The Early Years

• Author: Albert Fiadjoe
• Profession: Professor of Public Law at the University of the West Indies and a former Dean of Law
• Pages: 1-15

The Early Years | 1

THE EARLY YEARS

The Background Years

Philip Telford Georges was born in Roseau, Dominica in modest

circumstances on January 5, 1923, to Milutine Cox and John Henry

Duport-Georges. Although Philip was his given name, it was his middle

name, Telford, by which he came to be known and to be addressed.

At the time of his birth, Dominica, a mountainous volcanic island,

situated roughly in the centre of the chain of West Indian islands

known as the Lesser Antilles and part of the Leeward Islands grouping,

was a British Crown colony administered by a British Administrator.

In the 1920s, Dominica, largely a peasant society, relied on lime

production and not sugar, as its main export crop turning later to

vanilla and bananas when the lime estates fell victim to disease.

Dominica society was, to a large extent, fashioned by its topography.

Apart from Roseau, the capital in the south and Portsmouth in the

north, the rest of the population lived in small, isolated, self sufficient

village communities with little communication between them or with

the capital. There was no large White plantocracy as in Barbados.

The Englishmen who had been earlier enticed to Dominica to establish

estates on former Crown Lands had abandoned them for one reason

or another. Lennox Honychurch describes Dominica society as

comprising a small white Roseau elite headed by the British

Administrator and including the Crown Attorney and medical

professionals and a small coloured elite generally known as ‘mulatres

Roseau’. This stratification pattern was reflected in club membership

– the whites belonged to the Dominica Club while the coloureds

became members of the Union Club. On the whole, Dominica in the

early 1920s, was one of the least developed of the West Indian islands.

Literacy levels were very low with the majority speaking ‘patois’, access

to education was limited, communication was restricted by the absence

of roads and the severity of the terrain, and living standards were low

as the economy floundered with the demise of limes.