The Price of Politics: How Supporting the PLP Cost Clarence and Ardena Newry Their Home in 1950s Nassau

In the often knotted tapestry of Bahamian history, some threads run parallel for years before intersecting in ways that reveal the deeper patterns of power, politics, and principle.

The lives of Clarence Newry and Joseph Vincent Lleida were such threads—two men born into vastly different circumstances, whose collision in 1950s Nassau tells us as much about the Bahamas on the eve of a social revolution as any political speech or manifesto ever could.

Two Men, Two Worlds

Sir Joseph Vincent Lleida was born in Nassau on February 5, 1931, into a world of possibilities. His first venture was Sterling Steel Company, which sold steel bar joists and construction materials—the very building blocks of a rapidly developing Nassau.

In 1957, he and his sister Carmen founded Premier Importers Limited, establishing themselves as merchants in a city where the merchant class held not just economic power, but political dominance as well. His accomplishments would eventually earn him a knighthood to the Order of Saint Sylvester by Pope John Paul II in 2004.

Clarence Newry was born on August 14, 1914, seventeen years before Lleida, on Major’s Cay, Crooked Island. He was not a man of wealth. He was not a merchant or an importer. He was a tile maker—a craftsman of modest means, one among the tens of thousands of disenfranchised poor blacks in 1950s Bahamas whose labor built the colony but who had no say in how it was governed.

The distance between their worlds was vast. But in 1950s Nassau, everyone’s worlds were smaller than we might imagine today, and those worlds were about to collide.

A House in Mason’s Addition: Mortgage dated 1952

On July 4, 1936, Clarence Newry married Ardena Newry (born March 10, 1916). By 1952, they had several small children: Eugene (1935-2022), Ethyln (1938-2020), Geraldine (1940-1985), Florence (1945-2023), Clarence Jr. (1948-2016), and later Cyprian (1956-1984). They were building a life, raising a family, and like countless working class poor families before and since, they dreamed of owning their own home.

In 1952, Clarence and Ardena secured a mortgage for a piece of land in Mason’s Addition, in Over-the-Hill Nassau.

MORTGAGE TRANSFERRED INTO Wulff Road Limited COMPANY FORMED BY LLEIDA AND ROBERTS In 1955

In 1955, Lleida and Dawson formed a company named Wulff Road Limited.

In 1959, Lleida transfers the Mason’s Addition mortgage of Clarence and Ardena Newry to the company. According to the transfer document Eight Hundred and Ninety Two Pounds Nine Shillings and Two Pence (£892.9.2) and interest of One Hundred Thirty Seven Pounds Five Shillings and Eight Pence was still owing.

Mason’s Addition’s Signature on Bahamian History

According to the story that has been passed down, it was through Clarence’s employment with Joseph Lleida that this mortgage became possible. Lleida, the young entrepreneur building his business empire, employed Newry the tile maker, and in that employment relationship lay the opportunity for the Newry family to own property in Mason’s Addition.

The significance of that location—Mason’s Addition—cannot be overstated. This was the neighborhood where a young Lynden Pindling, who would eventually become the first Prime Minister in a Majority Rule Bahamas, was growing up. His father, Arnold Pindling, the ambitious police officer who ran a small grocery store, would have surely known Clarence Newry. In Over-the-Hill Nassau, everyone knew everyone. This was an era when the neighbourhood was truly a village. Your neighbors were your community, your support system, your witnesses to both triumph and tragedy.

Just a few hundred yards away, up the hill on East Street, lived Henry Milton Taylor—who would become one of the founding fathers of the Progressive Liberal Party—lived in an old two-story clapboard house.

The geography is incredibly significant because it reveals the ecosystem of political resistance that was forming in those streets, in those neighborhoods where working-class black Bahamians and poor whites lived, worked, struggled, and dreamed.

1953: The Year Everything Changed

In 1953, a new political party emerged that would transform Bahamian history: the Progressive Liberal Party. Its promise was radical in its simplicity—political and economic equality for all Bahamians, regardless of race or class. For a tile maker from Major’s Cay, Crooked Island, living in Mason’s Addition with a growing family and a mortgage to pay, that promise would have been irresistible.

Clarence Newry became a supporter of the PLP.

And for that support, according to the story that has been told and retold, he was fired from his job.

Think about what that meant. In 1950s Nassau, where Bay Street Boys controlled not just commerce but employment, where political opposition could cost you your livelihood, supporting the PLP wasn’t just a political act—it was an act of courage that could destroy your family’s economic security.

Clarence Newry made that choice anyway.

The Foreclosure

Without his job, Clarence could no longer pay the mortgage on the little house in Mason’s Addition. The mathematics were brutal and simple. No job meant no income. No income meant no mortgage payments. No mortgage payments meant foreclosure.

Joseph Lleida and the company he formed in 1955 with E. Dawson Roberts foreclosed on the Newrys.

