in Bourda. They gathered in large numbers day and night, armed with big sticks and “fish-hooks fastened in strings, thus striking terror into the hearts of the nervous and peaceful passers-by.” Although Acting Assistant Police Magistrate L.E. Hawtayne’s practice of “catting” suspected gang members was considered an effective deterrent, less than a year after the inception of this policy crowds of “young, strong men” gathered between Riverview and Great Eastern Bridges and gambled “within public view all the day.”109 The colonial government responded with legislation. In 1904 it amended the Summary Criminal Offences Ordinance by including the centipede law. Designed to stop stick-carrying centipedes from

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attacking innocent people on the street, it made those unlawfully carrying sticks, or “any dangerous weapon or instrument” that caused fear to the public, liable to imprisonment for six months as well as to corporal punishment.110 The law was enforced in the months both preceding and following the 1905 riot. After the riot, magistrates imposed severe sentences, and the police, assisted by the water police and “specially imported and expensive search light lanterns,” searched for and drove vagrant children from their “nightly haunts.”111 Local authorities congratulated themselves on their success. By 1908 the inspector general of police attributed the decline in the numbers of centipedes to the increased repression, noting they had come to “fear, respect and obey the police.” He considered “centipedism” “almost an evil of the past” in Georgetown and its environs. The trend continued in the 1910s. In 1915 the inspector general of police noted that there had been no “Hooliganism” during the year, an observation holding true for 1916, 1918, and 1919.112 By the early 1920s, though, there seemed to be an increase in centipedism. In 1920 an outbreak of centipede activity was reported in the Georgetown ward of Wortmanville. Though the conviction of the ringleaders was considered to have ended this episode, other accounts noted a significant increase in juvenile crime: “hundreds of lads between 15 and 20 years of age [were] wandering about Georgetown and making no attempt to earn an honest living.”113 In 1921 the Chronicle again addressed the issue, noting the difficulty that police encountered in stamping out centipedism.114 Centipedes shared with other members of the city’s masses the poverty and unemployment that were endemic in late nineteenthand early twentieth-century Georgetown. Van Sertima, in Among the Common People of British Guiana, described the penury of many of the city’s inhabitants; living in small, overcrowded rooms, they had little money for necessities and were dependent upon friends and family.115 The widespread poverty was doubtless responsible for the increase in the almshouse population. In 1916 the city’s almshouse was described as “congested,” its daily average increasing fairly steadily from 1906 to 1912, dipping slightly in 1913 and 1914, and then starting to climb again in 1916 – a rise attributed to the increased cost of living attendant upon the First World War, which “prevent[ed] the well-disposed from assisting their sick and infirm dependants.”116 Those who did work, as has been shown, were relegated to poorly paid, often casual jobs as labourers on the docks or as domestics. Rodney argues that poverty and unemployment encouraged many to join the centipede gangs.117 Although the association between poverty, unemployment, and petty crime is neither inevitable nor clear-cut, some

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coincidence does exist, as thieving constituted a survival strategy for both adults and children. The shortage of regular employment doubtless compelled many men and women to resort to crime, stealing from stores and the docks and robbing passers-by on the street. Yet, according to Kirke, in British Guiana there existed a culture of petty lawlessness that, although rooted in poverty, went beyond sheer immediate need: But unfortunately amongst the poorer classes, public disapprobation of criminals, especially when they are thieves can hardly be said to exist: on the contrary if the victims be the richer classes, more sympathy is shown than disapprobation. They consider property as a benefit in which they have no share, and that the rich are the natural prey of the poor; so that instead of being an assistance to justice the lower classes throw every obstacle in the way of the suppression of crime, and the punishment of offenders. Even respectable people of the poorer classes who themselves shrink from theft, will at the same time screen one of their own order who is pursued by the officers of justice for an offence against property, rather than incur the opprobrium which in their class always attaches to the name of an informer.118

The members of centipede gangs shared with the rest of Georgetown’s poor more than economic insecurity and the constant threat of unemployment: they also shared residential and recreational geography. Centipedes were associated with areas of working-class residence in Georgetown, particularly with Tiger Bay, an area of riverside wharves and warehouses.119 Both gathered at street-corner rum shops, loitering about the street. In 1905 “Truth” wrote to the Daily Chronicle complaining that the licensing of a rum shop at the corner of Hogg and James Streets in Albouystown would increase the disorder of the street (Hogg Street was already “one of the worst streets in the city – a place where all the roughs assemble[d] both day and night”) and the “lawless and riotous behaviour of the roughs.” It would also contaminate the youths attending a school located on the street.120 Several weeks after the 1905 riot, “Civilised Shopkeeper” complained about the “worthless characters” who gathered at rum-shop corners in the evenings “for wicked designs,” quarrelling, fighting, and using foul language.121 The centipede gangs were clearly part of the vast multitude of the city’s poor, all of whose members shared economic interests and the daily difficulties of earning a living. In their distinctive use of public spaces, however, they illuminated wider urban folk patterns. The written documents do not reveal the source of “centipede” as an appellation for urban gangs. The fact that it was generally employed in

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newspapers and government accounts in a pejorative fashion implies that the term may have been elite-generated; as a quick-moving, many-legged, poisonous insect that lived in debris, indistinguishable one from another, the centipede can be seen to embody many of the traits commonly attributed to members of the centipede gangs.122 However, “centipede” may have been a self-imposed title, its origins in Afro-creole cultural patterns. In particular, this term may have been linked to the masquerade tradition in the Caribbean: insect and other non-human characters commonly represent humans and their foibles in Afro-creole culture – in the anancy stories (of the canny spider) and during carnivals and festive events when men and women transform themselves into insects, animals, and other non-human forms.123 Centipedes were signified by their possession of hackia sticks (produced from an extremely hard, local wood).124 Police, local political leaders, and, indeed, “respectable” observers relied upon the presence of these weapons to identify gang members. The significance of the sticks was codified in legislation (anti-centipede laws usually mentioned them) and invariably cited in prosecutions. Yet these weapons, useful as they were to members of the superordinate classes, played an important cultural role among the gang members themselves, who employed them in a kind of ritualistic, mock-ferocious fashion that alluded to both Afro- and Indo-Creole traditional cultural practices. The origins of stick-carrying and stick-wielding are uncertain but suggest the influence of both Afro-Creole and Indo-Creole traditions. During the period of slavery, slaves in some parts of the Caribbean carried sticks, a tradition retained in the post-emancipation period. An anonymous observer of Jonkannu festivities in Jamaica in the late eighteenth century noted marchers with “painted sticks or wands.”125 Trinidad, though, is the best known site of such practices. Slaves transported there from French Caribbean islands brought stick-fighting with them, and, in the years after slavery’s end, its emancipated population maintained this tradition as an important part of carnival ritual. Every poor urban district was represented by champion stickfighters who fought others for the district’s “honor and reputation.” Yet stick-fighting, and its occasional overt aggression, frightened Trinidad’s political leaders, who banned it following the 1884 carnival riots.126 Although stick-fighting and stick-carrying may have migrated to British Guiana from Trinidad and Jamaica (or may have evolved in British Guiana during the course of its own Jonkannu-like Christmas carnival), there seems little evidence to show that stick-fighting was commonly practised by Afro-Guianese slaves.127 However, it can be

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seen in the Indo-Creole celebration of Hosay (or Tadjah, as it was called in British Guiana), suggesting that the origin of Guianese stickfighting and stick-carrying lay as much in East Indian as in African cultural practices. Basdeo Mangru describes Tadjah as the “most colourful festival among the Indian indentured population in the Caribbean.”128 A Shi’ite Muslim festival originating in India to commemorate the deaths of Hassan and Hussain, the grandsons of the Prophet Mohammed, it was held during Muharram – the first month of the Muslim calendar. Kelvin Singh describes it as “essentially a passion-play on a grand social scale, combining elements of fervent piety with the demands of street theatre.” It ended after ten days, with a street procession in which huge tazis, or tadjahs (the pyramidshaped tombs of Hassan and Hussain), were carried to the sea, accompanied by crowds of men and women. Indian immigrants brought this festival to the Caribbean, where it was celebrated annually in Trinidad and British Guiana. In both British Guiana and Trinidad, the marchers included men carrying sticks (in British Guiana, these were often hackia sticks), shouting and dancing, and ritualistically portraying Hassan and Hussain. Although a Muslim festival, in both Trinidad and British Guiana it attracted considerable Hindu participation.129 Tadjah also drew Afro-Creoles in both colonies. Bronkhurst noted that the Afro-Creoles “seem[ed] to be getting as fond of the annual show as the Coolies themselves and they follow[ed] the gaudilydressed temples in thousands.”130 So numerous were Afro-Creole participants (both male and female) by the 1870s and 1880s that they seemed, in the words of Brian Moore, “to be taking over the festivities.”131 A 1907 photograph shows Afro- and Indo-Guianese carrying a tadjah in Georgetown, despite the ritual’s association with plantations and country areas.132 Afro-Guianese also celebrated Muharram on their own. According to Bronkhurst, a “Creole [that is, Afro-Creole] Tadjah” was held in Essequibo in 1873.133 Mangru identifies several examples of “black Tadjahs” from the 1870s as well as one that involved a Portuguese “artist” who constructed the tadjah itself. The reasons underlying Afro-Guianese participation are uncertain. Mangru quotes several contemporaneous sources that blame the AfroCreole love of rowdyism, whereas Moore speculates that the postemancipation Afro-Creole interest in tadjah can be traced to the Muslim origins of at least some of the Afro-Creole population.134 Rhoda Reddock, in her work on Trinidad, suggests another answer: tadjah’s similarity to the “‘root traditions’ of the African working-class”– namely, drum-playing, stick-carrying, and dancing – encouraged this interculturation.135

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That participation in tadjah crossed ethnic lines suggests that its Guianese form was the product of cross-cultural fertilization. More to the point, the two stick-carrying traditions in the Caribbean may mean that the members of centipede gangs drew from both Afro- and Indo-Creole traditions. Indeed, although the newspaper reports did not explicitly identify the ethnic composition of the gangs, there are some intriguing hints that they may have included both Afro- and Indo-Guianese. These gangs were associated with the suburbs and environs of Georgetown, home to considerable numbers of IndoGuianese: they had been identified in Werk-en-Rust, Albouystown, and Kitty.136 In April 1905 the Daily Chronicle, under the heading “The Cat for Centipedes,” noted that several “rowdies” had been arrested in Agricola and Bagotstown for creating a “disturbance” at the local tadjah celebration and were charged with “carrying sticks” in public. The fact that one of the young men, William Scott, was nicknamed “Coolie Boy” suggests that he may have been East Indian or IndoGuianese (“coolie” was a pejorative term used to characterize East Indians).137 The culture of centipede gangs was notable in another respect: it reflected a determination to dominate particular urban places. Although centipedes, like the rest of the city’s non-white masses, gathered in Georgetown’s public areas (such as its streets and parks) – using these as key areas of recreation and livelihood (both licit and illicit) – the gangs seemed to claim certain spots as “theirs.” The reasons behind the choice of these places clearly varied and may have rested upon geographical convenience: individual gang members may have worked or lived in the vicinity. However, the consequences of such “ownership” are more certain: they contributed to intra-class tensions. A 1924 battle between two urban gangs illuminates the importance of place. The rival gangs were the Berlin Team (captained by Percival “Beast of Berlin” Greenidge) and the Peppersauce Team (captained by Ezekiel Williams), and their 1924 clash ended in the death of the latter’s captain. The confrontation seemed to result from one gang’s violation of “place” and the attempt of the gangs to control their territory. Indeed, during the course of the trial, the judge observed that the gangs seemed to “contest domination and rule over certain districts in this city.” In this case, the Berlin Team congregated at the fish koker in La Penitence and the Peppersauce Team in a particular area in Charlestown. Other areas of the city were also significant, notably the post office, where, on the day of the fight, some members of the Berlin Team congregated.138 The Peppersauce Team had left their area of Charlestown Ward and arrived at the Berlin Team’s territory, the

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La Penitence fish koker, apparently with the intention of beating a Berlin Team member. The arrival of the police delayed and de-placed the battle, but it was eventually played out at a gate in Saffon Street. Joining Charlestown Ward to Albouystown, this gate can be seen to signify the boundary between the two gang’s territories. The Berlin Team, armed with weapons (sticks and fish hooks), walked to Saffon Street, led by “Baba” English and Ismay Bowen, two female associates. The two captains fought with sticks, as did their male followers, all of whom fled when the police arrived.139 Those gang members who were arrested were tried before a jury in the colony’s Supreme Court; eight of the accused were convicted of manslaughter and were sentenced to periods ranging from twelve years of penal servitude for Greenidge to eight to ten years for the remainder.140 The fight illuminated something of the culture of Georgetown’s centipede gangs. Both the Berlin Team and the Peppersauce Team were comprised largely of young men in their late teens and early twenties. Although the newspaper reports described the men as “uneducated, idle, loafers” from the “Guiana slums,”141 the accuracy of this description is uncertain as relatively few details were provided about the men – and those that were seem to contradict this picture. Greenidge, for example, worked variously as a puntman and a diamond digger. Whether or not the men belonged to the criminal classes is also unclear; only Aldolphus “Coxie” Cox and Greendige were described as having prior convictions.142 The significance of the gangs’ names is ambiguous. The Peppersauce Team likely took its name from the famously hot Caribbean sauce; and the Berlin Team doubtless refers to the German city and may allude to its role as an “enemy” city during the First World War. Evelyn Waugh, who visited Georgetown several years later, suggested another possibility. He claimed that a local “criminal organization,” the “Beasts of Berlin” (headed by the “Blood of Corruption”) had taken their name from a movie.143 Perhaps the Berlin Team had been similarly influenced. The testimony of one witness, Emmanuel “Wuntin” Archer, describes Georgetown’s streets as sites of play, of “unrespectable,” or improper, behaviour, and of ritual.144 Archer’s possession of the “play name” Wuntin and his role as a drum-beater (he denied being the kettle-drum beater for the Pepper Team, but he had beaten one during the 1924 riots) implies his participation in the world of play and the street.145 (All the gang members had play names.) His testimony suggests that the gangs had military-type organizational structures – they had captains and may also have had colonels (indeed, Archer denied being the colonel of the Peppersauce Team) – which

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may have been analogous to the quasi-military structures and rituals of carnival and celebrations elsewhere in the Caribbean.146 And the gangs fought with sticks, which, within the Guianese context, signified centipedism and Tadjah. The role of the two women in this confrontation and in the structure of the gangs as a whole is intriguing but somewhat ambiguous. They led the procession at the suggestion of Fred “Penitence” Roberts in order to attract the attention of one of the members of the Peppersauce Team who lived with “Baba” English.147 Yet, despite this, and despite the willingness of another woman, Albertha Felix, to support Greenidge’s alibi (he claimed that he had been with her on the night in question), the women seemed quite independent. English and Bowen were friendly with members of both gangs. At the time of the fight, English lived with Worrell (of the Peppersauce Team) and Porter (of the Berlin Team), and Bowen was “friendly” with Marshall and “knew” the Peppersauce Team; these cross-gang alliances hint at the women’s skill in manipulating both sides in their own quest for survival, echoes of which are apparent in other contemporaneous sources.148 The activities of the centipede gangs demonstrate the ability of Georgetown’s masses to shape urban public spaces as places of recreation and festivity, and show the contribution of wider cultural patterns. In doing this, they – and other members of the urban poor – came into conflict with members of the “respectable” classes, who attempted to impose their own vision of order in the city’s streets and to rid them of the crowds whose danger was represented in sanitarian terms. Yet these opposing views of appropriate behaviour in public areas had wider implications: Georgetown’s streets and market buildings, as well as being popular festive sites, also promised a livelihood. This dual role intensified the conflicts that marked daily interactions in these places.

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5 Hucksters, Markets, and the Struggle to Control Public Space The market was a scene of riot and confusion, to the great annoyance of the residents in its neighbourhood.1 James Rodway

In the Caribbean, marketing was symbolically and economically important. During the period of slavery, it (along with provision-ground cultivation) existed in the interstices of the plantation complex, providing the enslaved with a degree of economic and cultural autonomy. For Afro-Creoles, engaging in such “own-account activities” represented freedom.2 In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Georgetown, marketing’s significance underlay many of the disputes that marked daily exchanges in the city’s public markets. These were places of miscegenation, where men and women of diverse ethnic backgrounds intermixed; in James Rodway’s words, in the market buildings, “sailors, merchants, clerks, porters, butchers, bakers, ginger-beer women ... all mingled in a motley crowd.”3 These interactions, though, were often fraught with social tension. Vendors, market officials, and customers battled with each other and among themselves in the city’s public markets, struggling to assert their right to market and to determine the terms on which they engaged in this activity. Ethnic tensions (largely between Afro-Guianese and Portuguese) and reputation (a concern with respect and appearance in the social world) coloured many of the disputes.

m a r k e t s d u r i n g s l av e r y During the period of slavery, markets were part of a complex of economic activities: slaves grew foodstuffs for subsistence and sale, produced finished goods, and marketed all these products themselves or

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The Struggle to Control Public Space

through freed persons who acted as intermediaries. These independent economic activities allowed slaves to obtain new items through barter; acquire specie; provide for their children; and, in sum, exercise a degree of autonomy. In most slave colonies, enslaved populations had access to small gardens that they could cultivate; however, in those colonies where all the land was either not needed or not available for staple crops, masters directed their slaves to grow their own food on provision grounds, plots of land generally located some distance from the slave huts. Following on long days working in the fields, this demand was a burden to slaves; yet, as many historians have argued, they manipulated it so as to realize a degree of freedom.4 Marketing played an important economic and social role. Marketplaces developed early in the Anglophone Caribbean, providing opportunity for slaves and freed persons to sell foodstuffs and manufactured items. Intermediaries – sometimes slaves working for their masters, sometimes freed persons – bought goods from slaves, selling them, in turn, to whites, freed persons, or to other slaves.5 Although key economic institutions, markets were also significant social and festive centres. Typically, they were lively social places. Slaves dressed in their finest clothes and, when the selling was done, engaged in recreational activities, drinking, gambling, and dancing.6 British Guiana tended to fit this pattern during the period of slavery. In the colonies of Demerara-Essequibo and Berbice, planters generally gave slaves only small plots of land. This policy was the result of the costs of establishing and maintaining cultivation in the low-lying land and the determination of planters to control both land and labour.7 Despite this, slaves cultivated a variety of crops, raised poultry, and traded their surplus with each other or with local whites or freed persons. Sundays, slaves took their produce to the markets in Mahaica and Georgetown and sold provision ground produce. They were joined by freed persons selling other foodstuffs, imported items, and manufactured goods. As in other parts of the Anglophone Caribbean, the markets provided a place where friends gathered and socialized.8

m a r k e t s a n d ve n d o r s i n p o s t - e m a n c i pa t i o n g e o r g e t o w n Georgetown’s earliest public market, consisting of little more than a few sheds, was established by at least 1792;9 in 1842 it was replaced by a covered market,10 and in 1881 by Stabroek Market. By the turn of the century Georgetown had three public markets (Stabroek,

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Order and Place in a Colonial City

Cumingsburg, and Bourda) and, by late 1910s, a market in the suburb of Albouystown (an earlier incarnation of which had been held on the public road).11 Stabroek, though, was the city’s premier market. A “vast building” constructed of zinc and iron, it was considered ugly by some observers: A tower of noble width, resting on skeleton legs, rises up, and comes to an abrupt terminus, as if funds had also come to an untimely end. A cornice of good projection and bold design, crowns this stunted tower – above the cornice, thin pieces of upright iron stand, holding aloft as best they can, not a graceful canopy, as so easily might have been, but the ugliest thing in town, unfortunately far easier seen than adequately described.12

Yet it dominated not only Water Street but the city’s skyline as a whole, its clock tower visible for miles around.13 As they had during the period of slavery, public markets continued to provide both consumer goods and a livelihood for those seeking an alternative to plantation life; after 1838 they met the expanded demand for both. Georgetown’s markets seemed to sell virtually any item one could desire. In 1853 a visitor to the colony, Robert Edward Sullivan, described the market as “first-rate and well stocked with monkeys, parrots, macaws, pine-apples, bananas, and other tropical productions, animal and vegetable, too numerous to mention.”14 Stallholders also sold such goods as corn, oats, and rice;15 others baked goods (bread and sweets) and prepared foods; and still others sold such goods as hats, ready-made clothing, scissors, knives, baskets, and “fancy articles.”16 Druggists and cookshops could also be found in the markets.17 After 1838 Georgetown’s public markets continued to provide a site for Afro-Guianese to sell their agricultural produce. According to James Rodway, “on Fridays and Saturdays when the tide ebb[ed] the river [was] dotted with bateaux coming to market with the produce of the grounds belonging to negroes, in the canals and on the banks of the Demerara river.”18 Many also became hucksters; one historian argues that, by 1842, they held most of the huckster licences.19 Relatively soon, though, in Rodway’s words, Afro-Creole retailers had their “noses ... put out of joint by the Madeirans” – the Portuguese immigrants who enjoyed early success in the petty retail sector.20 Mary Noel Menezes characterizes their “rapid rise ... from canefield to commerce” as “phenomenal.”21 Portuguese shops “sprang up” in Georgetown and in the country districts, the Portuguese “huckster became ubiquitous,” and Portuguese boats went up and down the rivers selling goods. By the late 1840s the Portuguese effectively dominated

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The Struggle to Control Public Space

Stabroek Market, c. 1912 (Rodway, Guiana, n.p.)

parts of the retail trade and, by the early 1870s, held a majority of shop and store licences.22 This specialization was due to several factors. First, the Portuguese benefited from planter beneficence. Walter Rodney and other historians argue that Portuguese immigrants were tied to the estates for shorter periods than were other immigrant groups and that they profited from planter and government “assistance” (notably in the realm of credit).23 Menezes, though, maintains that Portuguese retailers also profited from their commercial background: “their familiarity with commercial enterprises on their island put them in a position to move off the plantations into the huckstering and later the shopkeeping trades.”24 The near-monopoly that Portuguese immigrants came to exercise over parts of the petty retail sector was considered controversial, mostly because it came at the expense of Afro-Guianese vendors. Afro-Guianese resentment was expressed by John Sayers Orr, a street preacher whose arrest sparked the anti-Portuguese riots of 1856. Orr – the “Angel Gabriel” – reportedly declared that the “Portuguese took the bread out the mouths of poor people who lived formerly by huckstering.”25 Trading also provided a livelihood for Indian and Chinese immigrants.26 Like other new arrivals, they were no doubt attracted to street and market vending by the relatively few fixed costs. The Chinese, like the Portuguese, tended to leave the estates in large numbers

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once their indentures had expired, working as hawkers and hucksters in the countryside and Georgetown. Some Chinese operated stalls in Stabroek Market – twelve in 1924 – selling groceries, furniture, and provisions.27 Indo-Guianese, once their terms of indenture as sugar plantation workers had expired, also became petty traders, both in the countryside and in Georgetown. Using savings or “bounty-money” (i.e., the money they received for reindenturing) to finance this undertaking, they participated in a variety of trading activities: some hawked goods (such as milk) on Georgetown’s streets, and others ran stalls in the market buildings. Although many petty retailers just scraped by, some became relatively wealthy. Thomas Flood is one such example; in Clem Seecharan’s words, Flood was “probably the most celebrated early Indian businessman in the colony.”28 Flood arrived in British Guiana from India as an orphaned seven-year-old in 1865, finding work as a butcher in the Georgetown market. Between 1888 and 1906 he operated two or three licensed butcher stalls in Stabroek Market and, by 1916, was “one of the richest East Indians in the Colony,” owning an estate on the West Coast and a racing stable, and running (unsuccessfully) for a seat on the Court of Policy.29 Although Flood achieved an unusual degree of success, he was not alone in using the petty retail sector to realize some kind of economic independence. By 1924 Indo-Guianese clearly constituted a significant presence in Stabroek Market, with 123 of them occupying 136 stalls and selling such items as provisions, prepared food, and clothing. Women of all ethnic groups worked as hawkers and hucksters. Menezes argues that the Portuguese success as retailers was in large part due to the contributions of Portuguese women. Shopkeeping was a “family business.” As homes and shops were often located on the same spot, women who worked in the shops alongside their male relatives could simultaneously oversee both commercial and domestic matters.30 In this regard, Portuguese women represented a common pattern in Caribbean life. Caribbean women were a dominant presence in the post-emancipation retail sector: they ran small shops, operated market stalls, and sold goods on the streets. As was the case elsewhere in the Caribbean, the role of Afro-Guianese women as traders originated during slavery.31 In British Guiana, both free coloured women and enslaved Afro-Guianese women accounted for a significant proportion of the street and market vendors. They bought items from merchants and resold them in the market or on the street, where they monopolized huckstering, selling to whites, freed persons, and slaves.32 After the end of slavery, women throughout the Caribbean continued to work as petty traders, selling goods in public markets and on the streets as itinerant hucksters.33 This activity, as Hilary

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Beckles argues, became a “cornerstone in the survival strategies for many households.”34 The number of female market and street vendors in post-emancipation Georgetown is uncertain. The census reports only provide the totals for those retailers who described themselves as “merchants, shopkeepers, and agents” and do not specify either the number of stallholders in Georgetown’s public markets or the number of street vendors; the reports of the colony’s treasurer do not indicate the gender of those who bought hucksters’ licences. Government sources reveal that male merchants and shopkeepers outnumbered their female counterparts among the population as a whole and among IndoGuianese, but they also suggest that, within Georgetown’s IndoGuianese population, the number of women who worked as hucksters and peddlers steadily increased between 1891 and 1921. And by 1921 they outnumbered Indo-Guianese men (see Tables 5.1, 5.2., 5.3). Other sources, however, are more forthcoming and detail women’s work as traders. Female stallholders sold a range of products, from provisions to fresh meat.35 Female-operated butchers’ stalls were uncommon, most being run by men; however, The British Guiana Directory and Almanac notes that several women broke this pattern. For example, in 1894 Mrs Chang ran a butcher’s stall in Stabroek Market, and in 1896 Mary Chang and Candida De Freitas ran stalls in Cumingsburg Market.36 Women seemed to predominate as fish vendors in the Cumingsburg Market (they were referred to as “fish women” in at least one petition).37 Women also worked as hucksters outside the markets themselves; Hester Charles and Elizabeth Lynch, for example, sold sweets at Stabroek Market’s entrance (Charles did this for some fifteen years).38 The post-emancipation expansion of Georgetown’s retail sector created other, non-trading, jobs. In particular, the four public markets employed market officials, including the clerk of the market and his assistant as well as market constables. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries these men tended to be Portuguese, a development that likely reflects the growing importance of the Portuguese in the petty retail sector as a whole and their gradual arrival in the middling and professional classes. The clerk of the market was a powerful man, with the duty to settle marketplace disputes and the right to choose or reject stallholders and to decide what they could display for sale. Although he and his assistant reported to the town council, to a large extent they determined how the markets were ordered. These men were aided by the town constables posted to Georgetown’s markets. Most, if not all, of the town constables were AfroCreole (though whether Afro-Guianese or Afro-Barbadian is unclear).

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102 Order and Place in a Colonial City Table 5.1 Merchants, shopkeepers, and agents in Georgetown Year No.

Males %

Females No. %

Total No.

1891

1,870

85

157

15

1,027

1911

1,791

85

136

15

1,927

1921

1,932

79

254

21

1,186

1931

1,264

69

670

37

1,834

Table 5.2 Indo-Guianese merchants, agents, and shopkeepers in Georgetown and its environs Year No.

Males %

Females No. %

Total No.

1891

169

99

111

11

170

1911

171

82

116

18

187

1921

127

91

113

19

140

1931

205

65

113

35

318

Table 5.3 Indo-Guianese hucksters/Pedlars in Georgetown and its environs Year

Males %

Females %

Total

1891

160

137

197

1911

100

193

193

1921

131

159

290

For tables 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3, see Report on the Census Results, 1891, 7, 67; Report on the Census Results, 1911, 66, Table “East Indians in the Colony of British Guiana,” 70; Report on the Census Results, 1921, 70, 74; Report on the Census Results, 1931, 12, 13, 148, 149. The 1931 census did not note the numbers of Indian hucksters/peddlers.

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Indeed, Afro-Guianese generally seemed to dominate among city employees, particularly as artisans, porters, watchmen, and constables employed by the city.39 Thus, although the growth of the petty retail sector clearly benefited immigrant groups and Afro-Creole women, it also created non-plantation jobs for Afro-Creole men. As representatives of the local political authorities, the constables were charged with enforcing local bylaws governing the public markets. Their main task was to ensure the markets’ security. At Stabroek Market’s opening at half-past five each morning, a constable stood by the gate and observed anyone attempting to enter, detaining “suspicious and known prisoners” until stallholders had entered. During the day constables patrolled the markets and, at closing time, they searched the building.40 At night constables were stationed outside the market and night watchmen were stationed within to ensure that no one entered. The vital nature of this task was demonstrated by the frequent surprise inspections to which they were subjected (in 1917 there were between five and seven such visits per month)41 and the harsh penalties to which they were subject if caught sleeping on the job or absent from their post: they could be fined or even fired.42 Despite these precautions, though, stallholders were suspicious and condemned negligent constables for allowing thieves to invade the market buildings. Market constables were considered culpable for thefts occurring during their watch. Several stalls were broken into one night in 1899, and perfume, tobacco, silk handkerchiefs, and silver and copper coins were stolen. All interested parties blamed the constables on duty that night: the stallholders who had been robbed, the clerk of the markets, and local politicians and officials. Indeed, some town councillors called for their dismissal.43 However, Town Superintendent Luke Hill defended the men, blaming their onerous duties for the robberies; he maintained that thirteen-hour shifts with no relief and a beat encompassing the building’s perimeter would allow a “vigilant thief” success.44 Despite his defence, the town council decided to hold the men liable for robberies occurring during their shift.45

conflict in georgetown’s public markets Hucksters rented their stalls and paid fees to sell goods; in essence, they were paying for the right to trade sheltered and protected in a marketplace. Fees were significant in two ways: they presented a financial burden, and they determined one’s ability to market. Disputes between vendors and market authorities over fees concretely symbolized contestations over the right to control the terms of trading.

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104 Order and Place in a Colonial City

Vendors paid for the privilege of selling in the marketplace. Monthly rates for renting a stall varied from eight dollars in 1897 to ten dollars in 1900, and daily rates ranged from six to twenty-four cents in 1905.46 Market vendors had to compete annually for stalls, stands, booths, and counters, which could be held by the day, week, or month and could be lost for non-payment of rent. To sell in the markets, vendors also had to pay fees ranging in 1860 from one cent for a barrel of charcoal to eight cents for a package of cakes (and the like) to forty cents for a piece of beef. “Green Vegetables, Fresh Fish, and all Fruit other than Plantains and Bananas” were admitted free. By 1898 some of the fees had increased (it cost more to sell turkeys) and some had remained the same (trays of cakes and ginger beer). Fees were imposed for selling green vegetables, but all fruit and imported items arriving other than by the market stelling (except sweet potatoes, yams, eddoes, and tannias) were admitted free.47 In 1902 stallholders’ expenses rose even more. In that year the Combined Court imposed a trade licence of four dollars on each stall in the market. The Georgetown Town Council objected. Since Georgetown’s incorporation in 1837, the city had controlled and directed its public markets, and the town council considered “market rights” among “the municipal privileges universally acknowledged and granted to all incorporated boroughs throughout the British Empire” to provide revenues to help the cities pay their expenses. The new fees went ahead. Several stallholders threatened to give up their stalls rather than pay for licences, so the town council decided to pay for the licences itself and to keep the receipts for the tenants. Under this system the city paid for a year’s worth of licences whether the stalls were occupied or not.48 By 1905 the colonial government increased its demands. It insisted that the licences be held by the stallholders themselves and that a five-dollar fee be imposed for each licence transferred to a new tenant. This amounted to one dollar more than the cost of a new licence and was potentially oppressive when some of the daily or monthly stalls were occupied by several vendors during the year. The commissary of taxation exempted stalls for vegetables and fresh fruits but not those for the sale of such items as rice, corn, or oats as these were not “provisions.” This regulation was “unfair and absurd,” according to the town council. It argued stallholders faced constraints not confronted by shopkeepers, such as opening and closing hours and the power of the clerk of the markets to choose or reject tenants. The councillors proposed that stallholders be exempt from trade licences or that each market be permitted to pay a lump sum to cover all the stallholders.49 The government responded by allowing the town council to pay for the stalls.50

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Despite these costs, some stallholders seemed to earn a good living from retailing. For example, butchers R. Wilshire, Goolamadeen, and H. Gibson had licences for Wortmanville, Albert Town, and Queens Town Wards and also held stalls in the Stabroek and Cumingsburg Markets.51 Operating on a slightly smaller scale was butcher Manoel Ignacio, who wanted to expand from his butcher’s stall in the Cumingsburg Market to open a butcher’s shop in Albert Town.52 The sources suggest, however, that most stallholders ran very modest enterprises. The majority had only one stall, and most were able to operate their stalls for only one year.53 Indeed, many stallholders eked out a marginal existence, relying on the goods they sold at single stalls for their livelihood.54 Some hucksters barely managed to earn a living. In 1925 the widow of Manoel D’Cascensoa – who had been killed after he was knocked down by one of the council’s mule carts – tried to support her eight children (four of whom were “very small”) on her earnings as a huckster. She remained very poor, her earnings and the $148.72 compensation from the town council so inadequate that labour leader Hubert Critchlow wrote Georgetown’s mayor and town council asking for additional relief for union member D’Cascensoa’s wife.55 The difficulties many stallholders faced in trying to earn a living reflected the ongoing crisis in the sugar industry, which had repercussions throughout the rest of the economy; in addition the steady rise in the costs of selling within the marketplace must be seen within the context of colonial government attempts to restrict non-plantation livelihood options. Yet, regardless of the origin of these economic problems, their immediate impact on those who made their living from huckstering was to increase the costs, and tensions, of retailing. Disputes over fees – who should pay them and when – involved market officials and vendors, each attempting to carry out his or her duties and to gain some advantage. Disagreements over fees were, at times, expressed formally in the form of petitions submitted by market vendors. In some of these, stallholders based their appeal on the current economic crisis. In 1899, for example, butchers at Stabroek Market complained that, although their fresh meat sales had decreased during the past three years due to the “present depression,” they still had to pay market dues. They petitioned the mayor and town council to reduce the stall rents to allow them to at least break even, but the clerk of the markets refused, maintaining that “no appreciable falling off had occurred in the business by the butchers.”56 Several years later, butchers R. Wilshire, Goolamadeen, and H. Gibson also petitioned for lower fees, citing the same cause: poor economic conditions. As stallholders in Stabroek Market,

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they had seen their licence costs rise significantly, up to sixty dollars from twenty-four dollars four years earlier, and much higher than the eight dollars charged for a licence in the Albouystown market.57 The following year a group of stallholders in Stabroek Market petitioned for a reduction of stall rents, but the market committee thought the present rent was reasonable and so refused the request.58 Stallholders also protested high fees in a less formal manner. For example, stallholder George Bell attempted to manipulate physical space in the market to maximize his profits. He sold iced drinks from a drink table, but when he observed an empty space next to his table for the sale of “tubs, mortars, and things of that kind,” he expanded. Bell considered the four cents he paid for his drinks’ table adequate to cover his new space; he could not afford to pay two amounts, and, in his words, he “had a perfect right to sell the goods where he was selling them.” When Town Constable Arthur seized the goods for nonpayment of rent, Bell complained to the clerk of the markets and demanded that the value of the goods – a baby chair, three green heart mortars, and a wallaba tub – be returned to him.59 He based his complaint on two points: financial need and past practice. He needed to sell the extra items, the profits from selling “lemonade, ginger beer, and other temperate drinks ... being often insufficient to keep itself up”; he had been selling the mortars, tubs, and baby chairs for eight months in this space and, as he said, “ha[d] never been called upon to pay more than the usual amount for said space” (emphasis in original). He had even sold the acting clerk of markets a mortar eleven weeks before and had sold Constable Arthur a scrubbing board in November 1903.60 Bell’s assertion of his right to sell in the market is telling, suggesting that the labouring poor believed that they had a moral claim on a place in Georgetown’s markets. Yet the penalty to which Bell was subjected – the loss of his goods – shows the real financial risk that stallholders ran if they did not, or could not, pay their fees. They could be ejected from the market, their stalls closed, and their goods taken if they did not pay their rents at least two weeks in advance. In 1890, for example, one huckster complained that his stall had been shut down merely because he had neglected to pay February’s rent.61 The penalties forced stallholders to take drastic action. Thus, to avoid having his goods seized for late payment of his rent, Diego Gomes hid them in the stall of one of his fellow hucksters, John Rodrigues. Rodrigues’s assistance cost him dearly. Once caught, Rodrigues defied the market authorities, challenging the clerk of the markets, A. Fernandes, to “come and take the away the goods” if “he was a man.” Fernandes’s authority in the market allowed him to triumph over Rodrigues: Fernandes denied

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the latter’s request to rent a stall, the grounds being that he was not an “approved person.”62 Hucksters and Hawkers The high costs of selling in Georgetown’s markets provoked conflicts between two kinds of petty retailers: rent-paying stallholders in the market buildings and hawkers, or itinerant vendors. In part, economic rivalry lay at the root of the contests between these two groups of vendors. However, by at times supporting market hucksters’ appeals to restrict hawkers’ activities, local authorities aggravated this rivalry. In the British Caribbean the distinction between hucksters and hawkers – between those who sold their wares in the market buildings and those vending outside its walls – was a long-standing one. Barry Higman argues that public markets were constructed in such cities as Georgetown, Bridgetown, and Port-of-Spain to keep vendors “off the streets, bridges, and wharves of the towns and to regulate their prices and practices.”63 Local authorities in post-emancipation Georgetown made similar attempts. In 1890 Georgetown’s market commission objected to the Tuesday morning “provision traffic” in the Demerara Railway Company yard, where growers sold East Coast ground provisions and plantains at no charge. Recognizing its inability to stop the trading in the yard, which was permitted by the Demerara Railway Company, the commission turned its attention towards the “retail business which [was] carried on every Tuesday morning at the sides of the street” and declared its belief that “the retailers [should be] forced into the Cumingsburg Market, where for a small fee the ground stands would be available for their business.”64 The commission was worried about the future of the Cumingsburg Market, believing that, if it were to survive, then the retail activities of the vendors would have to be restricted. The hawkers’ proximity to the market building constituted a large part of the problem. Located as they were, they directly competed with fee-paying stallholders. Thus, a year before the Cumingsburg Market debate, Town Councillor Culpeper had voiced similar objections to the presence of Chinese vendors who sold nuts at the gate of Stabroek Market.65 By 1898 these concerns were encapsulated in municipal legislation. The 1898 ordinance stipulated that no one could “sell or expose for sale any article within Two Hundred yards of any market, except in a shop, store, or premises occupied by him,” on pain of a fine.66 Hawkers also directed less money than did hucksters to the city’s coffers, for their fees were much lower than were those imposed on the latter. In 1887 licences to hawk meat were five dollars for six months, and badges were forty-eight cents; under the 1898

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bylaw the five-dollar licence fee included the cost of the badge.67 Yearly licences to hawk milk on the streets were much lower (twentyfour cents in 1901 and 1907).68 In addition, hawkers did not have to pay the rents for which stallholders were responsible. Despite the many restrictions to which hawkers were subjected, they remained on the streets. Higman has argued that, in early nineteenth-century Georgetown, efforts to corral vendors into market buildings were also unsuccessful.69 Late nineteenth-century political authorities, unable to compel all vendors to restrict their activities to the public market buildings, responded by curtailing street selling. For example, legislation forbade the public display of wares, whether on a cask on a street or footpath, or hung so as to “project” into the street.70 Vendors could sell their wares on the market stelling, with permission of the clerk of the markets; however, on the streets, they could not carry trays of “fish, greasy articles, bundles of wood, or other articles liable to incommode other persons.”71 Clearly, such regulations reflected ongoing concerns with maintaining order in public spaces such as streets, but they also revealed a determination to dictate the terms under which men and women could participate in the petty retail sector. They also resonated with the sanitarian concerns that increasingly underlay laws and public policy. This can be seen in the efforts to restrict itinerant meat hawking. Although permitted under municipal legislation of 1860 and 1898 (as long as vendors also held licences for butchers stalls in a public market),72 by 1904 it had been banned at the request of several local butchers. Sanitary concerns convinced the town council to prohibit itinerant meat vending: councillors worried about possible contamination of meat sold outside the safe confines of the market building.73 Yet meat hawking continued. In 1904 Inspector General of Police Lushington discovered that a “species of unlicensed hawking of meat was being surreptitiously carried on by the sending out and delivering parcels of meat from the market.”74 Two years later it had not been stopped. “Ex-petty butcher” wrote the Chronicle, noting that had he observed a “coolieman who live[d] in Bourda ... [hawking meat] with impunity.” Every Sunday morning he killed two or three sheep, selling the meat. (During the week the man worked as a porter at a Water Street store.)75 Public market stallholders seemed to share official hostility to the hawkers, revealing the tensions within the subordinate classes. This was not surprising: the two competed for custom. In 1885 a Stabroek Market stallholder, Antonio Goveia, wrote the Daily Chronicle to ask the Combined Court to increase the taxes on hawkers’ and peddlers’ licences. He especially wanted them raised on those “women who

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[went] about from yard to yard with trays disposing of salt-fish, pork, &c.” Their licence allowed them to “walk and dispose of goods,” but they “exceed[ed] their limits.” He and his “brother shopkeepers,” who paid large amounts for their licences, “suffer[ed] materially owing to hawkers.”76 In 1897 several stallholders in Stabroek Market complained about hawkers in the market underselling them. J.L. Lewis, a dry goods retailer in Stabroek Market, complained of men who did not “pay any rent or dues whatever” selling cheaply opposite his stall and calling people away from him; Joaquim Da Silva also complained about vendors, probably without licences, selling the same goods but at a “smaller profit than [he] ... and other stallholdersdo.” The market committee advised the clerk of the markets to tell anyone found hawking that such practices were forbidden and to have repeat offenders ejected from the market; the committee also wanted warning notices posted at the market gates.77 According to the clerk of the markets, though, “technicalities” in the law “prevent[ed] any effective action being taken.”78 “Race” and Reputation in Marketplace “Affrays” Daily interactions in Georgetown’s marketplaces were marked by conflict. These altercations demonstrate the ease with which wider social stresses could trigger implosive violence. Although frequently configured by ethnic tensions, they were also shaped by popular concerns over reputation in the social world. Many of these conflicts were between Afro-Guianese and Portuguese. Although Brian Moore partially attributes tensions between them to the “deep-seated racial prejudices which had existed from the first encounters between these two groups,”79 clashes may have emerged more from occupationally based disagreements than from “racial prejudice.” In particular, the Afro-Guianese domination of the town constabulary, along with the virtual Portuguese monopoly of the petty retail sector, set the stage for conflicts between these two groups.80 Indeed, the same can be said for disputes between AfroGuianese police and town constables and the mostly Indo-Guianese milk sellers and cowkeepers.81 Here, too, one can question the extent to which these interactions – the result of occupation – were racist.82 Tensions in the public markets between Afro-Guianese and Portuguese occasionally took a more violent form, particularly in 1856 and 1889 when predominantly Afro-Guianese crowds attacked Portuguese vendors and shops. Historians identify several factors as responsible for such conflicts. They cite Afro-Guianese resentment over the Portuguese monopoly of the petty retail sector and their own concomitant

