​Dominic Kalipersad
Santa Cruz Valley is historically known for its cocoa plantations and production. It is also the home of cricketing superstars Brian Charles Lara and Jeffrey Stollmeyer.
It was home to Jonas Mohammed Bath, Sultan of Yalliallhad, who was partly responsible for the construction of the famed Fort George. But not well known is that Santa Cruz was also the laboratory for a man who would one day invent the television.
John Logie Baird, a Scottish engineer, spent time researching his invention on a cocoa estate in the Santa Cruz Valley, and produced the first-ever television, which earned him the title of 'Father of Television'.
Born in Scotland, Baird was the younger child of Rev John and Jessie Baird. In his early years, he showed signs of ingenuity by setting up a telephone exchange to connect his house to nearby friends.
Baird arrived in Trinidad in 1919 to begin researching the television. He chose the cool valley of Santa Cruz because weather conditions there were helping him to recover from an illness plaguing him for many years.
At Santa Cruz, he worked alone on his secret project.
His neighbours on the estate regarded him as a strange character who was creating ghosts in their quiet neighbourhood. The ghosts they were complaining about were the images transmitted by Baird while working feverishly on the production of television.
When he started his research, no one believed that it was possible to broadcast pictures, but that did not daunt his spirit.
His immediate problem was poverty. He had run out of money to continue his research and was forced to produce jams from fruits available in the valley. Meanwhile, his television project was gaining ground, By the time he was ready to return to England, he had already produced the first television set at Santa Cruz, and was working on colour television.
Baird returned to England in 1920 to continue his experiments. Five years later, he held his first public demonstration of television at Selfridge's, London.
The first public television programme was broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in 1936, and by the 1950s televisions were beginning to appear in every home in Britain.
Although the invention had its beginning in Trinidad, it was not until August 24, 1962 that commercial television was broadcast in this country.
The first set of films was shot by Wilfred A Lee and Co, (WALCO) who operated a studio on Park Street, Port of Spain. The films produced by Lee were transmitted to the nation by newly formed Trinidad and Tobago Television Company (TTT).
The films were aired in preparation for this country's Independence scheduled for August 31, 1962. Commercial television, however, did not begin in Trinidad until November when TTT was officially inaugurated.
The majority shareholders of TTT were Redifussion and Scottish Television, Columbia Broadcasting Systems and the Government of Trinidad and Tobago.
Chairman of the company was Sir Patrick Hobson. The station's first manager was Ronald Goodman and Ken Gordon was the company's first programme director.
The big telecast for Independence began at 9 p.m. on August 30, and the programme continued until this country's flag was raised at midnight.
On Independence Day, the proceedings in the Red House were telecast to a crowd of some 1,000 viewers who had assembled at Woodford Square to see the colourful ceremony in which Princess Royal brought greetings from Her Majesty the Queen, while Dr Eric Williams and Opposition Leader Dr Rudranath Capildeo made brief addresses. This scene has been proudly re-broadcast every year, with our undying gratitude to the inventor, John Logie Baird.
-- This article was written by Marlene Davis, and was published in the Trinidad Express on April 29th, 2012.

News coming to hand is that Fred Mitchell more popularly known as The Mighty Composer passed away today.May his soul rest in Peace
The singer was born Fred Mitchell but was also known as Agba Olu Sino Amono.
His calypsoes were popular in the 1960s and 70s. He offered hits such as “Workers’ Lament”, “Supposing”, “True or Lie”, “Black Fallacy” and “Child Training”. He was also a master of ceremonies, comedian, impresario and tent manager.
As a pioneer, he was a foundation member of the first Calypsonians’ Association in Trinidad and Tobago. He was also a TUCO founding member and an executive member for many years.
Composer is known for portraying the Red Indian character, parading in the traditional mas category on Carnival Monday and Tuesday in San Fernando. He is fluent in Warao (Warahoo) speech. Apart from Warao, he is proficient in patois and he is also fairly versed in Yoruba which he uses at every opportunity.
On July 30, 2018, the Emancipation Support Committee (ESC) dedicated a concert titled “Shikamoo – Ancestral Rhythm” to Composer for his contribution to the art form.
The Swahili word Shikamoo means “I respect you”. ESC said the concert was in keeping with this tradition of respect and reverence for elders and ancestors.

