GUEST COMMENTARY: BY SEAN MCWEENEY
EDITOR’S NOTE: When I was doing research for the article I published last week on THE ROLE PLAYED BY BAHAMIAN TIMES IN THE STUGGLE FOR MAJORITY RULE, I wanted to include the contributions made on a regular basis by Bill McWeeney, a white man who was a strong supporter of the Progressive Liberal Party (PLP). I got to know Bill very well when I worked with Bahamian Times in the 1960s. He made regular editorial contributions to Bahamian Times, using the pseudonym “Sandffly.” Bill was the father of noted Bahamian lawyer Sean McWeeney, who was a former Attorney General in a previous PLP government and is still very active; however, I did not have an email address for Sean to get some pertinent information on his father to include in my article, so I sent an email to Sir Franklyn Wilson, who I knew was a good friend of Sean’s, and asked him if he could confirm for me that the name of Sean’s mother was Thelma, as I vaguely remembered. Sir Franklyn forwarded my email to Sean and he sent me this absolutely wonderful email of considerable historical significance that I decided to share it with readers of BAHAMAS CHRONICLE as a Guest Commentary.
NASSAU, Bahamas, June 30, 2022 — I hope you’re well. It’s been a long time. I’m delighted Sir Franklyn has hooked us up. In answer to your questions: My father, William Thomas McWeeney (1920- 1999) was a keen supporter of the PLP from its birth in 1953 until his death in 1999. In the beginning, he was closely associated with H.M Taylor, a fellow Roman Catholic, who he also knew from his (my father’s) initial years in The Bahamas (1945 – 1949) in Long Island as a missionary with the Catholic Church (he was being prepared for the priesthood and had passed through a number of seminaries in the US before being posted here).
I know that my father wrote political speeches for H.M in the early years of the PLP. Later, my father grew closer to the (more radical) NCPA wing of the Party, of which I know you were an important part. He became particularly close to Arthur Foulkes (not coincidentally another Catholic) and other NCPA figures like Jimmy Shepherd, Milo Butler Jr., Bazel Nicholls (with whom he was closely associated in the City branch of the PLP), and I. G. Stubbs.
Later, he became very close to Beryl Hanna, with whom he shared a deep interest in Socialist thought and, more mundanely, political intrigue as well! Many a day they would be on the phone for hours at a time. (Incidentally, both AD and Beryl Hanna, in later years, were fond of telling me that they regarded my father as the first authentically white person to support the PLP).
Be that as it may, my father’s close association with the NCPA wing of the Party led to his becoming a columnist for the fledgling Bahamian Times newspaper, which had set out to replace The Herald as the voice of the Party. He wrote political satire under the pseudonym, “Sandfly”. He did this for quite a number of years, lampooning anti-PLP elements in the country, especially Etienne Dupuch and the Tribune. He also spent time helping out in the editorial room of the Bahamian Times, proofreading, etc. I suspect that that is where you got to know him. He did all this, unpaid of course, in his off-time as he was then still with Nestle’s (which had its main offshore operation here).
I know that my father was deeply disappointed over the 1970 split in the Party. Although his main friendships were with Foulkes, et al, he never wavered in his loyalty to the PLP and remained a party member until his death. Next to the Catholic Church, for which he would hold a fervent lifetime devotion, the PLP and the Nassau Public Library — the forerunner to the modem Archives Dept and as such the main repository of historical records back in the day, of which he was a Trustee for many years — were the two main institutions of interest to him in his life here in The Bahamas. (He would later write a weekly column on Bahamian history for the Nassau Guardian for well more than a decade).
I should add that books, books and more books were my father’s main source of nutrition! He read incessantly and had insatiable intellectual curiosity about so many different things. He was also fluent in Latin and classical Greek and routinely wrote in these languages at home when composing notes that he didn’t want us to read!
Along the way, of course, my father had married (in 1950) my mother, Thelma nee Cox, the daughter of J.V. Cox, the Crown Surveyor, who had immigrated here from his native St Lucia in the late 1920s, and his wife, Pearl Cox nee Clarke (daughter of George H Clarke of Savannah Sound, Eleuthera, who at his death in 1926 was the senior Resident Justice/Commissioner in the Family Islands, and his wife, Eugenie Clarke nee Bowleg, a native of North Andros and a direct descendant of the Black Seminoles, runaway slaves from Florida and the southern states, who had found refuge there in 1821 and stayed.
My parents produced a brood of 8 — in rapid succession, too — as Catholics were encouraged to do back then!
Happily my mother is still alive. She’s 92 now. My mother, I should say, was never into the PLP, or politics for that matter. Politically, her family were essentially followers of A.F. Adderley and what he represented, but after his death, my grandmother became a firm but not outspoken supporter of Sir Stafford Sands, who was her Representative for the City District. She never had much time for the PLP — in pointed contrast to my father, who did. My mother, for her part, was indifferent to the whole thing and abhorred strife, as indeed her only sibling, George V Cox, did as well.
My parents remained married and together for 49 years until my father’s death.
Incidentally, my father had politics in his own blood. His father William D. McWeeney, who disowned him after he married my mother, was a prominent member of the Rhode Island House of Representatives for quite a number of years, from the late 1930s well into the 1950s, I think.
I hope this helps with what you were asking about. Sorry, if I went off on a tangent here and there. That’s how it is sometimes: one reminiscence bumps into another one, and before you know it….
EDITOR’S NOTE: A former Attorney-General of The Bahamas, Sean McWeeney has been a partner of Graham Thompson Law Firm for nearly 40 years and currently is the Chairman of the firm’s Private Client/Trust Practice Group.
I should also note that I was a strong supporter of Sean’s when he was Attorney in a former PLP government, and I remember mentioning this fact to him at a reception I attended in Washington, D.C., during his visit to D.C. as as the Attorney General of The Bahamas. I can’t recall the year, but I initially moved to D.C. “permanently” in 1975 and lived there for 21 years before returning to The Bahamas, “permanently” at the time, in 1992.
In retrospect, I think that Sean’s apparent decision to “retire” from active personal participation in front-line politics robbed the country of the kind of leadership input in Bahamian politics nationally that was badly needed as the “ship of state” foundered during the treacherous years of political dissent in the 1970s and 1980s.
The same is true of Sir Franklyn Wilson, who in 1972 became one of the youngest persons ever elected to the House of Assembly. Both are now highly successful individuals, and I hope that they have not permanently closed the door on the possibility of being actively involved in political leadership in The Bahamas. As my late friend P. Anthony White would end his columns in the now-defunct THE PUNCH newspaper, that’s my sincere wish, “For What It’s Worth.”
