Dear Editor,
To Mr R Tiwari’s query: “Is there no one else to speak up for Arthur Abraham?” I say “Yes, there is.” I would speak.
I first met Mr Abraham in 1949, when I had to visit him at his office, in connection with my application for entry into the civil service. He struck me then as being unassuming, kind, polite and ‘fatherly’. I had to take a typing test, did a poor job of it, and he advised me to continue with my typing and shorthand classes, to reach the required standard. Several years later, when I had improved considerably, having undergone advanced secretarial training in London and working there for some time, I met him again in Guyana. He was the same smiling, charming, courteous, unassuming man. In personnel matters, he had a sense of fair play and, from what I have been told by his secretaries, he was very loyal to his staff.
Someone who knew him socially described him to me as “a most benign individual”.
I always got the impression that Mr Abraham was a “people person”, and it must have been a matter of some disappointment to him to be assigned to a department so far removed from the Chief Secretary’s Office, regardless of the fact that his transfer was horizontal.
I suspect that “the deafening silence of survivors of the urban middle class community who knew Arthur Abraham” may be attributed to the fact that not many of them from that era are still around.
But, for what it is worth, I remember Mr Arthur Abraham with gratitude and respect.
Yours faithfully,
Geralda Dennison
