Montserrat Speaking Frankly

A Spectacular Dance Production in Montserrat

April 28, 2009 on 12:10 am | In History | No Comments

By: Cathy Buffonge

DanceExcell, with its motto Dancing with Excellence, staged a spectacular show at Montserrat’s Cultural Centre at the end of January. The show was entitled “The Journey, Step by Step” reflecting the journey which DanceExcell has taken since its founding in 2004, with the group being divided into four “steps” by age. Step ladders as props on the stage, and footprints on the backdrop and in the front of the stage, accentuated this theme.

Choreographer and director of the group, Natalie Allen, has been tireless in training and rehearsing with the nearly all female group, which ranges from children to teens, along with a few adults. Dramatic lighting, beautiful costumes and excellent stage management contributed to the overall effect.

The show started dramatically with an imaginative dance to the song “There can be Miracles”, illustrating women’s strength under slavery in a dramatic and moving presentation. In contrast, the next dance showed the little ones in “Clap your Hands to the Music”, effectively and cheerfully done in their red and white costumes emblazoned with big music notes.

On the light-hearted side, “The Dance Studio” depicted a ballet class in disorder, with the children, in pretty ballet costumes, gradually achieving the right moves to the tune of the Nutcracker Suite. The adults (“the Divas”) in “A touch of Culture” enjoyed performing Caribbean dance movements to the fife and drum, dressed in variations of Montserrat’s green, yellow and white national dress.

“Jazz it up” showed the teen group in a most original and dramatic dance, effectively using chairs as props to their original and stylish moves, most effective in turquoise with black tights and black bowler hats. In “Ready or not”, the children illustrated enjoyment of children’s games in a cheerful and well rehearsed dance. The climax of the show was the exciting grand finale, “Jumping up to the Ceiling”, an energetic and dramatic dance, with the children and teens in bright costumes doing their thing.

Interspersed between the dances, films were projected on the back of the stage in a multimedia presentation of dances from past shows by DanceExcell. These presentations, put together by Justin Griffith, were entitled “A Step back in Time”, and added variety and a feeling of the evolution of the group over time.

In director Natalie Allen’s words, “It has been amazing to see what was once a dream become reality, Dance Excell’s vision is to produce highly skilled dancers with a spirit of excellence and professionalism.” Several of the teen dancers received award certificates for excellence, while the dancers who had been with the group from its inception also received certificates.

The Cultural Centre at Little Bay was a fitting venue for this spectacular show. It was built with funds raised by former Beatles manager Sir George Martin, who once ran a high profile recording studio, Air Studios, on Montserrat, attracting a host of famous stars and bands. The Centre has been very well used since its opening in 2007, and is a centrepiece for the long-planned new capital town, which is evolving around it, with the infrastructure now being put in place. The Centre has state of the art lighting and sound systems, making it ideal for performances such as this.

Natalie Allen, who designed all the costumes, has produced a breathtaking and highly imaginative show, never resting until everything was just as she had conceived it. In her words, “Young dancers are exposed to creative and interpretive movements, and begin to develop a sense of rhythm, timing and coordination. Dance education cultivates the whole person, while developing intuition, reasoning, imagination, and creativity.”

Assisting with coordinating the many aspects of the show was Katrice Galloway, a parent and member of the adult group, while parents and other volunteers also did their part. Taking the MC’s role was Eugene Skerritt of the recently formed Ministry of Youth, Culture, Tourism and Sports, while lighting by Eyon McPhoy and sound by Steve Ryan were excellently done. Technical advisor was Peter Filieul, who has been involved in the Cultural Centre all the way through, and was a member of the first band to record at George Martin’s Air Studios back in the 1970s.

How Irish is Montserrat (The Black Irish)

April 27, 2009 on 12:30 am | In History | No Comments

By: Brian McGinn

IT IS A BRITISH Colony that calls itself the Emerald Isle of the
Caribbean.

A carved green shamrock adorns the centre gable of
Government House, overlooking the Union Jack that flutters from a
nearby flagpole.

It observes St Patrick’s Day with one public holiday,
and three months later the Queen’s Birthday with another.

