“We Build”: How a Methodist Minister Started Boys’ Town in a Church Hall and Moved It Into Trench Town

• Rev Hugh Sherlock was seconded by the Methodist Church to lead Boys’ Town in 1940
• It began as Kingston Boys’ Club in the Jones Town Baptist Church hall
• Within two years it moved to Trench Town
• Trench Town then had about 1,000 people in one-room shacks sharing one standpipe

Veteran attorney K Churchill Neita used a Jamaica Observer column in October 2020 to remember the Reverend Dr Hugh Braham Sherlock (1905-1998), the Methodist minister who founded Boys’ Town, and the unlikely building where it began.

“It was in September 1940 that the Government of Jamaica and the YMCA collaborated on the need for a social intervention that would serve the needs of underprivileged youth in West Kingston and Trench Town,” Neita wrote. The Methodist Church seconded the 35-year-old Sherlock to lead the effort. It started as the Kingston Boys’ Club, meeting in the hall of the Jones Town Baptist Church, and within two years moved to Trench Town.

The Trench Town of 1940 was very different from today. According to the column, about 1,000 residents lived there in single-room structures made from cardboard and wooden barrels, sharing one standpipe. Boys’ Town took as its motto “We Build”, with a crest showing a boy reading, cricketers and a cross for its mental, physical and spiritual aims.

“To the extent that a social process can be the work of an individual, Hugh Sherlock, for 16 years as founding director, made Boys’ Town an oasis of training, hope and opportunity for boys in the western end of the capital city,” Neita wrote. Its most famous product was the cricketer O’Neil Gordon “Collie” Smith, who enrolled at 13. Sherlock also chaired the boards of St Andrew High School for Girls, Excelsior, York Castle and Morant Bay High, and received the Order of Jamaica in 1977.

The story is a reminder of how often Jamaican social institutions began in church buildings. A borrowed church hall gave Boys’ Town somewhere to start before it had land of its own. Church halls across the island still host basic schools, clubs, clinics and training programmes that later grow into independent institutions.

It is also a reminder of what housing looked like in parts of Kingston within living memory. For churches with halls and land in inner-city communities, and for diaspora donors looking for lasting projects, Boys’ Town’s motto still fits: providing a secure building is often the first step in building people.

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