The Shark Lady

THE WHITE FILE
As Regatta nears, memories of the Shark Lady abound
 by P. Anthony White
As the 60thrunning of the National Family Island Regatta nears, we recall in this space some interesting vignettes of former regattas in George Town, Exuma which today lend expansion to the merriment and the mystique of sloop racing which is today truly the national sport of The Bahamas.

In particular, much of that mystique surrounding the regatta has been the assortment of characters, visiting and local Exumians, who have played little and major roles in the growing popularity of the regatta.

We recall some time ago – perhaps in the late 1960s – when the late prime minister Sir Lynden Pindling attended what was then the Out Island Regatta in George Town, and ran into the late Gloria Patience, who was competing in one of the races, along with her traditional “crew” ex extremely attractive, scantily-clad ladies.

Sir Lynden greeted her warmly, asking, “how are you doing”, since Gloria was at the time well past the 60-year mark.

In response, Gloria stooped slightly, picked up the prime minister, and grinned in his face. “That’s how well I’m doing.” She said.

That was vintage Gloria Patience, “The Shark Lady”of The Ferry, Little Exuma who over the years led a charmed and matchless life, daring to do what others shunned, challenging most of the restrictions and limitations of orderly society, and, quite frankly, consistently doing her own thinglong, long before than expression became chic.

Gloria died in 1986, when she was 85 years old, and had she been yet been alive for this year’s regatta, Gloria Patience would have been 95. However, in terms of years of what over the years she brought to the Exuma table, she was unforgettable and irreplaceable.

Ah, it was truly a festive occasion when she turned 80 back in October of 1997, and the cream and the simple folk of Exuma came together in rambunctious co-minglement to celebrate the occasion.
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At that time, reminiscences abounded as person after person spoke of Gloria’s various escapades which often tentacled far beyond the borders of her home in The Ferry, and indeed far beyond Exuma and The Bahamas.

A few years before that, for example, when the United States took the position to remove the special detection balloon near the old airport ((which has been used to help in the interdiction of illegal drug smugglers) Gloria decided she had to do something.

She telephone the American ambassador in Nassau to complain about the impending removal, but apparently got little satisfaction, so she politely kissed him off, saying she would call Washington instead.

Gloria then proceeded to telephone the White House in Washington, saying that The Shark Lady wanted to speak with President Bill Clinton.

The President came on the line and she complained about the balloon removal, saying that it was of great assistance in keeping the druggies out of the area. The U.S. Chief apparently started gong into some winding explanations.

“That’s beside the point, Buckie Boy,” she was heard to say, then reminded the President that instead of spending billions in an elaborate space programme, the United States should spend the funds on solving problems right at home.

That was the daring, devil-may-care style of the feisty barefoot lady from The Ferry who in her diversified lifetime bore nine children, all of whom dutifully attended that celebration of her 80thbirthday, along with 23 grandchildren and 25 great grands.

Up to that time Gloria Patience hadn’t worn shoes on a regular basis for many, many years, and although elegantly bedecked in a long white dress with a high sequined waistline, he feet were still decorated simply with coloured beads which sparkled against the light as she danced with her son, Joey, who, understandably, thought the world of his most extraordinary mama.

She was born of Long Island parentage in The Ferry back in 1917, the year the United States entered World War I and the year Tsar Nicholas abdicated the Russian throne.

She migrated to Nassau and upon marriage became Gloria Lewless, giving birth to the proud nine. Her husband passed on, and she eventually met and married George Patience.
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Gloria moved back to The Ferry, and took a special interest in the sea. She used to fish for sharks, and sold the jaws and teeth to Americans who used them for chains, or to mount on mantleplaces.

That was how she came to be known as The Shark Lady.

But Gloria Patience was also known as The Barefoot Lady, and that’s quite a different story.

She began entering her boat, “The Barefoot Gal”, in the Out Island Regatta, mostly for the fun of it. Then in the early 1970s she would take on an all-girl crew of four or five Americans who came just for regatta.

The difficulty was that once the race in which she entered got underway, a number of the other entered boats inevitably seemed to lose direction and turned to follow the “Barefoot Gal”, which often seemed to be going in the opposite direction.

Apparently in the heat of the afternoon and way out yonder on the sea in Elizabeth Harbour, Gloria’s crew would divest themselves of the top half of their swimsuits.

Whilst the sailors tried to catch up with the “Barefoot Gal” for a closer look, dozens of spectators on the shore peered at the scintillating scene through binoculars quickly passed from hand to hand.

To Gloria, fully suited at the helm, it was sailing business as usual, and if some guys wanted to run off the course just to ogle, well . . .

At the birthday party, old timer Reggie Rolle, who had survived two wives and was not earnestly seeking a “youngish” bride, spoke of Gloria with a special kind of delicate warmth and tenderness reserved for people proud to be octogenarians.

With small bright eyes set deeply into his jet black face, he recounted occasions when he would be at sea “fishening” and would spot Gloria fighting with the sharks.

Back then the young Father Peter Scott, only recently installed in Exuma, spoke with traditional eloquence of Gloria, a member of his flock, and the retired Catholic priest, Father George, himself past 80 eulogised the Shark Lady in knowing terms.

Yet perhaps it was Elliot Lockhart, at the time the Member of Parliament for Exuma and who had known Gloria Patience all his life, summed her up most appropriately:
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“You are a woman of depth, a woman of character. We shall continue to honour you, to revere and respect you as an example to young women and men of Exuma. The family will never be the same without Gloria Patience.”

The late Howland Bottomley, “Mister Regatta”, who had at that time lived in Exuma for 41 years, spoke thus of Gloria:

“There is a hunger for where you come from,” meaning poetically that the woman in bare feet who was so excited by the sea, who spoke her mind with a lusty determination, and who really didn’t give a tinker’s damn if somebody disagreed with her, personified what real Bahamian womanhood should be all about.

Many years before that in El Toro Restaurant in Nassau after work, Pam Smith sat in a corner of the bar smoking and sipping rum and coke.

Those were times of hectic political intrigue, when the beautiful people of the world were in their hey-dey, and when The White Boy was fresh out of Manhattan with hefty afro, Lord & Taylor continentals, and filtered cigarette holder.

Gene Toote was there, as well as Napoleon McPhee and Box Weeks as Pam stressed her particular point.

“I appreciate a woman of strong convictions,” The White Boy said.

Pam laughed. “You should meet my mother,” she responded.

Pam was there at the birthday party as more than 300 people from five different countries sang Happy Birthday to her mother, the thoroughly delightful and unforgettable Gloria Patience.

30

Bill Cartwright: A last farewell to a nation’s hero

For more than four decades in The Bahamas, stretching back to 1968, successive governments have failed properly to recognise and pay tribute to nationals who have contributed significantly to the development first of the colony, and then of the Bahamian nation.

Back in June 1972 as the Progressive Liberal Party government had set out the terms of independence the following year, the government caused the House of Assembly to pass a Special Resolution honouring and acclaiming the late Sir Milo Butler as a National Hero.

