THE WHITE FILE How will the PLP treat its illustrious founding father?

“Lord now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word,
\for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation.”

LUKE 2:29

A few weeks back in this space we wrote of William W. Cartwright as the only surviving member of a trio of gallant Bahamians who, back in 1953, founded the Progressive Liberal Party as a political organisation purposed and propelled by what at the time seemed an impossible dream.

That purpose was to leave no stone unturned in an arduous and ambitious mission to lead the struggle for social and economic justice and equality for all Bahamians.

For the past few years Mr. Cartwright had been residing and cared for at Good Samaritan Home in Yellow Elder Gardens, where, less than a month ago he had been paid a visit by Governor General Sir Arthur Foulkes, a journalist who was employed at the Nassau Daily Tribune at the time of the establishment of the PLP.

An astute Sir Arthur, who eventually became news editor at the Tribune. would have been thoroughly familiar with the revolutionary feat carried out by Bill Cartwright and the other two co-founders, the late Sir Henry Taylor and Cyril St. John Stevenson.

In fact before long Sir Arthur went on to become a member of the PLP.

At the time he co-founded the PLP, Bill Cartwright was an independent Member of the House of Assembly for Cat Island, having been elected in 1949, and served for a single term. In the 1956 elections, the PLP nominated Arthur Hanna and Samuel White, father of The White Boy.

Cartwright, Taylor and Stevenson, all mulattos, suffered greatly at the hand of Bay Street for having dared to spearhead an organisation of largely black Bahamians whose common and greatest enemy was Bay Street, but Cartwright, an enterprising realtor, probably fared better than the rest through his sheer tenacity for survival.

In fact in 1952, even before the birth of the PLP, he had founder the Bahamian Review, the Bahamas’ first monthly new magazine which flourished, again despite the deliberate efforts of Bay Street to withhold vital advertising.

In the meantime in 1954, recognising the party’s need for an effective communications medium, and no doubt pressed by Cyril Stevenson in that regard, Bill Cartwright furnished the funds for the purchase on The Herald, a weekly tabloid that had been established in 1937 by Jack Stanley Lowe.

The paper, edited by Cyril Stevenson who had resigned as a senior reporter for Bay Street’s Nassau Guardian, became the major mouthpiece for the Progressive Liberal Party, and was to remain that important communications medium for the party almost up to the critical 1967 general elections, by which time both Stevenson and Taylor had been edged out of the party.

Throughout the years, however, Bay Street in its determination to hold on to political supremacy in The Bahamas, was relentless in its machinations to maintain that control in the face of the swelling popularity of the PLP.

Eventually as the economic screws were tightened and for other pressing reasons, Bill Cartwright stepped back from the front line of PLP politics, and was for years to remain but an avid and fully understanding observer of the passing political scene he had been fundamental in changing.

In fact for a long time following the advent of majority rule when the PLP was the government of The Bahamas, Bill Cartwright, for his own very good reasons, preferred that he not be publicly identified as one of the founders of the PLP, and in that regard personally sought the cooperation of some local publishers.

For years Bill Cartwright sought in one way or another to continue in the publishing field, and as late as 2001 had grandiose plans to publish a comprehensive book, Builders of The Bahamas, in which he intended to capture vignettes of the lives of dozens of Bahamians who had figured with some prominence in the process of making The Bahamas what it is today.

On that ambitious project he had solicited the partnership and assistance of The White Boy, who marvelled, quietly, that Bill Cartwright had not included himself in that list of builders, despite the fact that he had been one of three architects of the modern Bahamas.

On that publishing mission just over a decade ago, Bill Cartwright could be observed walking about town, primarily in the Palmdale, Village Road, and Shirley Street areas, with a knapsack containing the elements of his dreams, offering a cherry “morning” or “afternoon” to friend and stranger alike.

In his time Bill Cartwright when he operated his real estate business on Bay Street downstairs the Psilinakis Building, was a fairly short, freckled-faced natty dresser with an infectious smile who in fact had his way with the ladies, having stepped down the aisle more than once.

