Queen’s College – a pre-eminent ‘Boys will be boys’ school fraternity in the 1960’s

Apr 27, 2014 News

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Countryman – Stories about life, in and out of Guyana, from a Guyanese perspective

By Dennis A. Nichols
For several decades, Queen’s College’s high academic tradition has, almost imperiously, straddled and throttled those of other institutions of secondary education in Guyana. I say ‘almost’ because of late, a few  secondary schools that probably could have been been considered  less–pedigreed than Queen’s, may dissent, including President’s College and relatively ‘new kid on the block’ Anna Regina Multilateral School, both of which had outstanding achievements at last year’s regional CAPE and CSEC examinations.

However, for prestige, pre-eminence and sheer pride of place, this ‘queen’ of colleges is king, and in the 1960’s before it turned co-ed, its boys were princes of lofty esteem and scholastic excellence. Or so it would seem. But princes are not always the good little charmers some make them out to be; some are not so little and not so good, and one of the truest adages over time has been the one that asserts ‘Boys will be boys!’ This was more or less true during the five unforgettable years I spent there in the 1960’s.
Nineteen sixty-three was not a very good year for Guyana, or for me. That was the year of the infamous 80-day strike, (following the previous year’s Black Friday) as political and ethnic discord degenerated to raw criminality, spreading across many urban and rural areas in the country, That was when also my eyes and ears grew accustomed to the sight of burning buildings and the sound of exploding dynamite.
With a severe strike-related shortage of some consumer items during this period, I quickly grew to like cornmeal porridge cooked on a coal pot and flavoured with coconut milk. Nineteen sixty-three was also the year I entered Q.C., and my hitherto protected world was transformed and turned on its head.
I came from a poor family,albeit with middle-class aspirations, but nothing that I had experienced thus far could have prepared me for what I now term the QC ethos, the collective and self-assured mindset of an institution and its alumni fashioned over a hundred years of distinction – one that was painfully alien to a skinny, unassertive 10 year-old day-dreamer. I nevertheless strove to create for myself (even subliminally) a sort of uncommon niche, carved amidst the glory and brilliance of the Queen’s College aura. And almost perversely I managed to survive.
A look at the names of QC alumni, including some of my contemporaries and class mates between 1963 and 1968, reveal a veritable ‘Who’s Who’ of Guyanese distinction. Names such as Harry Annamunthodo, Forbes Burnham, Cheddi Jagan, Charles Denbow, Shridath Ramphal, Terry Holder, Roger Luncheon, Laurence Clarke, Deryck Bernard, David Granger, all men of acclaimed pedigree, jump out at me immediately. Among my actual classmates I could count ‘boys’ like Eric Phillips, Halvard White, Keith Carter, Derry Etkins and Colin Ming, again, all outstanding past students of a school considered then by many as the premier boys’ school not only in Guyana, but throughout the Caribbean.
I survived by becoming something of a delinquent, but also an observer, and a pretender, vicariously experiencing the actions and exploits of some of my class and school mates, none of which I thought I could have emulated. So I secretly stole and internalized their achievements, the cheers and accolades they earned, simply because I was, like each of them, a QC boy. But not only those. The escapades, truancy, flaunting of school rules, and academic bungling of some of the more interesting fellows stirred the latent rebel in me. By the time the first half term had rolled around, I had placed 30th in my class of 31 students, and was on my way to quiet notoriety.
Many older folk no doubt reminisce nostalgically on the clichéd ‘good old days’ with respect to the perceived waywardness of today’s schoolchildren. That’s obviously true, but not wholly so. Queen’s had its share of ‘bad’ boys more than 40 years ago; not overtly ‘hooliganistic’ but bad in a tough, honourable independent, Clint Eastwood/Make-my-day kind of way. Although there were some I admired for their seeming decency, like athlete Donald Rodney, (Walter’s brother) and my Weston House captain, Deryck Bernard,