Independence came on 10 July 1973, and on 1 August that year Milo Butler, having been knighted in the queen’s 1973 Birthday Honours, was sworn in as the first Bahamian governor-general.

All that was quite fitting, yet at the time there were yet alive three Bahamians whose early vision, defiance, and revolutionary spirit had initially set the stage for majority rule, and for independence.

They were Henry Milton Taylor, Cyril St. John Stevenson, and William Wilton Cartwright. The three had established the Progressive Liberal Party in September 1953, twenty years before independence.

All three, to one degree or another, had suffered deprivation and dispossession because of what they had dared to do blatantly in the face of the oligarchical regime then governing the colony, yet, quite frankly, successive new peoples’ governments had failed to go again to Parliament with a proposition of new Special Resolutions to designate the three as national heroes.

A new government of the Free National Movement came to office in 1992, serving until 2002, when the PLP again became the government for a single term. This was succeeded in 2007 by the FNM, which served until May of 2012, when the PLP again became the government.

By May of this year two of the three founders of the PLP – Sir Henry Taylor and Cyril Stevenson – had already passed on to another kind of glory, but the third founder, the final keeper of that original revolutionary flame, William Cartwright, was still barely alive, in a home for the aged, cared for, literally, by good Samaritans.

That was until one month following this year’s general elections. In a way, the chronicle of Bill Cartwright continues to be a sort of neverending story in The Bahamas, and perhaps rightfully it ought to be, all things considered.

Finally this past Monday we laid William Wilton Joseph Cartwright to rest in Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Cemetery on Shirley Street, following a two-hour funeral service at the Anglican Church of St. Gregory the Great on Carmichael Road.

Bill Cartwright, as noted, was one of the three founders of the Progressive Liberal Party. He passed away on 7 June, four months short of his 90^th birthday.

The funeral, if one may be forgiven such a description of such a traditionally sad and mournful affair, was a splendid occasion upon which leading representatives of Church and State spoke of the departed social and political revolutionary in quite fitting terms, with family members and others in the church nodding in quiet acknowledgement.

Among those in attendance was the Roman Archbishop Patrick Pinder, no doubt in recognition of the fact that William Cartwright had for most of his life been a practising Roman Catholic.

 There were no tears shed.

Regardless of the disconsolate condition of his final years, when Bill Cartwright was forced to lean so heavily on the care and kindness of strangers, there was a diverse number of Bahamians who could relate to several stages of his life, either directly or else through tales told by their elders.

For example, one such was a fellow named Samuel Alexander Miller II, who was about 13 years younger than Bill Cartwright, but who was funeralised at Bethel Baptist Church on Meeting Street on Saturday 16 June this year, two days before Bill.

They used to call him “Bodyguard”, and he hailed originally from Knowles, Cat Island. In his final years he resided in a building at the corner of West and South Streets, opposite the gas station.

Even when Bodyguard’s health began to fail, he would sit inside the door of the residence, watching the world pass by unless and until some friend stopped by to say hello and spend some caring, quality time with him.

Each day a few years back he used to make his way slowly down West Street to sit and chat with regulars at the Bethel-Robertson bar near to Meadow’s Street, and often he would move across the street under the fig tree where he sat on a bench or box and impart pearls of wisdom to the eager, thirsty souls who desired to know, such as The White Boy.

Bodyguard delighted especially in relating old time stories of Cat Island, and we vividly remember his versions of some of the things that happened back in 1949 when Bill Cartwright was making his first bid to become an elected Member if the House of Assembly for that district.

That was about four years before the establishment of the PLP, and Cartwright was at the time an enterprising relatively young Bahamian in the real estate business, with an office on Bay Street.

Bodyguard told of how Cartwright had gone ahead as an independent and nominated to run for one of the two Cat Island seats. At that time Cat Island was pretty much a political stronghold of the powerful Harold G. Christie, but apparently that did not faze Bill Cartwright.

On the last night of his campaign, Bill Cartwright took along his old friend, Dr. Claudius Roland Walker, who was one of the candidates for the Southern District of New Providence, and who was considered a man of great persuasion on the campaign trail.

Cartwright especially wanted Dr. Walker to help him convince the patriarch of The Bight settlement, Sammie Swain, that for the first time he should consider voting for a black man.

Cat Island was a two-man constituency, and Dr. Walker appealed to Sammie Swain to try at least to convince the people to split their votes. Later Bill Cartwright was to tell of how greatly impressed he was with the powerful argument advanced by Dr. Walker, who had already won his New Providence seat.

The Cat Island candidate then put to Swain the plain question concerning the way the patriarch would vote the following day, and persuade others to vote.

Sammie Swain, after thinking deeply, informed Bill Cartwright that he, Swain, was fond of both Bill Cartwright and Harold Christie, so what he planned to do was to vote for Christie, and pray for Cartwright.

Both Christie and Cartwright won the Cat Island seats, and four years later he went on, with Taylor and Stevenson, to establish the PLP. In 1972, the bulk of the political movers and shakers in the new Free National Movement had actually been at the heart of the PLP before disenchantment had set in.

In fact at the outset, the original members of the Free PLP used to boast that they were indeed the “keepers of the dream” – the dream of freedom and social and political development initially advanced back in September 1953 when Bill Cartwright and two other Bahamian visionaries look that quantum political leap.

Now Bill Cartwright is gone, but his and how two valiant founders of the PLP will be a neverending story in the modern Bahamas, and beyond . . . for what it’s worth.

The Silly Season? This Too Shall Pass Away

More and more these weeks and months leading up to the coming general elections are being described in various quarters as the “silly season”.

That is meant, presumably, that the players in the ongoing political debate are prone to saying things they would not ordinarily say, making charges and laying blames they know could never be substantiated, and generally entering into exchanges which are frivolous and sometimes asinine when there are genuine and pressing issues crying out for sensible argument.

To a degree, perhaps all that is fine, providing as it does a kind of comic relief – as Shakespeare often insinuated in his tragedies – in between the heavy sessions concentrating on the planks of the manifestos of the various contending political organisations.

Politicians of all shades are often fascinated by large crowds, particularly crowds of their own known supporters, and the more the crowd applauds and wave pom-poms and and yell for more, the more the speaker heaps on what often is largely and perhaps essentially bull, with some of them actually dancing to the music.

All that has become part of the silly season, when the chief objective is to impress the electorate to the extent that on election day the people will respond by voting for the most impressive party or individual.

Already, even before there is an indication of whether election day will be weeks or months away, the remarks of vitriol and vituperation have begun flying fast and to an extent furiously, with parties charging against one another with political ferocity.

Of course the insinuation of the Democratic National Alliance into the fray has tended to make a difference in the ongoing tenor of the debate, but that has only added a third dimension to what in this season, for a good part of the electorate, is reduced to little more than confusion.

Up through the years there have been incidents during campaigns which may have been considered ridiculous or laughable, but which, at the end of the day, have actually helped to dull the sharp edge of the constant contention.

