Anything I have written about the Birds from 1965 similarly to the present, I stand by to the letter. The malicious elite with all the malice in the world cannot turn what I wrote historically against the history of our time. No one, just no one, could justly deny or begrudge Vere Cornwall Bird snr the magnificent larger-than-life Cuban sculpture unveiled  in his honour and memory on Monday 1st July Caricom Day. T’were better though that CARICOM Day should have been renamed CARICOM Nation Heroes Day, rather than V C Bird Day. The regional was sacrificed on the altar of insularity in the global age.

Sir Vere Cornwall Bird is, after all, the longest serving President of the Antigua Trades & Labour Union, 1943-1968, who, following Reginald St Clair Stevens, served as First Elected member 1943-51; First Chief Minister 1951-67; First Premier, not second, but last Premier 1967-81; First Prime Minister 1981 – 1994.

No one in the Caribbean, English, French, Spanish, Dutch or U.S. islands in the region has served longer in political leadership in any island, or continental territory, such as Guyana or Suriname, than Vere Cornwall Bird 1943-1994, a monumental 51 years. Not even the redoubtable revolutionary leader of Cuba, Dr Fidel Castro, equals Sir V C Bird’s 51 years leadership record.

However, it would be an error, no less grave to hold that only V.C. Bird played a leading role or led the movement for liberation from colonialism here.

For sure, Reginald St Clair Stevens played a major role. It was Reginald St Clair Stevens who became the first President of the only Working-Men’s Association here from 1932 – 1939, in which year, 1939, he became the first President of the Antigua Trades & Labour Union. Before 1932, no organisation functioned on behalf of the working people. St Claire Stevens pioneered, often using his own money, earned as a jeweller, to fund this first worker organisation.

The historical importance of Reginald St Clair Stevens has often been questioned, even by PM Lester Bird, who foolishly holds that it is “revisionism” to assert the achievements of Reginald St Clair Stevens. Let the historical record speak again on behalf of Reginald St Clair Stevens.

In 1842 fieldworkers in Antigua who were deemed “first class” earned “one and a half shillings per day” or EC36 cents. In Barbados, fieldworkers, not “first class” fieldworkers, earned “one shilling and seven pence” or EC38 cents per day. In Trinidad “two shillings per day” or EC 48 cents, and in Tobago one shilling or 24 cents per day. In British Guiana, as Guyana was then called, it was “one shilling and eight pence to two shillings per day” or 40, to 48 cents per day. In St Vincent field workers pay ranged from 16 cents to 48 cents per day. Antigua was among the lowest of the low.

In 1845 Antiguan planters cut the wage to field workers from 36 cents to 24 cents. By 1848 it had been cut from 24 cents to 18 cents. Antigua and Antiguans were among the most exploited wage-earners, in field and factory, between 1848 and 1940. The last general wage increase in Antigua had been in 1888, for the next 52 years.

To prove the point beyond all reasonable doubt, on January 27, 1904 the Minutes of the Antigua Sugar Factory stated (and which the V.C. Bird government of 1981 made illegal to quote because of an exposé written by me).

“The daily rate paid fieldworkers of six pence held good for some 56 years in the colony but the introduction of a modern sugar factory may compel us to raise the rate to 9 pence or more for general labourers.”

Exploited workers, unprotected, could only lower output per person and per hour.

The first general wage increase in Antigua was secured by Reginald St Clair Stevens in 1940, as President of the Antigua Trades & Labour Union. An increase of 50 per cent, from 18 cents to 27 cents per day for men, and 20 cents for women. That this was won during the Second World War, when wage increases to workers in the Commonwealth were opposed, as “being against the war effort” is all the more incredible and praiseworthy.

It was the same Reginald Stevens, as First Elected Member in the Legislature, who secured the abolition of whipping on Sugar Estates here. Though slavery was abolished in 1834, whipping of sugar workers here, as ordered by the Estate manager or Overseer, continued for exactly another hundred years. It was Reginald St Clair Stevens who moved for its abolition here, and persuaded the Colonial Legislature here, that it “was brutish, cruel and inhuman punishment.”

