Entrepreneurs of St Vincent and the Grenadines – Egerton Richards

by Luke Browne Fri, Jan 24, 2014

Egerton M Richards was one of our nation’s finest and most flamboyant entrepreneurs. Mr Richards was a black self-made Vincentian businessman, and a visionary pioneer who was simply ahead of his time, had many original ideas and often came up with creative solutions for the problems of his day. Eggie, as he was popularly called, established the first indigenous insurance company in St Vincent and the Grenadines.{{more}} He also rescued The Vincentian newspaper from collapse and thereby preserved and reformed an important organ of our cultural heritage with all the positive implications for the freedom of the press. Mr Richards was a literary aficionado, government antagonist, political adventurer and so much more.

He was born on January 10, 1929 at Texier Road in Layou. Eggie went straight into the teaching profession as an adolescent for a short while after he left primary school. He then worked variously as a tailor, policeman and mechanic before he moved to Georgetown as a young adult to join his uncle on the Mt Bentinck Estate, where the up-and-coming businessman honed his mechanical and managerial skills as a sugar factory employee. Mr Richards also started a private trucking business “on the side.” He dealt in scrap metal and baffled many rural folks by his interest in buying their “junk.” He obviously knew that “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” and he gave meaning to the concept of recycling before it became a word.

After his loss to Ivy Joshua, Mr Richards was transferred to the post of manager at the Diamond Estate. He found time outside his management schedule to establish and operate his own state of the art farm and, relatedly, to set up high quality milk, pork and poultry industries. There was a farm factory which made animal feed from local waste material. “Eggie’s Milk” (some of which was produced on his farm and some of which he bought from other local suppliers) was sold to government institutions. Egerton Richards had all sorts of agro-processing ideas and believed deeply in the potential of local products. He bought copra from locals and used it to make coconut oil and soap. He thought we could produce flour from breadfruit and wanted to “can” mangoes instead of allowing them to fall from their trees and spoil. The creative genius also invented a household and general cleaning agent that was very effective and popular among housewives.

Eggie, as manager of the Diamond Estate, was the patron of many charitable and worthy causes. He, for instance, provided food hampers for underprivileged families at Christmas time from the proceeds of an annual caroling contest which he organised. He was very close to the young people in the neighbourhood, and he advised and supported the operation of a youth group called the Striders Club. This group is still around and is doing excellent work.

Mr Richards lost his job on the Diamond Estate for an undisclosed reason after he decided to run against Milton Cato in East St George. All told, he ran against Mr Cato three times and lost three times. Mr Richards, however, found some consolation after his first defeat at the hands of Cato through his marriage to the incomparably beautiful and attractive Noreen Sutton. He no doubt needed a companion for those rough and turbulent times during which the establishment of the Diamond Dairy caused him to lose his milk market and he had to scale down what had become a full-time and large-scale farming enterprise to the rearing of a few pigs.

Mr Richards got a break when he was asked to manage the Fancy Estate. He then took over a low-key bar and restaurant in Paul’s Avenue, the Rotary Bar, and transformed it into a high-profile and profitable hub of activity. Noreen, Eggie’s wife and business partner, said that especially during this period of their life her husband often jumped up in the middle of the night with all kinds of bright ideas. One of those ideas may have had something to do with starting an indigenous insurance company.

Mr Egerton Richards made a significant contribution to our economic decolonization when he established the Metrocint General Insurance Company Ltd on December 31, 1968. This was the first indigenous insurance company in St Vincent and the Grenadines. The foreign ownership of financial institutions is known to facilitate a rapid outflow of capital which could have otherwise been used for local development. Egerton Richards stemmed that outflow of our scarce financial resources and helped us to realise some of our economic potential.

 

Metrocint became Eggie’s flagship business and hallmark achievement. Mr Richards was even branded “Uncle Metro” through a popular promotional jingle for his insurance company that was aired during the 1977 carnival season and which was apparently able to attract steel pan players from Tobago to the inaugural June-July Vincy Mas of that year. Uncle Metro was certainly a most appropriate name.

