An exceptional and innovative talent for management… Earl B. John is a ‘Special Person’

Sep 07, 2014 News

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“Out of that group of 67 men (The Penumbrians), over time, we produced a president, (Desmond Hoyte) two Ministers of Foreign Affairs, (Rashleigh Jackson and Rudy Insanally) several diplomats, including Rudy Collins, and a principal of Queen’s College; (M.T. Lowe) in addition we’ve had reams of outstanding people, lawyers, doctors, and athletes. We were an indigenous group, (no overseas connections) and we all excelled in our personal lives.”

 

By Dennis Nichols

The life experiences of this week’s special person, Earl B. John, may be aptly described as multi-layered. His vocation and interests range from public service to poetry, and embrace human resource management, organization design, community development, sports, creative writing, and instructive letters-to-the-editor penned in local newspapers. Additionally, he is authoring a projected volume enigmatically titled ‘Being personal with Sugar’, an allusion to his long, productive career with Bookers Sugar Estates, and the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo).

Last Tuesday, I had the opportunity to sit and talk with him at his Prashad Nagar home about his life and work over the past six decades. Twice married, John has one daughter who lives in Canada, born to his first wife, Cicely, now deceased. He was born in Bourda, Georgetown, in 1931, but grew up in Cummingsburg where his father, Isaac John, operated a tinsmith establishment, and also wrote poetry, a talent his son suggests was passed down to him.

He started working in 1950 in the Public Works Department, and though now retired from public service, he is still very active – as a writer, and as a member of S.V. Jones Associates, a management consultant firm started in 1998 by Sandra V. Jones, a Human Resource and Organizational Management consultant. John is an Associate in the firm, with expertise in Human Resource Management and Development, Organization Design, and the development of relevant communication structures in organizations.

Young Earl attended Queenstown R.C. School before moving on to Washington High, a private secondary school from which he earned a Middle School Scholarship to attend Queen’s College in 1946. There he began to develop his talent for writing, and skill in athletic sports, playing first-division cricket, table tennis, and becoming the school’s 100-yards Open sprint champion in 1949.

John’s first creative writing experience came in 1950 when he wrote a piece for The Lictor, the school’s magazine that he and a group of students had started. He left QC later that year, and was invited by the British Council, and by the local radio station, VP3BG, to do book reviews for them. It was also in this year that he started working as a clerk with the Public Works Department, and four years later, with the Ministry of Communications and Works.

Then, significantly on February 23rd, 1953, he and a group of mostly ex-QC boys got together and formed The Penumbrians, a group that analyzed and commented on issues of the day, as British Guiana was about to hold its first general elections under adult suffrage. It comprised originally, a number of young men who would later achieve great prominence in their respective fields, including Aubrey Bishop, Frank Mongul, Maurice Moore, Vibert Lampkin and Rashleigh Jackson, its first president.

“Out of that group of 67 men, over time, we produced a president, (Desmond Hoyte) two Ministers of Foreign Affairs, (Rashleigh Jackson and Rudy Insanally) several diplomats, including Rudy Collins, and a principal of Queen’s College; (M.T. Lowe) in addition we’ve had reams of outstanding people, lawyers, doctors, and athletes. We were an indigenous group, (no overseas connections) and we all excelled in our personal lives,” he proudly declared.

John added, “That was the period in our history when most of the Caribbean, including Guyana, was in a state of intellectual turbulence as several countries in the region were contemplating independence.” He said the gathering was essentially a literary group with the motto, ‘Amistad, Fraternidad, Y Honor’ (Friendship, Brotherhood and Honour) which had built up a library of West Indian and Latin American literature. But it was also an activist group, and its members were sometimes referred to as young leftists.

The Penumbrians held fortnightly meetings and invited special speakers to address them, including Barbadian novelist, George Lamming, local writer, Jan Carew, and (Sir) Shridath Ramphal who was guest speaker at the group’s first anniversary dinner in 1954. During one of their subsequent Week of Anniversary Celebrations, John wrote a skit called ‘Thirteen Voices’ alluding to the short-lived West Indies Federation, which he said was well-received by ‘Bertie’ Martin, a leading director and producer at the time.

At the time, John was in his early twenties. He now observes with some degree of nostalgia, that the relationship with the other group members has continued and endured for over five decades, although most of them are now overseas, and some have died. He insists, however, that the organization remains intact in spirit, with six members still residing here in Guyana.

John revealed that a new phase in his life began while he was employed with the Ministry of Communication and Works. “One day, the late A.J. Seymour, then Chief Information Officer of the Government Information Services walked into my office and teased me into taking a job as a broadcasting officer at GIS. I took the offer without knowing what I was going to do, what I was capable of doing, or how much money I was going to get,” he chuckled.

On the plus side, however, it was at the GIS that he met persons of the calibre of Celeste Dolphin, Lloyd Searwar, Victor Forsythe, and other ‘big’ names. And it was there too that he began writing and producing programmes in which avant-garde dramatists like Wilbert Holder, Ken Corsbie, and Wordsworth McAndrew did the speaking parts.

Things were moving apace in the late fifties, and soon John found himself applying for a cadetship vacancy advertised by the Bookers Company. He wrote a series of examinations, and was subsequently employed at the organization’s head office in 1958 as a cadet where, among other tasks, he assisted Mrs. Winifred Gaskin in producing The Booker News. His employment with the company was a move he hoped would eventually lead to a personnel managerial position.

