Barbara Gloudon: Behind G-G rumour a national admiration
Part One of the The Desmond Allen Interviews looking at the life of veteran journalist, broadcaster, and playwright Barbara Gloudon, first published in the Jamaica Observer on May 9, 2004.
Some years ago, from out of our perennially active Jamaican rumour mill, there emerged a story that Barbara Gloudon would become the Most Hon Barbara Joy Gloudon, ON, OJ, OD, governor general of Jamaica, and thus create history as the first woman to be so named.
What gave birth to that rumour? To this day, Gloudon has no clue. People alleged that it was first uttered by Wilmot “Mutty” Perkins on his talk show. But she can’t confirm that, she says. However it got started, the thing spread like fire in a canepiece. Congratulatory comments came from far and near. To scotch the rumour, Gloudon turned to well-honed humour, telling people that she would only take the job if she could “get to wear a big hat and nice gloves, like The Queen”.
Friends of hers would say that’s just typical Barbara. But underlying the claim is a national admiration for a very spiritual woman who has used her vast talent as a journalist and writer to enrich her nation, and her natural humour to bring laughter to her people, through the annual pantomime. That is why The University of the West Indies outdid itself by conferring on her the Honorary Doctor of Letters.
If journalists today were to nominate a dean of the profession, Barbara Gloudon would be on the extremely short list. For her, it has been a lifetime of devotion to a craft she has loved. She entered journalism — at The Gleaner — in the early 1950s, as a mere slip of a girl. In those days, journalism was a mean profession, and the editorial department not a place for the faint-hearted. Tough men turned to drink and romanticised it — ‘Lawyers are called to the bar but journalists are called from the bar’. Only the strong survived.
Pretty and extroverted, Gloudon waltzed into the place and won over admiring young men and grumpy old men alike, none more notable than the editor-in-chief, Theodore Sealy, whom they nicknamed “The Bull”, so fearsome was he.
But as Gloudon revelled in the attention and the relative innocence of the times, unknown to her, a time was coming when The Gleaner itself would turn on her with a vengeance, violently rocking her hitherto safe world and plunging her into a personal crisis of huge proportions. She would exit The Gleaner, not in a blaze of glory, but “in pain and torture”.
Now, a half-century later and a communication consultant, Gloudon has endured where perhaps no other woman has. But it all started in the rustic hill country of Malvern, St Elizabeth, and, like all good stories, we must begin at the beginning.
I am becoming my mother
Gloudon’s maternal grandfather, David Harvey, was a man already accustomed to the spotlight. He hailed from a district which was named after his family. It was called Harvey River, located three miles from Lucea, the Hanover capital. He was a catechist in the Anglican Church which meant that he must have been able to read well, unusual for a relatively poor man at the time.
David and Margaret Harvey had five beautiful daughters. It was the custom of the times that villages played each other at the ballground and at one such competition the girls were all decked out in their fineries. Vivian Marcus Goodison from Malvern had come, resplendent in cricket flannel, maroon jacket and beret, to play against Harvey River. He saw Doris Harvey, one of the five sisters, and couldn’t take his eyes off her. In his heart he vowed he had to get her. This was the scheme: Goodison ‘forgot’ his beret when he left the village. The next week, he drove miles ‘to fetch his beret’, but it was really to feast his eyes on Doris. He kept going back until his persistence paid off. In 1933, they got married and lived in Malvern.
Barbara Goodison was the first of nine children born to Doris and Vivian Goodison. Two of her more well-known siblings are Vaughn “Bunny” Goodison, the musicologist, and Lorna Goodison, the poet who might best be remembered for her seminal work, I am becoming my mother, which she wrote in honour of their mother, Doris. The others are Howard; Carmen; Kingsley and Karl, the twins; Keith and Nigel, a skilful footballer who played for Jamaica.
Life was typically rural. However, her mother was a gifted seamstress who at one time sewed uniforms for Bethlehem Teachers’ College run by the Moravians, and her father was the chauffeur for the manager of the Barclay’s Bank (now National Commercial Bank) branch in Black River, the St Elizabeth, capital. That meant he would be among the elite who drove a motorcar then. Gloudon remembers her father as a proud man who was “poor but did not know poverty”.
In search of greener pastures
His wife earned the name “Miss Goody”, because she had a heart for the poor and fed many. She loved books and encouraged her young ones to read everything. Barbara Goodison grew up in this environment. There was a helper to look after her and her younger brother while their parents were out. But the garage her father was by now operating was not doing well, and in search of greener pastures, the family packed up and left for Kingston.
