A life of service … two times over Rev. Clifton Peters is a ‘Special Person’

Sep 26, 2010 News

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”Being headmaster brought a certain measure of respect and the people on the river were very kind to the people that were educating their children.”

By Crystal Conway

Most people take up a hobby or just choose to spend their days relaxing when they retire, but not former headmaster, Clifton Peters. No, at 62, Mr. Peters became Reverend Clifton Peters, an ordained Anglican priest who manages a parish of some five churches on the East Coast. That was thirteen years ago, and if you meet the 74-year-old reverend today you would probably have to revise your definition of the word ‘old’ to include sprightly and full of energy.
Born on December 26, 1935, to George and Rosaline Peters, Clifton is one of eight children. There were six boys and two girls, and as is frequently the case with growing up in such a large family, the Reverend is very comfortable with precepts such as sharing, giving and service before self as evidenced by his choice of careers during his life.
Clifton’s father was a contractor who worked to support his family while his mother took on the task of managing the home and raising eight children. One of the many things that George Peters gave his son was a good education. Clifton attended St. Mark’s Anglican Primary and thereafter two ‘private’ schools of his era, the Buxton Private School and the British Guiana Educational Trust (BGET). When he left BGET in 1956 he had sat and passed Senior Cambridge Examinations in English, Mathematics, Geometry, History, Literature, Scripture, French and Latin.
Clifton said that his next step in life was motivated by the desire to earn his own money; little did he know that the decision he made then would determine the course of his life. In 1957 he took up a post as a teacher at the St. Stephen’s Anglican School – now called the Cane Grove Primary School. His qualifications at the Cambridge Examinations allowed him to take a teaching position. To his surprise he found that instead of just being a means of earning a salary he enjoyed teaching.
He spent four years at Cane Grove Primary as a teacher from 1957 to 1961. It was during this time that his father suggested that he gave up the teaching profession to become an engineer. The young Mr. Peters elected to remain in his chosen profession and turned down the opportunity to be an engineer – he had found his calling.
In 1961 he transferred to St. Andrew’s Primary School where he joined a programme called ITTP to become a ‘trained’ teacher. The ITTP (In-service Teacher Training Programme), was one that let working teachers give morning classes and spend afternoons and evenings at district centers where they received formal training themselves. His training lasted some two years from 1964 to 1966 and afterwards he stayed on at the St. Andrew’s Primary School to fulfill his contractual obligations.
After a brief vacation to St. Lucia, Mr. Peters returned home to Guyana and really kick started his life. Not only did he take up a post as a headmaster but he even got married and started a family. The year 1967 you could say was a new beginning for Mr. Peters. On January 2, he married his sweetheart Joycelyn Peters, another teacher, and later that very year they welcomed their first daughter.

Mr. Peters’ first post as Headmaster was at Malali, 120 miles up the Demerara River where he had been tasked with running the community’s Primary School. Living ‘on the river’ as he affectionately calls it was an experience for not only him, but his entire family, since all three of his daughters were born during the ten years that he spent there.
He recalled that when he and his family moved back to the coastland his daughters bemoaned the fact. He laughed as he spoke of their impatience with the blackouts and other nuisances that plagued the people on the coast in the late 70s.

