By Kennedy Earle Clarke — 31 January 2022
Dear reader, the historical account of the People’s Action Movement (P.A.M.) is not a vendetta between PAM and myself, but this is a historical education to those who really and truly love their country, those who are not ashamed of where they came from, and those who are willing to listen to historical facts and not the false information peddled by those who proclaim that they are born again Christians.
In 1963 the ordinary working-class folks lived in small wooden houses, sometimes ten in a one-bedroomed house. These houses were lighted at night by Zulu lamps fueled by kerosene oil, hurricane lamps, or just candles. School children, when they received homework, would cluster forty or fifty of them under the lone lamp post in the neighbourhood to complete their assignment. In my growing up days, the electricity plant was situated at the corner of Central Street and Lower Prickle Pear Alley, commissioned on Saturday 21st April 1928. The soot from the Electricity Plant had transformed everything in nearby houses black — curtains, wire, even a white kitten left outside overnight.
After Trade Unions were legally formed in 1940, following the 1935 Buckley’s Estate Uprising, the Union saw the plight of the residents and agitated for the plant’s removal to Needsmust Estate lands near the Sugar Factory. The oligarchs of the day organized a demonstration giving the impression to the small man and woman that the government was going to kill them with electricity — when in truth the rates were charged according to floor space, meaning the little people in their small houses would be enjoying electricity at a much lower rate. The vast majority of those who took part in that demonstration were totally unaware of the treacherous role the organizer of that march — and later the founder of PAM — played whenever the Trade Union negotiated an increase in wages for the working class in the sugar industry. Look out for Chapter 2 next week!