And it did, when he was transferred to Blairmont Estate in West Berbice. He became an Assistant Personnel Manager, shortly after which he successfully completed a BSc Degree in Management at the London School of Economics, before returning there. He intimated that being placed in this position was actually part of the ‘Guyanization’ of the entity by having expatriates replaced with local managers, noting that he was the second person (after Training Officer Harold Davis) to be appointed to such a position.

Apart from his BSc, John also received a Diploma in Personnel and Industrial Relations from The University of Connecticut, and underwent additional training at the University of Strathclyde, Scotland, Harbridge House in Massachusetts, the University of The West Indies, Barbados, and the Industrial Society and the National Institute of Industrial Psychology, both in the U.K.

From Blairmont, John was transferred to Enmore Estate where he spent just three months before being promoted to the position of Administrative Assistant to The Director of Social Policy at the company’s Head office.

“That was the time when they were transferring all the residents of the logies in the various estates to proper housing units called extra-nuclear housing areas, financed by revenue gleaned from the export of sugar through the Sugar Industry Labour Welfare Fund, or SILWF, which also created Community Centres and Girls’ Clubs all along the Coast,” he explained.

The retired civil servant explained that through this welfare initiative, the Centres and the Girls’ Clubs were provided with the gear and other equipment for sports activities including cricket, basketball, table tennis and athletics, as well as drama, which he asserted, was of a very high quality at one time in the sugar estates, so much so that there were national competitions, with the finals being held at the newly-erected Theatre Guild.

John added that from a social perspective, it was ‘a very dynamic and exciting time’ during which talent was unearthed, not only in drama but also in cricket. That was the time of Kanhai, Butcher and Solomon, and the mentorship of young players by the legendary Clyde Walcott, recruited from Barbados by Bookers Estates, along with Robert Christiani, who helped coach them. There, he said, he ‘discovered’ a slightly-built, spectacular stroke-player from Ithaca Village named Roy Fredericks, who went on to represent Guyana and the West Indies, and to whom he became a lifelong friend.

Meanwhile, the expatriate Director of Social Policy had demitted office and returned to England, leaving John with the responsibility of coordinating all infrastructural activity dealing with the relocation of residents from logies to the updated housing units, and monitoring the activities of all the community centres and girls’ clubs. He also undertook the initiative of managing the country’s first contributory hospitalization and maternity insurance scheme offered by Bookers Estates through the American Life Insurance Company, for its first 5,000 salaried employees.

During this period, John, and Emamudeen Khan, another assistant personnel manager, initiated the formation of a National Personnel Officers’ Association (NPOA) in 1965, an organization of public and private sector management practitioners that expanded to accommodate ‘operational’ managers, and which later transitioned to become the Guyana Institute of Management.

One of his biggest undertakings, which he claims to know more about than any other Guyanese, was the Cane Farming Development Project, whereby small village cane farmers registered themselves as cooperatives, and supplied Bookers Estates with their produce. They accessed loans in an arrangement between the industry, the Royal Bank of Canada, and Barclays Bank, which John facilitated and made available to them. Some of the villages in which these co-ops were formed were Skeldon, Albion, and Rose Hall in East Berbice, and Sisters/Good Intent, Canal #2, and Stanleytown/La Retraite, West Bank Demerara.

He noted that this was a ‘legally significant’ venture, since special laws were passed to set it up, including a contract that had to be signed between the farmer and the manufacturer in case of breach of agreement. (John is concerned that the present administration has totally ignored this law which provides for a national cane farming committee represented by farmers from the various districts; favouring instead a system that deals with farmers on a personal basis.)

In the meantime, Chief Personnel Officer, Harold Davis, had made him his assistant, responsible for all junior staff matters. John continued to rise in the company, eventually becoming Assistant Personnel Director when Davis became Director, and by the time Davis rose to become the Chairman of GuySuCo, he had been elevated to Head of Personnel.

In 1979, John got an offer from Caricom to set up a Personnel Desk there, discharging the duties of Director, General Services and Administration. He worked closely with Dr. Kurleigh King, Secretary-General of the regional body, benefitting from the latter’s management acumen, and travelling extensively in the region while helping to establish the Caribbean Export Development Project, which certifies the quality of Caribbean goods.

He spent 12 years with Caricom before retiring in 1991. He was then invited back to GuySuCo (then under the management of Booker Tate) to work there as Personnel Director, a position he held until 1995, when he finally quit working at the corporation, and went into consultancy.

Space does not permit a more exhaustive exploration of Earl B. John’s life and work; suffice to say it encompasses a number of attachments to, and work done for, various organizations and agencies as consultant, advisor, trainer, coordinator, designer, facilitator throughout the Caribbean. Some of these entities are The Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute, (CARDI) The Guyana Livestock Development Authority, The Geology and Mines Commission, The Guyana Gold Board, The Audit Office of Guyana, The Deeds Registry, Ministry of Legal Affairs, and The Guyana Revenue Authority.

At present, he is recuperating from a fall-related injury, and spends much of his time writing. In addition to the volume already mentioned, he is working to update a book of poems first published in 2002, to be called ‘Phrases; Searches; Choices’. It’s a somewhat quizzical title for his collection of ‘John-try’ (John’s poetry) – literary licence I guess, but then again it probably reflects an idiosyncratic streak in the personality of this week’s Special Person, the exceptional and innovative talent that is Earl Brandis John.

 

The NPOA’s First Executive Committee in 1965 (Earl John is fifth from left)

 

 

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