In Tuesday’s column, I referred to the fact that the law partnership in the late 1970s between Denys Barrow (UDP) and Ernest Staine (PUP) was the first such in Belize history between attorneys from Belize’s two major political parties. 

In the mid-1960s, however, there had been the strange case where two attorneys who were in a partnership, separated professionally and politically. During their years of partnership, there was nothing to indicate that Dean Lindo and Joseph Gray did not have the same political views. (Incidentally, both had gotten their law degrees in Great Britain.)

But then a strange, mysterious thing took place. Gray separated himself from Lindo, opened his own law firm, and ran as the Albert constituency candidate for the ruling PUP in both the 1969 and 1974 general elections. Although he lost both times to Mr. Goldson, Mr. Gray was appointed Minister without Portfolio in both the 1969 and 1974 PUP Cabinets. No one in Belize had ever heard before of such an animal as “Minister without Portfolio.”

When British Honduras (Belize) held its first general election under our present Ministerial constitution in 1961, the PUP had won all 18 seats. So, there was no Opposition member in the House of Representatives. I believe the Opposition NIP appointed two senators to the Upper House, and I believe these to have been attorney Horace Young and Mr. Philip Goldson. I believe, but I am not sure. (Another Opposition party had contested the 1961 general election. That was the Christian Democratic Party (CDP), led by the late Nicholas Pollard, Sr.)

So, there was no Opposition in the House, and the talking in the streets was that some in the PUP felt there needed to be Opposition in the House for the new parliamentary democracy to operate properly. At the same time, there was also talking that some in the PUP wanted a one-party government.

During the years to which I refer, I was a high school and sixth form student at St. John’s College, so I’m just telling you about talking in the streets. The fact of the matter was that the PUP was a political juggernaut, supported by the working classes across the board. In fact, if you study Myrtle Palacio’s important work, Who and what in Belizean elections 1954 to 1993, you will see that Nick Pollard’s CDP performed impressively in that 1961 general election when compared to Herbert Fuller’s National Independence Party (NIP). Pollard enjoyed significant trade union credibility at the time.

The NIP base was the middle-class civil service, which was mostly Creole in the early and middle 1960s, and when Mr. Goldson succeeded Mr. Fuller as NIP leader in 1962 thereabouts, there began to be talking that the NIP was black, and the PUP was otherwise. That was not really the case. Although the PUP leader was brown, or Latin, the PUP base in the old capital was roots black, while the NIP blacks were middle-class black, what they would call “Afro-Saxon” in America. It was a little confusing, to be truthful.

In any case, it appears that Mr. Gray was recruited by the PUP leadership to run against Mr. Goldson in Albert, and Mr. Gray was promised the unprecedented “Minister without Portfolio” post. Mr. Goldson had won the Albert seat in 1965 (one of only two seats the NIP won in that election, the other being the Toledo North seat won by Edwin Morey.) Mr. Gray went on to lose to Mr. Goldson in both the 1969 and 1974 general elections.

With only Mr. Goldson representing the Opposition in the 1969 House of Representatives, the PUP could still claim Belize was running a democracy.

Personally, my sense is that the British Honduras Freedom Committee, chaired by the late Compton Fairweather and based in New York City, supported Mr. Goldson’s NIP financially in the 1965 general election but began to hedge its bets before the 1969 general election. The one Dean Lindo (Shyne Barrow’s grand uncle) had challenged Mr. Goldson’s leadership of the NIP in mid-1969. Losing to Goldson, Lindo then formed his own party, the People’s Development Movement (PDM), and opened his own newspaper, The Beacon, in August of 1969. When Mr. Price called the general election in November of 1969, Lindo’s PDM and Goldson’s NIP formed a hasty coalition, but Goldson won the only one of the 18 seats for the NIPDM coalition. It was 17-1, PUP.

In the 1974 general election, I ran as the only UBAD candidate in the election (Collet constituency), with the intention of dissolving the divided UBAD organization after the election and resigning from electoral politics.

But the UDP performed amazingly well in the 1974 election under Lindo’s de facto leadership, and the PUP became nervous enough to seek a coalition with my small group of supporters in 1977. With a Belize City Council election coming up in December of 1977, pressure came on me from the PUP to be one of their “Dynamic Nine” CitCo candidates. I ended up yielding to the pressure.

But, I told the PUP leaders I would not go back into Collet to campaign amongst the people I had visited as a UBAD candidate in the 1974 general election campaign. I wanted to go into Albert to see what exactly was going on with the PUP there. And so I did.

As a result of looking at the PUP campaign organization in Albert in that December 1977 CitCo campaign, I came to the conclusion that they were only going through the motions. And so, I personally felt that there could be some basis to the talk that Gray didn’t work hard to win: he was guaranteed a Cabinet seat, and that was what the deal was about.

In 1975 thereabouts, the late Leroy Taegar had challenged Gray in the PUP Albert chairmanship convention. He lost, but if the deal was the way I was seeing it, he was doomed to lose.

Today, Leroy and Andrea Taegar’s younger daughter, Tracy, is the three-time area representative for that same Albert constituency, and she has run as a powerful UDP candidate. Mr. Goldson is dead, and Mr. Gray is dead. The game has changed, beloved. Tal es la vida.