If Fae Ellington could turn back the hands of time, she would probably have asked to be placed somewhere other than in the glamorous but troublesome world of Jamaican media. But she had placed a fateful telephone call to Leonie Forbes, her teacher at drama school who was now head of the JBC Radio Two, telling her she needed a job after storming off her last one in a fit of anger. Forbes promptly buzzed Dennis Hall, the chief announcer, on his extension and asked him to speak with Ellington. The die was cast.

It was a nervous, doubtful Fae Ellington who turned up at the JBC. Timidly, she had asked for a behind-the-scenes job and when Hall noted that she was a graduate of the School of Drama and mentioned an audition, Ellington almost fainted.

“Mi tun fool,” she remembers. Hall led her to a radio studio and had her read a package of two or three news stories, the weather, some death announcements, a few live commercials and an item with classical names like Chopin, Bach, Wagner. Ellington passed with flying colours, despite her initial nervousness. This was real talent, Hall thought. He was sure she could go further.

When he invited her to accompany him to a television studio, “mi dead immediately”, she jokes. That audition was memorable for the fact that she made “a silly error”, followed by a knee-jerk expletive. But Hall continued and she was given three interviews at different levels, before getting a final grilling.

Among the stars of the JBC

Ellington was taken on as a trainee announcer and went through a thorough three-month in-house programme, before being allowed to do time signals. Several weeks later, she did the station ID, then moved from department to department to learn how the entire station hung together. This was 1974 and the general manager was Wycliffe Bennett, the renowned master of fine arts. In her training batch were two other notables, John Jones and Milton Blake.

She recalls that during her training, technical operators like Ossie Harvey, Algie Carby and Harry Ashman were very helpful to her, as were Rupert Linton; M G Robinson, the father of Tony ‘T Robb’ Robinson; Norman Marsh; Patrick Thomas; Mikey Whyte; Ruddy Boreland; Milford Edwards and Michael Chambers. At the time, she says, announcers saw themselves as superior to technical operators and she worked to break that down, insisting that everyone was equally important. Her understanding of technical operations came out of that early relationship.

She also worked with on-air personnel and producers like Dennis Hall; Uriel Aldridge; Al Scott; Jeremy Verity; Gladstone Wilson; Beverley Cole; Elaine Wint; John Wakeling; Charles Lewin; Winston Williams; Errol ‘E T’ Thompson and Winston Barnes. In the newsroom were heavyweights the likes of Hector Bernard; Consie Walters; Errol Lee; Carl Campbell; Colin Campbell; Monica Hawthorne-Campbell and Alison Symes.

The year 1974 was also notable for her first meeting with her father, Exford Joseph Ellington. She was 19 years old. He had left Clarendon and migrated to Canada before she was born and was coming home on a visit. She drove to the Norman Manley Airport to pick him up, taking with her for support, Jasmine Johnson now Campbell, the current vice-principal of St Hugh’s. Trying to behave as if his absence did not phase her, Fae gave herself away when, in reacting to something he said, she let loose a fat Jamaican bad word, which shocked him to no end. In time, the father-daughter relationship would improve.

Ellington’s first full radio programme was The Bamboo Lounge featuring music and interviews aired in the afternoon. She did that between 1975 and 1978. She became the first woman to host the morning show Morning Ride which deejay Yellowman immortalised in song, after an appearance on the show. She recalls Barrington “Barry G” Gordon working as an able production assistant on Morning Ride. Gordon, calling himself the Boogieman, was later to become one of Jamaica’s biggest stars of the airwaves. Ellington remembers him as a hard worker who was very innovative and who would spend time researching and preparing for his show.

At the BBC in London

In September 1977, Ellington went to the London-based British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) with which the JBC, through the British Council, had a four-month training arrangement in production. “It was a great experience and I felt very privileged.” She made a proud mental note of the fact that the BBC had said the people from JBC who came there had usually been well rounded. The training included a four-day stint in Scotland producing programmes on drama, outside broadcasts, magazines and making sound effects with state-of-the-art equipment.

