Dear Editor,
In recording our history, whether social, political or economic, we have a way of centring things around big names already known to the public. These persons are patently important and cannot be left out, but the big names by themselves do not carry the whole of the experience. In my village writings, I have sought to name people whose names may never have appeared in the newspapers, but who have been “the salt of the earth” in their communities, organizations and circles. Ms. Joyce Hutson, who passed away very recently, was one such person.
Ms. Joyce Hutson passed away at the age of 83, at a village on the west bank of Demerara, far away from her home village, Buxton-Friendship. She attended the Buxton Congregational School, with Mr. F.H Pollard as head teacher, and with stalwarts like George Young, Ivy Jacobs, Ruby Weatherspoon, Ruby John, and others. Mr. G.S.L. Payne succeeded Mr. Pollard as head teacher. Ms. Joyce Hutson did not attend secondary school like Magda and Brynmor Pollard, but she did a full course at the Fredericks’ School of Home Economics (formerly NPC) in Georgetown, Guyana.
The Buxton Congregational School was one of our four primary schools in Buxton-Friendship in which pupils of the various races sat in the same bench and played the same games. The majority were Africans with Indians next in order, and with very visible Portuguese and Chinese. I myself attended the Roman Catholic School, although I was an Anglican and later taught at the Anglican school. When I reported Ms. Joyce Hutson’s death to Mr. Rampersaud Tiwari, he was touched and told me that they sat in the same bench and were of the same age group. I write this on purpose because some communicators have found it useful to forget how Buxton became involved in the interethnic conflicts of the 1960s. Never mind, I shall soon be writing for general information an updated account of this village and its place in national politics. In my most recent book, The Legend, in which Dr. David Hinds interviews me about Guyana’s post-emancipation villages, I took care to name numerous persons in all parts of the coastland and from all political parties as history makers.
Ms. Joyce Hutson’s name may not have appeared in the newspapers, or in the public media before her passing. This is a fate she shares with a great majority of history makers. She had no political reputation or activity that I know of, local or national. Her work was on the economic front and particularly in the cooperative movement to which she made a vital contribution locally. She was one of the younger pioneers of the Guyana Garment Manufacturers Cooperative Society Limited, founded by Buxton women and a few men as an Independence project. Perhaps it was her training at the Fredericks’ School of Home Economics that prepared her for the role she was to play in the growth and development of this Garment Factory for the 13 years she served in it, mainly as its financial manager and, in fact, as a general motivator and welder of a community of producers. Stumbling along for the first two years, the factory, housed in a building of the Guyana Development Corporation began to rank honourably among Guyana’s garment factories.
In a book about cooperatives of that period, Mr. Keith Easton treats with some of the story of the GGMC. That book is available. This writing tries to do justice to the role of individuals within a collective, and to the role of Ms. Joyce Hutson in particular. The GGMC really took off as a factory when Mr. Lawrence Joseph, of Trinidad and Tobago, came to Guyana and stumbled on the Buxton group, then in need of someone trained in crafting and sustaining an assembly line for garments. Being a cooperative, the organization had a Committee of Management acting as an adjunct and holding the legal powers of management under the cooperative act. In the case of the GGMC, the Committee of Management, apart from those employed as workers in the factory, was a committee of volunteers who earned a living elsewhere. Because of the fact that GGMC had a set of principles, members of the workforce were represented on the committee of Management which was, as said before, a mixed bag. Each meeting was a business discussion that included the production manager, sewing machine workers, the volunteer accountant, Mr. Raymond Talbott, later replaced by Mr. Keith Easton, his student in accounting, a few other volunteers and me, the elected chairperson. All who took part in those meetings will confirm that Ms. Joyce Hutson, one of the youngest, was also the one with the fullest appreciation of the points of view of all the sectors making up the committee of management.
As recorded above the story of the factory, at least in outline, appears in Mr. Easton’s book. The purpose of this writing is to argue that the collective would not achieve its highest performance without the right type of individuals with the right experience and knowledge. And by knowledge here, I mean work knowledge and not mere book knowledge. This is just were Ms. Joyce Hutson excelled. She knew the skills that went into the assembly line, the needs of the cutting room, the problems of the workplace, the rates of pay which she applied to the pay list from pay-day to pay-day and the various bottlenecks, frustrations and uplifting experiences of the workplace. At a time when so much of the “News of the Woman” is about assaults on her, it is fitting to pay tribute to one that helped to create social history in one of the post-emancipation villages of Guyana. In the present atmosphere of polemics with an ethnic edge, it is timely to recall that, like the village itself, the garment factory was founded by Africans and later offered a place of equality to persons of other origins who sought to enter it, as I said in the dedication to The Legend, “for various human reasons.”
In the decades after 1838, the villages became places of production and community sustaining activities, based mainly on agriculture. Out of agriculture grew up a number of cottage industries or domestic industries in which men or women or both were active. The agricultural cooperatives withered away for a number of reasons, which invite more and more exploration.
We celebrate Ms. Joyce Hutson today because she played a critical role in a new economic climate in which village women took a decision to prepare themselves for the factory system on a small scale. My previous writings celebrate numerous individuals, including women, without whom the quality of life in the best of times would have been at levels lower than actually achieved.
Yours faithfully,
Eusi Kwayana