Sir Philip Sherlock: Founder and First Editor of Caribbean Quarterly

Abstract

Almost anything that 1 say about Sir Philip Sherlock would be to gild the anthurium - the anthurium being the gift of a life of hope and fulfillment creatively crafted and deftly lived as part of a process of transformation, growth and development of an entire society in quest of itself, of its reason for being, for over half a century. Philip Manderson Sherlock had been at the beginning, since the late Thirties, of all the great challenges facing the people of our groping West Indies whether it be the call for self-government followed the birth-pangs of a society in protracted labour or the halting courtship leading to an attempt at union, or the bringing forth, complete with primal screams, of so many Independent nations starting with his own native Jamaica and her sister twin-island state of Trinidad and Tobago in 1962. A persistent advocate of West Indian integration even in the face of the ill-fated Federation of 1958-61, Sir Philip has lived to see the light rekindled and the hope restored in the hearts of a new generation which remains the legatee of the vision he had for our Caribbean people in the surge towards a definitive civilisation. For him, as for other founding fathers, the twilight of colonialism was to herald a light rising from the West. Oriens ex Occidente Lux. Everywhere else it rises from the East. Trust us in our determination to be different, special and unique! Lord Milverton who, as Sir Arthur Richards the British Governor who detained trade unionist Alexander Bustamante and other radicals in 1939/1940. told me while I was researching the early self-goverment movement in Jamaica, that on being instructed by savingram from the British Colonial Office to proceed to Jamaica and restore Order, he arrived in the island with characteristic gubernatorial ardour intent on teaching the troublemakers a lesson. To his amazement he found alongside the fiery and remarkable Bustamante and a few egg-heads like Dick Hart and Frank Hill, a highly sophisticated society with people like the renowned lawyer N. W. Manley and young community leaders. Among these he singled out a bright young man named Phillip Manderson Sherlock. That young man had progressed to being the Vice Chancellor of the independent University of the West Indies at the time Lord Milverton was relating this story. None of this should be surprising, for Sir Philip was a great spirit, the avatar of all that gives force, purpose, life, hope and meaning to the turbulence, contradictions and chaosof our multi-sourced existence. He belonged to the chosen few the West Indies was lucky to have had at the helm of its social revolution - the chosen few who believed that the intractable problems of underdevelopment and the attendant immiseration of the mass of the population had to be met the empowerment of our people through the exercise of their intellect and their creative imagination. So he himself has been poet as well as historian, policy-determiner as well as classroom teacher, social worker and philosopher as well as administrator and man of public affairs. It is this call for texture rooted in a deep understanding of the need to inform intellectual pursuits with the arts of the imagination, which enriched the operation of the University of the West Indies from its fledgeling years. As a founding father, he actually helped to establish and administer the institution as its first Vice Principal and Director of Extra Mural Studies. By the time he became Vice Chancellor, after tending the establishment of the St. Augustine branch of the UWI, the Sherlock vision of the creative arts and the humanities acting as catalyst for intellectual pursuits and remaining handmaiden to the science and technology branches of knowledge, was well established. He institutionalised the vision partly through the introduction of a creative arts plank in the outreach work of his Extra Mural Department with the appointment of Staff Tutors in Drama along with counterparts in Social Work, Trade Union Education and Radio Education laying the foundations for degree programmes in Sociology and Social work, in Industrial Relations and related Social Science studies and in Mass Communications. …