Outstanding Jamaicans!

[Gamma]

i was JUST getting around to you

[HL]

Dr. Henry Lowe

Dr Henry Lowe is 2006 Observer Business Leader

Thursday, May 03, 2007


Dr Henry Lowe (centre) accepts the Observer Business Leader 2006 award from the newspaper's chairman Gordon 'Butch' Stewart (left), following a glitzy gala awards banquet at the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel in Kingston.

Sharing in Dr Lowe's triumph is the 2005 Observer Business Leader winner, Ryland Campbell, executive chairman, Capital and Credit Group. Lowe, the executive chairman of Blue Cross and conceptualiser of Eden Gardens, won from a field of five other nominees to take the prestigious award.
The other nominees were Stafford and Marilyn Burrowes, owners of Dolphin Cove; John Minott of Jamaica Standard Products; Peter McConnell, managing director of Trade Winds Citrus Ltd; Charles Ross, CEO of Sterling Asset Management Ltd; and Ralph Smith and Fred Junior Smith, owners of Tropical Tours group.
(Photo: Joseph Wellington)

[HL]

John Maxwell:

A short story by John Maxwell: Note: Arthur Benjamin Lowe is the nephew of Dr. Henry. He is my grand father. Both great men in my opinion
WHAT IS THE COCKPIT COUNTRY

My father was elected in 1934 to represent Trelawny as the parish's Member of the Legislative Council (parliament). My father's irredeemable blackness stimulated his wife's family to refuse to acknowledge their sister and new brother-in-law for seven years.

I made my first entrance onto the public stage when my mother took me as a nursing infant into the Falmouth Court room where powerful forces were determined to deny my father his against-the-odds election victory. In the election, he had beaten the man who had been MLC for 25 years and Custos of Trelawny for 15.

The Hon Guy Ewen was the leading lawyer in the parish and its most potent financier as head of the Trelawny Building Society. He was the attorney or owner of estates comprising one sixth of the arable land in the parish and chairman of the Parochial Board whenever he found the time. And Trelawny was, in those days, the political equivalent of Southern Rhodesia, not quite an apartheid society, but close.

My father lost the case but Mr Ewen, who won, collapsed and died shortly after. My grandmother - a Maroon was widely credited with 'obeahing' the sadly deceased plutocrat.

My father could not pay the legal fees and, though he won the bye-election after Ewen died, he was in danger of debtor's jail if the bailiffs found him before he was sworn in as MLC at Headquarters House.

My father disappeared into the Land of Look Behind after the bailiffs had seized all his furniture, including my baby crib. In this refuge from oppression, there are place names like "Me No Sen, You No Come" and "Waitabit".

My father didn't emerge until the day of the opening of the Legislative Council when his friend, Arthur Benjamin Lowe, MLC for St James, picked him up at a secret rendezvous and transported him to Kingston, the last part of the journey covered by a carpet in the back of Lowe's car.

When Lowe arrived at Duke Street the bailiffs were waiting. Mr Lowe, a Baptist lay preacher was obviously a man of truth, so he was to be believed when he told the querulous bailiffs that he had last seen Maxwell near the Beeston Street (back entrance) to Headquarters House.

They dashed off to Beeston Street and my father, freed of carpet, was soon sprinting up the steps of Headquarters House, hotly pursued by bailiffs. It was as they said of another occasion, 'a damned close-run thing'!
I tell this story to partly explain what may be regarded as my intense, 'almost hysterical' attachment to the Cockpit Country - the Land of Look Behind.

[Karl]

HL: Great story! ...if true...damn even if not true...gives...reminds us...tells a tale to those of us who do not know that Jamaica of not so long ago!

One degree of separation!

[Stonigut]

One interesting man who most of you have not heard of is Sam Grant from the Scott's Hall Maroons, he is said to have been the son of Captain Davy (chief of Scott's hall who shot and killed Tacky in the 1760 Coromantin rebellion with one shot on the run with a musket)

Sam Grant in defending Davy in another incident, shot at a plantation owner and hit a slave instead who had inadvertently stepped in front of the planter at the last moment, in escpaing Grant shot and killed a captain of an English ship who blocked his path and tried to whip him with a studded whip, by shooting and killing him also on the run with a musket with one shot, he probably may have been the first black man in the new world (no reserach on that) who was acquitted by a both a maroon jury as well as going through a trial with two justices and three freeholders (planters). He later went on to help capture Three Finger Jack 1781 as well as becoming the chief of the Scotts hall Maroons by 1800.

[Stonigut]

Very nice, that is very interesting. Land reform can be a transformative tool to economic development but with the degradation of the basic cultural peasant/small farmer work ethic fabric that probably was in place up to relatively recently, land reform would be a total disaster, it would have to be implemented in such a way that fundamentally rewarded the best or just clearly productive farmers which in time could reset/re-energise the thought process of that strata of rural Jamaica.

[Don1]

Still here... after 12 yrs., but considering a move back to the great white north. Would love to go back to yard but I didn't take "samfie" in University.

pr

not a good excuse- Jamaica offers Full Immersion/Rapid Results courses in Samfieology - throughout the country.

One can't help but learn.

[Peter R]

I take your word for that...I've been away too long.

And how about Jimmy Carnegie for an outstanding Jamaican?

pr