To mark the 128th anniversary of the birth of national hero and former President of the People’s National Party Norman Manley, we invite you to read a lightly edited version of a lecture given a few years ago in Manley’s honour by prominent attorney-at-law K Churchill Neita, QC, at the Norman Manley Law School, Mona, The University of the West Indies.

To be invited to deliver this lecture which commemorates the life and work of the Caribbean’s most outstanding advocate and pre-eminent statesman is a signal honour.

Looking at the list of legal luminaries and distinguished academics that have preceded me in presenting this lecture over the years, I am only too aware of the fact that not only has the ground been well covered, but has also been done in impeccable style. As a consequence, I am only too conscious of the debt I owe to my predecessors, as well as to those whose research, over the years, provides the material from which we are better able to assess Norman Manley’s enormous contribution to the making of modern Jamaica.

Let me commend members of the law faculty of The University of the West Indies for staging this annual lecture series which commemorates the life and work of one who has enriched the practice of law and to this day provides an invaluable source of Jamaica’s jurisprudence.

While this lecture will not attempt a biographical profile, there is one particular aspect of Norman Manley’s early life that I would like at the very outset to elaborate on, and in so doing dispel the unfounded myth of an indulgent and privileged childhood which is supposed to have been the experience of young Norman.

Born in 1893 to Thomas Manley, the enterprising pioneer of Jamaica’s fruit industry, and his wife, Margaret Shearer, Norman Manley’s experience of a comfortable home environment only lasted for the first six years of his life which was spent at the family home at Roxborough. When his father died in 1899, he left the family penniless.

It is one of those interesting footnotes of history that the father of the man who would become the legendary leader of the Jamaican Bar wasted his fortune in a series of losing litigations. The one that finally brought him down was his suit against his own lawyer which went all the way to the Privy Council. In addition to the expenses incurred, a hurricane that year destroyed a cargo of fruit which Thomas Manley had consigned for the United States, but which, unfortunately, was uninsured.

Within a year of his father’s death, Norman’s mother, faced with the formidable task of supporting a blind father, an invalid sister, and four children, took the option that so many Jamaican mothers, without the support of husbands have since chosen. She left her four children in the care of her sister and emigrated to the United States in search of employment. Unable to earn enough to support herself and her family in Jamaica, she returned home within a year, moved the family to Rae Town in Kingston, and enrolled young Norman at Wolmer’s High School for Boys. When the family income dipped, she was forced to take Norman out of Wolmer’s and enrol him in an elementary school. Few schoolboys could have worked harder than Norman, and when he came to write his memoirs, he reflected on those years:

“I grew up as a bushman. I earned my pocket money cleaning pastures and chipping logwood at standard rates. I would go out in the morning…looking for stray cattle, walk the day and get home late at night after 12 to 14 hours on the constant move.” In addition to the rigours of his weekly existence, it is significant that young norman made time to read for as long as time and light allowed.

Despite his mother’s efforts, growing up without a father had its consequences. This is as true today as it was then. At age 13, he won a half-scholarship to Jamaica College, and in his first three years there he achieved notoriety as a ‘gang leader’ and a student who constantly undermined school discipline.

It was the death of his mother in 1909 and the recognition of the time and effort she had invested in him that made him turn his life around. The mentorship provided by one of his teachers, Reginald Myrie Murray, had a major impact on the young adolescent, but Norman’s dramatic transformation was achieved by his own efforts; his iron discipline; his tremendous capacity for sustained work; his fixity of purpose; and his relentless pursuit of excellence.

His achievements in his last three years at Jamaica College are well known – legendary athlete, outstanding cricketer, footballer, and marksman. What is not so well known is that from this stage of his life contemporaries deferred to his leadership in every area of endeavour. When Jamaica College lost the Championship Cup in 1910, Norman Manley was voted team captain the following year, and personally took on the coaching of the junior members of the team. He led Jamaica College to victory his last two years in school. In his final year, 1912, he was also elected captain of the Sunlight Cup cricket team, and when he discovered that the team did not have an opening fast bowler he got up each morning and practised and filled the slot himself. That year he was the leading wicket taker in the competition. In 1912 he ran 10 seconds in the 100 yards – a record which stood until 1952 when it was broken by Frank Hall of Jamaica College. That record was equalled in 1940 by his son Douglas from Munro College, with the great Herb McKenley in third place.

The school magazine recorded his achievements as vice-captain of cricket, good bowler and batsman, [and] secretary of rifle club. Unmatched in running, jumping, and hurdling, captain of football team and sports, candidate for Rhodes scholar, monitor, as brilliant in academics as in athletics.

However, the trials and tribulations that were a part of his early life continued after his graduation from Jamaica College. Within a month of winning the Rhodes Scholarship in 1914, he was struck down by typhoid fever and went close to death’s door as his weight dropped from 175 to 94 pounds. He recovered to enter Oxford that year, but after one term joined the majority of the students in volunteering for World War I. He wanted to be a pilot, but couldn’t find the money for the training course, so he ended up as a gunner, and for three years faced the horrors and dangers of trench warfare. His job as a gun layer was one of the most dangerous, since it required him to place the guns while facing the constant risk of enemy fire. At the end of the war he won a medal for bravery and then suffered a nervous breakdown.

