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Franklyn: Glendairy was national embarrassment that should be razed, not preserved

by Dawne Parris
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Demolish the “national embarrassment” that is Glendairy Prison and develop it into something unrecognisable from its past.

That was the advice Opposition Senator Caswell Franklyn on Wednesday gave to Government as he strongly opposed any suggestion to preserve the former prison which was partially destroyed by fire during a March 2005 riot.

As debate began in the Senate on a resolution to vest the former Glendairy Prisons property in the Barbados Tourism Investment Inc. (BTII) for tourism development, Franklyn insisted that the prison’s history of being overcrowded – housing more than three times the number of inmates it was built for – and the resulting inhumane and degrading treatment meted out to inmates was nothing to either celebrate or preserve.

“These are things that we should be ashamed of and people should be apologising to the prisoners who had to go through that. They were prisoners and they committed crime but they were human beings too,” the Opposition Senator insisted.

“Our people, whether they committed crimes or not, should not have been treated in the way they were. That’s why it was burnt – because nobody listened to the cries of those people and they had to get rid of it, so they found the only way to get rid of it was to burn it. It was a place of torture – I’m not talking about actual physical torture but people had to exist in those conditions.”

Since the plan to vest the 27.7 acres of land at Glendairy in Station Hill, St Michael, to the BTII was made public through the resolution taken to Parliament late last month, several suggestions have been made in the House of Assembly and elsewhere, about how the property could be used.

Among those offering ideas was prominent historian Sir Henry Fraser who urged the Government not to destroy any of the five buildings at the prison but to reconsider a 25-page proposal he presented some eight years ago on behalf of the Barbados National Trust for a combined prison museum and an entertainment centre.

Although he did not make specific reference to Sir Henry’s suggestion, Senator Franklyn poured cold water on the idea of preserving the 166-year-old prison.

“Raze it to the ground! When you finish with that project, something should emerge like a phoenix from the ashes that has no connection to Glendairy Prison, or nobody would know that a prison was there….,” he said.

“We have some well-intentioned people who think that we must preserve everything colonial and anytime you put two blocks together on top of one another and it happened before Independence, we gotta celebrate it and we gotta call it a national treasure and we gotta do all kinds of things with it. Glendairy Prison was not a national treasure, it was a national embarrassment!”

The Senator added: “It is not something to celebrate….There are certain things that ain’t worth preserving. This is not something that we should want to preserve, not in an independent republic of Barbados come November 30th. This is not something we should be pushing.”

Franklyn acknowledged the prison’s architectural history but insisted that what happened within its walls was not something to be commemorated.

“If you’re going to use that property, do it like you’re preparing for COVID – sanitise the place, make sure you don’t have any trace of it on you and get rid of it and move elsewhere. We do not need a reminder of [what happened there].”

Independent Senator Dr Christopher Maynard expressed a similar view about the prison, saying that he had not “warmed up to the idea that we would retain it as a building where the vast majority of our people who went there suffered”.

“They went there for one reason – for punishment – and I don’t believe that places of punishment should be glorified, especially places where you carried out executions,” he opined. “I would feel tremendous relief if I drove down Station Hill and I saw a clear space. You cannot erase the past but there are some things about it that you should not keep.”

However, Senator Rudy Grant presented a polar opposite view in his contribution.

“I fundamentally disagree with what has been put forward by Senator Franklyn, that you should remove Glendairy Prison because prisons of yesteryear – and these are my words – were places of punishment, as opposed to being places of rehabilitation, and [because of] the treatment of the human rights of prisoners, that we should just get rid of Glendairy Prison and forget all that would have transpired,” he said.

“We must not, simply because some aspect of history is uncomfortable, erase the history, but we have to embrace it and we have to determine how we can utilise that history for our betterment.”

Another Government Senator, Rudolph Greenidge, agreed and insisted that preserving the heritage at Glendairy Prison, was not a celebration of what went on there.

Senator Franklyn had also questioned why so few details have been provided about Government’s plan for the prison.

Franklyn, who was the first person to contribute to the debate after Minister of Tourism Senator Lisa Cummins introduced the resolution, said he was disappointed that no details were provided in her presentation.

He said it was not enough to simply say that the land would be vested in the BTII for tourism-related development and that there would be a request for proposals.

“Government has not brought us into its confidence about what it is going to do with this property…. Tell us what it is. We’re not babies. Most of us are intelligent enough to understand,” Franklyn said.

“Yes, something needs to be done with Glendairy Prison, and all I want to know is what Government proposes to do. Don’t tell me that you have out proposals for investment,” he added, although making it clear that he had no quarrel with the work the BTII has done in the past.

“Let Barbadians have their say. Not after the fact.”

The Opposition Senator also suggested that any money the Government was allocating to this project could be better spent improving the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH).

However, Senator Cummins interjected to say that Government was not putting any money into the project.

“This is a request for proposals. It is an investment proposal. Government has no investment stake in the project. It is being leased and that has been clearly indicated, so to make the statement that Government is spending money on an investment project is, by definition, logically incorrect and is misleading to the House,” she explained.

While no decision has yet been made on what Glendairy Prison, which was decommissioned in late 2016, will be used for, Minister of Housing, Lands and Maintenance Dr William Duguid who introduced the resolution in Parliament on August 24 touted the idea of it being used for heritage tourism to offer tours, or for it to be transformed into a similar setting as that of the Oistins Bay Garden in Christ Church.

Opposition Leader Bishop Joseph Atherley had rejected the idea of developing the prison for heritage tourism, instead suggesting that it be turned into a juvenile offenders’ halfway house or be used to provide temporary relief housing for fire and hurricane victims.

After Glendairy, which was built in 1855, was destroyed in the March 2005 uprising, inmates were housed in a temporary prison at Harrison’s Point, St Lucy before a replacement jail, HMP Dodds, was opened in October 2007.
(DP)

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