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UWI TODAY
– SUNDAY 1 JULY, 2018
BOOKS
The trajectoryofSirGeorge’s career
andachievements
in many ways constitutes a classic Caribbean story of
the twentieth century.
There is the theme of mobility and migration. Sir
George spent his first 18 years in his native Barbados;
but then, apart from a short stint in 1960/61 working
as a junior doctor at the then Barbados General
Hospital, he never lived there again. (Of course, he still
talks like a Bajan.) He was in the UK in 1961/62 for
postgraduate training, but he spent the rest of his life
in Jamaica and in the USA. He is a transnational man,
but he has never ceased to be of and for the Caribbean.
Consider the social class origins which produced
this engaged Caribbean intellectual, teacher and
international public servant. Born in 1932, he was the
first child of a primary school teacher: how many of
this region’s distinguished sons and daughters born
in the last century had teacher parents? His father,
Clinton Alleyne, never went to a secondary school, far
less a tertiary institution; he began as a pupil teacher
and became a certified teacher in anAnglican primary
school. Young George attended his father’s school and
was coached for a government scholarship by him.
Sir George’s mother Eileen, in another classic
pattern, never worked outside the home while her
husband was alive (he died aged only 45 when his
first son was in Jamaica), but she sewed and baked to
earn extra cash. Eric Williams’ mother did the same,
and so did thousands of other ‘respectable’ mothers
of large families whose husbands had white-collar but
ill-paid jobs. Like CLR James’ mother, Eileen read a lot
and visited the public library in Bridgetown weekly.
The young George read everything he could get his
hands on and the Carnegie Public Library became a
‘second home’ to him.
Sir George grew up in a classic upwardly mobile,
lower-middle-class, nuclear Bajan family. There were
seven siblings who all reached adulthood, no mean
achievement, as he notes, in a Barbados which “had
some of the worse social conditions in the Caribbean”,
including a very high infant mortality rate in the 1930s
and 1940s.
Sir George was the classic “scholarship boy”.
On his second attempt, and helped by his father’s
coaching, he won a coveted scholarship to Harrison
College, the “first grade” school, in 1944. Like QRC
here, or Queen’s College inGeorgetown, Harrison was
an English grammar school, with many British staff
members, though by the 1940s they were increasingly
being replaced by Barbadians.
Young George did the classics, including Greek,
and he became conscious, for the first time, of racial
discrimination; he made no white friends at college.
After a brilliant career, he won one of the four
Barbados Scholarships in 1950.
At this point, Sir George deviated from the classic
pattern: he could have gone to a British university but
chose the very new UCWI at Mona. He says that his
main reason was a “nascent West Indian nationalism”
and the likelihood of the Federation coming into
being soon. And having discovered the extent of
discrimination and prejudice in Barbados—he quotes
Keith Hunte in describing it as “apartheid practiced
by consenting adults”—he had no desire to spend his
university years in another white-dominated country.
He had heard that Jamaica was “much more
open” than Barbados—class was important there but
race prejudice was less oppressive. (What he doesn’t
explain, however, is why he chose medicine despite
not having done the sciences in school.) And so he
departed for Jamaica, by air, in October 1951, a huge
event for the family; neither parent had ever left
Barbados.
Sir George’s account of his time at Mona as a
medical student and intern is a valuable source for
the history of UCWI in the 1950s. It was here he
“became West Indian”, just as so many others did at
British universities in the post-war period. It was peer
group friendships whichmade himand his classmates
West Indians, he writes, along with the federal debates
on campus and in the media; nor did the end of
Federation lead to any renouncing of theWest Indian
idea among his contemporaries.
He was a predictably brilliant student, but there
was time for a full undergraduate life. Most important,
there was time to court a young Jamaican nurse at the
University hospital, and he and Sylvan Chen were
married in 1958 after he completed his internship.
After his brief stint at the hospital in Barbados,
and his postgraduate training in London, Sir George
returned to Mona in 1962, and soon joined the
TMRU under John Waterlow. Here he became a
medical researcher, and was, as he writes, a driven
and competitive young scientist, keen to make his
mark and to prove his competence as a West Indian.
He participated in the ground-breaking work on
renal and cardiac function in malnourished children,
research which became internationally famous and
helped to improve the lives of countless youngsters in
developing countries. Waterlow was a great mentor,
“the doyen of mentors”, responsible not only for his
scientific development but for his personal growth, Sir
George writes, and his model as a manager and boss.
In 1972, aged 40, Sir George succeeded another
important mentor, his undergraduate Professor of
Medicine, Eric Cruickshank, in that prestigious post:
from junior doctor to professor in just ten years.
As Professor, and then Head of the Department of
These are excerpts from a talk by historian Professor Emerita Bridget Brereton on June 4, 2018 at the formal book launch
of The Grooming of a Chancellor, a memoir by medical researcher, Professor of Medicine, former PAHO Director and
UWI Chancellor Emeritus Sir George Alleyne. For the full speech, please see the online version of UWI Today.
SIR GEORGE ALLEYNE
LAUNCHES HIS NEWBOOK
Campus Principal Brian Copeland with author and UWI Chancellor Emeritus George Alleyne at the launch of Alleyne’s memoir,
“Grooming of a Chancellor”,
on June 4 at the Campus Principal’s office, The UWI, St Augustine.
PHOTO: KEYON MITCHELL
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