When he recovered, he resumed his studies at Oxford, where he took first-class honours in the BCL [bachelor of civil law] at Jesus College and was awarded a certificate of honour, the equivalent of a first, in the Bar finals.

Vivian Blake, one of Jamaica’s legal luminaries, who learnt at the feet of the great man, in delivering the 1984 Norman Manley Lecture, shared with the audience a conversation with Norman which demonstrated the extent of his preparation for the Bar finals. He “was familiar with the decisions in no less than 1,000 leading cases, which he could cite from memory to illustrate important principles in various branches of the law”.

Norman Manley returned to Jamaica in 1922 and was admitted to the Jamaican Bar in August of that year. No new barrister had been enrolled since 1911, and the contemporary view was that only the best made a good living from the Bar. Norman Manley himself attested to the fact that in the first couple months he found the going slow.

In the days leading up to his first court appearance, no advocate, it seems, could have prepared more thoroughly, as he later disclosed. “I knew every line and letter of the evidence by heart. I had cross-examined, on paper, every witness – I filled out three volumes of notebooks, cross-examining various witnesses…” yet, unbelievably, he nearly succumbed to an attack of nerves before the case, and when he rose in court on the day to ask his first question, he froze before the months of auto-suggestion came to his rescue.

Within a decade he became the undisputed leader of the Jamaican Bar, and in 1932 was invited to “take silk” – the highest professional honour that can be conferred on a practising barrister. The practice then was that, even for those who had climbed to the top of the profession, it was only after practising for a minimum of 10 years that they applied for the right to use the style and title King’s Counsel or Queen’s Counsel, depending on whether the reigning monarch was male or female, to occupy a place in the Inner Bar and to wear a silk gown.

It is beyond the scope of this lecture to present in detail the thoroughness of his preparation and the quality of his advocacy in the outstanding cases on which his well-deserved reputation for excellence has been built.

The verdict of the judges who were privileged to witness his courtroom style and listen to his advocacy will suffice to validate the claim that his eloquence, his skill, and effectiveness as a cross-examiner and the depth of his preparation are yet to be equalled by any member of the Jamaican Bar. In the legendary Vicks case in 1951, which he argued before the UK Privy Council, his submissions were described by the Lord Chancellor as “the best argument I have ever heard in a trademark case”.

When he successfully defended Donald Beard, a Jamaican RAF [Royal Air Force] serviceman living in London, who was accused of murder, Mr Justice Sellars said to Norman Manley, “I would express the pleasure it has been in this court and the satisfaction the prisoner must have experienced to have you appear in this case.”

After listening to the arguments presented in his winning defence of Mrs Alexander, who along with her brother had been charged with the murder of her husband, Justice Adrian Clarke was moved to say to the accused before discharging them, “if genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains, you have been defended by a genius”.

While there are undoubtedly many contributing factors to the phenomenal success of Norman Manley’s advocacy, the one which, in my opinion, gave him the edge over his peers was what he himself admitted to be “an absolutely egoistic determination to win every case…which I regard as the most important attribute of an advocate…maximum concentration, maximum personal observation, maximum study, maximum everything…”

The prosecution of any case in which Norman Manley appeared for the accused became demoralising for the legal arm of the Colonial State. After a series of cases lost by the State, a labour advisor in a minute to the colonial secretary explained the nature of his dilemma: Whenever a man in this country gets into trouble he first flies to Mr Manley and if Mr Manley was already retained, he next flies to Cuba.

Of equal importance to his success was his amazing stamina, which manifested itself in his capacity for long and concentrated effort. His protégé, Vivian Blake, recalls that on a typical Sunday Norman Manley would be spending the entire morning in the Supreme Court library and be off by lunchtime to various rural areas to address political rallies and meetings. Very rarely would he return to Drumblair before 11:00 pm and then study his brief for the following day. As his junior, I attended pretrial conferences at Drumblair, which began at midnight and ended at 3:00 am, and I can never forget that on one occasion when a conference ended at 3:00 am I was asked to accompany him to a cowshed to hold a torch while he inspected two suckling calves.

However, as important, time-consuming, and demanding as it was, Norman Manley’s legal practice was but one of the activities to which he devoted himself. Up until 1955, when he became Jamaica’s Chief Minister, he had taken the lead in establishing the Jamaica Boxing Board of Control in 1933; the Jamaica Amateur Athletic Association in 1934, and later that same year, the Jamaica Olympic Association.

In 1937 he negotiated the financing for the founding of Jamaica Welfare, Jamaica’s first rural community development process, which became the prototype for the developing world. Norman Manley served as president up until 1949.

The labour rebellion of May 1938 brought him to the centre stage of Jamaican politics, as he and Bustamante travelled islandwide speaking to the Jamaican people and organising them to ensure lasting benefits from the rebellion, as well as the building of the institutions which laid the foundations of modern Jamaica.

