The pages are rotting; they’re brittle and yellowing, and they tear easily. Bookworms are feasting as they drill down through 58 weeks of newsprint. (My Kindle and iPad friends are sniggering). It’s my treasured, bound collection of the first year of publication of THE NATION newspaper – from November 25, 1973, to December 29, 1974.
For the next two issues, I will extract some of the interesting events we covered in that difficult first year.
First, let me congratulate THE NATION and Curt. They came into the world at the same time 40 years ago.
On the morning of Thursday, November 1, Bentley Callender was practising Handel’s Dixit Dominus on St Mary’s Church organ as I climbed the rickety stairs of our rented two-door shop.
It was our first day of business. I hadn’t sat at my second-hand desk overlooking the churchyard when the Queen Elizabeth Hospital called. My wife had given birth to our first and only baby.
Chief obstetrician Dr Ralph Malone met me downstairs and as we walked up to the ward he said: “Mr Moore, you have a son. I can’t say he is a giant; he’s only just over three pounds, but he’s lively . . . and noisy.” That must’ve been the augury that led me 30 years later to found The Society for a Quieter Barbados.
The rest is history.
THE NATION’s first issue featured Gordon Brooks’ picture of Sydney Simmons’ baby son Eammon on the cover over the caption “Young, hopeful, eager, that’s us.” The front page editorial said: “We believe that politics is much more than a session of Parliament or a mass meeting in Independence Square. Some say it’s about power; THE NATION says it’s also about people.”
We started when Prime Minister Errol Barrow was ending a three-month sabbatical at Florida International University. We commissioned a journalist in Key West to send us a report. Frank Jacobson tried to track down Mr Barrow for ten days, with little success. All he could come up with was that the Prime Minister was teaching a course titled Conflict and Co-operation in the Caribbean.
He learned from Mr Barrow’s security detail that he felt he was “losing touch” with the academic world and with “current political thought” and that the break would help connect his thinking to what young people were talking about. It would also “recharge” his batteries.
The first wedding THE NATION covered was that of Mr and Mrs Junior Evanson. Officiating priest, the Rev. Alan Kirton, of the Hawthorne Memorial Methodist Church, told the young couple that marriage was like cricket: “You must always keep the shine on the ball.”
The second edition the following Friday found Barbados in the dark experiencing the first oil shock. All official functions for Independence celebrations were cancelled, with Trade Minister Senator Branford Taitt telling the nation on national television: “At this time of year many of us sing of a white Christmas. This year we may be saddened by a black Christmas. The prospects are as bad as that.”
Gasoline prices shot up 24 cents per gallon from 98 cents.
In that edition News Editor Charles Harding reported a situation that brought home to me acceptance that history is constantly undergoing revision to reflect not only what actually happened but what people believe happened.
Charles did a wide-ranging interview with blind, 61-year-old Roland Edwards, the Barbadian credited with writing the music to our national anthem. With tears in his eyes, Mr Edwards revealed that not only were the lyrics he submitted for the Independence anthem competition rejected, so was the music he composed.
Still very lucid and clear of memory – it was only seven years earlier – Mr Edwards said: “In order to reward me they took the melody of the welcome song I had composed for the Queen and set it to the lyrics sent by another composer. Probably they said ‘We will put that to those words so that Roland Edwards’ name will still live on’.”
The one-year-old Central Bank of Barbados placed an advertisement in that edition introducing this country’s own currency to be circulated from December 3 displaying a specimen of the now retired one dollar note with Samuel Jackman Prescod’s face on the obverse side.
In the year-end issue, the newspaper printed pictures and brief bios of Barbados’ 15 eligible bachelors: Woodbine Davis, Charlie Griffith, Al Gilkes, Ian Estwick, Errol Rawlins, Dennis Cumberbatch, Edward Haynes, Cammie Hinds, Carlton Proute, Trevor Browne, Elvin Sealy, Norman Barrow, Dennis Hunte, Ron Hope and Milton McCollin – the last three now deceased.
The new year (1974) opened with an Al Gilkes exposé: “While the masses in this country are daily dog-fighting, queuing up hours on end (sometimes overnight) begging and even trying to bribe gasoline attendants to get two or three dollars in gas, the Barbados Government has seen fit to designate a private pump for a privileged few high officials who, on presenting a letter, can have a full tank whenever they want.”
We headlined that story The Privileged Pump, and Opposition politicians went ballistic when they learned that Minister Taitt had been among those filling-up in Country Road.
In a later issue, THE NATION printed this bold front page headline: New oil find: Well No. 3, Woodbourne, will decide Barbados’ future this week.
By mid-March the Central Bank had “slammed on the brakes” instituting strict measures to “control the outflow of money” – foreign exchange, no doubt; and Harold Hoyte, always the political analyst, was predicting that “the twelve-year-old love affair” between the ruling Democratic Labour Party and the Barbados Workers’ Union would soon be over.
My next column, November 24, Deo volente, will begin with Prime Minister Barrow, batteries now recharged, cutting canes at Kent Plantation in Christ Church and calling on Barbadians to set aside our “false pride” and to take off our collars-and-ties and help him harvest the 1974 sugar crop.
One wag termed his display “cutting TV canes”.
• Carl Moore was the first editor of THE NATION and is a social commentator.