This island of incongruous and surprising contrasts is one of the
Leeward Islands of the Eastern Caribbean. To its south lies the French
island of Guadeloupe. To the north are Antigua, Nevis and St
Christopher (St Kitts), all former British colonies.

With fewer than 12,000 inhabitants on its 39 square miles, Montserrat has long ago
learned to survive in the shadow of its larger and more populous neighbours.

At Blackburne Airport, an immigration officer named Murraine smiles
when he learns that a visitor named Moran is exploring the island’s
Irish roots. He and all his family are Irish, too, the Black official
tells his somewhat sceptical guest, as he endorses his Irish passport
with Montserrat’s immigration stamp: a green shamrock.

An Afro-Caribbean island, whose population is 95 per cent Black,
flaunting itself as Irish? Surely this is a tourism scheme, a clever
gimmick to distinguish tiny Montserrat from a dozen sun-baked and
surf-splashed Caribbean competitors?

A glance at the map20begins to dispel such cynicism. Familiar names mark
the locations of geographical features: Cork Hill, Roche’s Mountain,
Sweeney’s Well and Carty’s Ghaut, or ravine. Irish place names, from
Kinsale (County Cork) to Delvins (County Westmeath) dot the island.

The road from the airport, on the east, to the capital Plymouth, on the
west, runs a gauntlet of names - Farrel, Riley, Dyer, Molyneux, Lee -
marking the location of former sugar estates.

The telephone directory helps set remaining doubts to rest. Page after
page, Irish names parade in seemingly endless columns: 132 families of
Allens, 91 Ryans, 81 Daleys, 68 Tuitts, 57 Farrells, 42 Rileys, 38
Skerretts, 35 Sweeneys, 28 Brownes, 26 Roches, 19 Lynches, 16 Cartys
and 12 Kirwans.

Other Irish names have undergone Caribbean transformations: O’Gara, for
example, has become O’Garro (38 families). Could the Cabeys (39) be
(Mac)Cabes, and the Brades (14) be Bradys?

Now, the immigration officer’s chance remark takes on a special genealogical significance.

Is Murraine (18) a Montserratian rendition of O’Muireáin, the Irish
Murrin? Or could it derive from O’Moráin, the Irish Moran? Perhaps the
Montserratian Murraine and the Irish Moran are long-lost cousins?

The Irish Indies of all the areas settled by seventeenth-century Irish exiles, the
Caribbean was the one they came closest to making their own.

Here, the Irish were not confined to the English islands. Irish exile communities
in=20 Spain sent priests, soldiers and administrators to Cuba, Puerto Rico
and Santo Domingo.

From France, Irish merchants, missionaries and planters went to Guadeloupe, Martinique and Saint Domingue - modern Haiti. Even today, visitors to the Dutch island of Aruba can find three pages of Kellys in the telephone directory.

No one, including the Kellys themselves, knows how they ended up there.

While individual Irishmen might rise to prominence in the French and Spanish Caribbean, the British West Indies - Barbados, Jamaica and the Leeward Islands - attracted Irish men and women in significant numbers.

Many did not come voluntarily.

In Irish history and folklore, some of these sunny islands evoke dark memories.

Between 1650 and 1660, Oliver Cromwell’s government used the West Indies as a dumping ground and
penal colony. The victims of Cromwellian transportation ranged from political and military prisoners to anyone who might burden the public purse: orphans, widows and the unemployed.

Although numerous English and Scottish subjects were deported, the harsh and often vindictive treatment of Irish exiles in Barbados has left a bitter historical residue.

Deportation was only one part of the story.

Irish men and women had been freely emigrating to the West Indies for at least a quarter century before the Cromwellian cruelties. As indentured servants, they contracted to work for a period, usually four or five years, in return for free passage and the20promise of land or cash at the end of their term.

Although the promises often went unfulfilled, the rumour that St Kitts paid £10 in ‘freedom dues’ proved irresistible.

By the 1630s, boatloads of servants regularly left Cork ports for the West Indies. ‘Here’, an English recruiting agent wrote from Kinsale in August 1636, ‘all are inclined for St Christophers’. Women, he added, were ‘readier to go than the men’.

In 1643, Fr Mathew O’Hartegan, an Irish Jesuit then stationed in Paris, reported that he had received a petition from 20,000 Irish exiles in St Kitts and nearby islands.