He was in fact and in effect a one man Amnesty International. His place in securing human rights here is unsurpassed.

As in slavery too, workers in sugar field and sugar factory, until the 1930’s here, worked from dawn (at best 6.00 am) to dusk (usually 6:00 pm) six days a week, from Monday to Saturday.

It was again Reginald St Clair Stevens, who persuaded an English Governor, and a planter dominated colonial legislature to reduce the working day from 72 hours to 44 hours. It was Reginald Stevens and the indomitable editor and publicist, Edward Mathurin, who led this unmatched campaign.

No matter how one looks at it, from the sheer facts of the matter, no individual who never held power as government, and including most who held power as government from 1951 to the present, can equal Reginald St Clair Stevens in magnitude of historical achievement. None, other than V.C. Bird.

Most important, Stevens, a jeweller by trade, living on Thames Street, with his jewellery on High Street, put all of his life’s savings into first the Working Men’s Association 1932-39 and then into the Antigua Trades and Labour Union from 1939-43. He died a virtual pauper, un-honoured and un-sung to this very day, in a country which he served with every fibre of his being. Few match him in terms of political honesty and integrity. The planters plied him with everything. Yet Reginald Stevens remained true to the workers of this land.

Yet, V.C. Bird is far more important than Reginald St Clair Stevens, politically and historically.

Oddly, while Reginald St Clair Stevens was a politician, an elected politician, he was not a political leader. He had and led no political organisation. The AT&LU under Reggie Stevens was all trade union and no political party.

It was V.C. Bird, who in 1943 as AT&LU President established the Political Committee in the AT&LU and began the anti-colonial political movement in Antigua and Barbuda. That is unquestionable, and unquestionably important.

Under St Clair Stevens, the Antigua Trades and Labour Union represented canefield workers and factory workers. It was under V.C. Bird that the Antigua Trades and Labour Union became a mass movement, representing the black, formerly fearful, often terrified masses, against the all powerful British Planters and Merchants who owned and controlled everything.

It took V.C. Bird, acting himself, and working almost every night, to organise oppressed black workers, once fearful and trembling en masse in the presence of a single white manager, into an organised and mighty fortress. There is nothing like it in all Caribbean history.

Where others like Sir Alexander Bustamante , Sir Norman Manley, Sir Grantley Adams led, they had organisers. Sir V.C. Bird was at one and the same time, Trade Union President, chief organiser, and Political Leader. It is an incredible political accomplishment.

It took V.C. Bird as President and chief organiser of the AT&LU some eight years, 1943-51 to organise the downpressed black workers of Antigua. He worked practically all day and all night, hiring vehicles at night from Chelsea garage and Clarence Edwards of Market Street, and neglecting family, leading to unhappiness and divorce.

An estimate of V.C. Bird’s monumental achievement is symbolised by this fact. So serious was the organisational effort of V.C. Bird, creating Sections and Districts throughout the country, with Section and District leaders emerging, that the all-powerful  planters felt compelled to react and respond in kind.

The Planters in turn, organised all Employers in the land into one body, and this organisational effort was led by Sir Alexander Moody Stuart, head of Antigua Sugar Estates and Antigua Sugar Factory, with substantial shares in several major enterprises, including Pan American Airways Handling Co. To the outrage of V.C. Bird and the AT&LU, the new Employers Federation was registered in 1950 under the Trade Union Act of 1939. The white planters and merchants who had fought the right of black workers to organise and assemble in a Trade Union, until 1939, now turned and themselves registered under the Trade Union Act. More than that they had organised themselves into one body, ready “to starve the workers into submission,” as they themselves pledged to both Governors Baldwin and Blackburn in 1950 and 1951. The battle was joined, because workers organised by V.C. Bird and others in the AT&LU now had the strike weapon.

On the one hand, the poor workers led and organised by V C Bird and the AT&LU, on the other, the wealthy employers in factory, field and commerce, and in control of police, militia and power in the Legislature. The forces, one unarmed, the other armed with the coercive power of the state, the one mainly barefoot, malnutritious and overworked, armed only with the power of labour, of numbers and therefore of solidarity, were by no means evenly matched.

