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The Hart family:
Sam Sharpe would make his peace with Tony Hart today
BY DESMOND ALLEN
Sunday, February 26, 2006
In the great slave rebellion of 1832, which brought Sam Sharpe to national prominence and secured a place in history for the future national hero, one of the properties that were violently burnt to the ground in that cataclysmic moment, was a store in Reading, St James owned by Aaron Hart.
If Sam Sharpe could climb down from yonder gallows and walk the streets of St James today, he would no doubt have made peace with the great great-grandson of Aaron Hart - Antony Keith Edmund Hart, affectionately Tony Hart, or the man without whom Montego Bay would not be the thriving northcoast resort city we know today.
Tony Hart (front centre) and wife Sheila (2nd row right) with their family members and in-laws.
Sam Sharpe might have spared the Harts their trauma. He was born, Tony Hart says, at the family home called Hartmont at Coopers Hill where he learnt to read, a rarity among slaves in those days. Of course, at the time of Sharpe's birth, the house was owned by an attorney, Samuel Sharpe after whom he was named. Edmund Hart, Tony's grandfather, subsequently acquired the property and made it the family home, renaming it Hartmont.
"The home is still owned today by my sister, Patricia," Hart points out.
The Harts can trace their family back to 1780 when their little-known ancestor, Moses Hart arrived in Jamaica from Colonial England. The Hart family chronicles begin in earnest with Aaron. And it might be easy to conclude that the Harts got their wealth from slave labour. Not so, if the records are to be believed. Aaron Hart, a Jew, had a millinery store selling things such as clothes, cloth, hats, shoes and the like, and operated a wharf.
It is written in the family diaries that after Aaron Hart's property at Reading was destroyed by the slaves protesting against their dreadful conditions, his son Samuel Hart, now barefooted and aged 10, was forced to seek work. Later, in adult years, a well off Indian gentleman, wishing to encash his Endowment Life Policy, persuaded Hart to purchase it for its surrender value and become the beneficiary.
Cheating wife
Tony Hart (left) hanging out with good friends (from left) Gordon 'Butch' Stewart, A B 'Tony' Lindo and Noel Hylton. Tony, Butch and Noel are three former Air Jamaica chairmen... what are the odds?
"Sometime after, the Indian gentleman suspected his wife of infidelity and, thereupon, set out to prove his suspicions by lying in wait for her in the open damp air. He quickly contracted a chill, which brought about his untimely demise. Bro. Hart, as beneficiary, inherited 500 pounds, a substantial sum in those days."
At age 36, Samuel Hart established several businesses including a dry goods store, a hardware store, an island produce store and a wharf. He also owned large tracts of land. In time, Montego Bay would become almost synonymous with the name Samuel Hart who was chairman of the St James Parochial Board for 25 years.
The sons of Samuel Hart who stayed in Jamaica and became prominent are: Edmund Hart and Ansel Hart. The children of Edmund are: Dudley Hart who died at 11 years of age; Clinton Hart, father of Hugh Hart, the former energy and mining minister; Dorothy Hart who married Percy Stephenson, the prominent St Ann businessman who owned Discovery Bay and Alan Keith Hart, Tony's father.
Tony Hart, overshadowed throughout his life by the awesome history of a famous town and family, was born on October 8, 1932, in the year of the 100th anniversary of the Sam Sharpe Rebellion. He grew up at Hilldene in the hills above Jarrett Park, the well known Montego Bay sporting facility and landmark. His siblings are: Patricia Hart Pinto and Jean Hart who died at age 21.
After Munro College which he attended between 1941 and 1948, Tony Hart worked briefly at the Casa Blanca Hotel and then went to work with the Parker Pen Company in Canada, on a sponsorship by the firm's president whom he had met on a visit to scenic Montego Bay. He spent a year there and enrolled in a business course at the Queen's University in Kingston, Toronto, working during the summer at the Lake Louise Hotel as a houseman and fishing guide.
Coming in from the cold
But finding the icy chill of the northern climes too hard to bear and missing his sun-drenched island home, Hart returned to Montego Bay to work in his father's hardware store called Samuel Hart and Son. In a strange twist of fate, Tony's dad, Alan Hart had also gone to Canada to study but abandoned his course and came home. He, however, had a more compelling reason.