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exclusion. Alan Adamson, for example, characterizes the “anti-Portuguese” riot of 1856 as an effort by the Afro-Guianese population to “rid itself of a very palpable incubus” – that is, the Portuguese – so that the “native” population could (re)gain control of the petty retail sector. Scholars also point to rumours of unfair trading practices by Portuguese hucksters, who were represented as unprincipled and as using their monopoly to engage in “restrictive trade practices” or outright fraud. Widely disseminated stories of such practices contributed to the development of popular perceptions of the “grasping avarice” of the Portuguese retailers, who made the “cost of housekeeping ... double” what it had been previously.83 As Mary Douglas argues, such unfair trading practices represented an offence to order and, thus, were considered particularly opprobrious: “theft, lying, false witness, cheating in weights and measures, [and] all kinds of dissembling” stood condemned by both sacred and secular codes.84 Such attitudes are often expressed over ethnic retail monopolies. Although newspaper accounts demonstrate that other ethnic groups used unjust weights and measures,85 contemporaneous sources tended to focus on Portuguese wrong-doers and were virtually unanimous in condemning these small traders. According to Kirke: The usual antagonistic feeling which must always exist between buyer and seller exists between them [Portuguese and Afro-Guianese]; and this feeling is much intensified by the contempt with which the people treat the Portuguese, and the fraudulent spirit which the shopkeepers show towards their customers. The use of unjust weights and measures is a common practice amongst these small shop keepers; and although they cannot detect it, the coloured people are well aware of the fact. Their feelings are too often expressed in insults and menaces, which sometimes drive even the mean spirited shopmen to retaliation, and a row ensures, which brings the policemen on the scene, and finds its development in the magistrate’s court.86

Historians argue that there is evidence to support such claims of fraud or unfair trading. According to Alan Adamson, Portuguese vendors refused to sell anything other than in “quantities ... [of] half a bit” or without the purchase of second items and that they would not provide change for “a bit.” Their dominance allowed them to increase prices.87 Legislation was the main weapon used to protect consumers from these practices. Bylaws allowed the town council to oversee the price, weight, and quality of goods for sale and stipulated that the “market price” be charged for all items sold in the markets.88 Municipal legislation prohibited selling “short weight” in the market

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and empowered three officials to inspect the “weights, beams, scales and measures” at every “booth, stall, stand, or counter.”89 As the town council declared, the “public [must] not be victimised.”90 Although marketplace disputes were often expressed in ethnic terms, a concern with reputation also seemed to underlie these conflicts. Scholars of the Caribbean region write about the perceived importance of maintaining one’s reputation in the social world. In Crab Antics Wilson argues that reputation among the male inhabitants of the small Caribbean island of Providencia consisted of a “constellation of skills,” ranging from the economic, to the sexual, to the verbal. Individuals engaged in unrespectable or illegal activities in an attempt to ensure their reputation. According to Wilson, reputation was related to respect: in his words, a man’s “reputation is the stimulus of other people’s respect for him, and a concern for respect, for one’s good name, is always smouldering.” Although he writes about Providencia in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Wilson considers his findings applicable to other places in the region as they were all the product of similar historical experiences.91 Chandra Jayawardena’s work seems to support Wilson’s contention. In his analysis of Guianese sugar plantation communities in the 1960s, Jayawardena argues that, when an individual was “belittle[d] and humiliate[d], ... his rights and claims” disregarded, and his “dignity and prestige” depressed, a public dispute invariably developed. He refers to these disputes as “eye-pass disputes.”92 Although Wilson and Jayawardena studied more modern populations, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Guianese sources also reveal a popular acceptance of the importance of maintaining reputation and the frequent conflict that could result. In a 1916 work, sometime Guianese archivist Graham J. Cruickshank used the same term as did these later writers to denote a lack of respect. He imagines the “veteran” saying to the “bumptious young man”: “‘Don’t you make your eye-pass to me’ ... ‘No make you eye pass me.›93 This concern with maintaining reputation has generally been represented in exclusively male terms. But, as Burton argues, women also tried to “enhance” their reputation through public “exchanges.” This was particularly apparent among market women, the West Indian “street woman par excellence.” Regarded as possessed of a “manlike autonomy and assertiveness,” an “often invasive physical presence ... loud dress and ... even louder demeanour and language,” these women were “public” women, “the absolute antithesis of what it means to be a ‘lady.›94 In British Guiana, women’s violation of the codes dictating respectable female behaviour often resulted in arrest and conviction. For four years during the 1890s, newspaper reports

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on the cases before Georgetown’s police magistrate reveal that far more women than men (about twice as many) were convicted of fighting, engaging in disorderly conduct, or using insulting/indecent language.95 For example, Rebecca Campbell and Mary Aaron were fined for fighting with each other in Stabroek Market, as was Rachel Foresterd (who fought with Joseph Moore) and Mary Forde (who fought with Bombassay).96 Although the number of charges may indicate little more than the fact that many women congregated in the markets, both as vendors and as buyers, they may also reveal the seriousness with which women’s violation of the laws governing respectable behaviour was regarded. The fines imposed on these women reflected the determination of market authorities to impose order on Georgetown’s markets and, in particular, to compel vendors and customers to behave “appropriately.” Thus, the same kind of disorderly behaviour that resulted in charges and fines on Georgetown’s streets also attracted legal attention in the markets. As the cases of Rebecca Campbell, Mary Aaron, Rachel Foresterd, and Mary Forde show, fighting was considered to be particularly egregious and earned stiff penalties. For example, Samuel Inniss was sentenced to be flogged with a tamarind rod for assaulting and wounding another man in the market. The incident had occurred within the course of a fight between Inniss and a woman who was fighting near a stall; Inniss began throwing potatoes and yams at the woman and inadvertently struck a bystander, hence the charge. In another affray in Stabroek Market, William Beckles was charged for assaulting and wounding William Arthur. The fight was a resumption of a previous day’s quarrel and culminated in Beckles biting off a piece of Arthur’s lip.97 Although the newspapers do not detail the origins of most of these fights, town council sources provide more information. In particular, they demonstrate that many disputes were provoked by infractions of regulations that ordered the physical space in the markets. These local ordinances allowed market officials to fine stallholders for violating the sanitary provisions (stalls, for example, had to be kept clean) and to expel anyone blocking walkways in the markets and seize their goods. If he chose, the clerk of the markets could even “direct what articles [could] be exposed for sale on the stalls, in different parts of the Markets.”98 The rights of constables and the market administrators to organize space in the markets and to seize the goods of non-compliant vendors set the stage for conflict. In 1921 a quarrel between a town constable, the assistant clerk of the markets, and a plantain seller initially concerned control of physical (and economic) space; ultimately, however, it came to revolve

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around ethnicity, occupation, and reputation. Following the instructions of Pacheco, the clerk of the markets, Town Constable Hughes told a group of plantain sellers to move their goods99 as they were blocking other stalls. Given permission to seize the goods unless they were moved, Hughes did just that to plantain seller Goodridge, the only vendor who would not move his wares himself. When told of the edict, all the plantain sellers agreed, except Goodridge, whose goods were consequently seized by Hughes. Soon afterwards, the plantain sellers were allowed to return to their original spot.100 When Goodridge discovered this, he confronted Hughes, addressing him by his surname. Hughes was infuriated at this breach of etiquette and, three or four times, said to Goodridge, “What the hell are you bothering me for: who are you calling Hughes. If it was Mr. Pacheco or Mr. Gomes you would not do that.” Hughes told Goodridge to see Gomes (who was acting assistant clerk of markets and thus Pacheco’s second-in-command) to discover why the plantain sellers had returned. When Goodridge continued to press him, he responded in what the former characterized as local “vernacular,” saying, “Man I am only a black man that is not in charge of any market and why he dont go to clerk of markets or Mr. Gomes the assistant clerk of markets.” Goodridge attempted to heal the breach and apologized to Hughes but to no avail. Hughes threatened to “kick [Goodridge’s] ass” if he “continue[d] to bother [him].”101 Goodridge reported the incident to Gomes, complaining about Hughes’s manner and lack of respect for Goodridge’s age. When Gomes confronted Hughes, the latter admitted using the offensive words in the constables’ office but denied directing them at Goodridge personally; indeed, Hughes “resented” the accusation that he had done so and claimed his “right to an investigation.” Asked to account for himself, Hughes – according to Gomes – responded in a “boisterous” and “fighting manner, [with] hands in his pockets, and ... a loud voice” and declared that he would not “have [Gomes] speaking to [him] in that manner.” When Gomes told Hughes that he was “impertinent and rude” and would be reported to the clerk of markets, Hughes responded that the former could “report [him] to whom the hell [he] like[d].”102 The exchange between Hughes and Gomes was also rumoured to have included a reference to Gomes’s Portuguese heritage, particularly suggestive in light of Hughes’s characterization of himself as “only a black man” who did not run the markets. One report had Hughes saying, as he turned away, “Portugee and all,” and another, reported to Gomes, quoted Hughes as later saying, “he did not give a damn [and] he would not submit to any Portuguese for a paltry salary

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of $30 a month.” Apparently the reference to Gomes as Portuguese was not heard by those nearby.103 For Gomes, Hughes’s rudeness was the main issue. Gomes wanted Pacheco to deal with the matter immediately and to express his refusal to allow “a constable or any other subordinate officer to be impertinent” and to “bring [him] into disrepute and contempt as this affair took place in the presence and hearing of several people.” Gomes wanted Hughes “severely dealt with as a deterrent and example to others.” The mayor must have agreed, for he found Hughes guilty, fined him five dollars, ordered him removed from the markets, and demoted him until he should show himself “worthy of being reinstated to the higher rank.” Hughes’s response demonstrated a determination to prove his innocence and an acknowledgment of the reigning proprieties: he wanted his case heard by the town council rather than only by the mayor; but he was willing to apologize to Gomes even though he believed the latter had misunderstood him.104 This dispute between Hughes, Gomes, and Goodridge was the latest in a series of disagreements. Twice before, Hughes had brought Goodridge before the clerk of the markets for some impropriety; and sometimes, when Hughes asked Goodridge for his entry ticket to the market, Goodridge left it on the ground.105 Perhaps Hughes was the origin of the disputes. Although he claimed that those testifying against him were biased (he had pursued complaints against them in the past and had generally alienated the stallholders through his strict adherence to his duty), Hughes was guilty of abusing market vendors and customers.106 He had slapped a woman at the gate, threatened to beat a Mrs Russell and stallholders Seek Allia and Golind, and had been convicted before the Magistrate’s Court for beating a man in Stabroek Market.107 The fight between Hughes, Gomes, and Goodridge demonstrates the complex tensions in Georgetown’s marketplaces. This particular case involved occupationally specific tensions – between vendors, market constables, and market officials – that also reflected personal enmity. The rapidity with which this episode metamorphosed into a concern about reputation and was articulated in the idiom of ethnic difference hints at the pervasiveness of these ideas.108 It also indicates the ease with which these concerns could configure disputes in public spaces.

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6 Hawkers and the Milk Industry

An 1837 account characterized Water Street as Georgetown’s “great mart,”1 a description that demonstrated the importance of city streets as sites of retail activity. Georgetown’s streets, like its marketplaces, provided a physical space where a succession of slaves, former slaves, and immigrants could exploit the petty retail sector - one of the few interstices in the predominantly plantation economy. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, former indentured Indo-Guianese moved into this economic and physical arena, becoming itinerant milk vendors. This peripatetic activity secured them some economic and social rewards; however, it was rendered corrupt by an elite discourse of purity, filth, and racism. And it brought vendors into conflict with local politicians, members of the medical/scientific bureaucracy, and police officers and town constables: itinerant milk sellers were represented as selling contaminated milk, thereby placing the wider community, particularly infants, at risk. Thus the milk industry was the site of struggle as milk vendors and local authorities both attempted to determine the terms under which this activity was to be carried out. In 1921 licensed milk sellers Dooknie and Narraine complained that Town Constables Seton and Spencer tried to bribe them, setting in motion a train of events that saw the two police officers fired. The claims and counter-claims leading to the constables’ dismissal illuminate one corner of Georgetown’s retail sector – the itinerant milk industry – and some of the tensions on the city’s streets. Dooknie and Narraine lived in the Georgetown suburb of Albouystown. Dooknie’s journey into the city to sell milk was one that was made daily by

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many milk sellers, importing milk (which was often contaminated) and crime into Georgetown itself. The actions of Dooknie and Narraine (the former in agreeing to pay a bribe and the latter in fighting its imposition) demonstrated a determination to protect and defend their livelihood, a goal underscored by Dooknie’s recidivism: she had previously been convicted of one of the offences with which Seton considered charging her. Their confrontation with Seton and Spencer reveals both the legislative forces arrayed against milk sellers and the rationale behind it: crimes so heinous must be prevented. On 11 August 1921 Dooknie was selling milk on Saffon Street, in the Charlestown district, adjoining Albouystown. In her story Town Constable Seton approached her, accused her of adding water to the milk she was selling, and told her to come with him. She readily agreed. He made her walk with him some distance – out of Charlestown, through Werk-en-Rust, and into Stabroek to the seat of the government, the Public Buildings on Brick Dam – from the suburbs of the city to its centre. Seton apparently told Dooknie that the colony paid him twenty-five dollars for each prisoner he captured but that, if she paid him thirty dollars, he would release her. Seton called a fellow town constable, Spencer, for backup. After a brief private conversation, the men agreed that Seton should stay with the pan of milk in the magistrate’s courtyard and that Spencer should accompany Dooknie back to Albouystown for the money. They went to Dooknie’s neighbour, Narraine. When Dooknie asked him for the money, Narraine refused to give it to her and said he would discuss the matter with the sergeant in charge of the constabulary, Major Lashley, and the mayor.2 Narraine, in his version, expressed anger at seeing the town constable in his yard asking for a bribe. Narraine led Spencer into the city to the magistrate’s courtyard where they found Seton, who joined Spencer in begging Naraine to take the pan of milk.3 In Seton’s story, Dooknie was not selling milk in Saffon Street in Charlestown but, rather, was walking near High and Hadfield Streets, the edge of Stabroek Ward, carrying three pails of milk. She was not selling milk, but Seton suspected her of doing so because he “kn[e]w her to be a regular milk seller.” Obedient to orders that suspicious cases be investigated, and recognizing that she was without the badge required by vendors, he detained her.4 Dooknie, in her story, claimed that Seton accused her of adding water to her milk.5 The confusion in the stories over which offence she had committed – selling milk without a badge or adulterating milk – demonstrates the legislative arsenal available to the constables. Convictions on either charge could result in a hefty fine as Dooknie had been previously convicted of selling milk without a badge. According to Seton, Dooknie declared the milk to be Narraine’s (which is likely, for in

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Georgetown many milk sellers sold milk purchased or acquired from cowkeepers). Seton wanted to confirm this assertion himself, so he and Spencer decided that Spencer should accompany Dooknie to Narraine’s while Seton waited with the milk in the magistrate’s courtyard. Both denied the bribery accusation.6 Stories collided when Narraine, Seton, Spencer, and the three pans of milk arrived at the town constabulary office. After hearing both versions, Lashley concluded that both constables had neglected their duty by failing to first bring the arrested person to the police station and that their actions were “highly improper,” bringing the force into disrepute.7 Dooknie, however, was absent. Indeed, once she brought Narraine into the picture, she withdrew from (or was pushed out of) the narratives. This particular confrontation occurred in 1921, but it could have taken place at any time during the past several decades. This story, and ones like it, reveals the significance of milk vending to parts of Georgetown’s population, particularly to Indo-Guianese, and the readiness with which this industry’s importance could lead to confrontations between vendors and local authorities.

i n d o - g u i a n e s e m i l k ve n d o r s Indian immigrants and Indo-Creoles provided most of British Guiana’s milk. A 1918 government report claimed that they owned 92 per cent of the cattle-pens and constituted 96 per cent of the licensed milk sellers.8 Although sources do not provide a detailed breakdown for Georgetown, there, too, Indians monopolized this economic activity.9 This domination was reflected in such popular sources as the anonymous Georgetown Vignettes, which described diverse social “types” (including “Hindoo milksellers”), as well as in newspaper cartoons.10 Two Daily Chronicle cartoons depicted “Baboo” the milker and milk vendor.11 This monopoly was of long-standing, at least according to Reverend H.V.P. Bronkhurst, who claimed, in the early 1880s, that the colony’s milk trade “to a large extent belong[ed]” to Indo-Guianese.12 Other groups also sold milk. Bronkhurst, for example, pointed to Portuguese and Chinese as itinerant milk sellers. He compared their participation with that of Afro-Guianese, who, he maintained, did not sell milk, considering it too “degrading a business.” He imagined several Afro-Guianese persons saying: “I am not a heathen Chinee, or Coolie, or Portuguese, to walk about the streets of Georgetown with a milk-can on my head, or in my hand, selling milk.”13 Statistical evidence on this score is uncertain. The population counts of 1891, 1911, and 1921 only report the number of Indo-Guianese milk sellers,

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(Daily Argosy, 17 July 1921; reprinted with the permission of the British Library)

neglecting the other ethnic groups; and surviving annual reports, which are more detailed, are scarce. In 1907 about 530 licences were issued to itinerant milk vendors; the number fell to 309 in 1908 and rebounded to 534 licences and 537 badges in 1912. (Luke Hill attributed the 1908 decrease to the suspension of the milk bylaws, which were awaiting amendments.)14 The numbers of badges and licences issued, though, continued to fluctuate. In 1914, 471 licences and 168 badges were issued, the numbers rising to 504 and 172 by the next year.15 The number of Indo-Guianese milk vendors in 1911 Georgetown was fiftysix, only 10 per cent of a possible 530 licencees; if the environs are included, then it seems that Indo-Guianese controlled roughly 22 per cent of this trade. Do these figures imply, as did Bronkhurst several

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decades earlier, participation by groups other than Indo-Guianese? Two sources hint at this. A 1906 letter sent by eleven cowkeepers (two of whom thought better of it and crossed out their names) was signed by four individuals with “Indo-Guianese” names and seven with “other” names. A 1906 letter sent by eleven cowkeepers was signed by four people with “Indo-Guianese” names.16 And in 1923 a list of fiftyfour Georgetown cow-keepers included three Portuguese names, twenty-eight Indo-Guianese, and twenty-three “other.”17 The participation of Indo-Guianese women in the milk industry is less ambiguous. The census reports indicate that they outnumbered men among Indo-Guianese milk vendors in Georgetown, its environs, and the colony as a whole. As Verene Shepherd argues for Jamaica, limited access to education and popular and elite attitudes towards Indian women were some of the reasons Indo-Creole women had few options for “non-plantation work.”18 Doubtless these factors were significant in British Guiana as well, where Indian females faced similar obstacles to gaining access to education. Yet women gradually lost ground to men. In Georgetown they made up 77 per cent of all Indo-Guianese milk sellers in 1891, 66 per cent in 1911, and 60 per cent in 1921. They experienced a similar drop in Georgetown’s environs from 1911 to 1921, from 74 per cent to 48 per cent, respectively; and, in the colony as a whole, they dropped from 74 per cent in 1891, to 66 per cent in 1911, to 47 per cent in 1921.19 This decline, occurring as it did in tandem with increasing regulation of the industry, may represent the higher costs associated with producing milk – costs that were out of the reach of many women. Or it may indicate the extent to which milk became a family enterprise under the name and licence of a household’s male.

m i l k h aw k i n g a s a n e c o n o m i c strategy For an immigrant group (such as the Indo-Guianese) wishing to earn a living off the plantations or in conjunction with plantation labour, milk selling and the cattle industry provided economic opportunity. Both were potentially significant sources of wealth. Although the economic gains of milk selling and cowkeeping were often marginal – rented land was used and many owned only one or two cows that provided “the only means of subsistence”20 – contemporaries commented upon the activities of Indo-Guianese in this sphere. Edward Jenkins, writing in 1871, noted that many Indo-Guianese in Georgetown used their “bounty-money” (i.e., the money immigrants received for reindenturing) to buy cows, eventually acquiring more – as many as six or seven – from the sales of the first cow’s milk.21

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(Daily Argosy, 17 July 1921; reprinted with the permission of the British Library)

Georgetown milk sellers occasionally made the most-successful-East Indian-of-the-year list compiled by the immigration agent general. In 1902 Muthura of Kitty Village sent $550 to India, and in 1903 Kushia sent $410.22 The milk industry was clearly connected with cowkeeping in Georgetown and its suburbs. As in other cities, cow ownership was common, providing needed income.23 In Georgetown, however (and, indeed, in all of British Guiana), this industry was heavily dominated by one particular ethnic group – Indo-Guianese. This group was able to parlay its ownership of cows into a role in the colony’s milk industry.24 Records of cow ownership for 1923 indicate that Georgetown and its suburbs were home to fifty-six cowpens and 180 cows, the great majority located in the suburbs of Queenstown and Albouystown (both of which had large Indo-Guianese populations), with lesser numbers in Wortmanville, followed distantly by Albertown, Werk-en-Rust, and South and North Cumingsburg. Although names

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are an uncertain indictor of ethnicity, over half the cow owners listed had Indo-Guianese names, and this hints strongly at the continued heavy participation of this group.25 Owning cows could mean having a business. In 1904 Ben Abdool Khan petitioned for the right to build a cowshed for four cows in Georgetown’s Queenstown Ward for the purpose of establishing a milk-selling business.26 (The town superintendent recommended acceptance of the application.)27 Milk selling provided more than a living: it seemed part of a complex of networks (some kin-based, others rooted in geography) that facilitated the exploitation of this industry and the creation of informal associations. The milk industry provided employment for compatriots and family members who often seemed to live in close proximity.28 When allegedly asked for a bribe by constables Spencer and Seton, Dooknie turned to her neighbour, Narraine, who seemed to take over. Perhaps Dooknie was selling milk for Narraine, as Spencer claimed, or maybe Narraine was a soft touch, willing to provide money for Dooknie when she was in trouble; regardless, the incident suggests the informal bonds within the community.29 Families also worked together. In 1921 Ramkellawan, a young milk vendor, was believed to be selling milk for his father.30 It is likely that kin ties facilitated the expansion of the industry within the Indo-Guianese community, but maybe the milk industry itself provided the basis for Indo-Guianese links. Perhaps it was the economic and social importance of this industry that convinced the Indo-Guianese to fight for their right to control the terms under which they engaged in it. Milk vendors disobeyed the laws detailing the terms under which they could practice this occupation: they frequently did not wear badges, did not carry licences, and, most damning of all, adulterated the milk with water. These actions doubtless had an economic motivation. Licences and badges had to be purchased, and adding water to milk could be seen as a way of maximizing profits. Controls on the price of milk through part of 1919 and all of 1920 (and their removal afterwards) were considered to have had an impact on the incidence of adulteration, which increased with controls and decreased without them.31 Milk vendors broke the law; some did so repeatedly.32 Whether faced with high fines due to previous convictions or dropped charges due to concurrent charges, these recidivists demonstrated the continuity of resistance among at least some milk vendors.33 Vendors employed “wiles” and “[a]rtful ... dodges.” Rather than adding water to the milk before arriving on the street, adulterators began carrying separate cans of “water of doubtful purity obtained from the most handy sources,” adding the water to the milk only when entering the customers’ yards. This technique could provide a ready-made explanation should the vendor be queried by an officer: the former could plausibly claim to be

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testing the worthiness of a recently soldered can.34 Wiles and dodges also included other deceptions. Milk sellers would gave false names and addresses to inspectors or sell skimmed or condensed milk as whole.35 “Leniency” and “moderate penalties” were exploited by “unscrupulous” vendors who, if they thought it would help reduce their penalty, would readily make up stories about the wives or families they had to support.36 Milk vendors also resisted the milk bylaws by attempting to exploit its loopholes. The chief sanitary inspector noted in 1918 that some milk vendors, “newcomers especially,” believed that they did not need to be licensed if the milk they sold was drunk on the premises. He recommended that the necessity of registration and licences be made clear.37 Resistance could also take more legal forms. In 1902 forty-one Georgetown cowkeepers petitioned for changes to the milk bylaws, which imposed upon them “great hardship and inconvenience.” Some of the alterations they requested were technical and were meant to facilitate the operation of their businesses. For example, they requested that a regulation be changed to allow them to replace cows more easily and that they be allowed longer than fourteen days to make any needed improvements in cowbyres or cowsheds. Some of the requests were more substantive, hitting at the heart of significant tensions. The petitioners expressed economic insecurity, describing their rivalry with vendors outside the city’s boundaries in their request to have bylaw provisions extend to vendors in the city’s suburbs, the home of “the majority of defaulters for selling adulterated milk.” They also expressed a mistrust of the police; they wanted the words “or by any Police constable” removed from the bylaw “as such prosecutions [could] be malicious.”38 Public spaces – the streets, the railway terminal, and the public stellings – were the sites for confrontations between police and milk sellers. The legislation operated publicly in public places. It allowed for private prosecutions, but these seem to have been few (perhaps individuals were discouraged by the fee).39 In 1921, noting that few people placed complaints, the chief sanitary inspector pointed out that inspectors had to criss-cross the city from “La Penitance to Kitty in search of milk vendors.” Inspectors stopped individuals on the street, taking milk samples, and also targeted places through which milk entered the city – the stellings and the railway station.40

a d i sc o ur s e of f i lt h Colonial authorities worried about the health risks associated with contaminated milk. Informed by a sanitarian and racist discourse, they developed a body of repressive legislation and initiated an attack on milk vendors who broke the law. This crusade by the city’s

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sanitary/medical bureaucracy paralleled similar attacks on other public health risks in public areas. Georgetown was not the only city in which people expressed concern about the public health consequences of impure milk; similar trends were apparent elsewhere in the Empire and North America. Unease was articulated in British and us cities as part of the growing push for sanitary reform. H. Swithinbank and G. Newman’s 1903 The Bacteriology of Milk confirmed milk’s ability to spread germs, a facility first recognized in the 1860s and 1870s. Impure milk was increasingly represented as a significant health issue, especially since the 1890s, when the victory of a “contagionist” over a “miasmic” interpretation of disease demonstrated its dangers. Impure milk was concomitant with urbanization, which ensured the distance between consumers and producers.41 In England the increasing cost of producing milk in cities and the strict dairy regulations in urban areas pushed milk production out of the cities, and a similar migration was seen in New York City.42 At the same time, medical and public health experts in both countries blamed high rates of infant mortality in the 1890s and 1900s on contaminated milk.43 The problem remained unsolved for some time as relatively low fines proved an inadequate deterrent.44 P.J. Atkins concludes that, in Great Britain, untreated milk continued to pose a risk to public health until the 1920s.45 Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Georgetown experienced similar problems, which, in large measure, were due to the methods of milk production employed. Part of the city’s milk supply originated in the city itself, but much of it – an increasing proportion after the early 1900s – came from the surrounding suburbs and villages. Some was produced in large operations, on nearby sugar estates, or by large-scale cowkeepers and sold to particular customers. These cowkeepers, along with those individuals who kept single cows, also sold milk through regular vendors who “hawked [it] about from street to street until sold.” This practice often resulted in spoilage as milk sent into Georgetown early in the morning was frequently still being sold in the afternoon. Indeed, the commissioners investigating British Guiana’s infant and general mortality rates in 1905 considered cow’s milk “the least satisfactory in quality of the foodstuffs consumed in the colony.” The commissioners concluded that “the practice of adulterating ... milk with water, not always of impeachable quality, [was] rife.” Cows were usually milked early in the morning, and milk left unsold at the end of the day was frequently scalded and kept overnight in a room where people slept. The next day the scalded milk was mixed with fresh and sold in Georgetown.46 Contemporaneous discourse represented Georgetown as vulnerable to impure milk produced outside the city’s borders. According to

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the Daily Chronicle, restrictions on Georgetown cattle owners made nearby Kitty Village an important centre for cowpens and, thus, for milk production.47 This dependence was considered a problem because suburban cows and suburban milk were believed to be dirty. A 1906 investigation into the milk arriving in Georgetown from the Bel Air district revealed that many samples were contaminated and that not all the cowpens and cowbyres from which they came conformed “to the standard set by the bylaws then in force inside the city boundaries.”48 W.B. St Aubyn, former manager of a Mahaica estate, made much the same point, noting the futility of Georgetown’s regulating pens and dairies when those in the country, which provided most of the city’s milk, remained unredeemed. On the estate he managed at the time, “it was notorious” that the cows’ udders were “never cleaned” and that lepers were “walking all about.”49 As laws regulating cowpens and dairies within the city were enforced, most of the pens, at least by 1903, had moved outside of the city to the suburbs and country areas.50 St Aubyn’s observations were supported by others. K.S. Wise and E.P. Minett, in their 1912 “Review of the Milk Question in British Guiana,” noted that the 1901 bylaw regulating milk sellers, cows, and cowpens applied only within the boundaries of Georgetown but that most of the city’s milk arrived from outside its borders.51 In the same year, Georgetown Town Clerk J.B. Woolford asked Magistrate P.A. Farrer Manby to condemn milk seized from Kitty cowkeeper Rajeoomar on the grounds that it was infected with typhoid. Wishart visited Rajeoomar’s cowpen and found it “deplorably filthy,” with dung on the cows, in the pen, everywhere. He returned the next day and seized some milk, acting on information he had received from Wise, who had analyzed milk from the same pen. This milk, according to Wise, contained “feccal [sic] organisms” and was “absolutely unfit for human food.” Interviewed by the Daily Argosy in May, Wise described Rajeoomar’s milk as “pretty bad – practically liquid sewage.” Wise believed that the problem should be dealt with by the local government board because it was not the responsibility of the Georgetown town council.52 Bylaws to regulate the milk trade in country districts were passed in 1912, but concern continued to be expressed about impure milk infiltrating Georgetown. In 1921, when Benarry was charged with selling adulterated milk, his lawyer, J.A. Luckhoo, argued that his client was not culpable. He had obtained the milk from De Kinderen, on the East Coast, and it had travelled by train in a locked can; at the station, Sanitary Inspector Roman unlocked the can, taking a sample (which revealed that the milk was adulterated) before Benarry could work any mischief. To Luckhoo, these events suggested that “milk vendors in the city [were] at the mercy of those in the country.” Though plans

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were made to take action against the rural supplier, Benarry faced a twenty-dollar fine or one month in jail.53 In 1925 Ramsook, employed in the milk industry, complained that milk from “Mahaica, Mahaicony, De Kinderen, the West Coast Berbice, etc., etc.” was sold for less in Georgetown than was locally produced milk because the vendors broke the law, failing to properly certify their cowbyres and “evad[ing] the responsible officers,” with the result that “bad milk which [was] dangerous to health” found its way into the city.54 The sense of a city under siege is almost palpable in some of these accounts. In 1906 the Mortality Commissioners responded to testimony about unclean suburban milk with a recommendation that milk testing and sterilizing stations be established at key points of entry to the city, on the Thomas Road, on the ferry stelling, and at La Penitance, thus creating a virtual cordon sanitaire.55 In 1912 chairman of the local government board, Dr Godfrey, made a similar suggestion, calling for the government to give the board the power to “proclaim” infected districts and to prohibit milk from “defined areas” being sold or brought into Georgetown or any other parts of the colony.56 In 1923 A. Seton Milne argued that itinerant milk vendors should be removed from the industry and that all the milk entering the city should be sold to a municipal dairy. Such a step was the only way to “ensure a good clean milk supply.”57 Such proposals resonate with attitudes expressed during the Georgetown riots, especially in 1924, when colonial authorities tried to keep the Indo-Guianese “mob” out of the city.58 Indeed, the proposals reveal the key difference between attempts to regulate the milk industry in British Guiana and efforts to do so in Great Britain. In British Guiana racism permeated the discourse; sanitarian discourse in the colony associated morality, cleanliness, and race – a trinity not apparent in Britain.59 In British Guiana, the “filthy” practice of the Indo-Guianese “endangered” the rest of the community. The testimony of P.J. Patterson (a Georgetown town overseer and sanitary inspector) at a 1905 commission inquiring into Georgetown’s high rate of general and infant mortality demonstrates the potency of conceptions of dirt, disease, and race. Patterson characterized the milk industry in Georgetown’s suburbs as being in unclean, largely Indo-Guianese hands. He claimed that country cows were sicker than were those in Georgetown; that milk was kept in airless houses where some six or eight Indo-Guianese slept; and, most damning of all, that two or three cowpens in Kitty Village employed lepers. Patterson’s testimony demonstrated the increasing concern of local policy makers with the public health consequences of impure milk. This testimony, published in the Daily Chronicle, resulted in an inquiry being launched by the governor and the town council, involving the inspector general of police and a medical officer.60

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Patterson was not alone in commenting on the number of lepers – archetypes of filth and disease – among the Indo-Guianese population employed in the milk industry. St Aubyn described Kitty as “reeking with leprous matter” and associated Indo-Guianese in general with leprosy. He claimed that “cooliem[e]n [did not] look at the affliction with horror,” adducing as proof the case of Indians coming from far away to pray over a piece of ground in which a leper was buried, hoping that doing so would give them children. In July 1905 “A Resident” wrote the Chronicle about leprous suburban milk attendants supplying Georgetown’s milk. At the Mahaica railway station, an “unquestionably leprous boy was seen with a vessel of milk which was to be emptied into a large milk can that was being filled for forwarding to Georgetown.” The boy was pointed out to the police, who seized the milk and planned to have the boy examined. However, the correspondent exclaimed that “that boy had been taking milk to the station for days before the one in question and the contaminated milk was being sent into the city” (emphasis in original). “A Resident” had also heard that “a great deal of milk ... sent to the city ... [came] from people residing at Jonestown who [were] associated with lepers themselves.”61 The discursive association between Indo-Guianese and leprosy suggests the extent to which they were perceived as unclean. Although Patterson’s testimony resonates with the “moral health, truth, and beauty” of “pure” milk, it also echoes contemporaneous representations of corrupt milk vendors in general and Indo-Guianese in particular.62 The association between Indo-Guianese and filth in Georgetown may have been informed, to an extent, by the well known fact that Indo-Guianese dominated the city’s scavenging industry.63 Contemporaries harshly condemned milk sellers who adulterated milk. It was almost as though the manipulation of substances, of making impure something pure, infected the milk seller’s very being. In 1923 the chief sanitary inspector described two vendors, one from whom he had taken two adulterated milk samples on the same day and one who, after having been fined twenty dollars for selling adulterated milk, was seen six days later selling more of the same. In 1917 Acting Sanitary Inspector S.H. Parkinson described himself as “systematic[ally] running to earth ... vendors guilty of milk adulteration.” This language strongly suggests a campaign to kill vermin.64 When, in 1921, Ramkellawan was convicted on two charges of selling adulterated milk, city magistrate Brummell condemned him: “You people have been in the habit of trying to poison the whole community with impure milk. The lives of the community and more are more or less in your hands and you must remember that the people are paying a fair price for the article and they demand pure milk. If you try to increase your gains by adding water you must suffer for

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it.” The high fine imposed on Ramkellawan, $150 for each charge, indicates the seriousness with which his offence was regarded.65 Patterson and his entourage did not find any lepers, but what they did uncover was the readiness of many Georgetowners to believe that leprous Indo-Guianese were contaminating the city’s milk supply. Although the officials accompanying Patterson ultimately disproved his “discoveries,” his story was accepted by the Daily Chronicle.66 The Chronicle claimed that the government was attempting to “discredit” Patterson’s testimony and to “discount the seriousness of the discovery,” despite the fact that the “coolie” milk vendor in question sold over 300 pints of milk in Georgetown each day. The newspaper agreed with Patterson that the presence of uniformed police in an open carriage on the way to hunt for lepers, and its coverage of Patterson’s testimony, doubtless allowed news of the expedition to spread, giving cowpen owners the chance “to get the inflicted persons out of the way at once.”67 Indo-Guianese, as owners of most of the colony’s cattle, were doubly culpable. As cowkeepers and milk sellers, they were well positioned to contaminate the city’s milk supply. St Aubyn associated Indo-Guianese cow keepers with unsanitary practices. It was “notorious” in Mahaica that cows’ udders “were never cleaned” because “coolies” believed the cows “[drew] up the milk” once water touched the udders; instead, the cowkeepers scraped the dirt away with their fingers, wiping it on the cows.68 In 1909 an “outbreak of virulent fever of enteric type” was blamed on the contaminated water used by cowkeepers and milk sellers to wash milk cans and dilute milk, and by cows as a place to “wallow.” In 1911 Wise and Minett characterized the city’s milk supply as “uncontrolled”: cows were kept in “filthy and unsanitary conditions” and containers washed in “faecally polluted water.” Wise and Minett concluded that “it [was] not surprising, when cows [were] milked in such adverse conditions, and the milk obtained and kept in such insanitary surroundings, by a people who [had] no idea of even the rudiments of hygiene, [that] the milk when ultimately sold [was] unfit for human food, especially for infants.”69 Similar points were made in 1912 when it was reported that six cases of enteric fever were traced to the milk supply.70 The discourse of impure milk intersected with the apparent exigencies of British Guiana and Georgetown life – namely, the size of the working population and the high levels of infant mortality. Contemporaries considered British Guiana in general, and Georgetown in particular, to have excessively high rates of infant mortality. The death rate seemed a problem largely due to the colony’s perceived labour shortage. The 1918 report of the Baby Saving League noted British Guiana’s “crying need ... [for] more population”; more labourers

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were needed to “develop the sick resources of the interior” and to stop the present erosion of sugar cultivation. According to the league, “A high general mortality, in large measure due to a high infant mortality, diminishes the natural increase of population in the Colony and it behooves [sic] the State, therefore, to preserve every single birth and to rear it in its most virile form, so that a more numerous and stronger manhood may be the result” (emphasis in original).71 In 1923 Georgetown’s chief sanitary inspector echoed this worry. The high rate of infant mortality contributed to high rates of mortality in general and thus retarded the colony’s “economic progress.”72 Official concern about the “unacceptably” high levels of infant mortality began to be expressed early in the century. In 1905 British Guiana’s governor appointed a commission of inquiry to examine general and infant mortality in Georgetown and the rest of the colony.73 The Mortality Commissioners concluded what contemporaries already believed: local death rates were too high. Although not out of line with “certain of the other West Indian countries,” British Guiana’s rate of infant mortality was much higher than that of England, where it was 141 per 1,000 births. Statistics published in the Mortality Commission’s report emphasized these points and drew attention to the relatively higher rate in Georgetown, greater than that for the colony as a whole and certainly greater than (and at times double) that in “country” districts. Subsequently, this discrepancy continued to be reported elsewhere in other government reports. Although the rate for particular years fluctuated, it was consistently higher in Georgetown than it was in the rest of the colony.74 Impure milk provided an easy target for those concerned about high levels of infant mortality. In 1890s England, medical and public health publications blamed milk for the high rate of infant mortality.75 In British Guiana, however, the association was not made as clearly until later, even though local officials knew of the discoveries abroad. In 1903, the first year the surgeon general’s report began noting the colony’s rate of infant mortality, the surgeon general characterized the rate as “excessive” in the colony as a whole and “appalling” in Georgetown. He noted that Britain and other countries provided lessons to “mothers amongst the poorer classes in the care and feeding of young infants” and that milk depots – where sterilized milk was provided – had been established; he believed that “some such measures” needed to be adopted in British Guiana in order for the colony’s rate of infant mortality to decline.76 Town Superintendent Luke Hill was also in touch with current thinking abroad. In 1903, while in England, he gathered information on the establishment and operation of infant milk depots. In 1905 he hoped that the colony’s Mortality Commission would push the town council to establish a similar institution.77

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Although infant milk depots were not established, the town council and local philanthropists did provide some infant care services. In 1913 the town council instituted a system of health visitors. A year later the governor’s wife, Lady Egerton, founded the Baby Saving League, which built two clinics in Georgetown and arranged for home visits by nurses. In 1915 a creche was established.78 From 1926 on, the mayor and town council agreed to take over the work of the Baby Saving League (renamed the Infant Welfare and Maternity League).79 The health visitors and the Baby Saving League were part of a colony-wide movement to supervise and educate mothers and to monitor infant health.80 Patterson’s testimony before the Mortality Commission demonstrated the relationship between the two discourses. Testifying about the colony’s high rate of mortality, he described a contaminated milk supply. The speed with which the governor, local officials, and one daily newspaper seized the issue suggests its potency. Ironically, the 1905 commission did not blame contaminated milk for the high rate of infant mortality; rather, it cited inadequate and inappropriate nourishment, blaming “starchy and other indigestible foods” rather than breast-milk or milk “suitably diluted for the age of the infant.” Indeed, the “difficulty and expense attendant on obtaining supplies of pure milk [was] one of the most important factors with regard to the infantile death-rate.”81 Concern about the risk milk posed to infant health was expressed with increasing urgency. Wise and Minett believed that the colony’s high rate of infant morality demanded an improvement in the milk supply.82 In 1921 Georgetown’s chief sanitary inspector condemned those who committed the “crime” of adding dirty trench water to milk for babies (trench water ensured that the milk did not acquire the blue tint given it by rain water). As milk was “the sole means of sustenance for unfortunate infants whose mothers [were] out working all day,” it contributed to the city’s “still excessive though happily reducing, infantile mortality.”83 In the same year, the Daily Chronicle editorialized about the danger impure milk posed to the community, particularly to children: “The high infantile mortality in the cities is due to milk-borne and milk-brought diseases. The life of every child is imperilled by dirty milk.”84 In 1923 Georgetown’s chief sanitary inspector emphasized the vulnerability of infants, “whose very existence depend[ed] upon the purity of its sole means of sustenance,” thus reinforcing the belief that impure milk contributed to the colony’s high rate of infant mortality.85 Although officials seemed to be at the forefront of those who promulgated this attitude, it also appears to have had some public acceptance. “Reader” wrote the Chronicle shortly after the editorial was published, congratulating the newspaper on its attention to such an important issue.86

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Indeed, unclean milk was considered to pose a risk to the population at large; it was a vector for a number of diseases, including diarrhoea, dysentery, infectious enteritis, gastric dyspepsia, scarlet fever, typhoid, diphtheria, and tuberculosis. In 1909 the surgeon-general, the government bacteriologist, and the health officer of Georgetown blamed an outbreak of “virulent fever of enteric type” on the city’s milk supply. And, in January 1913, new bylaws regulating the sale of milk in Georgetown came into effect, “hastened” by a spring outbreak of enteric fever that had affected four people and had been “traced” to infected milk from Kitty.87 How realistic were these fears? Was the Daily Chronicle correct when, in 1921, it implied that everyone was at risk from impure milk, rich and poor, country as well as city dwellers?88 Some contemporaries believed that Georgetown’s inhabitants ensured the safety of the milk they consumed. Luke Hill, writing in 1908, claimed that “most” of the city’s milk was scalded before use and, thereby, rendered safe – an observation with which Wise and Minett agreed, though with qualifications (it was probable that milk was not sterilized “thoroughly and efficiently”).89 In 1915 the prevalence of this practice made Hill reluctant to “accept the general theory of infection from milk,” despite the fact that deaths from typhoid or enteric fever were blamed on contaminated milk.90 (He generally considered milk supplied from private dairies in Georgetown to be of “excellent quality.”)91 The real risk milk posed to Georgetown’s infants, and to the general population, is uncertain. An 1886 correspondent to the Daily Chronicle characterized milk as an “article of wide consumption”; and Luke Hill, in 1895, described the “poorer people” as the “principle customers of the Coolie Milksellers.”92 Yet those testifying before the 1905 Mortality Commission disagreed. In rural areas, where milk was free, it was widely used for infants; but in the city, where milk was considered too expensive, paps mixed with water or a little milk were used instead. The commissioners concluded that the cost of milk placed it out of reach of the poor, making it a product consumed primarily by the “working and middle classes.”93 In 1906 milk hawked in Georgetown cost four cents a pint, but its cost, along with those of many other consumer items, increased during the First World War (doubling).94 In half of 1919 and all of 1920, the price of milk was controlled by the government.95 By 1924 fresh milk cost eight cents.96 A 1924 investigation into the cost of living neglected to address the cost of milk, implying, perhaps, its relative insignificance to working people. However, the observation of the assistant government analyst that milk was widely used at Christmas suggests that it was significant in diets at least part of the year.97 The apparent association between high rates of mortality – particularly infant mortality – and the quality of milk in a colony believed to

