A toast to Therese Mills

“It was very important for my mother that her memoirs were completed. I hope people are enjoying them,” Suzanne said adding that she felt her mother would have been satisfied at the end result, even if she was a hard taskmaster with exacting standards. “I swear her spirit was in the house driving me as I wrote that book,” Mills said.

Historian Prof Bridget Brereton said the book was “well-written, very engaging, clear, lively and readable”.

She said early chapters gave insight into the life of a young woman, born into a middle-class, mixed race family in Portof- Spain.

Straight out of school in 1945, at age 16, Therese Mills went to work at the venerable Port-of- Spain Gazette, founded in 1825, working there and at its successor, the Chronicle, until 1958.

Therese Mills then lived in London for seven years, married with three children and then returned to TT as a feature writer and columnist at the Trinidad Guardian.

Brereton said that Therese Mills rose through the ranks to become Guardian editor- in-chief thereby shattering a glass ceiling by her own efforts and despite her lack of a university degree.

Brereton hailed Mills for bringing out the paper every day but one during the dark days of the 1990 attempted coup, amid a shortage of food and sleep, and under risk of physical danger.

Therese Mills then set up Newsday in 1993, confounding all the so-called experts and their prediction that it was “completely impossible” for a third daily to thrive.

She built the paper to such an extent that years later, it reached number one in terms of circulation.

“She had a well-deserved reputation for being a very tough lady.

“The tradition is that she could be quite difficult at times but was unswerving in defence of her reporters and freedom of the press,” Prof Brereton said.

As an example, she recalled Therese Mills’ steadfastness at the time of the police raid of Newsday by police to try to unearth news sources for a story on infighting in the Integrity Commission.

“Therese Mills set high standards in the writing and gathering of news.” She noted Newsday editor Horace Monsegue’s, recollection of receiving a 6 am daily phone call from Therese Mills who would always pick up any shortcomings in a weak article and not leave you unscathed.

Brereton recognised Therese Mills as a “genuine trail blazer”, who opened up pathways for other women in journalism.

Retired news editor John Babb, recalled meeting Therese Mills, when he was a young shorthand writer at the Gazette in 1946.

“She taught me a lot about the newspaper business,” he related.

In addition, to Mills’ guidance, he accepted the advice of both former prime minister, the late Dr Eric Williams, to read books, and of a British news editor at the Gazette that he (Babb) is being to “know everything”, and to never say, “I don’t know”.

“So I fell in deeper love with journalism,” Babb related. He recalled the early days of Mills and himself working at Newsday, going up against two established newspapers.

“People said the market is too small for three newspapers.

I told Therese Mills, ‘we’ll show them!’ The doubters gave us the ‘fire’ to produce that paper,” he said.

“For the first three months I worked that staff from Sunday to Sunday to Sunday to Sunday.

“Nobody complained.

Everybody was happy.”