GRANTLEY HURLEY HAS RULED the cane-cutter’s throne in Barbados for 12 years and declares, “I will carry on as long as God gives me strength.”
The 58-year-old Crop Over Festival King Of The Crop is continuing the legacy of his late father who himself was “a very good cane-cutter” by his son’s assessment.
In an interview last week Hurley told the SUNDAY SUN: “It all started when my father had a lot of land in a place called Swans, Scotland, that was close to Turner’s Hall and Spring Head where we used to live and he used to grow a lot of cane on it.
“On vacations when we came out of school we would help out, me and my brothers and sisters.”
The champion cane-cutter started helping his father as early as age ten when he was still s student at Bawden’s Mixed School in St Andrew, and while dad planted, the third of his 16 sons and daughters helped his siblings weed the canes.
When the canes were ready to harvest in the days before the luxury of the mechanical harvester, the children all helped with the cutting and took the canes all the way to the trucks waiting outside the field.
“In those days the trucks had difficulty reaching the canefield, so all the youngsters would go and help head the cane from one location to a location where the truck could receive it to transport it to the factory . . . a lot of young people did that just to help them with money for school,” Hurley remembers.
In recent years ill health forced Hurley’s 81-year-old mother Caroline Drakes to retire from work, but she too recalled the struggle she and her late husband faced raising 16 children off the land and the hardship she encountered as a single parent when her husband suddenly became sick and died at an early age.
Hurley understood that with his father gone, he and his brothers had to step into those shoes.
As he explained to the SUNDAY SUN: “In those days my father used to plant a lot of those things that would help feed us instead of going to the supermarket and buying all that stuff.
“He used to plant a lot of peas, a lot of vegetables. He would plant it, we would care [for] it, and my mother used to go in the Eagle Hall market and sell it. So along with the cane money and along with the things that she sold from the land, all that helped raise us.
“Plus, my father was a very good cane-cutter too, and he used to get two days’ work a week at the plantation.”
As a teenager he was already working full-time in the sugar-cane industry and listening to his seasoned elders relate their experiences working in Florida’s cane fields as part of the Farm Labour Programme, so he took the opportunity to join them.
At 19 he set off for Florida and found himself sitting around idly in a labour camp for 13 days before finally being assigned work. That was 1973 and he still laughs when he remembers his first day’s pay – US$13 – for the quarter row (just over 300 feet) of canes he cut.
But his prowess at his craft did not escape the eyes of the older Bajans who promptly labelled him a “guinea gog” (a fast cutter) and it was not long before he would start working for “a decent dollar”.
So impressed were his employers when he started to surpass his supervisor in earnings that they promoted him to the position of field supervisor in charge of 113 workers.
Cane-cutting in Florida turned out to be a long, rewarding and successful period in Hurley’s life.
He moved on to Canada, working in a factory with flowers for export in Ontario, and later to Nova Scotia working with vegetables.
Barbados was, however, never far from his thoughts and he returned home to harvest sugar cane at the end of every overseas contract period until the day he decided he was “coming back home for good to cut canes”.
“I love it,” declared the six-footer as he stood on the balcony of his comfortable Sion Hill, St James home looking down on his backyard vegetable garden.
Today he is the only one of his brothers still cutting canes, having already lost three who all died in their 40s.
There was Carlisle Drakes, the younger brother, a five-time King Of The Crop of whom Grantley boasts, “He was even better than me.”
Another brother, Trevor Hurley who died at age 44, never won a cane-cutting prize though he too mastered the art of working both in Barbados’ and Florida’s cane fields.
Yet another, Bentley Hurley, also dead in his 40s, cut canes in Florida and Barbados as well.
Grantley is now the only child carrying the cane bill, and he sometimes asks himself for how long as he ponders “[the sugar cane industry’s] dying”.
“Before, the cane used to be a lot better; you could make a lot more money. But since they got the harvesters, I don’t know if it is the harvesters that causing the canes not to yield as much as before. . . .
“In the [olden] days people used to plant with forks, now they cutting with machinery and I don’t know if the machinery cutting too deep because the cane is not germinating like when we used to plant with forks.
“Years ago a field of cane would last five, six years before you plough that field. Now it scarcely making three. I think it is because of the heavy machinery in the fields – the harvester; the tractors pull some heavy bins through the field; the tractors go through the field to spray and all of that compacts the soil.
“Before, we used the men to spray, we used the men to cut and just used the trucks to collect the canes.”
One understands how this man whose life has been so intricately intertwined with the sugar industry could be so crestfallen at the thought of a dying sugar industry. It has been the means through which he supported a wife and two children with the “good money” he earned.
“I remember in one week I make $1 400 and my brother that died make $1 600.”
But mechanization has changed that, and he also blames a heavily mechanized sugar industry for a reduction in sugar worker earnings and a decline in jobs in the industry. He also regrets the radical shift in farming practices.
“In the [olden] days a plantation had a lot of workers, so [workers] could do things like forking the head row and planting grass. Now when [mechanical harvesters] plough the field, they plough everything and they don’t have any grass.
“That is how you get the washing of the soil when the rain falls and last year we find a lot of the topsoil washed in the road. But they have to go back to [planting grass along the head rows running along the perimeter of the field].
“There ain’t much workers now, and the young people not interested in coming into the field.
“After my generation gone now, I don’t know what will happen.
We will be short of labour and right now we need to import labour,” Hurley adds.
“I talk with a lot of young people, a lot come and try to cut cane, but they always say that they should be paid more money because it is hard work.”
Still he continues to cut canes for Warleigh Plantation in St?Peter and Mount Gay Plantation in St Lucy and farms his own plot of land in the Greenland Land Lease project in St Andrew.
Seeing cow itch and wild vegetation overtaking once fertile cane fields and farmland across Barbados distresses this Barbadian who was last week presented with the Barbados Service Medal for “his indefatiguable contribution to the sugar industry, both in Barbados and the United States of America”.
With gratification he remarked, “My children raised on the land.”
