Ebenezer Reid, senior, was a Scot who died in Kingston on 25 May 1843, aged 66. The slab in Kingston Parish Church Yard, printed by J. H. Lawrence-Archer in 1875, says he was elected head master of Wolmer’s Free School in 1815 and had lived in the island 43 years. Frank Cundall, writing for the Institute of Jamaica in 1915, added that he was headmaster for twenty-eight years and that the monument was erected by his pupils.

Patrick Bryan, as Edward Seaga reported at the 2004 launch of The legacy of a goldsmith, treats 1815 as a policy watershed: the school officially opened to Jewish and coloured children who had previously been barred as a class. Reid’s appointment and that reversal coincide. Seaga quotes Bryan’s enrolment contrast: 87 white pupils in 1814; by 1824, 94 white and 196 coloured. Bryan’s verdict, as Seaga prints it, is that Reid “democratised the institution.”

The 1929 Wolmer’s bicentennial souvenir still had a Reid voice on the record. It dates him as headmaster in 1814 — one year earlier than the tomb and Bryan — and quotes him on what leavers did: boys to trades, attorneys’ offices, clerkships and planting; girls to needle trades across the island. In 1837, American visitors found about five hundred scholars and described “Mr. Reid” as a “venerable” master.

The 1814 souvenir date and the 1815 election on the tomb are both on the record.

Sources

Sources: Lawrence-Archer, Monumental Inscriptions, 1875; Frank Cundall, Historic Jamaica, Institute of Jamaica, 1915; Edward Seaga reviewing Patrick Bryan, Jamaica Gleaner, 30 May 2004; Wolmer’s School Bi-Centennial Booklet, 1929.