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Back in 1946, for example, when the late Sir Henry Taylor tested the political waters for the first time, he encountered a variety of situations on the campaign trail which were alternately hilarious and heart-breaking.

Taylor, who seven years later was to become one of the three founders of the Progressive Liberal Party, had offered as a candidate for his native Long Island in a a bye-election necessitated by the resignation from the House of Assembly of the representative, Guilbert Dupuch.

Taylor was virtually penniless at the time, and in fact had to search around for the fifty pounds for his nomination fee. Yet this penniless man, who years later would become the third governor general of the Bahamas, had the gall to boast that he would not pay a penny for a vote.

His opponent in the face was Alexander Knowles, a successful farmer whose son, James, would one day represent Long Island in the House an serve as a cabinet minister in the Free National Movement government.

It was a rough campaign for the penniless Henry Taylor, but he roughed it and toughed it against a strong and well heeled adversary, some of whose campaign generals began spreading the word that Taylor was a heavy drinker and therefore not fit to sit in the House of Assembly.

One night when he was speaking during a campaign meeting in Glinton’s in the north of the island, when he knew that a cousin of Alexander Knowles was in the audience. He told the crowd that he was well aware of the accusations that he was a drunkard.

“I am not a drunkard,” he said, “but I have been talking to you for the last hour, and my throat is dry. Have any of you gentlemen in he audience a bottle in your pocket? Please bring it to the platform that that I can relieve my thirst.”

Several bottles were brought up, and Taylor took a sip from each.

“Now, gentlemen, if any of you do not drink, I want you to vote for the teetotaler, Mr, Alexander Knowles. Those of you that drink, please vote for me. I guarantee that I will beat him.”

Henry Taylor lost that election, but went on the win the seat in the general election of 1949.

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Sometimes the silly season turned tragic, as during the campaign for the fateful 1972 general election, the first in which the then infant Free National Movement was a contender.

The body of an FNM supporter and campaign worker, Barry Major from Grant’s Town, was murdered in Perpall Tract. There was an extended investigation, and his killers were eventually executed.

Then there were those incidents in the 1956 general elections which cold hardly have altered the outcome of that poll, but which were learning trees. The PLP had been established in 1953, and offered a full slate of 29 candidates in New Providence and the Out Islands.

One of those incidents involved the West End seat in Grand Bahama where the party’s candidate went missing on nomination day, and so he Bay Street candidate won the seat by acclamation. One report was that the PLP’s man had been “detained” in South Florida and couldn’t get back in time.

Another story was that he had received a handsome gift of several hundred pounds, via Bay Street, not to nominate.

Then there was the election in Acklins and Crooked Island, where the PLP’s candidate was young A. Loftus Roker.

The PLP had won four seats in New Providence, and one of the victors, Randol Fawkes, was traveling by mailboat to Crooked Island to assist the young candidate during the last days of the campaign there.

Apparently on that trip Roker revealed to Randol Fawkes that he, Loftus, was not quite 21, the legal voting age, which also meant the legal age for nominating to run for a seat.

The late Eugene Dupuch won the seat, and it was said that through the discretion of Kendal G.L. Isaacs, who was then Solicitor General, that legal action was not taken against Loftus Roker, who in later years was elected to the House of Assembly and served in several cabinet posts in the PLP government.

Most likely general elections this year will not take place until somewhat nearer the summer, and so the silly season will have to be endured for some time yet. The angry exchanges will continue, with even close friends or relatives lashing out in political anger, most of which will be regretted when the elections are over.

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In the meantime, the season must be endured, and Bahamians might find some solace in the story of an eastern monarch who had seen and done just about everything and, bored, he summoned some of his wisest advisors and ask them to go and search for an expression that would bring him hope.

They searched diligently, and after a time returned to the monarch and handed him a parchment on which they had written, “And this too shall pass away.”

So it shall. So it shall.

‘Hoolie’ Seymour: the epitome of the real Bahamas

(For The Punch – Issue 12 January 2012)

In each community, in New Providence and no doubt in the Family Islands, there has always existed a mainstream circle of male friends who come together at no designed, agreed or specified time to share memories of what used to be and what has transpired as a result, and to hold forth on the present passing scene.

They have traditionally been of diverse political and religious persuasions, mostly older men who have passed through several generations and have experienced all the changing scenes of life in The Bahamas, stretching far before the coming of majority rule in 1967.

When one passes there is a void, a vacuum, a terrible dent in the fabric of the fraternity, but the group moves on in a kind of wordless understanding that they have indeed over the years become a peculiar group.

This is about Kenneth Aaron Seymour, part of a Grant’s Town group of sporting,game-playing enthusiasts, who passed away last December. But let us first delve into the nature of such groups in Grant’s Town through the generations.

Most weekday afternoons down Blue Hill Road under an ageless seagrape tree, there has for years existed an interesting convention of older Bahamian men engaged in a hotly contested game of dominos.

The tree, located immediately south of Rodgers Corner, has a network of leaves so thick that residents underneath could easily withstand medium rainfall, especially when it came at a critical juncture of the game when quitting was beyond the thinking of any of the challengers, or the ever-present audience hovering.

Among the group of players there is a steady contingent of locals – older gentlemen who reside in the general Grant’s Town or Bain Town area, and who obviously find delight in spending leisure time in the company of old friends, playing or observing, and often engaging in casual conversation about the passing scene or the trend of current activities.

 From time to time the group is joined by game-playing zealots from outside the immediate community but who for years have added refreshing colour and challenge to the gathering. enthusiasts

These have included such as the Rev. Addison Turnquest, the unconventional Anglican priest some referred to as the Ayatollah, who, interestingly and obviously with the sanction of the late Anglican bishop Michael Eldon, contested a seat for the Free National Movement in the 1982 general elections.

Another fierce regular contender is attorney Sir Cyril Fountain, who once served as the Member of Parliament for North Long Island, then went on to become a justice of the Supreme Court. He ended up as Supreme Court Justice.

Over the years the gathering has been a sort of continuation of traditional male camaraderie in historic Grant’s Town. Back in the 1940s and 1950s, when the late MP Spurgeon Bethel operated Neely’s Bar at Rodgers Corner and Blue Hill Road, men used to gather to play Awari* and discuss the leading topics of the day.

Even more celebrated than that was the traditional gathering of men, led by the late, prolific undertaker Gerald Dean, playing Awari, dominos and checkers outside the Cotton Tree Bar farther up Blue Hill Road opposite the Southern Recreation Grounds.

Of historic interest is the fact that it was there at the front of the Cotton Tree Bar back in June 1942, as the Burma Road riot was bubbling, that the Provost Marshall officially read the Riot Act, declaring a dusk to dawn curfew.

Of course the centrepiece of that Grant’s Town male comradeship was the great silk cotton tree which was located on the eastern side of Blue Hill Road between Lewis and Cameron Streets, a half block south of St. Agnes Church, with its sprawling roots extending to the middle of the road, so that at that point traffic often became one-way.

