Battle of St. George’s Caye Day

September brought the annual celebration of The Battle of St. George’s Caye. This, according to occasionally debated history, was the glorious time on the Tenth of September, 1798, when slaves joined their Baymen masters to rout a Spanish armada that had the lack of good sense to sail into the shallow waters inside the reef, where they could not maneuver. It was the final futile attempt of the Spanish to seize the British settlements.

The Festivities surrounding celebration for the Tenth (which is spoken of in capital letters as we Americans speak of the Fourth) are wonderful. To begin with, they last almost two solid weeks. Beginning on the First of September, the town is draped with red, white, and blue bunting and pennants; the larger stores and public buildings and homes sport the most elaborate decorations and enormous Union Jacks; and even the humblest rickety shanties carry some tiny flag or crayoned bit of color. Nearer to the Tenth, palm fronds are cut by government employees and wired to the Swing Bridge that connects the two halves of the city and to every telephone pole along the main streets.

Enormous signs are festooned across the streets:

We Mingle the Baymen with God Save the Queen

God Gave Us This Land; We Work to Keep It Ours

God Save the Queen

Shoulder to Shoulder the Baymen Fought

…and dozens of others

Children and adults alike decorate their bicycles (and there are thousands in Belize City) with colored crepe paper. Cars sport signs and fly the British Flag. And everywhere there is a holiday spirit, plus a huge influx of people coming from the Districts to celebrate the Tenth in the Big City.

Each night from the first of the month on there is at least one, and usually more, scheduled activities…beauty contests (to choose Queen of the Bay), singing contests (Voice of the Bay), band contests, essay contests, story contests (to fictionalize the Battle of St. George’s Caye), radio-script contests, a float contest.

The pretty young women vying to be crowned Queen of The Bay are usually sponsored by Belize businesses. On the Tenth, the Queen and her court ride on a leading float in the colorful St. George’s Caye Day parade.

 

We lived in a fairly strategic place to enjoy things. We were just one block from Memorial Park, where most of the contests or rallies were held, and could hear everything perfectly. Still, we were not so close that it was overwhelming. For example, we could hear the singing from the Voice of the Bay contest beautifully. It would have been very pleasant except that most contestants chose to sing the same song and invariably flatted the same notes. And the band contest was fun…at a distance. God knows what those brasses would have been like any closer up. They weren’t in very good time and I’m not convinced that they were all in the same key.

Furthermore, the parades began or ended at Memorial Park and if we didn’t want to go out to see them, we could sit on our front porch and watch them pass down the street about three doors away at the intersection. Since the houses are build up on stilts and our front porch consequently was one floor above the street, we could see very easily.

The children saw even more of the activities than we did because some of them were staged in the park during their usual afternoon time there with Sonia. All the government (or in our terms, public) school children staged a big review in front of the Governor one afternoon. Bucher and I enjoyed just sitting on the porch and watching all the immaculately dressed little ones walking with their proud mamas to the park. And the floats were judged in the park another afternoon. However, they paraded past our intersection three times and then entered every parade for the rest of the Tenth celebration, so we had ample time to see them.

 

Two British Navy ships were in port during the festivities…both destroyer class. One brought the Regimental Band of the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry (we have a battalion stationed here). They beat Retreat one night and had a band concert another night, plus playing for some dances and one Regimental Officers’ cocktail party. The other ship was doing some marine survey work in the area and stayed on. Anyway, there were dozens of sailors mingled in the crowds…most of them National Service boys of about 18 (you could spot them easily; they were the sailors without full beards!). Their uniforms were strange to us, of course…all white, shorts with white knee socks, unfitted boat-neck middy, and pancake hat sitting square on their heads.

 

The high point of the Celebrations came on the night of the Ninth. Every club in town has a dance. We actually went this time…principally because it was the Pickwick Club’s traditional “Barn Dance,” a euphemism meaning sport shirts for men and reasonably informal cotton dresses for women. Mike Maestre had invited us to every dance the club had since we arrived and we had refused steadfastly, mainly on the grounds that we didn’t have dress clothes with us.

We had a wonderful time. It was a normal festive occasion until midnight. Then the band began playing British Honduras’ traditional patriotic songs and marches. Couples formed as large a circle as the room would allow and began a characteristic prancing-shuffling march around and around the room in time to the catchy music. Periodically they would break to fill the floor with dancing pairs but soon would regroup into the marching circle.

If Bucher and I ever were allowed to dance together, I do not remember it. New friends grabbed us, danced and talked and told us how pleased they were that we had stayed in Belize. We were passed around to new partners so quickly that faces became a blur and names became impossible. It was the loveliest of warm welcomes. Bucher and I finally found each other again and were the first to leave…at one-thirty. Thereafter, people started moving from one club to another and probably greeted the dawn still marching.

 

The morning of the Tenth brought official ceremonies at Memorial Park, with patriotic speeches and music by the Police and Volunteer Guard bands. The British Governor represented Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, resplendent in his choke-collar white dress uniform with a tall white plume dancing gracefully in the breeze from the top his white helmet. British troops attended him. And, of course, he traveled to and from his activities in his black limousine with grandly uniformed chauffeur, escorted by three uniformed well-mounted Mounted Police before and behind the car.

I really got to feel rather sorry for H.E. (the familiar nickname of His Excellency the Governor). I can’t imagine how many parades he reviewed or how many awards he presented.

As the ceremonies ended, the parade moved off. There were uniformed squads of Police, Volunteer Guards, British troops, the Red Cross, Black Cross Nurses, Volunteers of World War I. Bands small and large, were interspersed with elaborately decorated floats. Bicycles sped up and down the parade line, strips of colorful crepe paper fluttering in festive coils in their wheels.

Large floats were on trucks; smaller ones were on donkey carts, the kind that swarm through the city…nothing but the rudest sort of platform built of unmatched lumber with the ends not even sawn off straight, mounted on wheels, and drawn by anything from a dainty-footed donkey to a husky mule or sway-backed horse.

The most elaborate was the Public Works Department float, a replica of its dredge, mounted on a good-size truck chassis. However, until my better-informed son corrected me, I thought it was a railroad car and wondered how anyone in Belize knew what a train looked like, why they would make one, and what a funny derrick it was on! Alex straightened me out with some disdain.

My favorite float was built on a donkey cart. It had an adobe hut, thatched with palm fronds, and almost life size (in height) in a little fenced yard with a Creole man apparently snoozing in his chair in front of it—all on the donkey cart pulled by a tiny animal. It was charming and would have won applause in any parade in the States, it was so well done.

British Hondurans marched. Great phalanxes of people, ten or twelve abreast, filled the spaces between floats, men in their groups, women in their own. They were happy celebrants, singing and moving together with a foot-shuffling, hip-swinging strut.

Great masses of people lined the streets of the city as the parade passed. Over and over, along the route, a few people would drop out of the parade, to be replaced by ten other joyous marchers who had been waiting for its arrival. The parade took an hour or more to pass as it wound its way through the main streets of Belize City.

The children’s parade followed in the afternoon. Teachers and children from all the schools in the city marched solemnly, each uniformed group separated slightly from the next. This time there was no music, just the endless shushing sound of soles on pavement. The little ones marched through the hottest part of the afternoon, the raging sun beating down on them. (Teachers and parents protested year after year, but it was another decade before the children’s parades were abolished.)