In 1950 V.C. Bird led the AT&LU to declare May 1st 1951 as Labour Day, which day Antiguan labour would join workers around the world, celebrating the fallen heroes of labour, and the struggle of labour to come.

But before that, the planters acted in typical divide and rule stratagem. In order to divide small farmers (peasants) from labourers and factory workers, Moody-Stuart in February 1951 agreed to buy small farmers canes at the same price he had denied them all along and which had been paid to contractors. Bird was angry beyond words.

On March 6, 1951, the planters, again led by Moody Stuart, stopped the crop, arguing that it was a waste of money, fuel and time to reap less than 7,000 tons of cane a week. Obviously the workers had reduced output in view of the planters efforts to divide peasants from landless labourers.

Strikes ensued, with sugar curers. Then the landless labourers. Sugar Factory bosses announced that grinding operations would begin again on April 4, 1951, but for factory workers the cost of celebrating May Day or Labour Day on May 1 would be three days off, naturally, without pay. V.C. Bird and the AT&LU would have none of it.

May Day came and even maids refused to work, as did herdsmen on estates. Commerce ceased. The waterfront was work-less and worker-less. It was, in a manner of speaking, the first General strike in Antigua. Barbuda joined in solidarity.

For weeks, there were nightly battles between strikers and strike-breakers. Strikers, like Samuel Simon, were imprisoned for allegedly beating a strike-breaker. A woman unknown now to succeeding generations, Rebecca Roberts by name, took upon herself the task of enforcing the strike, especially in the North of Antigua by deploying gangs of strikers, with almost military precision. There is nothing like her in the history of Antigua and Barbuda.

Antigua heard its first political broadcast on May 17. Then when the chips were down, workers standing firm as one people for the first time, Governor Kenneth Blackburne addressed the “island” in a radio broadcast. The masses had no radios.

As the workers held firm, the government amended The Public Meetings and Processions Ordinance. The administrator-in-council could ban all public meetings, no noisy instruments were to be used, and any assembly of persons could be deemed a meeting.

The Malone Inquiry was established. On one side was the Antigua Trades & Labour Union represented by the Secretary and Solicitor of the Caribbean Labour Congress, Richard Hart [later to become Attorney General, in the Grenada Revolution 1980-83] and Claude Earle Francis, and Quentin O’Connor of the Oil Field Workers Trade Union of Trinidad and the Trade Union Council there. On the other side, the side of the Employers Federation, were attorneys-at-law Sydney Christian senior, and Egbert E Harney in this struggle of Employers vs. Workers. The black professional elite had broken ranks with their own oppressed and downpressed black brothers and sisters.

Sydney Christian snr, speaking to the Malone Commission of Inquiry, headed by Sir Clement Malone, told the inquiry that: “Under the circumstances, if force was applied to check the lawlessness of the AT&LU no one could blame the government”. And said this even though the AT&LU had called off the general strike on the establishment of the Malone Inquiry. The betrayal of the professional elite was thorough-going.

The Malone Inquiry began on June 11, 1951. However, by June 13th 1951, British troops, in the Welch Fusiliers had landed in Antigua. A State of Emergency had been declared. British troops could shoot on sight where more than two or three were gathered. V.C. Bird was declared a communist. His end at the hands of the invading British troops seemed certain.

On June 14 V.C. Bird announced the AT&LU would not continue to appear or to send witnesses to the Malone Commission of Inquiry. He risked going to prison while the establishment risked a social explosion hitherto unknown. V.C. Bird, in defying British colonial authority, had gone further than other anti-colonial Caribbean leaders.

Blackburne, then colonial Governor, again took to the airwaves to defend the invasion by British troops, but could give no evidence of any major disruption of law and order in Antigua. The AT&LU was not allowed right of reply to the colonial Governor. Massa spoke and that was the end of the matter. So began the authoritarian control over the electronic media, which, oddly, V.C. Bird himself in power was to vigorously maintain.

