Tom Adams

Tom Adams was prime minister of Barbados from 1976 until he died in office in March 1985, the son of the federation's prime minister, who had been the island's first. He was the Oxford lawyer and BBC producer who took the Barbados Labour Party from his father's generation and beat Barrow's Democratic Labour Party in September 1976 after ten years of it, by seventeen seats to seven, and again in 1981. The nine years were the island's move to the right of the Caribbean's argument. There were the offshore financial sector built from 1977, the tourism, the growth, and the free bus passes for the old and the young. The national insurance was widened. The foreign policy was Washington's. He was the Caribbean leader who wanted the Grenada intervention of October 1983, who had asked the Americans in before Bishop was dead, who sent the Barbadian troops and lent the airfield. He said afterwards that he would do it again. He was the one who let the Cubana airliner's bombers of 1976, the seventy-three dead off Bridgetown, be tried in Venezuela rather than at home. The island argued about that. He distrusted Bishop and Manley, and feared Cuba. He built the Barbados Defence Force in 1979 out of the regiment, proposed the regional security system of 1982 that the eastern Caribbean adopted. He was, in the small world of the Caribbean's prime ministers, the clever one and the cold one. He was born in St Michael, educated at Harrison College and Magdalen College, Oxford, and was called to the bar at Gray's Inn. He worked for the BBC's Caribbean service in London for eight years. He came home in 1962, entered parliament in 1966 for St Thomas, and took the party in 1971 after his father's retirement. He died at Ilaro Court, the prime minister's residence, of a heart attack, at fifty-three. St John, his deputy, took the office and lost the election of 1986 by twenty-four seats to three. That was the country's judgement on the years without him.

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