We gather today, to honor the memory of Headley Henlin who has died. In many ways, those of us who knew him well can hardly believe that he has died. We give thanks to God for his life, a life of devotion to family, a love of his fellowmen and a love for God.   By 1925 many descendants of newly freed slaves were just about organizing themselves Jamaican Peasantry with a sense of renewed sense of hope in a nation only recently emerging from the First World War.   Nestled in the hills of St. Ann, in a little district called Mt. Olivet, Alexander Henlin, the district constable and Margaret Henlin, the village seamstress, were about to have their 9th and last son.

 

Our grandmother Margaret told us this, that some weeks before his birth, she dreamt that she had gone to have him registered and there appearing at the desk, was God and two angels.  Why are you here and the child is not yet born they asked her?   And what is his name?   She had no name planned and so they told her to name him Headley Stair for he will be special.   At birth she named him as her the registrars had said and she would later discover that this was the only one of her children who caused no pain at birth.

 

 Aware that their family had suffered tragedy with the untimely death of some of their sons (and this at birth); they anxiously waited the birth of this new son. Would this one live or would this one die?

 

 And live he did.   From an early age it was obvious that he was a son of promise and was to become one of the sons of the poor who would soon enter the hallowed halls of the Mico College.   This was a first for the Henlin Family, as the last child became the first child to receive professional training.

 

The boy Headley

 

Born into poor and humble circumstances, Headley was to have some privileged heaped upon him if only because he was the baby of the family.  Carried often on the bicycle of his siblings, he would make the journey to school in Runaway Bay and there passed his First, Second and Third year examinations. This was accomplished not only by the support of his parents, but also by the sacrifices of his  surviving brothers, especially from Hector, who had learnt the skill of tailoring, and Baron, who had recently become a shoemaker.   With shirts provided by a sewing mother, pants by his brother and shoes by another brother, Headley was able to go on to school properly clothed. We have learnt that the boy Headley was shy and reserved, extremely kind and very playful.   He often became the butt of his brothers jokes about ghosts of which he was extremely fearful, refusing often to accompany them at nights because of that particular fear.

The assistance of his elder siblings and the sacrifice of his parents were soon to enable him to enter the Mico College.  His was the ambition to become a teacher, no doubt inspired by Mrs. Redway his teacher in Runaway Bay. On his first attempt at College he was not successful as 70 persons had applied and the College would only accommodate 50.   Refusing to accept failure as his lot in life, he enrolled for a few months at Buxton High School while further preparing himself as a pre-trained teacher.   In 1950, now aged 25, he was accepted at the College and was allowed to complete the three year course in only two years because of his previous experiences as a pre trained teacher.

 

 Again Baron had to use material from some of his customers to make shoes for his brother from the country who had now gone to school in town and upon his graduation; material bought for a girl friend’s dress was used to make a suit for the graduation of the first Henlin to receive professional training.

 

 

Professional Career

 

In 1952 he began his life long career as a teacher. The Point Hill Baptist School in St. Catherine was his first place of employment and while here, he met one Eunice Taylor, a young feisty Bethlehem graduate who taught at the Point Hill Anglican School.  Only recently, he told a gathering of us that he can’t remember why, but he was very often visiting the Anglican school as also the home where this young teacher lived.   By 1954 she would join him not only as wife, but also as member of the staff of all the schools that he would soon serve as Principal and that was to begin the long and lasting relationship that would last for the next fifty years.

 

After spending a mere two years in Point Hill, he went to assume his first assignment as School Principal at the Waltham Abbey School in St. Ann, the parish of his birth.   Because there was no vacancy here for his newly wed wife, he soon left this assignment and became Principal of the Philadelphia School in St. Ann, where his wife joined him on the staff.   From Philadelphia to Clonmel, then on to Oracabessa and finally to Ocho Rios, they both taught together until he retired from the profession in 1994?    .

 

By 1971   while serving as Principal of the Oracabessa All Age School, Headley was seconded by the Ministry of Education to its In-Service Programme of supervising interns from the Teachers Colleges.  This was where we began to see him unfold, as he began to work with young adults at the outset of their careers.    So many have credited him with being their mentors and guides at this time and he managed to create and maintain long lasting relationships with hundreds of teachers during this time. Soon he was to work with the newly created National Youth Service and here again proved to be a sound guide for many young people in this and neighboring parishes as they prepared themselves for the world of work.  When the programme of internship ended within the Teachers Colleges, our father was invited to work at the Mico College but declined because of family considerations and his fear of residing in Kingston, a fear approximate only to his child-like fear of ghosts.

 

Soon he was to return to his first love, that of being in the classroom.   In 1977 he was appointed Principal of the Ocho Rios Primary School to succeed the legendary A.G.R. Byfield and already, we have heard something of the service he offered there. Upon his retirement, our highly, publicly, reserved father, entered the life of the Insurance Industry and worked as a Sales Agent with Crown Eagle Insurance Company.

 

Headley and the community

 

Consistent with the tradition and vision  of the Mico College to train young men to be Principals of Schools and also to play leading role sin community development, Headley became extremely involved in the church and communities in which he lived and served. The 4H Movement in Clonmel, the St. Ann’s Bay singers in St. Ann, Gleaner Correspondent in Oracabessa, Leading the Programme of public education for the current change form English pounds, shillings and pence to dollars and cents in St. Mary, working with the various census taking exercises as supervisor, working as an election training supervisor and then as Justice of the Peace his was a presence not normally heard but by the quality of his commitment to his nation he served well beyond the call of duty.  Already we have heard much of this and thus I dare not repeat.

