This fine book is available now at our bookstore....

The Life and Times of Dr. John Parmenas Eustace

by Vin G. Samuel

220 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #02-1012; ISBN 1-55395-298-7; US$22.95, C$33.95, EUR22.10, £15.30

Biography of Dr. J.P. Eustace. A visionary who brought education to the exploited people of a British West Indian colony in his determination to serve God.

Read more!

about the book      about the author      table of contents and sample excerpts      catalogue info

About the Book The life and Times of Dr. J. P. Eustace is an account of how a man with faith in God, a positive mental attitude, dedication to unselfish service, and a commitment to educate the poor, triumphed over colonialism and mainstream religious doctrine to become one of the greatest West Indians of the twentieth century. His life story embodies the history of St. Vincent and the Grenadines for almost all of the twentieth century. And, although his initiatives in education were made without regard for political influence or financial rewards, they are generally recognized as having significant impacts on societies in the Caribbean, North America, and Europe. John Parmenas Eustace was born in Mayreau, St. Vincent, then a British colony in the West Indies, in 1905. He obtained an early education under a system that groomed him for life among the elites of British colonial society. With his family roots in the middle class elites, and also in the powerful European plantation-owners class (plantocracy), one would not have predicted that the young John Eustace would mature to be a revered name in the lives of the masses in his homeland, and a contributor to the struggle for political liberation in the Caribbean. The author examined the life of Dr. J. P. Eustace within the context of Christianity and twentieth century history. Third World struggles against colonialism and imperialism, world wars, the communist-capitalist cold war, international banana war, Rastafarianism, West Indies Cricket, and Caribbean music (Calypso, Reggae, and Soca) illustrate the times in which Dr. Eustace lived, and the pages of the book. Consequently, this book will appeal to a wide readership, including Christians and non-Christians alike. Furthermore, it will be particularly useful to those interested in Third World political and economic development, and for developing individual plans to meet the challenges of modern life. The lessons of the Life and Times of Dr. J. P. Eustace are many. But the greatest lesson of all is that we can make wise decisions based on unwavering belief and willingness to take positive actions for the glory of God. This lesson is timeless in appeal and if heeded will contribute to a full and useful life in this world. The book is intended as an educational source for both children and adults. It will be particularly enlightening to those seeking to understand Caribbean history and its connections to international politics and colonialism, students of third world economics, investors, and others with interest in the Caribbean, particularly in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

---

About the Author Vin G. Samuel is a native of Windward Lowmans, St. Vincent and the Grenadines. He received his early education at the Windward Lowmans Anglican School, and secondary education at the Emmanuel High School, Mesopotamia campus. After passing the University of Cambridge General Certificate of Education, Mr. Samuel worked as a teacher for one term at the Lowmans Anglican School, and then accepted a position at the Emmanuel High School where he taught English and History for one year, before immigrating to the United States Virgin Islands in 1972. Mr. Samuel has a long and much-valued relationship with his alma mater where he serves as a member of the International Board of Reference. It was at the Emmanuel High School that the Christian principles on which his life is based were nurtured, and his plans for the pursuit of higher education were developed. He is honored to write about the late Dr. John Parmenas Eustace - a great mentor, innovator, teacher, and Christian Crusader. Mr. Samuel currently resides in Princeton New Jersey with his wife Janet and four children: Tamara, Vin Jr.; Tiara, and Tenesha. He holds degrees in Business Administration (BA -- University of the Virgin Islands), Law (LLB (Hons) - University of London), and Agricultural Economics and Marketing (MS -- University of Tennessee), and the professional designation of Certified Public Manager (CPM -- Rutgers University). He has written newspaper and magazine articles, technical position papers, economic analyses, poetry, and edited several newsletters.

