Author Description

As a young boy I became aware of the contrast between two totally different worlds when I left British Guiana to attend school at St Dunstan’s College in Kent. The Join the Army Campaign in 1914 enticed me to change my choice of profession from becoming a doctor to joining the army and making the army my career, my first big mistake in life. I was commissioned to a Regular Army Unit in May 1915 and later joined the Machine Gun Corps at Grantham in Lincolnshire. I was chosen with eleven other officers to train the first twelve “lettered” Companies to be sent to France. In September 1916 I went out to Mesopotamia with the 39th Machine Gun Company to join the 13th Western Division from France to go to the relief of General Townshend at Kut-al-Amarah. After almost two years of active duty in Mesopotamia I was told I was to join the Dunster Force. We learned our final destination was Baku and we were to secure the oil fields to prevent the Turks and Germans from having access. I left Baku at the end of June 1919 to return to England having previously learned a few months earlier the war had ended the previous year. After I was demobilised, I returned to British Guiana, this adopted country of my birth, my grandparents and parents having emigrated from Madeira in the mid to late 1800’s to a British Colony. I have written in great depth about British Guiana and the US/Anglo involvement in Black Friday, 16th February 1962, when fifty-six premises were burnt to the ground in the centre of Georgetown during the staged riots and the ongoing conflict it entailed. This book was written in 1963 during the eighty-day strike in British Guiana when everything ground to a halt and the country was going through a rough political time.