Barbara Gloudon: Pain and torture at The Gleaner
The second and final part of The Desmond Allen Interviews looking at the life of veteran journalist, broadcaster and playwright Barbara Gloudon published in the Jamaica Observer on May 16, 2004.
Party Line by Stella
All the time, Gloudon’s career at The Gleaner was pumping up. In the 1970s, she was promoted to features editor. After covering nearly every beat, she was writing substantially on the arts where a great deal was happening. She recalled that when Edna Manley sculpted the Paul Bogle statue mounted in Morant Bay, the St Thomas capital, people cursed it and said “it was too black, Paul Bogle never black so!” Ken Allen came up with the brilliant idea for a social column to be written by her. And so began one of the most widely read columns of the time — Party Line by Stella. The logo carried a drawing of the back of Gloudon’s head done by the famed cartoonist Urban leandro.
She recalls the embarrassment of having to return money to people who were desperate to be mentioned in the column. Not accepting gifts was something The Gleaner insisted on. She still carries that chip on her shoulder today, frequently saying thanks-but-no-thanks to media appreciation invitations. She has memories of how she inadvertently caused a policeman to be court-marshalled when she wrote that she had seen a cop riding a horse in such a way that it fell and was injured. The police commissioner, Gordon Langdon at the time, had a fancy for horses and caused the policeman to be tried. Gloudon was summoned to testify at the hearing, at the end of which the cop was demoted to foot patrol.
‘God Protects fools and SMALL children’
Gloudon, by now a fast-rising reporter, editor and columnist, was interviewing and rubbing shoulders with some of Jamaica and the world’s biggest names: Sir Alexander Bustamante; NW Manley; Marilyn Monroe and Joan Crawford, the Hollywood megastars; Eric Gairy of Grenada; Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and his wife Margaret; Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi; and Greek Prime Minister Ferdinand Makarios, among them, the latter four having come to Jamaica for the 1975 Commonwealth Heads of Government Conference.
She bought her first car, an Anglia, from Hector Lodge, a co-worker with whom she became great friends. “I got this crazy idea to have readers of the Stella column name the car. Many people sent in names and I decided on the name “Angie”… It was a simple time. I did not have money but I got an education at the university of The Gleaner,” Gloudon says in retrospection. She did not keep any clipping of her work, not wanting to feel self-important and remembering that a mentor had said “today’s headline story will be wrapping fish tomorrow”.
She travelled to the United States on a US State Department four-month fellowship that she and John Maxwell had received. She was assigned to the Troy Daily News in a little town 25 miles west of Dayton, Ohio. The trip was good. She experienced her first cold winter and covered an ice hockey game, learnt to walk several blocks in thick snow and get to work at 5:00 am, no matter how bad the weather was. At the end of the fellowship, she was moved by the gifts she was given by children from the schools she had covered while in Troy. She also received a grant to tour several US cities, including Chicago, Detroit, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, which she fell in love with; and finally through Arizona to New York. Often Gloudon was the only black or woman on a plane in a violently racist America. “Truly, it is said that God protects fools and small children.”
barbara Gloudon, oj
Inevitably, the nation began to take notice of Gloudon. For her coverage of the 1975 Commonwealth Heads of Government Conference, the Government awarded her the Order of Distinction (OD) Officer Class. That would be surpassed many years later with the Order of Jamaica (OJ), the country’s fourth highest honour. She recalls having grave misgivings about accepting the OD at the time. Frank Hill, a great journalist for whom she had much respect, told her: “Girl, don’t be a fool. You deserve it.” Hill was chairman of the Institute of Jamaica at the time when Gloudon later received the Bronze Musgrave Medal and the institute’s Centenary Medal.
beginning of the end
Before Sealy retired from The Gleaner, he put Gloudon in charge of The Star the racy tabloid stablemate of the more conservative broadsheet. He could not know, of course, that in that promotion was the seed of her demise. The Star had a staple of sensational crime stories which made the crime reporter, George Daley, famous; gory details of nasty divorce cases; and pictures of bare-breasted white women supplied from England. Prior to Gloudon’s tenure, there was a memorable headline on one of the most famous divorce cases that of the late Hector Wynter who was state minister for education at the time: “The Minister of State used to come home late,” it screamed. By now, Wynter had become the editor-in-chief of The Gleaner and, ironically, Gloudon’s boss.
Gloudon had a vision of the paper as a community paper. This was the unforgettable 70s when the two main political parties fought a bitter electoral war. Overseas, the country was regarded as the pits. In her thinking, someone had to speak for the people and the country. It would be The Star, the people paper, Gloudon determined. She dropped the girlie pin-ups from the newspaper, saying that they were an unnecessary drain on the country’s fast dwindling foreign exchange reserves anyway, edited out the ugly details of divorce cases, on grounds that it was hurting children of the divorced parents, and ran human interest stories of community heroism. “The circulation rose sharply after that,” Gloudon claims. “People who used to stay away because of the naked ladies came back to
The Star.”
But in the austere boardroom on
The Gleaner’s fifth floor, it was a different story. There were claims that the paper had lost its excitement and sales were dropping fast, as readers tuned out. Instructions came down that the semi-nudes must return and the divorce cases spiced up again. Gloudon resisted. “I had reached a place in my life where I could no longer do it,” she explains. The upshot: Gloudon was removed as editor of The Star and “demoted laterally” with the title of “Associate editor” and no job description. “I was given a desk of one me!”
Gleaner career over
This was 1978. Word got out and the Gloudon “firing” from The Star became a cause celebre. The women’s movement took it up. So did the PAJ. Demonstrations were staged in her name. Two Gleaner reporter/