My song today is ‘Dreadlock Holiday’. This is a reggae song by 10cc. Written by Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldnman, it was the lead single from the band's 1978 album, ‘Bloody Tourists’.
The song was based on real events that Eric Stewart experienced in Barbados, but when writing the song, he changed the location to Jamaica. ‘Dreadlock Holiday’ became the group's international Number 1 hit topping the charts in the UK, Belgium, New Zealand, and The Netherlands. The single also reached Number 2 in Ireland and Australia. It also became a top 10 hit in Norway and Switzerland and was in the top 20 in Germany and Sweden. In Austria, the song became 10cc's single entry in the charts peaking at Number 18. In America, ‘Dreadlock Holiday’ became a minor hit and peaked at Number 30 and Number 44 in Canada's RPM, and on the US ‘Billboard Hot 100’ chart respectively.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Way back in the year 2000, the New Millennium came in with a bang for me. Between 1990-2000, I had written dozens of books which were sold exclusively to West Yorkshire Schools, and I had become a minor celebrity in Yorkshire for my writing, and presumably also for the fact that all the sales profit from my published books had been given to charitable causes, £200,000 (£ two hundred thousand).
I had been very lucky to have so many famous people and celebrated names from both the national and international fields of public life support my work, (the two most famous names being the late Princess Diana and the former South African President, Nelson Mandela) both of whom phoned me personally to praise my writing. I had also managed to persuade over 800 famous names (national and international) to visit Yorkshire schools to hold reading assemblies based on different children’s books I had written. This magnificent support I received ensured that I experienced an unbroken and enviably ten-year period of press and media coverage in West Yorkshire that no amount of money could ever have bought me. For over ten years, I would appear in between three and six newspapers almost weekly and become a regular interviewee on local television and radio stations. I stopped taking press cuttings of newspaper photographs, interviews, and mentions of me when they eventually reached two thousand cuttings!
My celebrity readers and supporters came from all walks of life including members of the Royal Family (three princesses and the Queen’s cousin) and the highest echelons of the Church (archbishops and celebrated bishops, and the chief rabbi of Great Britain) and the highest level of Politics (two presidents, two prime ministers and three prime ministers wives, and a few cabinet ministers), and Heads of the Police Force (six different Chief Constables). Apart from national sports captains of rugby and football, I also persuaded national and international film stars, painters, authors, athletes, classical pianists, opera singers, sculptors, scientists, and the first Antarctic explorer to travel to both the north and south poles, plus a female astronaut to read for me in Yorkshire schools. With such an array of talent supporting my works, it would have been virtually impossible for me not to succeed in my aims and objectives, along with maximising my press coverage.
After Nelson Mandela had praised the writing of my African stories, ‘News 24’ publicised the President’s praise, and the Jamaican authorities (who idolised Nelson Mandela) approached me and invited me to help them in a number of respects by working with the educational authority there. My decade’s work culminated in me liaising with the Jamaican ‘Minister for Education and Youth Culture’ in a Trans-Atlantic pen-pal project involving 32 West Yorkshire schools and 32 Jamaican schools in Trelawney, plus the Mayor (known as the Custos) of Falmouth (the old slave-port capital), along with other educational personnel. I co-ordinated this entire project over a three-year period which also incorporated writing four books that were published and sold to raise vital money for the school supplies in Trelawney, Jamaica. These books raised over £30,000, and I was proud to see the Jamaican educational authorities place them on the school curriculum. Overarching this work was our aim to reduce racial discrimination between black and white school pupils in both Yorkshire and Falmouth schools. Two heart attacks during the same week during my 60th year of age obliged me to eventually pass the co-ordination of this work over to others.
During this three-year period of my close work with Jamaica, I twice visited Jamaica to research and obtain background material for a few books, as well as needing to visit all 32 schools involved in the 64-school trans-Atlantic pen-pal project, and liaise with eminent educational figures. This enabled me to get a brief understanding of the Jamaican culture which I might never have otherwise achieved. This Jamaican contact was initiated and established after my family and I had spent a holiday in Falmouth Jamaica. Having seen the ‘News 24’ bulletin about Nelson Mandela’s praise for my writing, the Catering Manager (Mr. Basil Smith) at the holiday hotel complex we stayed at, approached me and asked me to meet some high-ranking educational officials and the Trelawney Mayor. I returned from that holiday determined to help out the schools in Falmouth, Trelawney and set about writing a number of books for them.