---

Table of Contents and Sample Excerpt

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Mayreau Antecedents
2. First Things First
3. The Faith to Do All Things
4. A Time of Major Decisions
5. In Pursuit of Knowledge
6. Nisi Emmanuel Frustra
7. The School in the Valley
8. The Preacher, Teacher, Doctor, and Entrepreneur
9. In Service to the Nation
10. Gone Home To Glory
11. A Legacy of Possibilities
12. National Challenges and Opportunities
Tribute to Dr. J.P Eustace by Hon. Mike Browne, MP
Appendices:
I. J.P Eustace Time Line
Genealogy
II. History of Secondary Education in St. Vincent
III. Vincentian Time Line 1300 -- 2001
IV. Population of St. Vincent and the Grenadines
National Anthem
Poems of Hairouna by Vinci Vin
About St. Vincent and the Grenadines
Profiles of Vincentian Political Leaders
Index
About the Author
List of Endnotes

excerpt from CHAPTER THREE: The Faith To Do All Things

Some men have many reasons why they cannot do what they want, when what they need is one reason why they can.

Anon.

J.P Eustace completed secondary school with the following certificates:

1. The University of Cambridge Preliminary Certificate of Education with honors.
2. The University of Cambridge Junior Certificate of Education with honors.
3. The University of Cambridge School Certificate with honors.

In 1924, he accepted a position of Second Clerk in the Public Works Department, then moved on the next year to be Second Clerk in the Audit Department of the colonial civil service. Both of these positions were quite prestigious and paid what would have been considered a good salary at that time.

With entry into the civil service, it would have appeared that J.P. Eustace was perpetuating a family tradition, being the third generation of Eustaces to be employed in the service. His grandfather, Ashton Eustace, was a colonial police officer, while his own father, Reynold Lambert Eustace was a teacher and Revenue Officer in the civil service. But J.P. had other plans.

Meanwhile he continued the evangelical services, preaching at revival meetings, and teaching Sunday school. His determination to become a full-fledged evangelist required in-depth study of the scriptures. Beyond simply reading the Bible, J.P. would study biblical history and work to improve proficiency in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Later, he would consider himself a Scholar of Latin, having mastered the conjugations, conversation, and other nuances of the language. For, although Latin is considered a dead language, having been replaced in Italy by the Italian language, and not being spoken as an everyday language in any nation, except perhaps at times in the Vatican, a background in Latin can be useful in translating classical literature, determining the origin and meaning of complex English words, and in learning the other romance languages, including Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Italian.

By the end of 1925 J.P. Eustace was 20 years old and ready to leave the civil service. It is not known whether this decision to leave had anything to do with the lack of opportunities to be creative, personal advancement, or whether the civil service jobs were temporary positions to earn money for investment in another venture. In any case by 1926 he had left the civil service and founded the Intermediate School.

The Intermediate School

Starting the Intermediate School was a bold and historical act in St. Vincent of the middle 1920s. To understand what was involved in this decision, we must take a trip backwards in time to St. Vincent, a small British West Indian colony, eight years after the ending of the First World War. There was an upper class comprised of wealthy landowners, merchants and colonial officials at the top of the socio-economic ladder; and the masses of the people survived at the extreme bottom. The Boys Grammar School, an all-male secondary institution started in 1908, had been in operation for only eighteen years. Its sister institution, the Girls High School, started in 1911, was only fifteen years old. So the Intermediate School represented:

I. The first private secondary school in St. Vincent
II. The first secondary co-educational school on the island
III. The first secondary school open to students of every race, color, creed, and economic class in the island
IV. The third secondary school on the island

It was a truly momentous day when the Intermediate School opened its doors at Kingstown, St. Vincent in 1926.This was a great leap forward for the poor, and the history of secondary education in St. Vincent.

Both the Boys Grammar School and the Girls High School, patterned after the British Public School System, were elitist institutions. They were established to provide secondary education for the children of the plantation owners, the merchants of Kingstown and the children of the administrative elites who were employed by the colonial civil service. Those people had the wealth to finance higher education, whereas the masses could scarcely scrape by on post-slavery wages.

