The Desmond Allen Interviews – part two

Veteran journalist Lloyd B Smith is celebrating twin milestones — 50 years in journalism and 45 years as founder of the Western Mirror newspaper. Following is the final instalment of a compelling two-part re-telling of Lloyd B’s early journey, a tale of hardships overcome and courage to face down the odds, as first published in the 2005 award-winning series,
The Desmond Allen Interviews.

In more ways than one, Lloyd B Smith’s award-winning scream in the Shakespeare play, Hamlet — when Hamlet’s deadly sword was fatally plunged into the flesh of his character, the verbose Polonius — was to be the announcement of Lloyd B’s future arrival on the Montego Bay stage.

Fresh out of Cornwall College he had grabbed the opportunity to become the first student to be accepted to the embryonic Mandeville Teachers’ College, now Church Teachers’ College and there had discovered that he was made for the spotlight.

At the end of the two-year teaching course in 1966, Edwin Allen, the famed education minister and his junior minister, Hector Wynter, introduced one year of internship for the newly trained teachers. Lloyd B was dispatched to Kingston Senior School in one of the capital city’s baddest slums. He remembers, like it only happened yesterday, when a seemingly disembodied hand reached through a window while he was teaching class and slit the forehead of a male student!

The country boy in him could not handle such senseless violence and spilling of blood. So when Allen and Wynter visited the school one day, to see how the internship programme was working out, Lloyd B implored them to relocate him to another school.

Yam for breakfast, lunch, and dinner

They placed him at Craig Head in Manchester, at a school where there was such desperate poverty that “half the students came to school barefooted” and where on Fridays there was hardly any school, as nearly all the students went to help parents prepare for market. Craig Head was yam country and he loved everything there, except that there was “yam for breakfast, yam for lunch, and yam for dinner”.

He completed his internship and graduated with a credit, becoming a teacher in his early 20s. The first schools to employ him were Frankfield Comprehensive High, later named after Edwin Allen; Holmwood Technical; St George’s College; and Kingston College.

Free of his two-year bond, he responded to an ad for a master teacher for English at the private Oxford Preparatory which was part of the Christian Boys’ Home complex at Norwood Road in Kingston. Chairman of the board was Vic Reid, the noted author and journalist. The headmaster, an Englishman, soon after returned to his homeland and recommended Lloyd B in the job as headmaster. He also coached the football team the year they won the prep schools championship, and the swimming team as well.

He brought many innovations to the school, including an internal spelling bee contest, remembering with delight that Beverley Anderson-Manley, then wife of the prime minister, donated the first trophy and presented it to the winner herself. When he put on a cultural show, the guest speaker was Eli Matalon, on his first official engagement as education minister. And he (Lloyd B) would save a boy from drowning by jumping fully clothed into the YMCA pool where the school did swimming.

Mike Henry is consumed by politics

During the years Lloyd B taught school, he became a stringer for The Gleaner newspaper, recalling that he used to send feature articles to Barbara Gloudon. Located across from Oxford Prep was Mike Henry’s Kingston Publishers, now LMH Publishing. The company then was a subsidiary of McGraw Hill, Singapore. The editor, a national of that country, was returning home and they advertised for an editor. Lloyd B applied and got the job.

He would like it there, saying many exciting things happened, including his frequent trips to The Bahamas on a geography book project commissioned by the education ministry there. He would also work with or come across famous names like Rex Nettleford, George Eaton, Henry Lowe, and Frank Hill. He chaired the ceremony launching Hill’s Bustamante and His Letters, meeting the likes of Michael Manley, Edward Seaga, and Dudley Thompson. He learned at the feet of Hill who at the time was dying of cancer, recalling that he was a “fussy and fastidious man” but also the man who inspired him to enter the heady world of Jamaican journalism.

He left Kingston Publishers when Mike Henry became “very absorbed in politics”. As Lloyd B remembers it, Henry used to be “a Michael Manley man” and had mentioned it several times that they were together at school in England. But Henry was interested in a St Catherine seat for the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and the politics consumed him. The publishing schedule was put on hold, and Lloyd B started looking around. One day he came across Hector Wynter, who was now editor of
The Gleaner. Wynter offered him a job as a sub-editor and he joined the staff of the paper in 1975, working with Harry Anderson.

It was a time of political intrigue leading up to the 1976 General Election and The Gleaner was at the centre of it. He recalls talk of “psychological warfare” and “juxtaposition of images” to create a desired effect. In fact, he was accused of so doing when he once placed a picture of Manley holding a pick-axe aloft at a ground-breaking ceremony, above a picture of Seaga. “I innocently thought it was just the best way I could layout the page, given what I was working with,” he says in recollection.

