Keeping fancy sailor mas alive

JASON GRIFFITH, 97, the veteran Belmont masman who died on June 19, was, even in his sunset years, always generous with his time and talent.

“I just can’t say no,” Mr Griffith told this newspaper in an interview in 2007 when he was approaching 80. “I can’t help helping people.”

Yet, the country of his birth has never showered the same generosity on him, especially when it comes to preserving his contribution to local culture.

There are few things fancier in our traditions than the fancy sailor. But there are also few things that have been treated as shabbily.

The Morris-Griffith Link Road, which connects the Belmont Circular Road and the Lady Young Road, is partly named after Mr Griffith, who breathed as much life into the tradition as its inventor, Jim Harding. But if you want to know who any of these once household names were or find more information, you would be hard-pressed. Poorly is much of our culture understood or analysed; even more poorly is it kept alive for future generations beyond naming roads, putting up terrible statutes or bestowing lower-tier national awards. Mr Griffith was emblematic of wider neglect.

“We are a society of forgetfulness, especially for our icons,” said former NCC chairperson Winston Peters upon news of the masman’s death.

Mr Peters himself would have arguably been placed in a role which afforded him some opportunity to fight that forgetfulness. But contempt for culture in TT is more powerful than any one individual.

Mr Griffith was born in 1927. He spent most of his life at 51 Pelham Street, Belmont, from which he would often hold court with visitors, sitting amid potted plants on his cool veranda. He began making mas in 1946, in Mr Harding’s camp. Three years later, he had his own band. He was drawn to the way sailors danced. But Mr Harding’s innovation of imposing a crown – inspired by the death of King George V – paved the way for increasingly surreal additions, including copper work, by Mr Griffith, culminating in a period between the 1980s-1990s which amounts to the genre’s height.

This evolution, tied as it is to history, should be more widely documented. Instead, organisations like the Carnival Institute of TT and TT Carnival Museum seem to be stagnant. The NCC mainly, and myopically, focuses on the annual festival cycle.

Every government plays lip service to culture, or sees it only in the most superficial of economic and political terms through subventions, fete approvals or new buildings. But that’s just a sophisticated form of ole mas. The genuine work of keeping cultural memory truly alive is lagging, as shown in Mr Griffith’s case.