Travel Special – Jamaica: Meeting the queen’s man

This August, Jamaica celebrates the 50th anniversary of independence. Amid the bunting and parades, talk will be of Britain’s continued presence in the island and the role of the monarchy in particular. Jamaicans are often incredulous that Queen Elizabeth II should still be their head of state. The Jamaican prime minister, Portia Simpson-Miller, has taken steps to replace the Queen with an elected president; yet she vigorously embraced Prince Harry during his Jubilee tour.

Recently in Jamaica I went to see the outgoing governor-general, Sir Howard Cooke. Jamaican by birth, Sir Howard was known to love Britain. We met in the Jamaican capital of Kingston. Soldiers in khaki drill saluted me as the taxi pulled up at the entrance to King’s House on Hope Road. Inside, an aide-de-camp in Sandhurst red accompanied me upstairs. At the top of the stairway he knocked on a door, heard a response, opened it. Sir Howard, a big man, with a big bald head, looking well for someone over 90, was sitting alone in his semi-darkened office.

‘Please sit down,’ he said, indicating a chair by his desk. On the mahogany surface there was little else but a copy of the Times and a bowl of fading roses. Yet Sir Howard was no unthinking servant of the Commonwealth: he had a background in Jamaican black nationalism and Christian socialism.

‘I’m an old-world person,’ he told me. ‘I am what I am today because of my relationship with Britain, and the British way of life.’ It was at London University — where he went in 1950, on a scholarship — that he met other West Indians engaged in independence struggles, and was strengthened in his conviction that Jamaica could no longer be ruled autocratically by Englishmen. ‘Britain no longer had the strength to carry out its overseas responsibilities — change had to come.’