There especially on Sunday mornings the men gathered to have their shoes shined by the legendary Ralph and his small team of workers. There the men, some of them leading professionals inside and beyond the community, debated the large and fatal issues.

The men, just about all of them now passed into eternity, included such as Members of the House of Assembly Bert Cambridge and Dr. C.R. Walker, Gerald Dean, Robert Turnquest, Spurgeon Bethel, Booze Rodgers, Big Hutch, Earl “Bing” Cambridge, Randol Fawkes, Jim Russell, and on occasion the quite knowing and loquacious Dr. Cleveland Eneas. 

Sometimes they debated well past noon, when the bell at St. Agnes would begin pealing, announcing the termination of the 10.30 a.m. Service, and it was not unusual for the church’s rector, Canon Milton Cooper, in his flowing black robe, to venture over to catch a piece of the action.

That had been the nature of Grant’s Town up through the years, where the men, their day’s work finished, would often gather for a game, for hearty argument and chatter, and, most of them, for a little of what St. Paul noted was good for the stomach’s sake.

It yet continues today under the seagrape tree, even though, from time to time, a member of that venerable band slips away forever.

That happened on 16 December last year, when Kenneth Aaron Seymour, who seemed always to light up all of Grant’s town, slipped into eternity following a bout with cancer. On 22 December, a handful of days before Christmas, his funeral services were held at his home Church of St. Mary the Virgin. .

He had been born in Cat Island in 1931, and at his homegoing service the sermon was delivered by the Rev. Canon Warren Rolle, a fellow Cat Islander, who had served as rector of St. Mary’s until 2007.

 A proud product of the old Government High School in Nassau Court, Kenneth Seymour, long called “Hoolie” by his friends, was one of those articulate Bahamians who, from boyhood, read voraciously, and in later years enjoyed watching films of worth and value.

It was no doubt he spoke with a stentorian tongue, his tenor and diction rising and falling according to the statement or the message it was his intent to convey. In that regard he often reminded one of classical educators like Rosalie “Rosa” Smith, Mildred Dillette, and headmaster Theodore Glover.

 It was no wonder that in the late 1940s and early 1950s he became keenly interested in plays written by then John Taylor, who had grown up in St. Mary’s Church. He began assisting in the stage work of the performances, which took place usually in St. Benedict’s Hall on the grounds of The Priory on West Street.

 Those were John Taylor’s productions of such as “Man with Maid”, “Gaolbird”, “Columbus”. and “O, Absolom”, and the main players were usually Calvin Cooper, Matthew Sawyer, Gertrude Gibson, and Sylvia Coakley.

Eventually John Taylor went off to New York to study, especially theatre, at Columbia University. However he switched to Theology instead, and was eventually ordained as a deacon and then a priest in the Episcopal Church.

In 1956 Fr. Taylor returned to The Bahamas, and eventually became a curate at St. Agnes Church in Grant’s Town, under Canon Milton Cooper. In 1958 he wrote a play,“The House on Calamity Street” for performance on the stage at St. Agnes Schoolroom. His carefully chosen cast included Kenneth Seymour, Edwin Archer, Frederica Turnquest, Gertrude Gibson, Cynthia Love, and The White Boy.

Years later after Fr. Taylor had returned to the U.S. And served in several churches there, he again returned to The Bahamas, and was attached to St. Mary’s. Whilst he was there St. Agnes observed its 150^th anniversary of Dedication, and the rector, Archdeacon William Thompson, requested Fr. Taylor to write an appropriate play to mark the occasion.

Thus came the historic work, “Agnes of Rome”, which Fr. Taylor personally directed. Among his chosen cast was his old standby, Kenneth Seymour. That was 1991 when Hoolie was 60 and still strutting his powerful stuff across the stage, which on that occasion was the Lower Gardens of Government House.

Often in Grant’s Town when he was not playing dominos, Hoolie would chat happily abut the old days and the thrill of theatre. It was a thrill, he used to remind, second only to his service, wherever required, in the sanctuary of St. Mary’s Church, right up until last summer, even when his health was failing.

Today in Grant’s Town, Hoolie is already missed as that exuberant, silver-haired fixture with the stentorian voice who enjoyed the company of his fellow Bahamians, who was once toasted as as outstanding thespian on he local stage, and who, for all his 80 years enjoyed every cycle of his colourful life.

 Kenneth Aaron “Hoolie” Seymour was truly the stuff of which the real Bahamas is made . . . for what it’s worth.

* AWARI: An abstract African game also known as the “African Bean Game”.

“Awari is an ancient game originating from Africa which consists of 12 holes in the ground (called houses) split up into 2 rows of 6. Designed for two players, each player selects a row as their territory. Each house starts with 4 seeds in it.” READ MORE

>> Read more about and PLAY ONLINE HERE

DAMN SAM! Sheddon Wilmore

Please note that on this date, 5 January 1924, in Peter Street off Blue Hill Road, New Providence, The Bahamas, a son was born to Caroline Cecilia Strachan and Frederick Anthony Strachan.

They named him Shedden Wilmore. He was the couple’s tenth child. Uncle Shedden would have been 88 today.

We can be certain that he continues to rest in the Everlasting Arms.

In The Bahamas Ignorant Armies Clash by Night

- for The Punch – Issue 24 March 2011
by P. Anthony White

“ . . . we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.”
Matthew Arnold, DOVER BEACH

This marks the second occasion upon which we have commended the Member of Parliament for Bamboo Town, Branville McCartney, in this space or another, for a display of integrity.

Earlier this week Mr. McCartney, who had been elected to the House of Assembly in May 2007 as a candidate for the Free National Movement, announced that he had resigned his membership with the governing party.

After the elections, in which the FNM was successful and became the government, Mr. McCartney was appointed a state minister, first for Tourism, and subsequently of Immigration. Early last year he resigned his cabinet post, citing an opined difference with the government with regard to policy, but nevertheless expressing his continued support for the FNM and the government.

Again on that occasion, in this space or another, we traced political history back to 1970 when the late Sir Cecil Wallace-Whitfield led seven other Progressive Liberal Party Members of Parliament in supporting a House of Assembly vote of no confidence in the PLP government and in prime minister Lynden Pindling.

At that time the Member of South Beach, the late Carlton Francis, a former headmaster and educator, who was Minister of Finance, on his feet in Parliament reminded the eight dissidents that “there is a path for honourable men to follow when they find they can no longer follow their leader.”

The eight, of course, voluntarily or not, went in a different political direction from their leader, and the result ultimately evolved into the Free National Movement, which served as the government of The Bahamas from 1992 until 2002, and has again been the government since 2007.

For the record, the eight had taken the honourable path suggested by Carlton Francis, and which he was himself eventually to follow when as a cabinet minister he disagreed with the PLP government’s plan and policy to extend casino gambling in The Bahamas.