One of those institutions was the People’s National Party, which was launched in September of that year. The initiative for the nationalist party came from OT Fairclough, but the deliberations which led to the founding bore the stamp of Norman Manley, who became the first president and served in that capacity for 30-consecutive years.

In 1949 he was elected to the House of Representatives, and although then the leader of the minority party, he led the House in the passage of critical pieces of legislation. Over time, his workday extended to 15 hours, and it was not uncommon for him to schedule the briefings by his solicitors after midnight.

I was a senior at Kingston College in 1955 when Norman Manley began presiding over the administration of the country. I witnessed first-hand the revolution his Administration created in education, with an unprecedented increase in the access to high schools, Common Entrance, and the modernisation of the curriculum in technical schools. In the seven-and-a-half years that he led the Jamaica Government, the average annual growth rate was some seven per cent. By 1962, when his term of office came to an end, Jamaica led the developing world.

In his acceptance speech, when he became chief minister in 1965, he said, “All my life I have carried responsibility on my shoulders, I have spent my life on many cases, and now I turn my back for good and all on that life. And take into my hands the cases of the people of Jamaica before the Bar of history against poverty and need – the case of my country for a better life and freedom in our land.”

Norman Manley, when he took office in 1955, contributed substantially to the development of tourism.

Two major infrastructure projects were undertaken – the modernisation of Montego Bay Airport and the construction of the Negril Highway, which opened Negril for development.

Another visionary and outstanding achievement by Norman Manley was the construction of 900 houses in Mona Heights, and others followed like Duhaney Park and Harbour View etc.

The achievement of Independence by Jamaica in August 1962 was the culmination of a sustained campaign led by Norman Manley for over two decades. As early as 1939, the party of which he was president committed itself to work to achieve “a parliamentary democracy on the lines which obtain in other self-governing units of the British Government…and supports the right of all persons of full age and without disability to a vote, as a condition precedent to a representative form of Government”.

This resolution by the People’s National Party was followed by a submission of proposals for constitutional change to the colonial office in 1941. These proposals were substantially reflected in the new constitution, granted in 1944, which laid the basis for Jamaica’s first elections under Universal Adult Suffrage. Then, in July 1952, Norman Manley invited the House of Representatives to declare itself in favour of self-government, and to set up a committee to draft an appropriate constitution. The record shows that he provided the leadership for the drafting of the proposals which led to the constitutional advance in May 1953, introducing the ministerial system.

In 1955, when he became Chief Minister, within a year he moved a resolution in the House of Representatives demanding “a new constitution for Jamaica, providing for complete self-government in all our internal affairs”. In 1957, Jamaica took a major step forward with the achievement of full internal self-government, and Norman Manley became the country’s first premier.

He had also sought to achieve Jamaica’s Independence through a Federation of the West Indies. It was an indicator of his deep commitment to democracy that in 1961, he offered the Jamaican people a referendum on Federation, and accepted their decision to withdraw from the federal experiment. With characteristic sense of purpose, he devoted his energies to securing Independence for Jamaica on its own by setting in motion the machinery for the drafting of the Independence constitution. By a cruel twist of fate he did not become Jamaica’s first prime minister, but there can be no doubt that when Jamaica celebrated its Independence on August 6, 1962, Norman Manley, the doyen of Jamaican nationalism, had been both architect and builder.

Today, after five decades of Independence, there is no doubt that the national project to which he devoted his life has been disintegrating for some time. A poll conducted during the 50th anniversary of Jamaica’s Independence showed that a majority of Jamaicans thought that we would have been better off as a British colony. The murder rate, which was 13 in 1962, Norman Manley’s last year as Jamaica’s premier, has repeatedly gone over the 1,500 mark in the last decade. Over the last four decades, Jamaica’s economic growth has averaged less than one per cent per year.

On the social side, we are only too aware of the extent to which family bonds and community ties have weakened, while violence and aggression are being increasingly regarded as legitimate responses. In short, the drift towards lawlessness and indiscipline and the weakening of traditional values continue to undermine the old authority systems.

How do we assess Norman Manley’s relevance to today’s Jamaica? As we continue to face a social crisis of immense proportions, our young people need to be constantly reminded of the difference that Norman Manley made to national development. They badly need positive role models to emulate and none more fitting than the man who we honour today.

His sustained pursuit of excellence, his fixity of purpose, his iron-clad integrity, and his commitment to family and community provide an example and a vision of our possibilities that need to be constantly presented to the youth of Jamaica by both the media and the school curriculum.

Today, too few Jamaicans know of Norman Manley, and it is for this reason that I want to end this lecture by again commending the law school, so appropriately named in his memory, for the part that this annual lecture plays in keeping before us the memory of one of the greatest Jamaicans of all times.

Norman Manley was an intellectual giant, brilliant advocate, a man of inflexible integrity, a man of an assailable and monumental dignity, visionary leader of men, statesman, patriot, truly the father of the nation.

I highly recommend the outstanding biography of Norman Manley – Norman Washington Manley and The Making of Modern Jamaica by Arnold Bertram, a mind of information and knowledge about our national hero.