A few posts back I asked…

When did the first “Courtesy Campaign” begin in the Bahamas? This was Pindling’s “Look Up, Move Up, The World is Watching campaign.” I just need a date and some details…

An answer to the question is January 4th 1968. However this is the answer to the question of when did the first PLP Courtesy Campaign begin. It turns out the UBP launched their own Courtesy Campaign in July 1961.

So, bad Bahamian service did not suddenly begin on January 10th 1967. In fact there is an even earlier courtesy campaign that started in 1955. This thing has deeper roots than I thought.

This is a sort of correction to the info-graphic that appears in the powerpoint presentation, the “Look up, Move up, The World is Watching” Courtesy Campaign began January 4, 1968 and not mid-1967 as the slides suggest.

Update: The slides have now been corrected.

Larry Smith has written a great column on the Fergusons of Farm Road at his blog at Bahama Pundit. Check it out.

A correction came in from Larry Smith:

I note the following on your website: “The creation of the Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) by black activists in 1955 ushered the Bahamas into the era of the political party.”

My understanding is that the PLP was formed in 1953 by mixed race (or conchy joe) activists like H M Taylor and Cyril Stevenson, although the party’s support came mostly from black Bahamians.

He is of course quite correct.

I will have to double check the original source that I used (Doris Johnson’s Quiet Revolution (which should have had the correct date) ) to get to the root of the problem, but for now I have changed the text and the citation to point to Saunders and Craton’s Islanders in the Stream vol 2 and used their “non-white” nomenclature instead of my previous “black activists.”

Thanks Larry!

So. Where am I? It’s been two weeks in beautiful Nassau and what do I have to show for it so far?

Let’s see. Thus far, I have done no interviews. I sent my appeal for interview subjects in to the Nassau newspapers but as yet, I don’t even think that they published it. Even if they did… I made an appeal for interviews at my talk/lecture (more on this later) and again, nothing. I will have to draw up a sample.

The talk (and TV interview) coincided with a week when I was quite sick. So I was going to the archives for far less hours than in the first week. I’m on the mend now and I’m hoping to get more done. My schedule will still entail me going to the Archives during the day but I guess I have to start scheduling some interviews in the evenings. This should not be too difficult. Three interviews this week?

The talk itself was quite useful in getting me to think about the information that I had already collected. I was able to fill a few gaps in my knowledge that I didn’t know needed to be filed and I can see some areas that I need to work on. I was surprised at the positive reactions to the work. A bit disturbed at the shallow nature of the questions afterwards, but overall I’m pleased with the response.

Coming up I need to get into the ZNS archives. There may be a Ministry of Tourism “archive-of-sorts” that I can call about. The Counsellors on Collins Avenue also have some kind of archive and a quick glance through their “archives” might also be helpful. I doubt that looking through government records will be useful, but I can check that at the archives tomorrow.

Questions that need answering at this point are:

• Why did ZNS pick up the Fergusons in 1974? There doesn’t seem to be a clear rationale for them to have done so. Yet they did.
• When did the first “Courtesy Campaign” begin in the Bahamas? This was Pindling’s “Look Up, Move Up, The World is Watching campaign.” I just need a date and some details…

I have a lot of information on the Friendliness through Understanding campaign, and I don’t think I need information on campaigns that came after, unless one of them was running when the Fergusons returned to ZNS…

Anyway. This is where I am. I’ve seen a lot of stuff so far, and unfortunately I just came off of a slow week. I have two weeks left. That’s it. Before I know it I’ll be back in the cold and I’ll have to start writing.

No time to waste.

Here is the powerpoint of the presentation that was given last night at the Bahamas Historical Society. The paper will most likely come sometime in February…

Just to let you know that I’m giving a lecture at the Bahamas Historical Society Museum on the northwest corner of Elizabeth and Shirley Streets, at 6:00 pm on Thursday January 15, 2009. (This happens to be tomorrow)

Thursday, January 15th, 2009 – Ward Minnis: “National Identity, Tourism and the Fergusons of Farm Road, 1970-74.”