Great Jamaicans in history

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The great Arthur Wint....

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"Arthur Wint, known as the Gentle Giant, was born in Plowden, Manchester, Jamaica. While at Calabar High School, he ran sprints and did both the high jump and long jump. He later transferred to Excelsior High School, where he finished his secondary education. In 1937 he was the Jamaica Boy Athlete of the year, and the following year won a gold medal in the 800 metres at the Central American Games in Panama. In 1942 he joined the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan and set the Canadian 400 metre record while training there. He was sent to Britain for active combat during World War II as a pilot. He left the Royal Air Force in 1947 to attend St Bartholomew's Hospital as a medical student. In the 1948 London Games, Wint won Jamaica’s first Olympic gold medal for the 400 metres (46.2 seconds), beating his team-mate Herb McKenley. In the 800 metres he won silver, after American Mal Whitfield's gold. Wint missed a probable third medal when he pulled a muscle in the 4 x 400 metres relay final. In Helsinki 1952 he was part of the historic team setting the world record while capturing the gold in the 4 x 400 metres relay. He also won silver in the 800 metres, again coming second to Mal Whitfield. Wint ran his final race in 1953 at Wembley Stadium, finished his internship, and graduated as a doctor. The following year he was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) by Queen Elizabeth II. In 1955 Wint returned to Jamaica, eventually settling in Hanover as the only resident doctor in the parish. In 1973 he was awarded the Jamaica honour of the Order of Distinction. He served as Jamaica's High Commissioner to Britain and ambassador to Sweden and Denmark from 1974 to 1978. He was inducted in the Black Athlete’s Hall of Fame in the US (1977), the Jamaica Sports Hall of Fame (1989) and the Central American & Caribbean Athletic Confederation Hall of Fame (2003). Arthur Wint died on Heroes Day in Linstead, aged 72."

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Donald Sangster, the forgotten prime minister....

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"He was appointed minister of social services between 1949 and 1953, minister of finance from 1953-55, and again from 1962 to 1967. He was his own minister of finance. By 1955, B B Coke had joined the People's National Party (PNP) and defeated Sangster by a few thousand votes. It was upon the disqualification of George Perrier — the member of the House of Representatives for the old North Clarendon constituency — on the grounds of defamation of character of another candidate that Sangster won a by-election in December 1995. Incidentally, the late Rose Leon was also disqualified for same reason. Sangster was re-elected every election thereafter until his death in 1967. His greatest contribution took place during his years as the deputy prime minister of Jamaica. Bustamante was ill for roughly three years before he finally left politics, during which time he was practically bedridden. So it was Sangster who 'ruled' the country during those years. As Jamaica was new to political independence, the framework had to be set. That lot fell on Donald Sangster. As finance minister, he introduced legislation for industrial expansion, with a stated emphasis on local production, in continuation of all the efforts done by previous governments. It is so unfortunate that in the 1990s Jamaica was forced by globalisation to take foreign goods, and that has killed so much of this initiative."

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Noel Nethersole....

"Nethersole helped found the People's National Party (PNP) in 1938 and served as its vice-president from 1938 until his death in 1959. Norman Manley was president. During World War Two he was prominent in the Jamaican trade union movement, and made a reputation as a conciliator. He stood unsuccessfully for the PNP in the 1944 Jamaican national election, but succeeded at the next election in 1949 and entered parliament as a member of the opposition for the constituency of Central St Andrew. In the early 1950s he chaired the PNP committee whose determinations led to the expulsion of extreme leftist members of the party. He became the first president of the National Workers Union, which was a more moderate successor to the Trade Union Council. In the 1955 elections the PNP won office. As party deputy to Norman Manley, the new First Minister, Nethersole became Second Minister and took the post of Finance Minister. Nethersole was determined to modernise Jamaica's financial institutions to give the country economic independence, in preparation for its political independence, which came in 1962. He played an important part in ensuring that when Jamaica became the world's largest producer of bauxite in 1957, the proceeds helped in Jamaica's development. He spent two years on negotiations to raise a substantial loan on the New York City money market, he laid the foundations for a central bank, and founded the Development Finance Corporation."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noel_Newton_Nethersole" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

