MONTEGO BAY, St James — ATTORNEY Clayton Morgan is planning to ask Sylvia Lyn the driving force behind a five-year effort to exhume Allan ‘Father Coombs, one of St James most celebrated politicians to reconsider her decision to have him reinterred in Manchester.

“I understand and respect her will to bury him in her hometown, but really, he belongs in St James, so I am going to at least try to prevail upon her to change her mind,” he told the Observer West.

Lyn, whom Father Coombs almost adopted when she was a little girl, has announced plans to exhume the politician — who was given a pauper’s burial in the backbushes of the May Pen cemetery forty years ago — and rebury him at the upscale Oak Lawn Memorial Garden in Mandeville.

She has already obtained the relevant permits from the municipal authorities, and hopes that the event will take place next month.

However, Morgan — who in 2006 spearheaded a failed effort by a group of influential politicians, including Headley Cunningham and former House Speaker, Violet Neilson, to obtain permission from the Kingston and St Andrew Co-operation to exhume Coombs' remains and have them reinterred in St James — said he didn’t think it was too late for a change of heart.

Coombs started the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union along with St William Grant and Alexander Bustamante. He later started the Jamaica Workers and Transport Union, the first union to have an islandwide network, and set the pace for the labour movement's success in the 1938 riots. He also served as member of parliament for North West St James and as Communication and Works Minister under the People's National Party administration.

He died on July 15, 1969, at the age of 68, seven years after premier Norman Manley fired him.

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