Frustrated with life in colonial Jamaica, he took up an offer for a trial to play county cricket with Northampton. Arriving in Manchester in 1959, he instead chose a career that leads him to become the first black mayor of Trafford and an audience with the Queen.
“I was an angry young man,” he said. This anger was directed at the social and political conditions in pre-independence Jamaica.
“A lot of young men like me had ambitions but the opportunities were few and far between,” he said. That would change in England.
His autobiography, ‘A Bittersweet Journey’, launched Thursday at the Devonshire, in Kingston, Jamaica, tells of a journey which took him from frustrated Garveyite to Labour Party activist and first citizen of Trafford.
“He has made Jamaica proud,” Mr. Earl Jarrett, general manager of Jamaica National Building Society said at the book launch. Mr. Jarrett said the Trafford councillor had contributed intellectually and materially to Jamaica.
“Today, he is one of Greater Manchester’s most respected community figures,” Mr. Jarrett said.
A substantial portion of the book dwells on his early years in Jamaica, as he says it is important for people to understand that, “you can lift yourself up from any type of situation.”
One defining moment he discusses is being struck by lightning at age 13. Surviving that episode helped him overcome his fears.
Another defining moment came within a week of arriving in Manchester. He left Jamaica as a nationalist but realized that a different kind of politics was needed to get people from different backgrounds working together sharing in greater opportunities.
“I have seen the signs with ‘No dogs, no blacks, no Irish’, but that didn’t bother me at all,” he said. “I could deal with it. I knew who I was as a man.”
The councilor from Clifton since 1993 was never a shy man. His book points out several instances where his aggressive stance against injustice justified his childhood nickname of ‘Red Blood’.
His journey to maturity would see him examining communism, Rastafarianism, Garveyism and Christianity. Finding that they all held contradictions, he decided to take from them what he needed and discard the rest.
He says what kept him on track during his darkest moments was the fact that he had boasted to the supervisor at his last job in Jamaica that he was going to England to play cricket, get a university education and return to kick him out of his job. He could not return a failure.
The high points of his journey included being designated a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 1998 and getting his degree from Manchester Metropolitan University in 2002. He became mayor of Trafford in 2003.
Mr. Stennett also received the Governor General’s Award for Jamaicans in the Diaspora, in Kingston on Tuesday. This award was for his services to the Jamaican community.
“We have broken down a lot of barriers,” Mr. Stennett said.
The councillor said he wrote the book in order to leave a legacy for the generation to follow. “I hope people will take it up and read it and draw some type of understanding of who we are as human beings.”