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Public relations for Sir Courtney Blackman was not about optics. He considered it an integral function of management.
As soon as I joined the Central Bank of Barbados as Public Affairs Officer in January 1981, I was invited to sitat the conference table with senior management.
He did not believe that the public relations officer should be “lost away” under an assistant to the Secretary or the Human Resources Manager.
He was a disciple of that American management specialist Peter Drucker.
Before I entered the Bank in the Treasury Building, he had enrolled me in a three-week course in Trinidad conducted by English public relations guru Frank Jefkins.
Brimming with ideas on my return to Barbados, I soon came up with a thick impressive document laying out a public relations programme for the Central Bank of Barbados.
He studied it for three days and called me in to his office. Leaning back in his chair, he said: “This is an impressive document, Carl, but I first wish to see a philosophy of public relations at this institution. You’ve put the cart before the horse.”
I spent the next nine months drafting and re-drafting a policy document underpinning the Bank’s public relations philosophy. Then, one Monday morning in November of that year he called me in and said: “Now, we can proceed with public relations at the Central Bank.”
My most enjoyable first six years in any Barbadian workplace was spent working with Sir Courtney as construction began on the new headquarters building at Church Village.
As head of a new Barbadian institution which he joined at the tender age of 39, he directed the Bank through six of its most challenging years, from ground-breaking in March 1981 to its opening on September 18, 1986, when the Errol Barrow Cabinet boycotted that function.
When he started the Bank in 1972, with a staff of five, including an IMF operations specialist, Rudolf Kroc, Sir Courtney brought a solid grounding in management and money, and experience in international banking on Wall Street.
I admired his courage and fortitude in the face of public criticism. It came to the fore during those tortuous years of construction on the new headquarters building, derisively dismissed by some as “Courtney’s erection” as the first of twelve concrete towers protruded ten storeys above the Bridgetown skyline, utilising a process called slip-forming, a technology applied in Barbados only once since then, at the cement plant in St. Lucy.
I will always remember his raucous laugh at the Topping Out ceremony on September 5, 1984, when the structure reached the top before the roof was attached. In the presence of Prime Minister Tom Adams and Anglican Bishop Drexel Gomex, he said to me: “I now have twelve erections!”
Sir Courtney always thought it would be unwise to erect such an imposing structure in the heart of Bridgetown and not include a social dimension; hence the Frank Collymore Hall and the Grande Salle, which now carries his name.
He did not settle for second best. During the closing stages of its construction, he insisted that nothing less than a Steinway 9-foot orchestral concert grand piano should grace the stage of that concert hall, named for an outstanding Barbadian man of letters.
He graciously accepted my suggestion that a steel plaque with words by English art critic John Ruskin should adorn the entrance to the main building, now known as the Tom Adams Financial Centre. It reads:
When we build, let it be such a work as our descendants will thank us for; and let us think as we lay stone on stone that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as they look upon them: “See, this our fathers did for us.”
To quote the fourth Governor, Winston Cox: “The wit lives on, the excoriation has passed, and the extravagance is now hailed as foresight.”
At the entrance of the Courtney Blackman Grande Salle is another plaque — this one of his selection — by Pablo Picasso:
Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
After three terms of office, Sir Courtney moved on in 1987 to establish an even wider footprint in the region and further afield, including becoming the Barbados Ambassador to the United States.
Years after his departure from Barbados, I always knew when he was back home. His trademark laugh would sail across Turquoise Avenue from #69, his younger brother Wally’s home. Then, he would walk across to #71 and we would have a lively chat.
No one enjoyed a laugh more than Sir Courtney Blackman. I shall miss him.
Carl Moore; Public Affairs Officer 1981 to 1999.
