Remembering Uriah Butler

It would point the way for the setting up of the Moyne Commission of Inquiry with its far reaching recommendations for more and modern schools as well as additional and better trained teachers; better health care, balanced and nutritional diets; increased people representation in the then legislative councils, encouragement of trade unions with emphasis on the protection of the rights of trade unions and members in the event of industrial action. In addition, labour departments were established.

Although, admittedly, trade unions in some of the then British colonies, for example in Jamaica and British Guiana (now Guyana), had been first organised following on World War 1, there had been official and business antagonism toward them.

Uriah Butler had been organising oil workers and along with Adrian Cola Rienzi, formerly Krishna Deonarine, had been involved in the mobilising of sugar workers as well. Butler had agitated and sought to negotiate better wages and working conditions for workers in the oil industry with specific reference to those at Trinidad Leaseholds Limited.

Meanwhile, although he had been exposed to intense provocation by the oil company’s managers he persevered with the bargaining process and had even resisted oilworkers’ calls for strike action. Butler understood the financial hardships which would be the plight of the families of oil workers should strike action be taken. Trinidad Leaseholds would have dragged out the process in an effort to starve the workers into submission. In the middle of June, 1937, however, workers staged a sudden sit down strike at the oil company.

A delegation was sent to Butler’s home to advise him of the new development and to seek his counsel. Butler pondered over this on his way by car to talk to the workers and as he neared Fyzabad, where the sit down strike action was taking place he agreed to the strike. Oil company’s officials had deliberately lied to Butler about Trinidad Leaseholds’ financial ability to pay. Indeed, the company despite the worldwide slide in demand resulting from the prevailing depression had prospered and in the last financial year had earned profits of more than 30 percent.

As Trinidad and Tobago’s Colonial Secretary would say in the legislative council in July at its first sitting after the strike and disturbances which would follow: “Today...the oil companies are paying big dividends. There can be no question today of these three employing groups, Government, the oil industry and the sugar industry being able to pay a fair wage and to provide decent conditions for their labour.”

When Uriah Butler reached the area, now called Charlie King Junction, where the striking workers were assembled, some 200 of them, he began to address the group. Corporal Charlie King, who had travelled by train from Port-of-Spain to San Fernando and then by car to Fyzabad, had made the journey with the sole intention of arresting Butler.

When an attempt at arresting Butler had ended somewhat abruptly when a lance corporal who had been designated, fumbled in reading the warrant, King stepped forward and held on to Butler. At this stage, Butler asked of the gathering human storm, “Must they arrest me?” The rest is history.

Several of the trade union leaders at the time were not content to remain solely in trade unionism, but became involved in politics as well. Butler, himself, along with some members of the party he would form, known as the Butler Party, was elected to Trinidad and Tobago’s pre-Independence Legislative Council.

In Jamaica, William Alexander Bustamante, came to the fore in January, 1938, during the unrest which had been triggered at Tate and Lyle’s factory in Jamaica. He would later be Prime Minister of Jamaica.

In Barbados, Grantley Adams would later head the Government. The story would be repeated in Antigua, Guyana and St Kitts and much later in Grenada et al. In each there was the push for political freedom.

They owed it in large measure to Tubal Uriah Butler and without seeking to diminish the roles which would be later played by Dr Eric Williams of Trinidad and Tobago, Dr Cheddi Jagan of Guyana and Errol Barrow of Barbados each Caricom country’s road to freedom was made that much easier by the leadership and struggles of Uriah Butler.