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| A Man For All Seasons, Barbados Today |
I wasn't a fan of that headline. Not at first. But it was a Ridley Greene headline, as I would discover hours before it would go to press. So I knew I was today years old and had something new to learn. "They're still of the first water," the headline ran. Cryptic, stylish, oblique even. It was for a news feature I wrote on the government's report on trace levels in our groundwater of a weedkiller widely used throughout the sugar industry, Atrazine, with links to cancer in lab rats. Pervasive, yes, in trace amounts, I hasten to add (It has since emerged that the levels of nitrogen fertilisers pose a bigger threat to our health). That was 30 years ago. For that investigative piece, I won a PAHO Award and brought attention not only to pesticides in our environment, however briefly, but to a brand new environment beat at The Nation.
"They're still of the first water." It was sensible, calm, reassuring and bade any reader to read on, not gloss over it and declare themselves informed, then say, "There's nothing to read in the paper" just before they wrap the fish. "Of the first water" - an idiom of the diamond trade - means of the highest quality. That was the reassurance - and the truth. It warned of the potential of unheeded abuse in farming, not to condemn our very precious groundwater.
Growing up, one of the things I loved about The Nation was the headlines - so damn clever and compelling. It is one of the things that drew me to it. I didn't hesitate when Harold Hoyte asked me to join them in 1992. But so much of that inimitable innovation and spark of The Nation - headlines, layout and style - was all Ridley Greene - the artful planner, the editor's sub-editor. Most people think a paper is reporter-story-headline. It, too, can be the product of auteurs; yes, there is art in journalism.
By all means, join in the current wailing and gnashing of teeth over today's journalism: the gleeful ignorance and dismissiveness of consumers who demand more to be provoked than informed; owners who care more for corporate balance sheets than the democratic balance of power; bean counters as managers; newsrooms reduced to cubicles; and an education system that churns out waves of the morbidly incurious - or just that we are all wicked bastards inside a conspiratorial cabal intent on sucking the marrow from your bones and inserting a microchip more well-informed than God.
Yet know this. There was a warm, charming, quietly brilliant, banjo-playing, gentleman journalist who spoke with the softest voice, smiled the kindest smile and yet cared truly, madly and deeply for the service we perform and especially how we do it. He was the essence of the very quotation from the Journalist's Creed that I first encountered on the walls of the newsroom in Fontabelle - "no one should write as a journalist what he would not say as a gentleman." Outmoded perhaps in this crude, gender-bending era, but there were words to live by and I felt Ridley certainly embodied that creed, and I am too bereft right now to explain it to anyone willing more to be offended than to learn the world didn't start with them - just as I learned that morning 30 years ago.
His name was Ridley Dacosta Greene, late of Barbados Today, The Nation, the Barbados Advocate and the Daily News; formerly of St Barnabas (Pine) Primary and Combermere; of St Barnabas' Church, 9.15 am. posse. And to me, he was of the first water. RIP.