there were others I looked up to for different reasons.
I constantly daydreamed, like Walter Mitty, about being a hero, but mostly settled for hero-worshipping some of the more irreverent QC boys instead; and even if not irreverent, at least disruptive. I liked disruptions, and fights, along with the sometimes incidental humour that accompanied them, and looked forward to looming confrontations, if only as a foil to the tedious routine of the chalk-and-talk teaching I loathed. One such confrontation I recall fairly well was between two boys that looked at the time like fully-grown men to me, Charlie Cambridge and Ian McDavid, in fourth or fifth form at the time.
Some of what transpired the day of ‘the fight’ has grown hazy with time, but this much I seem to remember. During the mid-morning break, there was talk of an upcoming encounter after one of the soon-to-be combatants had reportedly called the other an effeminate term and the latter had vowed to get even with him. There was an escalation of words and by the time the lunch break rolled around, the battle was a foregone conclusion.
I remember at first being attracted to a colossal commotion aback of the school by Thomas ‘Long’ Road. Then, venturing into the basement floor near the Bio Lab, I was astonished to see the athletic Mac, muddied and bruised, struggling furiously to free himself from the tangle of bodies trying to restrain him, and swearing defiance, with the stentorian voice of the diminutive Eddie London, (a teacher) rising above the din, vainly trying to maintain order and some sense of civility. By then the news was spreading that Cambridge had won the fight after the combatants had ended up in the muddy, murky water of the Thomas Road trench.
I guess that order was subsequently restored, but from that day on (to me) the façade of Queen’s College’s propriety had been dismantled, or at least substantially undermined. The boys were normal after all! Coming from a depressed area of Charlestown, and being overexposed to raunchy jukebox lyrics,  squabbling neighbours, and ‘bad-boy’ attitudes of street-smart kids, didn’t seem so ‘low-class’ anymore.
There were several other fights at Queen’s, none of which I can clearly recall. However, I occasionally heard talk of confrontations between groups of QC boys, and boys from Indians (Indian Education Trust College) or Saint’s (Saint Stanislaus College) often over girls from Bishops’ High School, although I don’t remember ever seeing any of these. But I do remember one between popular footballer ‘Farmer’ Brown and a guy named Sutherland on the football field, one involving a skinny, sinewy White boy nicknamed ‘Boney’ Goliath, and another in which I received a face-punch from a classmate we used to call ‘Big G‘, something I didn’t dare retaliate against, since there was good reason why he was given that sobriquet.
Apart from fights, a number of QC boys found several ways of unfavourably distinguishing themselves. Without naming names, I can reveal that one of the ‘baddest’ was a lanky lad who is now a respected Christian authority, another (a close friend of mine) who frequently played hooky, gambled and smoked, a third who scribbled racy comments on bathroom walls, and yours truly, once described as ‘incorrigible’ by headmaster Doodnauth ‘Tarzan’ Hetram after habitual late-coming, and earning the dubious record of most detentions in a half term.
No reminiscing on the 1960’s QC fraternity would be complete without some reference to a few of the ‘older old boys’, our male teachers, some of whom we bonded with almost as big brothers, and certainly as father figures. Most of us looked up to teachers like Pryor Jonas, Clarence’ Cop’ Perry, Benjiel Chinapen and the legendary  ‘Yango’ Yansen who surely ought to have known that his nickname was often conjugated (Active Indicative) in glorious Latin, ‘yango, yangas, yangat, yangamus …’ Nor can I forget stalwarts like the likeable deputy headmaster ‘Bup’ Barker who, (so some of the boys said) regularly carried a small bottle of a ‘potent potable’ in his back pocket, and our imperturbable Math master, ‘Balance’ Yhap.
Let me close off with an undying memory of ‘Balance’ and his famous stammer. One day he sauntered into class (I think it was 2B) and announced what I later heard was one of his pet statements. “T-t-t-oday in Math you w-w-will be introduced to a new topic, Stocks and Sh-sh-shares, b-b-ut for many of you, I-I- know it-it will be more a m-matter of ‘Sh-‘Sh-shocks a-and S-S-S-stares!’ That went down well with my classmates and me, and in my eyes it elevated Mr. Yhap to the status of legend similar to Mr. Yansen.
So although I didn’t get much scholastically from my five years of secondary school, I did get an education of sorts along with claim to membership in a fraternity that transcends mere academia; and, with deference to the late C.A.Yansen, I hereby state, ‘Fideles Ubique Utiles!’

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