Their house was sold.

The legal language is preserved in the public record, cold and formal: “The said lot of land and premises is sold, under and by virtue of the power of sale vested in the Mortgage by an Indenture of Mortgage made between Clarence Newry and Adina Newry to Joseph Vincent Lleida dated the 6th day of December. A.D., 1952 and now of record in the Registry of Records in Book A.20 at pages 533 to 597…”

On January 29, 1959, Lleida transferred the mortgage to Wulff Road Limited, a company incorporated in 1955. According to the Panama Papers, Wulff Road Limited was an intermediary company for E. Dawson Roberts and Company and remained current until at least 2016.

The Newry family moved to a house on Carmichael Road, displaced from the neighborhood where their children had been growing up, where Lynden Pindling was growing up, where the future of the Bahamas was being forged in conversations on street corners and in small wooden houses.

What the Story Reveals

This story—a mortgage, a firing, a foreclosure—is a microcosm of the forces that made Majority Rule inevitable.

It reveals the intertwining of economic and political power in colonial Nassau. Your employer could also be your mortgage holder. Your livelihood and your shelter could both depend on the goodwill of the same person. And if you challenged the political order that sustained that person’s power, you could lose everything.

It reveals the price that ordinary Bahamians paid for supporting political change. Clarence Newry wasn’t a politician or an activist or a public figure. He was a tile maker with a wife and six children. But he believed in the promise of the PLP strongly enough to risk his job, and he lost not just employment but his family’s home.

It reveals the geography of resistance. Mason’s Addition wasn’t just where the Newrys lived—it was where Pindling grew up, near where Henry Milton Taylor lived, in the heart of Over-the-Hill Nassau where the PLP would find its strongest support. These neighborhoods weren’t just residential areas; they were incubators of political consciousness.

And it reveals something about the different paths two men could take in the same moment of history. Lleida built businesses, accumulated wealth, and eventually received a papal knighthood. Newry supported a political movement, lost his home, and died in relative obscurity on May 3, 1975—just two years after Majority Rule finally came to the Bahamas in 1973.

The Aftermath

Ardena Newry lived until May 2, 2014—almost to her 98th birthday—long enough to see the Bahamas transformed beyond anything imaginable in that 1950s world. A woman of humble character who worked as a housekeeper, hotel worker, shell jewellery maker and straw vendor, eventually found secure employment as a courier at the Passport Office where she worked until her retirement in 1981, lived long enough to see a black Bahamian majority govern their own country for four decades. Long enough, perhaps, to reflect on the price her family paid in that transformation.

Joseph Vincent Lleida died in 2012, two years before Ardena, having lived a life of accomplishment and recognition that would have seemed perfectly natural to those who knew him as a young entrepreneur in the 1950s.

Their children—the Newry children who lost their home in Mason’s Addition, and the Lleida children who inherited a business empire—grew up in the same Nassau but in fundamentally different worlds.

A Mortgage as Monument

There is no monument to Clarence and Ardena Newry. No street bears their name. They received no national honors. History won’t record their humble sacrifices. He was just a tile maker and she a housekeeper who supported the PLP and lost their home in Mason’s Addition because of it.

But perhaps that mortgage document—Book A.20 at pages 533 to 597 in the Registry of Records—is monument enough. It stands as evidence that the fight for Majority Rule wasn’t fought only in the halls of the House of Assembly or in the streets during the General Strike. It was fought in small wooden houses in Mason’s Addition. It was fought by men and women who had everything to lose and lost it anyway because they believed in something larger than themselves.

The lives of Joseph Vincent Lleida and Clarence Newry were oddly connected in 1950s Bahamas. But perhaps “oddly” is the wrong word. Their connection was entirely typical of the time—employer and employee, creditor and debtor, the powerful and the powerless. What was odd, what was extraordinary, what was ultimately transformative, was that men like Clarence Newry decided that connection would not define the future.

They paid for that decision with their homes, their jobs, their security. But in paying that price, they purchased something for their children and grandchildren: a country where a tile maker’s political beliefs couldn’t cost him everything.

That is the real legacy of 1950s Nassau. That is what the story of a foreclosed mortgage in Mason’s Addition really tells us. That is why, even in defeat, even in displacement, even in being forgotten by history’s official record, Clarence Newry’s choice mattered.

And that is why his story, intertwined with Joseph Vincent Lleida’s in those turbulent years before Majority Rule, deserves to be remembered and told.

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Clarence Newry born 14th August 1914 in Major’s Cay, Crooked Island; died 3rd May 1975 in Nassau, Bahamas.

Ardena Gallie Rowena Newry (nee Moss) born 10th March 1916 in Lovely Bay Acklins Bahamas; died 2nd May 2014 Nassau, Bahamas.

Sir Joseph Vincent Lleida born 5th February 1932; died 21st July 2012, Nassau Bahamas