Although the conglomerate "T Geddes Grant- Manufacturers Representatives" no longer majestically stands at the corner of Chacon Street and South Quay, those who worked there for years and were practically part of the Grant family, are being cordially invited to meet their friends and colleagues of yesteryear on Saturday May 26, 2001, from 4.30 to 8.30 p.m. at the City Hall Auditorium, Knox Street, Port of Spain. Dress Code is "reasonably casual."
Since a list of six names has been given for replies, which are expected "no later than Monday 7 May" there should be no excuse for non-attendance. A contribution of $100.00 is being asked, and says Esla Morris of 23 Ariapita Avenue, Woodbrook "I will cheerfully receive cash or cheque with no rubber content." Contact can be made with Lin Lee (623-9053), Margot Walcott (674-8648 office/637-2836 home), Mary Baptiste (632-7772 office/637-9085 home), Mona Lyndersay (625-3663), and Molly Assing (625-2366).
The story of this well-known company started according to Sydney Hill in his book - Memoirs of Sir Lindsay Grant - "in mid-October in the year of Our Lord 1870" at which time "a newly-married man set out from the Canadian Maritime Province of Nova Scotia bound for the island of Trinidad, British West Indies. Travelling with him were his bride of a few days and his child of a first marriage - a four year old son." Reverend Kenneth James Grant, a Presbyterian Minister of Scottish heritage, was that newly married man who arrived in Trinidad on November 20 1870, to join Reverend John Morton, another Canadian Missionary, in his work of saving souls among some 25,000 East Indians of Trinidad.
Thomas Geddes, founder of what was at first a modest commission agency on lower Henry Street, was the four year old son. Strangely enough, Hill in his book sees Thomas' return to the island after school in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, as the date from which "The Grants of Trinidad" can be said to have taken root in the island."
Within a year of his arrival in San Fernando where his parents lived, Thomas Geddes married a young Canadian teacher, Christian Fraser Copeland, a distant relative on his father's side who had come to the island at the request of Reverend Grant to assist him with the heavy load of teaching that he had voluntarily undertaken. The young couple was married at the Bay Street Methodist Church in Barbados on October 15, 1890.
And it was from this union that ten children were born in Trinidad, the fifth of whom was Kenneth Lindsay Grant, "Sir Lin" as he was well-known in this country after being knighted in 1963 by Queen Elizabeth 11 "for his services to business, social welfare and West Indies cricket."
T. Geddes Grant- Manufacturers' Representatives, at one time the third largest conglomerate in Trinidad and Tobago and among the top commercial companies throughout the entire West Indies, was the fruit of Thomas Grant and his wife Christina, both born in small towns in Pictou County, Nova Scotia, within 25 miles of each other, because, says Hill of "these young people venturing forth to the tropics to adopt Trinidad and Tobago as their home and to dig in their roots very deep."