While at the BBC, Ellington was interviewed on the BBC World Service about the happenings in Jamaica. At the time, democratic socialist Michael Manley was growing in international stature. She learnt some important lessons from that interview. She was paid to appear as an interviewee and notes that that is still not a part of the Jamaican media culture. Two years ago, when Jamaica celebrated its 40th anniversary of Independence, she along with Pat Cumper and Luke Williams, were interviewed again by the BBC. Not only were they paid, but there was a contract, they were sent copies of all transcripts of discussions and e-mails about the interview, and chauffer-driven to and from the studio. This compares with a producer in Jamaica calling to invite a potential guest to do an interview a few hours before a show on the day of the show, giving them little or no time to prepare, no pay and leaving them to make their own arrangements to get to and from the studio.

“I have a lot of respect for the BBC. Many of the things I see happening on radio and TV here could not happen at the BBC,” Ellington bemoans. “If you exceed your time, a computer cuts you off air and goes onto the next time signal or programmes. Too many presenters here talk across the break. We have very little regard for time and so we come across as unprofessional. The BBC and JBC taught me thoroughness. There are no perfect shows, but we have to strive for excellent shows/presentations,” she lectures.

“We must be our harshest critics,” she continues. “We should not be satisfied with ‘Cho, it awright’. That tells me that something is terribly wrong with it.” She would go back to the BBC in 1996/97 to do a course called Training to Train in a wide variety of areas.

The politics of Michael Manley

Ellington would have been right for the BBC interview. She had, like many of her peers, been taken with the politics of Michael Manley. She had grown up in the 1960s which for her was the defining decade for Jamaica. Women had started to assert themselves and people were talking about their blackness: Nina Simone produced the anthem, Young, Gifted and Black. At St Hugh’s, her third form investigated socialism and communism and she recalls going to the University of the West Indies in 1967 to discuss with people like Ralph Gonsalves, then president of the Guild of Undergraduates and now prime minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines. Some people in the middle classes, she recalls, wanted to identify with the poor. Several of them started growing locks and embracing the Rasta movement and the black power movement, at the height of which came the Walter Rodney Riots.

Ten years later, Manley was articulating the situation of the poor. That stirred in her the political consciousness that had started in Smithville, Clarendon where she was born to a mother who supported the People’s National Party (PNP). At one point, she says, she had contemplated going into representational politics. “But I realised that I could not tek some man with mesh shirt on the corner, saying to me ‘let off suppm’. She was eventually approached to run in the 1997 general elections but turned down the invitation, on grounds that she did not have the kind of money it takes to run elections in Jamaica.

A cruel October morning

All this time, the JBC was home for Ellington. The spirit of camaraderie was legendary. On some nights, Ellington and the crew played scrabble all night till daylight. She was happy there. The long days did not matter. It seemed as if everything was perfect. Until one cruel morning in October 1981. Ellington had just got up to get ready to go to the station for her Morning Ride show. Her girlfriend was also up at the same time. It was dawn and the community was still asleep. She heard the familiar toot of the horn that signalled the arrival of the JBC driver, Rupert Campbell. Moments later, in rushed two armed young men. They had first subdued the driver and tied him up before breaking in on the women. They had come to rape and by extension to plunder the happy souls of two wonderful women; how could these wretched creatures not have known it!

Mustering every ounce of strength not to panic, Ellington kept her cool and calmly asked her assailant: “Do you have a sister?” That act of complete courage took away the essence of that stolen pleasure and brought an end to the foul deed.

As despicable as the event was, it was to demonstrate the deep reserves of character that evolved from innocent Smithville. While unkind people made derisive remarks meant to deepen the pain – one female caller was especially cruel the day she returned to work – Ellington talked bravely about the incident. It was a time when women bore the pain of rape in silence, rather than face the shame in public. Soon, from out of the woodwork, many women emerged to seek out her courage and find solace to deal with their own hurt from similar attacks by dastardly men. On television with moderator June Hines, she shared openly with her audience. And as she shared and counselled, her own healing began. “Like everything else, if you allow yourself to heal, you can heal,” she says now.

The incident also brought out the milk of human kindness. General manager Dr Joyce Robinson gave her a month’s compassionate leave. Her friends rallied to cushion the blow: people like Leonie Forbes, Easton Lee, Ruth Hoshing, Dennis Morrison Q C, Phyllis McFarlane, David Montague and a host of other very supportive individuals.

