John maxwell jamaica biography of williams

In the weeks leading up to the fateful referendum which ended the West Indies Federation in before it even reached cruising altitude, a certain editor at the still new Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation travelled all over the island lugging a cumbersome tape recorder to register the opinions of his compatriots. John Maxwell spoke to higglers, people standing along the roadside waiting for a bus, cane-cutters, carpenters, teachers, dressmakers and mechanics.

› john-william-maxwell.

He visited rum bars, meeting halls and churches. Then he returned to the station and sifted through reels and reels of tape and distilled their contents to fit into the quarter-hour the station had allocated to the news editors each week. That edition of Sunday News Special, broadcast on the eve of the referendum, consisted entirely of the voices of the people he spoke to, stitched together into an almost seamless discussion of the main themes of the referendum campaign.

The only other voice heard was a brief introduction and sign-off by an announcer. It is one of the finest pieces of radio I have ever heard, before and since. Maxwell was one of the original squad of reporters and editors who had been recruited from newspapers to bring a new dimension to journalism after the stiff, stilted model of print and broadcast journalism we had all grown up with.

One of the vehicles was the analytical minute programme The Week in Perspective, broadcast on Saturday nights. Yes, Wilmot Perkins was one of that band of brave new broadcasters. Perkins and Maxwell went all the way back to high school. John was a bookworm from early on, and his contemporaries used to claim, somewhat admiringly, that he always walked around with a book under his arm.

John William Maxwell was.

A few months after that remarkable referendum broadcast, I met Maxwell for the first time when I was the latest rookie in the newsroom. He was quite approachable even as he dazzled even those much older than he was with his breadth of knowledge and understanding. Maxwell introduced me to the JBC style guide, a slim little volume run off on a duplicating machine.

It consisted of a compact list of the right and wrong way to say things on the radio, pitfalls to avoid and the clarity and precision we should strive for. A couple of these axioms have stuck in my head.