Look back at early days of Dominica Labour Party as it celebrates 70 years

Dominica: As the Dominica Labour Party completed its 70 years of existence on May 24, 2025, a local named Lennox Honychurch recalled the early days of the party.  

Through a Facebook post Honychurch remembered the turning point in the politics of Dominica in 1951 following which the Labour Party came into existence.  

In 1951, Universal Suffrage was granted to the citizens of Dominica. This was a turning point in the politics of Dominica and the Windward Islands. Now, for the first time, every Dominican over the age of 21 was entitled to vote without the qualifications of property or size of income that were previously required and an elected majority was created in the Legislature.  

Two years later a Dominican woman returned from England to her island home. She was Phyllis Shand Allfrey. Born in Roseau, her grandfather had been the famous Sir Henry Nicholls and her uncle had helped to establish the first trade union. In England, Ma Allfrey, as she was popularly called, had been an active member of the British Labour Party and had worked as a welfare officer during the war. She helped Dominican immigrants arriving to England to adapt to their new lives in London. On her return to Dominica, she put her political experience to work and along with the pioneer trade unionist Emanuel Christopher Loblack, they together founded the first political party on the island. On 24 May 1955 the Labour Party of Dominica was inaugurated from the porch of the DTU Hall in Lagon, Roseau. 

Like the trade union drive ten years before, the party spread its idealistically socialist ideas throughout the countryside. In 1957, the party was joined by an ambitious and passionate young Dominican who knew the mood of his people and his island well. This man, Edward Oliver Le Blanc, soon became a leading spokesman for the party. Like other politicians in the West Indies at the time, he knew the power of an orator who identified himself with the mass of the people and soon his emotional hold over many Dominicans was remarkably strong. 

The Labour Party gained a mass following and in 1961 it won its first general elections. Historically, there were two basic reasons for the success, from which everything else resulted. The first was that never before had there been such a surge of development concentrated at one time upon a people who, for generations, had lived at subsistence level at the mercy of social and political conditions over which they had had no control. 

 

The second was that the Labour Party had presented them with a form of leadership with which they could identify, speaking in a language and presented in a manner which they could understand. Roads, schools, agricultural opportunities, water services, electricity expansion, village improvement and community development through an enhanced local government programme of village councils linked to a movement of cultural nationalism created a surge of social change.