Last week Colin Campbell, an old Etonian and quintessentially English, died at his home in Blackhorse Lane, South Mimms, in Hertfordshire at the age of 86. This death will have gone almost completely unnoticed in Guyana yet he was someone who changed more lives for the better here in Guyana and the West Indies than most even important Guyanese and West Indians ever get to do.
Colin Campbell was the younger brother of Jock Campbell, Chairman of Bookers in the 1950s and 1960s. It was Jock who reorganized the chaotic shambles of the sprawling Booker empire, put in train a revolution in the whole ethos of how Bookers was run and transformed the sugar industry from a run-down, unprofitable, inhuman, paternalistic and plutocratic expatriate family concern into a rehabilitated, forward-looking, productive and dynamic enterprise basically run by Guyanese for the much improved good of Guyana and Guyanese. He also played a key role in negotiating the Commonwealth Sugar Agreement which established the basis for much better prices for Caribbean (and Commonwealth) sugar and this was later converted into the Sugar Protocol between the European Union and African, Pacific and Caribbean countries which agreement provided remunerative prices for our sugar for decades until the Protocol was unilaterally abrogated by the European Union a few years ago.
Colin, almost completely anonymous compared with his larger-than-life and charismatic brother, was one of the team put together by Jock to provide advice, technical assistance and backroom expertise in international sugar marketing for Bookers Sugar Estates which comprised 80% of the Guyana sugar industry and led the way in negotiating with the British and the Europeans.
His knowledge of the subject was profound. He certainly knew much more than the European Union side of the bargaining table. He knew every clause and sub-clause and their applications in all the voluminous rules and regulations and addendums and exceptions. In those non-computer days he carried around a mountain of files to supplement the Everest in his head. Once, I recall, he rented a van for his files and drove the whole treasure trove of information from London to Geneva for an international sugar conference held under the auspices of the International Sugar Organisation.
Significantly as a result of his knowledge and backroom advice I reckon we on the ACP and Caribbean side were helped to squeeze every last possible advantage and improved pricing arrangement out of the European Commission over the decades while the Sugar Protocol lasted. The outcome was better prices for our sugar, a strengthened industry and improved wages and conditions for those who worked in the industry. Colin, a preternaturally modest man, would have scoffed at the idea, but I am sure that through his quiet backroom work he benefited hundreds of thousands of people in his lifetime when you count all those who worked and depended on the sugar industry in Guyana, the Caribbean and ACP countries and their families.
But Colin was not only a colleague, more treasured by all than he ever knew. He became an unforgettable friend. His shy and eccentric nature, his quirky high intelligence, his knowledge of so many arcane subjects, his special sense of the absurdities of life and the strange swings and roundabouts of the world, the deep-seated courtesy displayed in all his behaviour, his concern and helpfulness in times of one’s own times of trouble and worry makes it impossible to forget Colin.
He was fair-minded to a fault. A good friend of his and mine, Barry Newton, tells how he took his fair-mindedness far indeed. When he was called upon to umpire a cricket match on his village green it was startling to spectators and players alike when he applied his principle of fair play by finding ways to dismiss batsmen who stayed too long at the crease – time to give someone else a chance – and refusing to give any batsman out if he had only just come to the wicket on the score that since he had gone out of his way to come to the match he deserved a longer innings – and in any case the bowler had so many more chances!
Colin was exceptionally modest and retiring. Limelight was a hellish glare for him. He not so much minimised as he minusculed the value of any role he might be playing or contribution he might be making. It was not a matter of Colin being unsure of himself, he was absolutely sure of his complete unimportance in the grand scheme of things.
This had the result that he told stories casting himself in hilarious and even absurd situations of hopeless ineptitude and confused mistake-making. And one has to say that these stories were mostly true with friends often on hand to vouch for them, since Colin was indeed extraordinarily absent-minded and richly eccentric which time after time led to occasions of bizarre and inadvertent mess-ups.
It would take too long to go into details here but who can ever forget the time Colin locked the Guyanese Ambassador to Brussels in an underground parking lot by mistake. And I fondly remember and was personally in the car which Colin was driving and somehow got stuck sideways in an approach lane to a border post between France and Switzerland thereby piling up a long line of horn-honking traffic behind us. The picture of gesticulating French gendarmes rushing towards us shouting Merde! Merde! Merde! is imprinted in my memory. There were scores of stories like these. They should be collected.
Colin was absolutely sui generis. I shall never forget him, I had not seen him for a long while – we were both many years retired from our labours in the sugar industry – but when I got the news of his death a great sadness came upon me because his death is one of those deaths that in an indescribable but very real way brings an end to so many memorable and important things in one’s own life. It was late at night when I got the message and I sat a long time in the dark alone and thought about Colin and all that he had meant to me and a lot of us in our lives all those many years ago. As one gets older and friends die one’s past becomes more and more unpeopled except by shadows, and a feeling of loss grows. Colin much more than most made me realise this with a few tears coming in my eyes as I sat and remembered him.
I remember Colin on the day he was to receive an honorary Golden Arrow of Achievement from the Guyana Government for the services he had rendered to the sugar industry. He was agitated and in a complete panic of shyness and stage fright. He did not want to wear a suit to the ceremony because in those days he thought that might seem too rudely British. What on earth should he wear, he asked me, his agitation at its height. I suggested that a long-sleeved shirt-jac would be appropriate and he hurried off to buy one. To my amusement and even joy, when I met him at the Cultural Centre for the ceremony I found Colin splendidly arrayed, yes, in an embroidered, sky-blue, long-sleeved shirt-jac. He was not wearing a jacket but, glorious sight, with that splendid shirt-jac he was proudly wearing what I like to think was an Old Etonian tie! Ah, Colin, so many indelible memories flood through my mind. You were a wonderful presence in my life once upon a time and, despite what would certainly be your self-deprecating protests, you did a tremendous amount of good.