By OSWALD T. BROWN
WASHINGTON, D.C., May 23, 2022 – He was one of my heroes, so when I saw the news on Facebook that Dr. Eugene Newry died at the Princess Margaret Hospital last night, a torrent of tears gushed from my eyes and I wept uncontrollably.
Dr. Newry was more than one of my heroes, he was a very close and dear friend from when I worked at Bahamian Times, the Progressive Liberal Party’s newspaper, in the 1960s.
He was one of a Band of Brothers who formed the nucleus of the National Committee for Positive Action (NCPA), an action group within the Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) in the early 1960s that was primarily responsible for Sir Lynden emerging as the “supreme leader” of the PLP.
Dr. Newry was a regular at the office of The Bahamian Times on Andros Avenue in the Grove and even back then, he was known to be an erudite scholar who spoke several languages.
After the PLP won the 1967 general election — establishing a Black majority-rule government in The Bahamas for the first time — Premier Lynden Pindling arranged for me to go to London for one year’s advanced journalistic training at the London Evening Standard.
While I was in London, Arthur Foulkes – my journalistic mentor, who became the founding editor of Bahamian Times after he left The Tribune in 1962 — made an official visit as Minister of Tourism to London and Paris in 1969. Mr. Foulkes took me along with him on his trip to Paris, and one of the memorable highlights of that trip was a reunion with Dr. Newry and his wife Francoise, who were living in Paris at the time while he continued his medical studies, after having attended university in Canada.
I had not seen Dr. Newry for several years, but in 2013 I was appointed Press, Cultural Affairs and Information manager at The Bahamas Embassy in Washington, D.C., to assist the newly appointed Bahamas Ambassador to the United States, His Excellency Dr. Elliston Rahming, in representing The Bahamas diplomatically.
Dr. Rahming was subsequently transferred to New York to become Ambassador to the United Nations. He was replaced by Dr. Newry, who presented his credentials to President Barack Obama on Tuesday, December 3, 2013.
A neurosurgeon by profession, Dr. Newry was The Bahamas’ Ambassador to the United Nations before being transferred to D.C. as Ambassador to the United States on August 19, 2013. He previously served as the ambassador to Haiti and the Dominican Republic from 2002-2007 under the first Perry Christie administration.
Dr. Newry and I quite naturally had a remarkably good working relationship during my four-plus years under his diplomatic ledership before the change of government in The Bahamas in May of 2017.
His tenure as Bahamas Ambassador to the U.S. officially ended on July 31, 2017. An indication of the widespread respect he engendered among his diplomatic colleagues were the accolades he received at a farewell reception hosted at the State Department by the Office of the Chief of Protocol of the State Department on Thursday afternoon, July 27, 2017.
