Dr. William “Billy” Green stands today as one of the last surviving members of an extraordinary generation of Dominican-born physicians who assumed responsibility for the medical care of their homeland during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Their careers marked an important transition in Dominican history. At a time when colonial society still depended heavily upon expatriate professionals, these men returned from universities and medical schools abroad and increasingly placed the health of the Dominican people in Dominican hands.
Among that distinguished generation were physicians remembered by many Dominicans: Dr. Winston, Dr. Griffin, Dr. McIntyre, Dr. Dorian Shillingford, Dr. Paul, Dr. Etienne, Dr. Watty, Dr. Pemberton, Dr. Grell, Dr. Royer, Dr. Sorhaindo, and others whose work formed the foundation of modern Dominican medicine. They served when resources were modest, specialist services scarce, roads and communications difficult, and physicians were often required to be diagnosticians, surgeons, obstetricians, administrators, public-health officers, and counselors at once.
Dr. William Green was part of that remarkable company.
Born in Roseau in 1929, Green’s life spans almost the entire transformation of modern Dominica: from British colonial rule, through the Second World War, the growth of local professional leadership, political independence, and the expansion of public health and modern medical services. His memories are therefore more than personal reminiscence. They are testimony to the development of a nation.
A Roseau Childhood
Billy Green grew up in a Roseau far removed from the town known by younger generations. His parents were Sydney Leopold Vaughan Green and Clara Winston Green. His father, Sidney, was a pharmacist, while his mother was a housewife. Billy was their only surviving child. He also had a half-sister, Dorothy Green, who has since passed away.
Roseau had no electric streetlamps during his childhood. A lamp lighter moved through the streets lighting oil lamps, while electricity came from a dynamo at Elmshall, on the site of today’s University of the West Indies Open Campus.
That power station also gave the Roseau River basin known as “Under Power” its name. The basin lay below the generator, which stood on the cliff above that section of the river. The station was operated by Eddie Trotter, uncle of civil engineer Garner Trotter and Black Power advocate Desmond “Ras Kabinda” Trotter.
Green attended the Emory School, Miss Maggie Nichols’ school at Kingsland House, and the Convent preparatory school before entering the Dominica Grammar School in 1940.
His recollections evoke Sunday walks in the Botanic Gardens, films at the Olympic Cinema, Catholic observances, shops such as the Phoenix and the Dominica Dispensary, Carnival, neighborhood personalities, and a social world in which almost everyone seemed to know everyone else.
But the Second World War loomed over his childhood.
For Dominicans of Green’s generation, the war was not a distant European drama. German submarine warfare disrupted Atlantic and Caribbean shipping, imported goods became scarce, and French refugees fleeing turmoil in neighboring islands arrived in Dominica. Young boys heard adults discuss battles, casualties, Britain, Germany, and the fate of the empire of which Dominica was then a small part.
At the Dominica Grammar School, the war also had a military dimension.
The Grammar School Cadet
The Dominica Grammar School occupies a special place in the island’s educational and military history. Its organized school cadet tradition dated from 1910, and in its earliest period, when the school had only about fifty students, cadet training formed part of the boys’ discipline and culture.
The system reflected British educational ideals: drill, order, hierarchy, duty, and loyalty to Crown and Empire.
Green remembered the experience vividly. Younger boys sometimes drilled with wooden rifles or staffs rather than service weapons. On one unforgettable parade, young Billy Green dropped his wooden rifle. The British headmaster saw him and had him caned.
The episode is humorous across the distance of more than eighty years, but it also reveals the character of colonial education. The Grammar School was not merely teaching Latin, mathematics, history, and English composition. It was shaping boys according to a British conception of character and discipline.
The schoolboy punished for dropping a wooden rifle could hardly have imagined that he would become one of his country’s senior physicians and help lead Dominica’s medical service. His experience also connects education with the island’s wider military heritage, as generations of Grammar School students encountered a tradition that fostered leadership, service, and public responsibility.
Education Beyond Dominica
In 1942 Green’s father transferred him to Antigua Grammar School. He later pursued further studies before entering Loyola College in Montreal in 1948.
Canada presented a radically different world to a young Dominican accustomed to Roseau’s tropical climate. At Loyola he studied classics, chemistry, physics, and other subjects necessary for his medical career, graduating cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1952.
