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REMARKS BY THE
HON. FRED MITCHELL MP
AT THE FUNERAL FOR CYRIL STEVENSON MVO
CHRIST CHURCH CATHEDRAL
16th November 2006
The late Sir Lynden Pindling, our
founding Prime Minister, used to say whenever he heard of the death
of a man who had lived a long life: “He had a good innings.” That is
a metaphor from cricket, a game that few of us know in the
contemporary Bahamas but those who do, would know how apt the
metaphor is for Cyril St. John Stevenson MVO who has lived to be 92
years old. In his life time, he stepped up to the crease and batted
many fours and sixes. He had a long and fulfilling life and I was a
very small part of that life, the life of a man who walked the
national stage and helped in a very personal way to cause me to be
where I am today.
I am honoured
and humbled to have been asked by his family to speak today.
The doctors
have told me that it is only a short time before I shall have to
wear glasses more or less permanently if I want to read the small
print on the page. It is only now, creeping through my fifties and
with the wisdom of hindsight that I remember how when I was a boy I
used to laugh when my mother asked me to thread a needle for her or
to read the small print on a bottle. Nature is now taking its
course.
As nature
takes its course we certainly get older and most times wiser. In
that aged wisdom I think how when I left high school at the age of
16 and thought at the time that I could conquer the world, and
nothing could defeat me. In hindsight that was really hubris, an
absorptive capacity to grow that has served me well into these
times. In that light, I think back to my first memories of Cyril
St. John Stevenson, one of the founders of the organization of which
I am a proud member and that I represent in the Honourable House of
Assembly. Why and how could such a giant on the national stage take
into his confidence a mere boy of 17? He was then 58.
Death is a
part of life and with death the memories of life become sharper,
more valuable and more precious. Psalm ninety says we bring our
years to an end, as it were a tale that was told. I wish to tell a
tale this morning of a man who was a friend, and mentor , even
though I suspect neither of us knew at the time that was so, and nor
ever imagined that I would stand here this morning, days after he
had become one with the universe.
The late Henry
Milton Taylor former Governor General and co founder of the PLP in
his book My Political Memoirs credits Cyril Stevenson and William
Cartwright with giving him a call upon their return from Jamaica
where the two men had gone following their trip to the United
Kingdom and the Coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. In Jamaica they
had gone to consult about the formation of a political party. The
call was to come over to H. M.’s home opposite the police barracks
in East Street to discuss the formation of a political party in The
Bahamas.
They formed
the Progressive Liberal Party, the first and oldest political party
in the country. The party that took the country to independence and
to majority rule.
H. M. Taylor
sums up Mr. Stevenson’s life this way: “In 1941, Mr. Stevenson
joined the staff of the “Nassau Guardian” and in 1953 while still
working for The Guardian he co founded the Progressive Liberal
Party. He was elected the first Secretary General of the Party and
served in this position for thirteen years. He left the employ of
the Guardian in 1954, and started publication of The Herald. This
paper became the mouthpiece of the party.”
At the age of
16 I joined the then Bahamas Tourist News Bureau whose offices were
in Nassau Court and Government Information Services was part of its
remit. I was a messenger in the summer of 1970. In the spring of
1971, I came back as a trainee writer. Cyril Stevenson had joined
the staff in 1970 as well under William Kails, an American writer.
I was fascinated by this man who typed with one finger a mile a
minute on the old manual typewriter and who was barking out
instructions to me to run down to the Chinese and get a paper. I
did not realize it at the time but I was working with a national
hero, one of the founders of the modern political life of the
country.
Just three
years before he had joined the News Bureau, he had been defeated as
an independent in Andros in the 1967 election by Sir Lynden Pindling.
Mr. Stevenson had helped to set up Sir Lynden as the party’s and the
country’s leader. Lynden Pindling, the kind of man that he was,
offered him that position. Later, he did a similar act of kindness
for H.M. Taylor.
Mr. Stevenson
and I were far apart in age but were fast friends. I would love to
hear the stories about Clarence Bain and what they did to win the
hearts and minds of Androsians. Later when I worked at ZNS, I
called him in 1979 to tell the country about Sir Milo Butler who
died in January of that year. He told the country how when Sir Milo
was lifted out of the House in 1965, the straw vendors came running
over to the House shouting “Come quick, they’re killing Milo Butler!
They’re killing Milo Butler!”
I would go sit
in the office and he would start telling the stories. Clarence Bain
used to always say and then it went on and on. And he told me that
in 1967 in the General Election that pitted him against his former
party and leader when asked by life long PLPs in Andros how they
should vote in the 1967 election, faced with a choice between a
friend and alliance to party and a larger cause, Mr. Stevenson said
he told them to vote as he had always taught them to vote. Vote PLP!
