(The Daily Chronicle April 2, 1938).
In the bad old days when folks could proceed no further along the East Coast by train than Mahaica , passengers bound for Mahaicony and beyond, found it convenient to drop in at Springhall for a “si” down and a mouthful of food with Mr. J.B.W.Clementson , the proprietor of the estate, there being a mahogany avenue leading from the house and joining the public road at a point immediately opposite the railway terminus.
When lean years came, and “Old Man” as Mr. Clementson was called , could no longer afford to figure so extensively in the role of host, a barricade was erected at the road-end of the avenue.
It was a drastic expedient and I recall the distress which the decayed sugar-planter manifested , but that it was necessary I knew only too well.
By many travelers that barricade was an ugly thing to contemplate and a gross violation of a once vaunted hospitality .
I knew another East Coast gentleman who betrayed far greater strategy in thinning down the number of unwanted visitors.
The Transport Department in more recent times ran excursion trains on stated afternoons and our friend, the strategist was provided with ample opportunity to figure as a generous dispenser of hospitality to scores of excursionists from Georgetown, who must have proved a nuisance , especially as some of them contrived to get left behind and had perforce to be entertained till the departure of the next train.
Behold the tactician mixing energetically with the newly-arrived excursionists on the railway platform , solemnly uplifting his voice to proclaim the fiction that the train would be off again in exactly two fifth’s of a minute without fail.