Prior to the inception of the Government secondary schools in St. Vincent, the elites of Vincentian society sent their children abroad for secondary training. Some went to neighboring islands such as Trinidad, Barbados, Antigua, and Grenada; while others were sent to prestigious boarding or finishing schools in England. Of course, to afford such luxuries the parents had to be wealthy, in most cases be of European origin, meaning being white and socially connected. Therefore, there was not a great pool of wealthy families on which the Intermediate School could depend for prospective students.

If we go backwards to the St. Vincent of almost eight decades ago, we find a country with social, political, economic and other systems, which were highly opposed to local entrepreneurial developments of any significant nature. Among the obstacles existing at that time were:

1) The administration of the colony by the British.
2) The wide economic gap between the relatively wealthy plantation owners of European descent, and the poverty of the majority - descendants of African slaves.
3) The lack of any overriding demand for human capital development beyond the ability to read and write.
4) The overt opposition of plantation owners against empowerment of the working class.
5) Potential loss of income to households with students pursuing secondary education.
6) The lack of vision among the community to see expenditures on secondary education as an investment rather than as an exercise in economic folly.
7) The inability to guarantee that the school would attract enough students to render the initiative economically feasible.
8) The need to have enough capital to fund the initial start-up, ensures monthly payments to teachers, and meets other operational expenditures.

Eustace was definitely enamored with learning and intensely motivated to share his knowledge. This brilliant young man having completed secondary school, being exposed to the great classical works of world literature, and full of Christian zeal to spread the Gospel to all peoples at every corner of the world, could not contain the fires to bring others to the place where they too could experience the power of knowledge. This son of a teacher/preacher, grandson of a plantation owner, and former civil servant, being consumed with Christian love, the love that passes all understanding, had no time to be overwhelmed by perceived obstacles, but became the embodiment of positive vibrations. So what would have been mountains to lesser men were only small hills for him to scale.

Again, effectively educating natives was never a top priority in British colonial planning, as far as the colonial administration of St. Vincent was concerned native peoples were a raw commodity to be controlled for the exploitation of their labor, thereby producing cheap foods for the citizens of the mother land, consuming English manufactured goods, and providing profits for the plantation owners. Here we must remember that Britain brought about emancipation of slavery in a roundabout way, designed to insure that the planters had access to cheap labor even after the slaves were freed. The emancipation decree required slaves, who were six years and older, to stay on the plantation as apprentices and work for the 'massas' who would provide food and clothing. Under this scheme freed slaves had to spend at least seventy-five percent of each day working for the plantation owners. So in effect, the slaves were only free on paper.

The colonial administration controlled the police, treasury, hospital, and other civil service positions. It was primarily accountable to the British Government and the plantation owners from whom the administration collected taxes. The payment of taxes to the monarch guaranteed that her majesty would protect the landowners from native revolts through the maintenance of a local police force; would maintain proper schools for the children of merchants, administrators and landowners; would insure markets for the products of the estates; and would protect the colony from foreign attacks. In the scheme of colonial administration the welfare of the local poor was of very little consequence. Therefore, Eustace could not expect any support from that corner for the development and promotion of his fledgling Intermediate School.

Throughout the period of the twentieth century, up until around 1970 when banana production was in full swing, a few wealthy families comprising estate owners and the merchant class amassed the wealth accruing from merchandise trade and agricultural production while the masses of the people survived in poverty. The poor supplemented the low wages from the estates or menial service jobs by producing crops on small hillside plots mostly in the mountainous interiors. This disparity in wealth meant that the target group for Eustace's secondary school, the poor, could not demonstrate the financial wherewithal to pay school fees and bear the costs of financing a secondary education.

The lack of sufficient income earned by parents of potential secondary school students to meet the costs of tuition, travel, books, and clothing would have posed a great obstacle to anyone desiring to market educational services to that sector of the population. So was Eustace a man of quixotic mentality? Or did he have a secret treasury to finance this venture? These questions can only be answered in Biblical terms: Eustace believed that his God owned the cattle on a thousand hills; that his Jesus fed thousands with five loaves and two fishes; that the lilies of the field do not worry about how they would clothe themselves; and that his God would supply all his needs. After all, this was not a business of doing Eustace's work, he was in the service of his Lord. And his God promised to supply all his needs, which would include providing the means to finance this educational venture. What incredible faith!

