Tribute to Lloyd Best
Mickey Matthews

Tributes to close friends are indeed difficult to write. For me, who has been described as Lloyd Best’s “fan and protegee”, it has proven to be quite a task.

Only once in my life have I shared as close a friendship as the one I enjoy with Lloyd Best. That friendship was of my boyhood, and what they both had in common is this tendency to make me jealous. Only on the passing of Arthur Atwell did I learn that he enjoyed a friendship with Lloyd that rivaled the one I have. The truth is that in both instances I faced an army of rivals, for the same qualities which made them my bosom buddies made for them scores of other intimate friends.

What is it about a man that permits him to make so many friends? In the case of Best, it is because he would engage you at your own level while never relenting on his passion for teaching. Discussion is his key. Forever on the lookout for the craftily-put expression that captures the point of the case, he would engage you by underscoring the fact that you had coined one, and using it himself. Expressions like “UWI is a polytechnic” which he got from his son Stuart, the “cussedness of the opposition” from the late Martin Sampath, “clash of the protagonists” which I had coined, are just a few in his repertoire that I know to have been discovered in this way. This way of proceeding made teaching a partnership between teacher and student that in my own case, blossomed into enduring friendship.