I am highly honoured by the invitation extended to me by the leader of the Progressive Group Chief Femi Akinboye (and the Grand Patron of the group, Prince Ademola Dada) to be the Father of the Day on the auspicious occasion of the Grand Hosting of your Newly Promoted Members in recognition of their sterling qualities and elevation in their respective professional careers.
With all sense of humility, I must confess that the Island Club which was founded in 1943 and I are about the same age. What I am however obliged to highlight is that the Island Club right from inception was a progressive club.
If anyone is in doubt about the club’s credentials in this regard, a quick reference to what has become known as the Bristol Hotel Affair will suffice.
In 1948, Mr. Ivor Cummings, a distinguished African-Caribbean national and a top official of the Colonial Office in London was scheduled to pay an official visit to Nigeria. Naturally, his first port of call was Lagos, then our capital. The accommodation was reserved for him at the Bristol Hotel, Martin Street, Lagos, then owned and managed by expatriates.
Apparently, the hotel authorities thought, from the name Cummings, that he was a white Anglo-Saxon. But they were shocked when he presented himself at the reception to find that he was black. He was refused a room at the hotel on that ground.
One witness to the incident was a Warri-based Sierra Leonean legal luminary called T. E. Nelson-Williams. He deeply resented the action of the hotel management but was helpless in the circumstances.
It was a hot and humid afternoon and Nelson-Williams left for the Grand Hotel (now defunct), on Broad Street by Odunlami Street, Lagos, to rendezvous with friends for an afternoon drink. There, he met Frank Olugbake, the trade unionist, and others and narrated to them the Bristol Hotel incident.
They later trooped to the Island Club where they met me and my friends, also having a drink and cooling off in the gentle breeze from the lagoon. The Onikan Stadium was not walled round then. Nelson-Williams told us what had happened, and we were dumb-founded, angry, outraged, furious, and bitter.
One of my friends at the Island Club was OladipoOdunsi, a distinguished and enterprising Lagos lawyer. He stood up and exclaimed, “Our Nigeria of 1948, we cannot have this, let’s go and die.” I jumped up and shouted: “Die? No! Let’s go and teach them a harsh lesson.” Pa Alfred Rewane
The atmosphere of the club was now charged, and under Odunsi’s leadership, the late Milton Macaulay, the late Akiniran Olunloyo, Prince Adeleke Adedoyin, the late Garnet Williams and others and I marched through the Onikan Stadium, to the Marina.
Our elder friends, the late JK Randle and the late Bolaji Finnih, wanted to join us but we asked them to go and get hold of two lawyers, the late Oladipo Moore and the late Alaba Akerele, and our other colleagues to go to Tinubu Police Station (now defunct) on Customs Street, which is now part of the land on which the Central Bank of Nigeria headquarters is located (then), to wait for us because we were sure that we would be arrested and brought there if we carried out our plan “to die or teach them a lesson.”
At the Onikan Stadium point on Marina, we assembled all sorts of people known compendiously as Boma Boys, who collected their clubs and sticks and horsewhips (koboko) and followed us without hesitation, although they did not know our plan or where we were headed to.
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We then launched an assault on Bristol Hotel. By the time we finished, the reception, bar, and restaurant were sacked and the white men in the hotel premises and its vicinity had a sorry tale to tell. The whole place was wrecked and left in shambles.
Meanwhile, some police officers arrived on the scene but, surprisingly, did not arrest any of us. The job completed, we trooped back to the Island Club, to a rousing reception and warm congratulatory embrace from members.
But the then chairman of the club, late Mr. Omololu, was deeply concerned about our action, realizing that the then British Governor of Nigeria, Sir Arthur Richards, was himself the grand patron of the club. Mr. Omololu was sure that sooner or later we would be rounded up. We had only a pyrrhic victory and the inaction on the part of the colonial government was no more than the calm before the storm. However, we waited all day but there were no arrests.
Meanwhile, Mr. Omololu contacted our patron, the late Sir Adeyemo Alakija, to intervene with the authorities to pre-empt our arrest. Subsequently, Sir Adeyemo made an appointment to meet with Sir Arthur in his capacity as grand patron of our club and it was suggested that we who led and participated in the sacking of Bristol Hotel should accompany him. We reluctantly agreed.
A day or so before we were to meet with Sir Arthur, the Governor made a statement to the nation in which he referred publicly for the first time to the Bristol Hotel incident. His Excellency declared that some seventy years previously, there might have been the justification for whites and blacks to live apart, for the reason, if none other, that there were some diseases to which whites were immune but which killed blacks, and vice versa.
But for well over seventy years there had existed a medical department in Nigeria maintained at public expenses to find a solution to the problem and if no solution was found, then there was left only one of two choices, is either to continue to live apart and abolish the medical department or to live together and continue to maintain the department.
Sir Arthur then declared: “I have chosen the latter. With effect from today, there will be no more European hospital, club or reservation in Nigeria.”
Excerpts of an address delivered at the Island Club on 19th December 2021
