FORMER Minister of Education and Culture Tyrone Cecil Estwick is dead.
Relatives said the 54-year-old lawyer, brother of Government minister Dr David Estwick, died yesterday morning.
The cause of death of the Chancery Lane, Christ Church resident was not immediately clear.
Estwick, a double university honours graduate, was elected to the House of Assembly in 1991 and served as Minister of Education and Culture from then until the 1994 general election.
Former Prime Minister Sir Lloyd Erskine Sandiford headed that Cabinet, with present Prime Minister David Thompson serving as Finance Minister, and Branford Taitt as Minister of Foreign Affairs.
Estwick was one of several Democratic Labour Party (DLP) politicians losing their seats in the 1994 election, called early amidst serious internal strife in the DLP.
He lost to Wendell Callender (Barbados Labour Party) by fewer than 200 votes in that poll and suffered a heavier defeat at the hands of Reginald Farley five years later.
The year 1999 marked a political turning point for Estwick, who announced he was leaving the DLP because of disenchantment.
In 2001, he joined former Dees Kerrie Symmonds, Johnny Tudor and Rudy Grant in speaking on a Barbados Labour Party (BLP) platform during a by-election in St Thomas.
“The DLP has to be honest about its own existence,” he said then. “The DLP has lived a lie for a very long time and continues to live a lie today.”
He admitted that for a man who had grown up in a “DLP home”, it had not been an easy decision for him to walk away from the party which he had seen as the representative of the masses.
He told that St Thomas meeting he had made the decision to leave the DLP after some serious analysis.
Estwick has been out of the political limelight for several years, but has kept busy as a lawyer, handling criminal, as well as civil cases involving estates and conveyancing.
One of his major cases was the 2007 inquiry into the burning down of Glendairy Prisons.
He represented prison officers belonging to the National Union of Public Workers.
Lawyer Ralph Thorne, QC, who was a close friend for 32 years, said Estwick was “very modest” about his accomplishments as a criminal lawyer.
He described Estwick as a man who made friends very easily.
“This propensity to make friends hurt him,” Thorne admitted. “A lot of people used to take advantage of his friendship and would make unreasonable demands on it.
“But he was a good man, a genuinely good human being.”
Thorne called him a man of “very dry wit” who “loved to laugh”.
Estwick also loved sports and spent some time watching televised American basketball and football games.
Thorne said Estwick believed in personal advancement based on merit, rather than political or other connections.
“He always spoke about meritocracy.”
Estwick is survived by his wife Lisa, son Matthew, and daughter Ashley.
Yesterday a distraught David Estwick huddled with his brother’s family at their Christ Church home.
He declined to talk to the Press, but he is on record as saying in 1999 that though his brother switched political camps, they remained close.
“Tyrone and I have always been very independent individuals and we make our decisions based upon experience and how we analyse things in terms of whether we can contribute effectively in any environment at present,” he said then.
“Any decision he made would have been made with some justification in his own analysis. Therefore I will respect and accept that.
“It’s important people understand that though Tyrone and I are brothers, we can have divergent views, and we can sit down afterwards and have a laugh.”
