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.

In today’s Bahamas, who truly deserves a happy Father’s Day?

This week, five and a half months into the year 2012, The Bahamas recorded its 66^th murder, that record outdistancing any in any year thus far in modern history.

A few of the murder victims were women, but by far they were men, a good number of them “known to police” as persons with criminal backgrounds, some of them mowed down by criminal opponents.

Some of the male murder victims were fathers, young and middle aged, which means there exists children, perhaps hundreds of them, who will grow up fatherless, as thousands of others through the years before have been forced to do.

But that is the way it is, and the mournful way it will continue to be through the end of this year, and beyond, save for dramatic social or moral reform, or, of course, divine intervention.

This Sunday The Bahamas, along with most of the western world, will observe Father’s Day, an idea born in Spokane, Washington just over a century ago, and made official in 1972 by former U.S. President Richard Nixon, who declared that the third Sunday in June each year should be set aside in tribute to fathers.

In that declaration Nixon explained that the Father’s Day observance ought to be “in honour of all good fathers that contribute as much to the family as a mother, in their own way.”

For many years that American tradition of Father’s Day has been followed by countries all over the world, including The Bahamas which cannot truly boast of any superabundance of good fathers that contribute as much to the family as a mother, in their own ways.

This Sunday across the bothered Bahamian landscape, in churches and at lavish lunches, thousands of Bahamians will fete fathers, good, bad, indifferent, gone missing, or simply, as the late Archdeacon William Thompson used to describe them, “worthless and good-for-nothing”.

Yet over time this country has had its share of caring fathers who tried their best, but who far too often find themselves, as they grow nearer the grave, neglected by offspring who know, but who simply do not give a tinker’s damn.

Far too many once caring fathers are left to lean heavily on the Christian charity of strangers.

Not many blocks south of Mount Fitzwilliam down Blue Hill Road, where the Governor-General resides, there exists a graphic reflection of what we truly are in this nation of nearly 39 years.

At that somewhat famous crossroads Over-the-Hill, there exists an historic church stretching back before emancipation, and atop of which there is a concrete cross stretching high into the heavens, as if beseeching special intercession for God’s dispossessed.

That is the point of conjoinment with Grant’s Town and Bain Town where in the faces and in the lives of so many in the surrounding area there is on the ground the pained and wounded, a sad and sorrowful reflection of the real Bahamas.

Morning after morning there sit a tiny congregation of elderly, obviously indigent Bahamian men, now and then accompanied by who seems an equally depressed and disadvantaged old lady in need.

They sit on boxes,makeshift benches, and sometimes one or two perch with a kind of decrepit elegance in wheelchairs, seeking alms from the stream of motorists who must stop at the juncture waiting for the light to change from red to green.

Those waiting there at the corner, like others long before them sitting at the Bible’s Gate Beautiful are proud and no doubt prideful fathers and grandfathers and perhaps even great grandfathers who no doubt wonder what happened to human and familial gratitude.

We remember well how about five years back there was a funeral service for an elderly dear departed lady, and the young woman reading the Epistle or New Testament Lesson was so consumed with deep grief as she made her way through the scriptural passage.

The departed was the “grandmother” of the young lady, the quiet and almost fragile Sabria Armbrister, and the surrounding story was one of caring and concern which could have taught the Bahamian nation volumes about caring and concern, despite the indifference and neglect of blood relatives. 

Sabria was at the time not even 30, and for a long time back in the 1990s she used to grieve over the death of her own grandmother, finding herself often at the graveside in St. Joseph’s Cemetery, putting down flowers and reflecting with a lingering, relentless fondness.

There was no blood relationship between Sabria and the departed matron over whom she grieved with a kind of beautiful sadness at St. Agnes Church that Saturday afternoon, and therein existed a tale of compassion, amazingly exuding from a lovely young Bahamian with apparently little time for discos and the cataclysm of the fast lane.

Sabria had played a major role in what, in the late 1990s became the Grandmothers and Grandfathers Association up at the Geriatrics division of the Sandilands Rehabilitation Centre, where a good number of the elderly residents were in need of caring relatives.

In the programme, caring members of the community, like The White Boy, were prevailed upon to “adopt” a grandmother or grandfather, paying visits from time to time, remembering birthdays, and on occasion taking their “grandparent” for an outing.

It was a wonderful testimony of true caring and outreach, and strong bonds were formed between grandparent and “child”. As one of those “children”, The White Boy was at the time nearly 60.

Of course time would eventually overtake a grandparent, and death, the inevitable, had to be faced. That death came to Sabria’s grandmother, and the girl was completely distraught, so entirely connected she had become with the old lady.

Why is there today such a dearth of Bahamians who care so deeply for the elderly of the land, even when the elderly is a flesh-and-blood mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, or even an old aunt, uncle, or cousin?

Indeed why is there so little carting or compassion, like the gentle Sabria’s, simply for the withered old woman who years ago used to live down the street in the old neighbourhood?

Many, for whatever reason, do not find themselves ensconced up at the Geriatrics Hospital where at least there is orderly and efficient care, even if close, personal love is missing. Instead they fend for themselves in the outside world, often living alone, never quite knowing what the next day will bring.

Incredibly, the children and grandchildren of some of them, both up at Sandilands and in that outside world, are fairly prominent citizens of the community, some of them, well, economically comfortable. No one, except perhaps God, knows the whys and wherefores of their indifference and disregard.

What is indeed known in this community, however, is that there are far too many elderly folks sitting at crossroads, some who are blind led by children or other guides, as they make their way to regular and familiar places and people where there is a reasonable assurance of a hand-out.

And all this in a land where, despite the effects of the recession, there is often yet the boast of economic success and prosperity, where, it is said, there is a greater percentage of of landed, middle class, and wealthy blacks than there has ever been before.

Well, if truth be told, many of those sitting and waiting patiently at the crossroads daily are the forebears of some of that same fortunate ebony, wealthy, not a small number of whom find themselves present to prayers in church, raising their hands to heaven.

Yes, they raise their hands and their voices, but perhaps dare not raise their eyes, fearing they would eyeball God.

Yes, this Sunday the fathers of the land will be gaily feted and showered with praises and prayers and thanks, and that is well, especially for those who, as the stained Nixon put it, contribute as much to the family as mothers.

However, in the days and weeks following, there will continue to be at the various crossroads, corners, junctures, on porches and roadsides all over the modern and successful Bahamas, the elderly, forgotten, and dispossessed.

They, except for the love and caring of such as Sabria Armbrister and such as her revolutionary Grandparents Club would, in the words of Robert Frost, have, “nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope.”

Nevertheless, a Happy Father’s Day to all, especially the worthy . . . for what it’s worth.

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.