He had fearlessly played his historic revolutionary role as a political reformer, setting the stage for others to grasp the baton and run with equal fearlessness to the finish line. Then he stepped back from that front line leaving it to successive generations to continue on that mission.

He did not stick around like a political anachronism, standing selfishly in the way of other, young Bahamians like Lynden Pindling and Cecil Wallace Whitfield and Orville Turnquest, overlapping their moments in time, and in stepping back as he did he was providing an example for others who stubbornly hang on when time is clearly up.

Bill Cartwright passed away last week at the age of 89, three and a half weeks after the Progressive Liberal Party had gained its eighth general election victory in The Bahamas. In all the years since he had dropped out of the political limelight, this is what he said with regard to the PLP’s May 7^th win:

“Now I can go. I can leave now. I wanted to make sure the PLP won the election.”

It was, in modern political poetry, a sentiment taken almost straight out of St. Luke’s biblical account of the occasion upon when the young Jesus was brought to the aging Simeon for a blessing. The old man held up the child and uttered, “Lord, now lettest Thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation which Thou has set before all people; a light to lighten the gentiles . . . ”

Opposition deputy leader Loretta Butler-Turner noted in Parliament last week that “We are where we are today as a nation in terms of our democratic heritage in no small measure because of William Cartwright. . . He is in his own right a founder of the modern Bahamas. We owe him a deep debt of gratitude.”

Also in Parliament prime minister Perry Christie, describing Bill Cartwright, said: “He was always at pains to play down the historical role he had played in laying the foundations for party politics in The Bahamas. Although he personally suffered a great deal for that, and for his courageous battle against the racial and economic injustices of his day . . . he was a man of enormous goodwill, and a spirit of reconciliation was deeply embedded in his character.”

Mr. Christie announced that the government will accord Bill Cartwright a state-recognised funeral, which means essentially that the government will through the cabinet office provide the printed funeral programmes and the necessary protocol arrangements at the church, perhaps with such other assistance as police escorts.

Yet a state recognised funeral means also that the family of the deceased must bear the essential costs of the funeral. It is widely believed that Bill Cartwright was far from a wealthy man.

The nation will wait to see whether in the circumstances the Progressive Liberal Party steps up to the plate and bear the expenses of the burial of the party’s final illustrious founding father.

Memorable deaths and funerals we have known

(For The Punch – Issue 18 July 2011)
THE WHITE FILE by P.  Anthony White

 The people who pretend that dying is rather like strolling into
the next room always leave me unconvinced.
Death, like birth, must be a tremendous event.
~ J. B. Priestley ~

          Up through the years many writers, and especially poets, equally in former times and in the present, have had a morbid, incessant obsession with death, cemeteries, and the afterlife.

           Yes, even here in The Bahamas we live day after day, week after week with death and funerals, and, like the Irish who have always been passionate about death, wakes and funerals, death is hardly ever simply a passionate episode.

           Perhaps the most demonstrative example of that morbid, incessant obsession with death, funerals and cemeteries was the quite lengthy 19^th century poem by the English writer Thomas Gray titled ELEGY WRITTEN IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD.

           In that work, the poet actually took his time walking through a cemetery in Stokes Poges in England, pausing to comment on what might have been in th elife of  the person buried there. At one point he paused to write:

 “Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid

Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire,

Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed

Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.”

            We recall back in 1959 how when we were only a youngster at school in New York the late American jazz singer Billie Holliday passed away after a long and tragic battle with drug addiction.

          They organised a memorial service  for the occasion, held on Riker’s Island, which sits in the East or Harlem River, midway between, between Manhattan and Queen’s. Thousands turned out and under the food lights paid endless tributes to an ebony songstress who had turn out simply and ruinously to have become an angel flying too close to the ground.

          Then around midnight came the announcement over the loudspeakers that they were about to turn off all the lights, and invited all in the audience to light a match or flick on a cigarette lighter. In the bleak blackness thousands of little lights flickered, and from the speakers came Perry Como’s voice intoning that haunting song:

It is better to light just one little candle,
Than to stumble in the dark!
Better far that you light just one little candle,
All you need’s a tiny spark!