Daddy Hart was doing an engineering degree at McGill University when the grim news came that an arsonist had burnt down the MoBay store. And it was not insured! For the second time in Hart history, a fire had brought the family face to face with bankruptcy. He returned to Jamaica with his father who was then on the brink of a nervous breakdown.
They sold the two wharves, but kept the iron mongery (hardware store) that they also owned, took a loan and decided to rebuild Samuel Hart and Son.
About the time that the Harts were mourning their loss, the Henriques decided to invest in a lighting plant for MoBay. Samuel Hart and Son became the first store in the town to be electrified. But even as townsfolk basked in the splendour of the lighting ceremony which co-incided with the reopening of the store in 1928, dark and ominous days were yet ahead.
The economic depression of the 1920s announced itself by viciously gouging businesses, including the Harts'. It continued into the 30's and when it seemed that respite had come, the 1938 riots erupted as mainly poor Jamaicans decided they couldn't take the misery anymore.
Before the dust from that had settled, World War Two broke out. Through it all the Harts had the time of their lives trying to keep the business alive.
"The times were fraught with problems," recalls Tony Hart. "My father really struggled."
New day dawns for MoBay
But after the War ended in 1945, a new day dawned. The government of the day built an international airport and that heralded new life for Montego Bay. "The opportunity for tourism was created, representing a huge jump for Montego Bay," Hart says. It would also mark a big jump for the Harts.
"My father had the idea of bringing in goods duty free in a bonded warehouse and that got the in-bond trade going. He became the first president of the In-bond Merchants Association."
This was the point at which Tony Hart, aged 18, came home from Canada and joined his father. It was the year 1950. After three months, he convinced his father to buy back a building that was owned by Samuel Hart and Son in the past and established another store there selling radios, refrigerators, housewares and (vinyl) records.
Out of a chance meeting with the president of Capitol Records at the world famous Doctor's Cave Beach, Hart decided to start Records Limited, based in Kingston, with Ken and Gloria Khouri and Alec Durie who was the main shareholder.
His uncle Clinton Hart also put up some of the seed money. In that same year, Tony Hart went on to establish Jamaica Electronics, also located in Kingston and migrated to the capital city, having left Samuel Hart and Son, to manage it jointly with Eddie Lai. Capital was again put up by Clinton Hart and by Wonards, owned by the Wong brothers, one of whom was Lai's brother-in-law.
A year later, Tony Hart sold out his interests to the Wongs and returned to Montego Bay in early 1953. Not long after, he acquired a sub-agency for the dealership of Ford, the giant American auto firm and opened at the back of his father's store, then located at Church Street. Hart called it the Northern Industrial Garage (NIG). He was now ready to take off.
He hired Percy Dyer, who had impressed him as the accountant at Jamaica Electronics. Dyer ran the business while Hart and Caswell Chen See hit the road, selling cars all across the western end of the island. In the first year they sold 300 cars, at a time when cars were relatively few on Jamaican roads.
Mistakenly shot by wife
Caswell had an untimely and unfortunate demise. One night, having forgotten his house keys, he tried to enter his house through a window and was shot by his wife who mistook him for a burglar. "He was an amazingly organised man and we missed him," Hart mourns his loss.
With the profits churning in from NIG, Hart put up a building at Union Street to house that business. "We had huge penetration. Eighty per cent of the cars in western Jamaica was Ford," he recounts. "But we got tremendous help from the Henriques - Dossie and Broz - who owned the Kingston Industrial Garage (KIG) and without whom it could not have happened. Frank Melhado, father of O K Melhado was also at KIG at the time."
The Ford dealership had done well. Soon Hart established branches in thriving St Ann's Bay in St Ann, Savanna-La-Mar in Westmoreland and another at Bogue, just outside MoBay. In 1958, he joined with John Briscoe and the Godfreys to do a project called Central Motors, another Ford sub-dealership, in Mandeville. By then NIG had become a direct dealership with Ford.
A petite delight
The year 1958 would be significant for another special reason. Sheila Desnoes, daughter of the lawyer, George Desnoes, was home on holiday from the University of Toronto when the two had a chance meeting. Hart who had little time for anything else but business, found himself spellbound by this petite woman whose smile lit up her entire face.and his heart.
On August 27, 1960, he made her his wife. Their long and loving union has produced four children: Mark Hart who is now chairman of the family holdings and the best known of the four; Bruce Hart, Blaise Hart and Wendy Hart Schrager who lives in Miami.
