Tribute to Lloyd Best
A Remeniscence
Reginald Dumas

Lloyd Best and I entered Queen’s Royal College in the same class, 1A, in the same year, 1946. This immediate post-World War II period displayed the expected twin features of metropolitan authority and instinctive colonial allegiance. Minions in constitutional fetters, we would sing lustily of Britain as the Land of Hope and Glory, the Banner of the Free. The irony quite escaped most of us.

Like today, students did not on the whole come from a background of privilege. Your elders made it clear early o’clock, and kept reminding you, that because of their circumstances the only licit path to socio-economic upliftment was through free education.

In general, access to such education meant a three-stage pole vault exercise, the bar being raised in almost geometric progression at each stage: the government exhibition from primary to secondary school; the house scholarship based on the results of what we now call “O levels”; and finally one of the four - four! - annual “island” (now national) scholarships, the apogee of academic effort, which opened before you the road to university and, it was confidently hoped, financial independence. A British university, of course, or at least one in the Empire: the Crown would not have had it any other way.

Alleyne, Amoroso, Best, Boxhill, Carr, Corbie, Dumas, Finigan, Hajal, Ince, the 1A names scrolled every morning alphabetically down to Solomon. Twenty-five of us. Competition was unrelenting. We drove one another, drove many out: only thirteen survived to the sixth form. Eight of those, Lloyd among them, won island scholarships.

Surprisingly, Lloyd had not for many years been perceived as among the academically best. Two things about him were already apparent, however (and the contemporary Caribbean will at once recognise that nothing has changed). One was self-confidence. The other, closely related, was unwillingness to accept without question practices taken as established or theories posited by the cognoscenti. An example comes to mind.

Sometime in 1953 I secured an appointment with Eric Williams, then with the Caribbean Commission and already a legend in Trinidad and Tobago. I asked Lloyd to come with me. We spent two hours with Williams. I forget now the details of the conversation, but I do remember an awkward moment when Lloyd sharply disagreed with one of Williams’ historical interpretations. After we left, Lloyd was grumbling loudly. I have always suspected that the incident marked the beginning of his doubts, publicly and frequently expressed in the decades to come, about the then Prime Minister-in-waiting.

Cricket, ping-pong, football and all-fours in Tunapuna would give way that very year to new challenges at Cambridge, where the intellectual mediocrity of British students shocked us, until then fairly casual subjects of Buckingham Palace, into West Indian nationalism. Much later, the politics would come between some of us, as with Lloyd and Karl Hudson-Phillips. But we are all old men now, and ancient angularities have been scrubbed smooth by the pumice stone of time.

Lloyd is not well these days. But the weakness is physical. The self-confidence and optimism, thank God, have not dimmed. Nor has the eagerness to challenge received ideas and propose new ones. That above all is what for forty years he has consistently urged on this country and this region, and elsewhere, too: the indispensability of dispassionate analysis and thought and plan in the interest of societal progress.

It is only a pity that while we hasten to quote his observations and his maxims - “As Lloyd Best says” is one of our favourite phrases - so few of us, especially those who pass for politicians, actually heed his constant monitions, let alone reflect upon his proffered correctives.