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be suffering from a labour shortage set the stage for an increasing concern with the quality of milk sold. Reports of milk samples submitted to the government analyst, whether by the police and local government officials or by town council employees alone, demonstrate as much: the number of milk samples submitted for analysis generally increased from the mid-1890s (when milk analysis really began), far outnumbering other kinds of items submitted for analysis (ghee, butter, and so on).98 The reports of milk samples submitted by the Georgetown Town Council show the same general increase for the years between 1903 and 1923.99

a l eg i s l at i v e r es p o n s e Regardless of the actual consumption of milk, anxiety about its quality provoked a legislative response in British Guiana, much as it did in England and in the United States. The growing concern with the safety of British Guiana’s milk supply was reflected in a body of legislation providing fines and jail terms for a variety of offences, ranging from selling milk without a licence to adding water to milk. This rising solicitude – also manifested in increasingly severe penalties – occurred concomitantly with an equivalent regard for clean public spaces in general, which was part of the sanitary and public health movement of the first decades of the twentieth century. Yet, as was the case with the wider sanitary reform movement, attempts to purify the milk supply were not completely effective. Legislative efforts were divided between several levels of government: the colonial government, the Georgetown Town Council, and the Central Board of Health. The first colonial adulteration legislation attempted to regulate the manufacture and selling of bread.100 Subsequent ordinances (dating from the early 1880s) were less specific in their targets, prohibiting the adulteration of any material “so as to render the article injurious to health” with the intention of selling it in this condition. Penalties were harsh, ranging from fines of up to $250 and jail terms (and hard labour) of up to six months.101 Any one of several government officials who obtained food or drugs for analysis enforced the ordinances – government medical officers, commissaries of taxation, sanitary inspectors, inspectors of police, police constables, as well as diverse local government officials.102 These officials could approach suspects and take samples in a variety of places, including shops, “other premises or in any street or place of public resort” and “at the place of delivery.”103 Yet their right to obtain samples could be limited by commercial interests. Under a 1918 ordinance, the “exercise ... of [their] powers” had to “conform to such reasonable requirements of the railway company or other authority owning or using

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such station or premises or stelling as [were] necessary to prevent the traffic thereat being obstructed or interfered with.”104 The Georgetown Town Council also helped regulate the sale of milk, passing a series of bylaws designed to achieve the same goal desired by the colonial government – a pure milk supply – and targeted towards the same people; that is, milk vendors. The municipal legislation, though, included livestock and livestock keepers within its purview. The two streams of this legislation (the regulation of milk vendors and the regulation of cowkeepers) recognized that single individuals often engaged in both livelihoods. The dual nature of the legislation also revealed a confusion among lawmakers and others concerning causation: What caused milk’s impurity and who was culpable? Cowkeepers producing milk outside the city or milk sellers degrading pure milk inside? The town council built its pure milk regulations upon pre-existing bylaws designed to control the movement of livestock within the city. Georgetown ordinance no. 25, 1898, included a bylaw limiting the hours during which milk cows could be driven through the city’s streets, but by 1900 at least one official believed the bylaw should be amended to clearly regulate milk sellers.105 By the next year, the 1898 bylaw was replaced by one that explicitly regulated the milk trade rather than merely livestock. The bylaw, characterized by the chairman of the Central Board of Health as a tool to control the sale of milk in the city, regulated milk vendors as well as those keeping livestock.106 Sellers or suppliers of milk in Georgetown had to register at the town clerk’s office at a cost of twenty-four cents per year, milk sellers receiving a badge marked with their licence number to be worn on the left arm. Anyone carrying milk to deliver it from a dairy or milk shop, rather than selling it, had to carry authorization from the milk supplier. The bylaws also regulated the sanitary practices of those selling milk from shops, ranging from forbidding the employment of individuals apparently suffering from a contagious disease to demanding that the room in which the milk was stored be free from excrement, dirty clothes, and impure air. The bylaw also gave officials the right to inspect milk shops at any time in order to ensure compliance with the bylaws’ provisions.107 Yet city officials worried that this legislation was inadequate. In particular, they were concerned that “impure” milk from the suburbs was infiltrating Georgetown. Wise and Minett characterized the 1901 bylaw as ineffective because it only covered the milk industry within Georgetown when “practically the whole of the milk supply [was] obtained outside the city boundaries” (emphasis in original).108 In August 1906 the Drainage and Health and Cemeteries Committee of the City of Georgetown reported unsanitary conditions in the cowbyres and

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cowsheds in the city’s suburbs – especially in Kitty, Bel Air, Lodge, La Penitance, and Ruimveldt – and recommended that steps be taken to ensure conformity with government standards.109 Wise made similar observations; he noted that Bel Air cattle and cowbyres were dirty and that cattle were occasionally milked in filthy surroundings.110 A 1906 investigation revealed that some of the milk entering the city from Bel Air was contaminated and that all the inspected cowpens and cowbyres were substandard. The investigators’ recommendations demonstrate the confusion of problems and, thus, of solutions: they recommended that the milk bylaws be extended outside of the city, that “indiscriminate hawking” in the city be prohibited, and that a special inspector be appointed to control the milk trade. The surgeon general shared this confusion. J.E. Godfrey considered the reports to have revealed a “most unsatisfactory state of affairs” and suggested that those in power put an end to the “indiscriminate hawking of milk about the city.” To this end, he advised restricting the sale of milk to licensed dealers (who would be liable for adulteration), ensuring that containers were periodically stamped and inspected, and more rigorously regulating the conditions of cattle and cowbyres.111 Consequently, in 1907, new bylaws were passed in which licences were used to regulate the milk supply outside Georgetown. Licences were refused those who violated cowpen and cowbyre standards, and certificates were required testifying to the condition of cows, pens, and attendants.112 Milk vendors still had to pay twenty-four cents a year to register, to wear badges on their left arms (the badges, though, now cost twelve cents), and to carry milk vessels inscribed with their licence number. The bylaw prohibited anyone not named in a licence from wearing a badge and demanded that milk not be sold in Georgetown by anyone who was without a licence or a badge (or by anyone wearing a false badge). As in the earlier bylaw, anyone delivering milk from a dairy or milk shop needed written authorization to do so.113 The bylaw also tried to control milk sellers by controlling milk suppliers; vendors could only sell milk from approved sources. Within Georgetown, the names of cowkeepers and the addresses of cowsheds had to be noted, and certificates from the inspecting officer had to be included; and outside the city the names of the milkers and certificates from veterinarians and doctors vouching as to the good health of both milker and cow were required. As was the case with the earlier bylaw, milk sellers who owned cows were given precise instructions on the size of the cowsheds and cowbyres, the health of the milkers and the cows, and the cleanliness of the rooms where milk was stored and sold.114 The adulteration laws were not fully implemented until the late 1890s.115 However, milk was analyzed since at least 1890 (the results

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revealed a high rate of adulteration – 81.5 per cent of milk samples submitted between January 1890 and April 1893, and 86.3 per cent of samples submitted in 1891, were adulterated).116 In 1891 the legislation was not enforced, and only milk destined for paupers and orphans was analyzed. Officials were dilatory in enforcing the 1892 legislation as well. In the year it was passed, there were a few “attacks” on vendors of adulterated ghee; milk destined for the almshouse and the orphan asylum was examined and was, apparently, of “excellent quality.”117 Despite the willingness of government officials to analyze milk and to condemn or praise its quality, prosecutions were not instituted. The cries of the government analyst who insisted that in “no other colony [was] ... the standard of purity and quality amongst the foodstuffs sold to the labouring classes as low” as it was in British Guiana – a situation only the enforcement of the 1892 legislation could rectify – seemed to fall on deaf ears. Milk adulteration did not seem to have been prosecuted before 1894. In that year, of 308 samples submitted, 102 were samples of milk, forty-three of which were found to be adulterated. There were ninety-three convictions, and fines ranged from one dollar to fifty dollars, totalling $1,340.118 Municipal sanitary officers were not authorized to take action until at least 1898.119 Once the legislation was enforced, penalties usually resulted; prosecutions rarely resulted in acquittals or withdrawals. The same seemed to hold for prosecutions under the adulteration of food and drug legislation for the colony as a whole.120 An examination of prosecutions under the municipal milk bylaws and the food and drug adulteration laws demonstrates a number of patterns. Municipal penalties were lower than were those imposed under the colonial legislation (as stipulated in the laws themselves) and were also lower than was allowed by the legislation – often one or two dollars.121 However, tougher fines were imposed. Three individuals were fined a total of $37.16 for refusing to sell milk; one person was fined $3.84 for selling milk without a licence; and another was fined $10.72 for selling milk without a valid licence.122 Higher fines were imposed under the adulteration laws, the size of the fine often reflecting the perceived seriousness of the adulteration. Thus in June 1902 a milk vendor was fined twenty dollars for a “large” adulteration;123 in May 1912 Ramootar was convicted of selling milk that was 16 per cent water, the worst case of adulteration ever seen by the presiding magistrate (who decided to make an “example” of Ramootar, fining him thirty dollars or two months in prison).124 First offences, if the degree of adulteration was not large, could earn no more than a warning, as did two cases in November 1904.125 Such cases demonstrate the degree of discretion the magistrate could exercise. In May 1912 a milk seller, Parbate, was charged with having sold

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milk “not of the nature and substance required” to a sanitary inspector. Parbate pleaded guilty, but the magistrate, who only ordered her to pay costs, seemed to accept her story of supplementing her own exhausted milk supply by purchasing the contaminated milk from a “sister vendor” on the West Coast. (However, a day earlier, the same magistrate, P.A. Farrer Manby, sentenced Boodoo to a five-dollar fine or fourteen days in jail for pleading guilty to the same charge, which was justified with a similar excuse to Parbate’s.)126 Repeat offenders could be severely fined. In June 1921 Rhanjanny was convicted of selling adulterated milk; previously convicted and fined $10, $30, and $100, he faced a fine of $250 or three months in jail.127 In September 1921 a milk vendor who had two previous convictions was fined $100; and in April 1922 Sookie, “a female East Indian” who had two previous convictions for selling milk adulterated with water, faced a fine of $100 (and seventy-two cents costs) or two months in jail with hard labour.128 Uncooperative vendors could be severely fined, as was one vendor who, in January 1923, was fined seventy-five dollars for throwing away his milk to prevent a sample from being taken.129 The size of the fines, when considered alongside the price of milk, added force to the legislation’s goals. Legislation provided for jail time for individuals who were summarily convicted and unable to pay their fines, thus intensifying its force.130 Despite such patterns, as in other areas of the sanitary regulation of public space, several trends are clear: the late 1910s saw an increasingly rigid sanitarian rhetoric that seemed to be reflected in the imposition of more severe penalties. Yet throughout the period enforcement varied in intensity, as some local authorities displayed a less than whole-hearted willingness to enforce the legislation. Late in the 1890s the municipal government enforced milk laws with discretion, employing a judicious apportionment of warnings and prosecutions. Luke Hall believed that this policy coincided with a “marked decrease in milk adulteration in Georgetown” and earned the compliments of the Georgetown police magistrate.131 In 1908 Hill reiterated this policy, directing sanitary inspectors to exercise discretion. If reported adulterations turned out to be skimmed milk – generally the previous day’s milk from which the fat was skimmed – and were declared to be “scalded” at the time of purchase, then cautions were to be issued. Likewise, officers were to warn sellers of “doubtful” milk.132 This policy was reflected in the language used to describe milk adulteration. Until the late 1910s the town superintendent and the government analyst employed a range of terms to characterize cases of milk adulteration. They consistently indicated the number of cases in which the milk was “of doubtful quality” or was slightly adulterated; often these were cases of skimmed or scalded milk. “Doubtful”

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cases seem not to have been prosecuted, except when the vendor misrepresented the kind of milk being sold. Thus one vendor in July 1902 was fined four dollars for selling skimmed milk as fresh.133 Generally, though, those guilty of selling doubtful or mildly adulterated milk were let off with warnings, particularly if the offence was their first.134 Rhetoric and legal practice seemed to become harsher in the late 1910s, however, as officials began describing milk as either adulterated or pure.135 The same attitude was perhaps demonstrated in a 1921 Daily Chronicle editorial in which milk was described as either “clean or ... swarming with bacteria.”136 In general, penalties seemed to become progressively harsher, particularly in the 1920s. Fines were higher and jail terms were imposed. In 1921 the magistrate imposed the maximum fine of $250 on several offenders, fined five milk vendors a total of $228.20 and fined another five $128.60. Offenders were also being sent to jail without the option of a fine. In 1921 the magistrate sentenced four offenders to jail with hard labour.137 In 1923 three milk vendors were sentenced to imprisonment, one to seven days of hard labour, one to two months of hard labour, and a third to seven days without hard labour.138 Indeed, in 1923 the mayor, responding to the chief sanitary inspector’s report showing the results of milk samples, suggested that the town council ask the government to make second or subsequent offences “punishable by peremptory imprisonment for 6 months.”139 Authorities considered harsh penalties a deterrent. John Williams, one-time assistant analyst of food and drugs in Georgetown, believed he saw a link between penalties and offences: [There was an] apparent connection between the average amount of the fine inflicted by the Magistrates upon conviction for the sale of adulterated milk and the prevalence of this practice. Periods in which Magistrates have inflicted substantial fines for the offence have been followed by well-marked falls in the rate of offences detected while periods in which the average fines have been low have been followed by marked increased in the rates of adulteration detected.140

It is unclear whether personnel and organizational shifts played a role in this change. Luke Hill worked for the town council for twentytwo years and held the position of town superintendent for much of that time, retiring in 1910.141 During his reign, he ensured that the town superintendent’s department exercised considerable control over the operation of the milk laws. Hill reported directly to the mayor and town council, including in his reports convictions against the adulteration laws and against the milk bylaws (the last transmitted through the town constabulary report). After Hill’s retirement in

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1910 and the establishment of a health department in Georgetown, an expert in the field of milk and disease, W. de W. Wishart, was appointed health officer, a post he held during the 1910s and much of the 1920s.142 By at least 1916 the chief sanitary inspector began reporting on the operation of the milk bylaws to de Wishart. This bureaucratic change may have allowed Wishart the leeway to impose a stricter punishment regime. Yet despite the harsh rhetoric and severe punishment, enforcement of the legislation was at times sporadic, often due to the indifference or incompetence of local officials. In 1903 the government analyst limited the number of milk samples his department would accept from Georgetown’s sanitary inspectors to ten every three months, citing the pressure of other necessary work. Hill blamed this policy for the reduction in the number of prosecutions instituted by his department, a situation that lasted for years, until the government analyst reversed his decision and increased the number of samples to 200 a year.143 Yet gathering large numbers of milk samples did not ensure that alleged offenders were prosecuted: insufficient or indifferent personnel also affected prosecution levels. In 1917 Georgetown had only two sanitary officers to sample milk in the streets,144 this doubtless being the reason that Acting Sanitary Inspector Parkinson complained that his limited staff could not cope with the “milk problem.”145 Unconcerned police also seemed to be at fault. According to Hill, they did not adequately check unbadged milk sellers and instituted insufficient prosecutions for this offence.146 Cases that made it to court could also end up abandoned due to the failure of court officials to serve summons or to serve them to the wrong people (as happened in 1920 and in February 1923).147 This kind of administrative incompetence and indifference clearly undermined the force of the legislation regulating the milk industry and, in the process, the larger project of establishing sanitary order in the streets. Yet Georgetown’s streets remained sites of frequent confrontations. Their importance as public places used by milk sellers (and other itinerant vendors) to wrest a living from British Guiana’s plantation-dominated economy – in the face of the efforts of colonial authorities to regulate retail activities in the streets – ensured that this would be the case. Indeed, the conflicts that resulted from the opposing views concerning what was and was not an appropriate street activity reflected the importance of the street to both subordinate and superordinate classes. For both, the street was the battleground, a place where definitions of order were contested.

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7 Riot and the Struggle to Control the Street People paraded the streets with bands of music.... [W]hile the band played the people danced and waved sticks. The proceedings appeared to be a kind of jollification.1 Daily Argosy

Disputes were part of daily life on Georgetown’s streets, as the urban poor battled with local elites and fought amongst themselves. These contests emerged from the interactions and tensions that marked daily life in Georgetown’s streets and markets. Yet the riots were in a sense ritualistic affairs. The largely poor, non-white participants drew from a popular “repertoire” that included traditional cultural practices – African, Indian, and Creole – and new practices rooted in the rituals of trade unionism. Elements of these “learned cultural creations,” though differing in intensity, were apparent in all three of Georgetown’s major late post-emancipation riots: 1889, 1905, and 1924.2 In response to the threat posed by the rioters, local elites constructed their own, largely discursive, repertoire. It echoed contemporaneous European ideas about race and class, but it also reflected long-held beliefs about the place of non-whites in West Indian societies. The discourse of fear and hatred constructed by the Guianese ruling classes was also informed by more specific local exigencies, and it was manifested in violent repression of the riots.

th e g e o r g e t o w n r i o t s British Guiana’s history has been a tumultuous one, torn by social tension and unrest. Both enslaved and indentured plantation labourers rebelled frequently – slaves most dramatically in 1763 and 1823, and indentured labourers some eleven times between 1869 and 1913.3

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Georgetowners rioted four times in the early post-emancipation period – in 1856, 1889, 1905, and 1924. The 1856 “Angel Gabriel” riot was Georgetown’s first post-emancipation riot. Its characteristics – street battles between crowds and the colonial authorities, widespread attacks on shops and businesses (economic space popularly perceived as belonging to the emancipated population), the role of popular cultural forms, and an attempt by local and colonial elites to define the rioters by race and class – are apparent in the colony’s later post-emancipation riots in 1889, 1905, and 1924. The implosive nature of its violence, as the city’s AfroGuianese inhabitants targeted their Portuguese neighbours and their property, can also be seen in later disputes. The Angel Gabriel riot was provoked by the arrest and imprisonment of the “Angel Gabriel,” John Sayers Orr, a horn-blowing street preacher who lectured crowds at Stabroek Market about the supposed iniquities of Roman Catholics and Portuguese.4 However, widespread rumours that the governor had directed the Afro-Guianese population to expel the Portuguese and to appropriate their shops and property suggest that economic and social factors played a major role in causing the riot. The newly emancipated population – stymied either in the free villages, on co-operatively purchased land, or in the colony’s towns – were further frustrated by the presence of Portuguese immigrants in the petty retail sector, beneficiaries of the same elite aid refused former slaves. The popular perception of Portuguese retailers as greedy and dishonest contributed to the unhappiness of the emancipated population and provided the context for the riot.5 Georgetown’s 1889 riot is similar to that of 1856 in this respect. It, too, was provoked by a popular perception of biases among the colony’s political and judicial leaders and was marked by AfroGuianese attacks on Portuguese and upon their homes and businesses. The riot began in Stabroek Market following an attack by a Portuguese retail clerk on an Afro-Guianese boy and the latter’s rumoured death. Crowds attacked Portuguese stallholders and moved through the city, attacking Portuguese businesses and homes. Georgetown’s first two twentieth-century riots lacked this element of implosive violence. The riots of 1905 and 1924 originated in labour strife. In 1905 dock workers struck for higher wages and were gradually joined by the city’s “unrespectable” classes. A strike on the nearby plantation of Ruimveldt, which saw police shoot several strikers and passersby, triggered rioting in Georgetown. The unrest was repressed relatively quickly but was followed by a series of strikes on the plantations surrounding Georgetown. In 1924 a riot in Georgetown was also preceded by strikes in the city and on the plantations

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by both East Indian and Indo-Guianese workers. Again, it was quickly repressed, apart from some incendiarism directed at private homes and sugar cane fields on Plantations Diamond and Uitvlugt.6 Place and Riot The Georgetown riots emerged out of everyday interactions in key social places. In each, disorder began on Water Street, Georgetown’s “great mart.”7 A nexus for the employed and unemployed alike, for vendors and buyers, and for the idle and the criminal, Water Street was more than a place of commerce: it was (along with Staborek Market), in the words of E.P. Thompson, “the place where one-hundredand-one social and personal transactions went on; where news was passed, rumour and gossip flew around.”8 Its significance lay in more than its function as a retail area; rather, it rested on the sum of popular experiences and expectations of not only Georgetowners but also of Guianese as a whole.9 Both Water Street and Stabroek Market possessed considerable cultural weight: for some, these significant places symbolized the possibility of freedom from the plantations; for others, they represented the betrayal of such hopes. They were also sites where the petty tensions of daily life – between sellers and buyers or between employers and employees – were readily manifested, easily metamorphosing into violence and riot. The 1889 riot is one such example. It was triggered by a petty dispute between two teenage boys – John Vieria (a Portuguese retail employee) and Gersham Nurse (his Afro-Guianese customer)10 – that reflected the everyday stresses of marketplace interactions. Nurse had asked Vieira for a piece of cent bread, removing a piece from a tray on the stall, but Vieira quickly took it back, saying that it was “gill bread,” not cent bread.11 The two then argued, and Vieira hit Nurse with a stick, chasing him through the market, hitting him again until he fell to the ground unconscious. (According to the governor, Nurse had been arrested by a market constable but had escaped and tried to fight Vieira.)12 Vieira was arrested and removed to the police station, and Nurse was taken to the hospital where he remained for three or four days until he was discharged, by then being “quite well.”13 Vieira was soon released, supposedly on the orders of the clerk of the market, Binnie (who later denied this allegation). Nurse, on the other hand, was believed dead and discarded. Binnie was rumoured to have told Constables Murray and Rollins to “kick the d – d nigger [Nurse] out on the dam” (although the Chronicle claimed Binnie asked the constable to take Nurse “out on the dam and to the station”).14

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Water Street from the reading rooms tower, looking north (Bennett, Illustrated History, n.p.)

A crowd congregated, as it generally did during altercations at the market, and violence erupted when those gathered heard rumours of Nurse’s death and mistreatment. The hucksters left their stalls and “talked volubly and angrily in little knots,” and people flooded down the city’s streets to join those already in the market, which soon became filled with angry crowds. The crowds targeted Portugueseowned provision stalls, throwing the food on the ground and crushing it with their feet.15 They also attacked any Portuguese in their path, throwing stones and “beating them with sticks.”16 Forced out of the market by town constables and the police, the crowd attacked Portuguese-owned shops and buildings throughout the city. Portuguese houses in Middle Street were stoned; Portuguese riding the tram cars were “dragged out and beaten”; and, in one or two instances, some Englishmen who attempted to protect the Portuguese were hit by sticks and other weapons. The riot intensified during the evening and continued until dawn.17

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The riot of 1889 (as did that of 1856) demonstrates the reality of implosive violence in colonial Georgetown, the fact that contestations in public spaces were at times between members of the subordinate classes. In both riots Afro-Guianese fought with Portuguese, contesting control of the city’s petty retail sector and expressing unhappiness with perceived high prices and unjust trading practices. Popular perceptions of official biases in favour of the Portuguese were given added support by the governor’s earlier decision to commute the death sentence imposed upon Manoel Gonsalves, a Portuguese man convicted of murdering his Afro-Creole lover.18 Thus, the antipathy between Afro-Guianese and Portuguese inhabitants of Georgetown provided the context for the 1889 riot.19 This aspect of the 1889 riot can be seen in the actions and cries of the crowds. For example, one rioter, Joseph Ford, was quoted as chanting “Out Portuguese! ... beat Portuguese.”20 Although the governor considered that these feelings were mostly held by the “lower class of black people,”21 anti-Portuguese sentiments were expressed by individuals from a range of social classes, from newspaper editors and correspondents to local politicians. Members of all classes characterized the Portuguese as dishonest vendors. In particular, discussions by members of the government committee over the compensation owed the Portuguese shopkeepers following the riots rang with allegations of Portuguese commercial fraud.22 Riot and Popular Cultural Forms In 1905 and 1924, as in 1889, Water Street was the battleground. In all three riots the rioting crowds spread quickly from this street, seizing control of the city, or parts of it, if just for a few hours or a day. The rioters exploited their knowledge of Georgetown’s streets, alleys, and yards, throwing bricks and rocks at the colonial forces. Their goal was to control the city’s streets and its public spaces. Although this contest was violent – marked by exchanges of stones, bottles, clumps of dirt, and bullets – it was also cultural. Attempts to exert control over the streets were manifested through music, ritual, and ceremony. Indeed, the oppositional elements of everyday life gave form to Georgetown’s riots. The stylized verbal altercations between members of the subordinate classes and the ritualized aspects of centipede culture were manifested in widespread unrest in the city. As many Caribbean scholars have demonstrated, public ritual and performance have played an important role in many post-slavery riots. In some, official attempts to repress particular cultural traditions resulted in violence. In Trinidad, for example, the colonial authorities

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clashed with the population repeatedly during the 1880s over attempts to control the pre-Lenten Carnival and the Indo-Trinidadian festival of Hosein (known as “Tadjah” in British Guiana).23 Similarly, in Grenada, an 1885 move by the governor to limit Guy Fawkes celebrations provoked rioting by the masses who believed, according to Bonham Richardson, that they had a right to celebrate this day in the traditional manner.24 Ritual, though, was also crucial in riots that were not provoked by such official attacks. Thus, Woodville Marshall notes the “noise” and drum-playing that accompanied St Vincent’s “Vox Populi” riot, and Richard Burton observes the “drums, fifes, conch shells, and horns” that “provide[d] a continuous obbligato to the action in progress” during Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay uprising. Burton goes so far as to suggest that “it is as though, in the Caribbean, protest is unthinkable without some minimum of ritual.”25 What is the meaning of this ritual? Was it mere “background noise” or did it have a larger significance? An examination of the public processions and the carnivalesque aspects of the riots of 1889, 1905, and 1924 can add another dimension to the traditional views of these riots, which have tended to focus on ethnic and class stresses. Brian Moore, for example, sees the causes of the 1889 riot in the ongoing tensions between Afro-Guianese and Portuguese – tensions that were exacerbated by Portuguese domination of the petty retail sector and reputed dishonest business practices as well as by an apparent pattern of judicial discrimination that seemed to operate in favour of the Portuguese and to the detriment of Afro-Guianese.26 Walter Rodney characterizes the 1905 riot as, in part, a struggle between an immature working class and colonial capital; and historians of the 1924 riot address the role of organized labour, questioning whether or not the riots demonstrated incipient ethnic co-operation. Although these analyses have contributed a great deal to our understanding of social protest in British Guiana, an examination of the popular cultural forms that configured them can help us further unpack these riots. Indeed, examining these public rituals and exploring them as “the stories a culture tells about itself”27 can help us make sense of the Georgetown riots. Georgetown’s streets were the traditional locus for cultural displays by the non-elite and elite classes and the place where both attempted to articulate and enforce their own vision of public order. Local political authorities, in particular, created public spectacles that demonstrated the extent of colonial power. In 1889, shortly before the violence erupted in Stabroek Market, the colonial government held an official parade to mark the opening of the Combined Court. The procession included members of the police force and the militia band;

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the attendant pageantry drew crowds onto the city’s streets to watch.28 Although this was a regular parade – the court’s opening was always commemorated in this fashion – official processions were also held at moments of social crisis. Thus, in the immediate aftermath of the 1905 riot, the local armed forces marched through the streets of Georgetown several times to demonstrate the might of the colonial government. The first post-riot parade represented the re-establishment of authority. The militia band marched through the city’s streets, symbolically repossessing them. More than metaphor, though, was involved in this display: the militia band also aimed to “round up” potential troublemakers, clearly hoping to avoid a repeat of the disorder. The band paraded along Georgetown’s streets, playing “popular airs” to lure those who had “misconducted themselves during the disturbances” to the police station where they could be arrested. This “pied-piper” strategy actually worked. The militia band led a great many people, “mostly of the lower classes,” to the police station where they were driven inside by the police and marines.29 A second procession allowed the colonial authorities to demonstrate their control of the streets and their military power in an even more graphic form. In this “church parade,” representatives of all the groups charged with repressing the riot were present: foreign forces, the local police, and the local militia. Seventy officers and men of the warships, smartly dressed, landed from each ship and were met by the police band, which accompanied them to the Brickdam Barracks where they were joined by additional men from the ships, also nicely turned out. With the police band, all marched to the cathedral and then, the service over, returned in the same fashion.30 This procession illustrated the military power of the colonial government and its Empire-wide backing. Culminating at St George’s Cathedral, the centre of Anglicanism in the colony, the parade also signified that the government enjoyed a higher support. Who could resist God and King? A clearer demonstration of the might and origin of colonial power cannot be imagined. Colonial authorities also used Georgetown’s streets to demonstrate the power of the colony’s judicial/penal complex. In 1921 Joseph Douglas, who was found guilty of the “fiendish” murder of his wife, Cecillia Douglas, was sentenced to hang. His execution was marked by an official procession that simultaneously illuminated the might of the law and signified the hierarchy of the colonial judicial/penal system. The inspector general of police led the way, followed by the deputy inspector of prisons, the acting superintendent of the Georgetown Gaol (and his assistant), the prison surgeon, the dispenser, and an engineer. Two wardens and the executioner brought up the rear. At the

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scaffold, Douglas “received the final ministration of the church.” After the trapdoor opened and the “unfortunate man ... was hurled to his doom,” a “black flag” was raised, a signal that “the majesty of the law had been vindicated and that Douglas had expiated his crime.”31 These processions all clearly displayed the political, military, and legal might of the colonial state and the imperial and divine support it enjoyed. They were spectacles designed to awe and terrorize the masses who gathered to watch them. They can be contrasted with the “communal rites” constructed by the masses themselves.32 One such ritual occurred in 1905, during the height of the protests. After the shooting at Plantation Ruimveldt, the dead and wounded were placed in a cart and sent into the city, where they were taken not to the hospital but, rather, to Government House, the governor’s residence. Many of the Ruimveldt protesters walked with the cart, their numbers eventually growing to some six or seven hundred as the procession moved along Water Street. The governor convinced the crowd to take their burden to the Public Hospital. There, they encountered Inspector General of Police Lushington and his men and began throwing stones, bricks, and bottles.33 This kind of mortuary ritual was practised at other times and in other places in the colony. It was repeated in 1912 following a strikerelated shooting at Plantation Lusignan. The strikers refused to allow the injured man to be treated in the estate hospital and instead carried him on a bed some twelve miles distant to Government House in Georgetown, where they insisted upon meeting with the governor.34 Close to 100 years earlier, slaves on a Guianese plantation carried the beaten body of one of their fellows to the house of the manager. Pausing under the manager’s window, and placing the coffin on the ground, they “danced and sang, and played their music around [the house] ... for nearly two hours; beating at intervals, and with great violence, against the door ... and threatening vengeance upon the murderer of their companion.”35 These kinds of communal ceremonies can be seen as popular attempts at social control as the protesters confronted the authorities. In 1905 and 1912 the protesters went to visit Government House, home of the Crown’s representative (indeed, the residence of an earlier Guianese governor had been called “King’s House”),36 actions that resonated with earlier mass protests by aggrieved workers. Enslaved Afro-Creoles in the Caribbean had frequently appealed to the monarch or his/her representative, the governor; similarly, indentured Indians in British Guiana directed their appeals for justice to a government representative, invariably the immigration agent general. Thus, the funeral rites of 1905 and 1912 may have reflected the determination of

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the protesters to confront the governor – the embodiment of colonial power – with acts committed by the colonial forces. Yet perhaps these rituals also expressed the community’s judgment of guilt, its desire to publicly denounce the wrong-doer. The early nineteenth-century funeral procession certainly suggests this, as do more recent examples. Brackette Williams’s work on Guianese death rituals, for example, demonstrates the determination of villagers to use the death of one of their fellows to punish those who transgressed community norms; villagers would march to the wrong-doer’s house and sing about his or her “misconduct.”37 The correspondence in form and function is striking, despite the fact that the individual groups of participants had markedly different backgrounds. Most of the protesters and all of the victims of the 1905 shooting at Plantation Ruimveldt were Afro-Guianese (three were injured by gun-shot and one was killed), and, at Lusignan, the protesters and the dead man were Indo-Guianese.38 The participants in the early nineteenth-century funeral were all African or Afro-Guianese. The European witness, George Pinckard, suggested an African provenance in his description of the “mirthful ceremonies of African burial” as opposed to the “afflicting solemnity of the Christian rites.”39 Enslaved Africans in British Guiana doubtless drew upon the funerary practices of West and West Central Africa (from where most originated) in their construction of such rituals; it was part of the cultural repertoire of the enslaved.40 In so doing, they were – in the words of Nigel Bolland – building “their own social and cultural history [and] ... redefin[ing] themselves as a new collective identity vis-à-vis the Europeans.”41 Yet the similarity between it and the later examples hints at the emergence of a Guianese response to social crisis, one that was not restricted to the members of particular ethnic groups and that was created through the selection of particular cultural practices. The predominant ritual form of the 1905 and 1924 riots, however, was the labour parade. These riots drew on the rites of the incipient organized labour movement in British Guiana, but they quickly metamorphosed, addressing long-held economic grievances and incorporating traditional Afro- and Indo-Creole cultural forms. In 1905 and 1924 the riots were preceded by labour parades. Although the British Guiana Labour Union (bglu) was not founded until the late 1910s, dock workers and sugar estate labourers had frequently organized among themselves to protest labour conditions and low wages. In 1905 this protest took the form of a march by striking dock labourers along Water Street. Carrying a sign reading “6 cents an hour or no work,” they paraded on the street, going from

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wharf to wharf as they tried to convince those still working to stop work and to join their procession.42 In 1924 dock workers employed at the Water Street wharves struck for higher wages, but by the second day of their protest their marches along Water Street were under the auspices of the bglu.43 This procession began at the union’s Regent Street Hall and proceeded along Lombard and Water Streets, occupying the “whole width of the street.” The marchers of 1924 adopted the iconography the labour movement. They carried banners and pickets, decorating themselves with red sashes across their shoulders, red bands around their arms, and red badges inscribed with the letter “P.” Outside the city, crowds identified themselves in a similar fashion, waving red flags.44 In Georgetown the procession gradually made its way to Bourda Green, the site of a projected mass meeting. This was cancelled, however, as it was forbidden by martial law, which had been quickly proclaimed.45 In the two twentieth-century riots, the protests quickly spread as the strikers attempted to compel other workers to stop work. They did so by invading and attacking private places; namely, shops and homes. Crowds in 1889 carried out similar actions, suggesting that, although the motivation differed, the symbolic goal remained the same: to “take over” elite spaces. In 1889 organized “groups,” or “bands,” attacked and looted Portuguese businesses and houses. In part, their actions represented a popular desire for vengeance against “dishonest” Portuguese retailers. Thus, in Albouystown, rum shops were attacked and the contents of provision shops “scattered on the streets”; and, when a retail establishment on Croal Street was broken into, “every available thing” was destroyed.46 In the course of these “invasions,” the rioters appropriated the goods, consuming much of the food and alcohol on the spot; they ate and drank copiously in the rum and provision shops, consuming wine, ale, and food and engaging in “much drunkenness and obscene conduct.”47 Crowds in 1905 and 1924 engaged in similar actions, attacking shops and homes. In 1905 they broke into shops, expelled those inside, and stoned the Telephone Exchange.48 They also threw stones at businesses on Water and Main Streets – the shops “burst open and pillaged” – and attacked houses. There was a striking echo of 1889 in the decision of one group of protesters to loot the Portuguese pawnbroker’s shop.49 A crowd, reportedly mostly women, also attempted to prevent food vendors from selling prepared food to the police at the Hadfield Street police station. The crowd “set upon” the women carrying the food, destroying it.50 In 1924 crowds determined to enforce the strike attacked homes and businesses, compelling employees to

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cease work. The marchers attempted to force all Water Street workers to leave their employers, not just those employed by the shipping industry. The marchers blocked and disabled tramcars, ejecting the passengers and forcing the employees to cease work; they stopped the East Coast train, halted the Demerara ferry service, and convinced sewage contractors and carpenters to stop work.51 Hundreds of protesters, led by women, travelled from house to house and boarding house to hotel along Main Street, entering them and ordering the domestic servants outside. Plantation workers at Peter’s Hall and at Plantations Providence, Diamond, and Farm also invaded homes to force the servants to leave. As in 1889 and 1905, the crowds looted these establishments, eating and drinking in the houses they invaded. According to the Argosy, one “gang” entered the house of a “wellknown resident” and ate his wife’s recently baked pastry as well as her breakfast. Those who invaded J.G. Henriques’s Main Street home drank six pints of milk before leaving. At R.R. Craig’s, about fifty people ate cakes as well as everything in the “safe.”52 Likewise, large groups of labourers, “armed with sticks and beating drums,” entered the manager’s houses at Plantations Providence, Peter’s Hall, Diamond, and Farm and forced the servants to leave.53 The crowds in 1924 were described as festive. Those in Georgetown, whether participating in the house and business invasions or watching on the sidelines, “danced and shouted” and waved sticks in the air.54 The plantation crowds engaged in similar kinds of activities. The crowd at Plantation Peter’s Hall was accompanied by a “foo-foo” band, and at Plantation Farm, the band played while Stipendiary Magistrate Legge read the proclamation.55 Those who had gone to a meeting in Georgetown on the second of April returned home and paraded that night with a band, demanding higher wages.56 On the day of the shooting at La Penitence Bridge, the crowds at the bridge beat “drums and wav[ed] sticks and shout[ed] and danc[ed]” in front of the mounted police.57 Corporal Reid believed the crowds, both in and out of Georgetown, were “harmless,” their activities suggesting a kind of “jollification” more than anything else.58 In all three riots, the actions of the crowds in entering homes and businesses reflected poverty and hunger. In 1889, for example, individuals stole mostly necessary items – a piece or two of pork, matches, pairs of slippers, and, in one case, a frying pan.59 Yet their acts also reflected peculiarly West Indian cultural forms. Parades on the streets – particularly when accompanied by dancing, chanting, singing, stick wielding, and drum playing – and invasions of homes and businesses, especially when food and drink were consumed, resonate with traditional and daily cultural practices. Although the 1905

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riot most obviously coincided with the festive season in British Guiana, the crowds’ behaviour during the other riots suggest the significance of cultural practices in configuring the disorder. Their activities can be described as “carnivalesque.” Although carnival in the Caribbean is primarily associated with the pre-Lenten festivals held in colonies (such as Trinidad) with a Roman Catholic background,60 many scholars have demonstrated that it encompassed much more than a calendrical rite. Mikhail Bakhtin argues that the various forms of carnival all bore the “common traits of popular merriment.”61 Peter Burke suggests that one can consider “every festival [as] ... a miniature Carnival because it was an excuse for disorder and because it drew from the same repertoire of traditional forms.”62 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White agree, arguing that “carnival proper,” as well as being an annual occurrence, also refers to “a mobile set of symbolic practices, images and discourses which were employed throughout social revolts and conflicts.”63 The Georgetown riots can be seen as carnivalesque in that they encompassed the kinds of festive activities and inversions seen in carnivals elsewhere. In particular, they took the form of Caribbean carnival, reflecting aspects of quotidian life (particularly centipede culture) and popular cultural traditions. The 1905 riot was roughly contemporaneous with the start of the festive season in British Guiana, where the drawn out celebrations of Christmas and New Year (shared by Africans, English, Scots, Portuguese, and Creoles) were accompanied by street festivities. The roots of Afro-Creole Christmas celebrations are located in the period of slavery. As Roger Abrahams notes, Christmas in these colonies was “the traditional time of freedom and licence for the slaves.”64 Africans and Afro-Creoles celebrated Jonkannu; drummers, dancers, and masqueraders marched in the streets, carrying swords and visiting homes to obtain food and drink. Burton argues that Jonkannu’s roots were “without a doubt African”; however, as Michael Craton demonstrates, its form was also influenced by diverse European traditions, including mummering. During the course of this festival masked slaves, carrying swords, entered the great houses, eating and drinking with the white owners. For a time, the enslaved population took over the houses of their owners in true carnivalesque fashion.65 Variations of Jonkannu existed throughout the Anglophone Caribbean, including British Guiana, but there, according to Craton, it “faded early and completely,” as British planters successfully imposed their versions of Christmas celebrations, ensuring that little remained but a kind of English mummery.66 Christmas was also celebrated by British Guiana’s European population. The Portuguese masqueraded and set off

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fireworks, and the British marked the twelve days of Christmas with feasting and celebration.67 Indeed, one wonders to what extent such British carnivalesque forms as the late-December Feast of Fools, with its rituals of inversion, contributed to British Christmas celebrations in British Guiana.68 In the late nineteenth century, Christmas remained a time of revelry for all Guianese. Brian Moore argues that it was the “main AfroCreole festival” in British Guiana and that many marked the time between Christmas and New Year with music, drumming, bands, and masquerades.69 Yet sources show that it was not only Afro-Guianese who comprised the bands and masqueraders who paraded on the streets. Water Street clerks, many of whom were Afro-Guianese as well as Portuguese, marched on the streets during the holidays. In the aftermath of Christmas 1905, fifteen men were sentenced to fines or jail terms of ten days to three weeks for wearing costumes in that part of Georgetown that remained under martial law after the riots; two men were convicted for having dressed as women. The newspaper report does not indicate their ethnic origin, but eight of the men had Portuguese names. Members of the social elite also appeared on Georgetown’s streets dressed in costumes; they, however, were not arrested.70 The activities of the crowds in 1889, 1905, and 1924 resonate with traditional festivities. People carried sticks (similar to the swords of Jonkannu?) and danced and sang (as they did during Christmas festivities and, indeed, as they did in Africa, suggesting that continent as a source of cultural inspiration). But crowd behaviour in 1905, and particularly in 1924, also echoed other traditions, particularly stickfighting. In both 1905 and 1924 members of crowds were armed with sticks. These, of course, were the centipede weapon of choice, but their use, particularly during disorder in the streets, resonated with stick-fighting. As Burton points out, stick-fights were “preceded by an elaborate ritual of provocation,” which consisted of “singing, chanting, and beating drums and other improvised percussion instruments.”71 Descriptions of the confrontation in 1924 irresistibly suggest a stick-fight: the members of the crowd at La Penitence Bridge were armed with sticks and were dancing, beating drums, and waving flags and banners.72 In 1905, although the sources do not note the presence of such accompaniment, they do observe that other component of the stick-fight, verbal insults. Again, to cite Burton, during stick-fights the “batonniers would engage in ... [an] exchange of insults and boasts, both shouted and sung.”73 The crowds in 1905 mocked the political rulers and their armed representatives. Those gathered at Plantation Ruimveldt laughed mockingly and threatened

