Hugh Shearer and Papa

Julian 'Jingles' Reynolds, Guest Columnist

From ever since I can remember, there were five names frequently mentioned in my household: Alexander Bustamante, 'The Chief' or 'Busta', was the dominant one. Norman Washington Manley was another. The Reverend John Cyril Swaby (later Anglican bishop of Jamaica), Bishop Percival Gibson, Anglican bishop of Jamaica, and Hugh Lawson Shearer. The two men of the cloth were mentioned because of my family's connection to the Anglican Church, and my father coming from Islington, St Mary, also the home of Canon Swaby, and them being boyhood colleagues.

My father, the late Edmond 'Roy' 'Churchill' Reynolds, a port worker, builder, and trade unionist with the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union (BITU) and the United Port Workers Union (UPWU), had a working relationship with the man he always referred to as 'Hugh Lawson'. My father, as a BITU member, and later a delegate and trustee of the UPWU, was engaged in regular dialogue with Hugh Lawson, who was then a principal organiser for the BITU. Papa would always report to my mother and me about the different negotiations that were part of his routine. This was in the early to mid-1960s when trade unionism was vibrant and taking hold in many companies throughout a new independent Jamaica in pursuit of industrialisation.

SHEARER CONNECTION

There was also another connection of my family with Hugh Shearer. As a teenager, Mr Shearer attended St Simon's College on East Street, close to North Street (back of the present Gleaner Company), and my cousin, retired inspector of police, the late Lloyd Heywood, also attended St Simon's. My cousin had lived with my father, and recalled young Shearer at school. He was the same age as Mr Shearer, but considered himself a junior to him, as Hugh Lawson was two classes ahead of my cousin, who described Lawson as "academically brilliant and rode a bicycle to school".

Papa respected and was fond of his younger colleague, Hugh Shearer, but there was a period that remains vivid in my memory, and that was during the negotiations on the ports to implement the superannuation scheme. This was the agreement between the Shipping Association of Jamaica (SAJ) and the port workers that addressed the pension of port workers and other matters related to their welfare.

Papa was an unflinching, hard negotiator for the interest of port workers and working-class people in general. He was a short, handsome, muscular, bulldog-like man who smoked a pipe, hence the moniker 'Churchill' given to him by his colleagues on the ports of Kingston. Papa felt that the SAJ, and the owners of the means of production in Jamaica, were not appreciative or respectful to the rights of the workers, and were not prepared to offer proper compensation and working conditions to Jamaican workers.

At a crucial point in the negotiations, my father and other colleagues felt that Hugh Shearer, in leading the delegation comprising BITU and UPWU/National Workers Union (NWU) members, was too quick to compromise for what Papa described as "little scrapses of bones" that the SAJ, supported by the Jamaica Employers Federation, was offering to the port workers. I remember Papa was furious with Mr Shearer for "selling out".

Papa had a close, long relationship with 'The Chief' going back to the 1938 labour struggles which changed Jamaica forever. Led by Mr Bustamante, Papa, as a young port worker and as well from the district of Islington, another flashpoint in those labour struggles, battled at the sides of Bustamante, Aggie Bernard, St William Grant and many others against the then colonial government and their police and soldiers, to gain justice, dignity and parity for the workers of Jamaica. So Papa and a small delegation of port workers sought the intervention of 'The Chief' in their struggle with 'Shippers'. Mr Bustamante, however, was by then out of trade unionism and I suspect would not publicly counter his protégé Hugh Shearer.

Papa's great dilemma

Being a teenager then, I did not pay great attention to what was taking place in the trenches, but I remember hearing my father discussing regularly with my mother and a few of his close friends, Milton Henry, Oswald Oliver and others, this great dilemma that was facing him and his colleagues on the ports. I knew when Papa was angered to the point of 'going to war' when, in his Ashanti, maroon fierceness, eyes blood-red and bulging, veins popping in his neck, he bellowed, "Not over my dead body!" He said this quite a lot in expressing his disgust with how the negotiations were going under the leadership of Mr Shearer.