Beverley Ramsey–Moore has been voted as the new president of Pan Trinbago.
Mrs Ramsey-Moore, current manager of Petrotrin Kat-zen-jammers Steel Orchestra, received 116 votes to beat out the other 7 candidates at the organisation’s internal elections on Sunday.
She replaces embattled incumbent Keith Diaz and has become the first woman to be in charge of the national pan body.
Ramsey-Moore contested the Pan Trinbago elections under the Team-Rebuild banner.
Mrs Ramsey Moore said her first order of business will be to review Pan Trinbago’s constitution with a particular focus on separating the powers of the executive and administrative arms of the organisation.
Former Port of Spain mayor Keron Valentine finished second with 54 votes.
Other candidates included Darren Sheppard, Keith Byer, Thecla Forde-Rodriguez, Vernon Morancie and businessmen Lawford Duprey and Robert Amar.
Source:  102FM

THERE was once a village in 19th century Trinidad called Manantial.
It sat in a valley opening to the north coast. The homes were week-long projects of wood and carat leaves. No one was rich. No one was poor.
The hunters most always returned with meat, and the fishing was easy.
Plantain and provisions grew like weeds. The weed grew too, plentiful and potent.
The mountain ravines were the washtubs and bathing pools of the people.
And the spring that gave the place its Spanish name, provided clean water.
So people ate well.
If they survived malaria, yellow fever and dysentery, some lived long.
It was a village born to support the cocoa crop.
The residents were Venezuelan migrants, descendants of the African enslaved and what blood remained of the decimated First Peoples.
They worked estates that thrived in perfect conditions, and lived and planted subsistence gardens on rented lands.
To get to the closest ‘town’ meant a three kilometre walk or donkey ride under a rainforest canopy to the main road passing through the inland mountain village of Monte Video.
Then there was an even longer journey to Toco, where the bridal trail ended, and where the round-the-island steam ship made a call.
For some of the people here, entire lives were spent along a ten kilometre stretch of this coast.
So you would think the people of Manantial could not get further away from it all.
But the Christian missionaries found them.
The Catholics and Anglicans were already competing for souls on the north coast when the Moravian Church elders arrived.
According to the historical records, unsaved Moravians were discovered in Trinidad, so the Church sent someone over from Barbados to investigate.
The Church found hundreds on Barbadian-born Moravians living godlessly in Port of Spain and fornicating in unwed squalor in Ste Madeleine, where the sugar factory employed many.
And in Manantial, it was reported that: “heathen Chinese conducted a rum-shop (while) in some of the villages there were many Mahometans (Muslims), and many of the natives were still addicted to old African vices and superstitions”.

​So the missionaries came, and stations were founded in Rosehill, Port of Spain, Chaguanas, Belmont, Ste Madeleine and Manzanilla.
And in 1896, enough people donated time, money and material to build and consecrated a Sunday school and Chapel in a prominent spot in Manantial, a village whose name was corrupted by the locals to be called “Manantao”.
In attendance that day were thirty adults and twenty-five children.
A house would be built for the teacher and catechist and the school was recognised by the Colonial Government, with the salaries of the teachers paid for by the Board of Education.
As a result, Manantial’s dead no longer had to be carted off to the Catholic graveyards at Mission or Matelot.
They could be churched and buried in the place of their toil.
But despite the State funding, the Moravian Church couldn’t get enough people or their tithes to expand. Some moved away to work on other plantations.
Their children had to labour in the fields and did not often attend.
Estate owners raised the rental prices and those who couldn’t pay were evicted.