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De Rinzy’s men, and those at the Public Buildings responded to Governor Hodgson’s comments with derision. His expression of regret elicited calls of “we doubt it,” and a request that the men in the crowd remove their hats to demonstrate their willingness to return home quietly was rejected: the people “became uproarious and gesticulating in the wildest manner shouted ‘No, no.›74 When compared with accounts of stick-fighting in Trinidad – with the presence of singing, chanting, insult-hurling, and drum-playing men and women accompanying their stick-wielding champion – the similarity between this and the events in 1905 and 1924 is striking. Yet maybe the cultural repertoire at hand was larger than this. The presence of Afro- and Indo-Guianese – armed with sticks, beating drums, dancing and accompanied by bands – hints at the influence of Tadjah, which contained all these festive activities. Indeed, the fact that members of both ethnic groups engaged in behaviour that could have been drawn from both suggests the willingness of Georgetown’s multi-ethnic urban masses to appropriate cultural forms from a variety of sources. For example, a young Indo-Guianese boy, Mohamed Zahie – alias Midnight Man – was convicted of leading large groups into businesses and homes to expel the employees. Armed with a stick, he directed the “operations” of a crowd, some of whose members had a band.75 (His possession of an alias hints at his participation in centipede or other quasi-criminal gangs.) The existence of a foo-foo band during the unrest on the plantations also hints at this kind of interculturation. “Foo-foo” was, according to Moore, a “typical AfroCreole meal, made of pounded plantain and eaten with okra or calaloo soup.” Yet, according to Cruickshank, the word itself was Yoruba and meant “white-white,” the colour of the West African version of the dish, which was yam-based.76 Although the ethnic composition of the “foo-foo” band is unknown, the fact that a band with an African name accompanied what was surely a predominantly Indo-Guianese plantation crowd suggests the unexpected and intriguing ways in which “little” cultural practices were exchanged. The crowds’ activities were carnivalesque. Entering shops and homes, consuming food and drink, the crowds, in a sense, made these places their own, if only for a while. Their invasions of elite homes and businesses inverted the conventional order of things. Mikhail Bakhtin has popularized the use of the term “carnivalesque” to describe the “suspension of all hierarchical precedence” that marked medieval carnivals; during this time, “all were considered equal.”77 Peter Burke, in his examination of early European festivals, describes carnival and related events such as charivari, or “rough music,” as a “time of institutionalised disorder,” when the world turned “upside down”

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and “social relations were inverted.”78 Most scholars argue that this inversion acts to preserve social order. According to Victor Turner, such “rituals of reversal” – in which groups with relatively low social status “exercise ritual authority over their superiors” by “robust verbal and nonverbal behaviour” – “reaffirm the order of structure [and] ... restore [social] relations” by allowing for a “discharge of all the illfeeling that has accumulated in structural relationships during the previous year.”79 Thus, aggression and violence were channelled, being “more or less sublimated into ritual,” and acted as a “safetyvalve.”80 But these festive occasions, with their rituals of aggression, often became violent in reality. As Burke points out, in early modern Europe “rituals of revolt did coexist with serious questioning of the social, political, and religious order, and the one sometimes turned into the other.” Circumstances favoured such a “switching of codes,” when the “language of ritual” was replaced by “the language of rebellion.” The crowds on the streets, many masked or carrying weapons, the “excitement of the occasion,” and the loosening of inhibitions by “the heavy consumption of alcohol” could easily combine with particular political crises to create an explosion of violence. Indeed, Stallybrass and White suggest the pointlessness of the debate over whether carnival was radical or conservative; they point out that, although carnival can be “a stable and cyclical ritual with no noticeable politically transformative effects” for long periods of time, it can, in “the presence of sharpened political antagonism ... act as catalyst and site of actual and symbolic struggle.” (emphasis in original). There is a close relationship between the two. As Burke notes, riot can be seen as an “extraordinary form of popular ritual.” Although riot was “direct action, not symbolic action ... rebels and rioters employed ritual and symbol to legitimise their action.”81 Although there is some suggestion that festive events in the Caribbean functioned as a tool of social control,82 several scholars emphasize its oppositional potential. Bolland nicely sums up the kind of threat posed by such festive events with his argument that Jamaica’s Jonkannu revellers were “participants in a political process of cultural resistance and self-definition” (emphasis in original).83 Slave owners seem to have recognized this and were more nervous than usual during festive times like Christmas, and with good reason: slaves rebelled at Christmas in Trinidad in 1805 and Jamaica in 1831. Burton cites several rebellious plots by Jamaican slaves, which “show how readily the rituals of slave life ... and acts of resistance could flow into each other, the first providing both inspiration and cover for the second.”84 Local Guianese authorities, in the aftermath of the 1905 riot,

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acknowledged this. They banned masquerading in Georgetown’s streets during the Christmas season and, as has already been noted, arrested young men for violating this prohibition.85 The rituals of carnival and other festive events posed a cultural threat as well. Roger Abrahams has argued that St Vincent’s carnival, with “the tendency to play nonsense and boderation” and the sheer noise of the proceedings, constituted a “frontal attack on the household family-based ideals of socialization.” In its reflection of “everyday activities” and its representation of “street reputation values,” carnival functioned as a “stylized rendering of ... central expressive practices and moral concerns”; as such, it opposed respectability. The Georgetown riots can be seen as a similar kind of “ritual of intensification.”86 Everyday tensions surrounding the order and control of public spaces were writ large in the riots, which displayed the same festive aspects (particularly centipede culture) that configured these daily interactions. Thus, the Georgetown rioters posed a dual threat: in attempting to seize control of the streets and other public spaces (and, in so doing, to impose their own vision of public behaviour and order) they challenged elite power and cultural hegemony. The Colonial Forces Finding reliable men to arrest the rioters and to suppress the disorder vexed the colonial authorities. They were not convinced that the military and police rank and file – their representatives – would turn against their fellow Guianese. Consequently, although they employed these forces, they also took the precaution of enlisting the aid of foreign forces and arming themselves. In each riot, foreign and local repressive forces were called upon. In 1889 Barbados sent a man-of-war and sixty-five men at British Guiana’s request.87 In 1905 the same colony sent two warships,88 and in 1924 British Guiana requested a warship and asked Trinidad’s governor to have 100 or 150 men ready.89 Local forces were also used, including the police, the militia, and (before 1891) the military. The loyalty of these latter, though, was considered suspect by the colonial authorities. In 1889 concern was expressed about both the police and the military troops. Henry Kirke claimed subsequently that he was reluctant to call out the West India Regiment during the 1889 riot because he did not know whether the soldiers would side with the “mob.” Adding to his uncertainty, however, was the “long-standing” animosity between the “black troops and the black police.” Kirke worried that the soldiers would turn against the police and, in the process, ally themselves with the rioters.90 The police, however, were

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also criticized. In 1889 police inspectors condemned the police for their inaction, accusations echoed by the Chronicle, which blamed the police for “looking on approvingly at the plundering of shops, and making no effort to protect property and arrest the plunderers.”91 Similarly, in 1905, criticisms of the local forces were expressed by a range of non-working-class representatives, including local newspapers, opposition politicians, and members of Georgetown’s multi-racial middle class. For example, Court of Policy opposition members Patrick Dargan, Manoel Gonsalves, and Andrew Brown denounced what they saw as police reluctance to arrest individuals guilty of entering Water Street businesses and assaulting labourers who continued to work.92 A.A. Thorne (a Georgetown councillor and school principal) and Philip N. Browne (a barrister) organized a “monster petition,” which contained similar vituperations and was signed by approximately 5,750 persons, including twelve members of the professional middle class.93 Similarly, in 1924 newspapers blamed the police, whose “well-known weakness and unreliability ... encouraged the disorderly elements ... to engage in riot and disorder.”94 These fears were race- and class-based. Dargan, Gonsalves, Brown, Thorne, and Browne were members of the newly emergent black, coloured, and Portuguese middle class. Their castigation of the police seemed to rest upon class grounds and to betray concern about the influence of the social origins of most members of the police force upon their loyalties: as men from the poorer classes, would they protect the property of the more fortunate against the depredations of their own? This concern was certainly shared by the largely white political authorities and social elites (often one and the same). Yet a consciousness of race also coloured the latter’s worries; they were uneasy about their dependence upon black forces. The realities of colonial life in the West Indies required that whites rely upon armed blacks for their security. Inadequate numbers of white Europeans to fulfil this role resulted in black police forces (albeit officered by Europeans). Afro-Barbadian troops were employed as a compromise. Although black, they were foreign-born, leading the colonial rulers to hope that their loyalties would be to the state and not to the black masses they were enjoined to police. In British Guiana, this ambivalence on the part of local elites can be seen in their 1889 decision to enlist more whites than blacks as special officers (at a ratio of sixty to fifty) and to give the former more weapons: the white special constables received ten rounds of ball cartridge to the blacks’ five.95 It was also expressed in the post-riot demands for additional European (i.e., white) forces. Soon after the 1905 riot, Governor Hodgson called for a “Volunteer Force,” composed “almost entirely of men of European extraction.” A

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volunteer force was established, and the Creole alleged that its creators intended it to be largely white. The newspaper’s editors maintained that only whites were invited to attend the meeting held to establish the volunteer force and that any non-whites who did apply were directed towards the force’s Company B (whites were placed in Company A).96 In 1924 the Daily Argosy advised the government to hire “European non-commissioned officers, even at a considerable cost.”97 Despite these accusations, it is not clear whether the armed representatives of the colonial power sided with the rioters. Attacks on police officers in the 1905 riot suggest that they were seen as the “enemy,”98 and the violence with which the forces repressed the rioting suggests that they had allied themselves with the colonial authorities. In 1889 armed forces killed one demonstrator and wounded many more.99 In 1905 casualties were higher, seven killed and sixteen injured, as police first shot into the crowd of protesters at Plantation Ruimveldt and, later, at rioters in Georgetown’s streets.100 In 1924 police shot into the crowd of plantation labourers gathered at the bridge leading to Georgetown, injuring twenty-five people, four of whom later died, and killing eight, all of whom were from the plantations and villages surrounding Georgetown.101 An Elite Discourse of Fear Just as elite biases obfuscate the behaviour and motivation of the police, so they obscure the identity of the rioters. Descriptions of frenzied non-white mobs comprised of screaming women and children echo contemporaneous perspectives of the crowd as primitive and irrational and seem to be the product more of elite fantasies than of impartial observation. The fact that strikingly similar opinions were expressed in a range of newspaper and government accounts addressing all three riots reflects the pervasiveness of this trope. Indeed, these views, with their origins in Britain and in West Indian history, can be said to constitute the “learned cultural response” of British Guiana’s social, economic, and political elites to unrest. Anne McClintock argues that, in late nineteenth-century Britain, urban crowds were characterized as “savage, bestial, [and] inherently criminal” and were the subject of “ruling-class fears.”102 In the Caribbean, these kinds of representations and this fear of non-elite crowds (urban and rural alike) was intertwined with ideas about race. Fears of slave revolts combined with European racist ideology to create a brew that remained potent well into the post-emancipation period. In the last half of the nineteenth century, Africa was represented as dark

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and dangerous and as peopled by savage cannibals.103 Evolving nineteenth-century conceptions of race were partially responsible for such perceptions, as race was increasingly used to classify people according to phenotypical differences and to describe a confusion of cultural and physical traits, of which race was held to be the originator. Such ideas built upon traditional Western valuations of white and black. In the eighteenth century whiteness was equated with freedom, Christianity, civilization, and Europeanness, while blackness was associated with slavery, paganism, and Africanness. By the Victorian period, whiteness evoked purity, beauty, and cleanliness, whereas blackness evoked evil, ugliness, and filth. These ideas were applied to blacks living outside Africa; the 1865 rebellion in Jamaica and negative perceptions of the condition of independent Haiti were used to support views of Africans and Afro-Creoles as inferior and as incapable of ruling themselves.104 Victorian racial ideology represented “the natives” as being without “inner controls,” and these attitudes were combined with Victorian fears of the masses and a tendency to divide the working class into the “deserving respectables” and a “dangerous residuum.”105 The sources for the Georgetown riots echo many of these points. During episodes of urban unrest in Georgetown, members of local social, political, and economic elites defined the rioters as separate from the more law-abiding, “respectable” members of the non-white population. This perspective was frequently represented in the local newspapers. In 1889, for example, the Daily Chronicle distinguished between the “people who followed the mob” – wrecking and looting provision shops – and the “respectable part of the black and coloured population,” which was, the governor believed, “sincere in their condemnation of the rioters.”106 Similarly, in 1905 colonial authorities and their sympathizers saw two distinct crowds: strikers and rioters. Lushington, for example, distinguished striking wharf labourers – who were merely agitating for higher wages, their actions “unaccompanied by indiscriminate lawlessness” – from the “riff-raff of the town.” Government officials, politicians, and local literate newspaper correspondents agreed that the latter – whom they characterized as centipedes – were distinct from “respectable” folk. As A.B.C. wrote in the Chronicle, there were “2 distinct classes, viz. the workers and the rioters,” the latter being responsible for the “lawlessness.” This kind of crowd, armed with sticks and home-made weapons, was portrayed as violent, breaking into stores and throwing stones at businesses and the police. When reports of shootings at Ruimveldt filtered into the city, “men, women, and lads of the most degraded types ... perambulat[ed] the streets in a state of frenzy,” fighting po-

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lice and sending the city into “an uproar.”107 Contemporaneous observers considered the rioters to be the same people who made Georgetown’s streets so dangerous – the idle unemployed.108 In 1924 a similar correspondence was perceived. The Argosy refused to blame the striking dock labourers, noting that the “actual working-classes [had] no love for dangerous antics of this kind.” As the governor observed, the rioters were composed of the unrespectable and the idle.109 Yet in both 1905 and 1924 the categories were ambiguous, merging and creating one fearsome working class. Apart from the obvious problem of how observers distinguished one type of crowd from another, government and newspaper accounts of the 1905 riot delineate the impossibility of maintaining such divisions. The Argosy, in its attempt to blame the 1905 unrest on the city’s unrespectable crowds, noted that the “wastrels” who refused to work readily joined in such “agitation” as the strike “[taking] their place in the ranks and ... [being] counted with the genuine workers.”110 Those who entered Booker Brothers were chased out, absorbed by the rest of the crowd, making arrests impossible. The categories seem to fuse. Descriptions of the striking dock workers resonate with popular characterizations of centipedes. At one point during the labour unrest, the strikers threatened dock workers continuing to unload a ship and “climbed on the packages on the wharf dancing, shouting, howling and otherwise misconducting themselves; [t]hey then armed themselves with sticks of sugar cane.” These actions – dancing, howling, carrying sticks – were the actions of centipede gangs (and, indeed, are examples of the kind of play in which the festive crowd engaged in public space). The sources portray a crowd comprised of strikers and centipede gangs, the presence of the latter seeming to encourage the former to display more aggression, to throw stones and to assault labourers. On “black Friday,” the day of the Ruimveltdt shooting, the strikers seemed to adopt the tactics of the riotous crowd; they “rushed and pillaged” the railway wharf.111 As was the case in 1905, accounts of the 1924 riot demonstrate the difficulty of sustaining these distinctions between the different “types” of crowds. The difficulty of categorizing the rioters is demonstrated by the case of Andrew Payne, who was charged with disorderly behaviour on Water Street. His statement that he had been working on the rms Chignecto when some members of the bglu arrived armed with “sticks, bricks, axe handles, gun barrels, and bottles” surprised Justice J.H.S. McCowan, who “had thought up till then that it was the hooligan class who created the disturbance at Garnett’s and not the Labour Union people.” The identity of some of

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the rioters adds to the discursive confusion. Charged with disorderly conduct, they did not fit the category of “idle centipedes.” Adolphus Smith, for example, convicted of disorderly conduct on Water Street, worked as a blacksmith in Georgetown.112 Hester Charles was similarly charged. A sweet-seller in front of Stabroek Market, she was convicted of having behaved in a disorderly manner in Main Street on the first.113 These crowds were also described as primarily urban in origin. The Georgetown masses were represented as more culpable than the village and plantation participants during the riots; in fact, they were depicted as being responsible for agitating the latter. Thus, in 1889, sources blame Georgetown “roughs” for “instigat[ing]” much of the rioting outside the city in the East Bank, Demerara area.114 At Agricola village, some “furious” people from Georgetown reportedly destroyed a rum shop. D.L. Jordon, who lived at St Mary’s, East Bank, claimed that the disturbances at Meadow Bank (where one rum shop was looted) were not caused by the villagers and that, indeed, the Afro-Guianese men in the village “vowed to secure the protection ... of the whole village.”115 According to Inspector Gallagher, East Bank villagers looted two rum shops after being incited by the Georgetown “rabble.”116 The same division was noted in 1905, when R.G. Duncan – member of the Court of Policy, agent for Middleton Campbell, and owner of several sugar estates – held that the Afro-Guianese sugar estate workers had no “grievance as regards wages” and that the unrest on Plantation Versailles was caused by “loafers and hooligans ... from Georgetown and the large negro village of Pouderoyen.” Although a few of the Versailles workers had joined the mob, they said that they had been carried away by the excitement.117 In 1924, although the rioters were more diverse than they had been in the two earlier riots, disorder outside Georgetown was blamed on urban Afro-Guianese. This time, it may have been true, as witnesses from varied social groups made this point. Hukan, an Indo-Guianese driver at Plantation Farm, declared that he was “driven from the field by a number of strange persons,” some Indo- and some AfroGuianese, whom he believed “came from the direction of the city.” Most contemporaneous sources agree that Critchlow and the largely Afro-Guianese bglu encouraged the riotous actions of the plantation labourers.118 Indeed, Afro-Guianese union members distributed handbills that invited the plantation workers to participate in the April first meeting at the bglu hall, an action that a “prominent” Indo-Guianese cited as making “his” people march to Georgetown.119 In the riots of 1889, 1905, and 1924, elite discourse resonated with fear and hatred. In 1889 Police Inspector Gallagher compared the

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Afro-Guianese crowd to a “lot of infuriated monkeys, apes or Baboons.”120 According to the editors of the Daily Chronicle, the people, by rioting, “showed that their numbers yet include[d] many who [were] little better than wild beasts and [were] totally unfitted to be considered as part of the civilized community.”121 Similarly, in 1905 the non-white crowd was discursively dehumanized. A description of the crowd’s 1905 attack on the Public Buildings, the seat of the colonial government, demonstrates this. After a day of violence and battles, a crowd of about 2,000 had gathered at the Public Buildings to attend a public meeting arranged by several of the “recognized representatives of the people” – Combined Court member Wood Davis, Town Councillor A.A. Thorne, and Dr Rohler.122 When Inspector General of Police Lushington reportedly threatened to shoot more people, the crowd became “incensed” and “disorderly” and “swarmed” into the Public Buildings, a “motley crew of men, women, and boys” running upstairs, “thrust[ing] themselves into the upper gallery, shrieking and howling and breaking the windows,” forcing Governor Hodgson and Lushington to hide.123 This description suggests a crowd composed of the primitive, the dangerous, and the barely human, precisely the sense evoked by the use of the term “centipede” to characterize the members of urban gangs. Indeed, in 1889 and 1924 elite rhetoric suggested the longevity of this trope: Stabroek Market in 1889 was filled “with a seething mass of infuriated and howling people,” and, in 1924, the crowd at Ruimveldt plantation was a “seething mass of East Indian and black men, women and children.”124 Members of British Guiana’s white ruling class believed themselves to be in danger from these crowds. In the 1905 riots Governor Hodgson declared that whites were in danger as “racial hatred ... developed itself.” Crowds of “young women and youths, who had worked themselves up to a pitch of wild excitement ... attack[ed] every white person they met, and utter[ed] foul-mouth imprecations of vengeance.”125 According to Lushington cries of “stone the white sons of bitches” and “kill the white men” were heard all over, and any number of whites were assaulted.126 During the 1924 riot elite fears of the black masses were even more intense, likely due to worries that they might combine forces with the Indian plantation workers. Terror of the havoc a combined crowd could wreak convinced the colony’s political authorities that the Georgetown “mob” must be kept separate from the plantation crowds. When police efforts failed to stop the crowd, rumoured to be some 7,000-strong, marching to the La Penitence Bridge, the authorities decided that “a heroic effort would have to be made to safeguard the peace and order of Georgetown” and that

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the “entry of such a mob into the city ought to be prevented at all costs.”127 Racial and class terror filled the colonial elites. According to the governor, “East Indians and negroes in the mass [were] not open to reason or argument when excited.” An additional threat was posed by the “thousands of idle and disorderly persons in Georgetown” who would have joined with the “mob.” The governor believed that, had the crowd been allowed to enter Georgetown, the authority of the Government and its officers and their power to control the situation would ... have been so impaired, and the numbers and capacity for mischief of the rioters so increased, that the entire city might have been in the gravest danger of being given over to wholesale rioting accompanied, as was the case in 1905, by general attacks on Europeans, pillage, and probably by incendiarism.128

The Daily Argosy agreed. It believed that the “armed mob had to be prevented from penetrating into Georgetown at all costs.” Had it “managed to get through and join forces with the more cowardly disorderly elements of the city, the streets of Georgetown might ‘have run red with blood.’ Of that there [could] be little doubt.”129 Clearly, in both 1905 and 1924 these apprehensions were exaggerated and illustrated traditional elite terror of the non-white masses. Indeed, the hysterical nature of such claims makes it difficult to determine whether any facts underlay them. It appears, however, that, although the crowds did target some whites, many of these were representatives of colonial authority. In 1905, for example, several members of the colonial government were attacked at Government House, including the attorney general and the Georgetown assistant magistrate.130 The fact that those Afro-Guianese who were associated with the white power structure were also attacked indicates the direction of the crowd’s anger.131 Similarly, in 1924 whites and compromised blacks were attacked. A “mob” that stopped a car full of Europeans and an Afro-Creole policeman was reported to have shouted “Is wa you doin’ deh? Black no business wid white.” Two of the car’s occupants were injured, the policeman – who received an “ugly wound” on his neck from a pelted lemonade bottle – and one of the Europeans, whose arm was cut by a stick.132 In 1924 anti-white sentiment seemed to have been acute. Notices posted on the homes of G.R. Reid and of Dr W.G. Boases on the East Coast, Demerara, made this point: to all europeans! why, we have done it, because you have shot our fellow

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161 Riot and the Struggle to Control the Street men east indians, and negroes. throughout demerara, we are not satisfied with shooting and are seeking revenge.133

These sentiments were repeated by one of the speakers at the Bourda Green meeting on the first of April. “Professor Osborne” told his listeners to “demand their rights” and to stop “worship[ing] the ‘white god.›134 Although these comments (and those of the crowd) were made within the context of the riot and the events leading up to it, they resonate with the kind of anti-white rhetoric that seemed increasingly common on the streets of Georgetown and that was expressed by local political/religious organizations. In the early 1920s two groups, Garveyites (followers of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association [unia]) and Jordanites, preached on Georgetown’s streets. The unia had seven branches in British Guiana, at least four of which were located in Georgetown (although by 1926 this number had fallen to two). The Jordanites were a relatively small religious organization whose members (likely not more than 100), clad in white robes, preached on city streets. A police detective assigned to investigate this group reported that their “home-made religion appeal[ed] to the very lowest classes.” Both groups expressed a radical political message, one that advocated black unity and opposed white hegemony, and both were condemned by the local authorities for spreading “sedition and race hatred” during their “nightly orgies of hate at Georgetown street-corners.”135 Similarly, the Daily Argosy believed that they provoked “race consciousness and anti-white feeling.”136 Uncertain Identities These kinds of accounts make it difficult to uncover the identity of the rioters, hidden as they are within a tangle of biases. Yet a careful reading of the sources helps reveal the rioters and shows that they represented a diverse cross-section of Georgetown’s poor. The sources are fairly clear about the ethnic composition of the rioters. In 1889 and 1905 most were Afro-Guianese. In 1905 unrest in the city was followed by a strike by Afro-Guianese labourers at Plantation Ruimvelt for higher wages. Although there were East Indian and Indo-Guianese workers on the estate, they did not seem to have participated in the protest. Indeed, Indian labourers appeared caught between the striking Afro-Creole workers and the colonial forces. Major De Rinzey and some thirty armed police escorted indentured Indians to the factory at Ruimveldt Plantation, past the Afro-Guianese workers who were preventing them from working. All twenty-one of those

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injured and killed at Ruimveldt – following De Rinzy’s decision to read the riot act and then shoot the stone-throwing protesters (who were also armed with cutlasses) – and in Georgetown were AfroGuianese, four of whom were listed as “mixed.”137 In 1924 the crowds were more ethnically diverse than were the ones in the two earlier riots. As in 1905, disturbances in the city were quickly followed by unrest on nearby plantations. Colonial officials responded immediately, proclaiming the remainder of the colony (previously, only Georgetown had been proclaimed) and instructing police to visit nearby estates to try to quiet the crowds of estate labourers and villagers.138 District Inspector Bovell-Jones and Stipendiary Magistrate Legge went from plantation to plantation along the river, reading the proclamation (in English and Hindi) and telling the people to go home. At each, they saw sizeable crowds, which, although mostly Indo-Guianese, contained some Afro-Guianese. There were some 150 at Plantation Houston, about 700 or 800 at Plantation Peter’s Hall, about 1,000 at Plantation Farm, and 400 or 500 at Providence. The next day, large crowds gathered at plantations and villages in preparation for marching to Georgetown; Bovell-Jones estimated that 7,000 or 8,000 people were heading to the city.139 Although the sources do not provide a detailed breakdown of the marchers, most were likely Indo-Guianese. Those assembled at La Penitence Bridge (estimates of their number vary widely, from 500 to 4,000) declared their intention to enter the city to see Critchlow or some other labour leader,140 but they were told that only five AfroGuianese and five Indo-Guianese men would be allowed. According to many witnesses, including an Indo-Guianese plantation driver named Hukan, the crowd was comprised of Indo- and Afro-Guianese (although the former likely predominated).141 Corporal Reid of the mounted police agreed, noting the presence of a “band ... played by blacks and East Indians.”142 This mixed crowd tried to combine with a large “mob of people from the city” to encircle the police. Given Georgetown’s ethnic composition, this crowd was likely mostly AfroGuianese.143 Anecdotal observations claim that many of the rioters and members of the crowds were young, possibly children. In 1889, for example, official reports of the riots noted the presence of children, some even claiming that most of those who attacked the shops were “boys and girls.” Similarly, an account written in the Creole shortly after the 1905 riots observed that the “mobs ... were principally composed of women and youngsters.”144 Yet the source material does not indicate how many children (if any) were charged or convicted for participating in the unrest. In addition, it should be noted that the 1889 obser-

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vation was made by the commissioners charged with assessing the financial costs of the riots and accompanied an attack on the cowardliness of the Portuguese shopkeepers, who, it was claimed, could have defended themselves against such youthful foes.145 Thus, the possibility of bias is very real. The sources, however, are a little clearer for the two twentieth-century riots. In 1905, although the newspaper accounts of those charged and convicted do not note the presence of children, the lists of dead and wounded do. Thus, of the twenty-one dead and injured, fourteen were under thirty years of age. Three were teenagers and ten were in their twenties; one was just seven years of age (Cecil Carrington, who was shot in the leg).146 It is possible, though, that some of these individuals may have been passersby rather than rioters. The sources for the 1924 riot are less ambiguous and note that some children were convicted of riot-related offences. These children received punishments similar to those of adult rioters. Fourteen girls were sentenced to fines or jail time for assembling with others and/or disorderly conduct. Although some of the nine boys charged with these offences were jailed or fined, five were flogged as well. The age of the boys seems to have been the relevant factor, as those who were under fourteen years of age were flogged. The sources that describe women’s participation in the riots are problematic, echoing contemporaneous stereotypes about violent, non-white, lower-class urban women. A 1912 newspaper story that describes two separate fights between four women of the “lawless class” – in both, women had attacked other women with cutlasses – was entitled “Savage Women” and reveals as much about elite biases as it does about the violent nature of the lives of the city’s non-white masses.147 Observations of women’s role in the riots resonate with such images. The Daily Chronicle, for example, described the female participants in the 1905 riot as “turbulent Amazons.” It claimed that one woman, “of notorious character,” who was related to one of those shot at Thomas Street, reportedly shouted “in a threatening manner” at a white police officer that “she would have a white man’s blood in revenge for her relative who had been killed.”148 Newspaper and other sources describe the riotous crowds as being largely made up of women. In 1889 crowds were described as attacking and looting the Portuguese shops, and, indeed, the governor observed that most of the rioters were “women of the lowest class” (along with “boys and girls of all ages”).149 In 1905 the crowds at Government House and elsewhere in Georgetown were described as being made up of large numbers of women. The crowd that attacked the food sellers bringing

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meals to the police at the Hadfield Police Station “consist[ed] mostly of females.”150 Likewise, in 1924, the sources describe women as playing key roles in the riots. Women led the crowds that entered the houses, bording houses, and hotels along Main Street151 and were among those who tried to enforce the strike at places of employment. For example, Irene “Buncher” Edwards and Dorothy Drakes were part of the crowd that entered the Water Works, stopping the engines and driving out the employees. Newspaper reports describe “girls” who were convicted of disorderly behaviour, of dancing in the street, following the bands, and waving sticks in the air. Maggie McRae was convicted of assembling with five others at Ruimveldt and was seen by three police constables with a piece of wood in her hand, “danc[ing] and shout[ing] while the band played.”152 The admittedly spotty source material suggests that women made up a substantial proportion of the riotous crowds. In 1889, according to the newspaper reports, women made up eight (or 28 per cent) of the twenty-nine convicted, and in 1924 they made up seventeen (or 27 per cent) of sixty-four convicted. A government report on the 1905 riot notes that of the 105 convicted, forty-two (or 40 per cent) were female and that they made up twenty-two of those whose charges were dismissed.153 Reports of the shootings in 1905 also indicated the presence of women (although again, they may have been bystanders). They made up three of those injured and one of those killed. Females tended to be older than most of those shooting victims: Louisa Holder was thirty-three, Ivy Thomas twenty-one, Sarah Witford twenty-three, and Matilda Lewis forty-five. All but Witford received their injuries in Georgetown; she was shot at Plantation Ruimveldt.154 Women’s economic and social roles would have helped place them at the forefront of the violence. As vendors and consumers, they made up a significant proportion of the crowds in Stabroek Market and on Water Street; their daily activities placed them at the riots’ epicentres. They also would have experienced first hand the difficulties of earning a living in the petty retail sector and making ends meet during times of high prices and low wages. Both pressures primed them for participation in the attacks on shops in 1889, 1905, and 1924 and for the looting that followed. Indeed, all the women arrested in 1889 were charged with stealing food and one woman took two bottles of kerosene (because she “had none”).155 As Rodney argues for the riot of 1905, women’s involvement can be attributed to the “depressed conditions facing women of the working class” and the “unemployment and underemployment [that] redounded most viciously on female dependants.” He also points out that their role as providers of prepared meals was doubtless responsible, in part, for their attack

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on female “caterers” who brought meals to the police: they were “trying to bring their own ’strike-breakers’ in line.”156 Similarly, in 1924 women attacked domestics, attempting to drive them out of private houses and hotels. Although the sources do not note their occupation, the large number of female domestics in Georgetown makes it likely that, as in 1905, many of these women were domestics trying to enforce the strike. It is also possible that some of the women who participated in the riots were prostitutes or members of the petty criminal networks. Police Magistrate J.H.S. McCowan described Irene “Buncher” Edwards and Dorothy Drakes as “girls of the underworld and not as innocent as they had tried to make out.” Edwards’s possession of a nickname, which was common among members of Georgetown’s petty criminal population, is suggestive. County Inspector Craig described another twelve as “idle girls who walked about the town” and claimed that they “joined in the fun of the procession” on the first and “danced and shouted and were with those who raided private houses.”157 The offences with which women were charged – looting, throwing stones, carrying sticks, disorderly conduct – indicated their willingness to engage in violence. Indeed, according to Kirke, in 1889 women “taunted” him in the street, calling out that they would “wash the streets with [his] blood.”158 Although one must allow for Kirke’s tendency to hyperbole, his account supports conclusions drawn by historians of the region. According to Trotman, in post-slavery Trinidad, for example, “women could be found in the forefront of every affray and riot.” He notes that they “played both a supportive and an active role in all the violent activity of the society.” They formed themselves into “fighting bands” and were the “chantwells, who sang the fighting songs that served to intoxicate the male stick fighters.” He attributes their actions, in part, to the “brutality of slavery and its perpetuation in the conditions of the colonial plantation society, [to a] violent society [which] bred women who returned violence in like measure as they received it.”159 Yet the sources reporting on the kinds of offences for which men and women were charged are problematic as there is evidence that judicial proceedings were manipulated. In all of the riots, alleged participants were charged with summary criminal offences rather than with riot, despite the existence of legislation addressing the latter. The first such ordinance was introduced in 1846, and subsequent ones were introduced in 1856, 1889, and 1893: all of them provided for harsh fines and jail terms.160 It is possible that the rioters were charged with the offences most likely to ensure convictions. In 1924, for example, fourteen men and one woman were charged with

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behaving in a riotous manner on Water Street on 1 April. However, the police dropped this charge and changed it to unlawfully hindering Isaac Trim from “following his honest occupation in unloading the s.s. Chignecto.”161 Clifton Brown was originally charged with having carried a stick at Ruimveldt so as to cause terror to the public. District Inspector Long changed this charge to one of assembling with others in a proclaimed district and refusing to disperse.162 One man who faced a fine of twenty dollars or two months hard labour for disorderly conduct was initially charged with carrying a stick, but Magistrate C.H.E. Legge found little evidence to support the charge so changed it to disorderly conduct. Such manipulation was even more apparent in the aftermath of the 1905 riots. Then, alleged rioters were tried summarily in the Police Magistrate’s Courts, largely to ensure their conviction; members of the colonial government feared that local juries would not convict the accused. According to Captain Tothill, commander of hms Diamond, cases were tried in the Magistrates’ Courts because “the authorities felt convinced that no jury would convict.”163 Indeed, some thirteen years after the riots, Attorney General Nunan noted that, when he arrived in British Guiana after the 1905 riot, he “found the government was powerless to deal with the rioters except by prosecutions for summary convictions in the Magistrate’s court. No juries of [the government’s] lists would have convicted.”164 Many of those arrested were tried under the so-called “centipede law,” a 1904 ordinance that extended corporal punishment to anyone who, lacking a regular job or a home, carried a stick or other weapon in a threatening fashion.165 Members of the local educated, professional class suspected as much. Holding public meetings, crafting petitions, and writing memorials, they asked first the colonial government and then the secretary of state to hold an inquiry into police actions and the charges imposed, objecting particularly to the apparent manipulation of the charges.166 The “monster petition” outlined a number of complaints about social and economic conditions – from the price of land to the sexual exploitation of female sugar estate workers to the scarcity of jobs and the reduction in wages for casual workers. The petition also noted that large numbers of those arrested by the police in the days following the riot were initially charged with rioting but that the charges were subsequently withdrawn and replaced with summary conviction charges.167 Several “opposition” members of the colony’s Court of Policy – Patrick Dargan, A.B. Brown, and M.R. Gonsalves – alleged in a memorial to the secretary of state that the governor wanted the convicted men whipped and the women shorn of their hair, goals obtainable only if they were charged with summary of-

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fences under the centipede law, which allowed for imprisonment and corporal punishment for stick-carriers.168 If this was, in fact, his wish, then it seems to have been granted. Thirty women were to have their heads shaved and thirteen men were flogged (all but one receiving twenty-four strokes). (The remaining men and women were fined or sentenced to serve six months with hard labour.) In response to opposition by the secretary of state, the colonial government decided not to proceed with the head shearing (the only exception being made for women guilty of “gross misconduct” while they were in prison). Colonial authorities clearly valued this punishment, which, according to Government Secretary Cox, had existed “for generations.” Although seldom used, its very existence was “sufficient to keep in check any out burst on the part of the female criminal classes.” He argued that its repeal would be “misconstrued and would add to such latent danger as [could] be expected from the present unsettled state of people.”169 Both penalties, of course, were powerfully symbolic. Whipping was the slave owners’ preferred punishment; Burton characterizes the whip as the most “historically supercharged [object] in the Caribbean.”170 The decision to shear the women’s hair was also significant. As it was to be performed on the day before a woman was to be released from prison, her newly shorn head signified her status. Yet its import was greater than that. As Barry Chevennes argues, Afro-Creole women prized having “plenty hair” and felt that its loss was a “great tragedy.”171 Thus, it can be argued that the decision of the colonial authorities to shear the hair of their overwhelmingly AfroGuianese prisoners constituted a culturally powerful punishment. The riots of 1889, 1905, and 1924 represented a struggle, manifested in festivity and play, for cultural hegemony in public spaces. As such, they can be seen as festive events as much as riotous ones (perhaps as “serious play”).172 The rioters drew from a wide range of popular repertoires in their organization of unrest and, in the process, participated in the construction of a peculiarly Guianese ritual of protest that was neither Tadjah, nor Jonkannu, nor even Carnival – it was a new form, drawing upon these older ones and leavened by the newer tradition of trade unionism. In turn, the local social, political, and economic elites responded by drawing on long-standing views of the non-whites masses, and this provided the rationale for the violent repression of the riots.

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8 Conclusion

By 1924 British Guiana seemed to have begun a new phase of its history. The Guianese so long excluded from formal politics started to enter this realm in increasing numbers. Members of an Afro-, Indo-, and Portuguese-Guianese middle class – businessmen and professionals – gained more influence as their representation in the colonial legislature and the Georgetown Town Council increased and as a widened franchise ensured the vote for many who had been previously ineligible. Although the replacement of the quasi-representative system of government in 1928 (which Gordon K. Lewis has characterized as the “great rape of the constitution”)1 by official majority control saw this class lose some of its formal political influence, this defeat was temporary. Following the recommendations of the West India Royal Commission, struck in the aftermath of the riots of the 1930s, elected representatives were given a majority of seats in the Legislative Council.2 The Guianese masses remained outsiders. Yet their activities in Georgetown’s public spaces and the extralegal influence they exercised presaged the day when their contribution would be formalized. In a sense, their actions in the public spaces of Georgetown – its streets and its markets – brought them into the public sphere and saw them participate in ongoing debates about the nature of public order and make a claim for their right to control these places.3 The riots of 1889, 1905, and 1924 can be seen as expressions of this. The recourse of the rioters to popular cultural traditions employed in more quotidian interactions, as well as the significance of class and ethnic tensions,

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linked the riots with the everyday. For Georgetown’s subaltern classes, urban public spaces were sites of play and loud, often rambunctious, festivity that was shaped by popular cultural traditions – African and Indian as well as Creole. They provided the possibility of a livelihood for small-scale vendors, street scavengers, and petty thieves. Yet employing urban spaces in ways that violated metropolitan-defined norms of order brought the subordinate classes into conflict with Georgetown’s elites. As British Guiana’s capital city and its only significant urban centre, Georgetown was more than the hub of the colony’s political, economic, and administrative world: it was key to the social and intellectual life of the superordinate classes. To them, Georgetown was under siege from unsanitary hawkers, thieves, and vagrants whose behaviour seemed to aggravate high rates of mortality and morbidity and, thus, to worsen the colony’s chronic labour shortage. The pervasive sanitarian rhetoric contributed to a representation of Georgetown’s lower classes as a filthy and vagrant residuum needing to be regulated and removed from public spaces. The language of sanitation and disease causation, along with current racist attitudes, easily rendered non-white groups criminal/unclean/uncivilized. Daily interactions in the petty retail sector were especially marked by conflict. The symbolic and economic importance of marketing in the Anglophone Caribbean was established during the period of slavery, providing a “breach” within the plantation complex that allowed the enslaved populations some economic and cultural autonomy. Marketing continued to exist within the interstices of the plantation economy in the post-emancipation period, providing livelihoods for former slaves and, in British Guiana, for East Indian and Portuguese immigrants. Much of this marketing was practised in Georgetown – the city representing something of a refuge from the plantations – in its market buildings and on its streets. The significance of marketing in Georgetown contributed to the tensions in the city’s marketplaces, which became potential sites of implosive violence as vendors, market officials, and customers fought to market and to determine the terms on which they did so. Disputes within the markets demonstrated the role of local law enforcement officials – members of both the British Guiana police force and the town constabulary – who, in attempting to enforce regulations, often came into conflict with city officials and residents. The town constabulary also clashed with hawkers, particularly with itinerant milk sellers, many of whom were Indo-Guianese. Like other refugees from the plantations, they realized a measure of autonomy in the retail sector as well as a range of economic and social rewards.

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At the forefront of popular attempts to order Georgetown’s public spaces were the centipedes, Georgetown’s petty criminal gangs, whose identity at times seemed the product of elite fantasy, a distillation of elite fears of the residuum, of the criminal, vagrant, non-white masses. Subject to the same exigencies of Georgetown life as other members of the urban poor – sharing both their precarious livelihoods and their residential geography – their actions in the city’s public areas highlighted the ability of Georgetown’s masses to shape urban public spaces as places of recreation and festivity, reflecting, in the process, wider cultural patterns. Although the evidence is not conclusive, the sources suggest that the gangs were multi-ethnic and that their culture was influenced by both Afro- and Indo-Caribbean cultural traditions. Indeed, the actions of poor men and women in the city’s streets and markets point to the significance of public space as a place of recreation and livelihood. The intra-class tensions that saw the city’s masses fight amongst themselves are thus belied by this unanimity, which suggests the creation of a genuinely CreoleGuianese culture, one produced by the interaction of different groups within the Guianese environment. The masses participated in the public sphere by attempting to determine the order of the city’s public areas. In describing the city’s streets and markets as multi-ethnic spaces where Guianese of diverse origins worked and socialized and contributed their individual cultural traditions, Georgetown’s subordinate classes stood in sharp contrast to the local elites who increasingly envisioned a racially segregated world. In 1916 members of the Indo-Guianese middle class formed the East Indian Association and were followed in the 1930s by Portuguese, Chinese, and Afro-Guianese.4 Although the multi-ethnic People’s Progressive Party had formed in 1950, by 1956 it had splintered along ideological and then ethnic lines, a fracturing of the political landscape that, along with other social, political, and economic strains, prepared the way for the ethnic unrest of 1962–64, which saw some 700 killed.5 Some Guyanese historians view the country’s recent history as little more than the unfolding of these events. Indeed, although late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British Guiana was only intermittently marked by inter-ethnic tension, some of the historical literature represents the colony as marked by cultural pluralism; that is, by ethnic residential and occupational segregation, and by an antipathy between Afro- and Indo-Guianese.6 Yet historical inquiry should not be reduced to reading tea leaves or poking through entrails in the hope the future will reveal itself. Men and women living in the past had an intrinsic dignity and relevance, and they constructed their

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lives for their reasons, not ours. The great Guyanese historian Walter Rodney, who was killed in 1981, argued that the events of the 1960s do not represent all Guyanese history. However, although the Guianese masses articulated an alternative, more inclusive view of public order, some evidence suggests a different kind of contribution to the public sphere: an evolving racial consciousness. Within Georgetown’s Afro-Guianese population, for example, Garveyites and Jordanites preached a popular pan-Africanism that incorporated an anti-white sentiment. And the emergence of occupationally specific trade unions in British Guiana meant that these popular institutions and their demands were ethnically specific.7 Thus the sources hint that this, too, comprises part of the popular contribution to contemporaneous discourse and, by extension, part of the legacy of slavery, indentureship, and colonialism. Historians are only beginning to examine the crucial years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a non-white/non-British middle class was attempting to exercise more political power, and when the non-white masses were beginning to organize through trade unions and strike actions. Yet more work must be done to fully measure not only the responses of the articulate middle class but also the full range of popular cultural responses to these systems of oppression.

