On April 15, Gran Couva parish marked one hundred years of its existence. In the April 10 issue we carried the first part of the history of this parish. Part 2 follows:

Gran Couva – 1902-1961

The first parish priest of Gran Couva was Monsignor Joseph Maingot, a brilliant Trinidadian who had obtained his Doctor of Divinity at the Vatican and who had acted as Vicar General of Grenada.

Msgr Maingot had acted as parish priest of Montserrat briefly from November 1888. so the area was not unfamiliar to him. Then, however, areas of his parish like Flanagin Town would have been under high wood and accessible only by bridle path.

Msgr Maingot was an Augustinian priest and after him came a successor of Spanish-born Augustinian. Perhaps the idea was to better attend to the Venezuelans and “cocoa panyols” of the area.

But Spanish had long since ceased to be generally spoken in Gran Couva and indeed many of the “cocoa panyols” had moved elsewhere where roads and taxes had come into the area. From 1918 the Dominican order assumed control of the parish.

Tabaquite had remained with Tortuga parish when Montserrat parish was divided, but the people there complained that they hardly ever saw a priest, and they only had Mass once a month – maybe. When DH Mac Donald became parish priest of Gran Couva in June 1922, Tabaquite was transferred to Gran Couva parish.

Gran Couva church in April 2004

Tabaquite at that time was considered the “least Catholic” part of the parish because of the heavy influx of “small islanders” and others working at nearby Trinidad Central Oilfields.

It may have been a good thing that the parish had some oil money because the year before, cocoa prices had utterly collapsed. Gran Couva, which for the previous quarter century had been one of, if not the richest parish in Trinidad, suddenly became one of the poorest.

Prices slowly recovered but then “witchbroom” disease appeared in 1928 and wiped out the cocoa crop. The onset of the worldwide “Great Depression” the next year was the final nail in the parish's economy.

Carolus Joseph Ten Brink, a Dutchman who was parish priest for 20 years from 1923 saw all this decline and took it in stride. Even in a poor parish, the priest still had a standing invitation to dinner for every night of the week to one or another of the “plantocracy” families.

Somehow within this difficult time, Fr Ten Brink found resources to build two churches. He built the school/chapel of St Anthony of Padua in Tabaquite (abandoning the previous school/chapel which had been two miles away), blessed by Archbishop Dowling on March 29, 1929 . He completed the stone school/chapel of St Bartholomew's in Flanagin Town , and blessed it September 11, 1933 .

This had been standing as a foundation since 1911 – with an older, wooden school/chapel in use – until Fr Ten Brink announced one Sunday that he would complete the building, which he did in an amazing 11 weeks.

The next parish priest of Gran Couva was John Mary-Joseph O'Mullan, an elderly man whom the authorities were reluctant to place in a parish as demanding as Gran Couva. Fr O'Mullan insisted he be sent and it was a good thing for the parishioners.

He was an unusually active priest, walking all through the parish to better attend his flock. He is well remembered for doing marriages on spot when he visited a home and found mother and father unmarried.

Fr O'Mullan also rebuilt two school chapels in the parish. St Joseph in Brasso was blessed on March 17, 1946 and St Dominic (replacing St Phillip and Paul) in Chickland was blessed August 4 the same year. Both of the school/chapels had been in “terrible” condition and Fr O'Mullan somehow raised $30,000+, in wartime, to replace them.

During the war, the cocoa estates of Gran Couva lost almost all their labour as people drifted away to work for the Americans for comparatively huge sums of money.

This problem continued into the 1950s when Government make-work schemes competed with estate labour. Cocoa prices had improved; chemicals had been developed to combat “witchbroom”; new varieties of cocoa had greatly increased yields.

The problem was you cold not get anyone to pick, crack, sweat, dance and bag the cocoa. Up to the 1930s almost every acre of Gran Couva had been under cocoa.

But gradually some estates turned over to sugar, some to rubber or cattle grazing. Several of the more marginal estates were simply abandoned and reverted to secondary forest.

By 1961 the Gran Couva church – the last remaining of the original parish churches had become so dilapidated that the decision was taken to demolish it. This was duly begun in May 1961 and the magnificent old church with its stained glass and carved wood was consigned to memory.

Before the demolition, parish priest Donal MacMahon had done a head count over several weeks and found that the average Sunday attendance was 94. There was serious doubt about rebuilding a church for such a small attendance (Today, 94 is considered a quite healthy attendance).

But the powers that be decided to keep their faith in Gran Couva and construction of a new church was begun.