Fr Aubrey Gwynn, a twentieth century Jesuit historian and expert on the West Indies, concluded in his 1929 study that 6,000 - with roughly 3,000 on St Kitts - was a more realistic estimate. Even the lower figure, wrote Fr Gwynn, showed that ‘the emigration of Irish Catholics to the West Indies had already attained
large numbers before ever Cromwell began his policy of forced deportation’.

Little Ireland
By the third quarter of the seventeenth century, Montserrat had become the most Irish island in the West Indies.

A 1678 census shows a vibrant community of almost 1,900 Irish men, women and children. Family names
suggest that most came from County Cork, with smaller contingents from Clare, Donegal, Galway, Tipperary, Waterford, Westmeath and Wexford.

Numerically larger Irish colonies had already existed on other English islands.

In 1669, for example, 8,000 Irish were reported in Barbados. Jamaica, captured from Spain in 1655, also attracted large numbers of Irish.

But nowhere else did the Irish constitute a verifiable majority of the population.

Even on Barbados, 8,000 Irish would have constituted fewer than four out of every ten whites, and one seventh of the island’s total 1673 population.

On Montserrat, seven of every 10 whites were Irish.

Comparable 1678 census figures for the other Leeward Islands were: 26 per cent Irish on Antigua; 22 per cent on Nevis; and 10 per cent on St Christopher.

With Montserrat’s slaves added in, the Irish still made up more than half of that Island’s population.

The Montserrat Irish were, to an unprecedented extent, ruled by Irishmen: at least six of the island’s seventeenth-century governors were Irish.

The census was commissioned by Sir William Stapleton of Thurlesbegg, County Tipperary, a former governor of Montserrat and then governor of the Leeward islands.

The reasons why Montserrat became so Irish are still debated by historians.

Among the factors suggested are over-population in nearby islands, ethnic prejudices, political disputes, and even linguistic differences.

From an early date, it seems clear, English authorities looked on remote Montserrat as a safety valve to diffuse tensions among their West Indian subject.

Religious Haven
Religious conflict was a key factor, says Rev. Francis C. Mackin, SJ, of Boston College, a student 20 of Montserrat’s church history. The earliest surviving report on Montserrat, dated January 1634, described
a population of Irish Catholics rejected by Virginia on account of their religion.

‘Montserrat’, says Fr Mackin, ‘was a haven of religious liberty for Irish Catholics in the New World before Maryland was a haven for English Catholics.’

Events in Ireland spurred the growth of Montserrat’s Catholic population.

The Rising of 1641, and the subsequent warfare that brought Cromwell to Ireland in 1649, increased tension in distant St Kitts. ‘It is said’, wrote Fr Dermot O’Dwyer from Paris in October 1642, ‘at Christopher Island the Irish and English hath great emotions’.

Evidence that these emotions caused an Irish exodus from St Kitts can be found in the Portuguese archives.

In a petition dated 1643, an Irish captain named Peter Sweetman asked the King of Portugal to let 400 Irish
Catholics from St Kitts move to Brazil.

‘Harassed by the English heretics on the island of S. Christovao’, Sweetman wrote, he and his fellow Irishmen desired to live as Catholics under Portuguese protection. To eliminate ‘new uncertainties on account
of religion’, said Sweetman, the St Kitts Irish preferred not to accept ‘a whole island which the governor of S. Christovao gave them’.

This island was almost certainly Montserrat.

It is not known whether any Irish moved to Brazil. Some, probably most, accepted the offer of Antigua’s governor, Sir Thomas Warner.20′Wrangling and rioting had so become the order of the day’, historian Vincent T. Harlow wrote of St Kitts, ‘that Warner at last determined to get rid of the unruly elements.

Accordingly in 1643 a party of Irish Roman Catholics was settled at Montserrat, and other religious alcontents
were sent to colonize Antigua’.

Servants or Slaves?
Modern Montserratians are often bemused by well-meaning visitors who ask if they are descendants of ‘Irish slaves’.

Their confusion does not stem from ignorance of their history. But they know, as their visitors often do not, that an Irish name does not always imply Irish descent.

Some of their ancestors, who really were African slaves, worked on estates owned by men with names like Farrell, Galwey, Riley and Roche.

