Wes­ley Gib­bings

Feb­ru­ary 11 marks 15 years since the death of Ald­wyn Roberts (the Lord Kitch­en­er)–one of the great West In­di­an mu­si­cians of all time who died at age 77 on the eve of Trinidad Car­ni­val 2000.

Per­haps in an­tic­i­pa­tion of ex­pect­ed ob­ser­vances, UK-based Trinida­di­an po­et and broad­cast­er, An­tho­ny Joseph, in a half-hour BBC4 pro­gramme pro­duced by Al­le­gra McIl­roy, has pre­sent­ed some well-known and some­times de­bat­ed per­spec­tives on the late ca­lyp­son­ian's 15-year mu­si­cal so­journ in Britain.

For the as­sign­ment, Joseph sought the in­puts of peo­ple such as the bard's for­mer wife, Elsie (Mar­jorie) Lines; leg­endary Trinida­di­an jazz pi­anist and pan play­er, Russ Hen­der­son; mu­sic jour­nal­ist, Kevin Le Gen­dre; ca­lyp­son­ian David Rud­der; Leonard Joseph, a prot�g� who car­ried the per­form­ing name of Young Kitch­en­er, and British writer/pho­tog­ra­ph­er Val Wilmer.

The pro­duc­er al­so dug in­to the mu­sic archives for a se­lec­tion of Kitch­en­er's songs re­flect­ing the mu­si­cian's ex­pan­sive re­flec­tions on every­thing from love and pas­sion to his flir­ta­tion with Pan-African­ism to his love/hate re­la­tion­ship with Britain, his re­turn to Trinidad in 1963 to pro­vide Spar­row with worth­while mu­si­cal com­pe­ti­tion and his last­ing, in­ti­mate re­la­tion­ship with the steel­pan.

The ra­dio doc­u­men­tary pos­es sev­er­al some­what dis­put­ed ques­tions about Kitch­en­er's feel­ings about his home for 15 years. For ex­am­ple, was the young per­former en­tire­ly na�ve about the re­al­i­ties of life in Britain when he con­fi­dent­ly saun­tered off the HMT Em­pire Win­drush lin­er at the Port of Tilbury in Es­sex in June of 1948?

Or was it, as David Rud­der con­tends, all "a ma­m­aguy" when Kitch spon­ta­neous­ly launched, for the ben­e­fit of an en­quir­ing news­reel re­porter, in­to his now fa­mous ex­tem­pore verse which ex­tolled the great­ness of post-war Britain?

"Lon­don is the place for me, Lon­don, this love­ly city," sang an im­mac­u­late­ly dressed 26-year-old, in­tro­duced by fel­low pas­sen­gers as their "spokesman" and by the re­porter as Ja­maican per­haps be­cause Kitch had board­ed the ship in Ja­maica and most of its pas­sen­gers were from the is­land.

"You can go to France or Amer­i­ca, In­dia, Asia or Aus­tralia but you must come back to Lon­don city," the song goes.

Long­stand­ing friend, Leonard Joseph who knew Kitch from his days in Trinidad, lat­er adopt­ed the name Young Kitch­en­er when he start­ed mak­ing the rounds of Lon­don mu­sic clubs and halls in the ear­ly 1950s. He says in the doc­u­men­tary his mu­si­cal men­tor was just singing the prais­es of Eng­land in song "be­cause it was a song (and) he knew the be­hav­iour...the way they treat black peo­ple."

In­deed, Kitch was to lat­er lament: "It's a shame. It's a fear but what can you do?/The colour of your skin makes it hard for you./You can tour the world you still will get no place./Every door is shut in your face."

Joseph's ac­count al­so con­tends that de­spite the late ca­lyp­son­ian's some­times mixed mes­sages about what he had once de­scribed as his "Moth­er Coun­try" he was pre­pared to serve as a ver­i­ta­ble mes­sen­ger on be­half of Caribbean im­mi­grants in Britain fac­ing some­times un­wel­come and hos­tile con­di­tions.

In fact, when the West In­dies crick­et team beat Eng­land in a Test match in Eng­land for the very first time in 1950, out came Kitch at the fa­mous Lord's crick­et ground, gui­tar in hand, lead­ing in Pied Piper fash­ion a band of cheer­ing West In­di­an fans cel­e­brat­ing a vic­to­ry many con­sid­ered to have con­se­quences way be­yond the game it­self.

"He was the voice of Caribbean peo­ple," Rud­der says. In­deed, his move to Man­ches­ter five years af­ter his ar­rival in Britain, which brought about his mar­riage to Mar­jorie al­so saw a more in­ti­mate en­gage­ment of the wider Pan-African­ist strug­gle. It was this con­nec­tion that saw the launch of Birth of Ghana–a mu­si­cal trib­ute to the peo­ple of Ghana on its ac­ces­sion to in­de­pen­dence in 1957.

The host­ing of the Fifth Pan-African Con­gress in Man­ches­ter in 1945 was still res­onat­ing among the black pop­u­la­tion of the city and Kitch­en­er's em­ploy­er at the time, at the Fo­rum Club, was al­so an ac­tivist who was a close friend of peo­ple such as Ghana­ian leader Kwame Nkrumah and Trinidad-born thinkers and writ­ers George Pad­more and CLR James.

Wilmer claims in the doc­u­men­tary that at Kitch and Mar­jorie's wed­ding break­fast in Man­ches­ter in 1953, the man who be­came prime min­is­ter of Kenya in 1963, Jo­mo Keny­at­ta, sat around the ta­ble with the cou­ple. The his­tor­i­cal records how­ev­er show that Keny­at­ta was in prison in his home­land at that time.

?

What is clear, though, is that the Man­ches­ter ex­pe­ri­ence helped fine-tune Kitch­en­er's po­lit­i­cal sen­si­bil­i­ties. Though such com­men­tary would not come to dom­i­nate his pro­lif­ic mu­si­cal ca­reer, the Ari­ma Cham­pi­on as he was known in his ear­ly years as a ca­lyp­son­ian, is deemed im­por­tant as much more than a com­pos­er of bril­liant Road March win­ning songs (11 of them) and made-for-pan mu­sic.

Joseph's doc­u­men­tary adds im­por­tant brush marks to a time­ly por­trait of a ge­nius.

"Ge­nius, ge­nius, ge­nius," con­cludes Young Kitch­en­er. "He was fan­tas­tic. The great­est ca­lyp­son­ian ever. He was the Grand Mas­ter and will al­ways re­main that way."