William of Grant's Town

What's in a name? - Try “William” and feast on greatness

By P. Anthony White

Before real Bahamian time began in 1973, the huddled masses of these islands grew up, as it were, under a system of education and history based on the British legacy, just as other colonies across the landscape of the Empire upon which the sun never set.

Essentially, as part of that legacy of education, and especially in the public school system, there were included intense excursions through British history, beginning with the Norman Conquest in 1066, and inclusive of the dynamic and colourful characters who played pivotal roles through the ages.

Up through that history over time there have been outstanding personalities who made a distinct difference, and who bore the name of “William”, which is of old German origin, although William the Conqueror, who was born in Normandy, France, in 1027, perhaps made the name most popular.

The name meant “will”, “determined”, “resolute”, and history records that for a long time after the Norman Conquest, three out of four boys born were named after the conqueror. That first William of Norman Conquest fame, invaded and conquered England on Christmas Day in 1066. He became the first Norman king and reigned until his death in 1087.

That William, like Julius Caesar of ancient times, came, saw, and delivered a necessary conquest.

A few centuries later there was William of Orange, who was born in The Hague, Netherlands, in 1650, the son Charles the First of England. He later married his cousin, Mary, elder daughter of James, Duke of York, who was heir to the English throne. After driving the French out of the Netherlands, William of Orange became the champion of Protestantism across Europe.

In 1688 he was invited by protestant English opponents to Catholic King James II to come and depose the monarch. He landed in Devon with an army, and James quietly conceded, fleeing to France. The following year, in 1689, the English Parliament offered William and Mary the throne as joint monarchs under what became known as the Declaration of Rights. His wife predeceased him, and William III ruled until 1702.

William of Orange, all the way from the Netherlands, upon invitation came, saw the religious conflict rendering England asunder, and was, almost bloodlessly to bring a kind of awkward peace.

Yet in a way closer to home, there was William Sayle, who was born in the final decade of the 16^th century. He was one of the original Eleutherian Adventurers, who was reputed to have arrived from Bermuda with 76 settlers.

They were Bermudians and English, many of whom were driven out of Bermuda by intolerance and persecution resulting from the conflict between the Church of England and Bermuda's Independent Puritans (mostly Presbyterians).

Under the "Articles and Orders of Incorporation", Sayle established the first English settlement in The Bahamas between 1646 and 1648 in the north of the island of Eleuthera. However, after a rebellion against the Articles, he and his group left that first settlement and moved to St. George's Cay, which is now Spanish Wells.

Eventually, and before the American Revolution, many of the settlers from Bermuda travelled to North America, mostly Virginia. There, when he was an old man, William Sayle, became governor of South Carolina, and in fact founded the town of Charleston.

Many years later there was another William, a product of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in The Bahamas, who towered over a landscape which was gravely scorched at many levels, and who sought, through his many talents and through his commitment to the welfare of others, was determined to make a difference.

He was William of Grant's Town.

When William Edward Thompson was born at Alice Town, Eleuthera, in December of 1933, The Bahamas was still, in many ways, in social and political darkness. Indeed it was not to be for another two decades, in the autumn of 1953, that the first seeds of serious political reform were to be sown with the establishment of the Progressive Liberal Party.

Last Sunday at St. Agnes Church in New Providence, The Feast of William of Grant’s Town, a celebration of the life and contributions to Church and State of a man who had served for 32 years as the rector of that Anglican church and a shepherd of many in the Grant’s Town community and beyond.

Last month, 23^rd June, marked the tenth anniversary of the untimely death of Archdeacon Thompson after he received serious gunshot wounds at the hands of an intruder a month earlier. Ironically, for a number of years the archdeacon had served as a member of the Commission on Crime, which recommended ways in which crime might be curbed in The Bahamas.

Another irony was that even though Archdeacon Thompson’s bid to become a Suffrage Bishop failed a few years earlier, on the day following his death, 24 June 2000, his younger brother, Archdeacon Gilbert Arthur Thompson, was consecrated as a bishop of the Anglican Church.

In December 1967 Archdeacon Thompson became only the third Bahamian to be installed as rector of St. Agnes, which at that time already was 122-year institution in the Grant’s Town community. Willie Thompson had grown up serving around the altar of that church, along with such as former governor-general Sir Orville Turnquest.

