There is a persistent rumour that following the US-led invasion of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada in October 1983 to depose a newly installed military junta, concerned viewers rang up the Manchester-based TV company Granada in their droves to check none of their favourite soap-opera characters from Coronation Street had been killed or injured during the offensive.1 Ken and Deirdre Barlow may have survived unscathed, but Grenada itself was less fortunate, having been ruled since autonomy from Britain in 1974 by a series of crooks and autocrats whose grip on reality was sometimes every bit as loose as that of those who feared the consequences of a successful cruise-missile attack on the Rovers Return.
Grenada’s most flamboyant political actor was Sir Eric Gairy (1922-97), the nation’s first post-colonial PM, knighted by the Queen in 1977 for alleged services to his nation (although, uniquely, he claimed to actually have been knighted by Her Majesty on no fewer than five separate occasions, so that should really be Sir Sir Sir Sir Sir Eric Gairy). Another honour bestowed upon Gairy – by himself this time – was to appear upon one of his nation’s $2 postage stamps, issued in 1978, where his disembodied head floated next to the UN General Assembly Building in NewYork above the apostrophe-abusing caption “RESEARCH INTO U.F.O’s”. A special presentation-mount featured a larger surrounding image of a flying saucer hovering above Manhattan’s skyscrapers, monitoring Gairy’s lifelong “QUESTTO DISCOVER MORE ABOUT U.F.O’s AND RELATED PHENOMENA”. Other stamps in the series (see FT225:48-53) depicted famous UFOs from history, such as a classic 1950s Adamski Scoutship.2 If Sir Eric is known outside of Grenada for anything today, it is for tirelessly speechifying about UFOs to the UN – which is fortunate for his posthumous reputation, as posterity might otherwise have remembered him as an incompetent tin-pot chancer.
RED SKY IN THE MORNING…
Born into the poor black Catholic peasant-classes in 1922, Gairy toiled in the regional oil industry before returning to Grenada in 1949 to found the colony’s first trade union. In 1951, he called a general strike and proved himself a truly fiery orator – his men set fire to so many buildings that the period became known as the ‘Red Sky’ days. Gairy was imprisoned, which only aided his folk hero status among the downtrodden black Gairy’s private militia were known as the ‘Mongoose Gang’ and aped the similar of Papa Doc Duvalier over in Haiti (see , breaking up anti-Gairy meetings by driving cars into them, or beating up and murdering critics of the regime with rifles and planks. Yet Gairy denied his men were a militia at all, “just some unruly young fellows from my union” who were “always fighting in the rum shops” until he “got them jobs in a World Health Organisation mongoose eradication project” to put them on the straight and narrow; their weapons were for killing vermin, not people.