The house where they first lived in Kingston, at 71 Duke Street, is today a lawyer’s office. Gloudon says “If I had the money I’d buy it, my little gingerbread house”. Life in Kingston was a big step down from Malvern. Her mother often cried, although she would comfort herself and the children by saying, “We are just passing through this.” But her father retained his pride and when he worked with the telephone company, installing phones in offices, he was known to enter an office as an equal to the people there. “When he died, one of the first persons to call was Abe Issa, patriarch of the Issa household, who described him as ‘A fine gentleman’,” Gloudon recalls.
Sad news
Young Barbara was sent to the nearby St George’s Girls School where educators like Enid Holding, mother of the great West Indies cricketer Michael Holding, and Doris McPherson made positive impressions on her. She recalls an incident one day when she was reading a book in the math class. She didn’t like math. The teacher confiscated the book and put it away in a cupboard. When her back was turned, Gloudon retrieved the book and resumed reading. “The teacher gave me quite a beating for that bit of audacity. Then they sent for my mother who gave me another beating on top of that.”
From St George’s Girls she won a place at St Andrew High School for Girls, snatching the scholarship for Kingston, one of 14 parish scholarships awarded that year. On the first day of school, she recounts, her father presented her to the headmistress, Margaret Gartshore, “as if he was doing the school a favour”.
At St Andrew High her forte was literature, French and Latin. One teacher who stood out was Jean Watson, who taught literature and who had them doing things like Shakespeare. “I loved school, just loved the excitement of learning,” she says on reflection. Because of her love for reading, she had also joined the Junior Centre where she met people like Douglas Orane, later to become chairman of the GraceKennedy conglomerate.
After Senior Cambridge Exam, Gloudon was hit with sad news. Her mother informed her that she could not afford to have her continue her schooling — the family having grown by this. “Her reasoning was that it was time to give another one a chance”. Only 15 years old, Gloudon got a summer job at a wholesale business run by the Tewari family, one of whose sons was married to the daughter of VS Naipaul, the Trinidadian novelist. By this time, they were living in a big yard at 117 Orange Street in downtown Kingston. The children were not allowed to roam the streets. Projecting back in time, she reflects: “I think today of the many young people who live in the inner-city and feel condemned to live a bad life. I want them to know that it is not where you live, it is how you live.”
Adventures at The Gleaner
The summer job which lasted for three weeks was the prelude to a new exciting phase of Gloudon’s life. On the threshold of womanhood, new adventures began to beckon in the rough and tumble but glamorous world of journalism. Doris Goodison was reading The Gleaner and was impressed by an article on a speech that Sealy had made. Not saying anything to Barbara, she wrote to Sealy, telling him of her bright daughter who would be an asset to his establishment. The Gleaner editor responded and asked that Barbara be sent to see him.
From those days Barbara’s personality shone. And Sealy had no hesitation. He hired her and placed her in the reference library, under the supervision of Bi Bi Barton, father-in-law of Wilmot Perkins. Barton, she recalls, treated her as his daughter and “encouraged me to read everything”. After cutting and pasting articles from The Gleaner, she would read them. She read everything, including the encyclopaedia. From that she started to prepare what they called fillers to be used to fill small bits of space left on a newspaper page. All the section editors started coming to her for fillers.
In the editorial department, Gloudon saw hot shot journalists like Aimee Webster-Delisser, the outstanding woman journalist of her time; Vic Reid, Ferdie Williams, Ulric Simmonds, John Maxwell, who joined the company not long after her, Percy Trotman, Percy Miller, Charles Balfour, and a host of others. Gloudon was not a shy one and merrily introduced herself to one and all.
“Everybody treated me well,” she remembers. “I was very blessed. They all helped me to grow.” Soon enough, her ambitions outgrew the library and Gloudon discovered she had been infected by the newspaper ink. It was now, irrevocably, in her blood. Her eyes now fixed on the horizon, she saw an opportunity that would pave the way out of the library and launch her into the heady world of journalism.
Theodore Sealy wasn’t wicked
On a quiet Sunday evening, she went to buy ice cream and found that the price had been increased without fanfare. Gloudon wrote a news story about the price increase and it made the front page of The Gleaner, as a filler. But that was no ordinary filler. It showed that this girl could write news! So when Amoy Kong Quee, who was the editor producing The Gleaner’s Children’s Own newspaper, left to join the Jamaica Tourist Board, Sealy gave Gloudon the job of producing the Children’s Own.
In the following years, Sealy would see to it that she continued her climb up the ladder of success in the office. For that and other reasons, Gloudon has never shared the bitter criticisms of Sealy that came from journalists like John Maxwell. “He (Sealy) was a hard taskmaster and he did not pay us much. And I remember that he was hard on me but he was not wicked,” she insists.
