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Ossie MooreCharacters such as Ossie Moore have become ingrained into Barbados' folklore. The name itself is a name that just about every child in Barbados has heard about and every adult has joked about at some point in time. I remember as a child hearing neighbours talk about Ossie Moore seeing a fruit in a tree, climbing the tree to get confirmation on if the fruit was ripe. Once confirmed, he climbed down and proceeded to throw rocks at the same fruit in an effort to knock it down. His name was synonymous with a plethora of jokes that we often time just couldn't get enough of.
Despite what we grew up thinking or being told, Ossie Moore was indeed a real person and not just an old folks tale that everyone made up jokes about. This very popular character of Barbados came from Paynes Bay in the parish of St. James and was born on March 30, 1900 as George Ethelbert Oscar Moore.
According to the A to Z of Barbados Heritage, he apparently never married and had no children and worked as a handy-man for a now deceased Magistrate called Seymor Nurse for a number of years.
In a nutshell, Ossie Moore wasn't very bright and considered a "slow learner" so one of his teachers would often time send him on little errands to the shop to purchase rum for the other teachers to have a drink. Hence the reason he was labelled "Rum Boy" while in school.
Unfortunately, a lot of jokes told about Ossie Moore may have been distorted somewhat especially if someone wanted to truly impress a gathering of friends.
Ossie Moore died on the 17th of June 1976. Yet another one of Barbados' gone but not at all forgotten characters.
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