In my opinion we hold on too much to “traditional exports.” We fight for a place on the world market for our bananas when the market seems to want bananas from Costa Rica. We then accept a lower price. Our bauxite industry has all but died a long and painful death. Recycling aluminium is a lot cheaper than mining and producing it from scratch. Good riddance I say to the deep red gouges in our green landscape. Sugar is no longer King. The King is dead, bury him! Jamaica is a small country; if there is a demand for something we produce we would never be able to produce enough of it to satisfy the market, the old “supply and demand” of basic business. Case in point: coffee.  Jamaican Blue Mountain Coffee is in great demand worldwide. Unlike bananas, we set the price for our coffee and the market pays it. In the middle of a recession, income from coffee has increased by 30%. The same is true of cocoa. There is a limited area where these crops grow so we can’t put thousands of acres more into coffee and cocoa. We therefore need other products. We have hundreds of thousands of acres of sugar cane. Every year we accept lower prices on this crop which used to be the backbone of our economy. We will need some cane fields for domestic consumption and the production of another star export, rum. Some of our existing fields can be turned to the production of ethanol. This takes retooling and a fairly heavy financial outlay but isn’t that better in the long run than accepting half price for sugar?

Take a drive outside the cities. Wherever you go you are almost guaranteed to pass stands of bamboo on the roadside. In the countryside we use bamboo for fences, for scaffolding, even for homes. On small farms bamboo “pipes” are used for irrigation, small rivers are crossed on bamboo bridges and large ones navigated on bamboo rafts.  Children fish with bamboo poles and, unfortunately, some are disciplined with bamboo switches. In China and Japan, bamboo scaffolding is commonly used in construction.

There are many old wives’ tales about harvesting bamboo. But often those old wives were smart. The sugar content of bamboo rises and falls. The more sugar there is in the bamboo is the more attractive it is to insects. Sugar content is at its highest during the hottest time of the day. Harvesting bamboo at dawn during the full moon is actually the best time as the sugar content is lowest at that time! Bamboo also starts to rot from fungus after five to seven years. Bamboo is therefore best harvested between three to five and five to seven years, depending on the variety.

Bamboo grows at an incredible rate; it is the fastest growing plant on earth and can grow 24 inches (60 cm) per day. Bamboo plants reach maturity in three years. Because of this it is cheap and it is sustainable. Lumber and textiles made from bamboo are no longer niche products but are in incredibly high demand worldwide. In the U. S. one can buy bamboo flooring at any hardware store and bamboo sheets at your nearest department store. The bamboo products industry is anticipated to reach sales of twelve billion U S. dollars within two years. Why can’t Jamaica get a piece of that pie? Certainly with such an unbelievably high demand, the market would absorb as much bamboo lumber as we could produce. I can see it in my mind quite clearly: Acres and acres of former cane fields, already laid out, with irrigation in place, turned to bamboo and the huge sugar mills gutted and refitted to cure and laminate the lumber. Sugar cane and bamboo are both grasses, for all I know they could be planted and reaped using the same equipment. Maybe it’s time King Sugar was deposed in favour of the Big Bamboo!

Bamboo Avenue, St. Elizabeth

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The Theatre Royal after the Great Earthquake of 1907

A hundred years ago Kingston was rising from the ruins of the Great Earthquake of 1907. Col. Wray was now a middle-aged businessman himself but wealthier than his uncle could ever have imagined. He was also mindful of where his wealth started and made an offer to the city of Kingston to rebuild the Theatre Royal at his expense. This was a great relief to the Council as one can imagine the public purse would have been thinly stretched with rebuilding numerous public buildings. A competition was held for the design of the new structure and this was won by Mr Rudolph Henriques of Henriques and Sons. Ground was broken and, by the end of 1912, the new Ward Theatre, completed at a cost of 12,000 pounds, was handed over to the Mayor (coincidentally my Great Grandfather) and Council of the City of Kingston. It’s very first production, Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance took to the stage from December 19^th to 21^st with tickets costing between 2 and 4 shillings.