When the slaves were finally emancipated in 1834, some took the family names of their former Irish owners.

The meeting of African and Irish has left racial and psychological residues that defy casual assumption or
analysis.

In addition to honoring St Patrick on 17 March, Montserratians also honour slaves executed after an abortive revolt on 17 March 1768. A failed rebellion, betrayed by a talkative participant, is something any Irish history student can understand.

In this case,the targets of the slave plot were Irish planters who, had everything gone right, might have been too inebriated to resist.

The vast majority of Irish who came to Montserrat never become planters. Most were indentured servants, often bound to a fellow-Irishman for their contracted term. Of the 2,682 whites who lived on Montserrat in 1678, 1,644 were bonded or indentured.

Since 70 per cent of the population was then Irish, it is reasonable to assume that 1,000 or more of those servants were Irish.

US historian Winthrop D. Jordan has explained that ’servitude, no matter how long, brutal and involuntary, was not the same thing as perpetual slavery’. Slaves served for life, and their status was inherited by their children. For those servants who died from overwork and maltreatment before their terms ended, the distinction was meaningless.

But those who did survive were free to leave or stay, and to raise families without condemning their children to slavery.

According to historian Abbot E. Smith, there is no record of any white man serving in perpetuity in any English colony.

Apart from the planter families, many of the remaining 1,038 whites were former servants. These free men and women who, having served out their time, scraped out a livelihood as tradesmen or small tobacco,
cotton or indigo farmers. Montserrat, perhaps because of its reputed tolerance toward Catholics, is believed to have attracted former servants from the other English islands.

Once established, freemen invested their earnings the same way the big planters did; by buying slaves.

In 1678, it is estimated that only three planters owned more that 60 slaves. But Cornelius Bryan and David
Kelly had four each, and John Keagry, Edmond Kelly, Luke Garney and Darby Keneely had three apiece.

Mortogh Saghroe (Sugrue), Robert Goold and Turlough Hart had two each, Phillip Riley, Fynnen Mahoney,
Cornelius Murnane, Dennis Tynan and Thomas Ryan held one slave each.

The Protestant North
‘No people’, says Montserratian Cherrie Taylor, ‘can come in those numbers without leaving a legacy’. But beyond the obvious place and family names, the precise nature of Montserrat’s Irish heritage proves
difficult to pin down.

For Ms Taylor, a retired civil servant and newspaper columnist, the Irish legacy lives on in the northern part of the island, among a group of related families with names like Allen, Daly, Gibbons, Ryan and Sweeney.

Allegedly lighter-skinned than other Montserratians, these ‘Black Irish’ are said to retain such Irish traits as hospitality to strangers, clannishness, independence, rebelliousness, and hostility to outside interference.

Ms. Taylor’s belief is echoed in the writings of US anthropologist John C. Messenger, who studied the northern communities in the 1960s.

‘Families bearing Black Irish surnames’, wrote Dr Messenger, ‘are numerous and inbred and proud of their Irish ancestry; they intermarry out of a sense of tradition and to preserve their light skin colour, which is a status symbol in Montserrat as elsewhere in the West Indies’.

Historian Howard A. Fergus of Montserrat questions Messenger’s thesis.
‘The fair-skinned coloureds in the north’, he writes, have been labelled “black” and “hybridized” Irish on inconclusive evidence’.

Some, claims Fergus, could be descendants of Scots or Englishmen. Dr Fergus also points out that the northerners of St Peter’s Parish have never had a Catholic church, suggesting that ‘if their ancestors were
Irish, they were Protestant landlords’.

But historical records reveal that Catholics were once the majority - though an unchurched one - in this traditionally Anglican parish.

In 1724, pastor James Cruickshank reported ‘20 Protestant (and) 40 Popish families in St Peter’s’. The basic necessities of registering births,marriages and deaths may eventually have drawn the northern Catholics
into St Peter’s Anglican orbit.

Nowadays, Celtic crosses in the cemetery of St Peter’s Anglican church carry such names as Blake and Furlonge.

Other headstones memorialize members of the Allen, Fergus, Hogan, Kirnon, Lee, Molyneaux, Neale,
O’Garro, Skerrett and Sweeney families.