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"Salkey was educated at St George's College, in Kingston, and at Munro College, in St. Elizabeth, before going to England in the early 1950s to attend the College of St Mark and St John. According to Stuart Hall, Salkey "quickly took his place at the centre of a small but outstanding circle of Caribbean writers and intellectuals. For a critical period he was the key figure, the main presenter and writer-in-residence in the Caribbean section of the BBC World Service at Bush House, London, and his programmes became a glittering showcase for a generation of writers, including Sam Selvon and George Lamming, who had made London their second home. Established and aspiring authors were chivvied, cajoled, gently chastised, inspired and schooled to produce new work for radio on the Caribbean Voices programme over which Andrew Salkey often presided." After reading V. S. Naipaul's first story Salkey encouraged him to continue writing. At the BBC, he also helped write the production My People and Your People with D. G. Bridson, a radio play about a love affair between a West Indian migrant and a Scottish skiffle player. Salkey was a part of the West Indian Students Union (WISU), which provided an effective forum for Caribbean students to express their ideas and provided voluntary support to the "harassed" working-class Caribbean immigrant community, during the 1960s, '70s and '80s. The association also included Gerry Burton, Arif Ali, Chris LeMaitre, John La Rose and Horace Lashley. In the mid-1950s Salkey taught English at Walworth Secondary School (also known as Mina Road school), an early comprehensive just off the Old Kent Road in South-east London. His first novel, A Quality of Violence – set around 1900 in a remote area of Jamaica, and narrated in a Jamaican patois – was published in 1959, and his second, Escape to An Autumn Pavement, in 1960. That same year Salkey edited one of the first anthologies of Caribbean short stories, West Indian Stories, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of folklore and popular culture. His novels that followed were The Late Emancipation of Jerry Stover (1968), The Adventures of Catullus Kelly (1969) and Come Home, Malcolm Heartland (1976). He was a prolific writer and subsequently published several books for children, poetry, travelogues, books that drew on folk traditions, including Anancy's Score (1973), as well as editing anthologies including Breaklight (1971)."

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Rex Nettleford....

'Born on 3 February 1933 in Falmouth, Jamaica, Nettleford attended Unity Primary School in Bunkers Hill, Trelawny, and graduated from Cornwall College in Montego Bay, Jamaica, before going to the University of the West Indies (UWI) to obtain an honours degree in history. As a child he sang and recited in school concerts, sang in the church choir, danced, and began working as a choreographer at the age of 11 with the Worm Chambers Variety Troupe, which helped to fund his studies. At Cornwall College he acted in productions of the college's drama club, and was published as a poet. He was a recipient of the 1957 Rhodes Scholarship to Oriel College, Oxford where he received a postgraduate degree in Politics, and returned to Jamaica in the early 1960s to take up a position at UWI. At UWI he first came to attention as a co-author (with M. G. Smith and Roy Augier) of a groundbreaking study of the Rastafari movement in 1961. In 1962, Nettleford and Eddy Thomas co-founded the National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica, an ensemble which under his direction did much to incorporate traditional Jamaican music and dance into a formal balletic repertoire. For over twenty years, Nettleford has also been the artistic director for the University Singers of the University of the West Indies, Mona campus in Jamaica. The combination of Nettleford as artistic director and Noel Dexter as musical director with the University Singers has seen the creation of what is referred to as "choral theatre". Beginning with the collection of essays, Mirror, Mirror, published in 1969 and his editing and compiling of the speeches and writings of Norman Manley, Manley and the New Jamaica, in 1971, Nettleford established himself as a serious public historian and social critic. In 1968, he took over direction of the School for Continuing Studies at the UWI and then of the Extra-Mural Department. In 1975, the Jamaican state recognized his cultural and scholarly achievements by awarding him the Order of Merit. He also received the Gold Musgrave Medal (1981) and 13 honorary doctorates, including one in Civil Law from Oxford University. In 1996, he became Vice-Chancellor of the UWI, and held that office until 2004, when he was succeeded by E. Nigel Harris.'