Nun raped, killed in New York

Ellington’s healing was helped when she took friends’ advice and went to New York to get away mentally from the ordeal. Upon her arrival there, the big news was that a nun had just been raped and stabbed to death. It could happen anywhere!

Back in Jamaica, she resumed her busy schedule. A marriage proposal helped to roll back the dark clouds. She had met British-born Ian Smellie one morning in the JBC yard and was struck by the brightness of this police detective, but nothing happened. She met him again sometime after and a relationship was ignited. The couple got married at a private wedding in Easton Lee’s garden, with Rev Byron Chambers doing the honours. Mrs Lee baked the ‘wedding cake’ which was the famous Jamaican ‘toto’. Not long after, she got pregnant with Stuart Jonathan Smellie who now lives in England. But Ellington and her husband were poles apart in personality and the relationship did not last long. He eventually returned to England.

Tight-fisted media

Media in Jamaica had always been notorious for its low salaries. In 1982, now pregnant, Ellington felt the need to increase her earnings and contemplated resigning from the JBC to freelance. The station relied heavily on her and even when she went on a six-month maternity leave, sent for her to help with the preparations for the live broadcast of big state visits to Jamaica by United States president Ronald Reagan, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II and President Carsten of Germany. She remembers breastfeeding newborn son, Stuart “in front of everybody at the meetings”. But then JBC was family.

Shortly after giving birth, Ellington resigned from the JBC and started to freelance. She was doing the Morning Ride on radio, anchoring the evening TV news and presenting a half-hour daily festival programme produced by Don Bucknor. At the same time, she was working with LNCK, the advertising firm. In 1984, she enrolled in the one-year Diploma programme at the Caribbean Institute of Mass Communications (Carimac), which would open up new opportunities for training. Alma Mock Yen recommended her to teach radio announcing and presentation at the Carimac Summer School starting in 1985. She has been doing that since and in addition now teaches in the regular diploma and degree programmes, all the time still freelancing at JBC, regularly gracing the theatre stage and emceeing large numbers of events.

Rise and shine, it’s ‘Morning Time’

In 1986, she was asked by JBC to host their morning television show, Morning Time. The combination of theatre, radio and television vastly increased her visibility, making her today easily one of the most recognised names and faces in Jamaica. She credited the festival programmes with Bucknor as pivotal, saying “people like to see and hear themselves on radio and television”. It took Ellington a long time to see herself as the icon Jamaicans say she is. “I still see myself as the country girl who takes up her crocus bag and machete and go to the bushes each morning. But I feel happy when people meet me and say ‘you speak and sound as you do on radio and TV’.” And she thanks Louise Bennett for pioneering the use of patois. Ellington uses both very comfortably, and appropriately, she insists.

Between 1986 and 1991, she worked as a sales agent with First Life Insurance, considerably extending the length of her days with runs to places like Lucea, Hanover to return to anchor TV evening news. To keep fit, she became a fixture at the Holborn Gym owned by O T Fairclough, the PNP politician. After First Life, she joined Unimotors to set up their sales department, recalling that she used to take licence applications to the Trade Board, then headed by a younger Phillip Paulwell.

TVJ needed fresh young faces

After Unimotors, Ellington made a huge leap. She started her own company, Strictly Speaking Limited, followed by Fae Ellington Communications offering training to companies in microphone techniques, emceeing and culture; teaching at the UWI, broadcasting programmes and theatre appearances. But she finds time to do voluntary work for a wide variety of organisations, remaining true to the spirit of Mae Williams. She hosted My Place on KLAS-FM and can still be seen on Jamaica Information Service TV presenting the news.

Her credits also include co-hosting Nationwide with Cliff Hughes at the beginning in 1997, when the two dubbed themselves “Punch and Spice (Fae)”. And just before that, at the JBC, she and Errol Lee hosted the news and current affairs show, The World at Five. Her last days at JBC were filled with remorse. She witnessed the fiasco which involved a change of name from JBC to SSTV “which reminded of the Nazi symbol”. The station was eventually forced to change that name to TVJ. Worse, she and several other stalwarts, like Lindy Delapenha and Darcy Tulloch, who had served the JBC for ‘donkey years’, were unceremoniously informed one sad day that the station needed “fresh young faces”. “And here I was all this time thinking that my face was young and fresh,” Ellington laughs.