In 1973, as
the British flag lowered on 10th July and the Bahamian
flag went up for the first time, I was standing next to Mr.
Stevenson and I had my tape recorder. I recorded his first feelings
about the event; his voice was filled with emotion. He said he
thought that he would never see the day.
In 1977, Her
Majesty the Queen came to visit. I am a supporter of a republic and
not monarchy but we had good fun about it. When the Queen came in
to open Parliament in 1977, I declined the invitation to visit
Britannia for the press reception, but I later learned that prior to
her departure, the Queen had bestowed a personal honour that of
Member of Victorian Order. He was then Director of the Bahamas
Information Services that had been established by law in 1974. As he
placed away his belongings, the detritus of paper from the press
work for the successful visit in the trunk of the car, he showed me
the medal and again his voice was choked with emotion.
This is the
irony of that first generation of freedom fighters. They fought
against the injustice that they believed the colonial and local
powers had visited upon our country but they had a deep and abiding
respect for the soundness, decency and basic rectitude of the
British institutions and saw Britain as an ally in the cause of
freedom for the masses. In the development of public policy today,
it has caused me to take a more sensitive approach to the issue of
national honours and all the national institutions of our country.
I became the
editor of The Herald in 1981 and in succeeding him to what was a
different incarnation of the paper. The paper had ceased publishing
in the 1960s and was revived in 1976 under Michael Symonette and
Paul Drake. I began as a columnist in 1976 at the invitation of Mr.
Drake and later became its editor when it was revived again in 1981
for the 1982 general election. Paul Drake now deceased was a Jewish
American writer who had come to The Bahamas in the 1950s and who was
a protégé of Mr. Stevenson, a contemporary of Sir Arthur Foulkes.
In the 1981 version of the paper, I honed my skills as a political
writer and got the opportunity to work with Mark Beckford, now
deceased, Pandora Butler now with National Insurance Board and
Everett Bannister, its publisher also now deceased.
It also
provided me with an opportunity to work every day for the duration
of that campaign with the late Sir Lynden Pindling. The paper had
become necessary in a sea of unremitting hostility in the media to
the party, and once again its voice was needed to help us win. That
was the tradition of Cyril Stevenson.
Cyril
Stevenson who as editor of the earlier Herald searched the registry
of births and discovered that a prominent leader of the day who was
presumed to be of one race was in fact of mixed ancestry and he led
with the headline blazing across The Herald’s pages.
Mr. Stevenson
was devoted to his wife June and to all of his children but in the
years that I knew him a major concern was Michael and Clarke who
were still minors and their education. Having not been able to
study law himself, and convinced that part of the reason he had not
been as successful in politics as he should have been was because he
was not lawyer, he wanted one of his sons to study law, and in one
of those twists of fate, Michael Stevenson his son and I ended up
studying law in London together.
And he was
always coming up with a business idea to help his financial
situation. He came up in an era when politicians were not paid for
their work, and they had to sacrifice everything. The land in South
Beach was his inheritance for his children and it was to there that
he retired when he left the employ of the Government,
But he even
though he was no longer on the political scene, as late as five
years ago, he was there standing up for Bahamian heritage and
fighting to save Clifton. Michael reports that he was proud to see
his father in his T shirt, trying to save the land for generations
of unborn Bahamians.
Sir Clifford
Darling, the former Governor General often described politics as
being a slippery business. It is often a thankless task. Often
your family does not understand what drives you to it. But for those
who put their lives on the line in the service of the public there
can be no finer contribution to the national life. Cyril Stevenson
was that quintessential public man. He gave his all for this
country at a time when it was difficult to give and harder still to
succeed. How could he and the others have known what they were
beginning that fateful night in 1953?
The Minister
of Tourism was pointing out to me that this year on 29th
November marked the 50th anniversary of the election of
the Magnificent Six, the first PLP members of Parliament and the
march to majority rule and independence. Mr. Stevenson was part of
that magnificent six.
My
remembrances are national but more personal, the story of Mary
Mosley, the last Mosley owner of the Guardian who could not
understand how Mr. Stevenson could come back and report on a Bishop
of the Church of God. The traditionalist Ms. Mosley wanted to know
“Bishop? Where was he consecrated?” and refused to carry the story.
The contact
with him, the respect he had for me as a young man and his inclusion
of me in my life helped to give me the confidence to do what little
I do today to help to carry The Bahamas further. The very least I
can do today, is to share those memories with you, valued and very
personal memories and say to the generation that comes after me,
that your life's work will be immeasurably enhanced if you study
his example of selfless service, always reaching down with a helping
hand to the dispossessed and to the next generation.
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