- FileSir Arthur Richards, left, also known as Lord Milverton, and Lady Richards.
Louis Marriott, Contributor
This is the 19th in a series of articles reliving the years up to Independence by a journalist/broadcaster whose childhood and maturation coincided with Jamaica's.
THE family gained one new member in 1942 in the person of Herbert Adolph Marriott, born April 3.
The following month, the People's National Party (PNP) won its first seat in the legislature when Dr. Ivan Lloyd took St Ann in a by-election that followed the death of the previous Legislative Council Member for the parish. The party's candidate in adjoining St. Mary was swamped in June by the superior money power of his rival, and there were widespread allegations of bribery in that contest.
The autocratic behaviour of the Governor, Sir Arthur Richards, and his arbitrary detention and suppression of various men whose politics he deplored were being increasingly questioned.
Richards' credibility in London was apparently now in doubt. His aversion to the PNP's socialist philosophy and its advocacy of self-government led him to revise his initial favourable attitude towards the intellectual Norman Manley, who was clearly respected by the Colonial Office in Whitehall.
The Governor's hostility to anything that smacked of change or was even mildly critical of the old order or of his beloved British Empire caused unlikely alliances to coalesce against his autocratic rule.
His detention in May 1941 of the harmless Gleaner sportswriter G. St C. Scotter was the catalyst for the formation of the Council for Civil Liberties, with Leslie Ashenheim as its inaugural chairman, the following month. In the Council Ashenheim, well known as a conservative lawyer and businessman, was joined by a number of PNP leaders, regarded by Richards as dangerous subversives.
In 1942, Richards' relations with the influential Robert "Bobby" Kirkwood became increasingly strained. Kirkwood, an Englishman, had come to Jamaica initially to head the West Indies Sugar Company (WISCO), owners and operators of Frome Sugar Estate and Factory in Westmoreland. Richards had introduced him to Jamaican politics by naming him as one of the Governor's appointees to the Legislative Council. But soon Kirkwood, accustomed to the relatively high standards of human rights compliance in Britain, was outraged by the Governor's high-handed and intolerant behaviour.
Kirkwood was a dangerous foe, for he was well connected, being the son-in-law of the sugar tycoon and noble Lord Lyle, and he had the ear of the Governor's bosses at the Colonial Office.
Pressure on Richards also came from the Jamaican lobby in the United States, especially after his internment of the New-York-based Jamaican nationalist Wilfred A. Domingo. United States support being vital to the British war effort, the Jamaica Progressive League and its affiliates used their contacts to influence Whitehall into ensuring a more democratic approach to governance in Jamaica.
Britain had been humiliatingly defeated by the Japanese in the Far East, and German submarines in the Atlantic played havoc with the ships of Britain, its allies and neutral countries in 1942.
By then, the United States, drawn directly into the Second World War by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, had established a number of bases in the British Caribbean, including Vernam Field in Clarendon, in exchange for 50 submarine destroyers. Word soon got to the State Department and the White House of appalling socioeconomic conditions and imperialist dictatorship in the British Caribbean colonies. Questions were constantly raised in the Houses of Parliament in Westminster. The view was becoming current in Britain that if there was no fundamental constitutional change in Jamaica, there would be serious social unrest in the colony and that Britain's interests would be better served by its appearing to be a benevolent Empire rather than having change forced on it by violent convulsion. Perhaps not surprisingly, Richards was summoned to Whitehall towards the end of 1942.
A group of elected Members of the Legislative Council and Norman Manley were also invited to London at the same time for talks on constitutional advance for the colony, but those talks did not then materialise. Bustamante, however, bitterly protested his exclusion from the contingent invited to London. All these matters were discussed at meetings of Daddy's PNP group that met in our backyard. No one prevented us children from sitting in on the group discussions. Lloyd and Norma were clearly disinterested in the deliberations, but I always sat in and listened.
The internment of the 4Hs was a particularly sad event for the group, especially the loss of Ken Hill, who was a fairly frequent guest at group meetings and a very popular personality with the family. Edith Dalton James by then had persuaded Daddy and Mama to move Lloyd, Norma and me from Greenwich Farm to Half-Way Tree Elementary School. It had become obvious that her main motive was to teach me and prepare me for a Government scholarship.
The PNP now had a rival party in the field. Clarendon citrus farmer T.H. Sharp called on the agricultural leadership and the business community to form a party to safeguard their interests. There was little response from the agricultural leadership but more so from businessmen, and Kingston trader Abe Issa emerged as leader of the new party, the Jamaica Democratic Party (JDP), which, not surprisingly, had a conservative platform.
On Christmas Day 1942 Daddy introduced Lloyd and me to horse-racing at Knutsford Park, a counter-clockwise one-mile race track that lay between Altamont Crescent to the east, Holborn Road to the west, Trafalgar Road to the north, and Liguanea Club to the south. It was the start of a two-day carnival ending on Boxing Day. The horses ran on consecutive days. We gained access to Knutsford Park by a road that ran from Oxford Road north through the golf links of Liguanea Club. We sat with Daddy's closest friends -- Mr. East, Mr. Nalty and Mr. Johnson -- on the outside of the track in the homestretch leading from Holborn Road and adjacent to Liguanea Club. We had to walk about a hundred metres to the east to place our bets at the pari-mutuel windows, then walk back to our seats on the grass under a tamarind tree to watch the races.
Daddy gave Lloyd and me two shillings before the start of the feature race so that we could buy a ticket on Brown Bomber, that year's Jamaica Derby winner. Brown Bomber duly obliged, but the purse was small, as he was an obvious favourite. Afterwards, Lloyd and I went to the movies at Tivoli on Spanish Town Road, and with money left over after the movie price, snacks at the cinema, and bus fares, we bought a gift for Mama, her favourite grape nut ice cream.
On Boxing Day, Daddy again took us to the races. When it was time for the A Class race we asked if we could get money to buy a ticket. Daddy asked what had happened to our money from the previous day. We told him where it had gone, emphasising the ice cream we had bought for Mama. He was very pleased with us, and demonstrated this by giving each of us two shillings.
Lloyd and I then had a dispute. He wanted each of us to invest a shilling in a win ticket on Brown Bomber. I told him that I didn't think Brown Bomber would win that day, considering the closeness of the Christmas Day race, the extra furlong they would run on Boxing Day, and the additional impost of seven pounds that he picked up for winning the previous day. Failing to persuade me to share the ticket with him, and therefore going it alone, Lloyd spent his florin (two shillings) on a win ticket on Brown Bomber. The champion three-year-old looked especially impressive, under the hands of jockey Charlie Neath, as they approached the five furlong post near his trainer Leo Williams' stables on the southern side of Trafalgar Road. He opened up a huge gap on the field. As they approached the homestretch, however, his stride seemed to shorten and the field came back to him. A quarter mile from home, just before coming to the final bend, he seemed almost to stop.
A number of horses swept by him. Charlie Neath applied the whip, and it was a measure of Brown Bomber's greatness that he accelerated and overtook some of the horses that had gone past him, but he ended third in the race. Lloyd was of course very sad, but, rather than consoling him, I gloated over my good sense in abstaining from betting on the race and flaunted my safe florin in his face. His response was to hit me. Daddy, who witnessed the exchange at close range, took off his belt and flogged him there and then under the tamarind tree at Knutsford Park on Boxing Day 1942.
Louis Marriott is a journalist and broadcaster, a former BBC radio producer/presenter and Press Secretary to the Prime Minister of Jamaica.