Alan and Dorraine

But her media troubles were not over. In 1998, she was invited by RJR to sit-in with Alan Magnus while Dorraine Samuels was on maternity leave. Ellington brought her usual flair to the show. Near the end of the stint, word got out that there was a plan to transfer Samuels to TV and keep Ellington on the radio show. Samuels, she says, felt that it was a move to get her off the show. But she knew of no such plan though she admits that someone had suggested speculatively that Samuels would be excellent for TV. At one stage, she says, her co-host Alan stopped speaking to her, forcing her to complain to the management of the station. To this day, she and Samuels have not spoken, she adds.

Ellington is pained as she relates this episode. Whatever the truth of the incident, Samuels’ pretty face now lights up the screen of TVJ in the Prime Time news slot, although she remains with Alan in the morning.

And Ellington’s journey continues. She cherishes the many ways her nation and people have honoured her, including the Order of Distinction (Officer class) for contribution to the performing arts; the bronze Musgrave Medal for contribution to broadcasting and the Distinguished Past Student Award from her alma mater, St Hugh’s. There are roads not yet walked, trophies not yet claimed by this brilliant daughter of the Clarendon soil. And despite the rising mountain of achievement, there is always the clearest hint that the best days of Fae Audrey Ellington are yet to come.

Next week: Kingsley Cooper – A thing of beauty is a joy forever

Send comments on this interview to desal@cwjamaica.com

Your View of the Interview

Fae Ellington

. I have been reading your articles with great interest and enthusiasm. I have found them of the highest quality and reflective of the high quality we come to expect of you. I have been drawn to comment on this article because in it there lies my quintessential Jamaican woman. Fae has been a role model for years. In a lot of ways, her life is reflective of mine.

Our rural origin; humble family background; absence of father from parenting; triumph over adversity and a passion for education. Fae taught me at the University of the West Indies at Carimac and when she found out that I was blind, it was a major challenge for her at the outset. But she designed creative ways to ensure that I was fully on board with whatsoever she was doing. Her kindness and compassion have resulted in a lasting friendship and in my capacity as minister of state for welfare, I do not make any major decision without consulting Auntie Fae. Long live this Jamaican Queen.

Senator Floyd Morris

femorris@cwjamaica.com

. Thank you for that great interview. I think you captured the essence of Fae. I always thought she was a wonderful person whose courage I admired. She was also a valued friend of my late husband, Peter Scarlett, so I have continued to follow her “journeys” through the years. I look forward to reading and enjoying the rest of the interview.

Millicent Scarlett

Seattle

MillicentS@SeedIP.com

. I have been reading your columns for quite a while. You have been unfailing in your presentations, no matter what the story. I especially liked the article on Fae Ellington. I’ve found it both touching and inspiring. I am a son of Smithville myself, and a very close friend of Miss Mary “Mae” Williams. Fae has always been one of my role models. She never ceases to amaze me with her vigour and versatility. I am certain she has touched the lives of many Jamaicans, in spite of gender. She is living proof that nothing is unachievable if you set your mind to it.

Clive R Peck

Zugdidi, Georgia

titaray2000@yahoo.com

. The fact that at the precise moment that my husband was reading aloud (with relish) your article on Fae Ellington, my mother (the former Gerda Edwards…a distant cousin of Fae’s from Smithville) was calling me on the phone to tell me to read the said article, is testimony of how much Fae is revered in our family. Thank you for a fabulous article so far. You’ve, in a very interesting way, managed to present the woman honestly, while giving readers juicy titbits on the times in which she grew. Bravo! I enjoyed, too, the name dropping along the way. Found myself thinking, ‘Oh, they went to school together, eh? No wonder they are all achievers!’ I only have one question. Do I really have to wait until next week to get Part 2? I could proofread it for you before you print it (wink)!

Pat Meikle

Pmeikle_@hotmail.com

. Been loving your articles. Good work.

Marcia Erskine

merskine@anngel.com.jm