BARBARA Gloudon joined the Gleaner Company in 1951, the year that the Star newspaper was born. Who could have known then that the self-same Star newspaper would, in a time to come, be the innocent source of her undoing?

Then again, who’s to tell, because that very undoing would later prove to be the catalyst for a brilliant career outside the newspaper business and cement her name among the constellation of men and women whose talent has enriched our fledgling nation.

As they bury Barbara Gloudon today, I would like to believe that she held me as her friend in the way that I cherished her as mine. It wouldn’t be the usual friendship, because Barbara was 20 years my senior and I spent most of the time admiring her in the way juniors do those they hold in high esteem.

I met Barbara at the very beginning of my journalistic career, destined — now I know — to be travelling companions, whether dictated by design or desire. The Gleaner had this ritualistic practice of throwing out a wide net to bring in aspiring reporters for its trainee programme. I was caught in that net in October 1973, fresh out of Cornwall College.

After a test that sifted out a handful of us from several hundreds, I received a telegram (some of you don’t even know what that is), inviting me to an interview at the paper’s North Street offices in Kingston. The interview was conducted by six people.

Among them was one woman. A very pretty lady. A very confident person. She threw the first question at me (I don’t remember what it was) and I swear I spent the rest of the interview looking at her. When I received another telegram inviting me to report for work on October 1, it felt as if it was Barbara Gloudon who had selected me to be among the seven lucky ones.

In any event, our relationship did not start off on a very bright note. To begin with, as features editor she assigned me to a story that I expected would have landed me my first byline (by Desmond Allen, for the uninitiated). I didn’t sleep that night, couldn’t wait till morning to see my byline. Instead, she completely rewrote my story, to the point that I could not recognise it. And no byline. I was crushed.

In time I settled into the job, writing up a storm, with encouragement from several editors, including Barbara, whose desk was responsible for publishing the Sunday magazine and short stories in the Sunday paper. A retired editor used to come in one day a week to receive a pile of short stories submitted by aspiring writers, go through them and select the stories for publication. I decided I would take a crack at it and wrote one, thinking it was really good.

Two weeks later, Barbara returned my short story to me, saying that it had not been chosen by the old man. I was livid. My magnum opus had been rejected. I crushed up the paper in front of her and flung it into the waste paper basket beside her and stormed off. I reckoned she should have overridden the gentleman.

Still fuming, a few days later I submitted the short story to the competitor, the Jamaica Daily News which not only published it promptly but sent me a cheque for $15! At the time my Gleaner salary was $30 a week.

Seeing my byline on the short story in the Daily News, Barbara summoned me and explained things.

“You cannot write for the competitor, disciplinary action could be taken against you,” she said calmly.

“But I gave you the story and you didn’t want it. Why should you even care what I want to do with it? I wanted it published,” I responded and stormed off again. Did I mention I was just 19 years old?

That little episode notwithstanding, we got on well in the ensuing years, Barbara and I. Her editing got less and less. I was a rising news reporter but she gave me assignments that I liked — to do feature stories for her section. Of course, it helped greatly that in those days we got paid separately for feature stories. I felt I had ‘arrived’ when she picked me to cover a poetry reading by her now famous sister Lorna Goodison and she (Barbara) was compère. It was personal now.

Four years after joining the newspaper, I was made the youngest regular weekly columnist when our union — the Union of Journalists and Allied Employees (affectionately called UJAE) — proposed in negotiations for salary and better working conditions that it would help our development if reporters wrote opinion columns. Balford Henry and the late Harris Dias, both of whom had joined The Gleaner before me, were also chosen. Our column was called As I See It.

About that time, Barbara Gloudon was promoted to be editor of The Star, the daily afternoon tabloid, a racy publication which featured photos of topless girls supplied by the Sun newspaper in England; sensational divorce cases which left nothing to the imagination; and rape cases in which the victims would be named.

Not very long after, Barbara, who had been growing in her spirituality in the Anglican Church, argued that the divorce cases were hurting the children of divorced parents as the gory details were recited in school; publishing the names of rape victims was shaming them in public; and bare-breasted women in The Star was a drain on scarce foreign exchange. She revamped The Star, re-tagging it “The People Paper”.

The owners, through the directors, complained that the paper was losing sales as it was boring without those features. They ordered Barbara to restore them. She refused and stood her ground, insisting that The Star was contributing to national development and was more popular than ever. Angered by her obstinacy, the management removed her to a non-existent desk.

Harris Dias and I decided to write columns in support of Barbara. Both were rejected by the editor. On principle, we resigned the column on grounds that the Gleaner Company should be promoting, not infringing, press freedom and freedom of expression by its own journalists.

Not unexpectedly, Barbara was soon frustrated by having nothing to do and resigned from The Gleaner. She was offered a job as deputy director of the Jamaica Tourist Board (JTB) in charge of communication. Saying the JTB was short of good writers, she offered me a job. But it was right at the time I had won a journalism scholarship from the French Government so I turned the job down.

Shortly after my return to Jamaica from France, Barbara had started a public relations agency and when I left The Gleaner to become a freelancer, she regularly offered me jobs, explaining that the earnings were not substantial but never disputing my fees.

Many years later, in 1993, when I became the founding editor of the Jamaica Observer, she was one of the first persons — including Michael Manley and Pearnel Charles Sr — whom I invited to write a weekly column.

Barbara never missed a single deadline and wrote that column until illness forced her to stop in 2020. Editors and columnists know that is no mean feat — just the depth of commitment and the mental agility to find interesting topics than can hold readers weekly for 27 years!

I will always cherish the moment in Paris when we were both delegates and she, creating history for Jamaica by being appointed for an unprecedented third term as the rapporteur for the world conference of the International Programme for Development of Communication (IPDC), a key agency of UNESCO, which meets every two years in Paris. Pride caan done.

So as they bury her today, I’ll remember Barbara Joy Gloudon as a journalistic titan, a playwright extraordinaire, a patriot of her country, a wonderful human being and a friend for the ages. Rest in peace, Barbara.