Compton, John

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John Compton

1925-2007

Prime minister

John Compton was serving his third stint as the prime minister of Saint Lucia, the Caribbean island nation, when he suffered a stroke and died a few months later in September of 2007. The longtime head of the United Workers Party, eighty-two-year-old Compton was a veteran of the Saint Lucian political scene and had been instrumental in negotiating its independence from Britain back in 1979. His influence spanned some fifty years of the island's history, and the man dubbed "Pa Pa" or "Daddy Compton" by Saint Lucians had been the most famous figure in the country for several generations. "During his career, in a trajectory familiar to small Caribbean islands, St. Lucia changed from a neglected, semi-feudal backwater with a large, depressed peasantry," wrote Polly Pattullo of London's Guardian newspaper, "into an independent state that saw tourism displace agriculture as the economic driving force."

Compton was not a native of Saint Lucia; he was born to a single mother on a small island called Canouan in 1925. Canouan belonged to the Grenadines, a collection of six hundred islands, and later became part of the island nation known as Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. In 1939 Compton moved in with relatives who lived on Saint Lucia, located north of Canouan, to attend high school there. The members of this Compton branch of the family were known as skilled shipbuilders and boat captains, and during his teens Compton became an experienced sailor in this part of the Caribbean that borders the Atlantic Ocean.

Compton entered adulthood at a time when Saint Lucia was still a colonial possession of Britain. The 240-square-mile island in the eastern Caribbean Sea, with lush rainforest and majestic mountain peaks, was part of the Windward Islands, named so by European sailors because of the prevailing winds in the weather patterns of the West Indies. The other Windward isles were Dominica, Martinique, Saint Vincent, Grenadines, and Grenada, and most had originally been inhabited by the Carib people, who may have originally come from South America. In the 1600s the French, Dutch, and English established settlements on Saint Lucia, but the fertile soil became a battleground for competing British and French interests until 1814, when the last of fourteen wars fought over it ended with a British victory. By then, Saint Lucia had an immense population of African slaves, who had been brought over to work the sugarcane plantations.

Educated in England

After completing high school, Compton headed to Curaçao, an island off the coast of Venezuela, to work at one of its oil refineries. His two-year stint there helped pay the costs he would incur at college in Wales and then England as he pursued a degree in law and economics. After finishing at the London School of Economics, he was called to the bar of Gray's Inn in 1951. Returning home that same year, Compton became an attorney in private practice but also joined a new and thriving political scene in Saint Lucia brought on by the adoption of universal adult suffrage that same year. In 1954 he ran for and won a seat in the legislative council as a representative of the Micoud-Dennery district, a fishing village on the Atlantic side of the island.

Compton initially ran as an independent candidate, but he soon joined the Saint Lucia Labour Party (SLP), an organization that advocated for increased independence from British colonial authorities along with better conditions for workers. In 1957 Compton gained a measure of fame when he led a strike by workers at a sugar factory, during which he was arrested. This came because of a confrontation with a white man, either a sugar farmer or factory manager, who brandished a weapon in the heat of argument but froze when Compton pulled out his own in response. Compton was briefly jailed over the incident, but in the end the factory owners were forced to recognize the union.

Compton remained a member of the legislative council during the four-year period when Saint Lucia was part of a new political entity, the Federation of the West Indies, from 1958 to 1962, and served as a government minister after 1957. In 1961 he and two other SLP members broke with the party to found the National Labour Movement, which soon merged with another political party to become the United Workers' Party (UWP). Compton was elected to head it in 1964, and under Saint Lucia's new system of government became chief minister of Saint Lucia in April of that same year after elections. The party held onto power for the next two decades.

Agitated for Full Independence

In the late 1960s Compton led a faction of Saint Lucian politicians who pushed for full independence from Britain, but their plan was rejected. They were instead granted "associated statehood" status, which meant that they were free to rule at home, but Britain would oversee Saint Lucia's defense and foreign affairs. Compton famously quipped at the time that "the colour of our skins is against us," according to the Daily Telegraph, "and a government, even one that professes democracy, is pleased to legislate and propound the doctrine of second-class citizenship for people of another colour." People of African ancestry made up more than 90 percent of the island's population.

Compton took up the cause again after the 1974 general election, and this time Britain agreed to the opening of independence talks. Five years later, those negotiations concluded with Saint Lucia's independence day, February 22, 1979, and the ceremonies and festivities were presided over by Compton, whose title of chief minister now evolved to that of prime minister. The sole remaining tie to Britain was Saint Lucia's membership in the British Commonwealth of Nations, whose members recognize the British monarch as the head of state; traditionally, the king or queen is represented locally by an appointed governor-general.

