Norman Washington Manley (4 July 1893 – 2 September 1969) was a Jamaican statesman who served as the first and only Premier of Jamaica. A Rhodes Scholar, Manley became one of Jamaica's leading lawyers in the 1920s. Manley was an advocate of universal suffrage, which was granted by the British colonial government to the colony in 1944.
Encouraged by Osmond Theodore Fairclough, who had joined forces with the brothers Frank and Ken Hill, Hedley P. Jacobs and others in 1938, he helped to launch the People's National Party which later was affiliated to the Trade Union Congress and even later the National Workers Union. He led the PNP in every election from 1944 to 1967. Their efforts resulted in the New Constitution of 1944, granting full adult suffrage.
Manley served as the colony's Chief Minister from 1955 to 1959, and as Premier from 1959 to 1962. He was a proponent of self-government but was persuaded to join nine other British colonies in the Caribbean territories in a Federation of the West Indies but called a referendum on the issue in 1961. Voters chose to have Jamaica withdraw from the union. He then opted to call a general election even though his five-year mandate was barely halfway through.
Early life
Norman Manley was born to mixed-race parents in Roxborough in Jamaica's Manchester Parish. His father, Thomas Albert Samuel Manley was a small businessman born in Porus, Manchester, Jamaica in 1852. His mother, Margaret Ann Shearer, was the daughter of a mixed-race woman (Mrs. Ann Margaret Clarke, née Taylor, a widow) and her Irish second husband, Alexander Shearer, a pen-keeper on a farm. His paternal grandparents were Samuel Manley, a white English trader who had migrated from Yorkshire, and Susannah Patterson, a black woman of the Comfort Hall plantation, Manchester. Samuel Manley later married Esther Anderson Stone, a black woman of St. Elizabeth.
Thomas Manley was initially successful in citrus farming, but soon squandered his earnings through litigious activities. Once he died in 1899, Margaret Manley moved her family of four children to the Belmont estate, near Spanish Town.
Norman Manley was a brilliant scholar, soldier and athlete. He attended Wolmer's Schools and the Beckford & Smith High School (now St. Jago High School), each for one year. He later won a full scholarship and studied at Jamaica College where he won six medals in the Jamaican schoolboy championships in 1911, including the 100 yards in 10 seconds, an island schoolboy record not broken until 1952. That time would have put young Manley into the final of that event in both the 1908 and 1912 Olympics. Following his mother's death in 1913, Manley and two siblings travelled to the UK to continue their studies. Despite being orphaned at 16, Manley earned a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Jesus College at the University of Oxford where he earned a Bachelor of Civil Law with First Class Honours.
Manley arrived in the UK shortly after World War I had begun, and visited a number of relatives, including his white cousin, Edna Manley. In her diaries published in 1969, Edna would later remark that Norman was "[a] scholar, sportsman, and a strange, strange personality. He had won the Rhodes, nearly died of typhoid, had a hundred yards record which was a world record for a schoolboy. I came into supper—full of sunshine and running. I was fourteen and he stood there in front of the empty fireplace—his hands in his pockets—swaying—handsome, faun-like—smiling mischievously ... I studied him and met a mocking smile—and something somewhere deep down touched."
Manley served in the Royal Field Artillery during World War I, and was awarded the Military Medal (M.M.) for "acts of gallantry and devotion to duty under fire".
Political career
After the war, Manley was admitted to the bar in England in 1921, and returned to Jamaica in 1922, continuing to practise law as a barrister.
In the years of the Great Depression, and during the troubles of 1938, Manley identified with the workers, donating his time and advocacy to assist them. In September of that year, Manley co-founded the People's National Party, which was tied to the Trade Union Congress and later the National Workers Union. The PNP supported the trade union movement including the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union, then led by Bustamante. At the same time, Manley worked for Universal Adult Suffrage.