The Tribune

“The Rev Nev and family flew out on Friday to the UK having been recalled by the Methodist Missionary Society at the request of the Synod here. It was all a most unsavoury controversy triggered by Sean McWeeny’s slightly-racial remarks at the QC speech day, and I found it impossible to give my whole sympathy to either the Rev Nev or his critics. My abiding impression is that after seeing some of the comments which were hurled back and forth I’m more than ever convinced that you don’t have to be a Christian to be a church member. About 12 of the QC staff have given in their notices to leave at the end of the school year. They went on strike for a day in protest at the Rev. Nev’s ousting.” - Jim Graves, Tribune editor.

By LARRY SMITH

THAT comment from the English editor of The Tribune, whose daughter, Jane, was one of my classmates at Queen’s College in the late 1960s, was from a personal communication written in March 1971.

It referred to a bitter, though relatively short-lived, controversy that swept the capital during a critical moment in the nation’s sociopolitical development.

The man who sparked it all was an activist cleric with a forceful personality by the name of Neville Stewart, a one-time chemist with a divinity degree from Cambridge who had been sent by the Methodist Missionary Society in London to accelerate the integration of mostly white Queen’s College.

Queen’s College had opened in 1890, on land sandwiched between Frederick and Charlotte Streets downtown. I was there for a single term in 1962. Today, the old campus is a parking lot, and historic Victoria Hall lies vacant.

For most of its history, QC was an elite school – it’s most eminent headmaster being an English Methodist named R. P. Dyer, who reigned from 1925 until 1959, as a pillar of the Bahamian establishment.

According to historian Gail Saunders, Dyer once observed that although Bahamian whites “desire earnestly that their children be educated separately from the children of the other race there have always been a certain number of coloured children” at QC. Dyer had spent time at a Methodist school in Ghana, and he was sent to Nassau to deal diplomatically with our racial issues.

The late Eugene Dupuch had been one of those middle class “coloured” children who had gained early access to QC, becoming a top lawyer in later life. In 1948 Dyer invited Dupuch to speak to students in Victoria Hall on “the need to begin to look at persons different from ourselves – especially in skin colour – with more Christian eyes, because big changes were coming”, as Rev Charles Sweeting (who was principal of QC from 1979 to 1993) put it. Sweeting was only eight years old at the time, but he recalls the event vividly.

Within days of Dupuch’s shocking speech, many QC parents began preparations for a new “whites only” school. This became St Andrew’s, with classes held initially in the Kirk hall before moving to the former Collins mansion on Shirley Street (now headquarters of the Antiquities Corporation), and to a new campus out east in 1971, as the school was finally integrated.

A handful of black students had been admitted to QC in the 1950s, including Nigel Bowe, Marilyn Bethel, Irene Cooper, Yvonne Marshall and Annette Bethel. And on his retirement in 1959, Rev Dyer was replaced by another British Methodist with orders to make QC more representative. Rev Geoffrey Litherland supervised the school’s move to a new campus off Village Road and remained head until 1964, when the local establishment pressured the British Methodists to remove him.

Litherland was replaced by Rev Stewart—a transformational though polarising leader—during a period of difficult and long overdue change, until he too was sent packing by an alliance of arch conservative whites and black PLPs in 1971. Rev Nev, as he was called by friend and foe alike, died last week in North Wales at the age of 86, following a long battle with Parkinson’s disease, hence this assessment of his six years in the Bahamas.

When Rev Nev arrived in Nassau, Roland Symonette had just assumed the post of premier under a new constitution that devolved executive authority from the British to a system of cabinet posts. And in the midst of his tenure at QC, an historic general election brought the predominantly black Progressive Liberal Party to power for the first time, under the leadership of Lynden Pindling.

Stewart developed a close friendship with Pindling’s ambitious Education Minister, Cecil Wallace Whitfield, who was impatient to expand and improve opportunities for the long neglected black majority. In fact, at one point it was widely rumoured that Whitfield would appoint Stewart as director of education.

According to one of his contemporaries at the school, “Stewart was consumed by his dislike of the social and political injustice he observed when he first came to Nassau, to which he felt QC had contributed in its early history, and he enthusiastically embraced majority rule in 1967.”

In Rev Charles Sweeting’s words, he was “an activist of the highest order, impatient to see the changes in QC and in the nation take place – and so the level of turmoil certainly increased as he spoke, and worked, toward full integration.”

Stewart’s vision and drive were to transform QC from a small, mostly white, academically elitist school to a large, comprehensive, fully integrated institution catering to all levels of ability at affordable tuition rates.

He doubled the school population during his tenure (to 1700 students), handed out scholarships to those who could not pay, and financed new classrooms and facilities. By most accounts, the local Methodist Church and its wealthy patrons contributed little or nothing to this massive development.

Earl Deveaux, a classmate of mine who became a cabinet minister in the 1990s, recalled that Rev Nev had hit The Bahamas at a time when the world was seething with change yet blacks were still barred from the Savoy Theatre in Nassau or from entering Ebenezer Church by a common door.

“His blunt criticism from the pulpit, at assembly, and in the classroom, challenged and inspired a generation to get involved and to exit comfort zones of race, class, island and country,” Deveaux said.