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Edna Manley....

'Her move to Jamaica had a profound impact her work. She abandoned studying zoology back in London, and her work took on a more "inshespired formal elegance", according to Boxer. Manley's materials consisted mostly of native woods—she used yakka, mahogany, Guatemalan redwood, juniper cedar, and primavera. Some work dating from her first year on the island are "Beadseller", and "Listener". In describing "Beadseller", Boxer said, "It was as if in one fell swoop, nearly a hundred years of sculptural development had been bridged: in this, her first work done in Jamaica, Edna seems to have given expression to her ideas about contemporary British sculpture with which she had saturated herself prior to leaving England." Both pieces exhibited Manley's more progressive and cubist style. Between 1925 and 1929, Manley softened some of her geometric forms, replacing them with more massive, rounded ones. Her son Michael was born during this time. "Market Women", a study of two voluptuous women sitting back to back, and "Demeter", a carving of the mythical Earth Mother, are indicative of Manley's late-1920s influence. The 1930s saw another change in her sculptural style. She tamed her early-1920s cubist lines with rounder influences, and a new, definitive style that lasted into the 1940s. Jamaica was facing many political changes during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Members of the African diaspora were looking to do away with the aging colonial system that remained on the island. They were ready for a new social order, and voiced their displeasure with the colonial system by incurring strikes (along with riots), instigating food shortages, and promoting protest marches. Manley's work of the time reflected this civil unrest. Works like "Prophet", "Diggers", "Pocomania", and "Negro Aroused" "caught the inner spirit of our people and flung their rapidly rising resentment of the stagnant colonial order into vivid, appropriate sculptural forms," wrote poet M. G. Smith. Her works were exhibited very frequently in England between 1927 and 1980. Her first solo exhibition in Jamaica was in 1937. The show marked a turning point in Jamaica's undeveloped art movement, and it prompted the first island-wide group show of Jamaican artists. Manley was also one of the founders of the new Jamaica School of Art. After premiering in Jamaica, her show opened in England, where it was received with much fanfare. It was the last time Manley's work would be shown in London for nearly 40 years. Active for much of her life as an artist, she also taught at the Jamaica School of Art, now a component of the Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts.'

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'Una Marson was born on 6 February 1905, in Santa Cruz, Jamaica, in the parish of St Elizabeth. She was the youngest of six children of Rev. Solomon Isaac (1858–1915), a Baptist parson, and Ada Marson (d. 1930). Una had a middle-class upbringing and was very close to her father, who influenced some of her fatherlike characters in her later works. As a child before going to school she was an avid reader of available literature, which at the time was mostly English classical literature. At the age of 10, she was enrolled in Hampton High, a girl's boarding school in Jamaica of which her father was on the board of trustees. However, that same year, Rev. Isaac died, leaving the family with financial problems, so they moved to Kingston. Una finished school at Hampton High, but did not go on to a college education. After she left from Hampton, she found work in Kingston as a volunteer social worker and used the secretarial skills, such as stenography, she had learned in school. In 1926, she was appointed assistant editor of the Jamaican political journal Jamaica Critic. Her years there taught her journalism skills as well as influencing her political and social opinions and inspired her to create her own publication. In fact, in 1928, she became Jamaica's first female editor and publisher of her own magazine, The Cosmopolitan. The Cosmopolitan featured articles on feminist topics, local social issues and workers' rights and was aimed at a young, middle-class Jamaican audience. Marson's articles encouraged women to join the work force and to become politically active. The magazine also featured Jamaican poetry and literature from Marson's fellow members of the Jamaican Poetry League, started by J. E. Clare McFarlane. In 1930, Marson published her first collection of poems, entitled Tropic Reveries, that dealt with love and nature with elements of feminism. It won the Musgrave Medal from the Institute of Jamaica. Her poems about love are somewhat misunderstood by friends and critics, as there is no evidence of a romantic relationship in Marson's life, although love continued to be a common topic in her work. In 1931, due to financial difficulties, The Cosmopolitan ceased publication, which led her to begin publishing more poetry and plays. In 1931, she published another collection of poetry, entitled Heights and Depths, which also dealt with love and social issues. Also in 1931, she wrote her first play, At What a Price, about a Jamaican girl who moves from the country into the city of Kingston to work as a stenographer and falls in love with her white male boss. The play opened in Jamaica and later London to critical acclaim. In 1932, she decided to go to London to find a broader audience for her work and to experience life outside of Jamaica.'

