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Jan 10, 2014 News
By Sir Ronald Sanders
(The writer is a former General Manager of GBS, President of the Caribbean Broadcasting Union and Caribbean diplomat, now Senior Fellow at London University)
It was news that I was expecting any day, yet when it came it moved me profoundly. Terrence Ormond Holder with whom I started a relationship in broadcasting and communication 37 years ago has died.
As I write this remembrance in a hotel room in the ancient University City of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, I recall well the first time I met Terry Holder. It was 1966. I was an 18-year old, freshly returned from school in Britain, and Terry was an Information Officer in what was then the Government Information Services (GIS). Housed in a sprawling wooden building on Brickdam, the GIS boasted several great names in the information business in a newly-independent Guyana – Lloyd Searwar and Victor Forsythe among them. Two of the younger men in an array of first class writers and radio programme producers were Terry Holder and Wordsworth McAndrew.
I became a free-lance interviewer and broadcaster with the GIS and the person with whom I worked most closely was Terry Holder. I narrated documentary programmes that he wrote and produced, and I came to admire his artistry as a writer for radio – it is a skill very different from writing for the print media. It requires writing for the ear not the eye. Once the words are said, they cannot be re-read and the writer has only one chance to grip the listener’s attention and to hold it. Terry was a master at it.
He had a natural talent for radio writing with a fine command of English as a language, and he was a gifted producer of documentaries for radio. That was our early bond. Subsequently, I went back to Britain in 1968 along with others to train for the launch of the first television station in Guyana. It did not come to pass in the end. But, the failure to realise a television station placed a greater importance and a greater focus on radio. It was a focus for which Terry was ably suited.
By October 1968, the new Guyana Broadcasting Service (GBS) was launched in competition with what used to be its sister station, Radio Demerara. Terry was very much a part of the pioneering team at GBS that pushed the horizons of radio broadcasting far beyond the limits that, up to then, had constrained it. His was not a voice that audiences heard, but behind-the-scenes his opinions mattered and his writing skills were employed to good effect.
When I became General Manager of GBS in 1973, I appointed Terry as my new Deputy. In our brain-storming sessions on live outside broadcast coverage of major events; the themes with which “Action Line” (the first pubic call-in programme in Guyana) would deal; the sports meetings we would cover; the personalities we would enlist to give daily “viewpoints” on the issues of the day; the documentaries we would produce to give listeners in-depth information on matters that affected their lives; Terry was an integral part and influencer.
He had a wide range of interests but none more intense than cricket. It was little surprise to me that shortly after I visited him in hospital during a serious period of his illness, I found him at a cricket match at the New Providence ground. Once Terry could walk, I knew that nothing would keep him away from the pavilion of test cricket.
When I left GBS as General Manager in 1976, Terry succeeded me. I know little of his time as General Manager – my own life had taken me out of Guyana and into diplomacy and communications in a wider area than broadcasting alone.
My encounters with Terry were in his new role as Secretary-General of the Caribbean Broadcasting Union (CBU) – a region-wide entity that we had helped to establish and to develop under the earlier leadership of Hugh Cholmondeley. Terry served the CBU with distinction. During his term in office, the CBU broadened its scope, particularly in the area of training and – inevitably and to the delight of cricket fans – securing rights to Television broadcasts of international cricket in which the West Indies featured.
When I was instrumental in the privatization of the Guyana Telecommunications Corporation by the Atlantic Tele-Network group and the new Guyana Telephone and Telegraph Company (GTT) was created, I strongly recommended Terry for the post of its first Public Relations Manager. Terry wanted to return to his native Guyana for which I believe he yearned every day of his time abroad as CBU chief. He did not need much persuading to go back home.
But while his latter days were spent at GTT, which he served with the commitment and dedication that he brought to every task he took on, broadcasting was Terry’s first love. In those early days, in almost every field of endeavour in Guyana, there was an excitement and a keenness to aim for the stars not only for one’s individual accomplishment but for the advancement of the country as a whole.
In his period as an active broadcaster and broadcast manager, Terry contributed high standards. And that is how he should be remembered.
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