(Neville James Bissember, attorney-at-law and former cabinet minister in the People’s National Congress administration, died on May 3 aged 80 years.)
When the ‘PR’ series of motor vehicle licences was issued in the mid-1960s, first Deputy Prime Minister Dr Ptolemy Reid’s car was PR 1. Second Deputy Prime Minister Neville Bissember’s was PR 2. That was how close things were back then. PR, fortuitously, was also the abbreviation for proportional representation, the electoral system that allocates seats to political parties to be represented in the National Assembly in proportion to the number of votes received.
Neville Bissember had sealed his status in the People’s National Congress hierarchy and established his reputation as a persuasive party spokesman since 1961. In the elections held in August that year, he won the seat for the Campbellville electoral district in Georgetown and entered the Legislative Assembly. He was also selected as secretary of the PNC’s 11-member legislative group. Here he made his mark as a man of both words and action in September 1962 when the People’s Progres-sive Party administration’s Attorney General Dr Fenton Ramsahoye prematurely presented a new draft constitution.
The draft, disregarding the fact that British Guiana was still a colony, provided for sweeping changes including the attainment of independence, enlargement of the Legislative Assembly and establishment of a republic. Deputising for Opposition Leader Forbes Burnham, Neville Bissember argued that the assembly was not competent to consider such a crucial constitutional matter which was the subject of a forthcoming conference in London. After the speaker allowed the motion, Bissember led the entire opposition, which included the leader Peter d’Aguiar and members of the United Force party, in a walkout. It was a moment of satisfaction as much for the principle as for the action’s popular appeal.
Neville Bissember had entered politics as an ordinary member of the People’s Progressive Party in 1953 soon after qualifying as an attorney-at-law. He had known younger members of Cheddi Jagan’s family at Port Mourant on the Corentyne, not far from where he grew up, and was sympathetic to the party’s programme. But, disillusioned by the schism in the PPP that spawned rival Jaganite and Burnhamite factions in 1955, he sided with neither protagonist.
His legal practice, however, brought him into frequent and friendly contact with one of them − fellow attorney at law Forbes Burnham − who invited him to a PNC meeting at Bush Lot Village in West Coast Berbice. There he got a taste of addressing a huge, hostile horde of PPP followers and noted later that the experience was his “beginning in active and serious politics.”
After the PPP Jaganite faction won the August 1957 general elections, the PPP Burnhamite faction adopted the name People’s National Congress at its first congress on October 5, 1957. Bissember was elected to membership of the Central Executive Com-mittee and, eventually, to the senior vice-chairmanship. An ardent and articulate speaker on the hustings who earned himself the nickname ‘Fireball’ for his fervid orations, he threw himself into enthusiastic countrywide campaigning for the 1961 general elections.
As a member of the PNC delegations, he attended the constitutional conferences in London in 1962 and 1963 to discuss legal arrangements for independence. It was at the talks in October 1962 that Bissember experienced an ecumenical episode. In a futile effort to bring the two fiercely opposing sides together, he “privately” (according to Dr Cheddi Jagan) conveyed an offer to give the PNC four out of ten seats on the existing PPP council of ministers, among other things.
Overshadowed by the fresh memory of his walkout against the PPP draft constitution in the Legislative Assembly a mere month earlier, and overlooking the PNC’s policy of pursuing the proportional representation electoral system, Bissember’s innocent initiative crashed. Together with other causes, this failure of the PPP and PNC to resolve their differences contributed to the collapse of the constitutional conference.
After months of murderous ethnic violence in 1964, Bissember − the most prominent Indian in a predominantly African party − endured the worst of both worlds, becoming the target of undeserved threats and taunts. In the end, the PNC and UF parties gained a majority, formed a coalition administration and entered office. Neville Bissember was sworn in as a member of the council of ministers on December 1964 and was designated second deputy Prime Minister.
In his political career, he was elected to the assembly thrice, in 1961, 1964 and 1968, and held four portfolios − Health and Housing, Housing and Reconstruction, Information and Broadcasting, and Trade and Parliamentary Affairs and was leader of government business in the National Assembly. He represented first Guyana, then the Caribbean, Central and South American region, in the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association.
Bissember flourished in the turbulent 1960s when he found outlets for his ideas and interests. But, standing to the right of the trade unionists and earthy working class types who formed the party’s rank and file, he would have been ill at ease with the radical, socialist changes that were being introduced and reached their climax in the decade after the country became a republic in 1970.
A principled, perceptive and independent-minded person, Neville Bissember saw the writing on the wall and resigned from the administration in December 1969 after serving almost exactly five years. He had by then grown increasingly censorious in the cabinet of administrative shortcomings. Prime Minis-ter Forbes Burnham had succeeded, by the end of 1970, in removing every single one of his original 1964 set of ministers with the sole exception of Ptolemy Reid. All of them – Neville Bissember, Eugene Correia, Winifred Gaskin, Llewellyn John, Robert Jordan, Rudyard Kendall, and Claude Merriman – perceived as belonging to the party’s right wing, had gone. A fresh cadre of technocratic ministers was enlisted.
Bissember was appointed Chairman of the Guyana Telecommunications Corporation the next year. He then resumed full-time law practice handling largely civil matters in the magistrates’ courts. A mild stroke in the mid-1990s obliged him to reduce his professional workload and, following further illness, he retired totally in October 2004. Under Hugh Desmond Hoyte’s presidency, he was appointed a member of the Guyana Elections Commission in 1990-92.
Neville James Bissember, the third eldest son of ten children of Joshua Bissember, a sugar curer, and his wife Mary, née Ramdas, was born at Lancaster Village on the Corentyne, 27 km from New Amsterdam. A Presbyterian by religious denomination, he attended the Auchlyne Church of Scotland School, not far from Lancaster village, and the Port Mourant and Berbice High Schools, gaining the Cambridge School Certificate in 1943. He then served as a pupil teacher at St Patrick’s Anglican School at Canje, Berbice, for five years.
He went up to London in 1948 to read Law at the Middle Temple, Inns of Court, qualifying in 1951. Returning home, he entered private practice and also worked briefly as a Crown prosecutor. It was during this time that he joined the law firm of Clarke and Martin, mingling with attorneys at law Forbes Burnham, Eric Clarke and Desmond Hoyte, until the general elections of December 1964. It was under Hoyte’s presidency that he received the national award of the Cacique’s Crown of Honour (CCH) in 1987 for political service.
Neville Bissember married Mary née Durham on April 1, 1954, their union producing three children, Michael, Elfrieda and Neville junior.