An epidemic of dysentery killed some and sickened the young. And worshippers in the nearby village of L’anse Noire built their own Moravian Church to avoid having to foot it to Manantial.
By 1915, the Manantial church closed, beginning a long decline.
We know much of this history because of the memory of Isadore Tenia.
Source:  Richard Charran, the Daily Express, Oct 2018

Author : Historian ANGELO BISSESSARSINGH.
In the series of articles, " FROM THE PEN OF NAIPAUL" written by Local Historian Angelo Bissessarsingh an attempt is made to put into perspective, the world of Naipaul as he made his homeland famous through his works. This article and the ones to follow are VMOTT's tribute to a famous son of the soil " Sir Vidia Naipaul " .
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Sir Vidia's Naipaul father,Seepersad Naipaul died quite suddenly in 1953. An unobtrusive man with a penchant for written drama he spent years as a correspondent for the Trinidad Guardian Newspaper, after contributing his first article in 1929. His desire to write evocative stories set in the world that he knew saw no fruit until these sketches were published long after his demise.
Seepersad Naipaul might have spent his life in relative obscurity but for one posthumous event. In 1961, his son, then a moderately successful novelist, Oxford-educated and living in England penned one of the great works of modern literature. A House for Mr Biswas stands immortally from the genius of Seepersad’s son, Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul as one of the outstanding literary works of our time.
Based largely upon his father’s biography, Sir Vidia took the seemingly hapless, tragic hero, Mohun Biswas and created a new Odysseus. Long considered by critics to be the finest living writer of the English sentence, Sir Vidia to those of us who have been exceedingly fortunate to have met him is interchangeably supercilious, disdainful, engaging, acerbic or simply nonchalant.
He distances himself from his Trinidadian roots and has long been loath to reconnect to the landscapes of his early novels which show that in spite of his denial, Sir Vidia is indelibly a son of our soil.
From 1957 until 1961 and then again in 1967 with A Flag on the Island, he has shown us how deeply he grasped the nuances of being born and raised in the society that at once clung to its somewhat prejudiced identities while attempting to forge ahead in a changing environment that would trade the long-cherished mores of colonialism for something of a different stripe.
The books which earned Sir Vidia's his fame are familiar to many schoolchildren today—The Mystic Masseur, The Suffrage of Elvira, the ever-delightful Miguel Street and A House for Mr Biswas—are all stories which have overlapping elements. The NGO founded by Prof Kenneth Ramchand, Friends of Mr Biswas is the custodian of all things Naipaul, situated as it is in the home Seepersad bought in St James and here is where the spiritual nexus can be felt most intensely.
It was a time of war and Trinidad was being turned upside down by the arrival of thousands of American soldiers who brought chaos in their wake. These books show a life before, during and after the Yankees came. Who could forget Edward, Hat’s brother of Miguel Street, who was the archetypal Trini young-blood of the period falling under the American spell:
“Edward surrendered completely to the Americans. He began wearing clothes in the American style, he began chewing gum, and he tried to talk with an American accent. We didn’t see much of him except on Sundays, and then he made us feel small and inferior. He grew fussy about his dress, and he began wearing a gold chain around his neck. He began wearing straps around his wrists, after the fashion of tennis-players. These straps were just becoming fashionable among smart young men in Port of Spain.”
In continuing the theme of constant paradigm change, The Suffrage of Elvira comically assesses the ground level impact of electoral politics during its infancy in postwar Trinidad. This book was serialized some years ago by the Trinidad Guardian and was a hit, introducing a new generation of readers to a scenario that at once had shades of déjà vu—“Elvira, you is a bitch!”.
The rich descriptiveness of Trinidad enshrined in "A House for Mr Biswas" and "The Mystic Masseur" provides at once a kaleidoscope into the period as well as the sundry historical characters made memorable by the master writer himself. Sir Vidia’s eyes for detail opens a spectrum to us which only our senior citizens can remember with any clarity.
Scanning some old newspapers a couple of years ago, I became indelibly aware of just how connected the Nobel Laureate Naipaul had been to Trinidad and in spite of his rejection of the place of his birth, he exhibits a keen understanding of the place and its people. Thus, over the next weeks, we will learn that ‘Red Rose Tea is Good Tea’, be dosed on Sanatogen and live in the Trinidad of Naipaul.