A stalwart, a tower of strength and a very honest person were how some who were privileged to rub shoulders with legendary broadcaster and philanthropist Dame Olga Lopes-Seale remembered her.
Lopes-Seale died in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Barbados yesterday morning at the age of 93.
“She was a very stalwart person, honest in her undertaking and made everyone stick to the rules and regulations,” good friend and former colleague of Lopes-Seale Bernice Mansell told Stabroek News yesterday.
Mansell was with Lopes-Seale from the inception of the Radio Needy Children’s Fund, which started in 1960.
The veteran broadcaster was born in Guyana as Olga Lopes and worked as a broadcaster for Radio Demerara (where she acquired the nickname ‘Auntie Olga’).
Her career started when she was in her early teens. She loved singing and playing her own mandolin. She became well known as far back as 1942 visiting Barbados for singing engagements.
In 1939, Olga married a Barbadian Dick Seale. The couple had two children – Marcia and John – who were born in Guyana. The family moved to Barbados in 1963.
She always had a passion for helping the less fortunate and she formed the Dame Olga Lopes-Seale’s Needy Children’s Fund which is still in existence. On December 9, 2010, she fell at her home and broke her hip in a number of places, leaving her unable to continue her charity work for the Needy Children’s Fund.
Hugh Cholmondeley–a veteran broadcaster in his own right–recalled that he met Lopes-Seale 53 years ago when he entered broadcasting along with Clairmonte Lye and the late Eileen Pooran.
“She was a tower of strength to us and encouraged us, assisting us in all aspects of the business of broadcasting,” Cholmondeley said. He said over the years he met Lopes-Seale on many occasions in Barbados, where her work with needy children had replicated with just as much success as it did in Guyana.
Cholmondeley described her death as a great loss to the history of broadcasting in Guyana and the communication industry in the Caribbean.
‘A crown of glory and
a crown of thorns’
Meanwhile, according to Mansell, who herself has left the radio needy children’s fund and is now heading the Bernice Mansell Foundation, while at the fund Lopes-Seale ensured that they investigated each and every case to ensure that it was a genuine case of a child in need. She said it was through her now dead friend she got to know all the streets in Albouystown as they use to walk those streets up and down during their investigations.
According to her, when Lopes-Seale left Guyana it was on natural for her to take over the reigns of the fund because at one she had become her “chief cook and bottle washer.” But even so, Mansell said she knew that she would have never filled the shoes of Lopes-Seale because of how good she was at helping children.
“When she left she told me ‘I leave you with a crown of glory and a crown of thorns, you cannot wear one without the other,’” Mansell told Stabroek News. She said she understood what Lopes-Seale was saying at the time because she had seen the sometimes very good days and at other times very bad days while at the helm of the needy children’s fund.
“I know what she was telling me at the time, she was a very honest person and she told me later that I was a very good pupil.”
Mansell recalled that she carried out the mandate of the fund faithfully after Lopes-Seale left even though at the time she was a young mother and wife.
The last time Mansell spoke to her friend was about a year ago but she said she knew when she fell and kept in touch with relatives about her progress. She was happy to have learnt that she was recovering well but about a week ago she was told that Lopes-Seale had contracted pneumonia and then yesterday morning she got the news about her death.
She recalled when Lopes-Seale left for Barbados she