If we’d all say a prayer that the world would be free,
The wonderful dawn of a new day we’ll see!
And, if everyone lit just one little candle,
What a bright world this would be!

          It was a sad, sombre, and  serene scenario in a city which seldom knew utter peace and quietude, but those who were there will never forget New York on that touching occasion when the death of a black megastar singer practically brought to tears the city that never slept.

          There was another occasion in Brooklyn in New York back in the 1960s when a beautiful Bahamian girl from East Street perished tragically.

          Ethel King was truly, as they say in modern parlance, drop dead gorgeous. She was part of the great King family of East Street, which had deep roots in Cat Island. Her sisters were Octavia, former registrar of insurance companies, and Gladys who, like Ethel, had migrated to New York.

           A brother, Roy, had studied law in New York and eventually became a judge in Rochester in upstate New York.

          Ethel had had an unsuccessful marriage to Percy Pinder Jr., son of the entrepreneurial elder Percy Pinder who in fact had been the first to build and operate a movie theatre Over-the-Hill. After she and Percy separated she used to be frequently on the arm of the late Ernest Strachan, then employed in the French Department of the United Nations, before he returned in Nassau to become Chief of Protocol for the Bahamas Government.

           Ethel took a job in Manhattan and was living in an apartment in Brooklyn. The full story will probably be never known, but there was apparently a young Puerto Rican fellow who fell desperately in love with Ethel who, it seemed, was not interested.

          Once morning as she left her apartment for work, walking through the basement of the building, the young fellow accosted Ethel and perhaps for the last time pleaded for her heart. According to the New York Amsterdam News, when she again spurned him he opened fire on her with a handgun, and then turned the weapon on himself.

          The two were discovered lying next to each other on the ground of the basement.

           The funeral for Ethel, who had grown up in St. Agnes in New Providence, was held not long afterwards at the Episcopal church of St. Mark’s  in Brooklyn. The little church was packed with Bahamians living in New York, and scores of others who travelled to the city for the sad occasion. Among that Nassau contingent was Lynden Oscar Pindling.

          Back in New Providence some years later – in early 1969 – there occurred the death of  a bright and promising young thespian who had striven since his teenage years to master 6the stage in The Bahamas and in so doing to bring along other youngsters with a yearning for the footlights.

          Basil Eric Antonio Saunders was a truly ambitious lad who quietly felt his reach should always exceed his grasp. After studies in London he returned to The Bahamas and began teaching English and drama in the public school system, whilst, along with The White Boy who had been his childhood histrionic partner, continued acting, producing and directing. At one point he had a stint as an insurance agent, but his heart was never really in it.

          Yet at an early age B.E.A., as many referred to him, developed diabetes, and at only 31 years old he passed away. The town was stunned that one so young, so talented, so brilliant, so filled with a lust for life should have been plucked so prematurely from that life.

          It seemed half that town showed up at St. Agnes Church for one of the most mournful yet flambouyant funerals seen in Grant’s Town, after which he was buried in the extreme northern section of the church’s cemetery on Nassau Street next to Gibbs Lane. To mark the occasion The White Boy penned and published a poem on the life of Basil Saunders. The final stanza read thus:

“Now up against the northern wall

where friendly footsteps seldom fall,

when others last to withered end,

you’ll still be smiling, childlike, Friend.”

The community was in a dither back in early May of 1990 with the passing of Sir Cecil Wallace Whitfield who had for some years been afflicted with cancer. As Leader of the Opposition he had been  treated at home and abroad at the expense of the Bahamas Government, and had returned home to carry on his political assignment as best he could.

          He died in a Florida hospital surrounded by family and political colleagues. In the Free National Movement there was widespread speculation about the future leadership configurations of the party, especially since general elections were just over two years away.

          Orville Turnquest was at the time deputy leader of the party. That was about six years after Hubert Ingraham and Perry Christie had been fired from the PLP cabinet of  Sir Lynden Pindling. Ingraham, then an independent Member of Parliament, had thrown his parliamentary support behind the FNM.

          Whitfield had pretty much handpicked  Ingraham as his successor, and subsequently the party’s Central Council concurred.

