Background
Tom Adams was born on 24 September, 1931 in Barbados. The son of a famous Central American politician Grantley Herbert Adams.
government official politician
Tom Adams was born on 24 September, 1931 in Barbados. The son of a famous Central American politician Grantley Herbert Adams.
Following in the footsteps of his famous father, Sir Grantley Herbert Adams, he won the Barbados Island Scholarship in 1950 and went to Oxford University to study political philosophy and economics.
He became a practicing barrister. In1957 he joined the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) where he remained until 1962. He was also politically active in the British Labor Party. In 1957 Tom Adams also represented his father’s Barbados Labour Party at a conference in London.
Adams returned home in January 1963, was soon admitted to the local bar, and immediately launched his political career. His main task was to assist in the reorganization of the BLP which, just two years earlier, had suffered its first electoral defeat. In 1966 he was elected to the Barbadian Parliament for the first time, and with his father and other elected BLP representatives he made the party a formidable opposition.
When Sir Grantley Adams resigned in 1970, Tom Adams continued active in the party under its new chairman, Harold Bernard St. John. In 1971 the party suffered its most severe setback at the polls winning only 6 seats against the 18 constituencies of the ruling Democratic Labour Party (DLP). Among the defeated BLP candidates was party leader St. John. The party then elected Tom Adams as leader of the parliamentary opposition. On January 21, 1973, he was also elected chairman of the party.
Under Adams’ leadership, the BLP won a dramatic electoral victory in 1976, and he became prime minister. He assumed the portfolio of minister of finance and, in 1977, was chosen to be the spokesperson for the Commonwealth at the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Tom Adams died unexpectedly on March 11, 1985.
He was firmly committed to a moderate economic policy and to a pro-Western, particularly pro-U.S., foreign policy.
The advent of a revolution in neighboring Grenada in 1979 was a major concern for Barbados. Tom Adams was the principal politician in the Caribbean to criticize the coup and the failure of its leaders to schedule elections. Yet it was also Adams who would tell President Ronald Reagan at the March 1983 mini-summit in Barbados that he perceived no significant security threat from the Maurice Rupert Bishop regime and who rejected the Reagan administration’s initial intrusions into Grenadian internal affairs. After the murder of Maurice Bishop and other Grenadians by the Coard-Austin segment in November 1983, however, Adams gave full support to the U.S.-led intervention into Grenada and supplied Barbadian troops as well as the use of the Sir Grantley Adams Airport.
Tom Adams’ administration modernized the island’s archaic legal code and carried out the modernization of the Barbadian physical inlrastructure. In 1984 the economy registered a modest 3 percent economic growth, boosting Barbados to third position in all of Latin American in per capita gross domestic product.
Led the Barbados Labor Party (BLP) back to power after 15 years in opposition.
