By Kim Johnson

Sunday Express

February 8, 1998

Page 15

"He would have been prouder of the City Council award than of a Trinity Cross," says Marion O'Callaghan in her raspy voice. "His great love was Port of Spain and he knew every nook and cranny."

O'Callaghan, 66, was speaking of her father, the late Patrick Jones, who was honoured by the Port of Spain City Council on January 29^th for his contribution to downtown mas, a man who contributed to this society in every sphere, including trade unionism, politics and culture in every sense.

He was descended from the Chens, who, according to Hollis Liverpool in his book Calypsonians to Remember, had been involved in Chinese revolutionary movements in the 19^th century. His father and uncle were captured by the British and exiled from China as indentured servants, Jones's father to Guyana and his uncle to Trinidad, although both ended up here, where they became wealthy grocers. Jones's father married a mulatto woman who gave him four children, starting with Patrick Alexander Jones in September 1876.

Two years later his cousin Eugene Chen was born, also to a mulatto mother. But whereas Chen returned to China, where he became a leader in the nationalist movement, Jones lived his long life in Trinidad, hating colonial oppression and loving his Chinese heritage no less than his cousin. But in addition, he embraced the newly emerging creole culture that was being born of African and European roots.

"My first childhood memory of Daddy would be that he loved to cook an omelette in a very strange way," recalls O'Callaghan. "He'd get it almost flat and chop it in little slices - it was magnificent."

The culinary urge was only one aspect of his Chinese heritage, and a private one at that. More public was Jones's love for mas, and here he made contributions which are still with us, starting with the Dragon or Devil mas Jones created in 1906, according to Bruce Procope's 1956 Caribbean Quarterly essay on this masquerade, after he saw a sacred picture of the devil being exorcised from a sick person. There were imps and Lucifer; in 1910 Jones introduced Beelzebub in chains, and in 1911 the Bookman and the Beast.

As a teenager Jones studied pyrotechnics in Germany, and for the rest of his life he earned his livelihood providing fireworks for the festivals of the entire community, not just the official celebrations such as Coronation and Old Year's Night but also for the Caribs in Arima and the Indians in Caroni.

"He'd spend hours and hours getting one colour right in my mother's coal pot," says O'Callaghan. "He had this scale and he'd be mixing tiny little bits until he got the colour he wanted."

He was a member of the committee whose protests prevented the government from banning Carnival in 1919, and in 1930 he organized a lobby which persuaded the government to declare a holiday on Emancipation Day. "He was a Trinidadian without being any less Chinese," says O'Callaghan. "It was from him I heard about slavery, not from my Barbadian mother."

By then Jones was a well-known calypsonian who under the sobriquet Chinee Patrick sang trenchant political songs such as "Class Legislation" about colonialism, and "Sans Humanité" about calypso censorship. "I heard it just before Christmas played by a junior philharmonic," says O'Callaghan. "Everybody knew it. It was against a bill of subversion the British were thinking of, it was a hymn to freedom."

Chinee Patrick's political radicalism was as deeply rooted as his cultural activism, for he was one of the early members of the Trinidad Workingmen's Association (TWA), our first trade union, and a close friend of its founder Alfred Richards, another Chinese. Through the TWA Jones became an adviser to its leaders, including Howard Bishop, AA Cipriani and TUB Butler. Later he introduced to politics men such as APT James, Patrick Solomon, Adrian Cola Rienzi and Ranjit Kumar.

When the steelband movement came into being, Jones embraced it, scandalizing his Woodbrook neighbours. He posted the bond the authorities demanded for steelbands to come on the roads in 1946, he bailed out panmen caught stealing dustbins, and he interceded to stop riots among steelbands.

"I remember for my birthday he'd insist on bringing a steelband to play," recalls O"Callaghan. "I was so embarrassed because none of my friends wanted steelbands around - I was in St Joseph's Convent."

As Liverpool concludes, "Patrick Jones was a chemist, pyrotechnist, scientist, politician, trade unionist, steelbandsman, masquerader, chantuelle, calypsonian, parent and philosopher who enjoyed life tremendously. Above all, he was a man."