His years in Canada and later Belgium also broadened his understanding of business, administration, and the Caribbean. Like many West Indians of his generation, he encountered Jamaicans, Trinidadians, Barbadians, Grenadians, Antiguans, and Guyanese abroad, often before meeting them elsewhere in the Caribbean. He would later draw upon his wider experience in helping manage the Dominica Dispensary.
Green next attended the historic University of Louvain in Belgium. The challenge was formidable: he faced a foreign society and a different linguistic environment. He recalled sitting near the front of lectures so he could follow the professors more easily, a testament to his persistence and adaptability.
In 1958 he graduated as a medical doctor, then crossed the Atlantic again for internship training at Jersey City Medical Center in the United States.
He now had the opportunity, as many Caribbean professionals did, to remain overseas.
Instead, he returned home.
The Doctor Comes Home
In 1959 Dr. William Green entered Dominica’s Government Medical Service.
His return came at a critical stage in the country’s development. Dominica lacked the large corps of specialists and sophisticated diagnostic technology now taken for granted. Physicians relied heavily on clinical examination, professional judgment, experience, and the skill of the island’s nurses.
The medical community was small. Among the physicians practicing in Roseau were Dr. Watty, Dr. McIntyre, Dr. Griffin, and Green, alongside doctors from elsewhere in the Caribbean and overseas. The international composition of the medical corps reflected colonial realities: doctors came at various times from Poland, Sri Lanka, Barbados, Trinidad, and elsewhere.
But something important was changing. Dominicans themselves were increasingly assuming leadership.
Green became Medical Officer in charge at Princess Margaret Hospital, responsible for casualty services, the children’s ward, and the medical ward. There was little room for narrow specialization; a doctor served wherever needed.
The hospital became one of the central institutions of Dominican life. During a visit by Queen Elizabeth II, Green accompanied her through the wards—a remarkable moment linking a Dominican physician, the island’s principal hospital, and the monarch of the colonial power under which he had been educated.
Yet the true measure of Green’s career was not royal visits. It was the thousands of ordinary Dominican patients whose lives were touched by the medical service of his generation.
Medicine in an Earlier Dominica
Green’s recollections show how dramatically public health has changed.
Diseases such as yaws, leprosy, jiggers, and other parasitic infections remained familiar concerns. Antibiotics and organized public-health campaigns were transforming medicine, but the transition was still underway. Doctors and nurses witnessed disease patterns that younger physicians may rarely encounter today.
Their success can sometimes be measured by what later generations no longer remember. A disease eradicated becomes invisible; an infection prevented leaves no monument; a child saved grows into adulthood without knowing how close another generation came to losing children to illnesses later controlled by antibiotics, vaccination, sanitation, nutrition, or improved maternal and pediatric care.
Dr. Green particularly remembered the indispensable contribution of Dominican nurses. In an understaffed system, they often performed tasks that elsewhere might have been reserved for physicians. Their practical knowledge, discipline, and closeness to the communities they served made them essential partners in the island’s medical progress.
Doctors such as Green worked alongside generations of nurses, midwives, dispensers, orderlies, laboratory workers, public-health inspectors, pharmacists, and other dedicated personnel.
A Dominican Generation Takes the Reins
Green’s generation represented a broader transformation throughout Britain’s Caribbean colonies. Positions once dominated by expatriate officials were increasingly occupied by Caribbean professionals.
Dominicans became teachers, civil servants, lawyers, engineers, judges, administrators, and doctors.
The significance was psychological as well as practical. When Dominican children saw Dominican physicians walking the wards of Princess Margaret Hospital, they saw proof that excellence did not have to arrive from overseas.
Men and women such as Drs. Green, Griffin, McIntyre, Dorian Shillingford, Paul, Etienne, Watty, Pemberton, Winston, Grell, Royer, Sorhaindo, and their contemporaries represented an emerging professional confidence. Educated partly within colonial institutions, they were increasingly determined to serve their own society.
They helped establish the expectation that Dominicans could manage Dominican institutions. Their lives formed part of the foundation upon which political independence itself became imaginable.
Medicine as Nation Building
Nation building is often described through constitutions, elections, political parties, flags, and independence ceremonies. But a nation is also built in hospital wards: when infants survive childbirth, epidemics are contained, rural patients receive treatment, nurses work through the night, and diseases that once crippled villages disappear.