Sealy had a practice which caused great pain to some staff reporters and sub-editors and incurred their wrath to no end. In order to reprimand, he used to put comments about their shortcomings on a notice board in the department, for everyone to see. Several people walked off the job after their names appeared on the board. One morning, it was Gloudon’s turn. She arrived at work to see a biting comment from Sealy on the notice board about a page she had planned: “Barbara Goodison has fallen to pieces. Her page looks like a pig’s dinner (slop).” That hurt, Gloudon recalls. And she wept. “But I was determined that he would not get to write that about me again. Some people cursed and even left the job, but I learnt from it.” And she was not a quitter.
Razor-tongued Calvin Bowen and the Westmoreland healer
Gloudon also remembers Calvin Bowen “whose tongue was like a razor” but in defence of the English language. He sent her on her first assignment when she worked on the features desk. It was to do a story about a popular healer in Beeston Spring, Westmoreland. With her was The Gleaner’s chief photographer Aston Rhoden, after whom the Press Association of Jamaica (PAJ) would name an award in tribute for outstanding work. Gloudon, too, would become a life member and trustee of the PAJ. But before all that, they had to go to Westmoreland to see a man who had gained notoriety, after claiming that he had been struck like Paul of Tarsus and miraculously received healing powers after the enlightening experience.
Gloudon’s story was graphic, mushy and flowery, noting how the healer had touched women in parts that he did not touch the men. But Bowen ran his red pen through each page, thrust it back at her and told her to take a walk up the road, cool off, come back and rewrite it.
“I wept and cursed but I came back and rewrote it, and I saw what Calvin was trying to show me,” Gloudon admits. “It was emotional, out of focus and all over the place. The rewritten copy was far better and that was given an entire page in the Sunday paper.”
From Sealy she learnt that one was never too good to do over one’s story. He never published any of his editorials without having someone read them first. He once told her: “You write well because you suffer.”
NW Manley, Roger Mais, Peter Abrahams, Mavis Gilmour
Ferdie Williams also treated her like a daughter on the features desk and she grew on the job. She started visiting places like the Press Club, for which an invitation was regarded as a privilege by even top echelons of society. As a young reporter, she sat and listened to the likes of Premier NW Manley, Roger Mais, the poet, and Peter Abrahams, the author and journalist. There were many foreign speakers as well.
About this time, the family had moved to 30 Studley Park Road off Slipe Pen Road. Across the street from her was All Saints Elementary School, attended by several of her brothers. The school was legendary and known for teachers like Mr and Mrs Wilmot. People cried openly when the school was bulldozed in the 1980s under Education Minister Mavis Gilmour, Gloudon says, adding that she herself continues to feel the pain of that demolition. With nearby Chetolah Park school, All Saints had shaped the lives of many children in that part of the city and it has never been replaced. It was in that community that her mother developed her reputation for feeding other people’s children out of the little she had. “Even now I will be walking in a street in London or New York and someone will come up to me and say: ‘Your mother used to feed me’,” Gloudon reveals.
Growing spirituality and blooming romance
City life was still fairly innocent in the 1960s. Offices would close half-day on Saturdays and Gloudon would join people like Hartley Neita and other colleagues for a walk up King Street. As young people, they’d meet at a famous place called Nathan’s, at the corner of Barry and King streets for lemon pies. Then they’d head for Carib Cinema for the 4:30 pm matinee. Still, those were challenging times, but Gloudon could always draw on her spirituality. She attended All Saints Anglican Church and remembers how she could walk alone to church at 5:00 am for Easter mass, without fear of being harmed. Not so today.
She also grew in the Anglican Church, becoming, in later years, the editor of its newspaper, The Churchman — which has recently been renamed The Anglican, because the former name was too gender-biased — and producer of the church’s radio show, Think on these things, aired on RJR. She would later become a Diocesan lay reader, putting her among a select few, such as Lensley Wolfe, the chief justice of Jamaica, who today bears the bishop’s licence to speak at churches across the island.
It would have to happen one day. Barbara Goodison caught the eye of a big, handsome Trinidadian man named Ancile Gloudon who was attending The UWI, majoring in the sciences. After many dates, they got married, only the second couple to do so at University Chapel, after John Maxwell and his first bride. They have three children: Jason, who is a graphic artist; Anya, now Mrs Nelson, a costume designer; and Lisa, Mrs Easy, who works with a pharmaceutical company in New York.
To women who seek to marry, Gloudon has heartfelt advice: “Always marry a man who doesn’t feel threatened by you, a man who will let you grow.” This was the kind of man she had married, and even when, shortly after, she had to go to England, he did not say ‘no’ and he took pride in all her achievements. When she stepped forward to be conferred with the UWI honorary degree, no one was more choked up with pride than Ancile Llewellyn Gloudon.
TOMORROW: The birth of Stella, the Order of Jamaica, and The Gleaner conflict.