What is Drumblair?
Drumblair was a physical place. It was the home of the Founder and first President of the People’s National Party (PNP) and Jamaica’s National Hero Norman Washington Manley. Eventually, Norman Manley had to sell the whole of the property in order to help finance the activities of the PNP. It is because of that that the current community of Drumblair now exists
In the late l930s and early 1940s, Drumblair was much more than the home of Norman Manley. Rather it was a place where patriotic Jamaicans of all classes would come together to discuss and develop ideas that would advance the interest of Jamaican nationhood. It united all generations; young people like M.G. Smith; Ralph Campbell the poet, Albert Huie the painter, Cecil Baugh the potter and many others, as well as scholars, lawyers, working class people in the Trade Union Movement like Lester McKenzie, Ken Sterling, Osmond Dyce and Tossy Kelly.
It was a place of discussion and contending ideas and eventually helped to provide the vision which led the PNP not only into successful electoral contests, but also provided the whole basis for the policies which led to internal self-government and Independence for Jamaica. It was a place for tolerance, for diverse ideas and helped define the Party’s history and its achievements. Drumblair embodied all that Norman Manley was and cannot be spoken of in a negative sense. It is Drumblair that gave us Michael Manley that great visionary of the PNP and leader of a genuine social revolution in Jamaica.
We cannot now as a Party or as a country turn our back on our founders and on the generation who helped develop their ideas out of the Drumblair experience. To speak of Drumblair in a negative or pejorative sense is to denigrate the Party, its history and its founding fathers and mothers.