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Jamaican History February 2004 |
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Matthew
Joseph was born on the 25th October 1831 on a coffee plantation in the Blue Mountains, called Rose Hill. His grandfather, an 'Eboe prince', had been brought
to Jamaica as a slave about
1780 and died two years after Emancipation. His father, who had been taught to read by a book-keeper on the plantation on
which he was ‘headman,’ taught him and his brothers to read. From about 1839 to 1847 he attended the Church Missionary Society
school at Woodford, two miles from where he lived, and then was fortunate enough to gain a place to be trained as a teacher
at the Government Normal School, recently established near Spanish Town. Eighteen months later, in July 1849, he was sent for to take charge of Woodford
School, when the teacher’s position became vacant. Seven years later, in September, 1856, he was appointed to the head teacher’s post at the Church School, Trinity Ville, Blue Mountain Valley, in
St Thomas. Matthew Joseph was actually in Morant Bay at the time of the ‘Rebellion’ in 1865, but had no sympathy with the 'rebels'. He undertook the sad duty of giving spiritual comfort to some from the area who were summarily executed. From the 1860s he was writing and publishing poetry locally, in a conventional ‘Victorian’ style. In 1876 he virtually bankrupted himself by going to London to publish a book of poetry called The Wonders of Creation. The Rev Robert Gordon, a Jamaican Black Anglican clergyman then living in England, wrote an introduction to the work, but it failed to sell well, and Joseph lost his money.
Verse from poem written for August 1, 1872:
He took an interest in politics and was for some time a member of the Parochial Board of St. Andrew. He died in 1903, having lived to see his son called to the bar at the Middle Temple in London, and
return to Jamaica to practise as a barrister. |
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