This splendid Neo-Classical building was constructed of concrete and steel, the newest method of building after the Great Earthquake. It boasts a stage of more than 2000 square feet and seating for over 800 patrons and was designed to rival the great theatres of Europe but ventilated to suit our tropical climate. The Ward also boasts perfect acoustics and every word spoken and sung on stage carries throughout the theatre without the need for microphones.

A recent photo of the Ward Theatre

My family attended events at the Ward for four generations for, as children, my sister and I were taken to Pantomime every year as well as occasional ballets. I recall watching the very First National Pantomime at the Ward. The theatre attracted international performances from all over the world: Italian opera, Russian ballet and the latest Broadway play. Many events in Jamaica’s history also unfolded there. It was at the Ward that the People’s National Party was launched in 1938 and the Jamaica Labour Party in 1943.

The Ward started its decline in the 1970s, theatre goers went downtown less often and, in a more modern time, there was the major problem of parking. Since 1982 the Ward, once the centre of the arts, has been almost permanently closed. In 1986 the Ward Theatre Foundation was formed and they have been valiantly fighting to raise funds to maintain and refurbish the structure. The Foundation and the Centennial Committee are now trying desperately to raise US$20,000,000 to bring this magnificent old lady back to her former glory in time for her Centennial less than three years away. It would be a wonderful thing indeed if our children could experience a performance on its stage and feel the grandeur that is part of a traditional theatre for the Ward is the only one of its kind in Jamaica and, indeed, the entire English speaking Caribbean.

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Look at the houses in Cherry Gardens or Mona or Portmore. Concrete blocks sitting on the ground. Locked up from the rain or the heat or the wind. Air conditioners blasting in the Cherry Gardens ones and some of the others too.

Now take a drive through some of the older areas. Vinyard Town is a great example. Look at even older houses like Devon House or Harmony Hall; the Georgian and Queen Anne Victorian styles What do you see? Houses built for our climate not the modern “international style” we started to build in the sixties.

Devon House

So, how do we build a house for our climate? Look to the past. Use “green” air conditioning. Old houses were a marvel of air circulation. Firstly, the house was build off the ground, allowing air to circulate underneath. Quite often this area, or “cellar,” was enclosed with lattice of some sort to prevent animals from getting under the house. The larger homes, great houses or town homes, would have an actual cellar. The poorer homes, like farm-worker cottages, would just rest on blocks of limestone. This feature would also serve to keep the damp out during the rainy season.

The second, and possibly more important element, was the roof vent. This allowed the hot air trapped between the ceiling and the roof a means of escape. Windows were often sash windows with shutters: louvers or jalousies. The jalousies were opened and the windows closed to let in the light or, more often, the jalousies were closed and the windows opened to let in the air. Should a hurricane be imminent windows and jalousies were closed and barred. No time wasted in the days before satellite imagery when the only warning of a hurricane was a bell ringing at the coast when the storm made landfall!

And then, of course there were those wonderful verandahs on two or three sides of the house. Besides being the perfect place to gather, the verandah kept both heat and rain out. If you look at some of the former homes in downtown Kingston or in towns across the island, you will notice than many of these old houses have upstairs verandahs completely enclosed with lattice or jalousies. This allowed the householders privacy to leave all their bedroom windows and doors open in hot weather. In fact, I remember my grandmother telling me that as a child they would actually move their beds out and sleep on the upstairs verandah in very hot weather!

Headquarters House

Many of these old houses also had internal door lights or transoms, small latticed or louvred openings above the internal doors and, on occasion, even interior windows! This didn’t do much for privacy but it certainly allowed air and light to circulate within the house.

I grew up in a house built in the 1940s with a crawlspace, a roof vent, jalousies and internal lattice transoms and I can state quite definitely that it was a great deal cooler than my cousins’ brand new 1960s built on the ground, slab-roofed unventilated house.

So here’s my point. Why don’t we bring back some of those old features. The houses may cost marginally more to build but, in the long run, wouldn’t we have a substantial savings in air conditioning costs? And those of us who can’t afford air conditioning would be a damn sight cooler and more comfortable!

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