Errol Barrow

Errol Walton Barrow was born in Saint Lucy Parish, Barbados, on the twenty-first of January 1920, the son of an Anglican rector. He served as a navigator in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, flew forty-seven bombing missions over Nazi-occupied Europe, and took his law degree at Lincoln's Inn in London in 1949.

He returned to Barbados in 1950 and entered politics as a member of the Barbados Labour Party. In 1955 he broke with the BLP to co-found the Democratic Labour Party. The DLP became the principal vehicle for Barbadian independence over the next decade.

He served as Premier of Barbados from 1961 to 1966 — through the negotiations that produced Barbadian independence on the thirtieth of November 1966 — and as the first Prime Minister of independent Barbados from independence through 1976.

His government in the first decade of independence introduced universal free secondary education (1962), expanded social welfare, established the Caribbean Development Bank (1969), and made Barbados one of the founding states of the Caribbean Free Trade Association — the predecessor of CARICOM (1973).

He returned to office in 1986 after ten years in opposition. He died unexpectedly in office at his home in Saint Michael on the first of June 1987, age sixty-seven, of heart failure.

He was named a National Hero of Barbados in 1998. The first of June is observed in Barbados as Errol Barrow Day.

He is honored here as the navigator-pilot who founded Barbadian independence and made universal secondary education the first act of the new state.