I cannot say who made what was to become a brilliant suggestion, maybe The Chief, maybe my mother, maybe Mr Shearer himself, but Papa informed my mother that represen-tatives from the ports wanted to approach Michael Manley, then head of the NWU, to bring him in on the negotiations. But my father, being a diehard Bustamante Labourite, and a BITU member, was reluctant to reach out to Mr Manley.

My mother, Agatha, who I called Ma, however, encouraged my father to do so. She was a staunch Comrade supporter of the People's National Party and a great admirer of party leader Norman Manley. She had experienced Michael Manley's (who she described as "Fi mi bwoy") trade union skills at the helm of the NWU, representing her interest as a factory worker with Caribbean Products Company Ltd. This preceded the port workers negotiations with 'Shippers'.

My father was a pragmatist, more a trade unionist than a politician. For him, of paramount importance were workers' rights. Michael Manley was approached to join in the negotiations with the SAJ. The NWU, I later learnt, was the parent of the UPWU, but Mr Manley was fearful of the port workers, who were represented mainly by the BITU, hence his reluctance to be involved and distancing himself from the earlier days of the negotiations. However, he was convinced to participate alongside Mr Shearer and the rest, as they say, is history.

After each meeting led by Mr Shearer and Mr Manley, I would overhear Papa telling of the sharpness and bargaining strengths shown by Mr Manley. My mother would gloat, "Me no tell you, a fi mi bwoy dat."

Mr Manley, Mr Shearer, Papa, a neophyte Hopeton Caven and the other delegates negotiated a precedent, setting one of the most far-reaching pro-workers' contract in the history of Jamaica.

Malcolm X book ban

However, my exposure with Hugh Shearer didn't end there, as in 1968 Mr Shearer caused me to resign as a staff journalist with The Gleaner Company. On the 7:30 a.m. news on JBC Radio one morning, I heard then Prime Minister Hugh Shearer declare a ban on the book The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and other so-called black power books, refused re-entry into Jamaica of the Guyanese social activist and University of the West Indies historian, Dr Walter Rodney, and distanced Jamaica from the black-power movement then sweeping the United States of America.

As a young socialist, I was infuriated. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, for me and my peers and close friends at The Gleaner, Clarence 'Ben' Brodie, the late Eric McNish, Leslie Thompson and Lloyd 'Young Ben' McIntosh, was an inspiration to struggle against racism, classism and oppression - a must-read. And so I wrote an article condemning Prime Minister Shearer. I had just been transferred, upon my request, from The Gleaner's sports desk to the political desk, then headed by the late Ulric Simmonds.

I submitted the article to the editor, the late Theodore Sealy, who told me to go back and research the news item by going to JBC and carefully listening to the tape and use quotes to substantiate my article. I did that but the article was never published. I wrote a letter to Mr Sealy, resigning immediately, becoming a freelancer with the Public Opinion, Abeng, Swing Magazine, and Cooyah Magazine.

Misguided youthful zeal

Papa had arranged a meeting for me with Michael Manley, with the intention of me joining Mr Manley's staff at the NWU. However, I rejected this because Mr Manley kept me waiting for several hours at his South Camp Road office for our first meeting, and when asked to meet with him a second time, I refused. I also attempted to go to Cuba but was discouraged by my uncle-in-law, the late Constantine 'Sisto' Laveist, a Cuban living in Jamaica, and too by the then Cuban ambassador to Jamaica. I returned to The Gleaner as a features writer and columnist, but not on staff, after my father met with Mr Sealy and they forgave my leaving The Gleaner because of "youthful impetuosity, immaturity and misguided revolutionary zeal". I was not yet 20.

I cannot recall ever meeting Prime Minister Shearer or even going on an assignment that he was present. But he impacted my life, and worked closely with my father and his colleagues on the ports to improve working conditions in Jamaica.

Julian 'Jingles' Reynolds is a writer, filmmaker and entrepreneur who lives and works in Jamaica and New York. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and fiwipro@yahoo.com.