Edward Ricardo (E.R) Braithwaite never lost his distinctive Guyanese but clear, crisp accent even though he spent most of his long life away from his South American birthplace. Blessed with a cultured mother who loved the English language, she insisted that he use it well, even as a small boy. That passion for carefully choosing and arranging words came in good stead when Ted, as he was known, wrote his first book, the autobiographical “To Sir, With Love,” published in the United Kingdom in 1959, that raced on to become the well-loved international bestseller.
In a long, revealing interview, in 2009, a youthful E.R reminisced about his mother’s warning “that words are not to be thrown casually about.” He told Executive Director of the Washington-based English-Speaking Union, John F. Andrews, that “sometimes this was not easy for me.” Recorded by C-Span, the chat at the Washington-DC branch of the Phi Beta Kappa Society features extraordinary recollections by the affable author and eloquent educator, then an incredible, spry 95, who spoke almost continuously for most of the 78 minute broadcast, save for the occasional question from Andrews.
E.R recounted the family always ate and spent quality time together: “My mother reared me without recourse to punishment,” except for that “rare occasion when she had to resort to it,” and in the Braithwaites’ household, “I could not just open my mouth and let things (words) pop out.”
“I can remember once – and it will always live in my memory – I was playing in the backyard with some of my neighbour’s children – boys originally from India. Their names I’ll never forget – Alapi the oldest, Chote the middle and Boom Boom the youngest. We were playing marbles. And I became accustomed to hearing them using these richly descriptive words. I remember sitting at the dinner table with my mother and it popped out. I forgot to control my language – this word popped out. My mother took me by the hand into the bathroom, reached into the cabinet, took out a bottle which contained a black mixture called cascara… It is the essence of bitterness. If you take a little cascara in the mouth and you think you’ll use some water to lessen the effect, it makes it worse. And my mother said, ‘Any time I hear you using words like that, this bottle will be waiting for you!’ ”
Born in Queenstown, Georgetown, in June 1912, he was taught to enjoy books at an early age. “My mother taught me to read when I was three, and my mother read to me often…I just didn’t know what the words meant but I loved the cadence, I loved the lilt of her voice. I loved the flow of the words – they meant ‘somebody’ and I wished I too could read like that. They considered me bright when I was at school. But this was because my mother wanted to know whatever happened at school. And I wanted to be able to tell her good things have happened with me.”
Ted worked “very hard” to get into prestigious Queen’s College (QC) in the 1920s, then British Guiana’s top boys’ school. He narrated with a smile, “My mother and father, they had a strange way of keeping my nose to the grindstone. They always reminded me that if I wanted to get ahead in this world, I must do it through education. And it was known that Guiana could not provide me fully with that education. So there was always something else, somewhere else. And because it was a British colony, it was always that something else far away in England.”
Acknowledging some students seem “to think that having a little homework is such a chore,” he pointed out that to get into QC in the 1930s, one had to do well in a wide range of subjects including English, Nature and Bible Studies, Elementary Greek, Latin and French.
Now “I see kids who complain of how much work they have to do. Because they have not yet discovered that it’s our preparation for more work. There is nothing in this life which would allow you ever to escape work. Living is work. Those people who don’t work, but want to work at living always end up into debt because living is not easy. You work at living.” Braithwaite observed.
Developing a natural ease with language, he mused that “at school my friends and I would engage each other in the exercise of words. We would read books and then try to impress the others with what we had read and how we could express what we had read.”
Around 1930, he won a coveted science scholarship for Cambridge University. Even as the neighbours joined the family to celebrate, E.R. recalled that no one stopped to consider the difficulty of a boy actually travelling on his own, a maiden voyage from the South American colony to England, on the other side of the world.
“These were the days before international flights. We were not wealthy enough to book passage on an ocean liner. And therefore my father arranged room for me on a cargo ship. Let me tell you what that was like (laughter). A small cabin on the main deck -(like) a cupboard in your own home… I had no one to talk with because the men who worked on that ship had no time for a small boy.” Fortunately he had lots of his beloved books.
Teenaged Ted suffered a colossal culture shock on arrival for “I discovered what England really was.” “Every important person in Guiana during my boyhood was white, apart from my parents” so “I got into the habit of believing that white people were always in charge of everything.”