Hired and fired by the JTA

But fate was working with Lloyd B in mind. A woman he had employed as assistant editor at Mike Henry’s outfit had left the same time he did and went to work with the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA) subsidiary, Jamaica Publishing House at Church Street. She phoned him to say the JTA-owned Teachers Book Centre had a vacancy in Montego Bay that he might be interested in. The pay was much better and it came with a car. Lloyd B found this irresistible. Feeling that Wynter, from whom he had learned much, would be disappointed at his leaving, he resigned by telegram, something about which colleagues would tease him over the years.

He went to MoBay to be interviewed by Vidal Smith, the outstanding chairman of Teachers Book Centre and Lemuel Lindo, the managing director and top cadet man. Back in Kingston, he received a call from Lindo, saying he got the job to manage the MoBay book store. Shortly after, he was promoted to regional manager with responsibility for stores in MoBay, Savanna-La-Mar, and Brown’s Town.

As he celebrated his good luck, Lloyd B had not the slightest inkling of what was to come, that the same people who had flown to Montego Bay to interview him for a job would fly back down to fire him, as influential people in the ‘Bay’ ganged up on him.

While at the Teachers Book Centre job, Lloyd B found that the urge to write was growing. JC Proute, the Barbados-born editor of the Jamaica Daily News, asked him to write a column. He called it ‘Friday Frolics’ using the byline “Saka Saka”. He also called Ken Jones, the Englishman who owned the Beacon newspaper which was published out of MoBay and offered to write for the paper. That column was called ‘The Republican’, which became very popular very quickly and had everyone seeking to find out who was The Republican. The column took pot shots at the movers and shakers in the second city. Some
Beacon staffers were offered money to divulge the identity of the ghost writer.

By this time, Lloyd B was a solid supporter of Michael Manley whose democratic socialist dream had fired the imagination of the country, but had also unleashed a backlash among those opposed.

“He had given us a Jamaican identity and I supported the ideals generally,” says he. Manley was threatening to acquire all idle lands and to put them in the hands of poor farmers. There were allegations that certain churches in MoBay had agreed to hold certain idle lands in their name for a period of time, to defeat the Manley plan.

When The Republican mentioned it in his column, many were hurt and vowed to get him. It transpired that one day the influential people found out that Lloyd B was The Republican!

As he tells it, they came up with a plan to get rid of him. Word was sent to the head office of Teachers Book Centre in Kingston that Lloyd B was spending more time knocking people in his column and playing politics than with his work at the book centre. True, he was a supporter of PNP Member of Parliament Francis Tulloch but the book sales were doing quite well and he felt he had everything under wraps.

In their next move, the detractors sent to the book centre a photograph that was published in the
Beacon, showing Lloyd B with Manley at a function launching Operation Land Lease at Retirement, St James. The cup had overflowed. The bosses in Kingston jumped on a plane and turned up at Lloyd B’s office. By the time they went back on the plane, he was out of a job.

Ken Jones departs the Beacon

If there was someone somewhere tweaking the elements of time and fitting the pieces of the puzzle together, it could not have come at a more opportune time. As the Kingston Book Centre bigwigs fussed and fumed with Lloyd B, Ken Jones chose that very moment to turn the Beacon over to Carole O’Reilly, an American, and hastily departed the shores of Jamaica, taking with him the more successful tourism-based stable mate, Focus On Jamaica. Byron Balfour was editor of the Beacon at the time.

At home trying to relax one evening, O’Reilly was very troubled and felt stressed out. Jones had thrown the paper in her lap and darted off. She was not afraid of a good challenge, but running a newspaper was no picnic. To make matters worse, the paper was not doing well. Circulation sales and advertising revenue had plummeted in recent months, and at this rate, she was afraid for its future. What should she do? Then an idea struck her. Make Lloyd B Smith the editor. He had this uncanny knack of stirring up deep feelings in people and, love him or hate him, they read his column, she thought.

At a cocktail party the following evening, O’Reilly offered Lloyd B the job as editor. He protested. Surely Balfour was a qualified editor. O’Reilly said the paper was not doing well and something drastic had to be done, or it would fold. At that he accepted the job as editor. He has cherished the subsequent friendship which he developed with Balfour, he says. But in his own way, Lloyd B had gotten savage revenge on those who had worked so tirelessly to bring him down. From now on, he was going to mix things up in Montego Bay!