It is not difficult to imagine that the plantation owners would be overtly in opposition towards any movement that would take potential workers from the fields and place them in schools for the purpose of intellectual development and potentially social empowerment. Natives cultivated the fields, harvested crops, and transported the crops to the warehouses for preparation for the export markets. Agricultural products such as sugar, arrowroot, cotton, and coconuts exploited the brawn rather than brains of the local people. In fact, as recently as the 1960s possibly 75 percent of the students leaving the Lowmans Windward Anglican school would be working on the Union and Lauders estates by age 13. They harvested and processed coconuts, cultivated banana, and performed other menial jobs. At that time the going rate for estate laborers would have been around one dollar per day. So rewinding back to the 1920s we could expect laborers to earn a few shillings per week performing backbreaking work for the enrichment of estate owners.

As a consequence, the people who had the money to support the new secondary school would not have wanted any part of it. To actively support a venture that would enlighten the populace from which the landowners drew their farmhands would be to enter on a path leading to the dissipation of farm profits. Undoubtedly, an educated workforce would demand humane working conditions, reasonable wages, advancement, and even participation in decision-making. These were luxuries that the landowners reserved for themselves and their families. Luxuries that if permitted would end up siphoning off potential profits from the enterprise.

Those fears came to pass in the 1950s when a former student of the Intermediate School, Ebenezer Theodore Joshua became one of the most dynamic political and labor union leaders in St. Vincent. Joshua was born into a poor family in Bottom Town and was one of the early students at the Intermediate School. After leaving the school, he served as a primary school teacher in many of the rural villages. His encounter with rural poverty and the deprivations of his fellow Vincentians were great influences on his political actions. With an urge for personal advancement, Joshua immigrated to Trinidad where he associated himself with the emerging labor union movement and became a lieutenant of the great trade unionist Uriah Buzz Butler. This experience in Trinidad was to become quite valuable when Joshua returned to his homeland in the late 1940s and became involved in the emerging Vincentian labor and political struggles.

There are many others who were able to move on to productive lives through the influence of the Intermediate School. Recently, I had a conversation with Alston Becket Cyrus, the great Vincentian songwriter, calypso singer, and dynamic performer who has helped to elevate the name of St. Vincent and the Grenadines both on the local Caribbean stage and internationally. In response to my information concerning a fund-raiser for the Emmanuel High School, Becket asserted that he attended the Intermediate School. However, he did not know that Dr. Eustace was the founder of the Intermediate School.

According to some of his contemporaries, J.P. was a stubborn, hasty man. When he decided to start the high school he presented the idea to some of his friends. They all shied away from the responsibility. J.P. did not give up. He recruited his younger brother, Joseph Lambert, as a teacher and together they started the school with twelve students. His sister Leah became a student and later a teacher at the Intermediate School.

This is a testimony to the self-confidence and determination of the man. I suspect that if he had heeded his friends' advice, St. Vincent would have suffered the consequence of relying only on the Government high schools to educate the people. So while some might think that being 'hasty' was a negative character trait, it turned out to be quite a positive property for St. Vincent and the Grenadines in this instance. Throughout his life, J.P. continued to shoulder the risks squarely for the implementation of his ideas.

What Others Say About Dr. Eustace

Tribute to Dr. J. P. Eustace -- Visionary Educator

From The Honorable Mike Browne, Minister of Education

St. Vincent and the Grenadines

' The Century of Secondary Education' is the way that the last century can be described as far as the evolution of the formal education system is concerned. It built on the foundation of the 1800's -- the century of primary education - which saw the establishment and development of formal education in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. In turn, it served as a platform for the expansion of tertiary education and, in that sense, provided the educational bridge between the two levels of formal education and the two centuries.