          The ornate funeral was held at Christ Church Cathedral, and amongst those paying  tribute to his old childhood friend and political nemesis was Sir Lynden. The interment was in the Eastern Cemetery, where his father, Kenneth Whitfield, was buried a few years earlier.

          Of course ten years later, in 2000. Sir Lynden himself succumbed to prostate cancer, and after some deliberation the decision was made to have the funeral services conducted at the Church of God on East Street.

          Following the funeral,  at which Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham spoke, there was a massive procession – joined in by political friend and foe alike – down East Street, west on Wulff Road, north on Blue Hill Road, then west on Meeting Street to St. Agnes Cemetery on Nassau Street.

          There the body was received by then Anglican bishop Drexel Gomez and St. Agnes rector the late Fr. Patrick Johnson, assisted by The White Boy. Afterwards Sir Lynden was entombed in a special and imposing mausoleum in the cemetery.

          Bahamians have over the years continued to have a fascination for funerals in all their forms and fashions, and it never really matters the identity of the deceased if there is something special about the arrangements.

          A few years ago with the brutal murder of fashion designer Harl Taylor, mortician Ted Sweeting introduced to The Bahamas an interesting new embalming trend imported from the United States, whereby in the viewing room of the funeral home the full-clothed body was sitting in a chair in front of a desk with pen in hand as if engaged in work.

           For two days it seemed the whole Bahamas had beaten a path to Sweeting’s Colonial Mortuary on Blue Hill Road just to have a view of the fantastical scene.

          And so death, wakes, funerals and the celebrations afterwards are still rudimentary parts of Bahamian life, and will perhaps persist in that way for hundreds of years, so long as Bahamians continue to be born, to live, and to die.

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.

Those Diastrous, Unforgettable Elections of 1977

THE WHITE FILE For The Punch – 28 February 2011

We often speak of how more than half a century ago, when we were a budding teenager, we used to sit almost at the feet of our mentor the late Cyril St. John Stevenson, and listen to his myriad tales of political revolution and evolution in The Bahamas.

Today we often reflect on how much of what he recited had gone before had a definitive bearing on the existing state of political affairs in the colony.

Back then we were not sitting physically at Stevenson’s feet, but moving about in the print shop of the Nassau Herald on Lewis Street as he banged away on his portable typewriter with its lost “e” key, as he typed scathing editorials condemning the Bay Street demagogues.

He spoke of how sitting House of Assembly politicians like Dr. C. R. Walker and Bert Cambridge could have brought about radical political change had they adopted different political tactics.

Walker and Cambridge were the two members of the House of Assembly for the Southern District of New Providence back in the late 1940s, and were prominent parts of the Citizens Committee, which was organised in 1950 to protest Bay Street’s banning of the movie, No Way Out, which featured Bahamian actor Sidney Poitier for racial reasons.

That grouping had attracted the support of quite a number of the black Bahamian middle class, like the late Justice Maxwell Thompson and could perhaps have made a significant difference in the political outlook of the masses, except that the middle class was prepared to go only so far.

Successive elections, Stevenson used to say, such as the polls of 1949, could have gone dramatically in a different direction, if the will of the masses had been marshalled and directed differently. Stevenson ran for reelection as an independent. The PLP shifted Pindling from New Providence to Andros, where he defeated Stevenson.

Years later, long after he had quite the front line political scene, and when he was getting on in years, we sat quietly with Stevenson as he recounted election after election, attaching special significant to each.

We agreed that perhaps the most celebrated – and most wrenching for many – of all general elections held in the modern Bahamas were the historic polls of 1977, when the electorate was stretched in three political directions. But let us historically backtrack for a spell.

Following the 1967 general elections which ushered in majority rule, the Progressive Liberal Party went on to a landslide victory on 10 April 1968 in an election occasioned by the death of Shirlea Member of Parliament Uriah McPhee.

Not long after that, however, things in the PLP began to sour politically, in fact as early as the PLP’s 1969 convention. Even from then careful observers could detect that St. Agnes MP and cabinet minister Cecil Wallace-Whitfield had his eye on the political crown in the party.