Up to this point, Hart had been consumed by the Ford dealership. But something else was stirring in his blood. Politics. He had inherited that from great-grandfather Samuel Hart and grandfather Edmund Hart, both of whom were chairmen of the St James Parochial Board, forerunner of the parish council.
Politics in the blood
Money in his pocket, life feeling good, Hart was on top of the world. In that upbeat mood he went one night to a meeting of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) at the corner of Barracks Road and Hart Street, named after his great-grandfather. The speaker was Dr Herbert Eldemire who waxed warm.
"I was greatly impressed with what he was saying. He had great presence and he was a popular man in Montego Bay," says Hart of his mentor. "I campaigned heavily for him in the 1959 elections, which he lost to Father Coombs of the People's National Party (PNP)."
Hart himself would run unsuccessfully against Francis Tulloch in 1972.
But in the 1962 elections, Hart managed Eldemire's campaign and saw his candidate win, by 500 votes, and become minister of health.
In the run-up to the elections, Hart and Eldemire had separate dreams for the development of their beloved Montego Bay. Eldemire immediately wanted a regional hospital that would prevent persons from the West from having to go to Kingston for major medical care. As health minister, he was able to realise his dreams in the Cornwall Regional Hospital at Mount Salem.
"For my part, I wanted to see the harbour develop, and after the election, I started working on building the Montego Freeport," says Hart. It would be a development that would unleash the economic potential of the second city.
Hart brought in Guy Arthur Panero, head of a New York engineering firm and he in turn put together some investors, including George Farkas, an American who owned 'Laughing Waters' which he eventually sold to the government, and George A Sussman. They took a plan to the shipping companies who threw cold water on it, saying under that plan ships could get caught in rough seas.
Back to the drawing board, Hart pulled out his small-plane licence and, accompanied by Stuart Foster, flew over the area. He then identified the Inner Bogue Islands and the Outer Bogue Islands as potential sites for the port development.
The MoBay Freeport is born
On the advice of engineer and builder, Ellis Chingos - whom he described as "an incredible person" - and a marine engineer from the US, Hart chose the Outer Bogue islands for his Freeport project.
"In 1966, I put the project together, with 55 per cent of the funds from the United States and 45 per cent from Jamaica. Then we began negotiations with Edward Seaga, the minister of development, to build the port."
Hart's project called for the government to build a railroad and a road from the Pye Bridge that is now called the Alice Eldemire Way. This was built but not the railroad, he recounts. But the US$2.4 million which was needed to finance the dredging of the harbour to allow big ships to dock at pier side, was already secured.
The project proposal was waiting to be signed by Prime Minister Alexander Bustamante. Three days before Bustamante was to ink the proposal, he suffered a stroke.
The document was taken to the acting PM, Donald Sangster, a good friend of Tony Hart and Munro College old boy. The 1967 elections intervened, but Sangster assured Hart "not to worry", it would be signed. Right after the elections, which the JLP again won, Sangster too suffered a stroke and died before chairing his first Cabinet meeting.
Dead in the water
In the elections for a leader to replace Sangster, Eldemire led a group from the West in support of Hugh Lawson Shearer who beat D C 'Clem' Tavares and became prime minister. Shearer, the support of the West not lost on him, sent the Hart proposal to Seaga, now finance minister, for approval.
But before doing so, Seaga ordered a study of the project and later informed Shearer that it was not viable, Hart recalls. The project appeared dead in the water.
But Eldemire, not to mention Hart and his investors, was very angry. He fired off a letter of resignation to the Governor-General. To resolve the matter, Shearer set up a commission, headed by G Arthur Brown, to look into the project.
"Within half-an-hour, Brown declared that Seaga's advisors were talking nonsense and that they had not even gone to see the site before coming to their conclusion. He advised Shearer to approve it and within a month of the elections, the document was signed," Hart remembers. The Freeport project was now on its way.
Montego Bay changed forever
The development, the largest of its kind in Jamaica at the time, involved the dredging of three million cubic yards of sea and the filling of all the mangrove-covered Bogue Islands, the main one being 100 acres, and cutting a channel through the reef. The harbour was deepened from five-foot deep to 45 feet, and 32 feet deep at dockside, so that it can now dock three large ships and two small ones.
That changed Montego Bay forever.
