John Babb on his 70-year career

John Babb has the distinction of being the only journalist Trinidad and Tobago’s first prime minister and leader of the People’s National Movement (PNM) Dr Eric Williams ever trusted enough to give exclusive interviews.

This “working relationship”, balanced on respect, would evolve into a friendship.

“Yes, Dr Williams was my friend,” Babb recalls.

Sharing some of his experiences, Babb, Newsday’s first news editor and veteran of other pioneering print media, including Trinidad Guardian, shares how his relationship with Williams began.

In the early 1970s, when Williams was known to shun local journalists, Babb, who had returned to Trinidad after a three-year sojourn in Canada, had good relations with the late PNM founding member and former government minister Errol Mahabir.

Babb wanted to report on the first oil boom and was seeking an interview with Williams. He knew he could not get it on his own and approached Mahabir.

Mahabir told him, “You know damn well the prime minister does not like you local reporters.” Babb challenged Mahabir saying, “This is how I look at it. I see a nice young lady walking down the road. I walk across. I ask her something. All she could tell me is, no. All Williams could tell me is, no.” Two days later, Mahabir told him Williams will see him.

On arrival at Williams’ home in St Ann’s for the interview, Babb said he saw Leslie Fitzpatrick of the Government Information Services with two big tape-recorders. “I said to myself, ‘Lord this man does not trust me. He has two tape recorders’,” Babb said. A shorthand expert, he took notes with pencil and notepad.

After the first section of the interview was published in the Trinidad Guardian where he worked at the time, Babb said he waited for a phone call from Whitehall. Once Williams had come across an error his office would call. The following day the second part of the interview was published and Babb waited again for a call, but none came.

He waited for a more few days, and then asked Mahabir for another interview with Williams, who agreed. At the second interview, Babb said Fitzpatrick was there again with his two tape recorders.

After the second interview was published, Babb said Williams called and invited him for a drink and to talk. “That was how I got my third interview and our friendship started,” he says.

About two or three years later, Williams offered Babb a job which he refused while thanking him.

Williams called him “a smart man”, but Babb explained to the prime minister that he dealt with logic. He told Williams, “If I take that work, you become my boss and I become your employee. This relationship wouldn’t continue.” Three times, Williams offered him jobs. Babb turned all of them down.

Asked why he refused, Babb says he did not want any government job that would make him lose his freedom to report fairly and fearlessly.

“I see reporters, journalists running for work when there is a change in government. That does not work well for me,” he observes.

Williams, he says, “called me any time, and I called him any time.” Babb recalled the night of the 1976 general elections when results were coming out and then Guardian editor in chief, Lenn Chong Sing telephoned Williams for information and he told him, “Don’t you know I have a public relations department at Whitehall?” and put down the phone.

Williams trusted Babb’s reporting, and so in the 1970s on a visit to Cuba to meet with then president Fidel Castro, Babb was invited to join the Prime Minister’s delegation.

On arrival in Cuba, Babb was placed in a hotel, away from the rest of the official delegation and was unable to cover the first day of the visit. When he got the chance, Babb told Williams’ chief security detail about his isolation.

When Williams heard about it, he ensured Babb joined him on the second night, at about dinner-time, at the heavily guarded housing estate where Williams was staying.

That night, Williams just wanted to talk and did through almost the entire night. What they spoke about is for Babb’s memoirs, which the 83-year-old still has to write.

The next day Babb accompanied Williams to lunch with Cuba’s president on Isle of Pines, as it was then called. (The island, the second largest in the Cuban archipelago is now known as Isla de la Juventud or Isle of Youth).

Castro, who was “eating like a bushman”, Babb says dipping his hands into his food, told Williams, who was eating with a knife and a fork, “You have to eat like a Cuban.” Of the meal, Babb says, “I ate the biggest and best shrimps, I have seen in my life.” Noting the shrimp were fished in Cuban waters, Babb says Castro told him Cubans could not eat them because they were for export.

Another detail Babb shares is of the bottle of cigars, the best he has had, which Castro sent him before the the delegation’s departure for Trinidad. These cigars also Cubans could not use because they too were for export.

In the years before these early high-points in his career, Babb, while working at the Guardian in 1968, felt he was getting into a rut and saw no improvement.

He took advantage of an immigration recruitment drive by the then Canadian government and moved to Toronto, Canada, with his wife Lautnie, and two children.

Getting a job in journalism in metropolitan Toronto, he said, was difficult, but it taught him lessons in perseverance, and putting experience gained in Trinidad to work in order to beat his competitors.

Every media house he went to rejected him because he had no Canadian experience. They advised him to gain some experience with small newspapers and return after two years. One day, after almost half a year had passed since he and his family had arrived in Toronto, Babb went to the Ryerson Institute of Technology, formerly the Ryerson Polytechnic Institute to meet with the professor in journalism, John McCallum to see what the institute could teach him.

Having reviewed some of Babb’s work, McCallum told him they could not teach him anything there.

“I usually say he was the first genuine white man I met in Canada. He was a dye-in-the wool newspaper man who had spent 25 years at the Telegraph,” he said.

After asking McCallum “how in hell” he could get back into journalism, McCallum referred Babb to Ted Earl, a senior editor at Mc- Graw-Hill Publishing House, Canada’s largest publishing house. At the time Babb was working with the Canadian Pacific Rail as a scribe.

Earl could only offer him a temporary job to relieve staff members when they were on holidays.

“I was so desperate to get back to journalism that I accepted the temporary job and left my permanent one,” Babb said.

It did not take him long to join the permanent staff.

“There was a three-day convention for advertisers and their thinktanks at a hotel, Inn on the Park.

The reporter slated to do the job called in sick and Babb covered the assignment.

During the sessions, Babb says, “Once we got a break, the other reporters gone that way looking for coffee, and I go the other way looking for interviews.” When the convention was over, and all the papers carried their stories, Babb returned to the office on the fourth day and waited all morning in the office for a call to get an assessment. He got none.

The pattern then and now is for all newspapers’ editors to check out the competition.

Towards lunch time, Babb says, Earl invited him to have lunch with him on another floor in the building.

In the elevator, he said, Earl asked him how it was that he had gotten 11 stories while his competitors had seven, six and five. Babb told him that where he came from in Trinidad and Tobago, “Once there is work to be done, we do it” prompting Earl to ask him, “You come from a slave camp?” Earl then asked him, if he would like to work full time on the staff, Babb said, “I told him that is what I came to do in the first place.” On another assignment with a white secretary in Montreal for another advertisers’ convention, Babb says he spent a lot of time explaining where Trinidad and Tobago was on the map. However, he established a number of contacts.

On his return to Toronto, he did a feature on sun tan lotion out of a telephone interview he did with a promoter in Montreal. The feature was well received, and Babb was happy with the commendations he got from the editor and staff, but two days later, he received by courier, a case of sun tan lotion.

“That was the joke in the office,” he said. “Imagine, the only black man in an office of 12 people, gets a case of sun tan lotion. I shared it out among the staff. They need it more than me.” Babb worked at McGraw-Hill for almost three years.

He returned to Trinidad after Chong Sing sent him a telegram to say the Guardian was searching for a senior political reporter and asked if he was interested. He was.

When his wife asked why he would “go back to that place?” Babb told her, “You know why? Because I will be king in my own country. Not no second class citizen in Canada.” The Guardian agreed to cover the cost of his return travel and for shipment of his household articles back to Trinidad.

One his return, he sought ways to get interviews with Williams and struck up working relationships and contacts with ministers of Williams’ government, which was how he approached Mahabir, the break that would lead to his first Williams’ exclusive.