When Raoul John and Kenrick Nobbee first knew each other their interactions didn’t suggest they would develop a bond that would last more than 50 years.
Nobbee was a skinny Lower Six student in QRC and John—one year ahead—was in charge of the school’s chess club. In 1964 John became T&T’s first junior chess champion. He had considerable passion for the game and thought the other boys’ playing draughts was a waste of the checkerboard.
“If Raoul came and ketch you he used to just…,” Nobbee said in a recent interview, making a sweeping movement with his hands to demonstrate how John would snatch the board. “He wouldn’t even ask you please; he would just grab it and take it away.”
John, looking on, joined Nobbee in laughing at the memory.
“I will thank him for getting me to learn to play chess,” Nobbee continued. “But we were never really that friendly.”
Last September, the two men gathered with ten others to celebrate the experience that would make them friends and which they all felt had a lasting impact on their lives and careers.
In 1963, the year after T&T became independent, sugar giant Caroni Ltd, a major provider of employment, was managed by mainly white expats. “A set of short khaki pants, tall socks people” is how former Caroni manager now chairman of Witco, Anthony Phillip put it.
Then prime minister Dr Eric Williams felt this situation couldn’t continue in the newly independent nation and talked to representatives of British sugar manufacturers Tate and Lyle, which owned Caroni, about doing something about it.
They organised an ambitious programme to change the management face of Caroni, making it more representative of post-colonial T&T.
Every year between 1964 and 1969, promising young people—at the time all men—chosen from a pool of applicants were sent to work at Tate and Lyle interests in the UK for up to three years while they studied part time at technical institutions, in fields that complemented their work experience. They were expected to come back to work at Caroni in managerial positions.
It was an experiment of sorts, unprecedented in T&T, and the young men—most freshly out of secondary school—went on to make great contributions at Caroni and other companies.
Anthony Phillip and Christopher Knowles, who worked for Caroni then later Tate and Lyle in England and Saudi Arabia, were among the seven chosen in the first year of the programme. They worked, along with another Trinidadian, at a T&L refinery in east London while studying chemistry from 1964 to 1967.
John, once the head of the Elections & Boundaries Commission and the Chamber of Industry and Commerce, and Nobbee, the former estate manager at UWI, met up in Glasgow, Scotland, where they worked at sugar machinery manufacturer A and W Smith and Co Ltd, a subsidiary of Tate and Lyle, and studied mechanical engineering from 1965 to 1968.
Lloyd Walters, who spent 36 years at Caroni and now runs two businesses of his own, worked at T&L’s Thames refinery while studying chemistry in London during the same period.
Ellery Ng Wai, an in-demand packaging specialist who worked at various major companies after he left Caroni, joined John, Nobbee and five other Trinidadians in Glasgow, where he worked and studied from 1967 to 1970.
Former Caroni CEO Chandra Bobart was also among the first recruits and studied and worked in Glasgow from 1964.
“It was transformational as far as I’m concerned,” said Phillip, who spent five years at Caroni as a chemist and production manager before going on to the production department at WITCO, eventually becoming managing director. He retired in 2006.
“I always describe that experience in England as the cornerstone of my career,” he said. “We were exposed to a different culture, a different environment. We were working with technology that was state of the art. When I left there I had such a wide variety of skills. I was knowledgeable about so many things.”
The programme ended but the men’s connection to it and each other didn’t. Nobbee and John met up again while John was studying math and Nobbee engineering and production management at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. They both later worked for Texaco.
With the exception of John and one other, all the trainees worked at Caroni for various lengths of time before taking up other professional opportunities, keeping in touch and coming together for the occasional reunion.
This year they wanted to do something special for the programme’s golden anniversary. Twelve of them travelled to Tobago for a weekend that included dinner at the Kariwak Village Hotel in Crown Point.
At a joint interview with the T&T Guardian, John, Nobbee, Phillip, Walters, Bobart, Knowles and Ng Wai came together again and shared stories.
Phillip showed a photo of him, Knowles and another trainee in their overalls on the roof of the London refinery where they worked, their frames slim, their faces boyish. He recalled the challenge of coming back home and taking up managerial responsibilities at a young age. He remembered the first time he was left in charge of a section of one factory by his English boss.
“He was with me until about 6 pm. He then said, ‘Well I can’t stand up here and continue holding your hand, young Philip. I’m gone.’ Well, I almost panic and run out the door! A sugar factory is huge, noisy, with lots of things going on, steam hissing, machinery and people working. And you are in control. You mess it up if you make a mistake.”
Caroni, the source of controversy for decades after the government took control in 1970, became less viable and finally closed its doors in 2003. But it left its mark in many ways, including on the first Trinis who were trained to run it.
“I seldom think about it,” Christopher Knowles said of his training experience.
“And the reason why that happens is because it is part of me. It’s like growing up and learning to ride a bicycle. You don’t think about that learning phase. It was a part of my life, a very pleasant part and very informative.”