Today it seems Branville McCartney has chosen to follow that honourable path by tendering his resignation from the FNM, just as he did when he resigned as a cabinet minister.

Twice in relevantly recent times that has happened in the opposition Progressive Liberal Party. That was the case when Malcolm Adderley resigned his Elizabeth House of Assembly seat, prompting an early 2010 bye-election which was won by the PLP’s Ryan Pinder.

It happened again last year when the PLP MP for Kennedy, Kenyatta Gibson, left the PLP and walked across the floor of the House, allying himself politically with the governing FNM.

That is the way things are done by honourable men and women, especially in critical times when political leaders need to be able to rely on their loyal members and supporters, and most especially when leaders need to count committed Parliamentary heads in matters such as the BTC debate now taking place in the House of Assembly.

Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham has already announced his principle that should the House of Assembly vote go against his government’s decision to sell 51 percent of the Bahamas Telecommunications Company to Cable and Wireless, he would consider that a vote of no confidence in his government, and will call early general elections.

We have been around, politically, and we are not certain, from where we sit, that all FNM MPs are acutely aware of the significance of what will take place as a result of the extent of their support of the BTC resolution and how they vote, or of the significance of what the prime minister said with regard to that vote.

Hubert Ingraham, none can afford to forget, especially not at this juncture, long ago proclaimed that he is a man who says what he means and means what he says, and has not yet to date gone back on that proclamation.

Back in 2001, when Mr. Ingraham took the decision that he was ready to step down from the FNM leadership, he caused the party to hold a special convention for the election of a leader-designate. Of the three principal candidates vying for that post – Tennyson Wells, Tommy Turnquest and Algernon Allen – Mr. Turnquest emerged as the winner.

There was a great deal of bitterness in parts of the political camp of the FNM, which was at the time still the government of The Bahamas. That bitterness, and sometimes outward criticism of the party’s leadership, coupled with the issue of the February 2002 Referendum, conspired wickedly to energise the opposition PLP to mount its biggest and most expensive and flambouyant election campaign ever.

The FNM government lost the February 2002 Referendum, and on the heels of that defeat, in the May 2002 general elections, to a great extent because of division and disgruntlement in the party, and not necessarily at the rank and file level, the FNM went into a lost the 2 May 2002 general elections.

Up through the years from time to time, both the Free National Movement and the Progressive Liberal Party have suffered the political pain of fracture in the ranks, fracture sometimes so severe that it erodes party strength and public support, none of which is politically healthy near election time.

We write often of the disastrous 1977 general elections, when the opposition was split completely in half. Many argue that a huge contributing feature in that split came about because in the Free National Movement a dispute arose about the party’s candidate for the South Long Island seat.

On the Cecil Wallace Whitfield side the preference of a candidate was Tennyson Wells, a Long Islander, whilst the Bay Street faction favoured another Long Islander from Mangrove Bush, James Knowles.

There was to be no compromise, yet the impending fracture in the party had to do with infinitely more than the candidacy for Long Island, nor, as others contended, did it involve any sinister attempt of the old Bay Street diehards to regain control of the opposition in the hopes of returning Bay Street to the government.

It had more to do with a clash of strong political personalities in the opposition. Although a forceful, fearless and charismatic individual, Cecil Vincent Wallace Whitfield was also doctrinaire and dogmatic. He believed – and perhaps he had every right to harbour such a belief – that the Free National Movement was his political baby and that was that.

Others in the party, some of them veteran and seasoned politicians, no doubt respected and admired him, but were not prepared to follow blindly. There were yet others who had in another place gone through that “One Man’s Dream” syndrome, and would not endure another running of the episode.

The upshot of it all was a split, with the FNM led by Wallace Whitfield and the new Bahamian Democratic Party headed by Kendal Isaacs. Yes, when came elections, in South Long Island James Knowles was the BDP’s candidate and Tennyson Wells carried the banner for the FNM.

The PLP was able to chalk up a massive win at the polls in that election, a victory rendered even more massive because of the political disarray in the opposition. Yet through wise and tolerant dialogue, the fracture could have been avoided.

If personalities had been prepared to come to the discussion table, checking their egos at the door, that 1977 elections need not have been so disastrous. There was no way even a combined opposition could have triumphed, but at least the fundamental political chord would have remained intact for the next confrontation.

There was the case in the Progressive Liberal Party leading up to the 1997 elections when the party altered the constitution to call a leadership convention to allow for the election of two co deputy leaders to serve under party leader the late Sir Lynden Pindling. The outcome was that Perry Christie and Dr. Bernard Nottage, both former ministers in the PLP government, were elected to those offices.

Following the 1997 election, however, Sir Lynden resigned both as party leader and as a Member of Parliament. There was the need for a new party leader. The candidates were Christie, Nottage, and Philip Galanis. Actually, after the first ballot Bernard Nottage polled more than Christie, but not the required 50 percent.

There had to be another ballot. Philip Galanis pulled out of the race, and Perry Christie sailed to victory. At the next PLP convention Nottage again ran for the leadership, This time Christie stumped him.

That did not go well with Bernard Nottage, who apparently felt that something had gone awry. He soon resigned from the PLP, and went on to establish the Coalition for Democratic Reform, where, in fact, he was joined by such as Phenton Neymour and Charles Maynard, both of whom are now FNM cabinet ministers.

No doubt again much pain and political fracture could have been avoided through consultation and open argument around the table, with egos checked at the door, and party generals and political middlemen kept at bay.

For years in The Bahamas far too often around the political executive table and in the trenches there is mindless warring which dilutes the organisation’s forward battle thrust, and especially at times when there is a desperate need for all hand on deck, and fully accountable.

The ancient writer Thucydides presented an account of a battle during the Peloponnesian War which occurred on a beach during the invasion of Sicily by the Athenians. That confrontation took place at night, and the attacking army became so disoriented that in the darkness some of the soldiers were actually killing each other.

There is a lesson there for politicians and political organisations who cannibalise inside their groups because they often confuse friend with foe, lashing out left and right, sometimes ignorantly, often with sinister deliberation, seldom pausing to ponder the possible effect on the cause at hand.

That has, over the many years, been the sad case in both the PLP and the FNM, both as government and as opposition.

Back in the 19th century, the English poet Matthew Arnold commented on such a situation, no doubt drawing on the battle account rendered by Thucydides centuries before, whilst honeymooning with his bride near Dover Beach, Kent in England, penned the classic poem, DOVER BEACH, some of the last lines of the final stanza which reads:

“Ah, love, let us be true
To one another . . . we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

Far too often in The Bahamas have political battles been lost because supposed allied soldiers war on darkling plains like ignorant armies clashing by night . . . for what it’s worth.

Happy Birth to former parliamentarians Frank Howard Watson and Kendal Wellington Nottage, both born on this date in 1940, a very good year.

Please Get It Right: Today’s FNM Grew from a Pained PLP

For The Punch – Issue 3 March 2011
by P. Anthony White

In this or another space from time to time we recount the birth and development of the Progressive Liberal Party, starting in late 1953, as the beginning of the thrust of the Bahamian masses to that historic first general elections in 1956, majority rule in 1967, and eventually to full statehood in 1973.