At a Glance …

Born John George Melvin Compton on April 29 (some sources say April 30), 1925, in Canouan, the Grenadines (now Saint Vincent and the Grenadines); died following a stroke on September 7, 2007, in Castries, Saint Lucia; married Janice Clarke, c. 1968; children: one son, four daughters. Education: Studied law and economics at the University of Wales and the London School of Economics, late 1940s.

Career: Called to the bar, Gray's Inn, 1951; attorney in private practice in Saint Lucia, c. 1951-54; elected to the legislative council of Saint Lucia, 1954, and consistently reelected from the district of Micoud-Dennery; United Workers Party, 1964, cofounder, leader, 1964-96, 2005-07; in Saint Lucia became government minister, 1957, chief minister, 1964, and prime minister, 1979; resigned as prime minister, 1996; returned to office December 2006; part-time banana, coconut, and cocoa farmer; legal consultant, 1996-2006.

Awards: Knight Commander, Order of St. Michael and St. George, 1997; Order of the Caribbean Community, 2002.

Saint Lucians went to the polls again in July of 1979, and in a surprising turnaround Compton and the UWP were ousted by the SLP. Compton remained politically active, however, and in 1981 attained a long-sought achievement for greater regional cooperation with the formation of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), with Saint Lucia joined by six other founding member nations. A year later, Compton returned to power with the UWP in elections held in May of 1982, when he and his party colleagues took fourteen of the seventeen seats in the House of Assembly. He served as prime minister for the next fourteen years, a period of impressive economic growth for the island.

In 1983 the normally placid atmosphere of the Windward archipelago was shattered by an uprising in Grenada that prompted a U.S. military invasion to oust Marxist rebels. The foreign intervention came at the request of the OECS, whose members had immediately stepped forward and suggested the deployment of a multinational Caribbean force, backed by outside assistance, to quell the trouble in Grenada. President Ronald Reagan agreed, and on October 25, 1983, Americans were greeted by the headlines that a contingent of U.S. Marines and Special Forces had invaded a small Caribbean island most had never heard of until then. "Compton was by now recognised as a conservative figure, with a strong belief in capitalism and the competitive economy," noted his Times of London obituary. "He spoke out strongly against the coup in Grenada, seeing it as a threat to the stability of all the neighbouring small island states."

Returned to Office

In April of 1996 Compton resigned as head of the UWP and stepped down as prime minister in favor of Vaughan Lewis, his handpicked successor. In May of 1997 the UWP was badly beaten in the general election, taking just one of seventeen House of Assembly seats. This turn of events actually mirrored similar changes in other parts of the Caribbean, with the ouster or natural deaths of longtime political leaders who had held power since independence, often for decades by that point. "In many respects, political leaders like Mr. Compton, who first came to power in 1964, can be seen as victims of their own success," explained New York Times correspondent Larry Rohter. "Throughout the Caribbean, the governments that took power after independence invested heavily in education. As a result, the generation that is now coming to maturity and is voting for the first time is both more worldly and more demanding, unwilling to accept high rates of unemployment, corruption and the other ills that are typical of developing societies."

Compton retired to a banana, coconut, and cocoa farm he had in the Micoud area, and he took legal consulting jobs when not busy with his farm. In March of 2005 he made a surprising comeback when he was elected to head the UWP again, and in the general election on December 11, 2006, the party regained several seats and Compton began his third stint as prime minister. The following March he greeted scores of international visitors and VIPs who came for the cricket World Cup, held in Saint Lucia's capital of Castries. A month later, however, Compton suffered a stroke while in New York City, and in mid-May he transferred his powers to Saint Lucia's minister for health and labour relations, Stephenson King, who became acting prime minister. On September 7, Compton died at a hospital in Castries at the age of eighty-two. Survivors include his wife of thirty-nine years, Janice Clarke Compton, one son, four daughters, and several grandchildren.

Compton's Times of London obituary cited his somewhat unique low-key political style in listing his contributions to Caribbean politics over the decades. "Though not blessed with the power to move men by rhetoric, Compton became in effect the chief civil servant of the island," the tribute noted. "He grew increasingly impatient with the personality conflicts and verbiage of local politics and became firmly convinced that only free enterprise could deliver modernisation. A plain man, he could at times be brutally outspoken. There was no cult of personality—he always drove his own car, refusing police outriders or guards." Shortly before taking office in 2006, Compton gave an interview to Donna Sealy from the Barbadian newspaper Nation in which he remarked that "the day a prime minister has to get a bodyguard to walk around in his own country, that is the day he needs to go."