Dear Editor,
I see that you added an address to my letter in yesterday’s edition entitled `We should start a `Make Georgetown Beautiful Again’ movement’. Here is some further information.
I was born in Georgetown in 1941 (Hadfield St, Stabroek, to be precise), was educated in Georgetown – Freiburg Primary, D’Urban St, then St Sidwell Primary, Lodge, then The Bishops’ High School. You will find if you visit that school, I was Head Girl, and a winner of a Guyana Scholarship. I then went to UWI, then known as University College of the West Indies, an external College of the University of London. It became an independent university after I left. I then spent a year at the Ministry of Education and Social Development (then minister Cedric Nunes), because the Ministry which needed to send my application to the London School of Economics and Political Science, as I was going there on a Guiana Scholarship, sent the application too late for me to enter in the same year that I graduated at UCWI. I will never forget Mr. Nunes, listening to the Heads of several secondary schools when the then government decided to take over the administration of all the secondaries, and to admit students on the basis of their performance at a common entrance examination. He smiled as he propped his chin on one hand to listen to their arguments, at the end of which, continuing to smile, he argued, “But ……… (I’m not saying exactly to whom he was referring), you can’t accept government money then take only those students YOU want.”
So the following year I went off to the LSE, where I did my postgraduate studies in Sociology, and where I met my future husband, who was a Vincentian. At the end of my studies I returned to Guyana, where I taught Sociology at the University of Guyana. I became head of the Sociology Department where I worked to establish the Social Work Diploma, initially training Social Workers in the Departments of Community Development and Probation and Welfare. I then left, first to Trinidad and then to St Vincent. Why? Because President Forbes Burnham wanted to show his support for the first Women’s Year by appointing the first three women to hold the post of Permanent Secretary. And the PS post which he was offering me was at the Ministry of Housing, at that time one of the most corrupt Ministries in the country. He asked me how much he would have to pay me to take the job; to which I replied that there was nothing he could offer, because at that time a married woman did not pay taxes. Everything that she earned was attached to her husband’s income, and her total salary was taxed. To which he replied, “But Pat, we could make it a travel allowance or an entertainment allowance”. Which was the point at which I decided that I had to leave. Because under those terms I would have to do whatever he wanted, or I would discover that the salary increase was NOT an untaxed allowance, and that I owed taxes for however long I had been receiving those “allowances”. Hence Trinidad and St Vincent.
But I am now retired, and I have been back home in Guyana for six years. The letter which I sent you was written right here in Guyana in New Garden St, Queenstown, where I live with some of the maternal, Carto, side of my family. The “Commissiong” is because all of the British colonies adopted the English Common Law rule that a married woman is entitled to use her husband’s name. My family name hasn’t changed. And if I decide at some future date that I do not want to continue using his name, I can always revert to mine. But I continue to use both names because my friends in St. Vincent know me by his name while friends in Guyana know me by my family’s name.
Sincerely,
Patricia Robinson Commissiong