 

Headley as family man

 

But perhaps his greatest contribution has been his role as father

and husband in the home.  We knew him as a small farmer tenderly raising chickens (the common breed) growing cho chos sugar cane, oranges, naseberries, mangoes, while seeing about the large number of pimento trees in his home town Mt. Olivet.  Many are the stories that we have about those trips to St. Ann to pick pimento and then the duties we all had to ensure the berries were dried in Oracabessa for sale.   But while not all of his children learnt the intricacies of farming and industry from him, we learnt from observation, many lessons about kindness a sacrifice and sharing.   So often our father having six children, would carefully cut one mango into six equal portions while ensuring that at each feeding, a different child had the joy of receiving the mango seed. Even after many of us had grown to be teenagers, our father would be peeling sugar-cane and oranges for us ensuring again that each child received their fair portion.  We remember him cleaning all shoes on a Saturday evening for church on Sunday and cleaning them diligently for us all.

 

We remember him patrolling our bedrooms at nights because he had heard a child cough or sneeze or because it had stared to rain. His was the one responsible for ensuring that the house was locked up at nights and that those who had medication to take had it. And when our mother was so often at church in the nights, it was our father who ensured homework was done and that everyone was in bed when we should.  

 

His Brother Baron remembers that upon his return from England, Headley gave him a gift of a banana sucker that he planted at his home and to his great delight but also with some consternation; a naseberry tree grew from that sucker.   To this day he remains amazed at this agricultural miracle.

 

But we also remember his discipline even now with fear and trembling.  He could not tolerate laziness, indiscipline, rudeness and in his words, slackness.   While our friends were welcomed to visit, they all had strict departure times set and poor Chester did suffer the indignity of our father demanding that his friends go home now!  He was meticulous in filing all our report cards from high school and would lecture us about our performance in school and some of us were sometimes painfully aware of his grief on some occasions.   He was not a man for us to try playing tricks with, because we all knew our father was a serious man and a man who would get seriously miserable when things did not go well.

 

However there is something that I am sure he knows nothing about to this day.   When he was Principal of the school in Oracabessa, he would often cease the marbles of boys caught playing outside when school was in session.   But these boys were boys who knew me and would often threaten me if I did not retrieve their marbles. So often under threat, mine was the task of sneaking into my father’s desk drawer either at home or at school, with the greatest care, to retrieve those marbles.   It was double jeopardy - if I was caught I would have it and if I failed to deliver then that would be it.

 

We remember our father as a kind person always giving to any visitor in the home a fruit or some other produce from his farm. Many little children came to love him because of his gentleness with young kids; they simply adored him because he had this way of sitting with a child on his lap, simply playing.   They came to know him as daddy even to this day.   Those who know our family well will know that nothing made him more satisfied than to have all his children at home just being around him.

 

We remember our father as a good husband who allowed his wife to have her way even amidst his howls of protest.   She ruled the home or so she often thought, until Daddy spoke.  We watched as he dutifully took her wherever she wanted, if even grumbling about her love of the road.   He waited on her though still grumbling about "oono mother"  who love to chat, he threaten to drive off and leave her when church was over and she was busy chatting around and but he never did or perhaps he never dared. Together they were a team dedicated to raising the family and when he said no and she said yes, she would simply rub his head and have her own way.

 

We remember our father as a highly emotional person who cried at the birth of his children at their graduations, at their weddings and whenever he heard their names on the media.   He cried at his wedding anniversary and we believe that even today he is crying. Indeed as we gathered at his bedside and saw the lifeless body we looked and surely there in his eye was a tear.   Such was the man not given to much speech and expression but highly emotional when it had to do with his family whom he dearly loved.

And yet with all this he could be a harsh man, a man who sometimes forgot the basics of diplomacy, who could be demanding and bossy to the extent that we all feared for him when he entered into the Insurance Industry.  To us his family, we just could not visualize him graciously inviting persons to purchase insurance.   How would he manage?  Well we soon understood and the message came to all of us the children, conveyed by our mother, “all children must purchase a policy and those with children must purchase policies for all their children” and so we all had to do, but even then we discovered that he too would even pay the premiums for those unable to do so at the time.  Such was the man.

 

Finally, we remember our father as a church man and a Christian. We recall the times of devotions in the home, his love of hymns, his dissatisfaction with worship that was sloppily and thoughtlessly prepared and conducted.   We often told him about his sermons and criticized him about the tone and nature of the welcome he gave at church, with some of my sisters suggesting that he give it up.   But for him church was a must and those of his children who, in the their early adulthood years, who felt that a late night on the town on a Saturday night would inspire an apology for absence from church the next morning, would soon learn that they had better “faget it”.

 

Conclusion

 

We give thanks today for his life, a gift from God to so many of us. We give thanks for so many who becoming his friends, learnt to understand him, to be patient with him and to love him.  We give thanks for his church family of some 41 years who he loved so very passionately.  We thanks Sharon Laing, our next door neighbor and sister and friend for all these years who took on the job of daily nurse for these many years, lovingly administering his insulin.   He loved Sharon as a daughter and she did for us what we could not do because of distance and did it with love. We thank Mr. Walker who came into our family at just the right time, serving as their driver when our father’s eyesight dimmed but more than that, but as friend and brother.   We give thanks for Andrea Philips and Mark Irons who became his daughter and his son in the latter days of his life and the Chungs in Port Maria and they know the roles that they have played.

 

We give God thanks that from humble beginnings the son of peasant farmers, the last one born in the midst of death He, God gave him life and loved him that he could bring us life and love us. We have been privileged to have had him and to have loved him.     Now we say with confidence that the Lord has given, the Lord has taken, blessed be the name of the Lord.