Trinidadian Lauderic Rex Caton, who became famous in Britain as the man who introduced that country to the electric guitar, was buried last Saturday morning at the Woodbrook cemetery.

Caton, whose brother Nelson was well known here as a calypso composer, was born 1910 and left Trinidad 20 years later for England, hoping to further his studies in the fledgling field of electronics.

Although tentative efforts had been made to amplify the guitar in Britain before W.W.II, Lauderic Caton is widely acknowledged as the first prominent musician to introduce the instrument to that country.

He became guru to many, both a demon technician and star of the popular Ray Ellington Quartet.

Caton frequently told his audiences he had arrived at his tone while still at home, listening to records by the great Lonnie Johnson.

In the 1940s he jammed regularly with Pete Chilver and Dave Goldberg, two acknowledged British electric guitar pioneers and when West African seamen began to settle in Britain following the war, the man they now called "Professor" brought a new vitality to the music through his Trini / British guitaristics.

Caton began a European sojourn in Paris in 1937.

In 1940 he fled the oncoming Nazis and returned to Britain. Cuban bandleader Marino Barretto hired him to work at the exclusive Embassy in Mayfair, where he had to pretend he was Cuban, in order to keep the job.

Although penniless at that time, he bought an amplifier on credit and in the same year, penned his first piece 'Java Joint', named after a joint at which he fund day work. It was always a problem to present an electric guitar in those days, according to photo journalist Val Wilmer, who followed Caton's career, simply because people were afraid of the instrument electrocuting the whole dance.

A gig at the Havana Club was traumatic in that regard, but proved to be a major stepping stone, as when police closed the club, he got a home at Jig's a well-established black club in St Anne's Court in Soho.

It was at Jig's that he ran into Fats Waller and Duke Ellington, both of whom sought his services. As bandleader at Jig's he hired a fellow Trinidadian, Cyril Blake as trumpeter and began cutting records with him, but soon ditched that idea and formed the nucleus of what became the Ray Ellington Quartet.

Insisting that he remain a Trinidadian, Caton never gave up his passport and got his last wish, to be buried back home.

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