An eminent early lawyer and the seven-thousand-year-old skeleton

Dear Editor,

One afternoon when I was seven, my brother came home and told me that he saw the seven-thousand-year-old skeleton of a pregnant Amerindian woman. Seven-thousand-years-old? Skeleton? Pregnant? If there is a more loaded sentence you could tell to a curious seven-year- old,  I can’t think of it.

We didn’t have a television and the internet had not yet been invented, and hearing about that skeleton left a lasting impression on me. I didn’t know anything else about the Walter Roth Museum, where my brother went on a school trip that afternoon, and I had to wait another eight years when I was in fourth form and riding a bicycle to school with a small measure of independence before I could go and see it.

Ostensibly on our way home one day after school, my friend Javin and I went in the opposite direction to see about that seven-thousand-year-old skeleton. I took a good look at the skeleton and everything else in the museum and never forgot it. My interest in finding out about our past and the possibility of saving it started when I heard about that museum and stayed when I visited.

Seventeen years after I first visited the museum when my girlfriend, now wife, remarked one day that there was not much to do in Georgetown, the museum and that skeleton were the first things that came to my mind to show her.

The building where the museum is housed also came to have additional significance to me. When I first started working, I came across the signature ‘D M Hutson’ in some old English law reports. Around that time, I also saw the same person appearing as a lawyer in many of the cases published in the Guianese law reports in the 1890s.

I spent a long time trying to find out more about D M Hutson and to see if I could figure out why his set of The Revised Reports (about a hundred and forty-two books, by my count, published in1895) were in our office. One day I found an article from the Guyana Chronicle (September 22, 2002) saying that the building housing the Walter Roth Museum was once the home of Duncan McRae Hutson, who bought it in 1891, and that he was “an eminent lawyer, and a contemporary of Patrick Dargan with a fondness for horses”. There again was another link to that museum.

After reading that newspaper article, I got a copy of an old transport for the property and found out when Mr Hutson died. Unfortunately, the newspaper archives had nothing for that year and my search for Mr Hutson came to a premature end. Whatever else I found was by-the-way.

I do know, however, that Mr Hutson really was an eminent Guyanese lawyer. In the year he bought that house, he appeared in more than one-third of the cases reported in the Law Reports of British Guiana on many different areas of law, most of them important cases then. Today we are able to walk around freely in his house without having any business there, as we can do in no other heritage building that comes to mind except Castellani House, once the home of another eminent Guyanese lawyer who lived a few generations after Mr Hutson.

I was able to also find out that Mr Hutson’s grandson, Gilbert McRae Farnum, who probably played in the house as a child, was an eminent Guyanese lawyer as well. He attended St Stanislaus and Queen’s College, won the single Guiana Scholarship in 1928, fourteen years after his grandfather died, and qualified as a barrister in 1933.

Mr Farnum spent most of his legal career between 1943 and 1966, in the public service as Magistrate, Crown Counsel, Legal Draftsman and Solicitor General. One of his sons was Fr Oliver Farnum, a longstanding Catholic priest in Georgetown, who died in November 2014.

Because of these facts, in addition to its precious contents comprising the archaeological museum, the building itself is also a valuable part of our built heritage and it is itself an archaeological museum to our shared past through its connection to a line of Guyanese who have contributed to our society. One of us, a Guyanese, lived his life there with his family. Unlike many other buildings in Georgetown whose history and occupants are now lost forever, we already know – and can find out more – about the people who lived there.

Since the building is public and not private property, the government, acting on our behalf, has a free hand to put it to its best use.

The building looks largely unmodified from how it must have looked in the 1890s and surely, if there was interest, the Walter Roth Museum could not only be kept intact but also enhanced, like a Matryoshka doll, as an archaeological museum within an archaeological museum.

It can show (even if only with pictures and plaques for now) that this was where one of our best lawyers of his time lived and this was how he lived (as can also be done with Castellani House, if that is possible having regard to its use now) instead of turning it into just another government office.

I have, however, seen the statements of intention in the newspapers and I’m reasonably sure I know what will happen. I’m only surprised that the museum, unlike the National Archives formerly on the other side of Main Street, remained in place over the last ten years.

Before the museum moves, as I’m almost certain it will, I hope to visit one last time.

While I’ll still be able to tell our children, who aren’t born yet, about the day my brother told me about that seven- thousand-year-old skeleton and how I eventually saw it, and about the time I took their mother there, they won’t be able to go looking for it where I first saw it.

The museum will hopefully still be around somewhere then; maybe it’ll be upstairs at the Post Office or somewhere else out of the way best suited for relics.

Yours faithfully,

Kamal Ramkarran