Ten years before I had participated in the farewell concert that brought down the curtain on the long historic,unbroken head-teachership of one of the village schools. The teaching territory was almost a dominion and she the empress. The farewell concert was in honour of Madeline James. Today in the profuse language of politics and advertisement, it would be described as a cultural extravaganza. Village concerts were generous exercises in articulation and expression in word and song, in poetry, drama and dance. The audience was the entire village come to hear and see its sons and daughters, its friends and acquaintenances in a bright display of their talents. The village audience were the sharpest, most uncompromising critics you could find anywhere. In more ways than one, the performers were in focus. But that was ten years gone. "A thousand ages in thy sight are as an evening gone", but in the calendar of realistic mortality ten years is a long time. In the vision of the youngster it seemed it would never come. It spanned the distance between boyhood and young manhood. It bridged the gap betwen Madeline James my first head teacher and Cordelia Eugenie Martindale. Cordelia Eugenie Martindale the retired headteacher of St. Andrew's School Georgetown who died a few weeks ago at a ripe old age. Two lioness in succession. I was having more than my share of luck. Was my life in a certain area taking a predictable shape or pattern?. The past and the present school mistress had a lot in common. Both of them were striking personalities exuding the kind of dignity that is irresistible. Both mirrored the challenges of their times in a predominantly male perofessional environment. Miss Martindale met them with more spontaneity, much less fuss.This may have been the product of her own nature as it was a manifestation of the historical ingredients of a decade later than Madeline James. Cordelia Eugenie Martindale strode massively. She was a big compact woman who carried her size majestically. She presided over her school managing it with an easy competence and taught a class as well. She was a busy head teacher dynamically on the move from 8:30 - 4 p.m. There was no severity matching her bulk except as was necessary to preserve the highest level of law and order in her school. Her commands or orders respecting the staff issued by implication rather than by direct expression She was authoritarian without being manifestly and objectionably so. She was a headteacher who was a woman not a woman who was a headteacher. In this connection there were many of her male counterpartrs and contemporaries who were in their vocational antics more self-conscious than she was. In an archipalago of teaching renown she was an island of prominence. Confining oneself to the Georgetown community there were C.A. Walker, J.E. Owen, Percy Loncks of Queenstown, I can't remember all of them in the gostling galaxy but they were the committed teachers and headteachers of the wartime and immediate postwar generations who captured fame without fortune in their stride and left their footmarks on the sands of pedagogic achievement. It was a pleasure and privilege to know and to work with this lady, Cordelia Eugenie Martindale who shone in the contemporary constellation. When the teachers training college only a decade or so ago sent its students to do school practice as a very necessary part of the training regimen, the fledglings were expected to take in all that was relevant in terms of both precept and example. How experienced teachers conducted their classes. How headteachers exercised their authority and managed their schools. How cordial but disciplined staff relationahips were maintained. Student teachers observed the antics and the tactics of the stern and unbending school heads, the lax and the laxadasical yes, there were those, the good humoured and the persuasive.
In Miss Martindale's day the only other spectacular feature in the neighbourhood that emphatically claimed my attention was the peninsula of architectural beauty that encompassed her school - the Public Buildings, as we called them then, to the South, the Stabroek Market to the west, to the east the Magistrates Courts and the Town Hall across the way. The lady Cordelia Eugenie Martindale meshed proportionally in this pleasant setting.