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Notes

introduction 1 In this study, “British Guiana” is used to refer to the colonial period, while “Guyana” is used to refer to the years after 1966, when the colony became independent. 2 See Chapter 4 for a discussion of the term “play.” 3 See Brathwaite, Development of Creole Society, 297, 310. As well, see the special issue of Caribbean Quarterly for a nuanced discussion of Creole and Creolization. In particular, see Bolland, “Creolisation and Creole Societies,” 1; and Reddock, “Contestations over Culture,” 65. See also Burton, Afro-Creole; and Lazarus-Black, Legitimate Acts and Illegal Encounters. I am grateful to Nigel Bolland for drawing my attention to LazarusBlack’s work. 4 Reddock, “Contestations over Culture,” 78. 5 Bolland, “Creolisation and Creole Societies,” 1, 2, 4, 10, 11, 26. 6 See, for example, Potter, “Indian and African-Guyanese Village Settlement Patterns.” 7 See, for example, Gopal, Politics, Race, and Youth, 9–12; B. Moore, Race, Power and Social Segmentation, 10–24; Bisnauth, “East Indian Immigrant Society”; Cross, East Indians of Guyana and Trinidad; R. J. Moore,”East Indians and Negroes in British Guiana”; R.T. Smith, British Guiana; Glasgow, Guyana; Wagner, “Structural Pluralism and the Portuguese”; Danns, Domination and Power; Despres, Cultural Pluralism and Nationalist Politics. Brian Moore also provides a good discussion of the debate. In Cultural Power, Resistance and Pluralism he points out that, in the late nineteenth

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8 9

10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Notes to pages 6–9

century, social changes had undermined”many of the structural indicators of pluralism“and that the”beginnings of an integrated class stratified society were becoming more evident.“See B. Moore, Cultural Power, Resistance and Pluralism, 15. M.G. Smith, Plural Society in the British West Indies, vii, x, 88, 91. See, for example, Cross, “Cultural Pluralism and Sociological Theory”; Robotham, “Pluralism as an Ideology”; Deosaran, “Social Psychology of Cultural Pluralism”; Baber, “The Pluralism Controversy.” Adamson, Sugar without Slaves, 203, 204, 211, 212. In particular, Walter Rodney, Brian Moore, and Clem Seecharan have demonstrated this process. B. Moore, Cultural Power, Resistance and Pluralism, 133. See, for example, Brereton, Race Relations in Colonial Trinidad; and Bryan, The Jamaican People. B. Moore, Cultural Power, Resistance and Pluralism, 83. Seecharan, Bechu, 42, 26; Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 140, 118; Fraser, “The Immigration Issue in British Guiana,” 31. Moore makes a similar point about the Creole and the Echo. See B. Moore, Cultural Power, Resistance and Pluralism, 18. Engels and Marks, “Hegemony in a Colonial Context,” 4. Raychaudhuri, “Dominance, Hegemony and the Colonial State,” 272. See also Forbes, “Managing Midwifery in India.” Engels and Marks, “Hegemony in a Colonial Context,” 2. R. Williams, Keywords, 118. R. Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 112 (quoted in Eagleton, Introduction to Ideology, 115). See also Eley, “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures,” 322, 323, 324. Eagleton, Introduction to Ideology, 115. B. Moore, Cultural Power, Resistance and Pluralism, 89, 133. Ruddock, “Constructing Difference,” 133. See also the collection of essays edited by Craig Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere. In thinking about space/place, I profited enormously from reading Teresita MartinezVergne’s Shaping the Discourse on Space. Freitag, “Enactments of Ram’s Story,” 67, 68, 69, 74, 75, 88. Shields, Places on the Margin, 7, 60. Relph, Place and Placelessness, 3, 42, 43, 47. Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, 310, 316 . I have borrowed this phrase from Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 76. Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 125. Chakrabarty, “Open Space/Public Place,” 27, 28, 29. Jones, Outcast London, 1, 2, 161, 162. See also McClintock, Imperial Leather, 46, 118, 119; Mayhew and Hemyng, “The Prostitute Class Generally,” 215. Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal, 44, 45. Herbert, “Rat Worship and Taboo,” 10; E. Wilson, The Sphinx in the City, 37.

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175 Notes to pages 6–12 33 Arnold, “Disease, Medicine and Empire,” 7, 8; Thomas, “Sanitation and Seeing,” 153, 156, 157. 34 Chakrabarty, “Open Space/Public Place,” 27, 28, 29. 35 Arnold, “Disease, Medicine and Empire,” 3; Harrison, “Towards a Sanitary Utopia?” 19, 21. 36 Ibid. 37 Arnold, “Disease, Medicine and Empire,“12, 14, 15, 16; Nadis,”Ants, Muskeetoes, Flies and Stinking Chints,“47. 38 See, for example, Kiple and Higgins, “Cholera in Mid-nineteenth Century Jamaica”; Kiple, “Cholera and Race in the Caribbean”; Laurence, “The Development of Medical Services,” 59–67; Wilkins,”Doctors and Ex-slaves in Jamaica”; Wilkins, “The Medical Profession in Jamaica.” See also work by Rosemarijn Hoefte and Clem Seecharan that has examined the holdings of the Rockefeller Foundation Archives. For the Hispanic Caribbean, see, for example, work by Nancy Leys Stepan. 39 Laurence’s work on Trinidad and British Guiana is another important exception. 40 Rodway, History of British Guiana, 1 (quoted in Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1); Kirke, Twenty-five Years, 4. 41 Knight, The Caribbean, xiv. 42 Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 45. However, Raymond T. Smith notes that from 1792, Demerara and Essequibo were “known as the United Colony of Demerary and Essequibo.” See R. T. Smith, British Guiana, 24. 43 Thompson, Colonialism and Underdevelopment in Guyana, 41. 44 Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 63. 45 Trotman, Crime in Trinidad, 41. 46 Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle, “The Nigger Question,” John Stuart Mill, “The Negro Question,” ed. Eugene R. August (New York: Crofts Classics, 1971) (quoted in Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 280). 47 See, especially, Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean. 48 See, for example, Clarke, East Indians in a West Indian Town; and Shepherd, “Depression in ‘Tin Roof Towns.› 49 Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 94. See also Higman, “Jamaican Port Towns in the Early Nineteenth Century.” 50 Magid, Urban Nationalism, 67. 51 P. Wilson, Crab Antics, 9, 223; Burton, “Cricket, Carnival and Street Culture,” 182, 183;. Burton, Afro-Creole, 8, 158–62; Abrahams, The Man-of-Words in the West Indies. 52 B. Moore, Cultural Power, Resistance and Pluralism, 89. 53 See, for example, mcc, 29/1924, Report of the Committee Appointed to Enquire and Report as to the Best Means of Relieving the Present Housing Congestion of Georgetown, nag. See also mtc, “Town Superintendent’s

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54 55 56

57

58

59 60

61 62 63

Notes to pages 12–16

Annual Report, 1903,” 720, msb; mtc, Acting Medical Officer of Health to Chief Sanitary Inspector, 8 November 1921, encl. certificates of uninhabitable rooms, 848–878, msb. See also B. Moore, Cultural Power, Resistance and Pluralism, 88. For descriptions of the tiny, overcrowded homes in Georgetown, see Van Sertima, Among the Common People of British Guiana, 2, 3, 4; Kirke, “Our Criminal Classes,” 6. Magid, Urban Nationalism, 3, 7. See Richardson, “Depression Riots.” Richardson, Panama Money in Barbados, 32, 93; Richardson, Caribbean Migrants, 106. The “sugar bounty” depression hit the British Caribbean after the mid-1880s and lasted until the early twentieth century. It was caused by the appearance of subsidized European beet sugar, which drove down British West Indian sugar prices and resulted in economic crisis. See, for example, Johnson, “The Anti-Chinese Riots of 1918”; Holt, The Problem of Freedom; Craton, “Continuity Not Change”; Marshall, “We Be Wise to Many More Tings”; Wilmot, “The Politics of Protest in Free Jamaica.” See also Richardson,“A ‘Respectable’ Riot”; Singh, Bloodstained Tombs; Trotman, Crime in Trinidad; Russell Chase, “Protest in Postemancipation Dominica”; Marshall, “Vox Populi”; Brereton, “PostEmancipation Protest in the Caribbean.” See Patrick Bryan on the 1902 Montego Bay riots and Bridget Brereton on Trinidad’s “water riots.” Bryan, The Jamaican People, 271, 275; Brereton, A History of Modern Trinidad, 147, 151. See also Holt, The Problem of Freedom; Elkins, “Black Power in the British West Indies”; Martin, “Revolutionary Upheaval in Trinidad.” Hart, “Trade Unionism,” 59, 60. See also Haraksingh, “Control and Resistance among Overseas Indian Workers.” For example, see Pearse, “Carnival in Nineteenth Century Trinidad”; Crowley, “Festivals of the Calendar in St. Lucia”; Crowley, “The Traditional Masques of Carnival”; Craton, “Decoding Pitchy-Patchy”; E. Hill,”Traditional Figures in Carnival.” Lorimer, “Race, Science and Culture,” 16, 20, 21. R.T. Smith, British Guiana, 7; Nigel Bolland, private correspondence. M.G. Smith, “Race and Ethnicity,” 37. chapter two

1 2 3 4

Report of the Inspector General of Police for the Year 1923, 6. Rodway, The Story of Georgetown, 119, 120, 122, 123. Kirke, Twenty-five Years, 69. See, for example, gd, 3027, confidential, Governor Walter Egerton to Secretary of State Lewis Harcourt, 23 May 1914, nag, encl. petition from James Reginald Hill to Harcourt, 18 May 1914, nag; gd, confidential,

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177 Notes to pages 17–20

5

6 7

8 9 10 11

12

13 14 15

16 17

18 19

Governor Collet to Secretary of State Churchill, 20 January 1922, nag, encl. O. Webber, “Precis Prepared in the Secretariat of Papers Dealing with Mr. Hill’s Conduct in the Past,” 19 January 1922. The museum, founded as the Royal Agricultural and Commercial Society, was described by Evelyn Waugh as “musty, smelling, containing a few cases of Indian work, some faded photographs and the worst stuffed animals [he had] seen anywhere.” Waugh, Ninety-two Days, 23, 24. Rodway, The Story of Georgetown, 109, 110, 114. Leechman, The British Guiana Handbook 1913, 100, 103; Kirke, Twenty-five Years, 25; Dorothy “Bunny” King, interview by author, tape recording, Georgetown, Guyana, 20 October 1995. Kirke, Twenty-five Years, 61, 62, 63. bpp, Annual Report for 1893–94, 309. Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 99, 101. mcc, “Evidence Given before the Commission of Enquiry on the Conditions of Employment of and Rates of Wages Paid to Stevedores, Wharfmen and Others” (hereafter “Enquiry into the Employment of Stevedores”) 27/1924, 68, nag; mcc, “Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Enquire into the Causes and Results of the Increased Cost of the Necessaries of Life” (hereafter “Enquiry into the Cost of the Necessaries of Life”) 28/1920, 29, nag. Indeed, the 1931 census asked about “principal” and “subsidiary” occupations (see Report on the Census Results, 1931); enn, “The Growth of Centipedism in British Guiana,” 14. bpp, Report by the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies on His Visit to the West Indies and British Guiana December 1921 to February 1922 (hereafter Report by the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State), 437, 438. Rodway, The Story of Georgetown, 212, 214. Richardson, “Plantation and Village in Coastal Guyana,” 352; see also Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, chap. 1. Lancaster, “Proposals for Hinterland Settlement and Development of British Guiana, 1884–1890,”3, 4, 5; Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 20, 23; Adamson, Sugar without Slaves, 226. bpp, Papers Relating to Her Majesty’s Colonial Possessions for 1888, 23; see also Moohr, “Patterns of Change,” 221, 222, 224. bpp, Annual Report for 1891, 452; bpp, Report on the Blue Book for 1891, 452; bpp, Annual Report for 1893–4, 307, 315; bpp, Annual Report for 1894–5, 167, 178; bpp, Annual Report for 1895–6, 111; bpp, Annual Report for 1896–7, 562; bpp, Report for 1901–02, 104, 121; gd, 317, Governor James Alexander Swettenham to Secretary of State for the Colonies Joseph Chamberlain, 18 August 1902, nag; see also Saul, “The British West Indies.” Adamson, Sugar without Slaves, 228; Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 23. Moohr, “Patterns of Change,” 226.

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178

Notes to pages 20–3

20 bpp, Report for 1911–12, (1912–13 Cd. 6007–46 lvii.631), 640, 655; bpp, Report for 1912–13, 670; bpp, Report for 1913–14, 776, 793. 21 bpp, Report for 1914–15, 350; bpp, Report for 1915, 379, 380; bpp, Report for 1916, 346; bpp, Report for 1917, 184, 185. 22 bpp, Report by the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, 1922, 400, 401. 23 gd, 164, Collet to Churchill, 28 April 1922, nag. 24 Thompson, Colonialism and Underdevelopment in Guyana, 93. 25 Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 80, 122, 123. 26 Ibid., 63. 27 Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 61. 28 Lancaster, “Proposals for Hinterland Settlement,” 17; see also Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People. 29 See Laurence, “The Evolution of Long-term Labour Contracts.” 30 Look Lai, Indentured Labor, 276. 31 Trotman, “Yoruba Orisha Worship,” 2. See also B. Moore, Cultural Power, Resistance and Pluralism, 139; and Schuler, “Kru Emigration.” 32 Adamson, Sugar without Slaves, 147. See also Jenkins, The Coolie, 52, 94. 33 bpp, Treatment of Immigrants in British Guiana, 584; bpp, Conditions of Indian Immigrants in Four British Colonies and Surinam, 589. 34 bpp, Treatment of Immigrants in British Guiana, 584; bpp, Conditions of Indian Immigrants in Four British Colonies and Surinam, 589. 35 bpp, Annual Report for 1894–5, 167, 178. 36 Potter, “The Paddy Proletariat,” 3; Richardson, “Plantation and Village,” 354. See also bpp, Report on the Blue Books for 1884 and 1885, 15; bpp, Report for 1901–02, 104, 121. 37 bpp, Report for 1900–01, 190; bpp, Report from 1909–10, 371; bpp, Report for 1910–11, 610, 624; bpp, Report for 1913–14, 776, 793; bpp, Report for 1915, 379, 380; bpp, Report for 1916, 346; bpp, Report for 1917, 184, 185. 38 Lancaster, “Proposals for Hinterland Settlement,” 3, 4, 5, 7; Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 23. See also Moohr, “Patterns of Change”; bpp, Annual Report for 1894–95, 168; bpp, Annual Report for 1893– 94. 39 Lancaster, “Proposals for Hinterland Settlement,” 7. See also bpp, Annual Report for 1893–94; bpp, Annual Report for 1892–3, 482; bpp, Annual Report for 1895–96, 118. 40 Lancaster has argued that planter opposition to the loss of its labour resulted in regulations discouraging the industry’s growth (see Lancaster, “Proposals for Hinterland Settlement,” 14, 15, 17). See bpp, Annual Report for 1908–09, 1909–10, 1910–11; Census Report of British Guiana, 1911, xxix; bpp, Report for 1912–13, 1913–14, 1914–15, 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918, and 1919. Moohr has argued that the value of gold exports declined by 54.1 per cent between 1892 and 1912. See Moohr, “Patterns of Change,” 229.

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179 Notes to pages 23–6 41 Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 92; bpp, Annual Report for 1892–93, 481; bpp, Annual Report for 1893–94, 311; bpp, Report for 1908–9, 498; bpp, Report for 1909–10, 373; bpp, Report for 1910–11, 602, 612; bpp, Report for 1913–14, 782; bpp, Report for 1915, 379, 380, 384; bpp, Report for 1914–15, 351, 357; bpp, Report for 1919, 195. 42 Saul, “The British West Indies in Depression,” 16, 17. 43 Drakes, “The Middle Class,” 5, 6, 8; Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 86, 87, 140, 142, 143. See also Moohr, “Patterns of Change,” 254, 255; Will, Constitutional Change in the British West Indies, chap. 4. 44 Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 142, 143, 144; Will, Constitutional Change in the British West Indies, 98, 103. 45 Lutchman, “Patronage in Colonial Society,” 35, 36. 46 Ibid., 36, 37; bpp, Annual Report for 1890, 10, 11, 12; bpp, Report for 1909–10, 378; bpp, Annual Report for 1896–97, 563; bpp, Report of the British Guiana Constitution Commission, 744, 745, 746. 47 Guyanese historians have argued that planter hegemony was maintained due to the manipulation of civil servants and opposition politicians. See, for example, Fraser, “The Immigration Issue in British Guiana,” 28. See also Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 121, 123, 125; Lutchman, “Patronage in Colonial Society,” 36, 37; Adamson, Sugar without Slaves, 57. 48 Drakes, “The People’s Association,” 3, 5, 6; Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 176, 203. 49 Drakes, “The People’s Association,” 7, 8, 9. 50 gd, confidential, Governor Clementi to Secretary of State A. Bonar Law, 24 October 1916, nag. Bisnauth discusses, in some detail, the increasing political activism of Indo-Guianese in the second decade of the twentieth century. This activism was facilitated through the establishment of the British Guiana East Indian Association in 1916 and the participation of many Indo-Guianese in three key political debates: the so-called “colonization scheme,” the movement to recall Governor Egerton, and the debate over instituting Crown colony rule in 1928. See Bisnauth, “The East Indian Immigrant Society in British Guiana,” 373, 375, 378, 381, 391, 398, 412, 422, 423, 425, 429, 430, 442. 51 Hill, “The Nomenclature of Georgetown,” 42. 52 Rodway, The Story of Georgetown, 11; Hill, “The Nomenclature of Georgetown,” 42, 45, 46, 49. 53 Dodd and Parris, “An Urban Plantation,” 34; Higman, “Urban Slavery in the British Caribbean,” 43; bg, no. 2 of 1837, s. 4; bg, no. 25 of 1898, s. 5. 54 bg, no. 17 of 1891, ss. 2.2, 3.8.

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180

Notes to pages 27–32

55 Hill, “The Nomenclature of Georgetown,” 46, 47, 48; mcp, “Report of the Select Committee of the Court of Policy to Inquire into and Report upon the Affairs of the Vlissengen Commission,” 1895, 3, nag. 56 Dodd and Parris, “An Urban Plantation,” 34. 57 Higman, “Urban Slavery in the British Caribbean,” 41; Report on the Results of the Census of the Population, 1891, see tables 4, 8 (afterwards, see Report on the Census Results, 1891). See also tables 4, 8 (afterwards, see Report on the Census Results, 1911); Report on the Results of the Census of the Population, 1911, see tables 4, 8 (afterwards, see Report on the Census Results, 1912); Report on the Results of the Census of the Population, 1921, vii (afterwards, see Report on the Census Results, 1921); Report on the Results of the Census of the Population, 1931, vii, viii (afterwards, see Report on the Census Results, 1931). The figures for 1911, 1921, and 1931 include the environs. 58 Report on the Census Results, 1921, ix; Report on the Census Results, 1931, ix. 59 Higman, “Urban Slavery in the British Caribbean,” 43. 60 For an example elsewhere in the Empire, see Mayne, Fever, Squalor and Vice; Jones, Languages of Class, 191; Jones, Outcast London. 61 Report on the Census Results, 1891. 62 Hill, “The Municipality of Georgetown,” 229, 330; Hill, “The Nomenclature of Georgetown,” 45. 63 Hill, “The Municipality of Georgetown,” 229, 230. 64 mcc, Howard Humphreys, “Proposed Main Drainage to the City of Georgetown, British Guiana,” 35/1921, 1, nag; Wishart, Annual Report of the Public Health Department of the City of Georgetown for the Year 1914, 33, msb; Report of the Inspector General of Police for the Year 1891–1892, 299. 65 B. Moore, Cultural Power, Resistance and Pluralism, 19, 21. See also Crookall, British Guiana, 87, 88. 66 Dodd and Parris, “An Urban Plantation,” 38; dc, 6 May 1921, 4; Kirke, “Our Criminal Classes,” 5. 67 enn, “The Growth of Centipedism,” 16; dc, 6 May 1921, 4. 68 Hill, “The Nomenclature of Georgetown,” 47; Hill “The Municipality of Georgetown,” 330. 69 James Williams to Travers Buxton, 12 September 1914, “British Guiana Aborigines 1914–1919,” mss Brit. Emp. s. 22 G289, Rhodes House Collection. See also census reports for 1891, 1911, and 1921. 70 Lutchman, “Patronage in Colonial Society,” 37; Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 157; B. Moore, Cultural Power, Resistance and Pluralism, 17; Jenkins, The Coolie, 71; Bunny King, interview by author, tape recording, Georgetown, Guyana, 20 October 1995. 71 The distinction was maintained socially as well. Mary Noel Menezes, interview with author, Georgetown, Guyana, 20 October 1995. 72 B. Moore, Cultural Power, Resistance and Pluralism, 243.

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181 Notes to pages 32–43 73 Results of the Census, 1911; B. Moore, Race, Power and Social Segmentation, 195; Hintzen, “The Colonial Foundations of Race Relations,” 11, 12; Lutchman, “Race and Bureaucracy,” 227. See also Fraser, “The Immigration Issue,” 19. 74 B. Moore, Cultural Power, Resistance and Pluralism, 14. 75 Seecharan, Tiger in the Stars, 248, 232. 76 Ibid., 252. 77 Report on the Census Results, 1891; see also B. Moore, Race, Power and Social Segmentation, 214; See, for example, Matthews and Danns, Communities and Development, 37; Hill, “The Municipality of Georgetown,” 330; B. Moore, “The Settlement of Chinese in Guyana,” 46. 78 dc, 12 January 1904, 3; dc, 28 January 1904, 3. 79 See Report on the Census Results for 1891, 1911, and 1921. 80 Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 116, 117. 81 Mangru, “The Sex Ratio Disparity,” 211, 212. 82 Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 118; Trotman, Crime in Trinidad, 154, 155. 83 Rodway, The Story of Georgetown, 21, 22. See bg, no. 2 of 1837, ss. 2, 5, 6, 7. One guilder equalled thirty-two cents. See Mohamed, “The Establishment of a Portuguese Business Community,” 20, n. 23. 84 See Rodway, Stark’s Guide-Book and History, 83; Leechman, The British Guiana Handbook 1913, 209; No. 18, Hodgson to Lyttelton, Cd. 2822, 285, bpp; No. 25 of 1898, Schedule 7, nag; gd 11, Clementi to Long, 10 January 1917, nag; gd 45, Clementi to Long, 31 January 1917, nag, encl. Clark to the Government Secretary, 22 January 1917; gd 32, Clementi to Long, 23 January 1917; Report of the Commission appointed to Enquire into the Conditions of Employment of and Rates of Wages Paid to Stevedores, Wharfmen and Labourers, no. 15, mcc, 1924, 3, nag. See also Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 191. 85 bg, no. 1 of 1860, ss. 8, 9, 11, 12. 86 bg, no. 25 of 1898, s. 87 bg, no. 1 of 1860, ss. 8, 9, 11, 12. 88 bg, no. 25 of 1898, ss. 7, 8, 9, 11. 89 bg, no. 44 of 1918, s. 8.1, 9, 10. 90 bg, no. 2 of 1837, s. 12. 91 bg, no. 9 of 1837, s. 4. 92 bg, no. 2 of 1839. 93 bpp, Annual Report for 1912–13, 684; mcc, “Scale of Charges in Connection with the Training of Officers of the British Guiana Police with the Royal Irish Constabulary at Dublin,” Special Session 1907, nag. This practice seemed to have ended by the 1920s. (mcc, “Report by Captain R.A. Chancellor, cbe on the Composition, Methods of Training, Organisation,

Notes.fm Page 182 Thursday, December 5, 2002 11:03 AM

182

94

95 96

97

98 99

100 101 102

103 104 105 106

Notes to pages 43–5

Distribution and Standard of Discipline of the British Guiana Police Force” [hereafter “Report by Captain R.A. Chancellor”], 5/1924, 2, nag.) From 1891, police recruits were trained for some three months at a constabulary depot at the Eve Leary Barracks in Georgetown. They were instructed in gymnastics, company and battalion drill, and musketry. See Report of the Inspector General of Police for the Year 1892–1893, 313. bpp, Annual Report for 1891, 438; Report of the Inspector General of Police for the Year 1891–1892, 299; bg, no. 17 of 1891, s. 2.3. mcc, “Report by Captain R. A. Chancellor,” 5/1924, 2, nag. See also Trotman, Crime in Trinidad; Johnson, “Patterns of Policing”; Johnson, “Social Control and the Colonial State.” bg, no. 17 of 1891, s. 3.6. See, for example, gd, 3027, confidential, 3027, Egerton to Harcourt, 23 May 1914, nag, encl. petition from James Reginald Hill to Harcourt, 18 May 1914; gd, confidential, Governor Collet to Churchill, 20 January 1922, nag, encl. “Precis Prepared in the Secretariat of Papers Dealing with Mr. Hill’s Conduct in the Past,” by O. Webber, 19 January 1922. See also mcc, “Report by Captain R.A. Chancellor,” 5/1924, 7, nag; Anderson and Killingray, “Consent, Coercion and Colonial Control,” 4. mcc, “Minutes by the Acting Inspector General of Police in Regard to Increasing the Strength of the Police Force,” 44/1920, 2, nag; Report of the Inspector General of Police for the Year 1891–1892, 299, 305. bg, no. 25 of 1898, s. 108. dc, 13 June 1922, 5; mcc, “Report by Captain R.A. Chancellor,” 5/1924, 5, nag; Anderson and Killingray, “Consent, Coercion and Colonial Control,” 10. dc, 4 February 1890, 4; tcr, “Report on the Town Constabulary,” rptd. in dc, 4 February 1890, 4; dc, 13 June 1922, 5. Report of the Inspector General of Police for the Year 1881, 185, 197; Report of the Inspector General of Police for the Year 1883, 282. See Report of the Inspector General of Police for the years 1907–08, 1908–09, 1909–10, 1914–15, 1918, 1919, 1920, 1923, and 1926. See also enn, “Our Policemen,” 47, 49, 50. Other Caribbean historians have noted the preference for the use of Barbadian police throughout the region – a preference which, according to Johnson, was influenced by perceptions of Barbadians as a “‘martial race.› See, for example, Trotman, Crime in Trinidad; and Johnson, “Social Control and the Colonial State,” 53. dc, 9 May 1905, 4. dc, 1 November 1885. dc, 2 February 1905, 4. dc, 22 August 1905, 4. See also a letter by “Free Lance,” dc, 10 May 1905, 4; Howard Johnson has noted that Governor Ambrose Shea of the

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183 Notes to pages 45–7

107 108 109 110 111

112

113

114

115 116 117 118 119

120 121

Bahamas expressed similar concerns about the loyalty of that colony’s Afro-Creole police force. See Johnson, “Social Control and the Colonial State,” 47. Bisnauth, “The East Indian Immigrant Society in British Guiana, 1891– 1930,” 344, 346; Fraser, “The Immigration Issue,” 21. lob, no. 13, Petition of the Under-signed Cowkeepers, 13 January 1902, 25, 26, 27, 28, msb. bg, no. 1 of 1860, s. 67. bg, no. 25 of 1898, s. 103; bg, no. 44 of 1918, s. 96. Harrison, “Towards a Sanitary Utopia,” 19, 30, 31, See also Phillips, “The Local State and Public Health Reform,” 229, 230; Naidis, “Ants, Muskeetoes, Flies and Stinking Chints,” 46; Mayne, Fever, Squalor and Vice. Hill, “The Municipality of Georgetown,” 233, 234; dc, 30 January 1921, 4; bpp, Papers Relating to Her Majesty’s Colonial Possessions for 1885 and 1886, 444. Correspondence on the Subject of the Appointment of a Sanitary Inspector, 1912, encl. Government Bacteriologist to Surgeon General J.E. Godfrey, 21 May 1912, 4. See also encl. Godfrey to the Government Secretary, 24 May 1912, 5. co 111/661, no. C.17029, no. 389, J. Hampton King to Amery, 12 August 1926, encl. 30/1926, British Guiana Combined Court, Second Special Session, 1926, Memorandum on the Medical Service of British Guiana, July 1922 – May 1926, by P.J. Kelly, 3, pro; J. Anderson, Filariasis in British Guiana, 6. co 111/610, 15949, Clementi to Long, confidential, 8 February 1917, encl. memorandum by Wise to the Government Secretary, 25 January 1917, pro. co 111/608, 60197, minute, gp to Mr Grindle, 18/12/16, pro. co 111/608, 60197, minute, gp to Mr Grindle, 18/12/16, pro. co 111/425, 3111, Collet to Milner, confidential, 16 December, 1919, pro; co 111/594, no. 15657, no. 103, Egerton to Harcourt, 4 April 1914, pro. co 111/610, 15949, Clementi to Long, confidential, 8 February 1917, encl. memorandum by Wise to the Government Secretary, 25 January 1917, pro. co 111/610, 15949, Clementi to Long, confidential, 8 February 1917, pro. mtc, “Annual Report of the Public Health Department of the City of Georgetown for the Year 1924,” 28 September 1925, 633–6, msb. Compare this with India, where, from the 1890s, most new sanitary department employees had diplomas in public health; the diplomas were required in 1912. Harrison, “Towards a Sanitary Utopia,” 24. For details on the gradual organization of public health employees in Georgetown, see dc, 30 January 1921, 5; dc, 26 April 1921, 4.

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184

Notes to pages 49–52

c h a p t e r th r e e 1 Bronkhur, The Colony of British Guiana, 69. 2 Amory, The Conquest of Epidemic Disease, 236, 244, 245. See also Hamlin, “Providence and Putrefaction,” 382, 283, 389. 3 Amory,The Conquest of Epidemic Disease, 248, 249, 251. 4 Hays, The Burdens of Disease, 150. See also Warboys, “Germs, Malaria,” 181. 5 Hays, The Burdens of Disease, 206, 207. See also Vizcaino, “Carlos J. Finlay.” 6 See, for example, Sutphen, “Not What But Where.” 7 Karlen, Man and Microbes, 138, 139; Amory,The Conquest of Epidemic Disease, 266, 362, 365. 8 Harrison, “Towards a Sanitary Utopia,” 24; Phillips, “The Local State and Public Health Reform,” 222. 9 Richard Schomburgk, Richard Schomburgk’s Travels, 30. 10 Des Voeux, My Colonial Service, 31, 32. 11 Robert Schomburgk, A Description of British Guiana, 22, 23; co 111/289 no. 4, Barkly, 9 January 1852, pro; Curtin, Death by Migration, 70. 12 Rodway, The Story of Georgetown, 33. 13 Robert Schomburgk A Description of British Guiana, 22, 23. 14 Rodway, The Story of Georgetown, 1, 2, 5, 33; Higman, Writing West Indian Histories, 53. 15 Higman, Slave Populations, 275 16 British Guiana Directory and Almanack, for 1891, 11, 12. 17 Leechman, British Guiana Handbook 1913, 3. 18 See Curtin, Death by Migration, 131. 19 Rodway, The Story of Georgetown, 1, 2, 5; Higman, Writing West Indian Histories, 53. 20 Kirke, Twenty-five Years, 5, 6. 21 Minute by Town Superintendent Luke Hill, Monday 14 June 1902, lob, 32, msb; Report by the Parliamentary Under-secretary to the Colonies ... to the West Indies and British Guiana, December 1921 to February 1922, 1922 cmd. 1679 xvi.355, 440, bpp. See also tcr, rptd. in dc, 13 March 1906, 4; Report of the Surgeon General’s Office for the Year 1904–1905, 523. 22 For example, see mtc, Colonial Civil Engineer G. W. Dickson to Town Clerk, 2 June 1897, 92, msb; dc, 16 April 1889, 4; rg, 15 March 1889. 23 mtc, Government Secretary J. Hampden King to Town Clerk, 30 June 1899; encl. Acting Police Magistrate R. Swan to King, 23 June 1899; encl. Clerks of the Police Magistrate’s Office to Swan, June 1899, 95, M.S.B. 24 mtc, Sanitary Inspector Hubert Whitlock to Town Clerk Hill, 2 October 1873, 1079, msb; mtc, Whitlock to Hill, 20 October 1873, 1141, msb; mtc, 10 November 1873, mtc, 1139, msb; mtc, Petition from Undersigned Inhabitants of Werk-en-Rust to Mayor and Town Council, 6 October 1873, 1103,

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185 Notes to pages 52–4

25

26 27

28 29

30

31

32 33 34

35 36 37 38 39

msb. See also Whitlock to Mayor and Town Council, 1 October 1873, 1101, msb; tcr, rptd. in dc, 14 July 1885; mtc, Petition from Undersigned Taxpayers and Ratepayers of George Street to the Mayor and Town Council, 20 September 1904, 565, msb; lob, Luke Hill, “Town Superintendent’s Report, October 1904,” 9, msb. See, for example, tcr, rptd. in dc, 14 July 1885; mtc, Petition from Undersigned Taxpayers and Ratepayers of George Street to the Mayor and Town Council, 20 September 1904, 565, msb. tcr, rptd. in dc, 30 September 1890, 3, 4. mcc, Humphreys, “Proposed Main Drainage of the City of Georgetown, in British Guiana,” 35/1921, 1, nag; Thompson, “Sanitation on the Panama Canal Zone, Trinidad and British Guiana,” 143; Leechman, The British Guiana Handbook 1913, 53. mtc, 11 June 1928, 342, msb. mcc, Humphreys, “Proposed Main Drainage of the City of Georgetown, British Guiana,” 35/1921,1, nag; Luke Hill to Secretary to the Poor Law Commissioner W.H. Cook, 18 May 1909, mtc, 860, msb; tcr, rptd. in dc, 30 September 1890, 3, 4. Report into General Mortality, no. 334, 1906, 21, csl; tcr, rptd. in dc, 13 March 1906, 4; Kirke, Twenty-five Years, 5, 6; mcc, Humphreys, “Proposed Main Drainage of the City of Georgetown, British Guiana,” 35/1921, 4, nag; Report of the Surgeon General for the Year 1916, 539; mtc, 14 November 1921, 733, 734, msb. Report of the Surgeon General for the Year 1916, 539; M.C.C., Humphreys, “Proposed Main Drainage of the City of Georgetown, British Guiana,” 35/1921, 4, N.A.G.; Kirke, Twenty-five Years, 5, 6; Report into General Mortality, no. 334, 1906, 21. da, 15 September 1912, 5; Report of the Surgeon General of the Year 1916, 530. mtc, 12 October 1921, 450, 451, msb; mtc, 15 August 1921, 281, msb; dc, 19 July 1921, 4. dc, 9 August 1889, 3; Ozzard, “Preventable Diseases,” 147; Report into General Mortality, no. 334, 1906, 20, csl; lob, Canon Josa, Christ Church, Georgetown, 15 February, 1902, 8, msb; lob, Minute by Luke Hill, 14 June 1902, 29, 30, 31, 32, msb. For example, bpp, Report by the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, 1922, 439. dc, 13 April, 1921, 4. Report of the Register General for the Year 1891–1893, 384. Report into General Mortality, no. 334, 1906, 7, 9, 10, 20, csl. See also, Report of the Surgeon General’s Office for the Year 1904–1905, 523. bpp, Report on the Blue Book for 1880, 133; Report into General Mortality, no. 334, 1906, 7, 9, csl; Report of the Register General for the years 1906 to 1918, 1926; Report of the Register General for the years 1885 to 1926.

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186

Notes to pages 54–6

40 For example, see The Baby Saving League of British Guiana, The Fifth Annual Report, 1918, 7. 41 mcc, Humphreys, “Proposed Main Drainage of the City of Georgetown, British Guiana,” 35/1921, 1, nag; mtc, 22 January 1923, 163, msb. 42 bpp, Annual Reports on British Guiana 1905 to 1918; bpp, Report by the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, 440; Report of the Register General for 1891 to 1918. 43 Rowland, “The Necessity of Pure Water,” 273; Wise, “An Examination of the City of Georgetown,” 435; See also see Rodway, Handbook of British Guiana, 21. 44 Report of the Surgeon General for the 9 mos. April to December, 1915, 520; mcc, Humphreys, “Proposed Main Drainage of the City of Georgetown, British Guiana,” 35/1921, 3, nag; Report of the Register General for the Year 1891– 1892, 384, 385; Bronkhurst, The Colony of British Guiana, 72. 45 Manington, The West Indies, 151; Wise, “An Examination of the City of Georgetown,” 435; Rodway, Handbook of British Guiana, 21. See also bpp, Report by the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, 1922, 440. 46 na, British Guiana Directory and Almanack, for 1891, 21; Leechman, British Guiana Handbook, 101; Bronkhurst, The Colony of British Guiana, 72. 47 mcc, Humphreys, “Proposed Main Drainage of the City of Georgetown, British Guiana,” 35/1921, 4, nag. 48 Karnel, Man and Microbes, 53. See also Rowland, “The Necessity of Pure Water”; Hill, “The Municipality of Georgetown,” 234. 49 Report of the Surgeon General for the Year 1916, 539. See also Acting Health Officer, C.J. Gomes, “Special Report on Outbreak of Virulent Fever,” in Report of the Surgeon General for the Year 1909–1910, 464, 465. 50 dc, 6 April 1922. Report of the Medical Officer of Health 1912, 1, msb; Hill, “The Municipality of Georgetown,” 234; Report of the Surgeon General for the Year 1920, 467; Report of the Surgeon General for the Year 1916, 539; bpp, Annual Reports on British Guiana for 1905 to 1918; bpp, Report by the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, 1922, 440. 51 Thompson, “Sanitation on the Panama Canal Zone,” 143, 144. 52 mtc, Petition to Mayor and Council, 13 November 1906, 741, 742, msb. See also mtc, 14 November 1921, 733, 734, msb; dc, 23 April 1922, 7; dc, 16 November 1889, 4; dc, 19 March 1890, 4; mtc, 27 February 1928, 152, msb. 53 Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean 1807–1834, 273, 275, 276. 54 See, for example, no. 5 of 1852, no. 1 of 1860, no. 3 of 1878, no. 13 of 1907. 55 da, 28 April 1912, 5. See also Higman, Slave Populations, 274, 275, 276, 279. See also A Consolidated Act for the Better Regulation of Georgetown (1828), articles 7, 9. 56 Higman, Slave Populations, 273, 275, 276. See also An Ordinance to Establish Boards of Health in the Districts of Demerara and Essequebo and of Berbice, in the Colony of British Guiana (1832).

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187 Notes to pages 56–60 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

67 68

69 70 71 72 73 74

75

76 77

Or so Rodway contends. See Rodway, The Story of Georgetown, 32. co 111/283, no. 122, Barkly to Grey, 25 August 1851, pro. bg, no. 32 of 1850, s. 3; No. 5 of 1852, ss. 5, 11, 13. The Creole, 27 December 1856, and 10 January 1857. No. 1 of 1860, ss. 115, 116. No. 3 of 1878, ss 25, 51; No. 13 of 1907, ss. 171–227. Rodway, The Story of Georgetown, 3, 32, 41, 44, 48. da, 24 October 1924, 4. Hill, “The Municipality of Georgetown” 234; Report of the Surgeon General for the Year 1909–1910, 449. Wishart, Report of the Medical Officer of Health 1912, 21, 22, msb. See also Hill, “The Municipality of Georgetown,” 234; Report of the Surgeon General for the Year 1909–1910, 449. mtc, “Report of the Chief Sanitary Inspector, December 1922,” 1923, 57, msb. mcc, Humphreys, “Proposed Main Drainage of the City of Georgetown, in British Guiana,” 35/1921, 1, nag; Wishart, Annual Report of the Public Health Department of the City of Georgetown for the year 1914, 33, msb; B. Moore, Cultural Power, Resistance and Pluralism, 19, 21; dc, 9 August 1889, 3. See, for example, Marcus, “Reading the Illegible,” 260, 266. tcr, rptd. in dc, 6 October 1885; mtc, Cook to Town Clerk P.P. Fairbairn, 25 May 1909, 861, msb; da, 7 May 1912, 6. mtc, Wishart, “Report on the Anti-Mosquito Campaign, February 1923,” 538–1, 538–2, msb. mtc, Wishart, “Annual Report of the Public Health Department of the City of Georgetown for the Year 1924,” 633, msb. B. Moore, Cultural Power, Resistance and Pluralism, 19. mcc, “Report of Housing Congestion,” 29/1924, 15, msb, encl. “Interim Report of the Georgetown Housing Problem Committee in Connection with the Occupants of the Railway Line Lands.” mtc, (Mechanical Engineer of Water Works) to Fairbairn, 23 August 1906, 238, 239, msb; mcc, “Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Assess Claims for Losses Sustained during the Riots of March,” 1889, 5, nag; lob, Petition of gardeners on Railway Sideline, 24 February 1902, 10, msb; Petitions from some residents of the Railway Line Lands contained both Indian and Portuguese names. See mcc, “Report of Housing Congestion,” 29/1924,40, 50, 51, 60, 61, nag; mtc, Petition from residents on the Demerara Railway to Mayor and Town Council, 19 July 1906, 161, 162 msb. mcc, “Report of Housing Congestion,” 29/1924, 57, 62, 44, 14, nag. mcc, Report of the Evidence 29/1924, nag; encl. Report of the Georgetown Housing Problem Committee in Connection with Occupants of the Railway Line Lands, 15, 16, nag.

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188 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98

99 100 101

102 103

104

Notes to pages 60–3

dc, 25 June 1921, 4. dc, 16 November 1889, 4. dc, 19 March 1890, 4; dc, 7 November 1889, 4. da, 14 September 1912, 5. da, 9 September 1924, 5; mtc, 23 April, 1928, 269, 270, 271, msb; mtc, 27 February 1928, 152, msb; mtc, 11 June, 1929, 349, msb. da, 28 April 1912, 5. rg, 4 June 1889. dc, 27 January 1921, 4; da, 9 September 1924, 5. da, 9 September 1924, 5, 8. mtc, “Report of the Chief Sanitary Inspector, September 1918,” 684, 685, msb. dc, 17 January 1886, 4. Wishart, Report of the Medical Officer of Health 1912, 9, msb; da, 26 April 1912, 5. Report into General Mortality, 1906, viii. Index to Debates of Court of Policy, 25 April, 1922, 43, 44, nag; dc, 23 April 1922, 7. dc, 23 April 1922, 7. Index to Debates of Court of Policy, 25 April, 1922, 43, 44, nag. dc, 28 April 1922, 4; Index to Debates of Court of Policy, 25 April, 1922, 43, 44, nag. dc, 25 April 1922, 5; dc, 23 April 1922, 7. dc, 16 May 1922, 7; dc, 28 April 1922, 4. dc, 25 April 1922, 5. mcc, Report of the Evidence 29/1924, nag, encl. Report of the Georgetown Housing Problem Committee in Connection with Occupants of the Railway Line Lands, 84. dc, 13 May 1922, 5l; dc, 24 December 1924, 5; dc, 24 February 1924, 4. co 1113/3, no. 1 of 1860, part 5, ss. 116, 126. Hill, “The Municipality of Georgetown,” 233; Wishart, Report of the Medical Officer of Health, 9, msb; dc, 27 January 1921, 4; da, 23 February 1924, 4. See Hubert Whitlock to Mayor and Town Council, 1 September, 4 October, 3 November, and 1 December 1873, mtc, 837, 1054, 1131, 1249, msb. Wishart, Report of the Medical Officer of Health, 1912, 9, msb; Wishart, Annual Report of the Public Health Department of the City of Georgetown for the Year 1914, 49, msb; mtc, “Town Superintendent’s Annual Report, 1908,” 26 April 1909, 627, msb. Brereton has noted a similar pattern for Trinidad where, by the 1890s, Indians whose indentures had expired worked as scavengers. See Brereton, “The Experience of Indentureship,” 27.