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'Sydney Ignatius (Foggy) Burrowes attended Kingston College (K.C.) between 1943 and 1947. Many believe that he was the most influential student to wear the school’s colors.
As skipper (captain) of athletics and cricket, and a key member of the football (soccer) forward line, he was involved in every phase of school life. On joining the teaching staff he became sports master, while studying for the Inter-B.A. Degree of London University. He represented Lucas Club at cricket and football until polio ‘struck him’ in 1954. He returned to teach at KC aided by metal braces and a motorcar fitted with manual controls. It was for many students their first object lesson in adversity and how one may deal with it. He then sold insurance and finally published “Sports Life Magazine”, along with Errol Townsend. Many stories are told and written about him and his theories, among them: Jamaicans should regard any Olympic finalist as a hero; G. B. Grant (the Flying Farmer – School of Agriculture Athlete) and G. C. Foster were the best ever athletes; Jamaican women would be the future bearers of our Olympic hopes. He encouraged his students to write poems and plays praising K.C. and Jamaica. But it was his motivational talks, attitudes and schemes that affected every boy at KC in his time. He organized the “Faculty” of old boys who coached the Inter Scholastic Track Athletics Championship Team to its remarkable fourteen (14) year run, and “never ceased convincing boys that each one had a kernel of greatness in them”.'

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The outstanding master painter Barry Watson....

"Watson was born in Lucea, Hanover in 1931 . He was educated at Kingston College, the Royal College of Art, London (1958-1960) and continued his study of the works of European masters at the Rijksacademie, Amsterdam, the Academia de las Bellas Artes in Madrid and other major European art schools.

He returned to Jamaica in 1962 to become the first director of studies at the Jamaica School of Art (now part of the Edna Manley College) and spearheaded a new curriculum which allowed graduating artists to filter into the areas of teaching, advertising and television, as well as the conventional fine and applied arts.

As a founding member of the Contemporary Jamaican Artists Association in 1964, along with his fellow painters Karl Parboosingh and Eugene Hyde, he quickly became one of the leading artists of the post-Independence period in Jamaica, whose work represents a turning point in the development of Jamaica's cultural and artistic aesthetic and professionalised the local artistic practice.

His many accolades include the Institute of Jamaica's Gold Musgrave Medal and the Order of Jamaica."

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"Gerald Claude Eugene Foster (30 November 1885 – 25 February 1966), best known as G. C. Foster, was a Jamaican sportsman who excelled at sprinting, cricket, and tennis, and later became a well-known athletics coach and cricket umpire. Born in Spanish Town, Foster was educated in Kingston, and participated in organised sport from an early age. Aged 19, he set a national record for the 100-yard dash, becoming recognised as one of Jamaica's top sprinters. Foster unsuccessfully attempted to participate at the 1908 Summer Olympics, and subsequently defeated several competitors at post-games meetings. On return to Jamaica, he concentrated more on cricket, playing irregularly at first-class level until the mid-1920s. Foster would go on to become one of Jamaica's foremost athletics coaches, helping to train athletes for both the Summer Olympics and Commonwealth Games. He died in 1966, with Jamaica's principal sporting college, the G. C. Foster College of Physical Education and Sport, later being named after him."

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