Whatever their religious beliefs, northerners with Irish surnames have no doubts about their ancestry.

In March, 1992, the Emerald Community Singers, a Montserratian Folk and dance ensemble, performed in an
‘Irish Roots Festival’ sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC An audience member inquired whether any of the musicians was of Irish descent. ‘We’re all Irish’, replied several female singers
in unison, as they ticked off their names: Allen, Murraine and Ryan.

The Catholic South
If place names can signify Irishness, southern Montserrat should be the most Gaelic corner of the island.

South of Plymouth lies the seventeenth century town of Kinsale, perhaps named by nostalgic exiles for their last sight of Ireland. From Kinsale, the road winds past Broderick’s and Reid’s Hill estates to the village of St Patrick’s.

Above the village, the windmill and boiling house of Galway’s Estate recall the presence of the Galway family, seventeenth-century sugar planters from Cork.

In a 1724 report on religious affiliations in Montserrat, an Anglican minister wrote of St Patrick’s: ‘Never had a (Protestant) Church nor Minister.

Inhabited by Irish Papists’.
Today, St Patrick’s remains the most Catholic area of Montserrat. In the village’s church of Our Lady
of Montserrat, a statue of Ireland’s patron Saint overlooks an altar pedestal made of carved shamrocks.

But in contrast to the assertive northerners, southern Montserratians seem less sure of their region’s Irish history.

St Patrick’s resident Nelly Dyer, 87 years old, still remembers her great-grandmother, Rosetta Williams, a former slave who died in 1926 at 113 years. But when asked how they came by their Irish names, Nelly and her neighbours, Nenen, Riley and Hess Skerritt, shake their heads.

No family records have survived, and the oral history of any Irish lineage has been forgotten.

Lydia M. Pulsipher, an historical geographer at the University of Tennessee, has shown that the south was the centre of Montserrat’s seventeenth century Irish population. With some 15 years’ experience in archaeological and historical research on Montserrat, Dr Pulsipher backs up her conclusion with convincing documentary evidence.

The 1678 census, for example, lists inhabitants by name and residence, making it possible to calculate the ethnic make-up of individual census tracts. And a map of the island, commissioned by Governor William Stapleton in 1673, includes details as small as individual houses.

In the 1670s, says Pulsipher, Kinsale was the heart of the large Irish community. The area around Kinsale was 80 per cent Irish. St Patrick’s and the hills above it were, on average, 66 per cent Irish. For the
servants who laboured on the southern estates, Kinsale served as a provincial capital and social centre where small shops and ‘tippling houses’, or pubs, catered to Irish tastes.

Further south, the land now known as O’Garro’s and Roche’s estates was 98 percent Irish. This inhospitable area is where many free Irish men and women settled at the end of their servitude, living in thatched,
wattle-and-daub cottages, they grew food and cash crops on small plots of dry, hilly ground.

Unlike their countrymen at Kinsale, who lived primarily in two-man units, these Irish had formed extended families. Significantly, almost half of these households owned between one and six slaves.

No where else on Montserrat, writes Dr Pulsipher, were slaves so evenly distributed or living in such close association with whites.

By the early years of the eighteenth century, many of the southern Irish had drifted off to other colonies. But a significant number of former servants stayed on, farming the hilly backcountry and gradually intermarrying with their Black neighbours.

Their descendants, Dr Pulsipher believes, were genetically absorbed into the more numerous African population, leaving only their names as reminders of a once flourishing Irish community.

Montserrat Loses Two Centurians

April 25, 2009 on 2:59 pm | In History | No Comments

Karen ‘Lioness’ Allen
By the second month of 2009, Montserrat had lost two irreplaceable assets of its current society and history.

Both Montserratian centurions died at the age of 100. Their names were Mrs. Catherine (Ellie) Wade and Mrs. Charlotte Rodney.

In Montserrat, Mrs. Catherine (Ellie) Wade was more commonly referred to as ‘Miss Ellie’. She married John E. Wade.

Originating from the parish of St. Peter’s, Mrs. Wade bore no children of her own. However, oral records and written reports reveal that several of her nieces and nephews lived with her at some point in their lives.

Mrs. Ellie Wade’s noteworthy achievements included two businesses.