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189 Notes to pages 64–7 105 These figures are from the 1891 census. As the next census was not until 1911 (none was taken in 1901), the 1891 figures seemed to have a better chance of being accurate. For the composition on the town gangs, see mtc, Hill to Acting Town Clerk H.D. Belgrave, 14 October 1897, msb. 106 See, for example, enn, “Our Local Moneylenders,” 91. See also, dc, 13 and 14 March 1906, 4, 8; The Creole, 30 December 1905, 4, and 20 January 1906, 2. See also mtc, Hill to Belgrave, 14 October 1897, 714, 743, msb. 106 The Creole, 10 March 1906. 107 da, 25 March 1924, 4. 108 Laurence, A Question of Labour, 106; Seecharan, Tiger in the Stars, 4. 109 Seecharan, Tiger in the Stars, 4, 5. 110 Look Lai, Indentured Labor, 123, 124. 111 B. Moore, Cultural Power, Resistance and Pluralism, 191. See also Laurence, A Question of Labour, 112, 114. On the factors that weakened caste in British Guiana, see Seecharan, Tiger in the Stars, 39. See also Laurence, A Question of Labour, chap. 8. 112 Look Lai, Indentured Labor, 123, 124. See also Seecharan, Tiger in the Stars, 5, 6. 113 co 111/250, no. 10, Light to Grey, 11 January 1848, encl. Dr Bonyun to Light, 6 January 1848, pro. See also Look Lai, Indentured Labor, 109, 110, 123. 114 The Creole, 20 January 1906, 2. 115 enn, “Our Local Moneylenders,” 91. Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 185. 116 mtc, Hill to Belgrave, 14 October, 1897, 741, 743, msb. 117 mtc, Hill to Acting Town Clerk H.D. Belgrave, 14 October 1897, 741, 743, msb. 118 mtc, Hill to Belgrave, 14 October 1897, 714, 743, msb.; Report on the Census Results, 1891, 16, table 4; dc, 13 March 1906, 4. 119 dc, 13 and 14 March 1906, 4, 8; see the Creole, 30 December 1905, 4, and 20 January 1906, 2. 120 mtc, Hill to Belgrave, 14 October, 1897, 714, 743, msb; Report on the Census Results, 1891, 16, table 4; dc, 13 March 1906, 4. 121 dc, 13 and 14 March 1906, 4, 8; See also the Creole, 30 December 1905, 4, and 20 January 1906, 2. 122 The Creole, 10 March 1906. 123 Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 204. These anti-Indian sentiments angered at least one person. “An East Indian” wrote the editor of the Daily Chronicle, wondering whether Indo-Guianese were not free to find employment where they could when their terms of indenture had ended. This correspondent believed that Indo-Guianese should not be condemned to work forever on the sugar estates and should, as

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190

124 125 126 127 128 129

130 131

132 133 134

Notes to pages 67–72

taxpayers and subjects of the king, be given the same consideration as other workers and not be fired out of hand. See dc, 13 March 1906, 8. mtc, 11 January 1909, 44, 61, msb. See also dc, 21 January 1921, 8. dc, 30 January 1921, 5. mtc, 27 February 1928, 150, msb. Rodway, The Story of Georgetown, 32. dc, 9 August 1889, 3. tcr, rptd. in dc, 2 December 1890, 7; tcr, rptd. in dc, 16 December 1890, 4. The “dry earth closet” used dry earth to cover waste and was touted as waterless waste disposal. Such “‘conservancy methods› were promoted in England in the 1860s. Goddard, “A Mine of Wealth.” 279. mcc, “Report of Housing Congestion,” 29/1924, 57, 62, 44, 14, nag. mcc, “Report of the Evidence,” 29/1924, encl. “Report of the Georgetown Housing Problem Committee in Connection with Occupants of the Railway Line Lands,” 15, 16, nag. Index to Debates of Court of Policy, 25 April 1922, 43, 44, nag; dc, 23 April 1922, 7. See, for example, Arnold, “Disease, Medicine and Empire,” 3; Harrison, “Towards a Sanitary Utopia,” 19, 21. Nedd suggested as much. See dc, 23 April 1922, 7. I am indebted to Mary Douglas’s work for this concept. See Douglas, Purity and Danger. chapter four

1 Peter Wilson, Crab Antics, 9, 223. 2 Burton, “Cricket, Carnival and Street Culture,” 182, 183; Burton, AfroCreole, 8, 158–62. 3 B. Moore, Cultural Power, Resistance and Pluralism, 89, 133. 4 Rodway, Handbook of British Guiana, 20, 25. 5 mtc, “Report of the Public Recreation Grounds Committee,” 4 September 1918, 385, msb. 6 See, for example, mtc, 9 August 1897, 227, msb; mtc, 1 November 1897, 1038, msb; mtc, Letter from Herbert Wood, Providence Congregational Church, 9 August 1917, 220, msb; mtc, Secretary of the County of Demerara Agricultural and Livestock Show to Town Clerk, 26 June 1906, 58, msb; mtc, 26 April 1909, 640, msb. 7 mtc, “Report of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Celebration Committee,” 31 October 1897, 1139, 1145, 1146, msb. 8 Report of the Inspector General of Police 1919, 532; Report of the Inspector General of Police for the Year 1920, 522. 9 Report of the Inspector General of Police 1919, 532; Report of the Inspector General of Police for the Year 1920, 522.

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191 Notes to pages 72–3 10 B. Moore, Cultural Power, Resistance and Pluralism, 89, 133. David Trotman has identified the same oppositions as occurring in post-emancipation Trinidad. See Trotman, “Women and Crime,” 258, 259. 11 See, for example, Rodway, Handbook of British Guiana, 25; dc, 14 November 1905, 4; dc, 19 September 1905, 4; dc, 6 May 1921, 4. The meaning of “badgee” is uncertain, but a modern dictionary – the Dictionary of Caribbean English – defined “Baje” (“Bajee,” “Bajie”) as Barbadian, primarily of African origin, and notes that it was often derogatory. Though a modern definition, it may, given the number of Barbadians in Georgetown, be accurate for the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus “badgee” songs may refer to Barbadian songs. See Allsopp, Dictionary of Caribbean English, lvii, 72. 12 dc, 16 November 1889, 4. See also dc, 29 March 1906, 3. David Trotman discusses the elite-led campaigns against lower-class gambling. See Trotman, Crime in Trinidad, 260, 261. 13 dc, 16 November 1889, 4; 6 May 1921, 4; 16 January 1890, 4; 15 April 1890, 4; 3 January 1904, 8. 14 According to Burton, noise was the “inevitable and indispensable accompaniment to all forms of Caribbean play.” See Burton, Afro-Creole, 243. 15 See, for example, Rodway, Handbook of British Guiana, 25; dc, 1 November 1885. See also dc, 15 May 1906, 4; R. Schomburgk, Travels in British Guiana, 47; B. Moore, Cultural Power, Resistance, and Pluralism; and Burton, AfroCreole, 19, 22. 16 1642, I.A.G. Alexander to Government Secretary, 10 March 1896, Immigration Department, Miscellaneous 1896–1921, nag, encl. Undersigned Petitioners to Acting Governor Cavendish Boyle. The petition was sent to a variety of officials, including the immigration agent general, the governor, and Secretary of State Joseph Chamberlain. See 5526, Alexander to the Government Secretary, 28 August 1896, Immigration Department, Miscellaneous 1896– 1921, nag; encl. Undersigned Petitioners to Alexander, 22 August 1898; Undersigned Petitioners to Secretary of State for the Colonies Joseph Chamberlain; 1642, Alexander to Government Secretary, 10 March 1896, Immigration Department, Miscellaneous 1896–1921, nag; and dc, 6 February 1896. 17 1642, I.A.G. Alexander to Government Secretary, 10 March 1896, Immigration Department, Miscellaneous 1896–1921, nag, encl. Circular from Acting Government Secretary Francis Villiers to all magistrates and inspector general of police, 6 May 1896. 18 dc, 16 January 1889. 3; see also rg, 16 January 1889. 19 mtc, G.E. Bodkir to the Chairman, Ornamental Gardens Committee, 20 August 1918, 388, msb. 20 mtc, Secretary of the Board of Agriculture to Town Clerk, 25 October 1918, 1112, msb.

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192

Notes to pages 73–6

21 dc, 30 September 1906, 8; dc, 3 October 1906, 8; Burton, Afro-Creole, 164, 269; B. Moore Cultural Power, Resistance and Pluralism, 121, 122. See also Bronkhurst, The Colony of British Guyana, 387. 22 See, for example, dc, 1 November 1885; 15 May 1906, 4; 30 September 1906, 8. 23 Kirke, “Our Criminal Classes,” 2, 6. See also dc, 22 November 1889, 4; 1 December 1889, 4; 5 March 1905, 3; 12 July 1906, 3. 24 dc, 1 November 1885. 25 dc, 1 November 1885; dc, 16 January 1889, 3. See also rg, 16 January 1889; dc, 7 March 1905, 4; 5 April 1905, 8; 15 May 1906, 4. 26 dc, 22 August 1905, 4; dc, 24 August 1905, 4. 27 See Trotman, Crime in Trinidad, 255. See also Wilson, Crab Antics, 192. 28 B. Moore, Cultural Power, Resistance, and Pluralism, 92. See also Cruickshank, Black Talk, ii, iii, and chap. 1; Rickford, Dimensions of a Creole Continuum, 45, 50, 51, 52, 60. 29 Wilson, Crab Antics, 157. See also Trotman, Crime in Trinidad, 256, 257; Abrahams, Man-of-Words in the West Indies, chap. 1. See especially Sertima, Among the Common People. 30 mcp, An Ordinance to Make Provision for More Effectually Repressing Disturbances and Attempts to Commit Breaches of the Peace (no. 4 of 1856), s. 1, 18, nag; mcp, An Ordinance to Make Provision for the More Effectual Suppression of Riotous Disturbances and Other Breaches of the Public Peace (no. 11 of 1889), ss. 7.6, 7.7, nag; No. 17 of 1893, ss. 129, 141, 142, 143; mcp, An Ordinance to Consolidate and Amend the Laws Relating to Offences Punishable on Summary Conviction (no. 21 of 1893), ss. 129, 142, nag. 31 dc, 17 April 1890, 4; 15 April, 1890, 4. See also dc, 16 November 1889, 4. 32 Report of the Inspector of Prisons for the Year 1883, 43; Report of the Inspector General of Police for 1897 to 1923. 33 Trotman, Crime in Trinidad, 252, 253; Trotman, “Women and Crime,” 258, 259. 34 See dc, January, May, September 1890, 1891, 1892, 1893. See also Des Voeux, My Colonial Service, 28, 118. 35 This is based on an examination of dc, January, May, September 1890, 1891, 1892, 1893. 36 dc, 30 August 1885. 37 Des Voeux, My Colonial Service, 28, 118. 38 da, 19 May 1912, 8. 39 dc, 8 January, 1890. 40 Trotman, “Women and Crime,” 258, 259. 41 See dc, January, May, September 1890, 1891, 1892, 1893. 42 Bronkhurst, The Colony of British Guiana, 242, 243. 43 Burton, Afro-Creole, 166. 44 Kirke, “Our Criminal Classes,” 2, 5, 6.

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193 Notes to pages 76–80 45 dc, 1 November 1885. 46 dc, 21 February 1889, 3. See also dc, 1 November 1885. 47 Herbert, “Rat Worship and Taboo,” 7, 8, 10. See also Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 41. 48 E. Wilson, The Sphinx in the City, 37. 49 Thomas, “Sanitation and Seeing,” 53, 156, 157. 50 Swanson, “The Sanitation Syndrome,” 387, 388, 390, 391. 51 Harrison, “Towards a Sanitary Utopia,” 19, 21. 52 David Trotman and Bonham Richardson have argued that colonial authorities posited similar connections in turn-of-the-century Trinidad and Barbados. See Trotman, Crime in Trinidad, 239, 240; Richardson, Panama Money in Barbados, 57, 77, 80; Kirke, “Our Criminal Classes,” 9; Kirke Twenty-five Years, 46, 47. 53 dc, 1 November 1885. 54 Report of the Register General for the Year 1891–1892, 384, 385. 55 Staff-captain Tucker made a similar point in his testimony. See Report into General Mortality, no. 344, 1906, vii, 16, csl. 56 This phrase is from Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger. In this work, she provides one of the fullest discussions available of the diverse meanings of dirt and disorder. See Douglas, Purity and Danger, 1, 35. 57 dc, 17 December 1905, 8. 58 dc, 24 January 1904, 8. 59 dc, 3 September 1889, 4; tcr, rpt. in dc, 22 July 1890, 4. 60 dc, 18 March 1906, 2. 61 Bronkhurst, The Colony of British Guiana, 41, 42, 241. 62 Beebe and Beebe, Our Search for a Wilderness, 117, 118. 63 Trotman, “Women and Crime,” 258, 259. 64 Burton, Afro-Creole, 163, 164. 65 Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 46. 66 Report on the Census Results, 1891, table 3; Report of the Census Results, 1911, table 3; Report on the Census Results, 1931, table 3. 67 However, in 1906, the Combined Court passed a resolution noting widespread complaints pertaining to the increasing number of unemployed in the colony. See bpp, Annual Report on British Guiana 1906–7, 840; Report on the Census Results, 1911, iv-II. 68 Report on the Census Results, 1891, table 3; Report on the Census Results, 1911, table 3; Report on the Census Results, 1921, table 3. See mcc, “Report on the Distribution of Free Meals to Destitute Children Attending Schools in Georgetown,” no. 353, 1906, nag. 69 Report on the Census Results, 1891, table 1; Report on the Census Results, 1911, table 1; Report on the Census Results, 1921, table 1. 70 Report on the Census Results 1891, table 3; Report on the Census Results, 1911, table 3; Report on the Census Results, 1921, table 3.

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Notes to pages 81–5

71 Report on the Census Results 1891, table 3; Report on the Census Results, 1911, table 3; Report on the Census Results, 1921, table 3. Rodney has argued that the 1891 census reports show that close to one out of every of four women in Georgetown worked as a domestic; however, the number is higher if one looks only at the proportion of employed adult women over fifteen who worked as domestics. See Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 206. The reasons for the drop in the number of female non-agricultural labourers is uncertain; the economic crisis likely played a role. 72 Sobers v. Payne, Report of Decisions in the Supreme Court of during the Year 1917, 94, 95, 98; lob, no. 7, Georgetown Tank-keepers to Town Clerk, 1 March 1902, 19, 20, nag. 73 Shepherd, “Gender, Migration and Settlement,” 235, 236. 74 Brereton, “Family Strategies,” 86, 87, 93, 100, 102; See also Reddock, Women, Labour, and Politics, 76. 75 Reddock, Women, Labour, and Politics, 79, 81. 76 mcp, “Report of the Committee Appointed to Take Evidence and Report upon the Retail Shop Assistants (Hours) Bill,” 1911, 3, 6, nag; Rodway, Hand-Book of British Guiana, 19. 77 Robert Schomburgk, A Description of British Guiana, 23. 78 See, for example, gd, 11, Clementi to Long, 10 January 1917, nag; gd, 45, Clementi to Long, 31 January 1917, encl. Inspector General of Police Colonel Clark to the Government Secretary, 22 January 1917; The Chamber of Commerce of the City of Georgetown, Report of the Council 1918, 2; Report of the Inspector General of Police, 1919, 536; mcc, “Enquiry into the Cost of the Necessaries of Life,” 28/1920, nag, 9, 10. See also mcc, “Report of the Commission Appointed to Enquire into the Conditions of Employment of and Rates of Wages Paid to Stevedores, Wharfmen and Labourers” (hereafter “Report of Commissioners into Employment of Stevedores”), 15/1924, nag. 79 mcc, “Enquiry into Employment of Stevedores,” 27/1924, 64, nag. 80 of Stevedores,” 15/1924, 13, 14, 15, nag. 81 mcc, “Enquiry into Employment of Stevedores,” 27/1924, 23, 46, 47, 18, 15, 12, 23, nag; mcc, “Report of Commissioners into Employment of Stevedores,” 15/1924, 3 nag. 82 mcc, “Report of Commissioners into Employment of Stevedores,” 15/ 1924, 3, 4, nag. 83 mcc, “Report of Commissioners into Employment of Stevedores,” 15/ 1924, 9, 15, 21, nag. 84 da, 4 July 1924, 4. 85 Report of the Inspector General of Police for the year 1885, 297, 298, 299. See also Correspondence with Regard to the Introduction into British Guiana of Agricultural Labourers from Barbados and St. Vincent, 4, ics, encl. no. 4, Secretary of the

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195 Notes to pages 85–7

86

87

88 89

90

91

92

93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100

Chamber of Commerce of Georgetown J.H. De Jonge to the Government Secretary, 28 September 1898; Bronkhurst, The Colony of British Guiana, 22. mcp, An Ordinance to Consolidate and Amend the Laws Relating to Procedure in Respect of Offences Punishable on Summary Conviction (no. 15 of 1893), ss. 89, 90, nag. See dc, January, May, and September 1890, 1891, 1892, 1893. The records of the magistrates’ courts in Georgetown have been destroyed, with the result that records of petty crimes such as vagrancy and loitering can be found only in the newspapers, of which the Daily Chronicle seems to have provided the most complete account. Report of the Inspector General of Police for 1892 to 1923. bg, no. 15 of 1893, s. 60. Imperial Education Conference, Imperial Education Conference Papers IIIEducational Systems of the Chief Colonies Not Possessing Responsible Government, 29. mcc, “Report of the Committee Appointed to Consider How the Accommodation at the Public Hospital, Georgetown, and the Alms House Can Best Be Re-arranged so as to Afford Relief to the Present Congestion at Those Institutions,” 10/1922, 2, 3, nag. It should be understood that the term “centipede,” as used by local elites, was reductive and pejorative. Due to the frequency with which I use this term, I have generally opted not to enclose it within quotation marks. Victor Turner has argued that liminal, or “threshold,” people were “necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space.” Indeed, his observation that liminal people could be masked as monsters to ensure anonymity is suggestive in light of the name “centipede,” which was attached to part of Georgetown’s poorer classes and which tended to blanket these individuals, rendering them unidentifiable. See Turner, The Ritual Process, 95, 172. The piece was published in 1917 but had appeared previously in the Daily Chronicle. E.N.N., “The Growth of Centipedism,” 11, 12, 13; Report of the Inspector General of Police for the Year 1907–1908, 602, 603. E.N.N., “The Growth of Centipedism,” 14, 15, 16, 17; dc, 6 May 1921, 4. Trudgill, Madonnas and Magdalens, 108. Kirke, Twenty-five Years, 48, 49. dc, 6 May 1921, 4. dc, 6 May 1921, 4. Report of the Police Magistrate, Georgetown, for the Year 1894–1895, 500. See also dc, 3 January 1904, 8.

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196

Notes to pages 87–90

101 Jones, Outcast London, 11, 327; Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 307, 308, 309; Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race, 76, 86, 95, 102, 209; Beckles, “The 200 Years War.” 102 Borror and White, A Field Guide to the Insects of America, 50, 51; Allsopp, The Dictionary of Caribbean English, 144. 103 dc, 15 May 1906, 4; dc, 24 January 1904, 8. 104 Rob Sindall quotes Stanley Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers as arguing that moral panics occasionally appeared in societies in which a “condition, episode, person or groups of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests.” Politicians, religious leaders, and the media articulate the “panic” and suggest solutions. The panic can be new or just newly apparent. According to Sindall, street violence in the latter half of the nineteenth century is an example of just such a panic. See Sindall, Street Violence, 29, 30, 164. 105 dc, 2 December 1906, 8. Walter Rodney posited a link between unemployment and these gangs, arguing that the uncertain nature of their work made dock labourers ideal recruits for urban centipede gangs. See Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 196, 205. 106 dc, 26 October 1902. 107 Rodney makes a similar point. See Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 205. 108 dc, 24 January 1904, 8. 109 dc, 29 March 1906, 3; dc, 13 May 1905, 4. 110 bpp, Further Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, Cd. 3026, lxxvii.343, encl. 1 in no. 6, Dargan, Brown, and Gonsalves to the Secretary of State, the Earl of Elgin, 11 April 1906, 409; Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 210. 111 Report of the Inspector General of Police for the Year 1907–1908 602, 603; dc, 13 May 1905, 4. 112 Report of the Inspector General of Police for 1907 to 1919. 113 Report of the Inspector General of Police for the Year 1920, 527. 114 dc, 6 May 1921, 4. 115 Van Sertima, Among the Common People, 3, 4, 6, 11, 12. 116 In 1920, another report also noted the high cost of living in Georgetown, particularly the cost of imported goods. See mcc, “Report of the Committee Appointed to Enquire into the Organization and Sufficiency of the Staff at the Alms House,” 859/1916, 2, nag; mcc, “Enquiry into the Cost of Necessaries of Life,” 28/1920, 5; Report into General Mortality, no. 344, 1906, csl. 117 Rodney argues much the same. See Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 205. 118 Kirke, “The Criminal Classes,” 7, 8.

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197 Notes to pages 90–4 119 120 121 122

123 124 125

126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138

139 140 141 142 143 144 145

dc, 19 September 1906, 3. dc, 8 February 1905, 3. dc, 17 December 1905, 8. Borror and White, A Field Guide to the Insects of America, 50, 51. Modern definitions may be unreliable guides to contemporaneous terms, but Allsopp’s definition of “centipede”/“santapee” is generally in line with late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century practice. His Dictionary characterizes “centipede” as an “anti-formal” word – that is, a “consciously familiar and intimate form,” often employed in “folk-proverbs and sayings” – suggesting its popular use at least in the modern period and possibly during the period of this study. Allsopp, Dictionary of Caribbean English, lvii, 144, 487. See, for example, Bettelheim, Nunley, and Bridges, “Caribbean Festival Arts”; Bettelheim, “Jonkonnu and Other Christmas Masquerades.” Quelch, Catalogue of British Guiana, 32. Anonymous, “Characteristic Traits of the Creolian and African Negroes in Jamaica, &c., &c.,” Columbian Magazine (April-October 1797), quoted in Abrahams and Szwed, After Africa, 233. Burton, Afro-Creole, 173, 174. See Chapter 7 for a fuller discussion of Jonkannu in British Guiana. Mangru, “Tadjah in British Guiana,” 44. Singh, Bloodstained Tombs, 4, 5, 6; Mangru, “Tadjah in British Guiana,” 44. Bronkhurst, The Colony of British Guiana, 362, 363, 364. B. Moore, Cultural Power Resistance and Pluralism, 223. Figure 96, Bettelheim and Nunley, “The Hosay Festival,” 119. See Mangru, “Tadjah in British Guiana.” Bronkhurst, The Colony of British Guiana, 362, 363, 364. Mangru, “Tadjah in British Guiana,” 52, 53. Reddock, “Contestations over Culture,” 71. dc, 6 May 1921, 4; 9 November 1906, 3; 29 March 1906, 4. dc, 30 April 1905, 2. da, 1 November 1924, 5; da, 3 August 1924, 12. At least one other source suggests the idle congregated at the post office. See da, 17 August 1924, 12. da, 3 August 1924, 12. da, 3 August 1924, 12; 30 October 1924, 8; 31 August, 1924, 10; 1 November 1924, 5. da, 3 August 1924, 12; 30 October 1924, 5; 1 November 1924, 5. da, 3 August 1924, 12; 1 November 1924, 5. Waugh, Ninety-two Days, 35. Burton, “Cricket, Carnival and Street Culture,” 187. See also Abrahams, The Man-of-Words. da, 17 August 1924, 12.

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198

Notes to pages 95–8

146 da, 17 August 1924, 12. See, for example, Burton on Jamaica’s Morant Bay uprising. Burton, Afro-Creole, 109. See also Ranger, Dance and Society. 147 da, 3 August 1924, 12. Ismay Bowen recounted this version, and George Gittens’s account essentially supported hers. 148 da, 3 August 1924, 12; da, 1 November 1924, 5. chapter five 1 Rodway, The Story of Georgetown, 21. 2 See, for example, Marshall, “We Be Wise to Many More Tings,” 18; Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 168. 3 Rodway, The Story of Georgetown, 132. See also Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 27, for a useful description of the blurring of categories that occurred in marketplaces. 4 Berlin and Morgan, “Introduction,” 1, 2. See also Mintz, “Caribbean Marketplaces.” 5 Mintz, “The Origins of the Jamaican Market System,” 182, 183, 194, 195, 197. 6 Dirks, The Black Saturnalis, 13. 7 Higman, Slave Populations, 208. 8 da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood, 52, 54, 57; Bolingbroke, Voyage to the Demerary, 30, 31. 9 Rodway, The Story of Georgetown, 11, 12. 10 Rodway, The Story of Georgetown, 131. According to Barry Higman, Georgetown’s first market opened in 1811. See Higman, Slave Populations, 240. 11 mtc, “Town Superintendent’s Annual Report, 1903,” 717, msb; mtc, Letter from Town Superintendent’s Office, 13 August 1917, 267, msb; dc, 16 October, 1889, 3. 12 Scoles “The Architecture of Georgetown,” 100, 101. 13 Ibid., 101. 14 Sullivan, Rambles and Scrambles, 312. 15 lob, Acting Clerk of Markets Communication from J.A.M. Pacheco, 23 December 1904 (January 1905), 3, msb; mcc, “Enquiry into the Necessaries of Life,” 28/1920, 8, nag. 16 mcc, 12 March 1923, 571, msb; mtc, Petition from J.L. Lewis to H.D. Belgrave, 28 June 1897, 235, 236, msb; mtc, Draft Petition from the Mayor and Town Council to the Governor and Combined Court, 13 February 1905, 297, 298, msb. 17 Application from Druggists, Stabroek Market, 15 September 1902, Monday, 22 September 1902, lob, 5, msb; Report of the Market Committee on Cookshops, 21 June 1905, Monday 26 June 1905, lob, 1, 2, msb. 18 Rodway, Hand-book of British Guiana, 22. 19 Mohamed, “The Establishment of the Portuguese Business Community,” 7. 20 Rodway, The Story of Georgetown, 32; Look Lai, Indentured Labor, 196.

Notes.fm Page 199 Thursday, December 5, 2002 11:03 AM

199 Notes to pages 98–100 21 Menezes, “The Madeiran Portuguese Woman in Guyanese Society 1830– 1930,” 162. 22 A number of Guyanese historians have debated the origins and nature of Portuguese participation in the Guianese petty retail sector. See, for example, Mohamed, “The Establishment of the Portuguese Business Community,” 7, 8; Adamson, “Monoculture and Village Decay,” 394; Adamson, Sugar without Slaves, 67, 68; B. Moore, Race, Power and Social Segmentation, 141, 139, 142, 143, 150. 23 Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 108. Mary Noel Menezes, while agreeing that this factor was significant, has pointed out that the period of Portuguese immigration coincided with a more “flexible” attitude by the Colonial Office towards the length of contracts. See Menezes, “The Madeiran Portuguese Woman,” 161. For a fuller discussion of the origins and nature of Portuguese participation in the Guianese petty retail sector, see Mohamed, “The Establishment of the Portuguese Business Community”; Adamson, “Monoculture and Village Decay”; Adamson, Sugar without Slaves; B. Moore, Race, Power and Social Segmentation. 24 Menezes, “The Madeiran Portuguese Woman,” 162. 25 bpp, Correspondence between the Governor of British Guiana and the Secretary of State for the Colonies, on the Subject of the Recent Disturbances in that Colony, Governor Wodehouse to H. Labouchere, 9 May 1856, 1856 XLIV.9, 75, encl. 3, Trial of John Sayers Orr, Supreme Court of Criminal Justice, 28 April 1856. 26 As the census reports neither indicated occupation by ethnicity nor listed the number of hucksters and hawkers, it is difficult to draw firm conclusions about the precise involvement of any ethnic groups in Georgetown’s huckstering and hawking sectors. Petitions to the town council constitute one source; however, it must be remembered that the petitioners’ names may indicate acculturation rather than ethnicity. 27 Town Council Letters January to June, 1925, Town Clerk J.B. Woolford to the Immigration Agent General, 16 March 1925, nag, encl. Clerk of the Markets J.A.M. Pacheco to Woolford, 7 March 1925. See also Look Lai, indentured Labor, 200. 28 Seecharan, Tiger in the Stars, 253, 254. 29 G.D., confidential, Clementi to Bonar Law, 31 October 1916, nag; British Guiana Directory and Almanac for 1888, 1890, 1892, 1894, 1896, 1898, 1900, 1902, 1906. 30 Menezes, “The Madeiran Portuguese Woman,” 162. 31 See, for example, Beckles, Centering Woman. See also Reddock, Women, Labour, and Politics, 21. 32 da Costa, Crowns of Glory, 59; Mohamed, “The Establishment of the Portuguese Business Community,” 2; Bolingbroke, Voyage to the Demerary, 30, 31. See also Higman, Slave Populations, 239.

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200

Notes to pages 100–4

33 See, for example, Mintz, “The Contemporary Jamaican Market System”; and Mintz, “Black Women.” See also Reddock, Women, Labour, and Politics, chap. 2. 34 Beckles, Centering Woman, 153. 35 See, for example, mtc, Joshua Knights to Mayor, 7 September 1918, 436, msb. See also rg, 10 January 1889. 36 See British Guiana Directory and Almanac for 1888, 1890, 1892, 1894, 1896, 1898, 1900, 1902, and 1906. Perhaps Mrs Chang and Mrs Mary Chang were the same woman; for the purposes of the tables, I assumed they were two women. 37 mtc, Manager of Natural Ice Depot to Mayor and Town Council, 24 July 1899, 145, 148, msb. 38 da, 1 May 1924, 5. 39 mtc, Hill to Belgrave, 14 October 1897, 714, 743, msb; Report on the Census Results, 1891, 16, table 4; dc, 13 March 1906, 4. 40 Town Council Report, petition from stallholders in the market, to Mayor and Town Council, October 1890, rptd in dc, 4 November 1890, 4. 41 mtc, “Constabulary Report for June 1917,” msb; mtc, Sergeant in Charge Robert Lashley to Acting Town Superintendent James Seymour, 26 November 1917, 980, msb; Lashley to Mayor and Town Council, 1 November 1921, 712, msb; mtc, “Constabulary Report for August 1917,” 504, msb. 42 See, for example, mtc, Fernandes to Hill, 18/9/99, 25 September 1899, 664, 671, msb; mtc, Jas. N. Edwards to Hill, 20 and 25 September 1899, 666, msb; City Engineer I. Harris to Town Clerk, 30 January 1923, msb, encl. Memo from Captain in Charge Geo. H. Andrews to Harris, 12 February 1923, 223, 224; lob, “Report of the City Engineer for June 1928,” 446, msb. See also mtc, “Report of the Constabulary Committee,” 19 July 1897, 111, 112, msb; mtc, J.M. Lacee to Hill, 26 June 1897, 119, msb; mtc, Robert Quashie to Hill, 29 June 1897, 115, msb. 43 mtc, Petition from H. Gollenstede, 30 September 1897, 18 October 1897, 897, 898, msb; mtc, Petition from H. Gollenstede, 20 October 1897, 1003, 1006, 1015, msb; mtc, “Report of the Market Committee,” 12 October 1897, 883, msb; mtc, Petition from Joao De Silva Gaspar to Mayor and Town Council, 30 September 1897, 901, 902, msb; mtc, Fernandes to Fairbairn, 6 September 1899, 672, 679, 679, msb. 44 mtc, “Report of the Town Superintendent for September 1899,” 762, 763, msb. 45 mtc, “Report of the Constabulary Committee,” 23 October 1899, 929, 933, msb. 46 mtc, Petition from J.L. Lewis to Belgrave, 28 June 1897, 235, msb; Fernandes to Fairbarin, 19 September 1900, 607, msb; mtc, Draft Petition from the Mayor and Town Council to the Governor and Combined Court, 13 February 1905, 298, msb.

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201 Notes to pages 104–8 47 bg, no. 1 of 1860, ss. 147, 143; bg, no. 25 of 1898, bylaw 5, ss. 11, 16. 48 lob, Communication from Acting Clerk of Markets Pacheco, 23 December 1904 (January 1905), 3, msb; Private Minutes 1901 to 1903, 14 April 1903, 36, msb. 49 mtc, Draft petition from the Mayor and Town Council to the Governor and Combined Court, 13 February 1905, 297, 298, msb; lob, Communication from Acting Clerk of Markets Pacheco, 23 December 1904 (January 1905), 2, 3, 4, msb. 50 mtc, Government Secretary to the Town Clerk, 3 March 1905, 751, nag. 51 mtc, Petition from Henry Gollensted to the Mayor and Town Council, 20 October 1897, 1005, msb; lob, Petition from Butchers to the Mayor and Town Council, 7 July 1905, 19, 21, msb. 52 lob, Application from Manoel Ignacio to Fairbairn, 1 July 1904, 26, msb. 53 British Guiana Directory and Almanack for 1888, 1890, 1892, 1894, 1896, 1898, 1900, 1902, 1906. 54 mtc, Fernandes to Fairbarin, 19 September 1900, 607, msb; mtc, Petition from John Rodrigues to the Mayor and Town Council, 19 September 1900, 609, 610, msb. 55 mtc, Secretary-treasurer of British Guiana Labour Union Hubert Critchlow to Mayor and Town Council, 2 November 1925, 817, msb. 56 mtc, Petition from butchers in Stabroek Market to Mayor and Town Council, 22 March 1899, 127, 135, msb. 57 lob, Petition from butchers to the Mayor and Town Council, 7 July 1905, 19, 20, 21, msb. 58 tcr, Petition from stall-holders in Stabroek Market, 17 April, 1906, rptd. in dc, 15 May 1906, 3; tcr, rptd. in dc, 29 May 1906, 3. 59 lob, Acting Clerk of Markets Pacheco to Fairbairn, 19 August 1905, 48, 49, msb. 60 lob, George Bell to the Mayor and Town Council, 18 August 1904, 46, 47, 48, msb. 61 tcr, rptd. in dc, 18 February 1890, 5. 62 mtc, Clerk of Markets Fernandes to Fairbairn, 19 September 1900, 607, msb. 63 Higman, Slave Populations, 240. 64 tcr, rptd. in dc, 6 May 1890, 3, 4. 65 dc, 7 August 1889, 4. 66 bg, no. 25 of 1898, bylaw 5, s. 73. 67 mcp, Georgetown, “By-Laws Made by the Mayor and Town Council of Georgetown in Pursuance of the Georgetown Town Council Ordinance, 1860, with Respect to Hawking Fresh Meat in the City of Georgetown (Ordinance no. 25 of 1860, s. 59),” (1887), ss. 1, 2, nag; bg, no. 25 of 1898, bylaw 1, s. 42. 68 mcp, Georgetown, “By-law for the Regulation of Dairies, Cow-sheds and Milk Shops, and the Keeping of Cows and Relating to the Construction and

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202

69 70 71 72

73 74 75 76 77

78 79 80

81

82

83

Notes to pages 108–10

Cleaning of Cowhouses, Byres and Cattle Sheds in Georgetown,” (1901), s. 1.4, nag; mcp, Georgetown, “By-laws for the Regulation of Dairies, Cowsheds and Milk Shops, and the Keeping of Cows and Relating to the Construction and Cleansing of Cow-houses, Byres and Cattle-sheds Connected with the Milk Supply of the City of Georgetown,” (1907), nag. Higman, Slave Populations, 240. bg, no. 1 of 1860, part 4, s. 111; No. 17 of 1893, s. 156. bg, no. 25 of 1898, bylaw 1, ss. 13, 14; No. 1 of 1860, part 4, s. 107; No. 44 of 1918, by-law 1, s. 6, 7. mcp, Georgetown, “By-Laws Made by the Mayor and Town Council of Georgetown in Pursuance of the Georgetown Town Council Ordinance, 1860, with Respect to Hawking Fresh Meat in the City of Georgetown (Ordinance no. 25 of 1860, s. 59),” (1887), ss. 1, 2, nag; bg, no. 25 of 1898, bylaw 1, ss. 23, 37, 38. tcr, rptd. in dc, 26 January 1904, 4. mtc, 12 September 1904, 436, 445, msb; Lushington to Town Clerk, 5 December 1904, 1281, msb. dc, 29 April 1906, 8. dc, 28 October 1885. mtc, See J.L. Lewis to Belgrave, 28 June 1897, 235, 235, msb; mtc, Petition from Joaquim Da Silva, 25 June 1897, 235, 236, 237, msb; mtc, “Report of the Market Committee,” 22 July 1897, 233, msb. mtc, Marginal note from Clerk of Markets, 9 August 1897, 238, msb. B. Moore, Race, Power and Social Segmentation, 42, 152. See, for example, Town Council Report, petition from stallholders in the market, to Mayor and Town Council, October 1890, from John de Caires, Manole de Caires, M.G. Rodrigues, Manoel Jose Agostinho, G. Jardin, Mary Jose Rodrigues, John Faria, M. G. Ornellas, L.G. Ornellas, F.G. Farinha, Manoel Pereira, Antonio Vieira, John Vieira, D’Oliverira Brothers, Jose Fernandes, inhabitants of Georgetown, rptd. in dc, 4 November 1890, 4. Bisnauth and Fraser have made this argument. See Bisnauth, “The East Indian Immigrant Society,” 344, 346. See also Fraser, “The Immigration Issue,” 21. See the following for an example of a complaint by cowkeepers about “malicious” police prosecutions. lob, no. 13, Petition of the Under-signed Cowkeepers, 13 January 1902, 25, 26, 27, 28, msb. 86 bpp (1852), 31 (405): 4, stipendiary magistrates’ reports ending 30 June 1851; The Colonist 3 February 1854; co 111/334, Hinks to Newcastle, no. 107, 2 July 1862, and no. 50, 5 April 1862, all qtd. in Adamson, Sugar without Slaves, 69, 70; Adamson, Sugar without Slaves, 71. Moore’s suggestion that Afro-Guianese also despised the Portuguese because of their

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203 Notes to pages 110–13

84 85 86 87

88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

96 97 98 99 100

101

102

“unhygienic” habits suggests popular perceptions that ethnically specific trading groups were “unclean,” a view also held of East Indian milk vendors. See B. Moore, Race, Power and Social Segmentation, 42, 145, 152. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 53, 54. See, for example, da, 14 September, 1912, 5. See also da, 28 July 1912, 5. Kirke, Twenty-five Years, 273. bpp (1852), 31 (405): 4, stipendiary magistrates’ reports ending 30 June 1851; The Colonist 3 February 1854; 23 February 1855; co 111/334, Hinks to Newcastle, no. 107, 2 July 1862, and no. 50, 5 April 1862, all qtd. in Adamson, Sugar without Slaves, 69. According to Crookall, a “bit” was a four-penny coin. See Crookall, British Guiana, 85. bg, no. 1 of 1860, s. 166; No. 25 of 1898, bylaw no. 5, s. 68. bg, no. 1 of 1860, ss. 145, 163, 164. See also bg, no. 25 of 1898. mtc, Lashley to Town Superintendent K. Harris, 20 November 1918, msb, encl. Benjamin to Mayor, 9 November 1918, 847. Mintz, forward to Crab Antics, x, xi; P. Wilson, Crab Antics, 116, 150, 152. Jayawardena, Conflict and Solidarity, vii, 48, 72, 74, 77, 81, 82, 88. Cruickshank, Black Talk, 31. Burton, Afro-Creole, 164, 166. See rg, January to June 1889. See also dc, January to December 1890; January, May, September 1891; January, April, September 1892; January, April, September 1893. See rg, 19 January 1889; 19 March 1889; 26 March 1889; 8 May 1889; 7 June 1889. rg 7 June 1889, 19 June 1889. bg, no. 1 of 1860, ss. 150, 168; No. 25 of 1893, bylaw 5, ss. 14, 15, 75, 67, 74, 9. mtc, Report on investigation by the mayor of charges brought against T.C. no. 7 Hughes, 12 October 1921, 558, 599, 560, 561, msb. mtc, Memo from Acting Clerk of Markets Pacheco to the Mayor, 27 September 1921, msb; encl. T.C. Hughes to the Mayor and Town Council, 27 September 1921, 567, 568, 569. mtc, Report on investigation by the Mayor of charges brought against T.C. no. 7 Hughes, 12 October 1921, 558, 599, 560, 561, msb; mtc, Memo from Pacheco to the Mayor, 27 September 1921, msb, encl. Hughes to the Mayor and Town Council, 27 September 1921, 567, 568, 569. mtc, Report on investigation by the mayor of charges brought against T.C. no. 7 Hughes, 12 October 1921, 558, 599, 560, 561, msb; mtc, Memo from Pacheco to the Mayor, 27 September 1921, msb, encl. T.C. Hughes to the Mayor and Town Council, 27 September 1921, 12 October 1921, 567, 568, 569; mtc, Memo from Pacheco to the Mayor, 27 September 1921, msb, encl. Acting Assistant Clerk of Markets A.R. Gomes to Pacheco, 26 September 1921, 563, 564.

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204

Notes to pages 114–17

103 mtc, Report on investigation by the mayor of charges brought against T.C. no. 7 Hughes, 12 October 1921, 558, 599, 560, 561, msb; mtc, Memo from Pacheco to the Mayor, 27 September 1921, msb, encl. Gomes to Pacheco, 26 September 1921, 563, 564. 104 mtc, Memo from Pacheco to the Mayor, 27 September 1921, msb, encl. Gomes to Pacheco, 26 September 1921, 563, 564. See also encl. Hughes to the Mayor and Town Council, 27 September 1921, 567, 568, 569; mtc, Report on investigation by the mayor of charges brought against T.C. no. 7 Hughes, 12 October 1921, 558, 599, 560, 561, msb. 105 mtc, Report on investigation by the Mayor of charges brought against T.C. no. 7 Hughes, 12 October 1921, 558, 599, 560, 561, msb. 106 mtc, Pacheco to the Mayor, 27 September 1921, 562, msb. 107 mtc, from Pacheco to the Mayor, 27 September 1921, msb, encl. Gomes to Pacheco, 26 September 1921, 563, 564. See also encl. Hughes to the Mayor and Town Council, 27 September 1921, 567, 568, 569. 108 The minutes of the Georgetown town council are filled with examples of disputes between market officials and market constables. chapter six 1 “York” to the President of the Board of Police, 1837, qtd. in Rodway, The Story of Georgetown, 28. 2 mtc, “Dooknie's Statement,” 15 August 1921, 225, msb. 3 mtc, “Naraine's Statement,” 15 August 1921, 234, msb. 4 mtc, “T.C. Seton's Reply,” 15 August 1921, 227, msb; mtc, “Spencer's Reply,” 15 August 1921, 228, 229, msb. 5 mtc, “Dooknie's Statement,” 15 August 1921, 225, msb. 6 mtc, “T.C. Seton's Reply,” 15 August 1921, 227, msb; mtc, “Spencer's Reply,” 15 August 1921, 228, 229, msb. 7 The Daily Chronicle has another version. On 16 August 1921 it reported that the two constables complained that their cases were not investigated and that they could not “say a word in their defence.” According to the Chronicle story, Seton charged Dooknie for selling milk without a badge; she was fined three dollars and $1.20 costs. Narraine then told Seton that Nassibul was guilty of the same offence and threatened him with reporting this fact to the town council if it was not “dealt with”; Nassibul was fined four dollars and $1.20 costs. dc, 16 August 1921, 4. 8 co 111/617, 38008, R.P. Stewart, Immigration Agent General, to the Government Secretary, 5 June 1918, pro. Look Lai has argued much the same for Trinidad, where, by the 1870a, they were “major milk suppliers,” especially to Port of Spain. See Look Lai, Indentured Labor, 222, 225, 240, 248.

