To­day's Ed­i­to­r­i­al

Good­bye to a pa­tri­ot; farewell to a man who passed through this life pro­vid­ing his fel­low cit­i­zens with ex­em­plary cit­i­zen­ship which can be fol­lowed through the ages to come: Sir El­lis Em­manuel In­no­cent Clarke, of him it could be tru­ly said that he walked with kings and queens but nev­er for­got his hum­ble roots grow­ing up in the ur­ban vil­lage of Bel­mont. Very ear­ly in his life, young El­lis Clarke made con­nec­tion with the re­li­gion of his fam­i­ly and re­mained a fol­low­er of Ro­man Catholi­cism through­out his life, nev­er for­go­ing the re­quire­ment of the faith to fel­low­ship with like be­liev­ers. Sir El­lis al­so showed him­self to be com­plete­ly hu­man and Trinida­di­an/To­bag­on­ian to the core, nev­er for­go­ing an op­por- tu­ni­ty to share in the joys of life, the so­cial and sport­ing events and very hu­man in­ter­ac­tions with his friends and with the or­di­nary peo­ple he met in his life's jour­ney. His close per­son­al friends al­ways tell about Sir El­lis be­ing some­one who would tell a joke, take a joke and share in a good lime. One of them said re­cent­ly, "What you saw with Sir El­lis is what you got"-a quin­tes­sen­tial Tri­ni demon­strat­ing to all of us that we can be the high­est of achiev­ers with­out elim­i­nat­ing that es­sen­tial part of us in­cul­cat­ed as part of what it is to be a na­tion­al and a West In­di­an.

Dur­ing his life, Sir El­lis told the sto­ry of his school days at St Mary's Col­lege, the ca­ma­raderie he shared with his friends and their dili­gence in the aca­d­e­m­ic work put be­fore them and his own ef­forts and good for­tune in win­ning the is­land schol­ar­ship in maths. It is clear that through the schol­ar­ship he was des­tined to re­turn to serve the emerg­ing na­tion, hav­ing de­cid­ed to study law with an em­pha­sis on con­sti­tu­tion­al law. It has be­come al­most clich&ea­cute;d to state that Sir El­lis was the ma­jor shaper of the In­de­pen­dence Con­sti­tu­tion, there­by set­ting down the in­sti­tu­tion­al, le­gal con­fig­u­ra­tion of the state of Trinidad and To­ba­go; the fact though is that he did. Al­most 50 years af­ter in­de­pen­dence, we in this gen­er­a­tion may take the in­sti­tu­tion of the State as an au­to­mat­ic and ex­pect­ed cre­ation af­ter colo­nial rule. But on re­flec­tion it has been quite an achieve­ment, not mere­ly for T&T, but for the rest of the for­mer British colo­nial Caribbean, on­ly Ja­maica hav­ing gained in­de­pen­dence be­fore T&T. What Sir El­lis did was to fash­ion the out­lines of an in­de­pen­dent na­tion pur­su­ing an as­sent to na­tion­hood amongst the na­tions of the world.

Rather than have our Con­sti­tu­tion draft­ed from Britain by the colo­nial mas­ters, Sir El­lis' job was to demon­strate to the world that con­sti­tu­tion draft­ing was not the pre­serve of for­eign­ers but that we had the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty and ca­pa­bil­i­ty to do it our- selves. With be­ing named among the na­tions of the world, Sir El­lis al­so had the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to fash­ion from noth­ing the diplo­mat­ic pro­file of the coun­try in world fo­ra such as the Unit­ed Na­tions. There, his re­spon­si­bil­i­ty was to make this new­ly emerg­ing na­tion known to the world as an in­de­pen­dent state and not as a colo­nial ap­pendage of Britain. In 1981 when the poli­ty had to tran­si­tion from the po­lit­i­cal lead­er­ship of first Prime Min­is­ter Dr Er­ic Williams, walk­ing a road we had nev­er known be­fore, Sir El­lis' guid­ing hand and mind were there to see us through that tricky pe­ri­od which, if han­dled bad­ly, could have gone all wrong. If Dr Williams is the po­lit­i­cal Fa­ther of the Na­tion, Sir El­lis Clarke is the fa­ther of the le­gal, in­sti­tu­tion­al state of T&T. We are as­sured that to­day he will be with his Fa­ther in Heav­en. Good­bye most trust­ed ser­vant of the State.