THE People’s National Party (PNP) is expected to give due recognition to founder OT Fairclough during this year’s celebration of its 75th anniversary.

Patterson credited Fairclough, WA Domingo, and HP Jacobs with founding the party in 1938, but declared that Norman Manley was the party’s “founding leader”.

“Norman Manley actually said, in his speech, ‘I am not the founder of the party’. It’s in his text. He said, ‘I was drafted to answer the response for national leadership of the progressive forces of the country at this time,” the former prime minister told the weekly Jamaica Observer Monday Exchange.

He said that Manley, as the first president of the party, is considered its founding leader.

However, Patterson denied that Fairclough has been ignored, while suggesting that he could explain it better than anyone else could.

“Fairclough never claimed to be socialist. Fairclough never claimed to be a man of the people. Fairclough really belonged to the black aristocracy: That’s my view, which I think any proper research will confirm,” he explained.

“Fairclough was quite content, having founded the party, to make his contribution to the party largely through (the) Public Opinion (newspaper). To inform the public as to what was necessary to complete the transition of the country into nationhood,” he added.

Patterson also insisted that the PNP never sought to distance itself from Fairclough because of his “black aristocracy” image, and that he remained as treasurer of the party until his death. However, he conceded that the founding role of Fairclough, a Calabar High School old boy, has not been fully recognised by the party.

“One would have to say it is partly how the political process has been perceived, where you concentrate primarily on the leader and the people who are elected,” he pointed out.

He also noted, that Vernon Arnett, another Calabar old boy and the PNP’s first general secretary and second minister of finance, did not seek political office, either, but that it was thrust upon him following the death of NN Nethersole in 1959.

“It was a movement, and not everybody went into that movement seeking political office. Some were content to serve at differing levels, including advancing intellectual thought.

He noted that while Phillip Sherlock never identified himself politically with the party, “he was very, very influential in the kind of thinking that would have inspired the national movement which, at that time, was led by the People’s National Party”.

“So, one of the things that we have got to get through, in the whole commemoration of the 75th anniversary, is that to be in politics don’t necessarily mean standing for a seat as councillor or MP or seeking job as minister. You are simply seeing to contribute to the nation and regarding politics as an essential vehicle through which that contribution can be made.

“But, if you are saying that something should be done to perpetuate the contribution of OT Fairclough, unreservedly, yes. I think that that is one of the things that we should do during the 75th anniversary,” Patterson said. “I agree 100 per cent, somebody like OT Fairclough shouldn’t be lost in history”.