Background
Frank Leslie Walcott was born on 16 September 1916 in Barbados.
Frank Leslie Walcott was born on 16 September 1916 in Barbados.
He received his formal education at Wesley Hall Boys School.
He became an early associate of Sir Grantley Herbert Adams and Hugh Springer in the Barbados Labour Party (BLP) and Barbados Workers Union (BWU), formed in 1938. He was first elected in 1945 as a BLP member of the House of Assembly, a seat he would hold for most of the next three decades. In the 1970s he would serve in the appointed upper house, the Senate.
In 1948 Walcott served as a member of the government’s Executive Committee, representing the BLP. Shortly afterward, following a major BLP electoral victory, a serious split developed between Walcott and Grantley Adams. The governor asked Adams to assume leadership ot the new semiministerial government. Agreeing to do so, he resigned his position as secretary general of the BWU. sensing a possible conflict-of-interest arising from holding both posts. Walcott succeeded Adams in his BWU post, and Adams expected that he would thereupon resign from the cabinet. When Walcott refused, Adams finally forced him out.
Subsequently, when a revolt within the BLP in 1955 produced the Democratic Labour Party (DLP), Walcott led the BWU into alignment with the DLP. The support of the Barbados Workers Union was a major element in the victory of the DLP at the end of 1961 and its maintenance in power for 15 years. Walcott served in the cabinet of Prime Minister Errol Walton Barrow tor some years.
Walcott remained BWU secretary general for nearly 40 years. He led in the establishment of collective bargaining as the normal pattern of labor relations in the island and in the achievement of one of the highest levels of living of any workers in the Caribbean area. He also remained one of the most powerful figures in national politics.