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April 2012
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A founding fatherBy Professor Bridget Brereton
Sammy joined the Department of Chemical Engineering as a lecturer in 1964, just three years after the Faculty first admitted students. In 1966, he became the first person to receive a St Augustine PhD (in physical organic chemistry). In 1976, he was the first St. Augustine staff member to be promoted to the rank of Reader—a British academic title, which we abolished some years ago, conferred for distinguished scholarly work. And in 1977 he was promoted to professorial rank as the first Professor of Food Technology. This man was an institution builder, a true founding father. He founded the Caribbean Institute of Food Science and Technology and was its first President. (He also founded the Trinidad Tropical Fish Association—raising tropical fish and orchids were among his serious hobbies.) Since the aim of the Food Technology Unit was to contribute to national and regional self-reliance by processing food from our own agriculture, Sammy pioneered and taught modes of canning, bottling, preserving, drying and processing the products of local farming, for commercial markets at home and abroad. Among the better known products from this work were sorrel concentrate, instant yam flakes and flour made from a blend of wheat and sweet potatoes. Sammy was a distinguished scientist with many scientific publications and an international reputation in his field. But he was also a tireless advocate and public educator in the cause of self-reliance and what would today be called food security: eating more of what we produce, reducing our dependence on imported foods, changing our culturally and historically determined taste preferences for foreign commodities. It’s not surprising, then, that Sammy played a full role in national life outside the campus. He was a Senator in 1976-77; he chaired or was a member of several important national organizations, such as the (then) Standards Council and the board of CARIRI—he was its first chairman; he was vice-chairman of the Integrity Commission when he died; and he was a life-long activist in the Boy Scout movement. This record of achievement is all the more remarkable when put in the context of his life story. Sammy was born in a small rural village in south Trinidad to poor parents of South Indian origin—they spoke Tamil—only two years after the final end of Indian indenture. Though they were Hindus, they sent him to the Canaan Canadian Mission (now Presbyterian) School. This primary school was the only one he attended. He left what was then called ‘post-primary’ at 14; no secondary school, no prestigious college, for him. At 14 he went to work: he was a yard boy, he worked a vegetable garden, he sold its products in San Fernando, he did laboring jobs at the Union Hall sugar estate; he was even an apprentice tailor for a time. Eventually he got a job as a ‘bench hand’ and then a technical assistant in the laboratories of Texaco at Pointe-a-Pierre. Here he saved money and studied through correspondence courses to qualify to enter a British university—remember he had neither O nor A Levels. At the age of 31, he entered the University of London, studying for four years there to obtain his BSc in chemistry—funded by his own savings and his young wife’s salary as a teacher. On his return from London, he spent another seven years at Texaco as a research chemist, and began work for his PhD, which he was awarded at the age of 44. In this age of universal and free secondary schooling, GATE and plentiful scholarships for tertiary education, undergraduate and postgraduate—the story of George Sammy, one of the founding fathers of this campus, is definitely worth recalling. Bridget Brereton is Emerita Professor of History and author of the 2010 “From Imperial College to The University of the West Indies.” |
George Moon Sammy (1922-1988) was one of the founding fathers of the Faculty of Engineering, and a man who achieved several ‘firsts’ in his career on campus. For instance, he established the Food Technology Unit in the Department of Chemical Engineering and ran it until his retirement. It was wholly appropriate, therefore, that Block 9, the Food Technology Lab at the Faculty, was named in his honour at a ceremony in November 2011.