At each stage there was a vibrant presence of democracy, and particularly following the birth and development of the Free National Movement, and organisation which, it could be said, sprang from the bowels of the PLP, the result of the ambitions of some further to test the buoyancy of that democracy.

And so that birth, development of the FNM, a party which this year marks its 40th anniversary has evolved as an integral part of the modern history of The Bahamas, and Bahamians, especially the young, no matter what their political inclinations, have a right and a need to know.

What should be of interest to historians is that the Free National Movement did not come about as the result of the gentle or simmering yearning huddled masses yearning to breathe free, but rather like the restless awakening of a passionate woman who refuses to remain blind when light is shimmering all around. Those would-be historians need to get the story right.

The fact of the matter is that the events of 19 August 1992 – when the PLP government was toppled after nearly 26 years in office – became a powerful climax to a national political odyssey which began technically in the House of Assembly on 13 May 1970.

That was when the maverick Member of Parliament for the St. Barnabas constituency of New Providence, Randol Francis Fawkes, who has served as Minister of Labour and Commerce in the first PLP government, moved the following Resolution:

“Whereas Government, by its failure to consult with investors prior to the passing of Legislation nullifying the effects of certain provisions of Government’s agreements with local and foreign businessmen has caused the economic dislocation of the resources of the Commonwealth.
“AND WHEREAS moneys are being paid out to the Hon. Clifford Darling, the Minister of State, when unlike other Ministers no specific office of duties assigned to him are shown in the Bahamas Official Gazette.
“BE IT RESOLVED, that this House has no confidence in the Government.”

It was at that point that the MP for Freetown, the late Simeon Bowe. Who was then a Parliamentary Secretary in the PLP government, moved that Mr. Fawkes’ Resolution be amended by deleting all the words of the Resolution and substituting, instead, the following:

“Whereas this Government has a responsibility to the people of this Country to discharge its duty in their best interest and,
“Whereas this Government is discharging such duties (and) has done so to the satisfaction of the people:
“BE IT RESOLVED, that this House has confidence in the Government.”

The question was put and passed, and the record shows that the House resolved that the Resolution be amended as agreed..

It was a pivotal point in Bahamian political history, for it was then technically that black Bahamians were challenged publicly to support or vote against the black Bahamian government.

Some Members were absent from the chamber when the matter was put. Of those present, staunch supporters of the government and the prime minister, Lynden Pindling, remained seated during the vote, suggesting their were voting their confidence.

Of those who stood, indicating a lack of confidence, a majority were members of the then opposition United Bahamian Party. There were other members standing against the government, however, who were PLPs. Among them were the eight, including two cabinet ministers – Cecil Wallace-Whitfield and Dr. Curtis McMillan – who became known afterwards as the Dissident Eight.

At that time, the PLP government was barely three-and-a-half years old, but problems with the leadership had existed since the party’s convention of 1968, and indeed when Cecil Wallace Whitfield stood as one of those lacking confidence in the government and in the prime minister it was the second occasion upon which he had been openly and publicly defiant.

Yet Wallace Whitfield and Dr. Curtis McMillan remained in the PLP cabinet following that May 13 vote. Instead of any flickers of conciliation or mending of broken fences, the political chasm inside the PLP had widened.

By the PLP convention in October 1970 – five months after the no-confidence attempt – there were clear indications of a breaking point. Cecil Wallace-Whitfield, them the Member of Parliament for St. Agnes, was Minister of Education and Culture, and had performed admirably in that capacity, including new teaching concepts and learning, introducing revolutionary learning aids.

PLP leader Lynden Pindling delivered the convention’s keynote address on the first day, and a volatile keynote it was indeed. Lashing out at his critics and obviously confident about the measure of his support in the party, he warned those who disagreed with him: “if you can’t fish, cut bait; if you can’t cut bail, get the hell out of the boat”.

Yes, as The Tribune’s Nicki Kelly wrote back then, it was a masterful speech by a master politician, and it contained just the ingredients, the challenge, the temptation for revolution inside the party. Cecil Wallace-Whitfield had been born a revolutionary.

The crowds cheered wildly, others quietly drank in the great challenge, and yet others sucked their teeth and strode from the convention hall at the Sheraton British Colonial Hotel.

As each convention night progressed, cabinet ministers, one after the other, reported on the activities of the relevant portfolios, setting out also what future plans there were. It was not until Thursday evening that the Minister of Education and Culture was scheduled to report to the convention.

Cecil Wallace Whitfield was already not a totally liked figure in the PLP by those who misunderstood or misread his thinking in standing up and daring the brilliant black prime minister, and especially in standing shoulder to shoulder with the white Bay Street MPs when they voted against the PLP government five months earlier.

But Cecil Wallace Whitfield had never planned to participate in any popularity contest at the time, or at any other time. He strode up the centre aisle of the convention toward the platform, whilst Coconut Grove MP Edmund Moxey played rousing music on the organ.

The minister presented an expansive and detailed report on his portfolio, reading in measured tones from neatly typed five-by-seven index cards. He finished his official report and shoved the pile of cards into his coat pocket. At the same time he extracted a second set of a few cards from another pocket. He looked around the hushed hall and the organ started to play. He turned deliberately to Edmund Moxey and said that he wanted no music.

A few minutes before that the guards at Government House had opened the gates to admit a car in which rode Edwin “Vikey” Brown, and Ms. Beryl Pierce. One was a St. Agnes constituency general and the other the private secretary to Cecil Wallace Whitfield at the Ministry of Education.

Reading from his second set of cards, the Minister of Education told the convention that he had listened to all that had occurred during the week. He spoke of agreed principles which had sustained the PLP through the years, and about a philosophy and commonality of purpose which had brought the PLP to the seat of government, but which, he felt, had been violated.

All that he could not repudiate, he said, “no matter how grave my disillusionments”. Then, Cecil Wallace-Whitfield said, at 8 p.m. that evening he had had delivered to His Excellency the Governor his resignation from the Government of The Bahamas.

He then uttered what became his immortal epigram: “Free at last. Free at last. My soul is dancing!”.

From the West End and Bimini delegation table near the front, MP Warren Levarity leapt to his feet shouting an anguished, “No, no. Not yet, Man!”

Others were screaming in disbelief whilst the greater numbers were shrieking in something akin to merriment. At his Kemp’s Bay constituency table, PLP leader Lynden Pindling sat quietly, unsmiling amidst the pandemonium swirling about the room.

In the days and weeks that followed Dr. McMillan resigned as Minister of Health, and Dr. Elwood Donaldson gave up his post as Sports Commissioner. The troops, led by the gallant eight who had stood in Parliament on 13 May that year, rallied, and before the end of 1970, a curious creature known as the Free PLP was on the scene.

It was the first necessary step from the PLP to the Free National Movement, and the historical revisionists, no matter where they stand politically, need to get it right.