“And then I got to London, and the first time I saw a coal man humping some coal bags, I had to stop and look.” Shaking his head, and closing his eyes momentarily, he admitted, “I had never imagined this. I had never imagined white people sweeping the streets. There were lots of things which were brand new to me.”
“Gradually I began to see that the world was made up of others” and life “as it really is, not as I had allowed myself to believe it was. Then I went to school and I was the only black one among all these white students, and this was before women were allowed into my college at Cambridge.”
Surrounded by these Englishmen, “there was I, like a currant in a rice pudding. And they wondered if I felt the heat and they wondered if I felt the cold and they wondered…we would have a soccer match and at the end of it I would go and have a bath and they wondered why I bothered, who would know?” E.R said softly laughing.
Still Ted’s lifelong quest to learn made aspects of his early university time “magical.” Forced to memorise all the complex science formulae “until they were running out of your ears,” QC pupils like him studied without demonstrations and experiments at the institution, bereft in the 1920s of chemistry and physics laboratories.
E.R. saw a properly equipped facility at Cambridge for the first time: “God in heaven! It was as if this is where I ought to be. I felt at home!” he exclaimed nearly 80 years later. “The cold and other things didn’t matter. I could never convey to my young English associates, why it was that I hated not to be in the lab. It never occurred to me to miss classes, because that’s why I was there.”
World War Two broke out and Ted heeded the clarion call to serve. In the days before British television, the summons for all “able-bodied persons” came straight from Prime Minister Winston Churchill, by radio.
“He did not say we need only the short ones or the tall ones or the slim ones or the fat ones or the white ones or the black ones. And so like many of my fellow students, I volunteered. Some went into the (British) Army, some went to the Marines and some (like me) into the (Royal) Air Force.”
Knitting his fingers together, his eyes shining, Ted spoke of surviving as fighter pilot and returning to Cambridge following five and a half years of brutal war, “I realised how much I had missed the labs and the classrooms, the discussions and the talk. There is something about all of us which relishes talk, especially when talk is of a certain level and that language is exciting and beautiful.”
He delighted in the opportunity to listen to different points of view, “to match wits” and to engage in rousing debate. Unexpectedly, “All the reading I had done, all the things my mother and father discussed with me at the dinner table, the language began to make sense. A point of view was discussed and you could make an interjection and make it imaginatively. When words can come together and paint pictures at your discretion, not somebody else’s, you are doing it. You suddenly feel a relationship with words.”
Excelling as expected, he earned his Masters and a Doctorate in Physics. But even though Ted’s qualifications were impeccable, he was unable to find work in the field due to his race and the dark colour of his skin, dashing the driving desire to become a Research Physicist.
Frustrated and disillusioned, he brooded in the gardens of a London park disappointed “with everything British” until a fateful chat with an unknown, kind gentleman altered his mindset. The elderly man persisted in talking and counselled the taciturn Ted to try teaching since there were countless vacancies in post war-England and the authorities had no choice but to hire him. E.R was sent to a mostly white school in the tough, war-ravaged East End of London and he taught the poor pupils “without knowing how to teach,” as he put it in another interview.
Gradually “I started to enjoy being the black teacher. I started to enjoy being me.” His vivid experiences became the 1959 memoirs “To Sir, With Love” which led to the popular movie of the same name in 1967 starring Sidney Poitier, and featuring Lulu’s famous title song. Ted did not care much for the playful portrayals in the film, nor for those who criticised his multiracial marriage and friendships. When asked about this, at a time when such relationships were rare, E.R. said he never paid attention. “If you look right and left to see who is staring at you, you’ll ending up [falling and] breaking your nose.”
An extraordinary man, a lifetime lover of language, a serendipitous writer, a brilliant mind and a suave Ambassador, E.R. Braithwaite died of “a cardiac related event” in hospital, in Maryland, United States, December 12, 2016. R.I.P Sir, With Love. 104 years young.
ID marvels at E.R. Braithwaite’s chance encounters that changed his life, and his view that words create bridges for people to reach out and touch each other. Yet she wonders about black holes, dark energy and matter – and what a great research physicist the world lost.
Editor’s note: An abridged version of this column appeared in the Trinidad Express.