It is in that broad context that the educational work and contribution of Dr. John Parmenas Eustace must be analyzed. That he was a visionary and "passionate educator", who touched and influenced the lives of thousands of Vincentians, giving them "a chance for self-actualization", has already been established. His larger role and contribution are now receiving well-deserved attention.

At a time when the Vincentian agricultural economy was developing and providing large families with sustenance and livelihood, and new villages were being established in St. Vincent, Dr. Eustace recognized the need for expanded educational opportunities in his homeland. His establishment of primary schools at Sandy Bay, and at Simon/New Prospect, was pragmatic responses toward the solution to the inaccessibility of education in those rural areas,. Later, he moved to establish the largest private secondary school, the Emmanuel High School, in the island at Kingstown, and then proceeded to start another campus of the Emmanuel High School in rural Mesopotamia. That experience confirmed the inevitability of expanded secondary education in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

For more than a decade following the opening of the Boys Grammar School (1908), and the Girls High School (1911), secondary education was the preserve of the social elite and the educational "créme de la créme". Some relief was achieved when Dr. Eustace and his brother J.L Eustace opened the Intermediate School in Kingstown in 1926. However, the growth and development of the primary school system meant that an increasing number of Vincentian students were eligible for post-primary education and were knocking -- indeed pounding -- at the doors of the three secondary schools in the colony.

Doc Eustace, himself a product and beneficiary of the colonial education system, and visionary that he was, played a vanguard role in secondary school education. Having established the Intermediate School in 1926, two and a half decades later, he again stepped forward to address a secondary education demand that the colonial administration overlooked. The renowned Emmanuel High School, with campuses in Kingstown, and later Mesopotamia, was Dr. J.P. Eustace's responses to this pressing need.

From the 1950's and through to the mid -- 1960's -- there was a dearth of secondary school-places on mainland St. Vincent, offered by the Girls High School, Boys Grammar School, Intermediate High School, Emmanuel High School, and St. Joseph Convent which were all located in Kingstown. The Government's "Rural Secondary Schools" had not yet come on stream. They were a product essentially of the last three decades of the twentieth century. So, at the time of "Doc" Eustace's educational intervention in Mesopotamia, rural secondary education was an innovation. Doc's initiatives would be later recognized as clear evidence of a man driven to lifting his people to heights in preparation for the nation-building challenges ahead.

J. P.'s passion to provide educational opportunities to the wider population was clearly derived from, and reflected in his general philosophy, which had at its core, an equalitarian ethic, no doubt grounded in Christian beliefs. The view that all persons are "equal in the eyes of God" was incompatible with the inequalities characterizing St. Vincent and the Grenadines at that time. Of course, in a small society, it was inevitable that Doc would encounter, on a daily basis, its class nature, whether in his general interaction with people or in his profession as an Optometrist.

His philosophy of education embraced the holistic view that education should address the totality of the human being, since the real person is far from "one -- dimensional". He accordingly placed emphasis on the inclusion of sports and Christian doctrine in the curricula of the institutions, as he strove to produce well-rounded Vincentian citizens.

The educational work of Dr. J P Eustace was thus a living testimony of his belief system. In short, he sought, despite the difficulties and challenges, to put into practice, his beliefs. This is a potent lesson for contemporary St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

---

Catalogue Information

---

About Trafford Publishing:
Our books are manufactured one-at-a-time to fill individual orders -- part of an innovative process we invented, called "on-demand publishing." Authors and organizations from 120 countries are using Trafford for their publishing needs.
If you (or your company) wish to list a title for sale to the public, contact the nearest office or select "publishing offices" from our bookstore pages for details.

Canada • USA • UK • Republic of Ireland Contact Us URL http://www.trafford.com © 1995-2005 Trafford Publishing, a division of Trafford Holdings Ltd. Trafford's Privacy Policy: Client information will never be provided to anyone outside of Trafford and its subsidiaries except where required by law.