Doctors like William Green participated in nation building as surely as legislators and ministers.
For approximately three decades Green served in Dominica’s government medical service, witnessing the movement from basic facilities toward increasingly modern treatment. He has lived long enough to see Dominica construct a new hospital with equipment and facilities that would have seemed extraordinary when he returned in 1959.
Yet his reflections offer an important caution: newer buildings and sophisticated equipment do not by themselves guarantee better care. Medicine remains a human calling. Compassion, discipline, professionalism, accessibility, and devotion to patients matter as much now as when a small group of doctors and nurses carried much of Dominica’s medical burden.
The Man Beyond Medicine
Dr. Green’s story is also one of family and personal constancy.
He married Daisy Margot Green, née Kelsick, of Montserrat. They met at a West Indian dance in the Bronx while Green was studying in the United States and fell in love. Together they built a family whose succeeding generations continued the tradition of professional service.
They had three children: Richard, Eloise, and Sharon.
Their son Richard studied at the University of the West Indies and Howard University School of Dentistry and established a successful dental practice. The family now includes three grandchildren: Ilyanna, an attorney educated at Yale University; Simone, a physician educated at the University of the West Indies; and Dominic, a pilot and aviation instructor educated at Embry–Riddle Aeronautical University.
The journey from the boy drilling with a wooden rifle at Dominica Grammar School to the senior physician walking the wards of Princess Margaret Hospital captures something essential about twentieth-century Dominican history.
A Living Archive
The opportunity to record Dr. William Green’s story is precious because the generation to which he belongs is rapidly passing from us.
Every society possesses archives written on paper, but it also possesses living archives: teachers who remember the colonial classroom; nurses who remember hospital wards before modern antibiotics; farmers who remember cultivation before mechanization; civil servants who remember government before independence; veterans who remember war; and doctors who remember diseases that have almost disappeared.
When such people die without being interviewed, libraries burn without smoke. Their memories disappear.
Green’s fascinating memoir was published with the help of his dynamic and gracious daughter-in-law, Lesley Ann Green, née Barrow, of San Fernando, Trinidad. Lesley Ann manages the highly respected dental surgery run by Richard Green. Her assistance helped preserve not only the recollections of a physician, but also the family, social, and historical world from which they emerged.
Dr. William “Billy” Green’s story deserves preservation because his life connects multiple chapters of Dominican history.
He remembers colonial Roseau, the Grammar School of the Second World War, and being caned by a British headmaster after dropping his wooden cadet rifle. He remembers a Roseau lit by oil lamps and powered by the Elmshall dynamo, beneath which the river basin came to be known as “Under Power.” He remembers studying in Canada and Belgium, returning home when Dominican doctors were still few, and serving at Princess Margaret Hospital when technology was limited but professional dedication abundant.
He remembers yaws, leprosy, jiggers, and other illnesses that modern Dominicans rarely encounter. Above all, he remembers the men and women who transformed medical care on the island.
The Legacy
The measure of Dr. William Green’s generation can be found in the lives Dominicans now lead.
Longer life expectancy, improved maternal and child health, better control of infectious disease, greater access to trained medical personnel, and generations of Dominican doctors who followed in their footsteps all testify to what that pioneering cohort achieved.
Their legacy should not be romanticized. They worked within institutions constrained by limited resources and colonial inequalities, and the health system they inherited and developed was never perfect.
But they served. They returned. They assumed responsibility. Through competence, endurance, and professional commitment, they helped Dominicans live healthier and longer lives.
Today, Dr. William “Billy” Green stands as one of the remaining witnesses to that remarkable era.
The schoolboy punished for dropping his wooden rifle became a healer of his people. The young Dominican who crossed oceans in search of knowledge returned with that knowledge to serve the country that had raised him.
In his story we encounter not merely the biography of a physician, but the story of Dominica itself—a small island steadily taking possession of its institutions, educating its professionals, healing its people, and preparing itself for nationhood.
For that service, Dr. William Green, Dr. Grell, Dr. Royer, Dr. Sorhaindo, and the distinguished generation of Dominican physicians to which they belonged deserve to be remembered with gratitude, honor, and pride.
Watch video of the interview below.
