Martin Henry

I first met Burchell Whiteman as a nervous final year UWI undergraduate interviewing exclusively for teaching jobs at the university's job fair.

Brown's Town Community College was on my list, and there was I sitting across the table in the Assembly Hall from a tall, bespectacled man, rather thin - and rather young, I thought, for college principal.

Burchell Whiteman didn't 'interview' me. We chatted - almost as equals. I was to come out to Brown's Town and see the college and town and see if I liked them. Then we could seal a deal. I went - on the minibus - to that year's graduation, only my second visit, having gone once before with a group led by our Principal Ted Dwyer while an EXED Community College student. I had to ask directions to relocate the college. The graduation was impressive. I fell in love with town and college and the deal was sealed. The Principal personally found boarding for me to match my special requests and I spent my first year in Brown's Town in Lynda and Dalbert Hylton's home.

Consummate diplomat

Even then Burchell Whiteman was the consummate diplomat, suave, eloquent and erudite and a quiet problem-solver. Having made me dean of studies among his 'Group of nine' leaders, I once made a 'tough, no-nonsense' decision in a case of delinquency. The Principal, without taking me or the other party to task, quietly overturned it and built bridges.

Whiteman nurtured his staff and gave them room to run. After only two years of service, he approved my application for study leave fully expecting that I wouldn't return from going back to Kingston for the Diploma in Education. I returned, and a big part of the reason was the Principal. In short order I was asked to head up the science department and serve as dean of studies. We could try new things - and make mistakes. And our successes were always celebrated and the foul-ups handled diplomatically. It was a pleasure working with and learning so much from the diplomat for six years and a real pain leaving a really rewarding job [not the money] for reasons which had nothing whatsoever to do with disaffection.

We were all a little surprised when Burchell Whiteman, the gentle educator and Methodist lay preacher, entered the rough and tumble and sometimes ungentlemanly world of representational politics. Most ministers are soon forgotten after their stint of service, but Burchell Whiteman will be remembered among a small group of alpha Education ministers. Among them Edwin Allen of the 1960s, Howard Cooke in the 1970s, Mavis Gilmour in the 1980s, and Burchell Whiteman straddling the 1990s and the new century.

The unification of an unfairly stratified secondary system, still a work in progress, has to qualify as a major achievement, by any measure. So should the massive expansion, something like a tripling, of access to tertiary education on the Whiteman watch. GSAT replaced the CEE, and a National Assess-ment Programme can provide hard data for the assessment of everybody's performance at the primary level. Teachers' salaries made major leaps.

Towering stance

Whiteman fans outside of politics again held our breaths when he was named Minister of Information with all the possibilities of being merely chief propagandist. The diplomat handled himself well in a delicate job, was loved by the media and public, and retained his towering respectability and stance above the fray of 'dutty' politics.

I am always cautious about the rewarding of retired 'pols' with plum diplomatic posts, but Burchell Whiteman is a great pick for London. 'Puck' should be right at home in the British capital and a great Jamaican representative. In 1899, so says the Handbook of Jamaica, our trade with the United States first exceeded our trade with Britain, the colonial 'Mother Country'. Washington, not London, is our most important diplomatic post. But the important work to be done with the Jamaican Diaspora in the U.K. and for trade and aid will be in capable diplomatic hands. And some neglected things like the repatriation of more of our historical heritage held in British archives could well be undertaken by a Burchell Whiteman.

Martin Henry is a communication specialist.