Caribbean Compass Yachting Magazine April 2016

At the Movies with
Maurice Bishop
by William Pringle
CARIBBEAN MEMORIES DEPARTMENT
20-hours-a-day caucuses and endless strategy sessions, so I decided to go with my
first love — sailing, which brought me to Grenada, where I have lived, worked (I had
a work permit!), and visited since then. I owned Windward Marine Ltd. in Carriacou
from 1999 to 2003, and paid into the social security system for my employees, which
I totally believed in.
In the Grenada of 1972, I needed big-time help to get my somewhat run-down
60-foot cutter, Clover, back into charter condition. Fortunately, the lagoon was teeming
with talented Grenadian sailors, some soon to become internationally famous for
their skills. I hired what were to become lifetime friends: Ian Cecil (Mousey) Byer, my
son’s eventual godfather and later Commander of the Grenada Coast Guard; and
APRIL 2016 CARIBBEAN COMPASS PAGE 30
Grenada in 1973 was on the cusp of major
changes. The island was an “Associated State”
of Great Britain — not quite a colony, but not yet
independent. Yachting, centered at Grenada
Yacht Services, where Port Louis Marina now
stands, was booming, but the political situation
was tense. The Premier, Eric Gairy, had deployed
his “Mongoose Gang”, thugs that attacked his
opponents. The New Jewel Movement (NJM)
under the leadership of Maurice Bishop was the
main opposition party.
In 1979, the NJM overthrew the government
of Eric Gairy, which had ruled the country
since independence in 1974, and Bishop
became Prime Minister of the new People’s
Revolutionary Government. In 1983, an internal
take-over attempt by a hard-line faction of
his party resulted in Bishop’s death (along with
several of his cabinet ministers and an untold
number of civilians), followed by military intervention
by US and Caribbean Regional Security
System forces.
The international airport in Grenada is named
after Maurice Bishop.
It was late 1973 sometime when I took Maurice Bishop to see Jimmy Cliff’s movie
“The Harder They Come” at the old Drive-In Theatre in Grenada. You may ask, “How
was that possible? He was a wanted man, his face on a hundred posters looking sort
of like Che Guevara, the Mongoose Gang chasing the New Jewel supporters, a man
hiding in the bush!”
Here’s how it happened. I was an American hippie who arrived in Grenada in 1972,
not too long after the fateful protest march in which Maurice Bishop’s father was
killed, to buy a charter yacht at the old Grenada Yacht Services in the lagoon in
Belmont, St. George’s. A few years earlier, I had been involved in “radical” politics in
the US, even pursuing a PhD in Political Science at the University of California at
Berkeley in 1968 during the riots and boycotts of that era. I got totally burnt out on
Moviegoer Maurice Bishop, at right, in later days as head of Grenada’s short-lived
Revolutionary Government
Herman (Baby Face) Thompson from Caliste, widely known as the best varnisher/
painter in the Caribbean — maybe the world. We worked like demons in the summer
sun, drinking rum at night at Daddy Bull’s bar on Lagoon Road, and also at
Mamma’s Bar in the old Chinatown.
It was there that one night we met a somewhat straight-laced (tie and coat, short
hair) light-skinned fella with whom we began chatting, as bar patrons will do, and it
became obvious, as the Clarkes Court diminished in our glasses, that he was, at the
very least, a New Jewel sympathizer, for he shared our antipathy for “Uncle” (Grenada’s
then Premier,
—Continued on next page