William Kelly Smith

William Kelly Smith arrived in Jamaica in the early 1820s as a very young child; he may have been one of those liberated from slave-trading ships by British Navy. From as early as 1823 he was attending the Sunday School of the Church of Scotland in Kingston. With little opportunity for education, he made the best use of his own gifts to become a teacher and a catechist, in which capacities he served for many years.

In early life he was progressive in his political opinions, and was connected with the Watchman newspaper, from 1859 to 1865. In 1865 he was a spokesman for the opinions of the Black population in Kingston. Along with Samuel Clarke, Thomas Harry and others he spoke at a big political meeting in May 1865, and later in the year, after the events in Morant Bay, he was arrested with several others who were considered supporters of the ‘rebels’. They were taken to Morant Bay and held there, being witnesses to the floggings and hangings that were carried out. Although he was later released, his experiences in 1865 had a lasting effect on him, including prolonged illness and greatly straightened circumstances. His family, consisting of his mother, wife, three daughters and a son also suffered greatly from his misfortunes. In 1871 friends helped him to go to London to try to get compensation from the Government and also to seek a government post supervising the establishment of schools, especially in St Thomas. These efforts produced no results, and it is not clear how he and his family survived.

He remained something of a public figure for the remaining three decades of his life. He spoke for Black Jamaicans before the Royal Commission in 1882, and stood for the Kingston seat in the first elections under the new constitution in 1884. But he had no success with that attempt, or his later attempts to be elected to the Kingston City Council. Although Robert Love, in his obituary in the Jamaica Advocate in 1902, claimed that Smith’s intellect was ‘clear and strong to the last’, others clearly felt that his mind had been affected by his sufferings in 1865, and did not take him very seriously. Nonetheless he was a familiar figure seen at many public occasions, especially of a political nature: a living reminder to a later generation of the suffering of 1865.