At 93 he can still be found working with fork, hoe and shovel in the heat of the day, weeding, bushing, planting and reaping on his 9-acre property in Moneague, St. Ann. His hearing might not be as good as in earlier days and the cool clime of St Ann brings on the occasional arthritic pains especially at nights, but the memories are still vivid and the eyesight and reflexes sharp enough to withstand the challenges of driving into Kingston and back. With no other ailments, he believes he will make it to a hundred.
CHARLES CORNELIUS ALEXANDER RANDLE was born on April 20, 1925 in Green Island, Hanover the second of three sons to Iris Buchanan, dressmaker of the town. Little is known about his father except that he disappeared (some say to Mexico) shortly after he was born, so Charles was brought up in the early years by mother “Miss I’ and grandmother Rosa Tomlinson.
Recently, Jamaicaglobalonline visited ‘Uncle Charlie’ to jog his memory about growing up in 1930s and 1940s Hanover as part of our developing profile of the parish. His earliest memories were of sitting at the feet of his maternal grand-aunt, Meme Calvin, popularly known across the island as ‘Mother Penny’, one of Jamaica’s best-known healers. Both from observation and from family lore, he learned about her renowned healing powers of which he was a beneficiary soon after entering high school. After suffering from a series of debilitating headaches which no doctor could diagnose or cure, ‘Mother Penny’ not only identified the source of his ailment as the act of a jealous parent, but declared that once she had healed him, he would never in his lifetime be harmed in that way again. Today Charlie Randle remains absolutely convinced that her ‘seeing’ and ‘curing’ powers were special gifts with which she was born or acquired. ‘Mother Penny’s’ exploits are the subject of both legend and lived memories of many Hanoverians.
As a young boy his life was dominated by the sea – Green Island then being a banana (and sugar?) loading port with fishing as another main local activity. No wonder he came under the tutelage of Meme’s husband, Tata, whom he described as a ‘giant of a man’ physically, and reputed then to be the best fisherman in Western Hanover. Tata not only taught him to swim by throwing him overboard in the open sea but taught him an early life lesson in respecting the sea and its dangers, when he narrowly escaped being attacked by a tiger shark. Even today Charlie can still feel the pain from the single slap on the bottom he got from Tata’s huge hand for disobeying his admonition never to dive into the open sea without his prior approval.
A fruit de la mer of the surrounding waters of Green Island was the ‘Goggle eye’, a fish so delicate and tasty that the arrival of Tata and other fishermen with their catch would immediately bring hordes of eager buyers to the seaside. Alas! the Goggle Eye and the fishing industry in general have been overtaken by systematic underdevelopment in Hanover and especially in Green Island which these days is less than even a shadow of its past glory.
Apart from spending many hours by and in the sea, boys like Charlie passed the time in the late 1930s Green Island playing cricket at the ‘ball ground’ which is where he developed his lifelong passion for cricket. This was in between going to school at Cave Valley elementary to be tutored for the Ruseas scholarship by Teacher Selwyn Fletcher, which Charlie duly won and moved to the capital Lucea as a boarder.
Life at Ruseas and in Lucea in the 1940s was dominated by the Second World War and the fear of German U-Boats that were prevalent in Caribbean waters, forcing town authorities to refrain from turning on street lights in the evenings. At Rusea’s , the dominating force was the school’s legendary Headmaster, G.S. Mcdonald , known by contemporaries as ‘Bag of Knowledge’. As a student, Charlie did not impress the great headmaster who lost no opportunity in telling him in front of his classmates on more than one occasion that “you are just wasting your mother’s money”. Imagine the pleasure Charlie had in hearing headmaster McDonald eat his words when his Senior Cambridge results came out with distinctions in Mathematics and Religious Knowledge and the declaration: “ Congratulations; all those things I said I was deceived.”
There was one Rusea’s experience that has lived with Charlie all his life.
The English Literature teacher had given the class an assignment for each member to learn and recite word for word the entire poem Ode to the Nightingale by Keats. When the entire class failed to learn the poem, the incensed teacher Mr. Bertram Hamilton insisted that no one would go home that day until each one could recite the poem. Charlie walked home in darkness that day but not before learning and reciting all 8 stanzas of Ode to a Nightingale in its entirety – which if asked he can recite word for word even now. Indeed, his wife Mel says its not unusual for Charlie to walk around the house mumbling lines from the second stanza:
O, for a draught of vintage! That hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth……………
BUSTA & GLASSPOLE
Charlie recalls meeting Sir Alexander Bustamante late in the 1940s whilst he was working at the collectorate in Lucea and boarding at 11 O’Hare street in the town. The occasion for Busta’s visit was to see one of his Ministers Jehoida McPherson who was then in charge of Labour and whose daughter was a fellow boarder. From that one encounter, Charlie concluded from Busta’s reaction to learning of his occupation, that he did not particularly like civil servants. However, he liked Busta whom he thinks was a genuine person. Many years later when as a revenue agent Charlie was part of a team that went up to Busta’s house in Irish Town, the now retired Prime Minister regaled them with stories of his friendship with Norman Manley. In an ironic twist, Charlie revealed that some of the lychee trees which are now a feature of his Moneague property, actually came from Busta’s Irish Town estate! Coincidentally too, Florizel Glasspole lived in Lucea in the late 1940s two doors away from Charlie who delighted in reminiscing about how he stole Glasspole’s mangoes!
KINGSTON
Charlie’s Randle’s association with the parish of his birth was severed in 1948 when he applied for and got a job in the collectorate in Kingston. Although he was to be assigned to collectorates in other parishes, Charlie eventually returned to Kingston where he developed a reputation as something of a tax expert. In later life he found what was to be his second career, serving for many years as Secretary of the Jamaica Racing Commission (JRC) and later as manager for both the JRC and the Betting Gaming and Lotteries Commission (BGLC). He was later to be inducted into the Racing Hall of Fame and when the BGLC inaugurated the Emancipation Day race meeting to be run on August 1, a special race for the Charles Randle Trophy was named in his honour.
