The George William Gordon Story - Menace or martyr Part II

When George William Gordon returned to the House of Assembly in 1863, he was more vigilant and outspoken than he was in his first stint which began in 1944. He was also a magistrate (justice of the peace), and he would visit the Morant Bay jail to see the prevailing conditions as part of his duties.

On one such visit, he made the following notes in the visiting book: “a sick prisoner should be sent to a hospital; the foul prison cesspool should be pumped out, as it had not been cleaned for five years; personal details of committal to prison and particulars of the prisoner should be recorded at the prison; prisoners should have beef once a week; a copy of ‘these orders’ be sent to the proper authority, including a recommendation that attention should be given to the religious needs of the prisoners”.

Soon after, Governor Darling went on leave, but before he left, he let Gordon know in no ambiguous terms that Gordon had overstepped his boundary. But Gordon was not moved. Some members wished he would not return, because of the shaky state of affairs in the Assembly. Edward John Eyre had come to govern while Darling was on leave. But his incompetence was glaring from the start, causing much rancour in the Assembly.

Eyre had learnt of the communication between Gordon and Darling over the Morant Bay jail report, and he regarded Gordon’s actions as an attack on “constituted authority”. A part of Gordon’s letter to the governor says that he found a male pauper housed in the pit latrine, and that he was told it was the rector who had placed him there. Gordon wrote to the attorney general requesting a criminal investigation of the rector. Governor Eyre was now at his wit’s end. This was the watershed moment of the bad blood that existed between Eyre and Gordon.

Removal of Gordon

So, when the matter of the pauper, who had died, arose, Eyre proposed the removal of Gordon from office. He called an enquiry, on the advice of committee member Baron von Ketelhodt, who said, “I am of the opinion that the accusation against director … has every appearance off malevolence … and may, unless explained, justly be considered as such a willful and gross misrepresentation as would make him a disgrace to the commission.”

The Native Baptist Gordon did not get a chance to develop his case; his witnesses were not called, and without hesitation the Anglican Governor Eyre took away his commission as magistrate. Gordon and others protested, but “Eyre replied that Gordon had attacked the Established Church at the same time that he had attacked the rector, for, among Gordon’s representations to the secretary of state through Eyre, he had complained of the heavy burdens on the taxpayers of the upkeep of the Established Church, which ministered to comparatively few of the inhabitants.”

To freeze the tide of unpopularity that was tossing him all over, Governor Eyre had dissolved the House of Assembly on January 32, 1863. He didn’t want Darling to return in March to find the mess which Darling himself had been sinking in. And by virtue of his losing his commission as justice of the peace, Gordon also had lost his ex officio position as a member of the St Thomas Vestry (municipal council). He was member of the Vestry because of his status, so he ran an election to be reinstated, but lost that election. Gordon was finally elected to the St Thomas Vestry in 1864.

By the time the March 1863 elections had come around, news came that Darling was not returning to Jamaica. He was posted in Australia. Gordon was elected to represent St Thomas in the House of Assembly. Governor Eyre now had a new and hyper-critical Assembly to deal with, and a new member named George William Gordon, who was to become one of his fiercest critics.

“ The censures which he delivered in the Assembly during the next two years word to bring down on him ‘condign punishment’ at the hands of Eyre,” writes Ansell Hart in his book, The Life of George William Gordon. “ As we shall see, by the time of the next session of the Legislature in October 1863, Gordon had become the stormy petrel of the Assembly, as already out of session, he had been a gadfly of administrative irregularities.”

Morant Bay Uprising

In those two years, the state of affairs in the country was dire. Tension was rife among the people of St Thomas in the early 1860s. Things escalated from October 7, 1865, and climaxed with the Morant Bay Uprising on October 11. George William Gordon was arrested, court-martialed, and hanged on October 23. Deacon Paul Bogle, too, was hanged on the 25th. Many more were flagged and killed. Gordon’s murder was condemned near and far, and though Eyre was tried for it, he was found not culpable. He blamed Gordon for inspiring the uprising in which Custos Baron von Ketelhodt, too, was killed.

Yet, among other things, Gordon writes in his final letter to his wife, “ I do not deserve this sentence, for I never advised or took part in any insurrection. All I ever did was to recommend the people who complained to seek redress in a legitimate way, and if in this I err or have been misrepresented, I do not think I deserve the extreme sentence. It is, however, the will of my heavenly father that I should thus suffer in obeying his command to relieve the poor and needy, and to protect, as far as I was able, the oppressed. And glory be to his name, and I thank him that I suffer in such a cause.”