Mr. Brewley, 75, served in the legislature from 1983 until 1999, including a stint as communications and works minister under a former United Party government. An accountant by training, he also worked for businesses including Little Dix Bay resort. Additionally, Mr. Brewley was president of the territory’s softball associationfor more than 20 years, and he still serves as an announcer at games.
I was born in the village of Baughers Bay in the year 1941: September 24th. I grew up in an adjacent village called Free Bottom. It was a little sleepy village just nestled on the foot of Butu Mountain. When I was growing up at Free Bottom, everyone knew everyone else, and in fact I think that we were all related in that village. I came from a big family: There were 12 of us. I’m number three.
From there, I came to Road Town and I went to the Road Town Elementary School, which is now the Althea Scatliffe Primary School. It was not in the location it is now: It was located on the high school campus on the Lower Estate side. The secondary school was on the same campus, a little further up. I went as far as grade five there.
After the secondary school, I graduated with the Cambridge University School Certificate in 1957.
Starting work
Scholarships were not readily available at the time: Government didn’t have the money, and your parents didn’t have the money to send you abroad. So I went to work in the Treasury Department in 1960. It was Treasury and Customs. They collected custom duties, and the Treasury included the post office and others. We didn’t have banks then, so the government had a little savings bank within the Treasury Department. I worked there for a little over a year as a junior clerk.
When I left government, they were paying me about $93 a month, and that was a princely sum because there were people in the government service who were taking home about $60. That was about 1961. At that time, $93 was a lot of money. You could buy a lot of things for a little bit of money. We didn’t have many motorcars in those days. [There was only one] truck on the island: Government owned an old Dutch truck from World War II. We had a few people who owned taxicabs, but they could only go around town up to the bottom of Fort Hill, and that was the extent of where the taxis could go.
Political career
I used to follow politics, but I wasn’t interested in becoming a politician. I never considered myself as a politician anyway. I more considered myself as a statesman. I got into politics really in the early 1980s with a party called the United Party. My cousin — he and Conrad and Edmond Maduro — made it up. I would attend meetings and whatnot, but I didn’t seriously think about becoming a candidate. In 1983, about six months before general elections, they were seeking for candidates and I happened to be at that meeting. They identified candidates for the First, the Second and Third districts, and when they came to the Fourth, they couldn’t find anybody. I wasn’t really going to say anything because I didn’t want to become a candidate. But then they kept saying, “Who are we going to put in the Fourth District?” So I just said to them, “You want a candidate in the Fourth? I’ll run in the Fourth, and I’m going to beat the man for you all.” They were very surprised at the time. They looked at me and said, “Are you serious?”
At that time, the man in the Fourth was Mr. A.U. Anthony. He was a seasoned politician: a civil servant at one point and a well-known gentleman. He was deputy chief minister at the time.
I said I was going to run for the party, so I became a candidate. Mr. Anthony, I think he underestimated me. At one point I think he told somebody, “Well, that’s an easy win for me: I’m going to give him a two-to-one.” I said to myself, “He isn’t going to give me a two-to-one, but since he said that I’m going to try to give him that.”
Campaigning
In those days, a lot of campaigning was done from house to house. I was kind of well known in the Fourth District because I was heavily involved in sports. At that time, I was president of the softball association: All the parents who had children playing softball knew me. I went through the district from house to house, and when I was doing the second round Mr. Anthony started realising he had to do some house-to-house himself. But when he started, it was a little too late. Basically, we ran on a platform that whatever little bit of finances was coming into the government, we wanted to have value for whatever money we had. We ran on getting better schools, better roads and having the children up to par when they come out of secondary school. I won the first time around, and the party won the government too.
Interview conducted, condensed and edited by Ngovou Gyang.
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