Jamaica is a poor country, and any wealth in previous centuries was made by English and European plantation owners and slave masters. The Jamaican economy exists today upon international monetary grants and is supplemented by tourism. Jamaican crime statistics place the country at the top of the criminal, league, and when I was involved there, it was the murder capital of the world. Ironically, Jamaica has more churches per population than any other country. The most profitable business in Jamaica is the illegal trade of drug selling both in-country and abroad, and unfortunately, the most powerful men in Jamaica are the drug barons who essentially run many parishes and are in constant gun battles with the patrolling police. The drug barons are said to be even influential in government circles.
The most respected job in Jamaica is being a ‘teacher’. Teachers throughout Jamaica are revered by the public for the work they do. If we divide the educational ages of children into 5-12 and 12-15, these two categories reflect the vast chasm that appears once secondary schooling arrives. Education is paid for by the parents, and primary school children are immaculately dressed and give 100 percent attention in the classroom, and total respect their teachers. Once the boys and girls start attending Secondary School, however, everything witnesses a massive change. Realising that there are very few jobs to be had when they leave school, most of the boys gravitate towards drugs and other criminal lifestyles, and too many girls are literally left holding the baby for their children’s absent fathers. The clever girls go on to become teachers, while most of the other girls become employed in the tourist and the catering industry, and cleaning establishments for minimum wages. Almost all young Jamaicans share the same dream and future aspiration; to one day emigrate to either America or England.
All the males hope to someday to be able to get a passport to either America or England as many a female tourist with more money than common sense has found out to her financial and emotional cost! Go to any beach any day of the week and you will be able to observe young attractive muscular Jamaican male beach-hustlers’ approach middle-aged (often divorced) white female tourists who are old enough to be their mothers. Some of the female tourists may be seeking a holiday romance experience, but many more unattached female tourists are just there for the holiday, sun and golden sands, and not the beach pantomime that the hustlers play daily.
And still, despite having a functioning brain, too many gullible female tourists in the mid-life-crisis bracket manage to get themselves hoodwinked and conned into believing that some gorgeous-looking hunk of a young man (twenty years her junior) has fallen madly in love with her and cannot wait for the day when they can marry, and live together as man and wife in America or England, or whichever country their new, free passport out of Jamaica will take them to!
I am often puzzled by the cruel trick which the Creator seems to have played on the Jamaicans. Most of them are reared in the poorest of circumstances, and yet, God has provided all of them with golden sands, clear blue seas, majestic mountains ranges, marvellous food to eat, and reggae music filling the airwaves all day long. Their weather is beautiful for almost the full year, yet they are faced with the hurricane season annually that wrecks their bridges, tears up their poorly maintained roads, collapses their roadside stalls where they sell their wares to passers-by, and blows down and destroys the modest shack dwellings that the poorest Jamaicans call home.
But it is their response to annual disruption and disaster that amazes me most of all. They even face daily electricity supply cuts across the land. When all this happens year-after-year, what do they do? Do they give up and die? Do they moan and groan about the disaster that has befallen them again? Do they sink into a deep fit of ‘poor me’ depression? No! No! No! They light up their dark atmospheres in the electricity cuts with thousands of candles and turn their small disaster into a more romantic setting. They pick themselves up off the ground and rebuild, restock, and start all over again, and still wearing a great big smile on their face and a song close to their heart as they do so.
I found Jamaicans to be one of the friendliest people I have known. What little they have, they willingly share with you. They may be viewed by the white European as being too loud in their music, and too vociferous in their expression, and too volatile in their emotions, but as an Irishman and the oldest of seven children from a poor family, I am at home with their culture and emotional ways.
I recall as a young person growing up in a poor household, that when one of seven children came downstairs the first thing on a morning with a hungry belly, and there is only food enough on the table for four or five children to eat, one soon learns to push oneself to the front or starve in the attempt. The same is true about their force of emotional expression, which no outsiders observing an Irish or Jamaican family gathering can truly understand. Whenever the large Forde family are gathered in one setting, observers would think we are about to come to blows listening to us, whereas we are just having a heated discussion! The bottom line is that while Europeans (with the exception of the hot-blooded Italians) may take all the medals when it comes to ‘politeness and manners’, when it comes to ‘passion’, be it on the dance floor, on any platform, and even in the bedroom, the Jamaicans take first prize every time (with the Irish running a close second).
For me, let me make myself abundantly clear: “I don’t like cricket, I love it. Man! I don’t like reggae, I love it, Man! I don’t like Jamaica, I love her, Man!”
Love and peace Bill xxx