For three weeks British troops roamed Antigua, finding no chance to engage unarmed people who were counselled into non-violence by V C  Bird and the AT&LU  long before Dr Martin Luther King, and in the fashion of Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi of India. Britain had to withdraw the British troops, for the first time in colonial history. Others in the Caribbean would be threatened with British gun-boats. V C Bird and Cheddi Jagan alone were threatened with actual troops.

When the British troops were withdrawn, the Malone Commission resumed with the AT&LU in attendance. V.C. Bird had held the fort, the British government, the governor, the Antigua planters and merchants blinked first.

Emboldened, V.C. Bird who had seen, through Kem Roberts, to the organisation of the Montserrat Trades and Labour Union, headed by William Bramble, and along with Robert Bradshaw of the St Kitts-Nevis Trades & Labour Union, held several meetings with Governor Blackburne, demanding adult suffrage – the vote to all over 21 years old – immediately. At first the Colonial office stalled, but since its troops had failed, it had no alternative but to agree.

The Leewards, and Antigua in particular, is the only place to have wrested, by struggle, the vote to all over 21 without distinction between males and females since 1951. V C Bird, Llwellyn Bradshaw and William Bramble deserve eternal credit. Bradshaw and Bramble declared they would do as Bird had done.

Where the white and coloured middle class in Antigua had petitioned the Governor and the Queen, through the Colonial Office, to take away the vote from Antigua in 1936 because they feared blacks would have acquired the vote, in view of the rapidly declining white population, it was V.C. Bird and the struggling masses which restored the vote, and opened the way to democracy in Antigua against the authoritarian traditions of crown colony rule. The highest honour to whom the highest honour is justly due.

V.C. Bird’s place in the history of Antigua and Barbuda is unrivalled. It was his government that expanded Primary Education to every village or District. It was the V.C. Bird government, while reneging on its promise of 1951 to nationalise sugar and  turn “the sugar lands into co-operatives, which settled over 10,000 peasants on the land [admittedly in uneconomic units] and so initiated the most significant agrarian reform ever attempted in the English-speaking Caribbean. The Peasant Development Office which the V C Bird colonial administration founded, was, until 1962, a model of credit and agricultural assistance to farmers. For this, V.C. Bird and moreso McChesney George, deserve high praise. After 1965 in particular, the PDO became a cesspool of corruption. The movement had begun to turn into its opposite.

In 1955 V.C. Bird made the first expansion of secondary education, and the beginning of public secondary education with the establishment of the Princess Margaret School. In 1962, the V.C. Bird government took over the Antigua Grammar School, founded in 1884, and the Antigua Girl’s High School, founded in 1886, from the Anglican church. No individual or government has had a greater influence on education here, though it was the PLM government headed by Sir George Walter which expanded secondary education here from its 1962 limitations to the current level, including the State College. Since then education has stagnated.

Between 1960 and 1968, when most of the current hotels were constructed the Antiguan economy grew at an unprecedented rate of growth, then or since, according to economist Dr Carlie O’Loughlin, achieving a rate of 8.5 per cent per annum. It is the spectacular achievement of the V.C. Bird government. However, unlike what Sir Arthur Lewis advised, all the hotels remained foreign owned, controlled and managed to the end of V.C. Bird’s rule and reign in 1994. Blacks controlled no sector. American foreign power had replaced British foreign power.

However, Sir Vere Cornwall Bird more than deserves the impressive Cuban designed and executed sculpture, by Cuba’s Andres Gonzalez, standing in his honour as the Father of Modern Antigua & Barbuda. Oddly, V.C. Bird remained opposed to Cuba and it took a huge effort by ACLM to get the V.C. Bird government to agree to put Antiguan Doctors, Dentists, and Veterinarians trained in Cuba to work. To this very day the best trained and qualified agronomist, George Maurice Goodwin of Bolans and who graduated from the University of Havana, remains unemployed, having unsuccessfully applied for government jobs over the last 15 years!

Nevertheless for his unmatched and unsurpassed role in Antigua & Barbuda’s history, Sir Vere Cornwall Bird deserves the honour of the Cuban designed statue, but not to the exclusion of others like the incomparable, non-established leader, Reginald St Clair Stevens.