Yet from his installation, when he was barely 34 years old, he sought not to outdo or outshine his noble predecessors in that office, but instead strove to build on what they had advanced, and to make the church productive and effective and relevant to the congregation and the community he felt St. Agnes existed to serve.

Inside the church and the wider community, Willie Thompson was no coward or mealy-mouthed observer of the passing scene. He was one who saw life fully and saw it whole, never fearing to tell you when you were out of line, or when your lifestyle, in addition to the injury it inflicted upon yourself, was promoting pain amongst others.

Archdeacon Thompson, who hated mediocrity and suffered no fools, gladly or in any other way, was nevertheless a man humble to a fault, a man who, despite his absolute abhorrence of wrongdoing, had made an art of hating the sin but loving the sinner, or even those who thought of sinning.

There was an occasion on a Sunday morning in 1999 at St. Agnes when a deranged man entered the main door of the church and pranced up the centre aisle of the nave and into the sanctuary at the high point of the Eucharist. He ascended the sanctuary steps and approached the altar where he upset the chalice.

The assistant priest at St. Agnes, Rev. Rodney Burrows, who had served many years as an officer of the Royal Bahamas Police Force, although somewhat short of stature, sprang into action, gripping the man from behind and pinning his arms behind him.

When Fr. Burrows and a few others had finally managed to subdue the intruder, wrestling him to the ground, Archdeacon Thompson, standing at the altar perhaps with the attitude of Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket on the steps of Canterbury Cathedral in December 1170, said quietly, “Take the gentleman outside.” He then calmly proceeded with the consecration.

He was human in all fundamental aspects, but frowned upon fellow clergy who took too lightly the vows they made and who, in his view, set poor examples for the religiously-inclined young.

Indeed many believed it was Archdeacon Thompson’s intolerance of rogue and recalcitrant young priests that cost him their support when he sought to become suffragan to Bishop Michael Eldon.

Nevertheless Archdeacon Thompson, without rancor, plodded on with his priestly responsibilities, both at St. Agnes and in the diocese. He had served as Examining Chaplain to the bishop, Hospital Chaplain, Diocesan Missioner, and chairman of the Anglican Church Education Authority.

In the community, in addition to serving as part of the Commission on Crime, for two decades he served on the Public Disclosure Committee, and was a member of the National Drug Council.

Last Sunday the celebration of the life of William of Grant’s Town in many ways saw a departure from the norm. During the early morning Eucharist, for example, the preacher as a Baptist minister, Bishop Simeon B. Hall of New Covenant Baptist Church, who had actually been baptized at St. Agnes, grew up in Grant’s Town.

Speaking of the archdeacon he had known fairly well, Bishop Hall reminded the rapt congregation: “The cruel death which came to him will never eclipse the nobility of his life . . . some men have much, but do so little – Archdeacon Thompson took what God gave him and touched thousands of lives; each of us should seek to live so that when we come to die we would stand before our God empty of every gift and void of every talent.”

During a special afternoon service the preacher, Archdeacon James Palacious, spoke as one who had learnt and gained much from Archdeacon Thompson who, among other things, had taught Palacious at St. John’s College.  Importantly, he was able to capture the pure essence of the fallen priest who had no half measures about his beliefs and his commitments, the man from Grant’s Town whose life had always been an open book, who shot straight from the hips, and who had not a bone of ambivalence in him.   “You knew what he was because he never failed to remind you,” Archdeacon Palacious said, “he let you know he was from Grant’s Town, he was a black nationalist, he was a PLP, and he was an Anglican.”

Thus was described the exemplary, the archetypical William of Grant’s Town, a man who, as the Baptist prince said, had used what he received from God to touch the lives of thousands, who was so brutally despatched a decade ago, and who is today remembered and revered in his beloved St. Agnes, in the Anglican communion, and far, far beyond the corridors of the Church.

What’s in a name? Up through time and around the globe there have been men named William who have been of great consequence in their conquests, on their thrones, and in their countries. Then there was William of Grant’s Town, the quintessential man for all men and all seasons, who in his time made a resounding difference . . . for what it’s worth.