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205 Notes to pages 117–21 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17

18 19 20 21 22

23 24

25 26 27 28 29

mtc, 9 July 1917, 44, msb. E.N.N., “Our Local Moneylenders,” 88, 91. See cartoons, dc, 17 July 1921, 27 February 1921. Bronkhurst, The Colony of British Guiana, 320, 321. Ibid. Wishart, Report of the Medical Officer of Health, 1912, 7, msb; Luke Hill, Town Superintendent's Annual Report of 1908, 8, msb. Wishart, Annual Report of the Public Health Department of the City of Georgetown for the Year 1914, 55, msb; Wishart, Annual Report of the Public Health Department of the City of Georgetown, 1915, 41, msb. mtc, Letter from the Undersigned to the Mayor and Council, 30 October 1906, 796, 797, 798, msb. Names are an unreliable guide; they may indicate ethnicity or, at most, acculturation. mtc, A. Seton Milne, “Report of Cowpens and Cows in the City of Georgetown,” 12 March 1923, 642, 643, 644, msb. Shepherd, “Gender, Migration and Settlement,” 246, 247. Report on the Census Results, 1891, 68; Report on the Census Results, 1911, 71; Report on the Census Results, 1921, 75. lob, Petition of undersigned cow-keepers, 13 January 1902, 25, 26, 27, 28, msb. Jenkins, The Coolie, 364. Report of the Immigration Agent General for the Year 1902-1903, 198; Report of the Immigration Agent General for the Year 1903-1904, 219. Milk selling was also a potential source of wealth for Indians in Trinidad. Look Lai has characterized some Indians in Trinidad who owned cows and sold milk as part of an “enterprising peasant proprietor class.” See Look Lai, Indentured Labor, 222, 240, 248, 249, 249. See Bradbury, “Pigs, Cows, and Boarders.” Bisnauth argues that, by 1911, Indo-Guianese were the largest cattle owners in the colony. See Bisnauth, “The East Indian Immigrant Society,” 344. See the following for figures on cows and cowpens in Georgetown and its suburbs. Annual Report of the Public Health Department of the City of Georgetown for 1912, 1914, 1915, msb; mtc, “Town Superintendent's Annual Report, 1908,” 629, msb. mtc, A. Seton Milne, “Report of Cowpens and Cows in the City of Georgetown, 1923,” 644, msb. lob, Ben Abdool Khan to Mayor and Town Council, 19 December 1904, 13, msb. lob, Minute from Luke Hill, 21 December 1904, 14, msb. See, for example, dc, 12 October 1905, 3; mtc, “Dooknie's Statement,” 15 August 1921, 225, msb. mtc, “T.C. Spencer's Statement,” 15 August 1921, 228, msb. Perhaps milk selling was significant to the colony's Indo-Guianese population because

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206

30 31 32 33

34 35 36 37

38 39 40

41

42 43

Notes to pages 121–3

it complemented cowkeeping but did not harm the cows. Hindu reverence for cows is widely recognized. This point was made by Inspector General of Police Colonel Lushington, who, when inspecting cows in Kitty Village, noted that they seemed lovingly cared for. lob, Government Secretary Charles Cox to Town Clerk, 23 November 1905, msb, encl. Dr J.C. Conyers to the Surgeon General, 23 November 1905, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27. A number of scholars of colonial Indian history have addressed the late nineteenth-century “cow-protection” movement and the conflict this brought about with the British rulers. See, for example, Robb, “The Challenge of Gau Mata.” dc, 8 April 1921, 5. dc, 2 August 1921, 4. Report of the Government Analyst for the Year 1910-1911, 604; dc, 18 February 1905, 3. mtc, “Report of Chief Sanitary Inspector, August 1921,” msb. See Wishart, Annual Report of the Public Health Department 1920, 42, msb; mtc, “Report of the Chief Sanitary Inspector, June 1921,” 30, msb; mtc, “Report of the Chief Sanitary Inspector, February 1923,” 631, msb. mtc, Acting Sanitary Inspector S.H. Parkison to Medical Officer of Health, 9 July 1917, 44, msb. mtc, Government Analyst J.D. Harrison to Town Clerk, 3 September 1900, 491, 492, msb. mtc, “Report of the Chief Sanitary Inspector, January 1923,” 313, msb. This question, on being put to the town clerk, elicited the response that anyone who kept a shop to sell milk must be twice licensed: once, as stipulated by the tax ordinance of 1917, to keep a shop to sell milk, and again to sell milk (which was an item for which there was a special licence). mtc, Woolford to Mayor and Council, 21 October 1918, 789, msb; mtc, “Report of the Chief Sanitary Inspector, September 1918,” 685, msb. lob, Petition of undersigned cowkeepers, 13 January 1902, 25, 26, 27, 28, msb. See D.C., 18 January 1906, 4, 3; 21 January 1906, 8. mtc, “Report of the Chief Sanitary Inspector, June 1921,” 30, 31, msb; mtc, Parkinson to Medical Officer of Health, 9 July 1917, 44, msb; mtc, “Report of Chief Sanitary Inspector, October 1917,” 907, msb. Atkins, “White Poison?” 217, 210. See also L. Wilson, “The Historical Riddle of Milk-Borne Scarlet Fever,” 321; Atkins, “Sophistication Detected,” 338, 317. Melvin, “Milk to Motherhood,” 113; Atkins, “White Poison?” 208, 209, 210, 211. Atkins, “White Poison?” 219; Miller, “To Stop the Slaughter,” 158. See also Melvin, “Milk to Motherhood”; Shoemaker, “The Philadelphia Pediatric Society.”

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207 Notes to pages 123–5 44 Atkins, “Sophistication Detected,” 338. 45 Atkins, “White Poison?” 226. 46 Wise and Minett, “Review of the Milk Question” 75; Report of the Surgeon General for the Year 1906-1907, encl. “Report on Milk Supply of Georgetown,” 536; Report into General Mortality, no. 344, 1906, 19, csl. 47 dc, 25 October 1905, 4. 48 Wise and Minette, “Review of the Milk Question in British Guiana” 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 83. See also lob, “Petition of undersigned cow-keepers,” 13 January 1902 25, 26, 27, 28, msb. 49 lob, “Report of the Drainage and Health and Cemeteries Committee with Reference to Milk Supply, Together with Correspondence Connected Therewith,” 23 October 1905, msb, encl. Fairbairn to Government Secretary Charles Cox, 16 October 1905, 9, 10. See also encl. Evidence of St Aubyn before the Drainage and Health and Cemeteries Committee, 16 October 1905, 9, 10, 18. See also encl. Cox to the Mayor, 14 October 1905, 7, msb. 50 mtc, Luke Hill, “Town Superintendent's Annual Report, 1903,” 28 March 1904, 705, msb. 51 In 1912 Wise was the government medical officer of health, and Minett (a medical doctor) was the assistant government medical officer of health and a bacteriologist. See Wise and Minett, “Review of the Milk Question,” 77. 52 da, 17 May 1912, 5. 53 dc, 25 March 1921, 5. 54 da, 14 June 1912, 5; Town Council Letters, January to June, 1925, Ramsook to Woolford, 25 February 1925, msb. 55 Report into General Morality, no. 344, 1906, 19, csl. 56 da, 16 May 1912, 5; da, 17 May 1912, 5. 57 mtc, A. Seton Milne, “Report of Cowpens and Cows in the City of Georgetown,” 12 March 1923, 644, msb. 58 See Nath, History of Indians in Guyana, 44, concerning efforts to prevent indentureds entering Georgetown. 59 For examples from other jurisdictions, see Packard, “Tuberculosis and the Development of Industrial Health Policies”; Parnell, “Sanitation, Segregation and the Natives (Urban Areas) Act.” See also Thomas, “Sanitation and Seeing.” 60 See dc, 14 October 1905, 3. See also lob, “Report of the Drainage and Health and Cemeteries Committee with Reference to Milk Supply, Together with Correspondence Connected Therewith,” Evidence of Patterson before the Drainage and Health and Cemeteries Committee, 16 October 1905, 14, 15, 16, msb; lob, Cox to Town Clerk, 23 November 1905, msb, encl. Dr J.C. Conyers to the Surgeon General, 23 November 1905, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27. See also encl. Acting Chief County Inspector Kerr to Lushington, 1 November 1905, 28, 29, 31.

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208

Notes to pages 126–8

61 lob, “Report of the Drainage and Health and Cemetaries Committee with Reference to Milk Supply, Together with Correspondence Connected Therewith,” msb, encl. Fairbairn to Cox, 16 October 1905. See also encl. Evidence of St. Aubyn, before the Drainage and Health and Cemeteries Committee, 16 October 1905, 9, 10, 18. See also dc, 16 July 1905, 3; dc, 25 October 1905, 3. Maynard Swanson notes a similar association between Indians and disease. Swanson, “The Sanitation Syndrome,” 390. 62 Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap, and Water, 23. 63 See chap. 3. 64 mtc, Parkinson to Medical Officer of Health, 9 July 1917, 44, msb; mtc, 12 February 1923, 198, 199, msb; mtc, “Report of Chief Sanitary Inspector, June 1923,” 313, msb. See also mtc, S.H. Parkinson, “Report of Acting Sanitary Inspector, July 1917,” 252, msb. See also mtc, “Report of Chief Sanitary Inspector, June 1921,” 30, 31, msb. 65 dc, 8 April 1921, 5. 66 The newspaper's stance could reflect general opposition to the government. However, the Chronicle was not consistently antagonistic, both applauding and condemning the governor's actions during the 1905 riot. See, for example, co 111/549 3830, pro, encl dc, 3 January 1906, and 7 January 1906. 67 dc, 25 October 1905, 3, 4. 68 lob, “Report of the Drainage and Health and Cemeteries Committee with Reference to Milk Supply, Together with Correspondence Connected Therewith,” msb, encl. Fairbairn to Cox, 16 October 1905, 9, 10. See also encl. Evidence of Mr. St. Aubyn, before the Drainage and Health and Cemeteries Committee,” 16 October 1905, 18. 69 Wise and Minette, “Review of the Milk Question,” 75, 76, 77, 78, 79. See also Report of the Surgeon General for the Year 1909, encl. C.J. Gomes, “Special Report on Outbreak of Virulent Fever, 1909,” 464, 465, 466. 70 da, 16 May 1912, 5. 71 The Baby Saving League of British Guiana, The Fifth Annual Report, 1918, 7. 72 dc, 4 December 1921, 4; mtc, “Report of the Chief Sanitary Inspector, January 1923,” 313, msb. 73 mtc, Hampden King to Town Clerk, 22 April 1905, 1003, msb. 74 Report into General Mortality, no. 334, 1906, 11, 12, csl. See Report of the Surgeon General for 1903 to 1920; Wishart, Annual Report of the Public Health Department of the City of Georgetown for the Year 1923, 5, 6, msb; Report of the Register General for 1906 to 1919. 75 Atkins, “White Poison?” 219. 76 Report of the Surgeon General for the Year 1903-04, 465. See also Report of the Surgeon General for the Year 1906 to 1907, encl. “Report on Milk Supply of Georgetown,” 536.

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209 Notes to pages 128–30 77 The British “infant milk depot” movement began in 1899 with the opening of a depot in St Helens, with more following in the first years of the 1900s. They came to the United States soon afterwards. See Atkins, “White Poison?” 223; Miller, “To Stop the Slaughter,” 163. 78 By 1916 the Baby Saving League was established in the medical districts of Georgetown, New Amsterdam, Peter's Hall, Belle Vue, Plaisance, Buxton, Mahica, Leonora, Port Mourant, Springlands, Suddie, and Anna Regina. See Report of the Surgeon General for the Year 1909-1910, 452. See also Wishart, Annual Report of the Public Health Department of the City of Georgetown for 1923, 1915, 6; 3, msb. See also The Baby Saving League of British Guiana, Second Annual Report, 1915, 11, and The Fifth Annual Report, 1918, 8; Report of the Surgeon General for the Year 1916, 548. 79 mtc, Wishart, “Annual Report of the Public Health Department of the City of Georgetown for the Year 1924,” 633-6, 633-7, msb. 80 Wishart, Annual Report of the Public Health Department of the City of Georgetown for the Year 1914, 18, msb. For the duties of the health visitors, see, for example, mtc, Health Visitor M. Garrat, “Report of April 1916,” 622, msb; Report of the Surgeon General for the Year 1916, 548; The Baby Saving League of British Guiana, Second Annual Report, 1915, 10, and The Fifth Annual Report, 1918. 81 Report into General Mortality, no. 334, 1906, 14, 15, 19, csl. 82 Wise and Minett, “Review of the Milk Question,” 83. 83 mtc, “Report of the Chief Sanitary Inspector, June 1921,” 32, 33, msb. 84 dc, 4 December 1921, 4. 85 mtc, “Report of the Chief Sanitary Inspector, January 1923,” 313, msb. See also mtc, “Report of the Chief Sanitary Inspector, June 1921,” 33, msb. 86 dc, 8 December 1921, 8. 87 Report of the Surgeon General for the Year 1906-1907, 536; Report of the Surgeon General for the Year 1909-1910, encl. C.J. Gomes, “Report on Milk Supply of Georgetown” 464, 465, 466. There seemed to be some popular recognition of this problem. In 1906 W.P. Humphrey announced his intention to open a dairy in Kitty to provide clean and uncontaminated milk. He had a large clean stable, healthy well fed cows, and security measures in place to keep his employees from adulterating the milk. See dc, 21 October 1906, 5. See Humphrey's advertisement, dc, 12 December 1906, 4. See also Wishart, Report of the Medical Officer of Health 1912, 7, 19, msb; Wise and Minett “Review of the Milk Question,” 78. 88 dc, 4 December 1921, 4. 89 Luke Hill, Town Superintendent's Annual Report of 1908, 5, msb; Wise and Minett, “Review of the Milk Question,” 76, 83. 90 In 1924 “Pam,” in her column “Of Interest to Women,” described “the correct way to scald milk” so that one would kill the germs

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210

91 92 93

94 95 96 97 98 99

100 101

102 103 104 105

106 107

108 109

Notes to pages 130–3

while keeping the nutrients (milk should be scalded at seventy degrees for twenty minutes). da, 17 August 1924, 6; Hill, “The Municipality of Georgetown,” 234. Hill, “Food Adulteration,” Timehri, n.s., 9 (1895), 212. dc, 7 February 1886, 3; Hill, “Food Adulteration,” 212. In 1888, though, Kirke suggested that milk was consumed primarily by the “wealthier classes.” See Kirke, “Our Criminal Classes,” 10; Report into General Mortality, no. 344, 1906, 19, v, v, xii, 14, 15, 19, csl. dc, 21 October 1906, 5; gd, Clementi to Secretary of State Long, 6 March 1917, nag, encl. 94, Combined Court Report. dc, 2 August 1921, 4. mcc, “Report of Commissioners into Employment of Stevedores,” 15/ 1924, 7, nag. dc, 2 August 1921, 4. See Report of the Government Analyst for 1894 to 1911. See Report of the Government Analyst for the Year 1910-1911, 604. See also mtc, “Town Superintendent's Annual Report, 1903,” msb; Town Superintendent's Annual Report for 1908, 1914, 1915; Wishart, Report of the Medical Officer of Health, 1912; Annual Report of the Public Health Department of the City of Georgetown for 1914, 1920, 1923, 1924. The Bread (Making and Selling Ordinance, 1850) (no. 1 of 1850), ss. 12, 15, The Laws of British Guiana v. 1. The Sale of Food and Drugs Ordinance, 1892 (no. 9 of 1892), ss. 4, 7, 9, The Laws of British Guiana 1891-1895 v. 4; mcp, An Ordinance to Provide Against the Adulteration of Food and Drugs (no. 11 of 1882), ss. 3, 5, 6, 8, 12; The Sale of Food and Drugs (Consolidation) Ordinance 1918 (no. 38 of 1918), s. 19.1, The Laws of British Guiana (1803 to 1921) v. 4; No. 38 of 1918, ss. 6, 7, 9, 2, 19.1, 3. bg, no. 11 of 1882, ss. 3, 12; No. 9 of 1892, s. 19.1; No. 38 of 1918, s. 18. bg, no. 11 of 1882, ss. 11, 12. bg, no. 9 of 1892, ss. 19, 18.1, 18.2. bg, no. 25 of 1898, Seventh Schedule, s. 1.24; Government Analyst J. D. Harrison to Town Clerk, 3 September, 1900, Monday 10 September 1900, mtc, 491, 492, msb. lob, Chairman of the Central Board of Health J. E. Godfrey to the Town Clerk, 12 July 1905, 13, msb. mcp, Georgetown, “By-law for the Regulation of Dairies, Cow-sheds and Milk Shops, and the Keeping of Cows and Relating to the Construction and Cleaning of Cowhouses, Byres and Cattle Sheds in Georgetown” (1901), ss. 1, 2, 3, nag. Wise and Minett, “Review of the Milk Question,” 77. mtc, “Report of the Drainage and Health and Cemeteries Committee,” 24 August 1906, 193, msb.

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211 Notes to pages 133–5 110 mtc, Hampden King to Town Clerk, 20 September 1906, msb, encl. Government Bacteriologist K.S. Wise to Surgeon General J.E. Godfrey, 6 July 1906, 505. 111 mtc, J. Hampden King to Town Clerk 20 September 1906, encl. Letter from Godfrey, 502, 504, 505, msb. 112 Wise and Minett, “Review of the Milk Question,” 78. 113 mcp, Georgetown, “By-laws for the Regulation of Dairies, Cow-sheds and Milk Shops, and the Keeping of Cows and Relating to the Construction and Cleansing of Cow-houses, Byres and Cattle-sheds Connected with the Milk Supply of the City of Georgetown”(1907), 12, nag. See also Wise and Minett, “Review of the Milk Question,” 78. 114 mcp, Georgetown, “By-laws for the Regulation of Dairies, Cow-sheds and Milk Shops, and the Keeping of Cows and Relating to the Construction and Cleansing of Cow-houses, Byres and Cattle-sheds Connected with the Milk Supply of the City of Georgetown” (1907), ss. 12, 14-28, 13, 14, 15, nag. 115 See dc, 7 February 1886, 3. See also Kirke, “Our Criminal Classes,” 10. 116 Supplement to the Annual Report for 1892-1893 of the Government Analytical Chemist, 439, 440. 117 Report of the Government Analyst for the Year 1891-1892, 426; Report of the Government Analyst for the Year 1892-1893, 433. 118 Report of the Government Analyst for the Year 1894-1895, 458; Bisnauth argues that regulations for testing milk for adulteration were enforced from October 1908. Bisnauth, 346. 119 Hill, “The Municipality of Georgetown,” 232. 120 Report of the Police Force for the Year 1883; Report of the Inspector of Police for 1885, 1886; Report of the Inspector General of Police for 1892 to 1923. 121 See, for example, Annual Report of the Public Health Department of the City of Georgetown for the Year 1914, 55, msb; Annual Report of the Public Health Department of the City of Georgetown 1915, 41, 43, msb. 122 See mtc, Parkinson to Medical Officer of Health, July to December 1917, msb. See also lob, “Report of Town Superintendent” for 1902, 1904, 1905, msb; Town Superintendent's Annual Report for 1908, 1912, 1914, 1915, msb. mtc, “Town Superintendent's Annual Report, 1903,” msb. See also Wishart, Annual Report of the Public Health Department of the City of Georgetown for 1920 and 1923, msb. 123 lob, “Town Superintendent's Report, May 1902,” 6, msb. 124 da, 19 May 1912, 8. 125 lob, “Town Superintendent's Report, November 1904,” 5, msb. 126 da, May 1912, 6. 127 da, 10 May 1912, 8; 8 June 1921, 9. 128 mtc, Chief Sanitary Inspector to Medical Officer of Health, 12 September 1921, 306, msb. See also dc, 20 April 1922, 4; 5 May 1922, 6; 6 May 1922, 4.

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212

Notes to pages 135–9

129 mtc, “Report of Chief Sanitary Inspector of Health, December 1922,” 55, msb. 130 No 15 of 1893, 12, ss. 36, 37, mcp 1st sess. 1893 appendix; 3 of 1868 s. 4 co 113/5. 131 lob, Luke Hill to J. B. Harrison, 15 October 1902, 5, 6, msb. 132 Hill, Town Superintendent's Annual Report of February 1908 8, msb. 133 lob, “Town Superintendent's Report for June 1902,” 6, msb. 134 lob, Hill, “Town Superintendent's Report for May 1904,” 3, msb; lob, Hill, “Town Superintendent's Report for August, 1904,” 6, msb.; lob., Hill, “Town Superintendent's Report for October, 1904,” 7, msb. 135 See reports of the town superintendent and Georgetown's public health department. 136 dc, 4 December 1921, 4. 137 mtc, “Report of Chief Sanitary Inspector, August 1921,” 306, msb; mtc, “Report of Chief Sanitary Inspector, June 1921,” 30, 31, msb. 138 Wishart, Annual Report of the Public Health Department of the City of Georgetown for the Year 1923, 43, msb. 139 mtc, 12 February 1923, 198, 199, msb. 140 dc, 18 February 1905, 3. 141 mtc, Mayor's farewell Address, 28 December 1921, 1055, 1056 msb; mtc, 3 November 1921, 645, msb. 142 Hill, “The Municipality of Georgetown,” 233. 143 lob, Minute by Luke Hill, 19 July 1905, 14, 15, msb. 144 mtc, “Acting Sanitary Inspector's Report, October 1917,” 907, msb. 145 mtc, Parkinson to Medical Officer of Health, 9 July 1917, 44, msb. 146 lob, Minute by Luke Hill, 19 July 1905, 17, msb. 147 See, for example, lob, “Town Superintendent's Report, March 1904,” 7, 4, msb; Wishart, Annual Report of the Public Health Department of the City of Georgetown for the Year 1920, 42, msb; mtc, “Report of the Chief Sanitary Inspector, January 1923,” 310, 312, msb. chapter seven 1 da, 17 April 1924, 5. 2 I have borrowed these terms from Charles Tilly, who defines repertoires as “learned cultural creations ... [which] emerge from struggle.” See Tilly, Popular Contention in Great Britain , 42. 3 Kandhi, “Indentured Insurgency on the Sugar Estates,” 11. 4 Chan, “The Riots of 1856 in British Guiana,” 40, 41, 42, 43, 44; Craton, “Continuity Not Change,” 148; Adamson, Sugar without Slaves, 71. 5 Craton, “Continuity Not Change,” 154, 146, 147, 148; Chan, “The Riots of 1856,” 40, 41, 42; B. Moore, Race, Power and Social Segmentation, 141-4, 146-8, 152; Adamson, Sugar without Slaves, 68, 69, 70, 71. See also bpp, Correspondence on the Disturbances (1856).

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213 Notes to pages 140–2 6 co 111/652, 20598, Governor to the Secretary of State, 13 April 1924, confidential, pro. See also encl. 26, file of extracts from da, 1 April 1924. 7 “York” to the president of the board of police, 1837; qtd. in Rodway, The Story of Georgetown, 28. 8 E.P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd,” 256, 257. 9 See Relph's discussion of these points. Relph, Place and Placelessness, 42, 43, 47. 10 co 111/451, 7473, Gormanston to Knutsford, 30 March 1889, pro, encl. Harragin to Government Secretary, 29 March 1889. See also encl. Kirke to Governor, 28 March 1889, 1, 2, 3, 4; dc, 20 March 1889, 3. 11 Crookall defines a “gill” as a penny and a “cent” as a half-penny. See Crookall, British Guiana, 85. 12 co 111/451, 7473, Gormanston to Knutsford, 30 March 1889, pro, encl. Kirke to Gormanston, 28 March 1889, 1, 2, 3, 4. See also encl. Harragin to Government Secretary, 29 March 1889; rg, 26 March 1889. 13 John Vieira was subsequently tried for assaulting Nurse and was sentenced to two months imprisonment with hard labour. See rg, 26 March 1889; co 111/451, 7473, Gormanston to Knutsford, 30 March 1889, pro, encl. Kirke to Gormanston, 28 March 1889, 1, 2, 3, 4. See also encl. Inspector General of Police to Harragin, 29 March 1889. 14 dc, 20 March 1889, 3. 15 dc, 20 March 1889, 3. 16 co 111/451, Gormanston to Knutsford, 30 March 1889, pro, encl. Kirke to Gormanston, 28 March 1889, 4, 5. 17 co 111/451, 7473, Gormanston to Knutsford, 30 March 1889, pro, encl. Kirke to Gormanston 28 March 1889, 4, 5. 18 For the debate over the decision, see the following: co 111/451, 7473, confidential, Gormanston to Knutsford, 29 March 1889, 1, 2, 5, pro; co 111/451, 7473, Knutsford to Gormanston, 17 April 1889, draft, pro; co 111/451, 4432, Lieutenant Governor Charles Bruce to Knutsford, 9 February 1889, pro, encl. Atkinson to Bruce, 11 February 1889; co 111/451, 4432, Bruce to Knutsford, 9 February 1889, pro; co 111/451, 7471, no. 109, Gormanston to Knutsford, 29 March 1889, pro, encl. Atkinson to Knutsford, 27 March 1889. 19 See, for example, co 111/451, 7473, Governor Gormanston to Secretary of State for the Colonies Knutsford, 30 March 1889, pro. See also encl. Harragin to Government Secretary, 29 March 1889, and Kirke to Gormanston, 28 March 1889, 1. 20 rg, 2 April 1889. 21 See, for example, co 111/451, 7473, Gormanston to Knutsford, 30 March 1889, pro, encl. Harragin to Knutsford, 29 March 1889; dc, 21 March 1889, 3; dc, 20 March 1889, 3. Colonial Office officials accepted this interpretation. See co 111/451, 7473, R. Herbert to Wingfield, 15 April 1889, pro; ssd, 280, Knutford to Gormanston, 24 July 1889, nag.

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214

Notes to pages 142–6

22 mcc, “Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Assess Claims for Losses Sustained during the Riots of March 1889 Beyond the Limits of the City of Georgetown,” 1889, 2, 3, nag; mcc, “Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Assess Claims for Losses Sustained during the Riots in the City of Georgetown in March 1889,” 1889, 2, 5, 6, nag; dc, 6 November, 1889, 3; dc, 15 October 1889, 3; mcp, 28 March 1889, 58, nag, 4. 23 Trotman, Crime in Trinidad, 268, 269, 270; Burton, Afro-Creole, 202, 203. 24 Richardson, “A 'Respectable' Riot,” 25, 28. 25 Marshall, “Vox Populi,” 90; Burton, Afro-Creole, 85, 109. 26 For details on additional ethnic conflicts in the 1890s, see B. Moore and Rodney. B. Moore, Race, Power and Social Segmentation, 142, 145, 154, 155; Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 163, 164. 27 Quoted in Ryan, Women in Public, 20. 28 co 111/451, no. 7473. Governor to Knutsford, 30 March, 1889, encl. Kirke to Governor, 28 March 1889, 6, pro. See also encl. Inspector General to Government Secretary, 29 March 1889 and Gallagher to Harragin, 27 March 1889. 29 bpp, 6, Cox to Elgin, 25 April 1906, Further Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906, encl. 1, Dargan, Brown, and Gonsalves to Elgin, 11 April 1906, 408. 30 bpp, 33, Evan Macgreggor, Admiralty to Colonial Office, January 24 1906, Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906, encl. “Report of the Georgetown Riots, 1905,” from the hms Diamond at Georgetown, 20 December 1905. See also encl. General Order No. 4. 31 dc, 10 February 1921 and 8 May 1921. 32 I have borrowed this phrase from Mary Ryan. See Ryan, Women in Public, 23. 33 bpp, 6, Cox to Elgin, 25 April 1906, Further Correspondence Relating to the Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906, encl. 1, Dargan, Brown, and Gonsalves to Elgin, 11 April 1906, 399, 400, 404; bpp, 18, Hodgson to Lyttelton, Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906, 285, 286. See also encl. 8, Lushington to Hodgson, 4 December 1905, 297, 298; dc, 30 November 1905; qtd. in Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 191. 34 Nath, History of Indians in Guyana, 134. 35 Pinckard, Notes on the West Indies, 66, 67, 68. I am grateful to Vincent Brown for drawing my attention to this event and for providing me with a copy of the source. 36 Rodway, The Story of Georgetown, 60. 37 B. Williams, “Ef Me Naa Bin Come Me Nass Been Know,” 29, 30, 31, 36, 37, 39. Relph discusses the significance of such official “public places.” See Relph, Place and Placelessness, 35. 38 bpp, 18, Hodgson to Lyttelton, Correspondence Relating to the Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906 cd. 2822 lxxvii, encl. 9, Surgeon-General J.E. Godfrey, 302.

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215 Notes to pages 146–8 39 Pinckard, Notes on the West Indies, 67. 40 The actual composition of the slave population for the Guianese colonies in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is uncertain, although Higman has been able to uncover the origins of slaves in Berbice in 1819. See Higman, Slave Populations, 127, 133. 41 Bolland, “Creolisation and Creole societies,” 24. 42 bpp, 18, Governor Frederick Hodgson to Lyttelton, Correspondence Relating to the Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906 cd. 2822 lxxvii, 271, 285, 286, encl. 8, Lushington to Hodgson, 4 December 1905, 297, 298; dc, 30 November 1905; qtd. in Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905, 191. 43 co 111/652, 20598, confidential, Governor to the Secretary of State, 13 April 1924, pro, encl. 26, file of extracts from da, 1 April 1924. The bglu was established in 1919 and represented urban Afro-Guianese workers, primarily wharf labourers. 44 Red was likely chosen as a colour traditionally symbolizing radicalism, most recently in the Russian Revolution. 45 co 111/652, 20598, Governor to the Secretary of State, 13 April 1924, confidential, pro, encl. 24, Report of Acting Inspector General of Police to the Colonial Secretary, 8 April 1924; See also encl. 26, file of extracts from da, 4 April 1924. 46 co 111/451, 7473, Gormanston to Knutsford, 30 March 1889, pro, encl. Harragin to Government Secretary, 29 March 1889; encl. E. Clarke to Harragin, 26 March 1889; encl. Kirke to Gormanston, 28 March 1889, 5; dc, 20 March 1889, 3. 47 dc, 20 March 1889, 3; See also co 111/451, 7473, Gormanston to Knutsford, 30 March 1889, pro, encl. Harragin to Government Secretary, 29 March 1889; also encl. Gallagher to Harragin, 27 March 1889. 48 bpp, 6, Cox to Elgin, 25 April 1906, Further Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906, encl. 1, Dargan, Brown, and Gonsalves to Elgin, 11 April 1906, 399, 402, 428; bpp, 18, Hodgson to Lyttelton, Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906, 287, encl. 8, Lushington to Hodgson, 4 December 1905, 298, 299. 49 bpp, 6, Cox to Elgin, 25 April 1906, Further Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906, encl. 1, Dargan, Brown, and Gonsalves to Elgin, 11 April 1906, 399, 402, 428. bpp, 18, Hodgson to Lyttelton, Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906, 287, encl. 8, Lushington to Hodgson, 4 December 1905, 298, 299. 50 dc, 3 December, 1905, 5. 51 co 111/652, 20598, confidential, Governor to the Secretary of State, 13 April 1924, pro, encl. 24, Report of Acting Inspector General of Police to the Colonial Secretary, 8 April 1924. See also encl. 26, file of extracts from the da, 4 April 1924.

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216

Notes to pages 148–50

52 20598, Governor to the Secretary of State, 13 April 1924, confidential, co 111 652, encl. 24, report of Acting Inspector General of Police to the Colonial Secretary, 8 April 1924; 20598, Governor to the Secretary of State, 13 April 1924, confidential, co 111 652, encl. 26, file of extracts from da, April, May, August, 1924. 53 co 111/652, 20598, Governor to Secretary of State, 13 April 1924, pro, encl. 26, file of extracts from da, 3 April 1924. See also da, 18 April 1924. 54 da, 25 April, 1924, 5; da, 2 May 1924, 5. 55 co 111/652, 20598, confidential, Governor to Secretary of State, 13 April 1924, confidential, pro, encl. 29, Memo from District Inspector BovellJones, 10 April 1924. 56 co 111/652, 20598, confidential, Governor to Secretary of State, 13 April 1924, pro, encl. 26, file of extracts from da, 3 April 1924. 57 Most sources note the presence of bands. da, 12 April 1924, 5; co 111/652, 20598, confidential, Governor to Secretary of State, 13 April 1924, pro, encl. 14, Widdup, Acting Inspector General of Police to Colonial Secretary, 3 April 1924. See also encl. 15, Captain Ramsay, Staff Officer, The Black Watch, Local Forces to the Commandante Local Forces, 3 April 1924. 58 da, 17 April 1924, 5. 59 co 111/451, 7473, Gormanston to Knutsford, 30 March 1889, pro, encl. Harragin to Government Secretary, 29 March 1889. See also encl. Gallagher to Harragin, 27 March 1889. See rg, 30, 31, March 1889; 2, 3, 4, April 1889. 60 Craton, “Decoding Pitch-Patchy,” 14. 61 Bahktin, Rabelais and His World, 218, 219. 62 Burke, Popular Culture, 197, 198, 199. 63 Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 8, 15. 64 Abrahams, Man-of-Words, 99, 101. 65 Burton, Afro-Creole, 81, 82. 66 Craton, “Decoding Pitchy-Patchy,” 14, 17, 31; Bettelheim, “Jonkonnu,” 39, 46. 67 Pearse, “Carnival in Nineteenth Century Trinidad,” 179; Menezes, “The Madeiran Portuguese,” 66, 67; B. Moore, Cultural Power, Resistance and Pluralism, 253. 68 Burke, Popular Culture, 191, 192, 193. 69 B. Moore, Cultural Power, Resistance and Pluralism, 122, 123, 124. Bettelheim has described similar festivities elsewhere in the nineteenth-century Anglophone Caribbean. See Bettelheim, “Jamaican Jonkannu,” 89, 95. 70 dc, 29 December 1905, 4; 30 December 1905, 4; 7 January 1906, 8; 4 January 1906, 4. 71 Burton, Afro-Creole, 175. 72 co 111/652, 20598, confidential, Governor to Secretary of State, 13 April 1924, encl. 18, da, 6 April 1924. See also encl. 15, Captain Ramsay, The

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217 Notes to pages 150–3

73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

87 88

Black Watch, Staff Officer, Local Forces to the Commandante Local Forces, 3 April 1924; da, 17 April 1924, 5; da, 12 April 1924, 5. Burton, Afro-Creole, 175. bpp, 18, Hodgson to Lyttelton, Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906, encl. 4, 292, 293. da, 21 May, 1924, 5. B. Moore, Cultural Power, Resistance and Pluralism, 100; Cruickshank, “Black Talk”, 6, 7. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 10, 246. Burke, Popular Culture, 189, 190. See also E.P. Thompson, “Rough Music.” Turner, The Ritual Process, 167, 168, 169, 177, 178, 179. Burke, Popular Culture, 201, 202. See also Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 13. Burke, Popular Culture, 187, 203, 204; Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 14. See, for example, Burton on Jonkannu in Burton, Afro-Creole, 82. Bolland, “Creolisation and Creole Societies,” 24. Burton, Afro-Creole, 85. See also Dirks, The Black Saturnalis, chap. 7. dc, 29 December 1905, 4; 30 December 1905, 4; 7 January 1906, 8; 4 January 1906, 4. Abrahams, Man-of-Words, 98, 100, 107. See also Burton, Afro-Creole, 156, 157. The term “rituals of intensification” has been borrowed from Burton, who, in turn, quotes from Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 482. mcp, 26 March 1889, 523, 524, nag; co 111/451, 74743, Gormanston to Knutsford, 30 March 1889, pro. bpp, 6, Cox to Elgin, 25 April 1906, Further Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906, encl. 1, Dargan, Brown, and Gonsalves to Elgin, 11 April 1906, 399, 402; bpp, 18, Hodgson to Lyttelton, Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 286, 287, 288, 289, 301, 302, 306, encl. 8, Lushington to Hodgson, 4 December 1905, 298. See also encl. 9, Surgeon-General J.E. Godfrey; bpp, 24, Hodgson to Lyttelton, 18 December 1905, Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 305. See also Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 202; bpp, 1, Hodgson to Lyttelton, 1 December 1905, Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906, 279; co 111/652, 20598, confidential, Governor to the Secretary of State, 13 April 1924, pro. See also encl. 24, Report of Acting Inspector General of Police to the Colonial Secretary, 8 April, 1924; encl. 5, Proclamation No. 124, 1 April 1924; encl. 8, Proclamation No. 128, 2 April 1924; bpp, 1, Hodgson to Secretary of State, Further Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana 1906, 1906; encl. 5, Cox to Secretary of State, 381.

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218

Notes to pages 153–6

89 co 111/652, 20598, Governor to Secretary of State, 13 April 1924, confidential. 90 Kirke, Twenty-five Years, 277. 91 co 111/451, 7473, Gormanston to Knutsford, 30 March 1889, pro, encl. Kirke to Gormanston, 28 March 1889, 30, 31. See also encl. Harragin to the Government Secretary, 29 March 1889; dc, 21 March 1889, 3. 92 Creole, 30 December 1905, 3, qtd. in bpp, 6, Cox to Elgin, 25 April 1906, Further Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906, encl. 1, Dargan, Brown, and Gonsalves to Elgin, 11 April 1906, 400. 93 bpp, 5, Cox to Elgin, Further Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906, 373, encl. 1, Thorne and Browne to Cox, 385, 380. 94 da, 2 April 1924, 4. 95 co 111/451, 7473, Gormanston to Knutsford, 30 March 1889, pro, encl. Kirke to Gormanston, 28 March 1889, 9, 19. See also encl. Arrangements for Police, Military etc. to Take Effect from 5pm on This Day and Continue into the Night; mcp, 20 March 1889, 501, nag; co 111/451, 7473, Wingfield to R. Herbert, 15 April 1889; mcp, 20 March 1889, 50, 51, nag; dc, 21 March 1889, 3, 4. 96 bpp, 25, Hodgson to Lyttelton, 19 December 1905, Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 312; bpp, 32, Hodgson to Lyttelton, 2 January, 1906, Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 318; the Creole, 30 December 1905; the Creole, 13 January 1906, 6. 97 da, 2 April 1924, 4. 98 mcp, 28 December 1905, nag. 99 dc, 21 March 1889, 3; dc, 26 March 1889, 3. 100 bpp, 1, Hodgson to Secretary of State, Further Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906, encl. 5, Cox to Secretary of State, 381; bpp, 18, Hodgson to Lyttelton, Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906, 288, 289, 301, 302, 306, encl. 9, SurgeonGeneral J.E. Godfrey; bpp, 24, Hodgson to Lyttelton, 18 December 1905, Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906, 305. Godfrey said that five died in the riots, whereas Hodgson said that seven had died. 101 co 111/652, 20598, confidential, Governor to Secretary of State, 13 April 1924, pro, encl. 16, List of Killed and Wounded. See also encl. 26, file of extracts from da, 4 April 1924. 102 McClintock, Imperial Leather, 118, 119. 103 Brantlinger, “Victorians and Africans,” 189, 217. 104 Brereton, Race Relations in Colonial Trinidad, 193; Bolt, Victorian Attitudes, 9, 76, 86, 95, 102, 131, 209. 105 Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 307, 308. See also Lorimer, “Race, Science, and Culture”; Drescher, “The Ending of the Slave Trade.” 106 See, for example, dc, 20 March 1889, 3; mcc, “Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Assess Claims for Losses Sustained during the Riots of

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219 Notes to pages 157–8 March 1889 in the City of Georgetown,” 1889, 2, nag; co 111/451, 7473, Gormanston to Knutsford, 30 March 1889, pro. 107 bpp, 6, Cox to Elgin, 25 April 1906, Further Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906, encl. 1, Dargan, Brown, and Gonsalves to Elgin, 11 April 1906, 399, 401. See also encl. 3, Lushington to the Government Secretary, 23 April 1906, 419, 420; bpp, 18, Hodgson to Lyttelton, Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906, 286, 287, 288. dc, 20 December 1905, 5. See also Creole, 30 December 1905, 2, 3; bpp, 6, Cox to Elgin, 25 April 1906, Further Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906, encl. 1, Dargan, Brown, and Gonsalves to Elgin, 11 April 1906, 399, 401. See also encl. 3, Lushington to the Government Secretary, 23 April 1906, 419; dc, 20 December 1905, 5; Creole 30 December 1905, 2, 3. 108 See, for example, co 111/549, 2421, confidential, Hodgson to Secretary of State, 2 January 1906, pro, encl. da, 2 January 1906. 109 See, for example, co 111/652, 20598, Governor to Secretary of State, 13 April 1924, pro; da, 2 April 1924, 4. 110 co 111/549, 2421, confidential, Hodgson to Secretary of State, 2 January 1906, pro, encl. da, 2 January 1906. 111 bpp, 6, Cox to Elgin, 25 April 1906, Further Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906, encl. 1, Dargan, Brown, and Gonsalves to Elgin, 11 April 1906, 419, 399, 400. See also encl. 3, Lushington to the Government Secretary, 23 April 1906; bpp, 18, Hodgson to Lyttelton, Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906, 286, encl. 8, Lushington to Hodgson, 4 December 1905, 298. 112 da, 16 April 1924, 5. See also 17 da, April 1924, 5; 30 April 1924, 8; 10 April 1924, 5. 113 da, 8 May 1924, 4; 4 May 1924, 4; 30 April 1924, 8; 1 May 1924, 5. 114 co 111/451, 7473, Gormanston to Knutsford, 30 March 1889, pro, encl. Harragin to Government Secretary, 29 March 1889. 115 dc, 21 March 1889, 4. 116 co 111/451, 7473, Gormanston to Knutsford, 30 March 1889, pro, encl. Harragin to Government Secretary, 29 March 1889. See also encl. Gallagher to Harragin, 27 March 1889. 117 co 111/549, 4067, confidential, Hodgson to Secretary of State, 16 January 1906, confidential, pro, encl. 2, Duncan to Hodgson, 15 January, 1906. A Colonial Office official, however, did “not attach very much importance to Mr. Duncan as he [was] entirely a sugar planter's representative.” See co 111/549, 4067, Minute, Lucas, 3 February 1906, pro. 118 co 111/652, 20598, confidential, Governor to Secretary of State, 13 April 1924, pro, encl. 26, file of extracts from da, 4 April, 1924; da, 12 April 1924, 5. See also Seecharan, Tiger in the Stars, chap. 11. 119 co 111/652, 20598, confidential, Governor to Secretary of State, 13 April 1924, pro, encl. 12, Precis of verbal report by Stipendiary Magistrate C.H.E. Legge, 3 April 1924. See also encl. 1.

