Selby Wooding, QC, academic and cultural connoisseur

Hugh Arthur Selby Wooding, QC, is regarded as one of the lawyers of the golden age of local and regional jurisprudence. His father, Sir Hugh Wooding, was this country’s first chief justice at Independence and the law school in St Augustine was named in his honour.

Selby Wooding died on October 12 at 91. He would have been 92 on October 29. On October 16, a small group of family and close friends gathered to say their final goodbyes in a solemn funeral service at RM De Souza Memorial Chapel, in Diego Martin.

The following is the first part of an edited version of a eulogy for Selby Wooding by Ian L Benjamin.

Drs Fauci, Parasram and Trotman tell us to wear our masks. Selby Wooding said of Queen’s Royal College: “You had to wear the mask of the master in order to advance” – as his brother Henley told me only yesterday: wear a mask over the mask we usually wear. Let us peek behind a few of Selby’s masks.

I first met Selby in 1992, shortly after a lecture given by VS Naipaul. I was stunned by his elegant command of language. Selby Wooding was my friend and mentor for nearly 30 years.

Hugh Arthur Selby Wooding was born on October 29, 1928 and died on October 12, 2020, just shy of his 92nd birthday.

Selby’s paternal grandparents were Iddo Arthur Reginald Wooding (1870-1950) – a shoemaker, later sanitary inspector for the Port of Spain City Corporation; and Rosina Estheline Isador Cadogan (1874-1943), a seamstress. Reginald and Rosina Wooding came to Trinidad from Barbados in 1892.

His maternal grandparents were Charles Louis Pierre Coussey, a lawyer and businessman, and Ambah Elizabeth Coussey, née Orbah.

His parents were Sir Hugh (HOB) Wooding (1904-1974) and Anne Marie (1902-1976). After a distinguished academic career at QRC (Jerningham Medal 1923), Sir Hugh left for London and the Inns of Court, where he distinguished himself academically.

He eventually distinguished himself romantically, for it was while in London, Sir Hugh had met Anne Marie Coussey of Accra, Gold Coast (now Ghana). But it was a close-run thing, as I shall share.

Anne, like her siblings (one of her brothers was later a Court of Appeal judge in Ghana), was sent to school in England and later Paris for further studies. (Selby’s undoubted love for his mother and his shared sensibility provide context for Selby’s affection for Paris. After reading law, Selby spent time enjoying Paris and its sights, museums and art galleries and studying French at the Sorbonne.)

It was there, as a student in the city of love, that Anne was introduced to the American poet and leader of the Harlem Renaissance Langston Hughes (1901-1967). Anne and Langston exchanged letters (some of which are in the Yale rare book library) and became close (Langston is said to have described her as his lady love in his autobiography).

Anne’s father was having none of this, and sent his friend, Trinidadian doctor and activist John Alcindor (great-uncle of basketball great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) to nip this in the bud. Anne returned to London in 1925, and afterwards met Sir Hugh. Their courtship blossomed and they were married in Trinidad on January 14, 1928.

Their union produced four children: Selby, the eldest; Ambah Rose (1929-2017), who married Max Thomas; Anne (born in 1933), who married Garnet Woodham; and Henley (born in 1940), who married Ingrid. I have no doubt that Selby was close to his mother and inherited both her sense of propriety and her acute sensibility. She had had by any measure a sophisticated and cultured upbringing. She put her life into Sir Hugh’s hand as a stranger in his country of birth.

Selby had no children of his own and never married. He had a dozen nieces and nephews (from Sara, the eldest, to Benedict, the youngest) and 14 great-nephews and nieces. Selby was protective and proud of them all.

Like his father Sir Hugh and his brother Henley and his nephews Ian, Hugh and Stephen after him, Selby attended the distinguished institution of Queen’s Royal College, from 1938-1946.

There he was founder member of the First QRC Air Scouts.

Selby was also an active dramatist – founder member of the QRC Drama Society and its first secretary, producing both radio and one-act plays. He was, as well, a pianist and active in the Musical Society. In 2006 he was inducted into the QRC Hall of Fame.

In fact, Henley’s earliest childhood recollection of his elder brother Selby was as a pianist performing at QRC. Just as Shiva Naipaul had to get to know his elder brother Vidia, Henley had to get to know his elder again, to have a firm and first mature memory of Selby once he returned from university.

Selby, like other QRC graduates as far back as the 1870s, would have been more than adequately prepared, both academically and culturally, for Cambridge: he said of QRC that you were rewarded (Eric Williams, Lloyd Best, Vidia Naipaul each has an anecdote of the first-year undergraduate work being child’s play). In reading law at Cambridge, Selby was fulfilling a lifelong ambition of Sir Hugh, who always regretted that he had not read for a law degree.

But in his time the national scholarship did not cover the cost of a degree and professional training as a barrister. Selby was admitted to the Bar in 1951 and took silk a mere 20 years later, in 1971. He joined his father’s practice and took it over upon Sir Hugh’s departure to become the first Chief Justice after Independence.