First Woman to Join the PLP Died Before Seeing Independence: Ethel Alice Kemp (1933-1973)

In the 1950s, The Bahamas was a Crown Colony. The Progressive Liberal Party had only recently been founded, and Bahamian women did not yet have the vote. Politics was largely the province of men, and the domestic sphere was largely the province of women. That was the world as it was arranged, and most people navigated it accordingly.

Women’s suffrage had arrived across the Caribbean at different moments — Jamaica in 1944, Barbados in 1950, Trinidad and Tobago in 1946. In the Bahamas, it had not yet come. Bahamian women ran households, raised children, managed small businesses, sustained churches and civic associations. Their political participation, where it existed, was generally channelled through their husbands and fathers.

Some women, however, were drawn into the new political movement taking shape around them.

The Progressive Liberal Party, founded in 1953, was building its membership and needed people willing to organise, canvass, and carry its message into communities across Nassau. Among those who answered that call were women — wives, in most cases, of men already active in the party, participating as the times expected them to: alongside their husbands, in support of a shared cause.

That woman was Ethel Alice Turnquest, who would become Ethel Alice Kemp. She came from Deadman’s Cay, Long Island — the settled, salt-aired southern Bahamas, far from Nassau’s factional politics but not far, in spirit, from its aspirations. She was the daughter of Austin Esper Turnquest, born on Long Island in June 1896, and Lillian Maude Dean, born there the previous December. Hers was a family of the Out Islands: rooted, unpretentious, and bound by the ordinary dignities of Bahamian working life.

On 8 March 1953, at nineteen years of age, she married Audley Cyprian Kemp in Nassau — a New Providence man twelve years her senior, born in December 1921, who had established himself as a local businessman. She would carry those dignities north to Nassau, and into history.

First Female Member of The First Political Party

The Progressive Liberal Party was founded in October 1953, assembled from primarily Black and Mixed Race Bahamian professionals, labour activists, and community organisers who wished to broaden political participation in the colony.

Its founding figures — Henry Milton Taylor, William Cartwright, Cyril Stevenson, and the young barrister Lynden Oscar Pindling among them — understood that the party’s strength would rest on popular membership and community organisation. Canvassing, door-to-door persuasion, and neighbourhood engagement were the practical instruments of a party building itself from the ground up.

It was into this early PLP that Ethel Alice Kemp entered. The record, as it has come down to us, does not tell us how the decision was made — whether it was Audley who first committed to the party and Ethel who followed, as was entirely customary for wives in that era, or whether her own conviction played its part.

The PLP in those early years was a movement still finding its footing. It had no established institutional support and operated on the energy of its membership. To join was to lend one’s name and effort to a cause whose outcome was far from certain. The Kemps, husband and wife, were part of that founding generation of party members who built the PLP from a gathering of committed individuals into a mass political organisation.

Geography matters here. The Kemps established themselves on East Street — and East Street, in those years, was not merely an address but a thread running through the social fabric of early PLP Nassau. Henry Milton Taylor, one of the party’s founding figures, lived on the hill rise of East Street in 1953. Mason’s Addition, a side street off East Street, was where the parents of Lynden Oscar Pindling lived. These were not strangers to one another. Audley and Ethel Kemp of East Street would have known these people by name — would have passed them on the street, spoken at church, met at the gatherings where the party was being quietly assembled. The PLP was not, in its beginnings, an ideology. It was really a network of neighbours, and East Street was one of its address lines.

The timing speaks for itself: she married Audley Cyprian Kemp on 8 March 1953 and arrived in Nassau a nineteen-year-old bride — and it was there, in that new life, that she found her way to the PLP, as so many did in those charged years of late 1953 and 1954.

In 1953, a wife followed her husband’s lead in most things, and politics was no exception. What the record does tell us — confirmed by The Nassau Tribune on the morning after her death in June 1973 — is that she was recorded as the first woman to join the Progressive Liberal Party. Not merely among the early members. The first.

Independence itself arrived on 10 July 1973. On that morning, the Union Jack was lowered at Clifford Park. The new Bahamian flag — aquamarine and gold and black — rose in its place. Lynden Pindling became Prime Minister of a sovereign nation.

Ethel Alice Kemp did not live to see it.

She died on the eleventh of June, 1973 — twenty-nine days before independence. She was approximately forty years old. The cause of her death was childbirth. She died at Princess Margaret Hospital, Nassau, having delivered a daughter, Margaret Alice, who survived.

Nine children survived her: Audley Junior, Michael, Theresa, Peter, John, Margaret, Paul, Osborne, and the newly born Margaret Alice. Her father, Austin Esper Turnquest — who had been born in Deadman’s Cay in 1896 and would live there until approximately 1979 — survived her. Her mother, Lillian Maude, had preceded her in death, in 1965.

Her two eldest sons — Audley Ciprian, then studying at Bryant College in Rhode Island, and Michael, then at Lakefield College in Toronto — were en route home when the Tribune published its notice. Funeral services were held the following Friday, at five o’clock in the afternoon, at Saint Agnes Church on Baillou Hill Road.

A Note on Memory and the Out Islands

The historical record of the PLP’s founding and early years has been assembled from newspapers, oral histories, and the recollections of prominent participants. It naturally reflects the people who held public positions — the parliamentary candidates, the party officers, the men whose names appeared on ballots. Huge gaps in the historical record remain. The women who participated alongside them were recorded less consistently, and their individual stories are harder to reconstruct.

Ethel Alice Kemp was from Long Island. That matters. The PLP drew its membership from across the Bahamas, not Nassau alone, and the Out Island families who affiliated with it in those early years were making a choice about which direction they believed the country should move. A young woman from Deadman’s Cay, newly arrived in Nassau and newly married, who joined the PLP in its founding year, was part of that broader story.

We do not know when she came to Nassau. We do not know precisely when she joined the PLP. We do not know the full texture of her political life beyond the campaign work the Tribune briefly notes. What we know is the structure of her commitment: she was recorded first, she stayed active, she raised nine children and served her church and her school board and died in the act of bringing another life into the world.

That is enough to warrant remembrance. More than enough.

A £100 Loan in 1953 and a Life Built Together: A Woman of Great Promise

The Tribune of January 1974 offers a telling footnote to the Kemp story. In an advertisement celebrating Barclays Bank’s Bahamian presence, Audley Kemp was held up as a model of the bank’s promise: twenty-one years earlier — in 1953, the very year he and Ethel married — he had taken out a loan of £100, and had built from that modest beginning one of the colony’s most successful wine and spirit merchant businesses.

Behind that ascent stood Ethel.

A woman who joined the PLP at the movement’s earliest stirrings, raised nine children, and helped anchor a household from which a thriving enterprise grew — she was, in every sense, a partner in the making of that success.

A note on what followed: by the 1977 general election, Audley Cyprian Kemp had left the PLP and stood as a candidate for the Free National Movement. He was not alone in this. The years between independence and 1977 saw considerable movement across Bahamian political lines, as the PLP’s exercise of power in government reshaped the loyalties of men who had supported the party during its years of opposition.

Political realignment of this kind was a familiar feature of the post-independence era across the Caribbean, as the coalitions built to win self-governance were tested by the realities of governing. Whatever Audley Kemp’s reasons, his move to the FNM belonged to that broader pattern. Ethel was gone by then — and the record tells us nothing of what she might have thought of it.

This essay is part of Bahamian Lives, Bahamian Legacies, a series dedicated to recovering the full record of Bahamian historical experience — the prominent and the private, the celebrated and the overlooked.