This Vincentian business magnate gave many of his fellow countrymen and women who were contemplating migration, and who would therefore have contributed to an aggravation of the brain drain, a reason to stay at home. He himself was very patriotic and he was adamant that he would never go to live in another man’s country. Eggie sought to create in his homeland a rich and fertile intellectual environment through scholarly publications and interaction. Uncle Metro bought the Olive’s Hotel in the seventies and created the University of the Olive’s Hotel, which hosted lectures from leading intellectuals, in its upstairs. He also acquired Tally-Ho Apartments and a country guest house in Maroon Hill.

Mr Egerton Richards made a historically significant intervention to save The Vincentian newspaper from bankruptcy and liquidation in 1982. He intervened after the paper’s original planter-merchant elite owners had run it to the ground and when the company was on the brink of collapse. The paper was “underwater” and insolvent when it was purchased by Metrocint for just $1. Uncle Metro, of course, also had to assume responsibility for all the paper’s substantial liabilities at the time of the sale.

It was quite a symbolic achievement for a local black self-made businessman to buy out what was previously regarded as the mouthpiece of the white plantocracy. Dr Ralph Gonsalves, who was Metrocint’s lawyer when it purchased The Vincentian, and who is now the Prime Minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, expressed the view that Uncle Metro bought the paper for two principal reasons: to promote his ideas; and to demonstrate to the planter class that he could succeed where they failed.

There are other business ventures in which the indomitable Eggie was either directly or indirectly involved. He had a Quarry at Happy Hill, for example, and considered stones to be “black gold.” Egerton Richards had so much foresight. He wanted to produce cheap electricity for his companies. He tried solar power before it became popular even in the United States of America and also experimented with wind energy. Mr Richards, according to Vin G. Samuel, a well-known Vincentian writer, had a keen vision of what to do in developing countries in those days even though he never secured the Parliamentary outlet that he desired.

Eggie, however, launched what was dubbed the “People’s Parliament,” which expressed itself through a weekly column in The Vincentian newspaper, in response to James Mitchell’s 15-0 triumph in the 1989 general elections. He was distressed and outraged by the fact that St. Vincent and the Grenadines had an “elected dictatorship” and thought it was necessary to provide public opposition to the government to make up for the lack of a formal Opposition in the House of Assembly, and therefore to guard against state tyranny. Mr Richards played the important role of public watchdog and became a thorn in Mitchell’s side. He scrutinized the actions of the de facto one party state administration and provided a critical analysis of the national developments of the time.

Mitchell wanted no dissenting voices whatsoever in Parliament to the point where he even blocked the appointment of Opposition Senators. He went all out to safeguard his legislative stranglehold. Eggie, meanwhile, brought an official constitutional case against that government for the appointment of two Opposition Senators in order to break the undesirable unanimity in Parliament. The state had its way in court but Eggie’s fought an honourable fight and was by no means disgraced. In fact, the late Karl Hudson-Phillips QC, of Trinidad and Tobago, who represented the crown in the case, was so impressed by Eggie’s advocacy that he bestowed on him the title “Lord Richards of Penniston.” Eggie was living at Queensbury, in the Vermont Valley, which was loosely called Penniston, at the time.

It’s certainly not that Eggie craved any resemblance of colonial honours or titles; and Mr Richards refused to be guided by inappropriate British dress codes. He adopted a casual mode of dress that was suitable for our warm weather and which often belied his fierce determination and fighting spirit. Eggie fought his battles, in the vanguard of public opinion and elsewhere, without fright or flight. He was characteristically fearless and courageous and he typically didn’t allow anyone or anything to dampen his spirit or to break his stride.

Eggie’s writing was not at all restricted to a newspaper column and the booklets which have been cited. He was a prolific writer who wrote short stories for the BBC and contributed articles to the Flambeau and Flamingo magazines. Furthermore, Mr Richards created a Writer’s Club through which he helped with the development of young professional writers.

Eggie died two days after his 72nd birthday in the wee hours of the morning and his death triggered an outpouring of tributes and initiated an unofficial period of national mourning. Mr Richards was called “A Great Son of the Soil” and a “very helpful man.” He was declared by his trumpeter friend, Ricardo McDonald, to be the “Uncrowned Man of the Century.” Casper London described him as a “print media mogul.” For some strange reason, I like the way Theodore Browne, a prominent local attorney-at-law and literary scholar in his own right, put it in the foreword of the Agony of Success when Eggie was still alive and kicking. Browne said that Egerton Richards was a Vincentian Colossus. This man will go down in history.