A Carlisle teacher recalls 1970s Jamaica and the rise of Bob Marley

SOMEWHERE between stomach and groin it stabs. The reverb rattles your ribcage. The one drop back beat misses the second pulse and snags the third, bass and snare together. What Stewart Copeland, drummer of The Police, called a ‘paradigm of the cosmos’. This is the genie that is reggae.

The soundtrack of my teenage years had been the Mersey Sound, especially the Beatles, music with a conventional back-beat which pulsed on the second and fourth beats.

Now here was a music which defied that convention and hit the third beat in a way which punches you in the gut . It pulses in the street - at bus stops people can’t resist moving to it. The beat is infectious.

It’s all new. The drubbing heat on Hope Road, this sound vibrating the melting tarmac and thudding from the two metre high speakers on either side of a shop doorway at Half Way Tree. Where the country buses tilt top heavy with produce for Coronation Market and the goats grub along the gutters nosing the garbage.

Kingston, Jamaica. Our home for the next three years.

It’s 1973 and somewhere downtown a young Bob Marley is quietly stirring up a cauldron. The stage is being set. And we will be watchers.

We were newly arrived, me and my wife Sue , to teach at an international school. From the quiet English streets of small town suburbia and an eleven day crossing of the Atlantic on a banana boat we were now dropping into a maelstrom of heat, reggae and political turmoil.

Barrie Day, Jamaica, 1974 (Image: Barrie Day)

For our first six months we lived in the heat and torpor of Kingston. Our small apartment overlooked the grounds of the Prime Minister’s residence just off Hope Road. It was said that Bob Marley and his posse would regularly play soccer in the grounds in the early morning. After music, soccer was Marley’s passion. 

The PM, Michael Manley, son of Jamaican political royalty, Norman Manley, had been elected by a landslide in 1972. For a time he rode a wave of massive popularity. This light-skinned Jamaican, favouring African-style Kariba suits over conventional suits and ties, walked a new path of democratic socialism introducing initiatives in education, land reform and health care.

He cut a swathe through traditional practices wielding his ‘rod of correction’, a symbolic African walking stick gifted to him by the Emperor Haile Selassie. But when he ventured to take on the north American aluminium companies, ALCOA and ALCAN, and tax them at 40 per cent in addition to making overtures to Fidel Castro in Cuba, then the worm started turning.

A beautiful Jamaican scene in the 1970s (Image: Barrie Day)

Big business got the jitters, Henry Kissinger, the US Secretary of State paid a visit to Manley who refused to abandon his left wing policies and Edward Seaga (dubbed CIAga), the JLP, opposition party leader started stirring up a storm.

The turf wars in downtown Kingston became increasingly violent, gun crimes rocketed and in the spring of 1974 Manley unveiled his policy of ‘heavy manners’ - indefinite detention for possession of a gun, gun scenes cut from mainstream films and trial in camera inside the infamous Gun Court, a blood-red, razor wire topped compound built like a POW camp with guard towers and machine guns at the corners and fronting onto one of the main downtown streets.

Gun Court, 1974 (Image: Barrie Day)

Out of this bubbling cauldron of unrest emerged Bob Marley’s Natty Dread album in the October of 1974. The songs spoke of the rawness of life in the Kingston ghetto, of police aggression, of the threat of revolution - ‘a hungry mob is a hangry mob’.

They sang of the corrupting power of capitalism or ‘Babylon’ and the healing power of Jah - the Rastafarian name for God. But the track, more than any, which probably brought Marley to a global audience wasn’t driven by a gut wrenching reggae beat. No Woman No Cry was haunting and poignant and referenced Marley’s Trenchtown roots, cooking cornmeal porridge with his friend Georgie who ‘kept a logwood fire burnin’ through the night’.

The song was later released as a single in the UK and stayed in the charts for seven weeks.

It was in 1974 that the Bob Marley entourage moved into Island House at 56 Hope Road. It was a sprawling complex - house, offices, recording space, bought by Chris Blackwell, the Island Records founder and loaned to Marley as a refuge from the street violence of downtown Kingston. And our school was just 100 metres down the road at 32 Hope Road. We drove past each day but his gates were always firmly closed.

In the Spring of ’74 we escaped the heat and tension of Kingston and moved to a small cabin 4,000ft up in the Blue Mountains. Each work day we would drive the 12 miles from Irish Town, down to the school on Hope Road. And as violence increased we would stand on our mountain ridge at night and watch the helicopters far below in Kingston probing the curfewed streets with their laser searchlights. 

A country bus in Jamaica, 1973 (Image: Barrie Day)

It was a world of shifting mirrors. There was still the idyll of the palm fringed beaches and the lilting Caribbean, but it would be shattered by some sudden shock. One weekend, friends who ran a downtown restaurant appeared bruised and bandaged having been pistol whipped by gunmen who shot holes in the walls and ceiling before being shot themselves by some of the guests.

There was talk of communist plots and political assassinations and in fact one of the American teachers at the school disappeared, feared murdered, only to surface months later back in America. It was rumoured his CIA cover had been blown.

On a school trip taking my class of youngsters to see a working plantation, our bus was held up on the main road to the north coast by a gang of young men. They came on board asking for ‘donations to good causes’. There were no guns in sight but I guessed that under their leather jackets they were armed.

We handed over our small change and were waved through but it was unnerving and I felt helpless to reassure my students that all was fine. 

On a weekend trip to Negril on the west of the island, we were travelling along an open highway when our car was overtaken by a light aircraft. It landed on the road ahead of us, taxied for a distance while from a side road, a truck emerged in a cloud of dust, drove up close to the plane and we watched as sacks were thrown from the truck through the open door of the moving plane. The plane revved, lifted off the ground and the truck veered away to our left. This was the way ganja was trafficked.

During 1975 Bob Marley had been touring North America and the UK on his Natty Dread tour. It was the start of his rise to becoming a global icon. On every street corner the boom boxes snagged the air with that infectious reggae back-beat. But now Marley was being wooed by the Prime Minister as a useful propaganda tool which meant he would become a likely CIA target. 

In late 1975 a plot to overthrow the government, called Operation Werewolf was uncovered. There were tanks and road blocks on the streets, soldiers with sub machine guns. We were thankful that each night we could escape to our home in the mountains where the air was cooler and the drone of helicopters was a distant murmur.

Bob Marley after his move to the UK (Image: PA)

Our time in Jamaica was drawing to a close. We were leaving in the summer of 1976 and in June a state of emergency was declared following more street battles in downtown Kingston. In December, just prior to Marley performing at his free Smile Jamaica concert, gunmen attacked his house on Hope Road. Several of his friends were shot and he sustained a bullet to his arm. Fearing the removal of the bullet would affect his guitar playing, he played the concert with the bullet still in place.

Soon afterwards he left Jamaica for the UK to the start next chapter - the Exodus album. 

And the music still lives. Even now, fifty years on, when I hear the jab of that reggae beat I’m back on the goat grubbing streets of Kingston, the higglers sitting at the roadside selling sugar cane, mangoes and green coconuts, the country buses rammed with people, the Rastas imperious with their netted dreadlocks.

The memories are indelible, the beat is infectious, and the message of ‘one love’ still stirs the heart.

Barrie Day, who taught in Jamaica in the 1970s. He also taught for 30 years in Carlisle, first at St Aidans and then for 20 years as Head of English at Newman School. (Image: Submitted)

A more detailed account of Barrie’s life in Jamaica can be found in his memoir 
Not Behind The Bike Sheds. His Jamaican experience is also woven into his novel 
A Thread In Time. Both books are available from Bookends, Carlisle or from Amazon.