Norman Manley

Norman Washington Manley was born in Roxborough, Manchester Parish, Jamaica, on the fourth of July 1893, the son of a Black Jamaican father and a mother of mixed African and Irish ancestry. He took his secondary education at Jamaica College, served in the Royal Field Artillery during the First World War (winning the Military Medal at the Battle of the Somme), and took his undergraduate and legal education at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar.

He was admitted to the English bar at Gray's Inn in 1921, returned to Jamaica, and built the largest legal practice in the British Caribbean. He represented Jamaican plaintiffs in landmark constitutional and labor cases through the 1920s and 1930s.

He founded the People's National Party (PNP) in September 1938 in the aftermath of the 1938 Frome strike and the wider Caribbean labor uprisings. He led the PNP for the next thirty-one years.

He served as Chief Minister of Jamaica from 1955 to 1959 and as Premier from 1959 to 1962 — the senior elected official of the colony through the negotiations that produced Jamaican independence on the sixth of August 1962. He lost the 1962 general election to the rival Jamaica Labour Party two months before independence and never served as Prime Minister of an independent Jamaica.

His son Michael Manley — also placed in this archive — succeeded him as PNP leader in 1969 and served two terms as Prime Minister.

Norman Manley was named a National Hero of Jamaica in 1969. He died in Kingston on the second of September 1969, age seventy-six.

He is honored here as the founder of the People's National Party and the principal negotiator of Jamaican independence.