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220

Notes to pages 159–61

120 co 111/451, 7473, Gormanston to Knutsford, 30 March 1889, pro, encl. Harragin to Government Secretary, 29 March 1889. See also encl. Gallagher to Harragin, 27 March 1889. 121 dc, 21 March 1889, 3. 122 bpp, 18, Hodgson to Lyttelton, Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906, 285, 298. 123 bpp, 18, Hodgson to Lyttelton, Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906, 288, 290, 299, encl. 4, 293; co 111/549, 3830, Hodgson to Elgin, 9 January 1906, encl. da, 6 January 1906. See also encl. 8, Lushington to Hodgson, 4 December 1905, 300; encl. dc, 3, 7, January 1906; ssd, confidential, Elgin to Hodgson, 13 December 1905; 18 January 1906; 8 February 1906, nag; bpp, Further Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906, 6, Cox to Elgin, 25 April 1906, encl. 1, Dargan, Brown, and Gonsalves to Elgin, 11 April 1906, 399, 406. 124 dc, 20 March 1889, 3; 20598, co 111/652, confidential, Governor to Secretary of State, 13 April 1924, pro, encl. 18, da, 6 April 1924. 125 bpp, 18, Hodgson to Lyttelton, Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906, 287, encl. 8, Lushington to Hodgson, 4 December 1905, 299; dc, 2 December 1905, 3. 126 bpp, 7, Cox to Elgin, Further Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906, encl. 3, Lushington to the Government Secretary, 30 April 1906. 127 co. 111/652, 20598, confidential, Governor to Secretary of State, 13 April 1924, prp, encl. 18, da, 6 April 1924. 128 co 111/652, 20598, confidential, Governor to Secretary of State, 13 April 1924, pro, encl. 18, da, 6 April, 1924. See also da, 26 April 1924, 5; da, 26 April 1924, 8. 129 da, 4 April 1924, 4. 130 bpp, 18, Hodgson to Lyttelton, Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906, 287, encl. 8, Lushington to Hodgson, 4 December 1905, 299; dc, 2 December 1905, 3. 131 dc, 15 December, 1905, 4. 132 co 111/652, 20598, confidential, Governor to the Secretary of State, 13 April 1924, pro, encl. 26, file of extracts from da, 4 April 1924. 133 co 111/652, confidential, Governor to Secretary of State, 13 April 1924, pro, encl. 24, Copy of Notices Posted. 134 Professor Osborne may have been Benjamin Osborne, a member of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. co 111/652, 20598, confidential, Governor to the Secretary of State, 13 April 1924, pro, encl. 26, file of extracts from da, 4 April 1924. See also J.E. Hoover, Acting Director, Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Department of Justice, to Arthur Bliss Lane, U.S. Department of State, 6 December 1924, in The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers. Caribbean Series

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221 Notes to pages 161–3

135

136 137

138

139

140 141

142 143

144 145

146 147

Manuscript: British Guiana Documents, unpublished MS, ed. Robert Hill, 81, 82; encl. Report by James E. Amos, Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Department of Justice, 11/5/24. I am grateful to Dr Hill for the opportunity to examine these documents. co 111/652, 20598, confidential, Governor to Secretary of State, 13 April 1924, pro, encl. 26, 6 April and 24 September 1924; da; gd, Governor to Secretary of State J.H. Thomas, 28 October 1924, confidential, encl. Copy of minute by Detective Inspector Captain R.J. Craig, 22 October 1924, nag; gd, Governor C.H. Rodwell to Secretary of State Amery, 21 July 1926, confidential, encl. Report for Half-year Ended 30th June 1926, R.J. Craig, 7/7/26, nag; da, 2 April 1924, 4. See also da, 24 June 1924, 5. See also Martin, “Marcus Garvey,” 59, 60. da, 2 April 1924, 4. bpp, 1, Governor to Secretary of State, Further Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906, encl. 7, Dargan, Brown and Gonsalves to Elgin, 26 April 1906, 426, 428, 429; Rodney, 210; bpp, 18, Hodgson to Lyttelton, Correspondence Relating to the Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906, encl. 9, Surgeon-General J.E. Godfrey, 302. co 111/652, 20598, confidential, Governor to Secretary of State, 13 April 1924, pro, encl. 26, file of extracts from da, 3 April 1924. See also encl. Proclamation No. 126, 1 April 1924; encl. 7, Proclamation No. 129, 2 April 1924. co 111/652, 20598, confidential, Governor to Secretary of State, 13 April 1924, pro, encl. 29, Memo from District Inspector Bovell-Jones, 10 April 1924. co 111/652, 20598, confidential, Governor to Secretary of State, 13 April 1924, pro, encl. 18, da, 6 April 1924. co 111/652, 20598, confidential, Governor to Secretary of State, 13 April 1924, pro, encl. 15, Captain Ramsay, the Black Watch, Staff Officer, Local Forces to the Commandante Local Forces, 3 April 1924; da, 12 April 1924, 5. da, 17 April 1924, 5. co 111/652, 20598, confidential, Governor to Secretary of State, 13 April 1924, pro, encl. 15, Captain Ramsay, the Black Watch, Staff Officer, Local Forces to the Commandante Local Forces, 3 April 1924. The Creole, 6 January 1906. mcc, “Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Assess Claims for Losses Sustained during the Riots in the City of Georgetown in March 1889,” 1889, 2, nag; co 111/451, no. 7473, Governor to Knutsford, 30 March 1889, pro. bpp, 18, Hodgson to Lyttelton, Correspondence Relating to the Disturbances in British Guiana 1906, encl. 9, Surgeon-General J.E. Godfrey, 302. da, 3 April 1912.

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222 148 149 150 151

152 153

154 155

156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163

164 165

166

Notes to pages 163–6

dc, 3 December 1905, 5. co 111/451, no. 7473, Governor to Knutsford, 30 March 1889, pro. dc, 3 December 1905, 5. 20598, Governor to the Secretary of State, 13 April 1924, confidential, co 111 652, encl. 24, report of Acting Inspector General of Police to the Colonial Secretary, 8 April 1924; 20598, Governor to the Secretary of State, 13 April 1924, confidential, co 111 652, encl. 26, file of extracts from da, April, May, August, 1924. da, 25 April 1924, 5; da, 2 May 1924, 5. mcp, 28 December, 1905. See also Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 206. Rodney's figures are a little different. He notes that fortyone women were convicted for participating in the riot and that nineteen had their charges dismissed. bpp, 18, Hodgson to Lyttelton, Correspondence Relating to the Disturbances in British Guiana, encl. 9, Surgeon-General J.E. Godfrey, 302. co 111/451, 7473, Gormanston to Knutsford, 30 March 1889, pro, encl. Harragin to Government Secretary, 29 March 1889. See also encl. Gallagher to Harragin, 27 March 1889; rg, 30, 31, March 1889; 2, 3, 4, April 1889. Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 206, 207. da, 25 April, 1924, 5; da, 2 May 1924, 5. Kirke, Twenty-five Years, 277. Trotman, Crime in Trinidad, 180, 181. bg, no. 23 of 1846, s. 1, 2, 6; no. 11 of 1889, s.s. 7.1, 7.3, 7.4, 7.7; no. 17 of 1893, ss. 128, 129; no. 18 of 1893, ss. 318, 319, 320, 322, 323, 324. da, 9 April 1924, 5. da, 13 April 1924. bpp, 24, Hodgson to Lyttelton, 18 December 1905, Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906, 306; bpp, 33, Evan Macgreggor to Colonial Office, 24 January 1906, Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906, encl. “Report of the Georgetown Riots, 1905,” from the hms Diamond at Georgetown, 20 December 1905, 324. See also Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 210. gd, 390, Collet to Long, 7 August 1918, nag, encl. Memorandum from Attorney General Nunan. gd, 45, Hodgson to Secretary of State, 14 February 1906, 558, 559, 560, nag; bpp, 33, Evan Macgreggor to Colonial Office, 24 January 1906, Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906, encl. “Report of the Georgetown Riots, 1905,” from the hms Diamond at Georgetown, 20 December 1905, 324. On the disagreement over holding an enquiry, see the following: co 111/ 550, 11534, confidential, Hodgson to Elgin, 14 March 1906, pro, 1, 2, 4; encl. Minutes of Executive Council of British Guiana, 26 January 1906, 10.

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223 Notes to pages 166–71

167

168

169

170 171 172

See also encl. Minutes of Executive Council of British Guiana, 30 January 1906, 12, 13; co 111/549, 5975, confidential, Hodgson to Secretary of State, 31 January 1906, pro, encl. Guiana Despatch 31 January 1906, 43, Hodgson to Elgin, Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 340. bpp, 5, Cox to Elgin, Further Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906, 373, encl. 1, Thorne and Browne to Cox, 379, 380, 383, 385. bpp, 6, Cox to Elgin, 25 April 1906, Further Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906, encl. 1, Dargan, Brown, and Gonsalves to Elgin, 11 April 1906, 399, 401, 407, 408, 409, 410, 411, 414, 415, 416. See also co 111/550, Hodgson to Elgin, 14 March 1906, pro, encl. Minutes of Executive Council of British Guiana, 30 January 1906, 13, 14, 15; gd, 11534, confidential, Elgin to Hodgson, 8 February 1906, nag. bpp, 24, Hodgson to Lyttelton, 18 December 1905, Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906; bpp, 41, Elgin to Hodgson, 8 February 1906, Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana, 1906, 339; gd, 162, Cox, 1 June 1906, 119, nag; gd, 188, Cox to Elgin, 22 June 1906, 142, 143, 144, 145, nag. Burton, Afro-Creole, 243. Chevannes, “The Phallus and the Outcast,” 108. Burton, Afro-Creole, 9. chapter eight: conclusion

Lewis, The Growth of the Modern West Indies, 267. Hintzen, “The Colonial Foundations of Race Relations,” 17. Holub, Jurgen Habermas, 3. Hintzen, “The Colonial Foundations of Race Relations,” 20. Hintzen, “The Colonial Foundations of Race Relations,” 25; Mars, “The Significance of the Disturbances,” 3. 6 For example, see B. Moore, Race, Power and Social Segregation. See also Potter, “Indian and African-Guyanese Village Settlement Patterns.” 7 Hintzen, “The Colonial Foundations of Race Relations,” 20, 21. 1 2 3 4 5

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ab b re vi ati on s bg bpp co crl csl da dc gd lms lob mcc mcp msb mtc nag nypl rg ssd

British Guiana British Parliamentary Papers Colonial Office Caribbean Research Library Commonwealth Studies Library Daily Argosy Daily Chronicle Governor’s Despatches London Missionary Society List of Business (Municipal Town Council) Minutes of the Combined Court Minutes of the Court of Policy Municipal Storage Building Minutes of the Town Council National Archives of Guyana New York Public Library Royal Gazette Secretary of State’s Despatches

primary sources Unpublished Primary Sources n a t i o n a l a r c h i v e s o f g u ya n a gd 1902 nag

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226 Bibliography gd 1914 nag gd 1922 nag gd 1914 confidential, nag gd 1922 confidential, nag gd 1916 nag gd 1916 confidential, nag gd 1917 nag ssg 1917 nag public record office co 111/250 co 111/254 co 111/425 co 111/451 co 111/549 co 111/550 co 111/593 co 111/608 co 111/610 co 111/652 co 111/661 co 700/36 rhodes house “British Guiana Aborigines 1914–1919.” mss Brit. Emp. s22 G289, Rhodes House, Oxford. pr i n te d g ov e r n m e n t r e po r t s . British Guiana. Correspondence on the Subject of the Appointment of a Sanitary Inspector, 1912. Georgetown: The Argosy Company, Limited, 1912, nypl. – Correspondence with Regard to the Introduction into British Guiana of Agricultural Labourers from Barbados and St. Vincent. Georgetown: C.K. Jardine, 1898. ics. – Report of the Government Analyst. 1894 to 1911. – Report of the Immigration Agent General. 1902 to 1903, 1903 to 1904. – Report of the Inspector of Police. 1885, 1886. – Report of the Inspector General of Police. 1891 to 1923. – Report of the Inspector of Prisons for the Year 1883. – Report of the Police Force for the Year 1883. – Report of the Police Magistrate, Georgetown, for the Year 1894–1895. – Report of the Register General. 1885 to 1926. – Report of the Surgeon General. 1903 to 1920.

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227 Bibliography – “Special Investigations. Report on Milk Supply of Georgetown.” In Report of the Surgeon General for the Year 1906 to 1907. – “Special Report on the Outbreak of Virulent Fever, 1909.” Prepared by C.J. Gomes. In Report of the Surgeon General for the Year 1909–1910. – Supplement to the Annual Report for 1892–1893 of the Government Analytical Chemist. British Guiana Combined Court. “Evidence Given before the Commission of Enquiry on the Conditions of Employment and Rates of Wages Paid to Stevedores, Wharfmen and Others.“27/1924. mcc. nag. – “Interim Report of the Georgetown Housing Problem Committee in Connection with the Occupants of the Railway Line Lands.” In “Report of the Committee Appointed to Enquire and Report as to the Best Means of Relieving the Present Housing Congestion in the City of Georgetown, Together with Minutes of Meetings, and Report of Evidence, &c., &c.” 29/1924. mcc. nag. – “Minutes by the Acting Inspector General of Police in Regard to Increasing the Strength of the Police Force.” 44/1920. mcc. nag. – “Preliminary Report on the Epidemic of Influenza in British Guiana, 1918– 1919.” Prepared by K.S. Wise. 5/1919. mcc. nag. – “Proposed Main Drainage of the City of Georgetown, British Guiana.” 35/ 1921. Prepared by Howard Humphreys. mcc. nag. – “Report by Captain R.A. Chancellor, cbe on the Composition, Methods, Organisation, Distribution and Standard of Discipline of the British Guiana Police Force.” 5/1924. mcc. nag. – “Report of Evidence Taken Before the Committee Appointed by His Excellency Sir Graeme Thomson, K.C.B., to Enquire into and Suggest Means of Relieving the Housing Congestion in the City of Georgetown.” In “Report of the Committee Appointed to Enquire and Report as the Best Means of Relieving the Present Housing Congestion in the City of Georgetown, Together with the Minutes of Meetings, Report of Evidence, &c, &c.” 29/1924. mcc. nag. – “Report of the Commission Appointed to Enquire into the Conditions of Employment of and Rates of Wages Paid to Stevedores, Wharfmen and Labourers.” 15/1924. mcc. nag. – Report of the Commission Appointed to Enquire into and Report upon the General and Infantile Mortality; Together with Minutes of the Sittings, Evidence of Witnesses, Etc. No. 334, 1906. Georgetown: The Argosy, Company, 1906. csl. – “Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Assess Claims for Losses Sustained during the Riots in the City of Georgetown in March 1889.” 1889. mcc. nag. – “Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Assess Claims for Losses Sustained during the Riots of March, 1889.” mcc. nag. – “Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Assess Claims for Losses Sustained during the Riots of March 1889 beyond the Limits of the City of Georgetown.” 1889. mcc. nag.

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228 Bibliography – “Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Enquire into the Causes and Results of the Increased Cost of the Necessaries of Life.” 28/1920. mcc. nag. – “Report of the Committee Appointed to Consider How the Accommodation at the Public Hospital, Georgetown, and the Alms House Can Best Be Re-arranged so as to Afford Relief to the Present Congestion at Those Institutions.” 10/1922. mcc. nag. – “Report of the Committee Appointed to Enquire and Report as to the Best Means of Relieving the Present Housing Congestion in the City of Georgetown.” 29/1924. In “Report of the Committee Appointed to Enquire and Report as to the Best Means of Relieving the Present Housing Congestion in the City of Georgetown, Together with Minutes of Meetings, and Report of Evidence, &c., &c.” mcc. nag. – “Report of the Committee Appointed to Enquire into the Organization and Sufficiency of the Staff at the Alms House.” 859/1916. mcc. nag. – “Report of the Onderneeming School for the Year 1903.” No. 188. 1904. mcc. nag. – “Report on the Distribution of Free Meals to Destitute Children Attending Schools in Georgetown.” No. 353. 1906. mcc. nag. – “Second Report on the Epidemic of Influenza in British Guiana in 1918– 1919.” Prepared by J.H. Conyers. 24/1919. mcc. nag. British Guiana Court of Policy. Index to Debates of Court of Policy. 25 April 1922. mcp. nag. – “Report of the Committee Appointed to Take Evidence and Report upon the Retail Shop Assistants (Hours) Bill.” 1911. mco. nag. – “Report of the Select Committee of the Court of Policy Appointed to Inquire into and Report upon the Affairs of the Vlissengen Committee.” 1895. nag. British Guiana Immigration Department. Miscellaneous 1896, 1921. nag. British Guiana. Minutes of the Court of Policy. 1856, 1887, 1889, 1891, 1893, 1898, 1901, 1903, 1907, 1916. nag. Report on the Census Results, 1891. Georgetown: 1891. Report on the Results of the Census of the Population, 1911. Georgetown: The Argosy Company, Limited, 1912. Report on the Results of the Census of the Population, 1921. Georgetown: The Argosy Comapny, Limited, 1921. Report on the Results of the Census of the Population, 1931.Georgetown: The Argosy Company, Limited, 1932. Georgetown British Guiana Town Council. Annual Report of the Public Health Department of the City of Georgetown. 1914, 1915, 1920, 1923, 1924. Report by W. de W. Wishart. msb. – “Annual Report of the Public Health Department of the City of Georgetown for the Year 1924.” September 1925. mtc. msb.

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229 Bibliography – “Constabulary Report.” 1917. mtc. msb. – List of Business. 1902, 1904, 1905, 1928. msb. – Minutes of the Georgetown Town Council. 1873, 1889, 1897, 1899, 1900, 1903, 1904, 1905, 1906, 1909, 1916, 1917, 1918, 1921, 1923, 1925, 1928. msb. – Private Minutes 1901 to 1903. msb. – “Report of April 1916.” Report by Health Visitor M. Garrat. mtc. msb. – “Report of Cowpens and Cows in the City of Georgetown, 1923.” Report by A. Seton Milne. mtc. msb. – “Report of the Chief Sanitary Inspector.” 1917, 1918, 1921, 1922, 1923. mtc. msb. – “Report of the Chief Sanitary Inspector for March 1928.” lob. msb. – “Report of the City Engineer.” 1928. lob. msb. – “Report of the Constabulary Committee.” 1897, 1899. mtc. msb. – “Report of the Drainage and Health Committee.” 27 September 1897. mtc. msb. – “Report of the Drainage and Health and Cemeteries Committee.” 24 August 1906. mtc. msb. – “Report of the Drainage and Health and Cemeteries Committee with Reference to Milk Supply, Together with Correspondence Connected Therewith.” 23 October 1905. lob. msb. – Report of the Medical Officer of Health 1912. Report by W. de W. Wishart. msb. – “Report of the Market Committee.” 1897. mtc. msb. – Report of the Medical Officer of Health 1912. Report by W. de W. Wishart. msb. – “Report of the Public Recreation Grounds Committee.” 4 September 1918. mtc. msb. – “Report of the Public Recreation Grounds and Town Hall Committee.” 7 September 1904. mtc. msb. – “Report of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Celebration Committee.” 31 October 1897. mtc. msb. – “Report of Town Superintendent.” 1902, 1904, 1905. lob. msb. – “Report of the Town Superintendent for September 1899.” mtc. msb. – “Report on the Anti-Mosquito Campaign, February 1923.” Report by W. de W. Wishart. mtc. msb. – Town Council Letters January to June, 1925. msb. – “Town Superintendent’s Annual Report.” 1903, 1908. mtc. msb. – Town Superintendent’s Annual Report. 1908, 1909, 1912, 1914, 1915. msb. – “Town Superintendent’s Report.” 1902, 1904, 1905, lob. msb. pa r l i a m e n t a r y pa p e r s United Kingdom. Correspondence Relating to the Disturbances in British Guiana. Cd. 2822 lxxvii.271. 1906. – Further Correspondence Relating to Disturbances in British Guiana. Cd. 3026, lxxvii.343. 1906.

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230 Bibliography – Papers Relating to Her Majesty’s Colonial Possessions for 1885 and 1886. (c. 5239) LVII.323. 1885–86: 1887. – Papers Relating to Her Majesty’s Colonial Possessions for 1888. (c. 5897–2) XLVIII.421. 1888: 1890. – Report by the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies on His Visit to the West Indies and British Guiana December 1921 to February 1922. Cmd. 1679 xvi.355. 1922. – Report of the British Guiana Constitution Commission. Cmd. 2985 vii.735. 1927. – Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Enquire into the Treatment of Immigrants in British Guiana. (c. 393) xx.483. 1871. – Report on the Blue Book for 1880. (c. 3218) XLIV.1. 1879–81: 1882. – Report on the Blue Book for 1891. LIX.423. 1893–94. – Report to the Government of India on the Conditions of Indian Immigrants in Four British Colonies and Surinam, Part I –“Trinidad and British Guiana. Prepared by James McNeill and Chimman Lal. Cd. 7744 xlvii.517. 1914–16. – Annual Report for 1890. LV.309. 1890: 1892. – Annual Report for 1891. LIX.423. 1891: 1893–94. – Annual Report for 1892–93. LIX.463. 1893. – Annual Report for 1893–4. LXIX. 295. 1895. – Annual Report for 1894–5. LVII.157. 1896. – Annual Report for 1895–6. LIX.101. 1897. – Annual Report for 1896–7. LIX.547. 1898. – Annual Report on British Guiana for 1905–06. Cd. 3285–1 liii.223. 1907. – Annual Report on British Guiana. Cd. 3729–14 lxviii.807. 1906–7, 1908. – Annual Report on British Guiana for 1907–08. Cd. 3729–53 lxviii.843. 1908. – Report for 1900–01. Cd. 788–19 lxiv.171. 1902. – Report for 1901–02. Cd. 1388–2 xliii.85. 1903. – Report for 1908–9. Cd. 4964 lxiv.483. 1910. – Report from 1909–10. Cd. 5467–7 li.359. 1911. – Report for 1910–11. Cd. 6007–2 lvii.599. 1912–13. – Report for 1911–12. Cd. 6007–46 lvii.631. 1912–13. – Report for 1912–13. Cd. 67050–21 lvii.659. 1914. – Report for 1913–14. Cd. 7622–24 xlviii.767. 1914–16. – Report for 1914–15. Cd. 8172 xix.343. 1916. – Report for 1915. Cd. 8172 xix.373. 1916. – Report for 1916. Cd. 8434–24 xxii.341. 1917–18. – Report for 1917. Cd. 8973–25 xvii.181. 1918. – Report for 1918. Cmd. 1–37 xxxv.429, 429. 1919. – Report for 1919. Cmd. 1103–11 xxiv.187. 1921. – Report on the Blue Books for 1884 and 1885. (c. 5249–32) LXXII.279. 1888. s tat u t e s British Guiana. A Consolidated Act for the Better Regulation of Georgetown (1828). Almanack and Local Guide of British Guiana (1833).

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231 Bibliography – An Ordinance to Establish a Mayor and Town-Council for the Superintendence of Georgetown (no. 2 of 1837). co 113/1. – An Ordinance to Constitute a Mayor’s Court in Georgetown, and to Define the Jurisdiction Thereof (no. 9 of 1837). co 113/1. – “An Ordinance to Repeal The Ordinance Entitled ‘An Ordinance to Constitute a Mayor’s Court in Georgetown, and to Define the Jurisdiction Thereof,’ and to Make Other Provisions for the Better Administration of Justice in Georgetown” (no. 2 of 1839). co 113/2. – An Ordinance to Introduce into the Colony of British Guiana the Laws of England with Respect to Riots, Routs, and Unlawful and Tumultuous Assemblies (no. 23 of 1846). co 113/1. – The Bread (Making & Selling Ordinance, 1850) (no. 1 of 1850). In The Laws of British Guiana.V. 1. – An Ordinance to Establish Boards of Health in the Colony of British Guiana (no. 32 of 1850). co 113/2. – An Ordinance to Repeal Ordinance No. 32, Anno 1850, Entitled “An Ordinance to Establish Boards of Health in the Colony of British Guiana,” and to Make Effectual Provision for the Removal of Nuisances and the Preservation of the Public Health (no. 5 of 1852). co 113/2. – An Ordinance to Appoint a Local Board of Health for the Parishes of St. George and St. Andrew, including the City of Georgetown and for that Purpose to Repeal so much of the Ordinance No. 5, of the Year 1852, as Constitutes the Mayor and Members of the Town Council of Georgetown the Local Board of Health for the Parishes and City as aforesaid (no. 8 of 1853). co 113/2. – An Ordinance to Make Provision for More Effectually Repressing Disturbances and Attempts to Commit Breaches of the Peace (no. 4 of 1856). mcp. nag. – An Ordinance to Amend and Consolidate Certain of the Regulations Relating to Immigrants in this Colony (no. 1 of 1860). co 113/3. – An Ordinance to Make More Effectual Provision for the Control of the Georgetown Fire Brigade in Case of Fire (no. 33 of 1880). co 113/6. – An Ordinance to Provide against the Adulteration of Food and Drugs (no. 11 of 1882). mcp. nag. – An Ordinance to Make Provision for the More Effectual Suppression of Riotous Disturbances and Other Breaches of the Public Peace (no. 11 of 1889). mcp. nag. – Ordinance to Consolidate and Amend the Laws Relating to the Police Force (no. 17 of 1891). mcp. nag. – The Sale of Food and Drugs Ordinance (no. 9 of 1892). In The Laws of British Guiana 1891–1895. V. 4. – An Ordinance to Consolidate and Amend the Laws Relating to Procedure in Respect of Offences Punishable on Summary Conviction (no. 15 of 1893). mcp. nag.

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232 Bibliography – An Ordinance to Consolidate and Amend the Laws Relating to Offences Punishable on Summary Conviction (no. 17 of 1893). In The Laws of British Guiana.V. 2. – An Ordinance to Consolidate and Amend the Laws Relating to Offences Punishable on Summary Conviction (no. 21 of 1893). mcp. nag. – An Ordinance to Consolidate and Amend the Laws Relating to the Mayor and Town Council of the City of Georgetown, and to the Due Regulation of the Said City (no.25 of 1898). mcp. nag. – An Ordinance to Consolidate and Amend the Laws Relating to the City of Georgetown, and to the Due Regulation of the Said City (no. 25 of 1898). mcp. nag. – An Ordinance to Consolidate and Amend the Laws Relating to Local Government and to Public Health and for Other Purposes Connected Therewith (no. 13 of 1907). In The Laws of British Guiana.V. 3. – The Sale of Food and Drugs (Consolidation) Ordinance 1918 (no. 38 of 1918). In The Laws of British Guiana (1803 to 1921).V. 4. – An Ordinance to Consolidate and Amend the Laws Relating to the Mayor and Town Council of Georgetown, and to the Due Regulation of the Said City (no. 44 of 1918). The Laws of British Guiana (1803 to 1924). V. 4. Georgetown, British Guiana. “By-Laws made by the Mayor and Town Council of Georgetown in pursuance of the Georgetown Town Council Ordinance, 1860, with respect to hawking fresh meat in the city of Georgetown (Ordinance No. 25 of 1860, section 59).“(1887). mcp. nag. – “By-law for the Regulation of Dairies, Cow-sheds and Milk Shops, and the Keeping of Cows and Relating to the Construction and Cleaning of Cowhouses, Byres and Cattle sheds in Georgetown.” (1901). mcp. nag. – “By-laws for the Regulation of Dairies, Cow-sheds and Milk Shops, and the Keeping of Cows and Relating to the Construction and Cleansing of Cow-houses, Byres and Cattle Sheds Connected with the Milk Supply of the City of Georgetown.” (1907). mcp. nag. – “By-laws Framed under sections 48 and 53, Sub-section (c) of the Public Health Ordinance, 1878.” (1903). mcp. nag. l aw r e p o r t s Sobers v. Payne, Report of Decisions in the Supreme Court of During the Year 1917. Georgetown: The Argosy Company, Ltd., 1918. n e w s pa p e r s The Creole (tc), 1906, 1907. Daily Argosy (da), 1912, 1924. Daily Chronicle (dc), 1885, 1886, 1889, 1890, 1891, 1892, 1893, 1904, 1905, 1906, 1921, 1922. Illustrated London News, 1888.

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233 Bibliography Official Gazette (oa), 20 August 1887. Royal Gazette (rg), 1889. Contemporary Published Sources Anderson, John. Filariasis in British Guiana. N.p., n.p., 1924. The Baby Saving League of British Guiana, Second Annual Report, 1915. N.p., n.p., n.d. – The Fifth Annual Report, 1918. N.p., n.d. Bayley, George, ed. Handbook of British Guiana, 1909. Georgetown: The Argosy, n.d. Beebe, William, and Mary Balir Beebe. Our Search for a Wilderness: An Account of Two Ornithological Expeditions to Venezuela and to British Guiana. New York: Holt, 1910. Bennett, George. An Illustrated History of British Guiana. Georgetown: N.p. 1866. Bolingbroke, Henry. Voyage to the Demerary, Containing a Statistical Account of the Settlements There. London: N.p., 1809. The British Guiana Directory and Almanac for 1888, 1890, 1892, 1894, 1896, 1898, 1900, 1902, and 1906. Bronkhurst, H.V.P. The Colony of British Guiana and Its Labouring Population. London: N.p., 1883. The Chamber of Commerce of the City of Georgetown. Report of the Council 1918. N.p., n.p., n.d. Crookall, L. British Guiana, or, Work and Wandering among the Creoles and Coolies, the Africans and Indians of the Wild Country. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898. Cruickshank, J. Graham. Black Talk: Being Notes on Negro Dialect in British Guiana with (Inevitably) a Chapter on theVernacular of Barbados. Demerara: The Argosy Company, 1916. Des Voeux, George William. My Colonial Service in British Guiana, St. Lucia, Trinidad, Fiji, Australia, New Zealand, and Hong Kong with Interludes. London: Murray, 1903. E.N.N. “The Growth of Centipedism in British Guiana.” In Georgetown Vignettes: Sidelights on Local Life. Georgetown: Daily Chronicle, 1917. – “The Masherine.” In Georgetown Vignettes: Sidelights on Local Life. Georgetown: Daily Chronicle, 1917. – “Our Local Moneylenders.” In Georgetown Vignettes. Sidelights on Local Life. Georgetown: Daily Chronicle, 1917. – “Our Policemen.” In Georgetown Vignettes. Sidelights on Local Life. Georgetown: Daily Chronicle, 1917. Hardy, Alfred. Life and Adventure in the “Land of Mud.” London: N.p., 1913. Hill, Luke. “Food Adulteration.” Timehri n.s. 9 (1895): 207–19.

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234 Bibliography – “The Nomenclature of Georgetown. Its Streets and Districts.” Timehri 3rd ser., 3 (1911): 42–52. – “The Municipality of Georgetown.” Timehri 3rd ser., 3, 2 (1915): 227–35. Hill, Robert. ed. The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers. Caribbean Series Manuscript: British Guiana Documents. Unpublished manuscript. N.d. Howard, Ebenezer. Garden Cities of To-Morrow. Cambridge: mit Press, 1965; 1898 as To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. Imperial Education Conference. Imperial Education Conference Papers III-Educational Systems of the Chief Colonies Not Possessing Responsible Government. London: hmso, 1913–15. Jenkins, Edward. The Coolie: His Rights and Wrongs. London: Strahan and Company, Publishers, 1871. Kirke, Henry. “Our Criminal Classes.” Timehri n.s. 2 (1888): 1–16. – Twenty-five Years in British Guiana. Westport: Negro Universities Press, 1970 (1898). Leechman, Alleyne. The British Guiana Handbook 1913. London: Dulau & Co. Manington, George. The West Indies, with British Guiana and British Honduras. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1925. Mayhew, Henry. and Bracebridge Hemyng. “The Prostitute Class Generally.” In London Labour and the London Poor: The Classical Study of the Culture of Poverty and Criminal Classes in the 19th Century. Vol. 4, ed. by Mayhew. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1968. N.A. British Guiana Directory and Almanac for 1891. Georgetown: C.K. Jardine, 1891. Ozzard, A.T. “Some of the Preventable Diseases of British Guiana and What We Can Do to Prevent Them.“Timehri 3rd. ser. 1 (1911): 136–48. Pinckard, George. Notes on the West Indies. Vol. 3. London: N.p., 1806. Quelch, J.J. Catalogue of British Guiana at the World’s Columbia Exposition, Chicago, 1893. Chicago: N.p., 1893. Rodway, James. Handbook of British Guiana: Prepared Under the Direction of the Columbia Exposition Literary Committee of the Royal Agricultural and Commercial Society. Georgetown: N.p., 1893. – The Story of Georgetown. Demerara: The Argosy Company, Ltd., 1920. Rodway, James. Guiana: British, Dutch, and French. London: N.p., 1912. Rowland, E.D. “The Necessity of Pure Water for Health.” Timehri n.s. 5 (1891): 258–79. Schomburgk, Richard. Richard Schomburgk’s Travels in British Guiana. Georgetown: Daily Chronicle Office, 1922–23. Schomburgk, Robert. A Description of British Guiana: Geographical and Statistical. New York: A.M. Kelly, 1970. Scoles, I. “The Architecture of Georgetown.” Timehri 4 (1885): 82–121. Sullivan, Robert Edward. Rambles and Scrambles in North and South America. London: R. Bentley, 1853.

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235 Bibliography Thompson, D. “Sanitation on the Panama Canal Zone, Trinidad and British Guiana.” Annals of Tropical Medicine and Parasitology 7 (1913): 125–52. Van Sertima, J. Among the Common People of British Guiana. Georgetown: C.K. Jardine, 1897. Waugh, Evelyn. Ninety-two Days: The Account of a Tropical Journey through British Guiana and Part of Brazil. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, Inc., 1934. Wise, K.S. “An Examination of the City of Georgetown, British Guiana, for the Breeding Places of Mosquitoes.“Annals of Tropical Medicine and Parasitology 5 (1911): 435–41. Wise, K.S., and E. P. Minett. “Review of the Milk Question in British Guiana.” Journal of the Royal Sanitary Institute: Colonial Supplement 33 (October 1912): 75–84. Interviews Dorothy “Bunny” King, interview by author, tape recording, Georgetown, Guyana, 20 October 1995. Mary Noel Menezes, interview with author, Georgetown, Guyana, 20 October 1995.

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245 Bibliography – “Contestations over Culture, Class, Gender and Identity in Trinidad & Tobago: The Little Tradition.” Caribbean Quarterly 44.1 and 2 (March-June, 1998): 62–80. Relph, E. Place and Placelessness. London: Pion Limited, 1976. Richardson, Bonham C. “Plantation and Village in Coastal Guyana, 18871969: Conflict or Complementarity?” Journal of Historical Geography 3, 4 (1977): 349–62. Richardson, Bonham C. Caribbean Migrants: Environment and Human Survival on St. Kitts and Nevis. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983. – Panama Money in Barbados 1900–1920. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985. – “Depression Riots and the Calling of the 1897 West India Royal Commission.” New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West -Indische Gids 66, 3 and 4 (1992): 169–91. – “A ‘Respectable’ Riot: Guy Fawkes Night in St. George’s, Grenada, 1885.” Journal of Caribbean History 27, 1 (1993): 21–35. Rickford, John. Dimensions of a Creole Continuum: History, Texts, and Linguistic Analysis of Guyanese Creole. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987. Robb, Peter. “The Challenge of Gau Mata: British Policy and Religious Change in India, 1880–1916.” Modern Asian Studies 20, 2 (1986): 285–319. Robbotham, Don. “Pluralism as an Ideology.” Social and Economic Studies 29 (1980): 69–89. Rodney, Walter. A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881 -1905. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. Rodway, James. Guiana: British, Dutch, and French. London: N.p., 1912. Rohlehr, Gordon. Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad. Tunapuna, Trinidad: Self-published, 1990. Ruddick, Susan. “Constructing Difference in Public Spaces: Race, Class, and Gender as Interlocking Systems.” Urban Geography 17, 2 (1996): n.p. Ryan, Mary. Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. – “Gender and Public Access: Women’s Politics in Nineteenth-Century America.” In Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun, 259–88. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992. Saul, S.B. “The British West Indies in Depression, 1880–1914.” Inter-American Economic Affairs 12, 3 (Winter, 1958): 3–25. Seecharan, Clem. ’Tiger in the Stars’: The Anatomy of Indian Achievement in British Guiana 1919–29. London: Caribbean Macmillan, 1997. Schuler, Monica. “Plantation Labourers, the London Missionary Society and Emancipation in West Demerara, Guyana.” Journal of Caribbean Studies 22, 1 and 2 (n.d.): 88–115. Shepherd, Verene. “From Rural Plantations to Urban Slums: The Economic Status and Problems of East Indians in Kingston, Jamaica, in the Late

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247 Bibliography Thompson, Alvin. Colonialism and Underdevelopment in Guyana 1580–1803. Bridgetown: Carib Research and Publications, 1987. Thompson, E.P. “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century.” In Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture, ed. E.P. Thompson, 185–258. New York: New Press, 1993. – “Rough Music.” In Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture, ed. E.P. Thompson, 467–538. New York: New Press, 1993. Tilly, Charles. Popular Contention in Great Britain 1758–1834. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Trotman, David. “The Yoruba and Orisha Worship in Trinidad and British Guiana: 1838–1870.” African Studies Review 12, 2 (September, 1976): 1–17. – Crime in Trinidad: Conflict and Control in a Plantation Society. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986. – “Women and Crime in Late Nineteenth Century Trinidad.” In Caribbean Freedom: Economy and Society from Emancipation to the Present, ed. Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd, 251–9. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1993. Trudgill, Eric. Madonnas and Magdalens: The Origins and Development of Victorian Sexual Attitudes. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1976. Turner, Victor W. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Aldine Publishing Company, 1969. Valverde, Mariana. The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885–1925. Toronto: McClelland and Steward, 1991. Vizcaino, Juan F. “Carlos J. Finlay, Gloria Americana.” Journal of Inter-American Studies 7, 1 (January 1965): 493–502. Wagner, Michael. “Structural Pluralism and the Portuguese in Nineteenth Century British Guiana: A Study in Historical Geography.” PhD diss., McGill University, 1975. Walkowitz, Judith. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in LateVictorian London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Warboys, Michael. “Germs, Malaria and the Invention of Mansonian Tropical Medicine: From ‘Diseases in the Tropics’ to ‘Tropical Diseases.› In Warm Climates and Western Medicine: The Emergence of Tropical Medicine, 1500– 1900, ed. David Arnold, 181–206. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996. Wiener, Martin. Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law, and Policy in England, 1830–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Wilkins, Nadine Joy. “Doctors and Ex-slaves in Jamaica 1834–1850.” Jamaican Historical Review 17 (1991): 19–30. – “The Medical Profession in Jamaica in the Post-emancipation Period.” Jamaica Journal 21, 4 (1988–89): 27–32. Will, H.A. Constitutional Change in the British West Indies: With Special Reference to Jamaica, British Guiana, and Trinidad. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. Williams, Brackette. “‘Ef Me Naa Bin Come Me Nass Been Know’: Informal Social Control and the Afro-Guyanese Wake, 1900–1948.” Caribbean Quarterly 30, 3 and 4 (September- December 1984): 26–44.

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Index

Abrahams, Roger 12, 153 Albouystown 60–1

Dargan, Patrick 7, 67, 154 Douglas, Mary 110

Bolland, Nigel 5, 152 British Guiana: constitutional changes 23, 24, 179n47; economy 19, 22, 23; government 23, 24, 25; minor industries 22–3; population composition, by ethnicity/ gender 21–2, 29, 31–7, 39; sugar industry 10, 11, 20–1, 83 British Guiana Labour Union (bglu) 146– 7, 158 Burton, Richard 12, 70, 79, 111, 217n86

elites 6

Centipede gangs 85–95, 196n105; composition of 85, 86, 87, 90, 93, 94, 95; legislation against 88–9; meaning of term 90, 195n91, 195n92, 197n122; and place 90, 93; and stick-carrying and stick-fighting 91–2, 93 children: as members of centipede gangs 86, 89; as participants in riot 162–3; poverty and unemployment among 80 cities 8, 9, 11–12 creole and creolization 5 crowds: ethnic composition of 4; views of 9, 76–7, 87. See also riot cultural pluralism 6, 170, 173n7

Georgetown: cultural, economic, military, and social institutions 16, 17, 18; description 3–4; early history 25; municipal franchise 37, 38, 39, 40; municipal government 37, 40–1; population composition, by ethnicity/gender 21, 27, 29, 31, 33–7, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42; population movement 27–30; relationships with interior 18–19; relationships with suburbs 120, 123, 132–3; sanitation (see sanitation/hygiene); urban geography: impact of fires 30; residential/ recreational 27–31, 58, 90; wards 25, 27, 28 Government Medical Service 46, 47 hegemony 7 Hill, Luke 46, 136–7 Jordanites 161 language use 73–6; legislation 74 Menezes, Mary Noel 98, 100, 199n23

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250 Index middle class, indigenous 6–7; social mobility 6–7, 31–2; and the retail sector 98–100 milk industry 115–37; conflict 115, 116– 17, 121–2, 169, 204n7; consumption/ use of milk 130; and cow-keeping 120–1; infant mortality, relation to 127–9, 130; kinship and other ties, significance of 116, 121; licences 116, 132–3, 206n37; participation by ethnicity (especially Indo-Guianese) 117–19, 205n29; sanitary regulation 122–4, 131–7; urban/suburban tensions 120, 123, 124–6; views of 125–7, 209n87 Moore, Brian 12, 70–1, 143 newspapers 7, 208n66 occupational categories: dock workers 82–5; by ethnicity/gender 22, 23, 31–2, 80–2, 194n71. See also milk industry, retail sector, sanitation/hygiene, and police police 16, 41, 43, 169, 181n93; composition of police force 44, 45, 182n102; public attitudes towards 44–5. See also riot poor: and centipede gangs 85–7; and view of 9. See also vagrancy race defined 14, 15; as factor in marketplace conflict 109–14 Railway Line Lands 59–60, 63 reputation/respectability 4, 69–71, 75–6, 109, 111–14 retail sector: conflict in 98, 103, 105–6, 108–14, 169; during slavery 96–7; market constables 101–3, 112–14; market officials 101, 112–14; markets 97–8, 107, 169; participation by ethnicity/gender 98–101, 102, 199n22, 199n23, 199n26; regulations/licences 104–8; Stabroek Market 98, 140. See also milk industry riot 99, 109, 138–67, 213n13; in the British West Indies 12, 13; casualties 155; colonial forces 153–5; the crowd 148, composition of (by age/gender/ethnicity) 148, 161–5, 222n153, views of 155–61; ethnic/racial tensions 139, 140–2, 155–

6, 159–60; interpretations of postemancipation Guianese riots 143; market-place tensions as contributing factor 139, 140–2; middle-class view of riots 154, 166, 222n166; repression of 165–7; ritual/performance in 142–53, as compared to elsewhere in the British West Indies 143, 152, 153; and the street 143–4 ritual: carnival 149, 151–2; Christmas festivities 150; Jonkannu 91–3, 149; labour parade 146–7; mortuary 145–6; stick-carrying 91–3, 150; and the street 144; Tadjah 91–3, 95, 151. See also riot Rodney, Walter 143, 194n71, 196n105, 222n153 Rodway, James 49, 51 sanitation/hygiene 49–55; anti-mosquito campaigns 58; disease 50–1, 53–5; disbursement of sanitary facilities 58–62; Guyanese historiography 9; as metaphor 76–9, 193n52; regulation 55–7; solid waste disposal 52, 53, 62, 67; workers: medical officer of health 46, sanitary officers 47, 183n121, scavengers 33, 63–7, 189n123. See also milk industry sea defence and drainage 9, 52–3 Smith, M.G. 6 space/place 7, 8, 93, 140, 168 stick-carrying/stick-fighting 91–2, 93 streets and public spaces 4, 12, 71–2; language disputes 73–6; noise in 72; places of ceremony 144; places of disorder and unrest 77, 122; as sites of livelihood 82 sugar industry 10, 11, 20–1, 83 Tadjah/Hosay 91–3, 95, 151 Trotman, David 10, 75, 79 Turner, Victor 195n92 Universal Negro Improvement Association (unia) 161, 220n134 vagrancy and unemployment 11, 79–80, 84–5, 87, 89, 196n.105; institutions for housing vagrants 85; legislation 84–5; Water Street 82, 115, 140, 142

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251 Index Wilson, Peter 12, 69–70, 111 Wise, K.S. 46, 207n51 Wishart, W. de W. 46, 137 women: as members of centipede gangs 86, 95; occupation 80–2, 100–1, 194n71; participation in the Georgetown riots 148, 163–5; and reputation 76, 111–12; and the street 79, 82

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