St Kitts and Nevis

The blog site had its first ever visitor from St Kitts and Nevis the other day, a tiny island in the Caribbean Sea off the northern coast of South America. 

Now I know virtually nothing about St Kitts and Nevis although I've worked with lost of people from the West Indies in my time including a fabulous character called Reece Campbell, a lovely man from Jamaica originally, who was the NUPE branch secretary at Central Middlesex Hospital in west London during the 1980s.

The chairperson of the local union branch was another West Indian chap, a lovely man named Stan Campbell would you believe - and I got on with both of them like a house on fire.

Reece was a bishop in the Church of God and he was employed by the local health authority while I was employed by NUPE to organise and support union members in that branch and others in my 'patch' covering north west London.

Boy, we ran some great campaigns together - one led to a boycott of South African goods during the Apartheid era (Brent Health Authority was a very big purchaser), others followed over pay disputes and hospital closures - and I always remember that Reece spoke like an old-fashioned preacher at meetings with union members, as if he were delivering one of his sermons.

I used to tease Reece about the sometimes wayward and occasionally rambling nature of his speeches at these big meetings and he used to tease me right back that while I always knew what I was talking about - the union members (most of them from the West Indies) could not understand me because of my Scottish accent.

One day, right out of the blue, he told me about his past and the fact that he was the ancestor of African slaves - and that he was the child of a Scottish overseer who had travelled to the West Indies to work on the plantations which is why he had ended up with a Scottish name like Campbell.

Now that was a humbling moment, for a short time at least, at the cruelty that these events must have caused his family and forebears, but if he's still going strong either in London or the West Indies somewhere, I tip my hat to him - because Reece Campbell was a big,kind and gentle person who made a lasting impression on me and taught me a few things about life.