COMMENTARY: BY OSWALD T. BROWN
WASHINGTON, D.C., November 26, 2019 – Tuesday White, one of the daughters of the late P. Anthony White, posted a photo of her father and the late Sir Randol Fawkes apparently taken at a reception in New York when he decided to return to The Bahamas after living in New York for a number of years that brought back some wonderful memories of the friendship P. Antony and I shared.
It is not a coincidence that both Tuesday and her sister Dr. Adair White-Johnson are excellent writers; their writing skills were “passed on to them” by their father, who was a remarkably gifted and talented journalist.
Although I embarked on my life-long career as a journalist in May of 1960 when I joined the staff of the Nassau Daily Tribune, I did not know P. Anthony very well back then, even though he had already launched his journalism career working with the late Cyril St. John Stevenson at the Nassau Herald.
In 1953, Stevenson, Henry Milton Taylor and William Cartwright co-founded the Progressive Liberal Party (PLP), the first national political party to be established in The Bahamas, and Stevenson used The Herald to promote the views of the PLP at a time when The Bahamas was as segregated as the most rigidly segregated city in the Southern United States, where segregation back then was enforced by law.
Under the journalistic tutelage of Stevenson, who was one of the six PLP representatives elected to the House of Assembly in 1956, P. Anthony established an analytical foundation for the political commentaries that became a distinguished aspect of his journalistic career. His weekly columns in THE PUNCH were one of the most popular features in that weekly – now twice weekly – publication, which is the most widely circulated newspaper in The Bahamas, mainly because it also publishes a highly entertaining GRAPEVINE gossip column, according to one school of thought.
I actually don’t recall ever meeting P. Anthony before he moved to New York to further his education in the late 1950s or early 1960s, but I was aware of his developing journalistic skills while he was working at The Herald. However, I got the opportunity to meet him when a PLP delegation went to New York in February of 1967 to attend a dinner sponsored by Huntington Hartford, heir to the A.&P. grocery chain fortune, to celebrate the PLP’s historic victory in the January 10, 1967, general election.
Hartford owned what was then known as Hog Island — which is now called Paradise Island, where the world-renowned Atlantis Resort is located – and he was a strong supporter and financial contributor to the PLP. He clearly loved The Bahamas and actually died at the age of 97 at his home in Lyford Cay in May of 2008, according to an article in the New York Times.
Commenting on Hartford’s “makeover of Hog Island,” The Times article noted: “After buying four-fifths of the place in 1959 and having it renamed Paradise Island, he set about developing a resort with the construction of the Ocean Club and other amenities. Advisers persuaded him to stop short of exotic attractions like chariot races, but, overextended and unable to get a gambling license, he wound up losing an estimated $25 million to $30 million.”
It is safe to assume that Hartford was “unable to get a gambling license” from the vindictive Bay Street Boys, who subsequently organized themselves politically as the United Bahamian Party (UBP), because of his behind-the-scenes support for the PLP; however, another major contributing factor could also have been because he refused to “give” a percentage of his Paradise Island development to the late Sir Stafford Sands, the then chairman of the Bahamas Development Board, who was known to demand such payments from investors wanting to do business in The Bahamas.
I was among the group that made the trip to New York because of my contributions to the struggle for majority rule in the 1960s, which included my journalistic contributions in assisting my mentor, Arthur A. Foulkes, at Bahamian Times, the PLP’s newspaper that he helped to establish after he left The Tribune in 1962. As I have noted on more than one occasion over the years, Arthur A. Foulkes was the News Editor at The Tribune when I joined the staff in 1960, and he is primarily responsible – along with the late Sir Etienne Dupuch, the then Publisher and Editor of The Tribune – for the foundational training I received as a young journalist that was developed into whatever journalistic skills I have today.
It was bitter cold in February of 1967 when we went to New York for the Hartford dinner and I did not have a top coat. I mentioned this fact to P. Anthony and the next morning he came to the Americana Hotel, where we were staying, with a blue wool top coat that I used throughout my stay in New York.
That trip unquestionably set the stage for the “committed brotherhood” that subsequently developed between us, and although there may have been some other compelling reasons why P. Anthony decided to return to The Bahamas to practice his journalistic craft, I still adamantly believe that the reasons I suggested convinced him that it was a good time to return home.
We had some great times together after he returned to The Bahamas. I also have some wonderful memories of a trip P. Anthony made to London and Paris in 1969 along Sir Arthur Foulkes, who was the then Minister of Tourism and was on official visits to tourism offices in those two cities. I was in London at the time on a one-year journalism training program at the London Evening Standard, and Sir Arthur took me along with him to Paris.
Both P. Anthony and I incurred the wrath of the political-powers-that be in the 1970s because of our “tell-it-like-it-is” writing styles and both of us eventual moved away from The Bahamas. I moved to Washington, D.C., in 1974 and remained here for more than 21 years before returning to The Bahamas permanently in 1996.
In an article on P. Anthony’s death published in the Nassau Guardian on November 28, 2013, former Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham was credited as saying that White’s “biting” critiques in the 1970s angered the government of the day, prompting him to relocate to the Cayman Islands and later the Seychelles in the South Pacific, where he established the Government News Bureau.
“Ingraham said White was working with the Free National Movement when he joined the party in 1990,” according to the Guardian. “He said White helped the party craft the message that led the FNM to win the 1992 general election.”
And Ingraham was quoted as saying: “He was exceptionally well-read, an insightful political commentator and a man of great personal faith. To me he was a political comrade and a personal friend. He will be sorely missed.”
May the soul of my late very dear friend P. Anthony White continue to rest in peace.
