Dear Editor,
It was a sad but glad night at the London High Commission on Tuesday 17th. A jam-packed room came to salute two great Guyanese writers ‒ Michael Abbensetts and ER Braitwaite ‒ and they were in some very distinguished company. ER was remembered by his son, Francis, with some lovely tales and a joke or two. Ram John ‘Porkpie’ Holder read out his first impressions of his East End class from To Sir with Love. The audience was then treated to the fictional end to the tale from the film.
Two hugely significant figures in British literature paid tribute in person. Hanif ‘My Beautiful Laundrette’ Kureshi has written a BBC film on To Sir which is to be shown soon. He said simply the book had changed his life when he came across it in a suburban library. Farrukh Dhondy, the former multicultural tsar of Channel Four, paid tribute to ER and Michael Abbensetts and how the sheer quality of their writing, versed firmly in the Western intellectual tradition, had taken on the white man in literature and beat him.
Michael was remembered both on film and with an extract from his ground-breaking 1970s BBC series ‘Empire Road’ starring the late, great, Norman Beaton. The series producer Peter Ansorge fondly recalled working with Michael as did the actor Gordon Case who had done so in the theatre.
All in all, it was a fitting and fulsome tribute to two sons of the soil who left their mark on British and Caribbean culture and left a void when they died late last year.
High Commissioner Hamley Case is to be thanked for his hospitality and for chairing the event.
Yours faithfully,
John ‘Bill Cotton/Reform’ Mair