By 1970 premier Lynden Pindling had already fired two cabinet ministers, Warren Levarity and Arthur Foulkes, and at that year’s convention Wallace Whitfield announced that he had resigned from the cabinet. He went on to lead seven other MPs and a number of PLP dissidents in what was known as the Free PLP.

By 1972 there came into being the Free National Movement, which comprised the PLP dissidents, former members of the dismantled United Bahamian Party, and former members of Paul Adderley’s National Democratic Party. Later that year the FNM went into campaign battle against the ruling PLP under the theme, “All Together”.

Fevers ran high in that 1972 campaign, and the FNM contracted public relations experts from Jamaica who had successfully delivered the election in that country for Michael Manley. However, the main issue during the campaign was that of independence the following year, and the PLP, understandably, pushed that emotional issue to the hilt.

That was in September of 1972, and when the votes were counted, the FNM had been defeated dismally. Most dismal of the whole defeat was the fact that every single one of the original eight dissidents – Cecil Wallace-Whitfield, Dr. Curtis McMillan, Dr, Elwood Donaldson, Arthur Foulkes, Warren Levarity, George Thompson, Maurice Moore, and James Shepherd – had lost his seat.

The blow was severe, but a new FNM candidate, Kendal G. L. Isaacs, had won the House of Assembly seat for Fort Montagu. He subsequently became Leader of the Official Opposition. At least for a time, there was peace in the Opposition.

Inevitably, however, by about 1975, there came the famous split in the Opposition, and Cecil Wallace-Whitfield was once more at the centre of it all, surrounded by many who had been with him from the days of the Free PLP.

The other side was formed into the Bahamian Democratic Party. When the 1977 elections were called, both sides offered complements of candidates, some very familiar political faces.

Contesting the election with Whitfield on the FNM side were Bazel Nichols, Frank Watson, Charles Hunt, Clayton Taylor, James Wood, Granville Bain, Audley Kemp, Sterling Quant, Bernard Mortimer, Rudolph Knowles, James Shepherd, and Emerick Knowles.

Additional FNM candidates were James Thompson, Chester Thompson, Peter Galanos, Lucius Moree, Basil Neymour, Oswald Munnings, Warren Levarity, Garnet Levarity, Maurice Moore, Giles Newbold, Edwin Brown, Bill Facquharson and Wideon Pyfrom.

Meanwhile on the BDP side the slate included Geoffrey Johnstone, Roland Symonette, Basil Kelly, Tommy Robinson, Orville Turnquest, Arthur Foulkes, Henry Bostwick, Janet Bostwick, Fred Ramsey, Edmund Moxey, Godfrey Pinder, Clifford Cooper, Edward Barrett, Peter Christie, Erwin Knowles, Norman Solomon, Geoffrey Brown, George Baker, Cyril Tynes and Michael Lightbourn.

In the lead-up to nominations, Whitfield’s political right-hand man, Bazel Nichols, ran shuffle diplomacy between the two sides, resulting in tacit agreement that in places such as North End Long Island the FNM would not mount an opposition candidate. The same was to happen in Governor’s Harbour, Eleuthera, where the BDP did not send a candidate. The FNM also nominated no candidates in Shirlea and Crooked Island.

Additionally, the BDP sent no candidates in Pine Ridge and High Rock, Grand Bahama; in Inagua; in Kemp’s Bay and Mangrove Cay, Andros; and in South Beach and Grant’s Town in New Providence.

During the campaign, from the political platforms, both the FNM and the BDP carefully aimed their cannons at the PLP, carefully and sensible avoiding any criticism of each other.

In the meantime from his own political platform, the wily PLP leader, Lynden Pindling, poked fun at the severed opposition, noting laughingly that, “they were all together, now they are all apart”.

Otherwise in the opposition camps, some races were extremely painful, because they saw close personal friends opposing each other, because they were running as part of opposing political slates.

Such was the case, for example, of the Delaporte constituency, where close friends Arthur Foulkes and Bazel Nichols were representing the BDP and the FNM respectively. Both were defeated by the PLP’s Philip Pinder. In another such case the FNM’s Frank Watson found himself facing the BDP’s Clifford Cooper, with Paul Adderley as the PLP’s candidate.

