Corporal Charlie King was a particularly hated policeman throughout the island. As such Fyzabad junction on June 19, 1937 was for him the wrong place and the wrong time.

The oilfields were hot. Workers were disgruntled with the low wages and the racism of the bosses. Four days before Tubal Uriah "Buzz" Butler had handed out leaflets calling for a sit-down strike in the oilfields. He'd thought it would be launched on June 23, but as yet had not communicated that date to anyone.

On June 18, Trinidad Leasehold workers at Forest Reserve noticed that the Apex Oilfields were in darkness. Talk started. Some felt that the strike must have started. Others thought not - they would have been informed if it had. An engineer said that Apex had tried a new process that didn't work hence the darkness. No one believed him. Police arrived to chase everyone off, and Apex workers decided to strike.

Butler was staying in Fyzabad, having scheduled a meeting for the night of June 19. As he walked to the junction, a police van passed and they called out to him.

When Butler reached Fyzabad junction, the police said no meeting could be held there. They went to hold it at Lum Tack Hill, but the police said that couldn't work either. So they returned to a private yard by the junction. Night had fallen and the crowd grew to a few hundred.

Grinning, a man in plain clothes stepped forward.

"Hello Charlie King," greeted Butler. "I hear you come to arrest me, with your gold teeth shining like a circus clown."

"Go and tell those colonial bastards that I, Butler, will turn the British Empire upside down if they don't give the workers their just due."

He paused, then said, "God and Uriah." The crowd repeated, "God and Uriah."

Charlie King retreated. A white police inspector strode up with two officers. "Read the warrant!" he ordered. The constable, trembling, was making rough weather of it. After a while he stopped and told Butler abruptly, "You're under arrest."

"Did you hear that?" Butler told the crowd in his loud, booming Baptist preacher's voice. "They say I'm under arrest. Must I go?"

A woman, who was subsequently tried for murder and acquitted, asked aloud, "Allyou going to let them carry the chief?"

The crowd rushed forward to share blows. The police fled, but more returned and fired two warning shots. "Blanks!" shouted the cried. The third shot, however, aimed at the crowd, blew off a man's ear. He fell and everyone began to scamper. Even the police van left, after which the crowed regrouped angrier than ever.

"Look Charlie King in the parlour!" shouted a man. A few entered the Chinese parlour but returned saying he wasn't there at all. "He bound to be somewhere inside," someone shouted, so they reentered for a more thorough search. One man took a cobweb broom and began to poke vigorously behind the bags of rice under the Chinaman's bed.

Out dashed Charlie King, and dived through a window. The shop was on the edge of a hill, however and the policeman fell about 30 feet to the ground where he lay with a broken leg. As people began to stone him, Charlie King wept: "O Gawd have mercy, spare me, spare me, have mercy, I beg allyou pardon, stop, stop, forgive me."

Instead they threw gas on him and burnt him to death as if he was just so much garbage in the La Basse.