An­ge­lo Bisses­sars­ingh

Wood­brook is best known to­day as be­ing the lim­ing cap­i­tal of the is­land. There is lit­tle re­minder of the old days save the sprawl­ing mass of Lapey­rouse Ceme­tery and the names of the streets.

Wood­brook as a sub­urb is an amal­ga­ma­tion of three sug­ar es­tates. Wood­brook, the largest, was orig­i­nal­ly the prop­er­ty of Pi­cot de Lapey­rouse, who came to the is­land in 1783 un­der the Cedu­la of Pop­u­la­tion. He plant­ed bour­bon canes, thus found­ing the first sug­ar es­tate in the is­land, which was to be the back­bone of the econ­o­my from the late 18th cen­tu­ry well in­to the 1920s.On his lands was a mud­dy patch of grave­yard known as the Cam­po San­to, con­tain­ing a sin­gle leg­i­ble tomb­stone, that of Jean Creteau, who died in 1745. This was lat­er to be­come the of­fi­cial bur­ial ground for the city of Port-of-Spain and took the name Lapey­rouse Ceme­tery. The Lapey­rouse fam­i­ly sold the prop­er­ty, with its sug­ar fac­to­ry, to Hen­ry Mur­ray in 1820.With the com­ing of Eman­ci­pa­tion in 1834-36 Mur­ray saw ru­in star­ing him in the face and sold the lands to the mega-con­glom­er­ate of WH Burn­ley and Co, which was owned by the rich­est man in the is­land, William Burn­ley, and man­aged by his con­fed­er­ate William Ec­cles.

Af­ter William died in 1850, his son William F Burn­ley in­her­it­ed the prop­er­ty, but was pre­vent­ed from com­ing to Trinidad by a life in­sur­ance pol­i­cy which for­bade his en­ter­ing the trop­ics.

The Wood­brook Es­tate fell un­der the man­age­ment of Burn­ley Hunter Ec­cles, son of William Ec­cles. When Burn­ley Hunter died pre­ma­ture­ly in 1892, the Wood­brook Es­tate was oc­cu­pied by a huge, red-haired, Scots man­ag­er named Wat­son. He mar­ried a young lo­cal French Cre­ole girl from the Ros­tant clan. They had a child named Ozzie.He em­ployed dozens of in­den­tured In­di­an labour­ers and retro­fit­ted the an­cient fac­to­ry shell with mod­ern ma­chin­ery, in­clud­ing vac­u­um pans for man­u­fac­tur­ing crys­tals. They al­so con­tin­ued to make mus­co­v­a­do sug­ar or sug­ar loaves, which were like cones of hard­ened mo­lasses, wrapped in dried leaves. These were for the lo­cal mar­ket, since they were cheap and pop­u­lar, be­ing es­sen­tial as "brown­ing" in cre­ole cook­ing and as a key com­po­nent of the cui­sine of the many Venezue­lans who were set­tling in the city at the point in time.Speak­ing of food, Wood­brook was fa­mous for its pep­per­pot. This was a dish of Amerindi­an ori­gin con­sti­tut­ing the poi­so­nous juice of bit­ter cas­sa­va (cas­sa­reep) in­fused with pep­per (cap­sicum) and herbs to defuse its tox­i­c­i­ty, stewed with meat and veg­eta­bles. Pep­per­pot was an es­sen­tial food in times be­fore re­frig­er­a­tion, as the cas­sa­reep pos­sessed preser­v­a­tive prop­er­ties and thus the stew, if kept go­ing over a slow fire, could lit­er­al­ly keep ed­i­ble for years, with the ad­di­tion of fresh in­gre­di­ents pe­ri­od­i­cal­ly.

Al­so dat­ing from Amerindi­an times, the ves­sel for cook­ing the pep­per­pot was the cana­ree–a huge earth­en caul­dron of­ten con­tain­ing sev­er­al gal­lons, and great­ly heat-re­sis­tant. The pep­per­pot at Wood­brook was said to have been near­ing 100 years of ex­is­tence by the time of the Wat­son man­age­ment in the 1890s and was renowned both for its an­cient cana­ree and ex­cel­lent flavour.

The fac­to­ry be­gan to make a prof­it but tragedy struck when Mrs Wat­son and her son Ozzie were tak­en away by dis­ease, leav­ing the Scots­man des­o­late.He left his job short­ly there­after.In 1899, the al­most 90-year ex­is­tence of the Burn­ley em­pire in Trinidad end­ed when Wood­brook was sold to the Siegert fam­i­ly, of An­gos­tu­ra fame. The sug­ar fac­to­ry was de­mol­ished and the cane­fields laid out in lots for rent to a bur­geon­ing coloured mid­dle class. A small es­tate of­fice was erect­ed in 1907 to col­lect land rents and is still to be seen on the south­west­ern cor­ner be­low Mur­ray Street play­ground, the site of the old sug­ar fac­to­ry. Streets were laid out which re­flect­ed the Siegert fam­i­ly–Car­los, Al­fre­do, Ros­ali­no, Ana, Pe­tra and Al­ber­to.The lots were snapped up since there was a new re­spectabil­i­ty in the area. Coloured peo­ple of de­cent ed­u­ca­tion were find­ing em­ploy­ment in the civ­il ser­vice and thus need­ed to es­cape from the bar­rack-yards of the city. Quaint gin­ger­bread cot­tages sprang up which gave the dis­trict its sig­na­ture style. In one of these cot­tages, the fa­ther of the na­tion, Dr Er­ic Williams, was born in 1911.Fi­nan­cial trou­bles plagued the Siegert fam­i­ly and as one of the sons was a may­or of the city, the larg­er part of it was sold in 1911 to the colo­nial gov­ern­ment for �25,000.It re­mained a mid­dle-class area and de­vel­oped steadi­ly, grad­u­al­ly be­ing em­braced by the city to be­come the mi­ni-me­trop­o­lis it is to­day.