The Early Years

1912-1929

Hugh Conrad Maitland Stollmeyer was born on the 13th of January, 1912, at his parents’ home, “Mon Valmont,” which was located across the Santa Cruz River from the village of Bourg Mulatresse in the Santa Cruz Valley of Trinidad.

He was the fourth of seven children, Rex, Alex, André, Hugh, Victor, Daphne and Jeffrey. There were three years between him and his older brother, Andre’, and almost four between him and Victor, the next youngest. The Stollmeyers were a prominent family who had arrived in Trinidad in the 1840s and done very well. Hugh’s father, Albert Victor, a cocoa planter and a businessman, was also politically active and a member of the House of Assembly in the 1920s. His mother, Ada Kate, was from an upper-middle-class English family and had an adventurous disposition. However privileged, charismatic and attentive her husband was, moving from England to the tropics was not for the faint of heart.

In many ways Hugh’s childhood was idyllic; the children had a great deal of freedom, favourite pastimes were playing in the river, catching butterflies and exploring the estate. They were encouraged to follow their own interests often without regard for the gender stereotypes of the period.

Even as a child Hugh had a literary bent and wrote plays and produced them, enlisting his not-always-willing younger siblings to take part in theatricals. The plays may not have been to his sister’s taste but she very much enjoyed making things with Hugh, and the bonds formed in childhood were important to both of them throughout their lives.

Hugh, like his siblings, first went to school at his aunt Sophie Potter’s Preparatory School in Port-of-Spain and, at age 9, entered Queens Royal College. He was a good student but when a bout of typhoid fever held him back, he lost interest in his schooling. In 1929 he passed his School Certificate with good results in English Language and English Literature, but in little else.

At about this time Hugh joined The Society of Trinidad Independents. Their credo Epater les bourgeois - Shock the bourgeois- would certainly have appealed to him. The nucleus of this group gathered around author and editor Alfred “Alfie” H. Mendes to read from each other’s writings, listen to recorded music, debate social ills and fight oppression. The members were involved in the “arts,” most of them writers, but there were also painters and designers like Hugh, Amy Leong Pang, Ivy Achoy and Alice Pashley. The group published their work and views in the literary magazine The Beacon founded by Albert Gomes in 1931. They represented an intellectual coming of age and the first break with Trinidad’s colonial status.

Hugh had his first serious love affair with one of the founding members of The Society, Jean de Boissiere. Hugh was never shy about his sexuality and his liaison was certainly well known within his circle.

→ Coming of Age (1930 - 1938)

Photos of Hugh