The other centurion, Mrs. Charlotte Rodney was born on Montserrat and decided to relocate as a result of the current volcanic activity that initiated in 1995. But, unlike 90 percent of the population, at that time, she only relocated to Salem, Montserrat, just a bit further north of the island.

One noteworthy achievement attained by Mrs. Rodney is a monetary contribution awarded her for being the oldest person to be still involved in backyard gardening in Montserrat.

Destiny’s Revelation No. 17

April 9, 2009 on 10:52 am | In Destiny Revelations | No Comments

Guess who?

I know it has been some time since I have actually written anything to be published on this blog. This is only because I had to leave Montserrat unexpectedly, family issues–you know how that goes.

Anyway, might I point out to you how stunned I am by my own reaction to leaving Montserrat. Who would have ever guessed that a tumbleweed like me would develop a longing in my heart for such a simple, unique, and pleasantly odd place.

It’s obvious that I have been away for quite some time, considering the date of my last post. The publisher of this blog promised me this page solely for my personal renditions of experiences I have while in Montserrat. It was really important to me that no one else contribute to this particular page. It’s mine, and I am thrilled that the publisher kept her end of the deal. Believe me, no one says it quite like me anyway.

You may have noted that I described myself as a tumbleweed. I really am. I find, due to my favorable lifestyle, that I drift in search of natural education and wonder. Hence, my bafflement at being stunned from the depressed emotional state I found myself in while away from Montserrat.

Just leaving Montserrat evoked a reaction I have never before experienced in all my years of globetrotting. As I arrived to the airport, I didn’t particularly notice anything. Like I mention earlier, I consider myself quite the globetrotter. Things started going humdingy-like when I started gathering my things and going towards the tiny plane sitting on this quaint and neatly built airport.

Yes, this is the very same airport that caused me some severe levels of heart failure when I first arrived to Montserrat. As you can easily gather, I am no longer a stranger. Hence, the airport is quaint.

Needless to say, one tends to forget the visual impact of Montserrat from a bird’s eye view. It is an awe-inspiring rumbling scenery of varied shades of emerald greens that change with every angle available to you. Enough about that, for now.

Now, I do have one confession to report since I have been away. I have been eating the hell out of fast food and restaurant menus. You don’t get that sought of thing, or not to the extent I’m use to in Montserrat.

Why are concerned about my weight?

I’m not!

As oddly as this may sound coming from a person of my exposed background, I only missed the convenience of food, in all its variety, fat content, and delivery.

Compared to Montserrat, you sure do get a bang for your dollar
Besides the food, I sure didn’t miss much else.

Okay, the fashion selection, in Montserrat, is quite neglected and boring, but I have ensured that I brought back enough to make my usual daily fashion statement in Montserrat, which by the way is not very hard. I am not a fashion guru by an sense of the word. But here in Montserrat, I could be the Commissioner of the Fashion Police.

Another thing, I will be able to walk in stelletos in Montserrat, if it kills me or breaks my ankle.

If these Montserratian female residents that do that and look sexy, damn it, so can I!

By the way, it sure was hard getting use to putting my face back on every morning, while I was away from Montserrat. See, in Montserrat, the community embraces natural beauty over everything else, and this is one of many reasons why this tiny unknown island has stolen my heart.

Not to mention, I think I overdid it at the Rhunaway Ghaut tourist site.

You see this site has a sign that says, I am not quoting this, that if you drink from this water you are destined to return to Montserrat. Well, I wanted to make sure that I would come backt to Montserrat so badly that every time I drove by that spot, I drank like a thirsty camel.

That might have a lot to do with why Montserrat consumed my thoughts day and night. I couldn’t help but be constantly reminded of the things that are not in Montserrat that just are elsewhere, that annoy me.

How the hell did I ever sleep with all those damn sirens going off all hours of the night, and who would have believed that I would have gotten unaccustomed to the sound of sporadic gunshots during the night.

Go figure.

I know Montserrat is a quiet gem of a magic garden of Eden. But, you sure do need to leave to realize that there a whole hell of a lot of thing you overlooked and take for granted quite easily in Montserrat.

Well, as you can tell, I am on a mission.

I am craving to start my new adventures of discovery in Montserrat. As usual, I will keep you posted!

Until next time.