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Bustamante described himself as a dietician and businessman with North American experience, but while he might have returned with some wealth to the island, his formal training and experience were mostly his own fantastic fabrication. He installed Gladys Longbridge as his private secretary, and she was to accompany him for the rest of his life as confidante, assistant, companion, and, finally, after September 6, 1962, his second wife. Along with his famous half-cousin Norman Washington Manley he became the dominant political figure in Jamaica until his retirement in the late 1960s.Īfter his return to Jamaica, Bustamante established himself as a money-lender in modest offices on Duke Street, then the desired cachet for all business addresses in Kingston. To this situation Bustamante brought great charisma, an attractive, empathetic eloquence spiced with rapier-like humor, carnival-like flair, boundless enthusiasm, energy, and an unflagging support for the working classes and the underprivileged. Workers were being organized and militantly politicized not only by the race and color conscious supporters of Marcus Garvey but also by the articulate socialist-oriented committees of Norman Manley, Frank Hill, Ken Hill, Arthur Henry, Richard Hart, Allan Coombs, Wills O. Wages and working conditions had declined steadily, and the government had consistently refused to provide relief. The decline of the old colonial system, hastened by the enormous difficulties which Great Britain had encountered during World War I and during the Great Depression, had saddled Jamaica with a type of politics and a bureaucracy which could not respond to the many problems which the island encountered. The Jamaica to which Bustamante returned in 1934 was a cauldron of social and economic discontent. There he met Mildred Edith Blanck, the widow of an English consulting engineer, whom he married in the Kingston Parish Church on December 12, 1910, while on one of his short visits to the island. Earlier he had spent nearly ten years in Panama (probably between 19) working as a traffic inspector. Most of this time was spent in Cuba, where he eventually gained employment in the security police of Presidents Alfredo Zayas and Gerardo Machado in the 1920s. Have led him to succeed his father as an overseer of the Jamaican landed interests.īetween 19 Bustamante lived outside of Jamaica, returning to his homeland for only brief visits. Although intelligent, he had little formal education beyond the elementary level in Jamaica and resisted the apprenticeship which would He was restless, extremely extroverted and gregarious. Those few who recall his youth remember him as a fine horseman, who even as a teenager owned his personal horse and raced regularly with his numerous male cousins and others. He attended elementary school in rural Hanover, once even in his mother's native village of Dalmally. Of Bustamante's early life little is known. However, Bustamante did not leave Jamaica until 1905, when he was 21 years old-and he left as part of the early Jamaican migration to Cuba, where employment opportunities were expanding in the sugar industry. Bustamante's own apochryphal explanation of the name is that it derives from the Spanish mariner who adopted him at the age of five, taking him to Spain where he was sent to school and where he saw active military service. His mother, Mary Wilson, descended from the sturdy, independent Black peasantry of rural Hanover.īustamante is the surname which he formally adopted in September 1944, although he had been using that name regularly since the 1920s. By virtue of the second marriage of Elsie Hunter, his paternal grandmother, to Alexander Shearer, he became distantly related to both Norman Washington Manley and Michael Manley, as well as to Hugh Shearer- all of whom were to be chief ministers or prime ministers of Jamaica. His father, Robert Constantine Clarke, a member of the declining white plantocracy, was the overseer of a small, mixed-crop plantation called Blenheim, in the parish of Hanover on the then-isolated northwestern coast of the island. William Alexander Bustamante, perhaps Jamaica's most flamboyant and charismatic politician, was born William Alexander Clarke on February 24, 1884.