"Up to that time, all our ships had to anchor about quarter mile offshore and everything, including sugar and banana, had to go on lighters. Everything else came through Kingston. The shipping lines had found it inconvenient so we could not get any business," as Hart tells it.
From his home at Seawind on the Bay, he watches with satisfaction today as ships laden with big containers call twice a week at the port. Cruise ships offload hundreds of passengers at the pier, a far cry from the days when tourists disembarked from lifeboats.
"It had the same effect on Montego Bay as the airport had on tourism," he notes, unable to mask his pride and emotion. "It has made a huge difference to cruise shipping. Montego Bay has grown exponentially because of the airport and the seaport. We are the tourism capital of Jamaica and the commercial centre of western Jamaica."
He points to the town's population which was 17,000 in the 1940s and is now 150,000 in Montego Bay and surrounding areas.
On to new horizons
With the Freeport up and running, Hart looked to new ventures. He took over the bankrupt Montego Towers Hotel, now the Sunset Resort and started an all-inclusive programme called Go-Bananas, filling the 350-room hotel every week with tourists from five Canadian cities, at a time when hotel rooms generally were empty in the troublesome 1970s. In 1979, he added 120 rooms and the sizzling Cave Night Club.
He pays tribute to the work of people like resident manager Merrick Fray of Sandals fame, the late Lucille Lue and Basil Cahusack, the entertainment manager. After four years of ownership, Hart sold the property in 1981.
Of the politically volatile 70s, Hart says he considered the prospect of migrating to the US but found he could not leave Montego Bay. "I love Jamaica with a passion and Montego Bay even more. Outside of my family, it's hard to beat," Hart testifies, adding that his family is "fiercely Montegonian".
Bringing the Concord to Jamaica
In 1980, Hart was appointed chairman of the national airline, Air Jamaica, a post he held until 1989. During that time, he excited Jamaica and the tourism market by bringing the world's fastest commercial plane, the British Airways-owned Concord and saw business triple on the New York leg.
A year after the Air Jamaica appointment, he gave up the chairmanship of Freeport. His instincts were correct. The year 1983 would force him to make life-changing decisions. After six heart by-pass operations, he sold nearly all of his remaining assets in companies like Blaise Trust, Avis Rent-a-Car, Unique Travel and Tours, Northern Industrial Garage and an insurance company.
Feeling up to it, Hart turned to the land in 1989. He bought the Covey and Good Hope properties in Trelawny in 1989, which his son, Blaise and his wife, Tammy currently manage as a resort. This acquisition was followed by the Chippenham Park farm that was previously owned by John Tharpe, for cattle rearing, the 1,000-acre Woodstock in Westmoreland, also for cattle and a small citrus farm in Cambridge, St James.
In a joint venture with Robert Levy of Jamaica Broilers, he started a fish farm at Brumdec, supplying the fish to Broilers. He then bought a banana farm, jointly with Charlie Johnson at Springvale on the St James-Trelawny border and changed it to sugar cane production. Later he sold all his property but kept Good Hope which he had bought jointly with Hugh Hart, Chris Blackwell, the music mogul and Farhad Azima.
Nothing more for personal gain
Satisfied that he had done enough, Tony Hart, over the last five to six years, has been doing mostly voluntary work, saying he is no longer interested in anything for personal gain. As chairman of the finance committee for the development of Doctor's Cave Beach, he is heavily involved in the planning and preparations for the celebrations next year of the 100th anniversary of the world famous beach.
He is fundraising for 50 scholarships, a playing field and computer centre to benefit the children of the Montpelier College run by Tony and Pat Ottey and he mentions the considerable help of Patrick Casserley of E-Services. Hart is also working to build a 100-capacity computer centre for inner-city Montego Bay.
The Hanover Charities has promised funding through money raised from home-owners in the upscale Tryall resort, to support the computer project. He has received significant assistance from John Carney, a US lawyer who has made Jamaica his home.
At 73, Tony Hart, Commander of the Order of Distinction (CD) is vivacious, laughs heartily, enjoys lunching with friends, hangs out at the Yacht Club and the Doctors Cave Beach whose membership he has helped to build from 100 to 750 members in seven years. And most of all, he celebrates his family.
Tony Hart has built a city and touched the lives of countless Montegonians and Jamaicans. Just perhaps now, Sam Sharpe can rest well this night in this Black History Month.
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Sam Sharpe would make his peace with Tony Hart today
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