As a civil engineer ‘Iron Lady’ Agnes Dalrymple...

successfully wrote the College of Preceptors examinations followed by the General Certificate of Education Ordinary Levels examinations.

The fourth child of ten siblings, her father died when she was nine years old but before he died he ensured his older children knew the value of education. Her mother was also strict with their schoolwork.

After her father died her secondary education was taken care of partially by his brother, who was a superintendent of police, and a cousin on the West Bank Demerara.

“In those days we caught the train from Den Amstel to Vreed en Hoop and walked from Vreed en Hoop to Pouderoyen on the West Bank Demerara and walked back to catch the train in the afternoons,” she recalled.

“Village life was lots of fun. We had a lot of fruit trees in the yard. Mangoes, sapodillas, cherries, coconut trees. Dad planted a farm in Den Amstel backdam. We had rice lands and he planted ground provisions. We had a kitchen garden at home. We also had livestock - pigs, goats, cows. We had ducks and fowls.”

After her father died, Dalrymple assisted to babysit her younger siblings. “They called me the nurse. I had an aunt who said I wasn’t going to get children because of my attention to the younger ones but I gave birth to six children,” she said.

One of her sons died but the others are all university graduates; one has a PhD in civil engineering, and three others have master’s degrees.

After leaving school Dalrymple joined the Black Showcase Cultural Group, which was also an educational group at Den Amstel. “We had resource persons who taught members who hadn’t completed school, various skills so some young people were able to pick up pieces of their lives. That was where I met my husband,” she said. Growing up she learnt to sew and make handbags using different materials including the discarded bags in which potatoes were imported.

“So I had an income even before I started working with the government. In the village was a seamstress who I befriended. I observed how she made clothes. I started sewing my school skirts. Then I started sewing for my siblings. I loved sewing for little girls, the frills, the flounces and the laces. I sold them. I sewed clothes and school uniforms for my children. I even experimented with shirts and made dashikis for the Black Showcase members. I sewed for my husband,” she said.

After she had her first child at 19 years, having obtained a diploma in architecture from the Government Technical Institute (GTI), she started working in April 1976 in the drawing office as a trainee draughtsman in the then Hydraulics Division of the Ministry of Public Works. In two months, she was promoted to assistant draughtsman and she was one of four women in a male dominated office.

After that she did the Building, Mechanical and Technical Drawing I and II diplomas at GTI.

“My responsibilities were always my family, work and study,” she noted.