Get it right . . . for what it’s worth.

The Fascinating Story of a Man Called Henry

THE WHITE FILE For The Punch – 7 March 2011

“What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now forever taken from my sight;
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower,
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind.”
~ WILLIAM WORDSWORTH ~

There are thousands of young Bahamians, many of whom have somehow gone through the school system in The Bahamas, who will, unfortunately, never figure prominently in the future scheme of meaningful things in this country, and for a variety of equally sad reasons.

A vast majority of them are males. Some are unemployed because they are unemployable, or else because they simply have no desire to work. Others are consumed by alcohol or drugs, and yet others who evolved into offenders against society, are languishing in Her Majesty’s Prison.

Of course there are thousands of other young Bahamians who are the pride of their families and their communities, who are shaping their lives in positive directions, who appreciate the need for diligence and hard work, who have set career goals for themselves, and who appreciate that they will be expected to participate and to perform when comes the time for their generation to take over.

They are the hope and waiting glory of the next chapter in the life of The Bahamas. Some of them, an anticipation of that challenge, have involved themselves in causes such as Toastmasters International, and, on a younger stage, The Gentlemen’s Club. Youth groups in the various churches are designed to promote thought and eventually to shape leadership skills.

In that same manner, years ago, intellectually industrious groups of young people found themselves engaged in debate on large and profound issues on the community and international levels.

We remember one such group, styled the Young People’s Organisation, which back in the 1950s assembled upstairs at St. Agnes Schoolroom at Cockburn and Market Streets to debate issues such as Capitalism versus Communism.

Members of that group were such as Joseph Hollingsworth, Wilshire Bethel, Veronica Turnquest, Vernita Johnson, and Kendal Nottage, the latter of whom was the president. The White Boy hovered on the perimeter.

The outspoken Nottage, who hailed from East Street and attended Government High School, went on to be called to the Bahamas Bar after studying as an articled law student in the chambers of Paul L. Adderley, was later to be elected to Parliament, and to serve as a senator and Cabinet minister.

Kendal Nottage – whose younger brother is Dr. Bernard Nottage, MP for Farm Road and Grant’s Town, and former cabinet minister in two PLP governments – was one of those eager and capable young Bahamians who aspired to office early, and who was identified by the late PLP leader Sir Lynden Pindling as a positive political prospect in the country.

In the meantime elsewhere back in the 1950s. Over-the-Hill, in places like Kemp Road, Fox Hill, on Wulff Road, and in Chippingham there were other small groups of bright young Bahamians who understood and appreciated the political state of the colony – Bay Street versus the masses – and who would meet casually and discuss the pros and cons.

Following the collapse of the short-lived Citizen’s Committee, the Progressive Liberal Party was established in the fall on 1953, and that establishment and the ingredients included in the party’s Platform, widely publicised in the Nassau Herald, provided provocative fodder for those young groups debating around the town.

One such small, loose, but energetic group used to gather evenings at Butler’s food store, a modest grocery business on Blue Hill Road in facilities now occupied by the Urban Renewal and Bain and Grant’s Town Centre. The store, the precursor to the present Butler’s Bargain Mart farther down Blue Hill Road, was managed by the late Asa Butler, fourth son of Sir Milo and Lady Butler.

Asa, who was a former student at Government High School, was himself quite a debater and had a keen interest in politics no doubt because his illustrious father had been a political mover and shaker since the 1930s – and so the shop was a perfect venue for those lively sessions, which sometimes stretched past ten o’clock in the evening, long after the shop was supposed to have been closed for the night.

That group of itinerant debaters included such as Joseph Hollingsworth, Franklyn Butler, Rawson McDonald, Frank Watson (a first cousin of Asa), and The White Boy.

Yet it always seemed as if the debating circle was not satisfied or compete until the arrival of a fellow who somehow became the unofficial dean of the corps, who was slightly older than the rest, and to whom so many looked for the final wise word on a particularly argumentative point.

That was John Henry Bostwick, a fellow who, even before he turned 20, seemed to know a healthy little of almost everything, and a great deal about a lot of other things, especially those things which provoked the most heated arguments among the group, and which, almost with something like a wave of the hand, he instantly resolved.

Like Kendal Wellington Nottage, the young and effervescent John Henry Bostwick seemed destined for meaningful future public and political life and office, despite what some considered a stubborn nature, then reconsidered a nature, back in the 1950s, which was not so much stubborn but defiantly insistent that common sense should figure in any argument one hoped to pursue to fruitful conclusion.

Like Kendal Nottage – Henry Bostwick, who attended Government High School and later Calabar High School in Kingston, Jamaica – went on to become an attorney-at law, and in fact developed, like the late Eugene Dupuch, as one of the country’s most accomplished and outstanding criminal attorneys.

Yet in so many of those youthful gatherings of budding intellectuals, although far too many of them turned out to be charlatans, pseudo intellectuals, and fatuous four-flushers, Bostwick, from as far back as the late 1950s, displayed all the signs of a political mover and shaker in the future Bahamas.

This year John Henry Bostwick, Queen’s Counsel, with God’s help will achieve his 72nd year to heaven. Over those years, in addition to his courtroom stardom, he has attained and accomplished much in the political arena, and in fact his contributions to the enhancement of democracy deserve note and commendation.

We remembered this particularly last week when in this space we recounted the fascinating political story of the 1977 general elections which saw the ruling Progressive Liberal Party chalk up a massive victory, primarily because the Opposition was split into two camps.

On the one side the Free National Movement was led by Cecil Wallace-Whitfield, and on the other, yes, the leader of the Bahamian Democratic Party was John Henry Bostwick, at the time barely 38 years old.

All round, that was a fiery campaign, even though the odds were slim that the opposition, especially sawn asunder as it was, could bring down Lynden Pindling and his PLP government. Yet John Henry Bostwick was determined to give the battle his best shot.

In fact, considering the make-up of the BDP with his heavy Bay Street complement, Henry Bostwick was perhaps the most acceptable national face the party could offer the masses. When during the campaign he complained to the PLP government that because of the tough economic times some Bahamians were scavenging at the Blue Hill Road dump for food, he also issued an ominous warning:

“When sufficient people in this country feel their bellies aching, they will lose all sense of reason. I urge the government to wake up, and take heed.”

When the votes were counted following that gruelling campaign, the BDP had won only six seats, with Henry Bostwick capturing the seat for the Montagu constituency, and becoming the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in Parliament.

By the 1982 elections, the opposition was once again a single fighting force, and Henry Bostwick was to remain a prominent part of that force. Later, on the governmental watch of the Free National Movement, he became president of the Bahamas Senate.

And so, it might be said, John Henry Bostwick, who had become one of The Bahamas’ most outstanding courtroom orators, an effective and powerful political preacher, a sobering Leader of the Opposition, and a stern but fair president of the Senate had his practise range in a modest grocery shop on Blue Hill Road back in the 1950s.