Mr. Adderley, who as a PLP was first elected to the House of Assembly in 1961, triumphed in the 1977 polls.

Those 1977 elections had proven not only that at the time the PLP under Lynden Pindling was practically an invincible political fighting machine, but that a fragmented opposition, no matter how astute the leadership, would forever fail in The Bahamas.

For a few years following those elections, there were a few other political spin-offs from the mainstream opposition, but by the 1982 elections, the opposition was once again all together. Seat-wise, there were some gains in 1982, but, most importantly, Janet Bostwick, as an FNM candidate, became the first female ever elected to the Bahamian Parliament.

There were even greater gains in 1987, and eventually, in 1992, the Free National Movement triumphed at the polls, with Hubert Ingraham as the party’s leader.

Interestingly, during those historic 1977 elections, Hubert Ingraham was chairman of the governing Progressive Liberal Party.

Meet Dr. Elwood, the First of the Red-Hot Mavericks

(For The Punch – Issue 6 January 2011)

“Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.” ~ OSCAR WILDE

As the old folks used to say at critical junctures, when there was a need to stern decisions that would bring about necessary change, “It’s separation time,” and in this new year, just begun, the Bahamian nation, and especially the youth, must be constantly schooled on the route the nation took to arrive at this stage.

Almost every day there are attempts – both clumsy attempts by the stupid and benighted or disingenuous attempts by the supercilious and self-serving – to twist history in this direction or the next. Yet the devil must be forced to remain forever a liar, and there are still those in the community who can remember, and who can from time to time ensure that he remains a liar.

And so, let another history lesson begin.

Of the original eight Progressive Liberal Party Parliamentarians who, in 1970, supported a vote of no-confidence in former prime minister the late Sir Lynden Pindling, four have passed into glory. These were Sir Cecil Wallace Whitfield, Dr. Curtis McMillan, and James Shepherd.

Those yet alive include the present governor-general Sir Arthur Foulkes, former West End and Bimini MP Warren Levarity, former Freeport MP Maurice Moore, and Dr. Elwood Donaldson, who was first elected to the House of Assembly for the Killarney constituency of New Providence.

Each of the eight “Dissidents” in addition to forming the nucleus of what was to become the Free National Movement, had his own private and political row to hoe, as it were, his own life’s story to tell, and most of those stories – such as Sir Arthur Foulkes’s to-hell-and-back tale – have brimmed with fascination.

Every now and then we encounter Dr. Edwood Donaldson, now in his seventies, who has long been off the political front line, but who today, four decades after his front line tour of duty which saw experiences of resignations, firings, protests, and caucuses, enjoys his own curious brand of exile.

Few astute observers of the Bahamian political scene over the decades will deny that Dr. Donaldson was the very first of the established mavericks in The Bahamas, and although he may from time have been accused of being guilty of ill-timing, impetuosity, or even over-estimation, the record that he always spoke out first still remains unchallenged.

Elwood Donaldson, who was born and bred in Bain Town, returned to The Bahamas in the 1960s after completing medical studies at the University of Hawaii. He became formally aligned with the then opposition PLP, receiving that party’s nomination for Killarney in the 1967 polls, winning that election.

The story is well-known about how, when the votes were counted following those January 10th elections, the PLP had won 18 seats, and the governing United Bahamian Party also 18. There was work to be done.

It is little known that in addition to Randol Fawkes and three others who won their seats in that election, Elwood Donaldson was one of those approached by the UBP to throw his support their way, to help form another Bay Street government. The fact that he resisted the lucrative offers is not especially dramatic – so did all the others who were approached.

Even before the PLP won the landslide in 1968, Donaldson was already speaking out against certain of those elements in the party which, he thought, needed correction and renovation. For example, he insisted, publicly, that the law which prevented Bahamians from gambling in the casinos was discriminatory.

After the PLP took office as the government, it was not clear what was offered Dr. Donaldson in the way of cabinet portfolios, chairmanships, or parliamentary secretaryships, but he served, for a time, as Sports Commissioner. Many thought he accepted that position more out of an attitude of team cooperation than out of any real sense of love for the job.

