The Clemetson Family of Port Maria

As far as we can tell the original Clemetson was a wealthy European Plantation owner by the name of John Clemetson. His slave, Nancy bore him 3 sons, James, Robert and Richard. In 1805 "Robert was born a free man of colour," as was the custom children of white slave owners and slaves were often given their freedom at birth or shortly thereafter and were allowed to earn whatever living they could in lowly occupations. "As late as the 1760s, free coloured people were required to wear a blue cross on the right shoulder of their clothing to prove they were indeed free." In 1813 the House of Assembly passed legislation allowing free coloured men to become ship's pilots at sea and clerks. Thus Robert and his brother Richard turned to the sea, becoming wealthy for performing the well-paid and dangerous job of safely navigating ships in the Pirate infested waters of the Caribbean. It had only been 3 years earlier that the British Royal Navy had executed 10 pirates at Port Royal, Jamaica, for the killings of several passengers and crew on ships. By the time all slaves were emancipated the Clemetson brothers along with their cousins, the Goffes were well positioned to purchase several large properties in St. Mary. Many of the plantation owners sold their properties for very little or fled out right back to Europe. "Robert Clemetson was able to purchase.....Frontier, an enormous property upon which most of the town of Port Maria, St. Mary's capital, was erected."

All the Clemetson sons owned slaves and the eldest daughter of Robert, Margaret, was the offspring of Robert Clemetson's quadroon (3/4 white and 1/4 black) slave, Eliza Ayton. Margaret eventually married John Beecham Goffe who owned a wharf and pier and several large business buildings as well as 3 large St. Mary plantations. 

"In the Jamaican race and class stakes, Margaret had her pluses and her minuses. On the plus side, she was the daughter of a wealthy man [Robert Clemetson]. On the minus side, she was darker-skinned and thus in the color calculus not as desirable as one of fairer skin. Additionally. she had been born a slave, though she was freed when she was still an infant." 

"John Beecham Goffe, aged 31, married Margaret Clemetson, aged 24, on 11 August, 1853 in St Mary. The wedding was officiated by Church of England curate J. Davidson at the Holy Trinity Anglican Church in the town of Retreat in western St Mary, near the border with St Ann."

John and Margaret had nine children, among them John, Robert and Cecil who were educated in Britain, while A. C., Alec, Ernest, Clarence and Rowland spent their initial years of school in Jamaica. The Goffe brothers went into the banana shipping business, politics, law and Earnest moved to England and became a physician.

Ernest Goffe later went on to have a son who helped to research and discover a vaccine for polio. 

Information retrieved from: 

Leslie Gordon Goffe, When Banana Was King, A Jamaican Banana King in Jim Crow America

"...Eileen Clemetson-Goffe, though lived a tortued existence, happy she was the daughter of a white woman, distressed she was a daughter of a black man. Born in 1909, three years after her parents married, Eileen was raised in comfort and splendour on her father's St Mary estate, Roslyn. Ironically, whatever privileges she enjoyed came not as a result of her mother's white family, but as a result of the wealth and influence of her father and his black family."

"Like her uncles, Eileen was determined to get out of Jamaica. Privileged or not, it was still for her a prison, a racial one. After school at St. Hilda's in St. Ann parish, she went off to continue her studies in England. She returned home for a time, doing nothing more useful than arranging tennis and golf tournaments and organizing outings at the local movie house. For a sophisticate it was a miserable existence, She returned to England during the Second World War and somehow managed to hide her race and join the Women's Auxiliary Territorial Service." 

"The British Armed Services had erected a 'colour bar' to keep blacks and other non-whites out of, at least, the important positions in its military. Crafty and cunning, Eileen skirted their racial barrier and became a stage sergeant in the Women's Auxiliary Territorial Service anyway."

"She wasn't on a mission, but Eileen went deep into Nazi dominated Europe in 1936. On a sightseeing tour, and seemingly oblivious or indifferent to the Jews and other ethnic minorities fleeing the Continent, she visited Hitler's homeland, Austria, which had adopted pro-German policies and just signed a co-operation treaty with the Nazis meant to bring the two German speaking countries closer together. In 1936, Austria wasn't a friendly place for Auslanders, outsiders. It was a hostile time and place for Europeans who were not Aryan, much less a black woman from Jamaica." 

"Whatever Eileen Clemetson-Goffe's job was in the Territorial Service, she was so successful at it she was later assigned to the Briish Army staff in Washington D.C. It's clear the Briish top brass had no inkling that a black woman was hiding among the staff they sent to work at their diplomatic headquarters in Washington. It would have caused an international incident. The United States was still a deeply segregated country in the 1940s and had the Americans discovered Eileen they would have demanded she be replaced. She remained undetected, however, and was able after the war to become a permanent resident in the United States."

"She steered clear of neighbourhoods where others of her race might expose her ruse. She moved instead to the waspy, white town if Darien in Connecticut. Eileen's training in the Women's Auxiliary Territorial Service stood her in good stead there. She lived undercover in this Anglo-American bastion for forty years until her death, her black Jamaican roots hidden from friend and foe, alike. Her cover was never broken. When a Jamaican cousin asked Eileen to play host on a visit she was planning to the United States, she was rebuffed. 'You'll mess things up here for me,' the cousin was told. The cousin shot back, 'Remember your father will always be a coloured man.' " 

Information retrieved from: 

Leslie Gordon Goffe, When Banana Was King, A Jamaican Banana King in Jim Crow America

"Lt. David Louis Clemetson (1893-1918) was one of a very small number of black officers serving in the British military during WWI. Very little information is known about Clemetson apart from his military record, but this is what research by Trinity Library and College staff has uncovered.

Born in St. Mary, Jamaica, Clemetson attended Clifton College in Bristol, where he served for five years in the OTC. He was admitted to Trinity in 1912, studying Law and rowing in the Lent Bumps. At the outbreak of war in 1914, Clemetson seems to have left his studies to enlist in the Sportsmen’s Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, a unit whose slogan was “Hard as nails”. He was wounded while serving with the Royal Fusiliers, invalided back to England, then transferred to the 24th Welsh Regiment of the Pembroke Yeomanry, at which point he received a commission to serve as Second Lieutenant in October of 1915."

Information retrieved from: https://trinitycollegelibrarycambridge.wordpress.com/2014/07/09/wwi-clemetson/

Marjorie and Marion Clemetson- Mein, were the granddaughters of George Alfred Clemetson and Margaret Josephine Davis. Their mother was Lucille Clemetson.