- FileJudah, left, and Mair
Louis Marriott, Contributor
This is the 26th in a series of articles reliving the years up to Independence by a journalist/broadcaster whose childhood and maturation coincided with Jamaica's.
A SERIES of significant events occurred in my small corner and in the wider world from late 1944 to early 1945.
In the Second World War, the Allied Forces of the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the British Empire and Commonwealth and the United States of America, continued their forward thrust into German territory. There was much speculation regarding the whereabouts of the German Fuhrer, Herr Adolf Hitler, as he missed a number of high-profile events at which he was billed to appear. Meanwhile, the term "the united nations" was being repeatedly used to define the aggregation that was pitted against the axis forces of Germany, Italy, Japan and their satellite states.
On Monday, November 6, Lord Moyne, chairman of the famous Royal Commission that followed the Jamaican labour disturbances of 1938, was assassinated in Cairo, Egypt. He was serving as the British Minister resident in the Middle East and was about to enter his home when he was felled by the bullets of two men dressed in European garb.
On Tuesday, November 7, the Democratic Party candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), from his wheelchair, comfortably withstood the challenge of the Republican Party's Thomas Dewey to win a fourth consecutive term as President of the United States, which he had been since 1933.
The old Legislative Council, with its mixture of members elected under a restricted franchise, ex-officio members holding directorates of Government departments and others arbitrarily chosen by the colonial Governor, had its final sitting at Headquarters House (or Hibbert's House) in Duke Street, Kingston, on Friday, November 17 as the countdown continued to Nomination Day, November 20, when the new Constitution would come into force, and with it universal adult suffrage.
POLITICAL COLLUSION
As the campaign heated up towards the general election of December 14, the People's National Party (PNP) charged that there was collusion between the populist Alexander Bustamante's Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and the businessmen's organisation, the Jamaica Democratic Party (JDP), whose leaders included Abe Issa, Gerald Mair, Douglas Judah, Lewis Kelly, George Bowen, Vernon Sasso, Jim Russell and Eric Abrahams. The JLP and the JDP had in common, their attack on the PNP's socialism, which they denounced as a dangerous path for Jamaica and as leading inevitably to curtailment of human rights.
The anti-socialist parties had divergent views, however, on the question of self-government, an important plank of the PNP platform. The JDP, perhaps surprisingly, stated in the second of nine declared principles: "We believe in achieving self-government within the democratic framework of the British Commonwealth of Nations, by the orderly process of evolution." Meanwhile, Bustamante warned against self-government.
The election campaign reached very banal levels at times. On Constitution Day, November 20, Norman Manley symbolically held aloft a lighted torch at the top of the Kingston Parish Church tower. That act became the subject of much ridicule. JLP supporters sang a new song, "Manley in the tower top hiding". They posed the question "Manley, where art thou?" and answered it, "Manley hide himself from man." The jibes and rumours following the tower incident evidently unnerved the PNP leader, who responded in a paid newspaper advertisement: "May I in all solemnity affirm that I did not get on top of the Parish Church Tower on Constitution Day, November 20, 1944, by any improper means. I was invited there by the lawful custodians of the keys to the belfry to whom I repeat my grateful thanks. I did not find any bats in that belfry. They dwell in the minds of the scaremongers."
In the general election on December 14, the JLP, with 41.4 per cent of the votes cast, won 22 of the 32 seats in the new House of Representatives. Independent candidates, polling 30.0 per cent of the votes, won five seats, and the PNP, with 23.5 per cent of the votes, limiting itself to 19 constituencies, took five seats. The JDP were decimated, polling a mere 4.1 per cent of the vote and losing their deposits everywhere. The only successful PNP candidate in the Corporate Area was Florizel Glasspole, with a comfortable win in Eastern Kingston and Port Royal.
MANLEY DEFEATED
In the preliminary count in West Kingston, Bustamante chalked up 9,587 votes to Ken Hill's 3,504. The bitterest pill for the PNP, however, was in Eastern St. Andrew, where Manley was narrowly defeated by the JLP's Dr. Edward Fagan. Not even the most pessimistic comrade would have expected their illustrious leader to go down to defeat at the hands of the little-known doctor, a pioneer practitioner of alternative medicine who had been cast in PNP demonology as some kind of sorcerer.
The Secretary of State for the Colonies, Colonel Oliver Stanley, journeyed from London to attend the opening of the new legislature, comprising the House of Representatives and a new-style Legislative Council consisting of nominated and ex-officio Members. The historic state opening of the legislature took place at Headquarters House on Tuesday January 9, 1945. Stanley was the first Secretary of State for the Colonies to visit Jamaica during his incumbency in that office. A message to the people of Jamaica from His Imperial Majesty King George VI was read by the Governor, Sir John Huggins. Pride of place went to Bustamante, de facto head of the Government, though with limited de jure powers. Bustamante wore to the opening a top hat and a formal suit with tails.
The defeat of the PNP virtually brought the curtain down on the Marriotts' residence in Greenwich Farm. Despite the allure of the railway track, Davis Beach, Tinson Pen and May Pen Cemetery, Greenwich Farm was generally an unhappy place for me and one of sad and painful memories.
There was no sadder or more painful memory than that of an afternoon near the end of 1944 involving Collin and I and a large supporting cast. Mama sent me to the grocery to buy a pound of rice. I was nine years old. As I was about to exit the yard, when I saw my five-year-old brother Collin near the gate struggling with an old bicycle wheel, trying to propel it with a stick that he placed in the groove. I demanded the wheel so I could motor to the shop. Collin refused to yield.
THE STONE INCIDENT
As I left the yard, I picked up a stone, aimed carefully, lobbed it over his head, and ran off to the shop. When I returned with the rice, there was a crowd at the gate, the family were in a state of panic, and a bloody Collin was being prepared for an emergency visit to the hospital. My luck had run out. Daddy was at home. He was adamant that he would have me committed to Stony Hill Approved School, the second time I was thus threatened within a year. Mama and the neighbours begged him not to commit me. Collin, who in fright had run into the harmlessly lobbed stone, got a few stitches in his head. Charges were not preferred against me. Mama, who was very heavy with child at the time of the incident, delivered two months later a grossly overweight stillborn male child, whom they buried in the name 'John' in a little coffin that Daddy made.
My maternal grandmother, Mammy, was now reconfirmed in her belief that I was no good. I never intended to hit Collin with the stone. Indeed, he collided with it a considerable distance from where he was when I threw it. But while others believed me, Mammy was totally unconvinced. She regurgitated the five-year-old incident when I accidentally spilled piping hot banana porridge on my cousin Rema. Mammy also cited as evidence of my wickedness my pre-dawn flight from her sister's home near Ewarton two years earlier. She now became even more steadfast in her policy of starving me and feeding the other children when we visited her home.
In a bizarre sense, Mammy's hostility must have helped me to withstand the mental suffering I underwent as a result of the injury I inflicted on Collin. While others accepted that it was an accident - and it was - she was so unforgiving and vindictive that in my resentment of her, I found some escape from the guilt and remorse that I felt over the incident.
Louis Marriott is a journalist and broadcaster, a former BBC radio producer/presenter and Press Secretary to the Prime Minister of Jamaica.
