Labor & Lunatics

Britain hoped that its worries in Jamaica were over when it granted limited self-government to its turbulent, dusky islanders 14 months ago. But last fortnight Kingston erupted in a chaos of strong-arm politics, union shootings, and escaped lunatics.

The Hon. Alexander Bustamante, half-Irish boss of riotous Bustamante's Industrial Unions and self-styled "Prime Minister of Jamaica," was out to break the rival Trades Union Council, made up of government and public-service workers. Bushy-haired Bustamante had swept Jamaica's first democratic elections in 1944, boasted "I am the government," now ran roughshod over mild Governor Sir John Huggins.

Attendants and nurses at Kingston's dismal Mental Hospital struck to force the removal of a Bustamante-supported superintendent. Scores of unguarded lunatics yelled "We are free!", romped (some naked) into town, looting stores and homes, raping, smashing windows, or just wandering aimlessly.

Coffee-colored Bustamante gathered his tough dock workers, bawled out orders (dictated to his common-law wife-secretary): "Handle the strikers with an iron hand." In reply, Norman Washington Manley, leftist leader of the defiant T.U.C., called strikes among prison guards, firemen and railroad workers. Armed mobs of rival unionists prowled the streets. Three men were killed. Bustamante was hit on the head by a brick.

The lunatics were no sooner hustled back to the asylum than they set fire to the epileptic ward. Fifteen inmates burned to death. When American nuns arrived to give their help, one piano-playing lunatic strummed Happy Days Are Here Again, but surly strikers ejected the nuns with the cry of "strikebreakers."

Manley, a former Rhodes scholar, howled for a Royal investigation and Bustamante's arrest. Adapting Churchill's rhetoric to Jamaican terrain, Manley vowed that his unions would "fight in the streets, lanes and bedrooms." But pistol-toting Bustamante, who seemed to be getting Colonial Office support, chortled: "They'll get no mercy. They struck against the government."

The only serene person in Jamaica was Percival Bennett, a convicted murderer awaiting execution in St. Catherine prison. His sentence had been commuted to life imprisonment, after the hangman had answered Norman Manley's strike call.

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