Winston Spaulding is the nemesis

The Beacon was located in a decrepit, sleazy-looking building at the intersection of Corner Lane and Strand Street. When it rained the office was wet. But there was a solid core staff of people committed to the newspaper and he got busy trying to lift its fortunes. Lloyd B’s pen could be caustic and the pages of the Beacon dripped blood. His admirers increased. But so too his critics. They accused him of being a rabid communist and said he was anti-JLP. His nemesis would be Winston Spaulding, the attorney who was assigned by the JLP to run in St JamesEast Central.

In the run up to the 1980 General Election, Lloyd B wrote an editorial questioning Spaulding’s assignment to MoBay and pointing to certain political undesireables who had followed in his wake. Spaulding, who would become national security minister and attorney general when the JLP won the election, sued the
Beacon editor for libel and declared he wanted nothing less than the closing down of the paper. Many people begged for Lloyd B, including Francis Tulloch, who is a relative of Spaulding’s. Some readers of the paper launched a fund to defend him, determined that the Beacon must go on.

As the turmoil raged around him, Lloyd B’s notoriety grew and his name hit the national newspapers. In time, Spaulding dropped the suit and they became good friends later.

O’Reilly abandons the Beacon

And just as well because the Beacon could not withstand even the smallest libel award against it. Before leaving, Ken Jones had bought a press with a $250,000 loan from Jamaica Development Bank (JDB). When the paper stopped paying the loan in the face of dwindling revenues, the JDB seized the press and sold it to a foreign entity to recover its money.

The Beacon had to farm out its printing. O’Reilly went into a panic. The staff started clamouring to be paid off. Lloyd B turned to the Press Association of Jamaica (PAJ), then led by the veteran Clarence ‘Ben’ Brodie. The PAJ did not have money but he received their solidarity, remembering people like the secretary at the time, Elaine Wallace, the late Maurice Garrison, the late Elean Thomas, along with Ben who had visited the paper and met with the staff in MoBay. He (Lloyd B) was voted first vice-president of the association, an apparent move to raise his national image.

But the dark clouds over the paper grew darker. The National Workers’ Union, representing the employees, demanded they be paid off. At that point, O’Reilly felt she had had enough and threw in the towel.

“She left without even telling me, the editor. We turned up to work one morning and found that she had gone. We were on our own,” recounts Lloyd B. He and the other four senior staffers vowed to fight to the end to keep the paper going. They were: Dennis Barton, the print and circulation manager; Evelyn Robinson, advertising manager; Miriam Williams, accountant; and Michael Bryan, production supervisor. They had worked for the paper for years. It was a perilous time for Lloyd B. The paper was collapsing and the JLP was threatening to destroy what was left of it. Threatening phone calls made him afraid to answer his phone.

Thank God for Dunbar McFarlane!

The workers turned to Barton to lead the survival struggle. But the paper’s woes continued and as the Bank of Nova Scotia threatened to foreclose on an unpaid loan, the staff signed a petition authorising a management committee, led by Lloyd B, to try to save the company. With a plan to buy out the paper, they went to several banks… in vain. Some thought they were crazy.

Almost ready to give up, they went to one final banker – Dunbar McFarlane, manager of the MoBay branch of National Commercial Bank (NCB). McFarlane was a past president of the NCB Staff Association and he understood the workers’ plight and their vision. He had gotten his chance to rise after Manley nationalised the former Barclays Bank and renamed it the NCB. He decided he would lend them the $30,000 they needed to buy an old press that Gauze Thompson of Speedy Prints had offered to sell them. The Beacon was saved!

“It was one of the most emotional moments of my life,” says Lloyd B now. Thank God for Dunbar McFarlane. Everybody was emotional. As we could not afford to pay a truck to move the press to our building, the workers used trolleys to take it there, almost a mile away.”

They formed a new company called Western Publishers Limited and later renamed the paper Western Mirror. As the JDB had also owned the premises where the Beacon was located, they moved to Westgate Shopping Plaza on the other side of town.

On October 4 of that year, the first issue of the Western Mirror was published out of their new home. Lloyd B remembers how people had tried to convince them they could not have done it.

“They told us that we were in the midst of political turmoil. The economy was down, people were running away and the [1980[ election was only months away. But we refused to listen. We decided that henceforth we would move the paper away from the cocktail circuit and become the voice of the ordinary man. And the people warmed to us.” The paper was the first recipient of the PAJ’s Marcus Garvey Award for community newspapers, the first of many to come.

