Shaping our modern times

HUBERT Nathaniel Critchlow was born on December 18, 1884. His father was James Nathaniel Critchlow, a British subject of Barbados. His mother was Julia Elizabeth Critchlow, nee Daniels, from the Essequibo Coast. He attended the Bedford Wesleyan Primary School (possibly Bourda). His father died when he was 13 years old, so he left school to help feed his family, working on the tough waterfront of Georgetown. (See Wikipedia) He was 21 years old in 1905, a year that was the most pivotal pre-independence year in modern Guyanese history and social existence. 1905 launched a dangerous but necessary and unavoidable struggle in the then British Guiana that would usher in a new era of rights for the working class at the cost of blood and sacrifice. It is strange that none of the correspondences of that period (1905-6) remains in our archives. But it is the story of Georgetown that would echo throughout the colony and beyond. The conflicts of change that followed post-emancipation British Guiana were centred around primarily the conflicts between the plantocracy-controlled administration of the colony and the ambitions of the manumitted former slave populations, now British subjects, whose expressions of entrepreneurship was seen as a force to be curtailed and distinguished that would lead them back to the plantations. The plots, schemes and privilege of authority held by the old plantation owners and merchants did intercept and derail, in some cases, and curtailed the entrepreneurship of the Afro-Guianese, who were, from the beginnings of the town of Stabroek, the majority.

This led to numerous conflicts, as, with the uneasy introduction of indentured labour at the cost of the new villages, whose taxes were diverted to serve the planters by aiding the financing of indentured labour, the indentured Portuguese were manipulated by the plantocracy administration into eagerly accepting the opportunity to replace the business thrust of the manumitted subjects. This led to numerous riots and confrontations, bringing to the fore folk leaders like the apocalyptic Afro-preacher James Sayers Orr, also known as ‘The Angel Gabriel’, attacking the schemes of the Catholic influence in placing the Portuguese in a favourable position at the sacrifice of the Creole Africans, resulting in serious riots. The year was 1856. This hostility between the two groups would, however, change somewhat. Leading to the 1900s, the social conditions of Georgetown did not change much.

Earnings were minimal. However, a Creole middle class had emerged, but mostly oblivious through interactions with the grassroots. The decline of sugar, taxation and meagre wages haunted the mass of workers. Two areas of mass employment, the waterfront and general labour services, suffered. By the 1880s, mining in the hinterland had begun. This area attracted mainly men from the first villages, more than city dwellers. The former was not subject to rentals, had farming groves that could be attended to, and fed families in their absence, while those who resided in the troubled wards of the town were tied to rents and the daily expenses for victuals.

This was the atmosphere of dismal living conditions referred to by Henry Kirke, Magistrate and Sheriff of Demerara, who remarked, “Let anyone walk through the yards which lead out of lower Regent Street, Lombard Street and Leopold Street in Georgetown, and let him ask how he expects law-abiding citizens to be raised therein.” In the 1905 riot, Critchlow was a young man, but he urged the boys (many of them teenagers, this category existed up to the late 1970s) to put down tools. Hubert Nathaniel Critchlow was fully committed to the struggle of the masses of grass-root workers; both male and female found in him a shoulder to lean on, his tact and incredible courage. Critchlow was an athlete, and a stick fighter, a common martial arts sport of the day. He was an organiser who was committed to the ideas of his struggle. What cannot be ignored is the natural class perception to deemphasise, based on the creature of academic accolades. This affected Critchlow in the peak of his contribution, in the interest of the Plantocracy merchants and the local emerging political and professional middle class, even by his first limited Biographers. For example, “Hubert Nathaniel Critchlow, affectionately called ‘Skibbee’, was a stevedore on the waterfront of Georgetown. From his humble and off-times humiliating occupation, there stemmed his philosophy of the workers, his great dream of freeing them from the fetters of exploitation and degradation, and his vision of forming a militant working-class organisation to be used as an instrument for accomplishing his aim. Thus, Critchlow founded the labour union in the early 1919s. It was the first in what was called the Colonial Empire. Critchlow was thus the Father of Trade unionism in Guyana and the Caribbean. He was the foremost freedom fighter of the early 20th Century. It was significant good fortune that the Father of Trade Unionism was an outstanding athlete in his prime, for the husky physique which he developed played right in with the requirements of a pioneer working-class organiser in a hostile and reactionary capitalist society” see-GUYANA GRAPHIC Independence Souvenir page 41 -1966 {the article is called ‘50 Years of History’ but carried no pen name. Most of the significant political party leaders that had emerged pre-Independence joined Critchlow’s school of organisation (for their own purposes), the B.G.L.U. Many others came to usurp his authority, claiming the union was generating too much money, and he was not educated to handle it. Such temerity lay with the curse of the ‘Colonial ego.’ See -page 347 ‘A Survey of Guyanese History Dr. Winston McGowan’.

It is imperative that our young leaders look to the era of Critchlow, and not only the repetitive text around this time. I close with a ‘third person’ statement by Critchlow that embodied his time. “He don’t want no man to get themselves in no trouble, for the government don’t like him, and they will do anything to put him in prison, but He is a free English subject, and can speak as he likes, He don’t mind how many spies is sent out to listen and report him”. -McGowan: “It was a British Governor in 1918 after a protest at Government House, Governor Sir Wilfred Collet, who had advised Critchlow to establish a genuine trade union, and to seek the assistance of unions in England.” See -Hazel M. Woolford pg 277 Themes in African-Guyanese history.