“Don’t Vote For Him; He Likin’ White Woman”: The Smear That Did Not Work on Cyril St. John Stevenson, 1956

Cyril St. John Stevenson was a man caught in the crevice of enormous social and political change — change he would help engineer, even as it threatened to swallow him whole.

Politics is a bare-knuckle boxing match. Opponents face each other in the ring of public opinion and debate. You can walk away with a bloodied nose or a black eye. Those are expected. But every so often — and in politics, all too often — someone hits below the belt. They go for the kidneys — a one-two punch — and try to send the rival to the ropes, doubled over in pain. No referee. No rules. Just the cold calculation of someone who knows exactly where to hit hard and hits there anyway.

In 1956, the Bay Street Boys hit Cyril St. John Stevenson in the kidneys. Hard!

The neophyte Progressive Liberal Party had just achieved something remarkable. In the days when parliamentary elections were held over days and sometimes weeks, four members in New Providence had been elected.

Lynden Pindling (New Providence South Second Place). Randol Fawkes (New Providence South First Place) . Milo Butler (New Providence West First Place). Samuel Isaacs (New Providence East Second Place). Seated. The Bay Street machinery understood the arithmetic.

If Andros fell, the PLP would have its six.

Six meant an official opposition.

An official opposition meant the beginning of the end of the carefully crafted world Bay Street controlled.

Cyril Stevenson in 1956 was brash and bold and determined. Bay Street realised he had to hampered in some way. So they picked up a pen. They went after the most personal thing they could find — his marriage.

The Attack: Political Pellets by Unpolitical Pete 14th June 1956 on the eve of the Out Islands Elections

It was the smear campaign designed to hit his political kidneys. It opened with a knowing wink — “The man who said anything can happen in this election, had something” — and descended without delay into what it always intended to be: a public gutting of a Bahamian man for the crime of leaving one woman and taking up with another. The particulars were arranged for maximum damage. His Bahamian wife. His four Bahamian children. His abandoned home. His empty cupboard. And then the kicker, placed with surgical precision into a society still raw with colonial wounds: “that English woman.”

Read it again slowly. That English woman.

The racial coding was not subtle because it was not meant to be subtle. The message to Andros voters was simple enough. Here is a man who made promises at a sacred altar and broke them. Here is a man who got himself a little money and a little politics and traded his Bahamian wife for a white Englishwoman. Punch 1.

He promises food in your cupboard and nice clothes on your back. Ask his wife what his promises are worth. She is walking the streets of Nassau right now, trying to find a job to feed his children. Punch 2!

The column even asked, with theatrical innocence, why Stevenson had not run for a New Providence seat. The insinuation was plain: he ran for Andros because Nassau people knew too much. He ran for Andros to hide.

It was a one-two punch. The first jab: he abandoned his Bahamian family. The second: he replaced them with a white Englishwoman. Body blow. Ropes. Done.

Except it was not done.

Charles Farquharson Thread: A Slave Owner’s Daughter and A Free Woman of Colour Would Marry The Same Henry Stevenson Sr. Grandfather to Cyril

Before we delve into the impact of Bay Street press’s actions against Cyril Stevenson, let’s understand his background. Not just politically, but also genealogically. His family’s story is deeply intertwined with the Bahamas’ history of slavery, colour, and the colonial order the Bay Street Boys inherited which Stevenson sought to dismantle.

Begin with Jessamyn Thompson. She was a free-coloured woman. Her Christ Church baptismal records confirm it. In a society that catalogued human beings by their proximity to whiteness, that notation determined what Jessamyn could own, where she could move, what her children could inherit. She was the mother of Henry Stevenson Sr.

Henry Stevenson Sr. married three times. His first marriage links this family to Charles Farquharson. On the 10th of July, 1835, at Christ Church, Henry Stevenson married Christina Farquharson, youngest daughter of the late Charles Farquharson, Esquire, of Watlings Island, a prominent slave owner. The Bahama Argus recorded it. Farquharson was not merely a slave owner. He was, by the measure of that island, likely its largest — owner of Prospect Hill Plantation on the east side of Watlings Island, where he grew cotton. His diary survives as one of the few first-person planter accounts of Bahamian plantation life.

Henry Sr. eventually married a woman the family called Maria. That union produced Harry — Cyril’s father. Here is where precision requires honesty. Cyril did not descend directly from Charles Farquharson. That blood ran through Jessie and Helen, daughters of the first marriage — Harry’s half-sisters. What Cyril carried was not Farquharson blood but Farquharson adjacency. His direct line ran through Jessamyn Thompson — free-coloured, her status recorded in the baptismal register with the clinical precision of a society that needed to keep track of such things.