In late 1968, when the late Cecil Wallace-Whitfield made his initial move against the Premier at the famous but little-remembered PLP Balmoral convention, Elwood Donaldson was in the thick of it.

Some say that Dr. Donaldson was there, later that night, to help prepare Sir Lynden Pindling’s short address, which said that there had been a “genuine misunderstanding” between himself and the Minister of Education (Wallace-Whitfield).

Two years later, in 1970, when the dissident eight joined in the move against the prime minister on the floor of the House of Assembly, Donaldson was one of those who spoke most strongly – yet with proper respect – against the PLP leader. Only a few months before that he had led the way, during the PLP convention for the dissidents to voice their complaints against the leadership,

Taking issue with the PLP leader’s suggestion that those who could not fish should cut bait or get the hell out of the boat, Elwood Donaldson no doubt set the tone of the attack, which subsequently saw Whitfield and D. Curtis McMillan resign as ministers, and James Shepherd resign as chairman of Bahamas Electricity Corporation.

When the new Free National Movement was formed, following the Booby Rock-like shivering existence of the Free PLP, Elwood Donaldson emerged as the party’s first chairman, even though, from the break, he had publicly denounced the idea of any kind of joining up with the United Bahamian Party.

The FNM lost the 1972 general elections, badly, with every single one of the original Dissident Eight incumbents, including Dr. Elwood Donaldson, being vanquished. Donaldson was appointed an FNM senator. However, within a few weeks’ time he resigned from both the Senate and the FNM, apparently still uncomfortable with what he termed the “coupling” with Bay Street.

For years Dr. Donaldson existed, politically, unconnected, and he remained in that state of political limbo, although he admitted back than that he “will move when the time is right,” whatever that indicated.

As time passed, it seemed Elwood Donaldson held the view that he could not support Lynden Pindling and the PLP, but neither was he prepared to follow Cecil Wallace Whitfield, entertaining an attitude that he could never be content in saying, as some back then did, that “anything is better than the PLP.”

Expanding, he was reported at the time as saying that “if you replace one leaky pipe with another leaky pipe, what, really, have you done?”

It used to be an utter and joyous education sitting and listening to Elwood Donaldson, a young but renaissance man, as he held forth eloquently on this subject and the next, his head forever tilted to one side, and you came away with the impression that he was once an even younger man filled with passion and anger, and, drawing near his furtive forties, that passion and anger had coalesced into a burning philosophy.

Ten years after Elwood Donaldson’s first fierce foray onto the rigid range of Bahamian front line politics – back in the mid to late seventies – some who may have been viewed him as once who had gained great experience during that devilish decade. Yet Oscar Wilde once noted near the turn of the 20th century that “experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes”.

If Donaldson, a brilliant if somewhat eccentric Bahamian professional, was indeed thought to have been guilty of mistakes during those first critical years beginning with his election in 1967, then without doubt the biggest of those would have been to drop, suddenly and unceremoniously from the Bahamian front line political scene.

Of course his reasoning might understandably have been that that scene – as in some many ways it remains all round today – was too profusely peopled with the traditional fickle, fanatical, and fortune-hunting four-flushers who own, if nothing else, a say in the supreme political board rooms, and, alas, a vote.

Dr. Elwood Donaldson, who is, in his way, still a very voluble and vibrant part of the present passing scene, has always been socialist by nature, and his other mistake may have been attempting the application of that theory to a Bahamian situation where there were others, with more money and more power who did not want to be so, at least not at that time.

Today Elwood Donaldson, although still far from the madding crowd of front line politics, is far from any kine of relic. Today he is an even more seasoned renaissance man. If one observes carefully, that old fire in his belly which on so many occasions in the past caused him to stroke out, is now re-directed, but hardly simmered.

He was the very first of the political mavericks of the land, who didn’t give a damn if he way damned for saying his piece against friend and foe alike, and whose whole frank and fearless contribution to the advancement of democracy, made a whole and mighty difference to what is today the new Bahamas.

History is all, and the people, especially the young, should know . . . for what it’s worth.