He pointed out that there were no blackouts to bother you when there was no electricity in the first place, and one certainly did not wonder for fresh, clean running water when you lived on the river. As for food, that was never a concern. “Being headmaster brought a certain measure of respect and the people on the river were very kind to the people that were educating their children,” the Reverend remembers fondly. One student would bring him some fish, “Headmaster, grandfather send this for you.” Another would bring him some vegetables, “Headmaster, uncle send this for you.” As he put it, he and his family never wanted for anything. When the residents of the community hunted or harvested, invariably some of them would always remember ‘headmaster’ and his family and send something along.
Mr. Peters laughed as he recalled one instance where the ‘bosses’ didn’t send down any salary for some three months. The proprietress of the local shop told him, “Sir, you just collect whatever it is you need, you don’t worry about anything.”
Up there, you were family, he stressed. Travelling was another activity where that sense of belonging to a large family came out. He said that on the river if you went down then they would wait for you to come back up just to make sure that you got there safely.
He relived the night when he, his wife and their baby were on their way back up the river when their launch broke down. They managed to make it to a landing, the name of which he couldn’t remember despite the darkness and the treacherous river currents. He said when they got there a voice called down, “Who’s there?” When the launch captain cried back, “Headmaster and his family” the welcome was overwhelming. He and his wife were taken to the man’s home, they were given dinner, made comfortable and put up for the night until the launch could be repaired to take them the rest of the way. But that wasn’t the only adventure that Mr. Peters got for his ten years at Malali … far from it.
Teaching as well as being a headmaster was not all that the Government required of Mr. Peters. He was also expected to run registration exercises for the National Bureau of Statistics for population censuses and national registration. He said that even though the Government would run training courses they did not think it was worth the cost to bring Mr. Peters and others like him all the way down to the capital to do the training. Instead they would send him a manual which he would have to read and study in his own time – this was the only training these teachers and headmasters would get, yet they did their jobs admirably.
Covering distances of ninety miles and more both up and down-river was a regular occurrence for Mr. Peters. The residents would try to make his job easier for him by coming out to the landings where they could be registered but not all of them would be able to do that; so on many occasions he would find himself trekking down some trail in search of a house or a settlement.
On one occasion he was going down a trail in a truck when the vehicle passed a huge tawny-coloured cat, it stood about three to four feet at the shoulder and was about four feet long from neck to rump. He said the cat just looked at him as he passed, so he asked the other guys in the truck if it was normal for the cats to be that brave, the man laughed and told him that this particular cat was from the area and crossed the trail regularly. Shaking his head in amazement at their calm and matter-of-fact attitude about the incident he went about his business that day. That wasn’t his only close call however, he told me about the day he was walking down a trail to a river and came head to head with another large cat.
“We both just stopped … he looked at me, I looked at him … then he crossed the trail and continued on his way. He went one way and I made sure I went the other.”
When he got back and asked the villagers about the cat, they smiled and told him that the cat was from down by the river, and he occasionally went in the direction he had seen him go to hunt. It was a normal thing.
During another registration exercise he was trekking his way down a trail to find an old lady he needed to register when he was stopped dead in his tracks by a snake. No ordinary snake, “this fellow was the colour of this table (he taps the orange-brown table in front of him) and at least eight feet long. When I got to the old lady’s house I asked her if she had any snake troubles. She laughed and asked me if it was a long brown snake. When I told her yes she told me, ‘Oh he lives in the area’ as if the snake were a neighbour.
But after a decade, Mr. Peters and his family needed to come back to the coast, and that they did when in 1977 he was appointed his new position as headmaster of the Ascencion Primary School in West Ruimveldt where he spent a year before he was transferred to take up the position of headmaster at Enmore Primary School – a move that made life easier for Mr. Peters, who had moved back to Paradise, on the East Coast of Demerara, with his family.

His tenure at Enmore Primary lasted from 1978 to 1981 and then he was transferred to Strathspey Primary in 1982 where he remained as headmaster until he retired in 1991 after giving 35 years of service to his country as a teacher and a headmaster.
I asked Mr. Peters what were some of his fondest memories of his time spent as a headmaster on the coast. He said he could think of only one thing that stayed with him for years afterwards and still goes with him today. When he took office at Strathspey Primary School, one of the things he found there was a dusty old chess set. Older teachers at the school told him that the school had won it years ago at some competition but it was never used. So he took it out of storage, and that same day a student saw the chess set and said, “Sir, I have a chess book at home. Do you want it?” And that was the start of chess at the Strathspey Primary School. He said that in a matter of weeks he had taught most of the Prep A and Prep B children how to play the game and shortly after that the older ones wanted to join in. In a matter of months, he had the children playing chess competitions; one class against another on Friday afternoons after the work was done for the day.
In fact, the experience carried over to him so that even in retirement he still teaches chess at his home, but he lamented that most of his pupils have gone off to schools in Georgetown and rarely have the time to play anymore, as such his chess club has dwindled somewhat, but he still has his seven-year-old granddaughter whom he taught to play. He laughs as he recalled the irony that his granddaughter had to turn back and teach him how to play the game.
Apparently the little chess enthusiast had discovered that she could play the game on her parents’ laptop so she brought her grandfather over and challenged him to a game. He said he sat there staring at the computer trying to remember how to make the moves he wanted when she chided him, “Grandfather, you’re taking too long!” He said he told her that she would have to teach him how to play now.
You would think that after leading such a full, busy, life Mr. Peters would have called it quits and settled into retirement doing something sedate and peaceful but that wasn’t to be.
While he was teaching on the Coast, Mr. Peters also had a very active church life. He was warden for the Anglican parish that stretches from Enmore to Mahaicony. His duties included ensuring that every church in the parish – and there were six of them – had a priest to conduct the necessary services. He was also tasked with serving as liaison between each of the churches and the parish priests. His service and dedication were so exemplary that he was handpicked to be part of a programme called the Fellowship for Vocation.
The group started out with 13 men but dwindled to eight, and over the span of several years he was instructed in the ways of the church and taught all he would need to know to lead his flock. His instruction which was begun by Bishop Barry Jenks was eventually completed by Canon Thurston Rheil.
On August 25, 1997, Mr. Clifton Peters became Reverend Clifton Peters. For the last thirteen years, Reverend Peters has been ministering in the very same parish where he was a warden.
Today he manages five of the six churches in the parish since one has been closed completely; one is currently being renovated. The churches are St. Andrews, St. Mark, St. John of the Cross, St. Nicholas and Corpus Christi.

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