Today the Department of Culture continues to profile Mr Edgar Challenger and the Challenger lineage.
After the death of Edgar Challenger's father, his mother, Mrs Louisa Wynter Challenger who was very light in complexion, leaned heavily towards the white aristocracy and tried to get her sons to appreciate that between them, and the poorer Kittitians of darker colour, there was a barrier that should not be breached.
Mrs Challenger sent Edgar to the infant school of Miss Malvena Amory, a white woman who tutored a small group of children of well-todo parents, and then to Miss Connie Wattley, who ran a primary school for the same purpose.
When he was twelve, Edgar was sent to the St. Kitts-Nevis Grammar School - which was the male counterpart of the school run by Connie Wattley's sister, Miss Eliza Wattley. At this school, staffed mainly by expatriate teachers, the sons of rich families received a secondary education.
Edgar Challenger did not stay long at the Grammar School. In his second year, a Barbadian Master, Mr Jordan, ordered him to read Latin from the blackboard. Suffering from near-sightedness, he was unable to do so properly and, when his fellow students laughed at his effort, the angry master thought that young Challenger was trying to turn his class into a fete and administered six strokes with the cane.
For Edgar Challenger these were decisive blows. He refused to go back to Grammar School and had to be sent away to boarding school at Lodge in Barbados.
Challenger liked Lodge School and thrived there. Apart from distancing himself from his mother and elder brother, it brought him into contact with other boys from the various Caribbean Islands, and it helped him to develop his self-assurance. He also did well at his lessons, passing the Cambridge School Certificate Examination, excelling in Mathematics and Science. It was while he as at Lodge that his eldest brother Percy, sold the 79 acres of land which was their inheritance and used the money to go 'to Canada to study. His attempt at studies failed however, and he returned to St. Kitts, stayed for a while supporting himself from the lamily's business until be journeyed to Trinidad. There he died one morning, as he was about to board a bus to go to work. "A so ee go." | 
Culture 