Today in the late afternoon of his full and bountiful life, he richly deserves to be resting on his laurels. However, the nature of the man, John Henry Bostwick, says he is not at all ready for resting.

No, Sir, not John Henry Bostwick.

Dr. Doris Johnson Helped Shape the Quiet Revolution

(For The Punch – Issue 20 January 2011)

One Saturday in the summer of 1969 when she was serving as the first female cabinet minister in the Progressive Liberal Party government of the late Sir Lynden Pindling, the late Dr. Doris L. Johnson assembled a modest group of persons for the purpose of discussing and eventually publishing a history of the Bahamian people’s stride and struggle to majority rule.

Dr. Johnson had apparently secured financing fro the project from Juan Trippe, who was at the time owner of Pan American World Airways, which flew direct flights between Rock Sound, Eleuthera and New York City. The White Boy was privileged to be part of that team, and his duties were essentially to research, assist with and write several of the informative chapters of the work.

At the end of the day, the refreshing and satisfying result of that summer’s effort was “THE QUIET REVOLUTION IN THE BAHAMAS”, and Doris Johnson was extremely proud of the accomplishment, which was, in fact, the very first chronicle of the political struggle which led to the successful elections of January and a precursor of Bahamas independence in July 1973.

Doris Johnson, who in 1979 was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II, was a truly amazing Bahamian woman who over the years had refused to be pigeon-holed by male chauvinists in The Bahamas, especially by those she may have been aware were her academic and even political inferiors.
1. The White Boy first came to know Doris Johnson when he was a student at St. John’s University and she was a doctoral candidate at New York University, where former cabinet ministers Charles Carter and Sir William Allen also studied.
2. Prior to her studies in New York, the former Doris Sands from Masons Addition attended Virginia Union University in Richmond, Virginia, McGill University’s MacDonald College of Education, Ontario College of Education at the University of Toronto, where she obtained a master of education degree in Administration and Supervision

In New York Doris Johnson also became the supreme catalyst in the movement to establish the Bahamian Students Association, with the late Ernest Strachan, then employed in the French Department of the United Nations, who became the group’s first president.

Doris Johnson, even before she travelled abroad for higher education, was a social and political fighter, particularly with regard to the rights of Bahamian women.

Determined to bring to Parliament the issues of Universal Adult Suffrage, but not allowed to speak in the precincts of the House of Assembly, she was able to persuade House members to assemble in a nearby Magistrate’s Court to hear her impassioned plea for women’s rights to vote. That was in 1959.

The following year the House passed an Act granting that right. In 1961 the former Ruby Ann Cooper became the first Bahamian woman to register to vote, and all Bahamian women were eligible to vote in the general elections of 1962.

That was the same year Doris Johnson completed her doctoral studies in New York, and she was back at home in time to accept the Progressive Liberal Party’s nomination to contest one of the House of Assembly seats in Eleuthera, thereby becoming the first Bahamian woman to run for Parliament.

She lost that bid, but an important historic point had been made.

Three years later Doris Johnson was part of a strategic PLP delegation which travelled to New York to address the UN’s Committee of 24 on the issue of parliamentary imbalance in The Bahamas. It was there that she encountered the president of her alma mater, Virginia Union, who enticed her to become a teacher at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

She accepted the challenge, and taught there for fewer than two years, until duty called early in January 1967 when majority rule prevailed and the PLP became the government.

The new premier, the late Sir Lynden Pindling, caused Doris Johnson to be appointed the first female senator in the history of the colony. Following the 1968 elections which the PLP won by a tremendous landslide, she was not only re-appointed to the senate but was made leader of government business in that chamber.

Doris Johnson subsequently became the first female cabinet minister, eventually Minister of Transport. She resigned from the cabinet in 1973, the years of independence, and was elected president of the Senate.

The fervour of her a seemingly unquenchable thirst for education and more education with a view to imparting to others was matched only by her fierce and fiery devotion to the cause of the rights and privileges of Bahamian women, and on that mission she was able to inspire thousands of sisters around the islands to kindle similar flames.

In her time Doris Johnson had made her mark as the first Bahamian female candidate in an election, parliamentarian, the first female to become a cabinet minister, and the first elected president of the Senate.

Back in November of 1973, after her appointment to the top senate post, in an editorial the Nassau Guardian gushingly wrote:

“The tread is firm, the smile serene, and the torso buxom. Medium of height, in ample sturdiness, stands the new president of the Senate. At 52, this may well be her crowning glory in a long, varied and tempestuous career.
“Ten years ago the appointment of DR. Doris Johnson to be President of the Senate would have been absolutely unthinkable. Yet time marches on, and today we do live in changed and changing times.
“Dr. Johnson, probably now at the pinnacle of public achievement, has reached there through unrelenting involvement with public causes, sheer hard work to improve herself educationally, and a dogged determination to press on when those of faint heart and less resolve would have stopped and turned back.
“Way before the pre-1967 days of booming prosperity and political deprivation, when the progressive and liberal forces took counsel and then action to hasten the downfall of that consortium knows as the Bay Street Boys, Dr. Johnson was, as it is said, in there doing her bit.
“As a result she experienced some trying times – as did others engaged in the same endeavour. Her interests in many cases stretch beyond mundane politics to arcane matters. For she is equally at home leading a gospel meeting, or professing the tenets of Moral Rearmament. And she has been an untiring worker for women’s rights in The Bahamas.”

The mother of one son, Gerald, Dr. Johnson was an avid Baptist, attending Bethel Baptist Church on Meeting Street, where she cultivated special spiritual and political relationship with the pastor, the late Rev. Dr. H.W. Brown. Indeed it was she who often impressed upon Dr. Brown the need for him to lend his supportive voice to the PLP’s cause during rallies on the Southern Recreation Grounds.

In many ways Doris Johnson was woman before her time, a renaissance Bahamian woman whose entire life was one of upward mobility. She was sort of an embodiment of Robert Browning’s line that “a man’s reach much exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”

She totally understood the cause and the mission of the Progressive Liberal Party, perhaps better than some of the front line movers and shakers, and in that regard, particularly in the earl;y days, had a special bond with Sir Lynden Pindling. She was easily among the most classical of the party’s speakers both before and after the quiet revolution.

For example, in 1972, the year before independence, when she was invited to address the Tiger Bay Club of Miami, this was how she summed up that revolution:

“The peaceful revolution of 1967 and 1968 has become the subject of discussion for many students of history. We have shown the world that physical violence is not the only force which changes and overturns corrupt and undesirable regimes, and that armed might and gangsterism ought not to be condoned as a way of life in our impatience to bring about change.
“There is another and more potent factor which men must take into account and deal with effectively, and that is the factor of the human spirit in the ultimate quest of freedom, and it is perhaps in this area that The Bahamas, the birthplace of the new world, might eventually play a role in the world of today.”

That was almost four decades ago, and that was vintage Doris Johnson, a truly, truly remarkable Bahamian woman . . . for what it’s worth.