The family that produced Cyril St. John Stevenson contained, within two generations, a free-coloured woman and the daughter of the largest slave owner on Watlings Island renamed San Salvador.

The men who tried to destroy him in 1956 were heirs to the world Charles Farquharson had built at Prospect Hill. They did not know — or did not care — that the man they were smearing carried that entire history of The Bahamas at that time in his bloodline. 

The irony is almost too neat. Almost.

The Man They Were Trying to Destroy

Cyril St. John Stevenson was born on the 13th of July, 1914, the youngest child of Henry and Georgianna Stevenson. His father Harry died when Cyril was eight months old. He never knew him. He grew up in the care of his adored mother Lulie, shaped by her love and haunted, always, by the absence of the paternal line he could not touch.

He attended Sacred Heart School until his stepfather Cedric Farrington died and Cyril was thirteen. Then he left school. Not because he lacked ambition. Because his family needed him. He raised his siblings. He scraped and he read and he educated himself with ferocious determination.

He worked as a bellhop at the Montagu Hotel boasting later on that he once opened the door for prohibition gangster Al Capone— in a time, he would note with characteristic precision, when Black people were not allowed in the hotels. He worked as a movie projectionist. He dabbled in prize boxing. He treasured a photograph of himself in a pugilist pose with Jack Dempsey.

By the 1950s, he had assumed editorial control of The Nassau Herald and co-founded, with Sir Henry Taylor and William Cartwright, the Progressive Liberal Party — the first political party in the history of The Bahamas. He and Taylor drafted its first platform. He used The Nassau Herald as the party’s voice and instrument.

Sir Etienne Dupuch, no friend to flattery, would later write that without the Herald, the PLP movement did not have a chance.

Race Shaped Every Chapter of Cyril Stevenson’s Life

His great-grandmother Jessamyn Thompson was classified free-coloured in a society that made that distinction matter enormously. He worked as a bellhop in a hotel that did not admit Black people.

He co-founded a party built on the political awakening of a Black majority. He was smeared in 1956 with a column that weaponised his relationship with a white Englishwoman to turn Black Andros voters against him.

And when he eventually broke with the PLP he had helped build, the obituary he left behind noted — carefully, obliquely — that “slight degrees of difference in the complexion of a person’s skin” played a role in Bahamian politics that could not be ignored. It followed him from the baptismal register to the ballot box. It followed him out of the party he founded.

Race was not a chapter in Cyril Stevenson’s life.

It was the whole book.

In 1956, Bay Street played the race card hard.

By 1967, an expanding PLP would also play the race card.

Different objectives.

Same outcome.

Cyril St. John Stevenson was a man caught in the crevice of enormous social change — change he would help engineer, even as it would eventually swallow him whole.

Andros 1956

The people of Andros were not fooled by Bay Street’s antics.

They returned Cyril St. John Stevenson to the House of Assembly. He took his place among the Magnificent Six — the first official opposition in Bahamian parliamentary history. All six dressed in morning tails and top hats. All six, the obituary notes, looking quite delighted by their accomplishment. They had reason to be.

Andros returned Stevenson again in 1962. He would say, in later years, “my Andros, oh my Andros.” It was not the rhetoric of a man who had hidden from his constituents. It was the language of a man bound to a people by something no gossip column could manufacture and no gossip column could destroy.

The Irony the Obituary Contains

The woman the article called “that English woman” — the young woman from England Stevenson was said to have taken up with after founding the PLP — was June Ellen Stevenson, née Maplethorpe.

They were married for forty-seven years.

From 1961 until his death on the 6th of November, 2006, Cyril resided at the home he and June built at South Beach, New Providence. She cared for him there. Their children — William, Ray, Grace, Michael, and Clark — are named among those who survived him. Sandra, their daughter, predeceased him in 1991.

---

Cyril St. John Stevenson died on the 6th of November, 2006. He was ninety-two years old. He had been, among other things, a bellhop, a boxer, a journalist, a printer, a politician, a founding Secretary-General of the PLP, a co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous in The Bahamas, and a charter member of Chapel on the Hill. He was made a Member of the Royal Victorian Order in 1975. He was honoured by the Bahamas Press Club in 1999. He was named among the One Hundred Most Outstanding Bahamians of the Twentieth Century.

---

Bahamian Lives, Bahamian Legacies is a series dedicated to preserving the names, stories, and contributions of Bahamians who might otherwise be forgotten.