Errol Barrow

Errol Barrow led Barbados to independence in 1966, was its first prime minister, and is the source of the line about not loitering on colonial premises that was quoted when the island became a republic fifty-five years later. He flew forty-eight bombing missions over Europe as an RAF navigator during the war, then read law and economics in London, where he was part of the West Indian student circle that included Michael Manley and Forbes Burnham. He returned in 1950, broke with Grantley Adams's Barbados Labour Party and founded the Democratic Labour Party in 1955. As premier from 1961 he introduced free secondary education, the school meals service, the national insurance scheme and the university campus at Cave Hill, and pushed the economy away from sugar towards tourism and light manufacturing. He took the island out of the collapsing West Indies Federation into separate independence on 30 November 1966 and was a founder of CARIFTA and then CARICOM, and of the Caribbean Development Bank. He established relations with Cuba in 1972, against American wishes, together with Guyana, Jamaica and Trinidad. He lost the 1976 election and spent eleven years in opposition, during which he condemned the American invasion of Grenada in 1983 in the sharpest terms of any regional leader. He won again in 1986 and died of a heart attack in office the following year. Barbados named its airport after him and put him on the fifty-dollar note, and his birthday is a public holiday. He described his own politics as being about the ownership of the country by the people who lived in it.

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