Roger Kelty, the Scottish teacher who acted as headmaster when Stewart was fired, called him “a true visionary with a powerful personality allied to the inspirational qualities that all leaders of men possess, and he was a leader at QC make no mistake. I shared his aspirations with regard to a comprehensive system of education at the school, and he was the architect of its successful implementation. I respected his courage and conviction, and admired his achievements in consolidating the work of Rev. Litherland.”

But not long after Deveaux and I graduated from QC in 1969, Rev Nev became embroiled in a titanic political struggle that was intimately connected to a simultaneous rupture in the ruling PLP, which ultimately led to the formation of the Free National Movement.

The split widened slowly. In July 1969, Whitfield complained publicly that he did not have the resources to carry out his vital education mission effectively. At about the same time, Pindling made his famous “bend or break” speech in Freeport. Both events caused tension within the PLP cabinet.

As the economy nose-dived and Freeport faltered, these tensions grew. And some within the PLP were increasingly uneasy about what they regarded as the development of a Pindling personality cult. Doris Johnson, for example, started something called “‘the Leader Movement”, and it appeared that Pindling was out to cull any potential rivals.

These tensions reached a crisis level in the summer of 1970, and at the PLP convention in October there was a public showdown. Whitfield resigned and the party split into warring factions – with Whitfield and others being physically attacked by Pindling supporters. In November, the split was formalised after a vote of no confidence in the House of Assembly (which Pindling won by only four votes).

In the midst of all this, QC Head Boy Sean McWeeney delivered a radical speech at a school assembly in mid-November, which (though not sanctioned by Stewart) angered the conservative Methodist community and convinced many that Stewart had to go. McWeeney called QC “a seething mass of racial prejudice”, and condemned the lack of a Bahamian curriculum and the absence of Bahamian teachers.

A Bahamian curriculum was only a distant dream at that point, and there was widespread recognition that we had nowhere near enough qualified teachers to do the job that needed to be done. In fact, the political appointment of poorly qualified teachers over the years contributed significantly to the reduction of the country’s education system to the condition it is in today.

Following Stewart’s death last week, I asked McWeeney (who was once a senior PLP cabinet minister) to reflect on that period of his life: “I was sorry to hear of Rev. Nev’s passing,” he told me. “He was a major contributor to the development of the modern system of education in The Bahamas, not only through his innovative policies at QC but also through the great influence he had over Cecil Wallace-Whitfield during his time as minister of education in the first PLP administration.

“Of particular note, Rev Nev spurred the racial integration of QC and dismantled the social elitism that had historically marked the school. He achieved this mainly through the liberal supply of scholarships to children from poor, black families both here and in the Family Islands. Rev Nev was an outspoken individual on a wide range of political and social issues – rare, then as now, for an expatriate; even rarer for a white, British Methodist minister of the 1960s.”

By the time of McWeeney’s speech, Rev Edwin Taylor had taken over as chairman of the local Methodist district. He was a strong supporter of Pindling and the PLP, but he made common cause with the arch-conservative white Methodists in order to get rid of Stewart. The underlying issue was Stewart’s collaboration with Whitfield, and many parents, in a bid to remove QC from Methodist control by setting up an independent governing body for the school.

As McWeeney put it, “I have no doubt that after November 1970 Rev Nev would not have been favourably regarded by the leaders of the PLP. And given the climate at the time, I seriously doubt that he could have counted on getting a work permit for any new venture or for any new teaching assignment he might have wanted to pursue. Foreigners were kept on a pretty short leash back then, and with Cecil removed from power, Rev Nev would have had few friends left up there on Mount Olympus.”

During the months of December, January and February (1970-71) the school was in turmoil, with students demonstrating in support of Rev Nev, teachers threatening to resign, and parents seeking to either make QC independent, or set up a new school with Stewart in charge. At every meeting there was a verbal slugging match between pro- and anti-Stewart factions, until finally, in March 1971, he was bundled out of the country.

At Taylor’s insistence, Roger Kelty took over as acting head for six months until the arrival of Stewart’s replacement – a Welshman named Hayden Middleton who remained as headmaster until 1979, when Charles Sweeting famously became the school’s first Bahamian principal.

“It is a shame that Rev Nev was never accorded the recognition and credit he deserved,” Kelty told me. “He was treated unfairly by the Methodist Church, whose action midway through the school year showed scant regard for the welfare of the students and staff. On the other hand, he left a divisive legacy that continues to this day within the Methodist Church, and indeed within the populace at large old enough to remember that time.”

Another classmate of mine, Pericles Maillis, whose father – Alexander – was a vituperative opponent of the Rev Nev, had this to say: “He profoundly influenced our lives. What he set out to do for all of us was to give us good character and mould us to think and see through masks and mirages in business and political life, to become highly educated, to make us potential serving leaders for a just society and a better world without losing faith in God. I remember him every day with honour and love for the education he gave us.”

The last word goes to Earl Deveaux, who maintained a close friendship with Stewart until his death last week: “He challenged the Bahamian establishment of the Methodist Synod, the last of the UBP, and the young PLP with his sometimes acerbic and sharp observations. He paid by being fired and deported. He gained by the lasting impact he left on all he touched.”

What do you think? Send comments to larry@tribunemedia.net

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