A permanent home at last

When Hurricane Gilbert flooded them out of the Westgate location in 1988, they relocated to 82 Barnett Street, from which they are now about to move to permanent offices at the Mirror’s own building at 4 Cottage Road near Jarrett Park. They went back to the JDB for a $33-million loan which they used to purchase a reconditioned colour press soon to be installed.

“It’s a story of success, but the success belongs to the people who buy and read the Mirror. Without them, there would be no Mirror today,” a choked up Lloyd B confesses.

In 1989, he married the love of his life, Michelle Wallace. The couple have a daughter, Saroya, 13, who is a student at Mt Alvernia High School, and a son, Brett, 8 who attends Mt Alvernia Preparatory. Over the years, Lloyd B’s stature grew in the Bay, and nationally too, after Gordon“Butch” Stewart’s newly born Jamaica Observer newspaper invited him to write a column to reflect issues of importance to the west.

It seemed nothing could stir in MoBay without his knowing. He’s sought after by all the talk shows which treat him as if he is the foremost journalist in western Jamaica. The MoBay Chamber of Commerce elected him its president in the 1990s. From that vantage point, he saw the financial meltdown in 1995 that spawned Finsac and saw the businessmen sweat as the punishing interest rates climbed mercilessly. As a businessman himself, he feared the worst. Against that background, Lloyd B became disenchanted with the PNP.

Bruce Golding, Edmund Bartlett, Derrick Kellier

When Bruce Golding, then heir apparent to Seaga, left the JLP to form the National Democratic Movement (NDM) — at the height of a squabble triggered by the so-called Western 11 — Lloyd B accepted an invitation to give the vote of thanks at the launch ceremony. There was rampant speculation that he had joined the NDM. But Lloyd B says he never joined the party.

Enter Edmund Bartlett whom he had met as a student at Church Teachers’ College. Bartlett had come to St James to marshall the JLP campaign in the coming 1997 General Election. He invited Lloyd B to run against the seemingly impregnable Derrick Kellier of the PNP. Lloyd B turned the invitation over and over in his mind. He’d like to serve his people in this way. On the other hand, he could lose everything. His closest confidants were against it. But his wife, Michelle, felt that if he believed that the community wanted him, he should go ahead.

While he was debating the matter in his head, a prominent member of the PNP met him at a meeting at Wyndham Rosehall hotel and blasted him for planning to run for the JLP. When the man charged that Lloyd was “being paid big money to run”, he made up his mind. In a moment of anger, he decided he would face Kellier on the campaign trail.

It was an impulsive decision, he would admit later. But when Bartlett called saying he had Seaga on the line and needed his answer right away, he said he’d do it. Seaga came on the line and thanked him. Suddenly Lloyd B Smith had become a political animal. He remembers having to make a momentous decision one day when a group of gun-toting political toughs from Kingston offered him their services in the campaign, in exchange for money, a car, and a place to stay. But he didn’t hesitate. He said a firm ‘No’. The men hissed their teeth and declared: “Him ah eediot, him no know what a gwaan”.

But politics can be a lonely thing, he was also to learn. One day Bartlett organised for all the candidates to give Lloyd B a motorcade into his constituency. On the day, no one turned up. After his loss to Kellier, he was abandoned. “Nobody even called. Luckily I had kept the paper out of the political fray and my board offered me some time off to recollect my thoughts and come back,” he recounts.

The Street People Affair

In the year 2000, Lloyd B would face perhaps his toughest challenge. In the dead of night, as most of Montego Bay slept, a truck moved stealthily through the city, scraping up about 32 street people. They were taken to St Elizabeth and dumped near a red mud lake. When the media flashed the story, all hell broke loose. Everybody wanted to know who could have done such a heinous thing. As the weeks passed, Lloyd B suggested in his columns that he had heard names. As public calls mounted, Prime Minister PJ Patterson approved the setting up of a Commission of Inquiry into the Street People affair. The commission called Lloyd B to the stand. Under pressure, and badgering, he says, he named some prominent people as rumoured to be behind the affair. He has since regretted that, but felt at the time he had no choice. Naturally, those named were severely upset with Lloyd B and some sought to ostracise him. Once again, Lloyd B was thrown into the national spotlight. But in time, all would be forgotten.

For now, we’ll end the story of Lloyd Barnes Smith. The many untold episodes are for another time and another place. ‘The Governor’ was never elected by the ballot. But three times a week, thousands of readers vote with their pockets by purchasing a copy of the Western Mirror. They do it because they know that through thick or thin he is their eyes and their ears.

SMITH… the survival of the Western Mirror a story of success, but the success belongs to the people who buy and read the Mirror. Without them, there would be no Mirror today