Many tributes have been paid to Dudley Thompson for his work in politics and for his efforts to place Africa at the centre of our consciousness. But it is as a lawyer, which constituted a big portion of his life, that I remember him best.

Dudley first came to my notice in the mid-1950s when he returned home after his successes in east Africa, where he had adopted the nickname “Burning Spear” during his sojourn in the colonies of Tanganyika and Kenya. While attending high school I stayed with relatives on Belmont Road in east Kingston. The postman would occasionally deliver letters bearing the same house number and street addressed to one Dudley Thompson. On a couple of occasions a visitor coming in from the airport would stop at our house, thinking it was his.

We of course had heard about the Mau Mau, a militant group demanding that the British leave Kenya. They were descended from the Kikuyu Central Association which was formed in the 1920s to oppose the settlers in the White Highlands, who the Kikuyu people said had stolen their land. By the 1950s the Mau Mau had become very nationalist and engaged in a campaign in which 2000 Africans and 230 Europeans were killed. The British unleashed a counter-insurgency operation in which they incarcerated some 100,000 Kikuyu in detention camps.

Dudley had met the Mau Mau leader, Jomo Kenyatta, while studying in England after World War II. Soon after graduation, he had gone to Tanganyika (which later merged with Zanzibar and became Tanzania) and practised law there and in neighbouring Kenya. When the British detained Kenyatta in 1952, Dudley put together an international legal team to defend him. As it turned out, the British didn’t release Kenyatta until 1961, when he was named leader of the Kenya African National Union and led his country to independence two years later.

Now back home, the Burning Spear settled in to his law practice and became an active member of the People’s National Party. Dudley wasn’t always in sync with the party’s old guard. In the 1960s when he engaged in the frustrating exercise of running unsuccessfully against Edward Seaga in West Kingston, many of his supporters felt that the party didn’t care much about them. I once witnessed this resentment boiling over at a party meeting at the Ward Theatre. Standing at one corner of the stage, I watched as bottles and other missiles flew from the crowd straight at the old guard seated on the stage. Fortunately, nobody was hurt, and Dudley was eventually able to pacify his followers. He would go on to become a central figure in Michael Manley’s PNP.

It was during the infamous JBC strike of 1964 that I met Dudley. Some of us strikers, frustrated with the lack of progress in the strike, launched a campaign to stir things up. Half a dozen of us decided to kick the affair off by lying across the gate one morning as the management staff and the scabs who supported them came to work. The constables, many of whom we had got to know well over the weeks on the picket line, treated us with courtesy. They ordered us to move, and were greeted both by silence and lack of movement. So they lifted us up, two by two, and moved us to the side. After a while a hard-nosed senior officer came over and ordered the constables to arrest anybody else who lay across the gate.

So it was that we ended up in the holding pen at the Half Way Tree Police Station to wait several hours until our union leader, Michael Manley, came to post bail. In time, we appeared at the Traffic Court to answer the charges before a judge with a reputation for throwing the book at anyone who appeared before him. Dudley was assigned to represent us, but he was in another court completing a case. The first of our group to be called up were Hu Gentles and Leslie Thomas, who pleaded guilty. As the rest of us waited to hear our names, Dudley showed up and was furious at what had happened. He approached the judge and asked that the case be re-opened. The judge responded that the case was already disposed of, and both Dudley and his clients were out of luck.

Now, a lawyer needs not only to know the law, but has to be able to think on his feet. This is where Dudley demonstrated his nimbleness and legal acumen. He told the judge that since the court was still in session, the rules allowed any case already heard to be re-opened. The judge acceded and Dudley argued that the case shouldn’t even be in that court, since the offences the defendants were charged with had occurred on private property and not on the roadway, and therefore were not under the Road Traffic Law. As it turned out, the cases were re-assigned to the Resident Magistrate’s court at Half Way Tree where a young lawyer who had just recently returned from England successfully argued that the charges had no merit. That advocate was PJ Patterson.

Our little island has produced many fine lawyers, and in the course of my career I have been privileged to observe some of them in the courtroom. Unfortunately, I came along too late to have seen Norman Manley at work in that forum, but Dudley was cast in that mould. Not only was he skilled in the law and legal procedure, he was very good at courtroom dramatics and was an extremely quick study.

One time he had a case in Montego Bay but had been so busy with his other activities that he was unable to read the brief. It was his custom to get someone else to drive him on out-of-town trips, and on the day of this case he paid no attention to his driver as he ensconced himself in the back seat. While his silver Mercedes sped towards Montego Bay, Dudley studied the case and by the time he got there he was able to sweep successfully through it, much to the relief of his client.

In all his activities, Dudley was motivated by the needs and rights of his fellow citizens. He once told me a story about his days in the Royal Air Force during World War II. He was stationed at a base in Scotland one winter when a new batch of recruits from the Caribbean had just come in. Early on the day after their arrival, the sergeant-major opened the door of their barracks, bringing in a blast of frigid air and announcing in the customary manner, “Wakey, wakey, chaps! Time to get going!”

“Wakey wakey, you r^^s!” came a sleepy voice from a top bunk, followed by a flung boot which bounced off the sergeant-major’s chest. The thrower was brought up on charges of insubordination, and his comrades asked Flight-Lieutenant Dudley Thompson to intercede on the man’s behalf, since he had been around and understood the ways of the military. He argued that since the men had just come from a place with a completely different climate, they should be allowed a period of acclimatisation. The man was let off with a token penalty.

Dudley Thompson was a man of short physical stature, but his characteristics – faults as well as assets – were huge.

keeble.mack@sympatico.ca