An outstanding Guyanese statistician has passed on

Dear Editor,
We mourn the death of Mr Joseph Fitzmorris John, 75, who passed away peacefully in Miami, Florida, on September 2, 2010, and for whom a memorial service was held in Miami on September 11 by his family.

Joseph was part of a chain of competent and outstanding Guyanese statisticians who included HOE Barker, Frank E Hope, Vivian ‘Bongy’ Wong, Bertram Bowman, Ahmad Ali, Pamela Chase and Lennox Benjamin. It was they who developed the institutional machinery for national statistics from the small Statistical Unit of the colonial era to the Statistical Bureau of the 1970s and 1980s, and the current semi-autonomous Bureau of Statistics (BoS). Joseph (JJ as he was fondly called by his close friends) was a graduate of the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, where he met his Jamaican wife. He was a product of Profs George Roberts and  Jack Harewood, demographers/statisticians.

His specialization was surveys, including those for the labour force, population censuses, and industrial and agricultural surveys, which informed the compilation of the national accounts. His professional practice was one of correctness and accuracy based on verifiable data and analysis, and not one of damned statistics or lies. He established and managed the Health Statistics Unit of the Ministry of Health at a time when various sectoral units with links to the central Statistical Bureau, were being established in the 1970s in critical social and productive ministries in the health, education, and agriculture sectors.

JJ was a true son of the soil. His residence in Georgetown, Guyana, was adorned by sugar cane and corn trees. In Miami, he cultivated a sizeable plot at the back of his residence with perennials such as coconuts and mangoes; medicinal or bush tea sweet broom and lemon grass plants;  kitchen vegetables of all sorts, including tomatoes, lettuce, bora, carrots, pumpkins and flowers. During the years of his retirement, he and guests, admired his kitchen garden from the concrete platform and the iron chairs overlooking the plot. As a symbol of his generosity guests always left his residence with gifts of produce from his garden.

Joseph undoubtedly made a sterling contribution to the development of statistics in Guyana and the Carribean, and to the education system in Miami/Dade where he taught for several years. Our deepest condolences and prayers go out to his wife and children.
Yours faithfully,
A. Donald Augustin