10
UWI TODAY – SUNDAY 16 DECEMBER, 2018
70
th
ANNIVERSARY COMMEMORATIVE ISSUE
HISTORY
– ISSUE ARCHIVE SEPTEMBER 2010
On October 12, 1960,
an impressive ceremony took place
at the brand newQueen’s Hall in Port of Spain: the handing
over of the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture (ICTA)
to theUniversity College of theWest Indies (UCWI.) Present
were a veritable Who’s Who of the day: the Governor-
General and Prime Minister of the West Indies Federation;
the Governor and Premier of Trinidad & Tobago; ministers
of both the Federal and the local governments; and, of
course, the top officials of UCWI and ICTA.
The speech of the day was by Arthur Lewis, Principal
of UCWI, the future first Vice-Chancellor of UWI (1962)
and Nobel Prize winner. He described the ‘marriage’ being
celebrated as one between a mature lady of forty and a
twelve-year-old boy, and advised that the boy must be
Professor Bridget Brereton’s book,
From Imperial College to University of the West Indies:
A History of the St Augustine Campus, Trinidad & Tobago,
will be launched as part of
the celebrations of the 50th Anniversary of St Augustine on October 12, 2010
TheMature Lady and
the 12-year-oldBoy
B Y P R O F E S S O R B R I D G E T B R E R E T O N
willing to learn and the lady to be tolerant. This was the
union which made St Augustine the second campus of the
regional University and launched fifty years of steady growth
in tertiary education at this site.
The Imperial College had opened its doors to students
in 1922. In its 38 years of operation, it never offered degrees;
instead, students (mainly West Indian school-leavers)
studied for a Diploma which was roughly equivalent to
an undergraduate degree, while others (mostly British)
obtained postgraduate qualifications. Its main purpose was
to prepare British men for posts in the empire’s agricultural
services, and to do research on the cultivation and
processing of tropical crops; training youngWest Indians in
agriculture was secondary. By the 1950s ICTA’s student body
was very international, with West Indians outnumbered by
postgraduates fromBritain and from virtually every colony
in the tropical empire.
ICTA’s weaknesses were that it never offered degrees, its
student body was always small, its links to the country and
the region in which it was located were weak, and it was a
distinctly colonial institution at a time when colonialismwas
on its way out. Its strength lay in its international reputation
for high-level research and its impressive group of research
scientists at St Augustine.
This formed the core of the first Faculty at the new
UCWI campus, the Faculty of Agriculture (1960), followed
in 1961 by the Faculty of Engineering. Under the leadership
of Philip Sherlock and Dudley Huggins in the 1960s, the
fledgling campus was transformed as part of the regional
University, which gained its ‘independence’ as UWI in
1962. In 1963, undergraduate teaching in the arts, social
sciences and natural sciences began under the umbrella of
a ‘College of Arts and Sciences’. From a total student body
of 67 in 1960, all in the Faculty of Agriculture, the campus
had 1270 students in 1969, studying many different subjects
and courses.
During the 1960s, St Augustine was still dominated
by the buildings and facilities inherited from ICTA: the
Administration Building, the Frank Stockdale Building, and
many other structures located in the northern half of the
campus. But new structures soon appeared, starting with the
first Engineering Block (1962-63) and Canada Hall (1964),
the second student residence (Milner has been opened in
1927-28 as ICTA’s student hostel). Trinity Hall, for women,
was opened in 1972. Much of the new building in the
1960s was located in the southern half of the campus—the
area used as the College Farm in the days of ICTA—and
the impressive, if hardly beautiful, structures of the JFK
Complex were erected here. By 1968-69 the Complex was
occupied, providing much-needed space for teaching in the
arts, social sciences and natural sciences, along with a lecture
theatre, an auditorium, a cafeteria and student amenities,
and—above all—a new Library. From its desperately
cramped quarters in the Administration Building, theMain
Library, under the inspirational leadership of Alma Jordan,
moved to its present location in 1969. It was to undergo two
major extensions in the 1980s and 1990s. In the northern
area where most of ICTA’s facilities had been taken over
After a visit to the Campus in April1958, this photo appeared in the Trinidad Guardian with the following caption: HRH Princess Margaret
receives a bouquet from Patricia Khelawan. Standing in the background are student representatives from each of the West Indian territories
participating in the ICTA.
