Coast Guard’s first recruits a band of brothers

Fifty years ago the Barbados Coast Guard was formed with several men selected after “careful scrutiny”.

Those men went on to form a bond that has lasted through the years and yesterday they returned to the area where it all started – Oistins, Christ Church.

The gathering took place at Dora’s stall at Bay Gardens, in Oistins. Seventy-seven-year-old Eudora “Dora” Rice fed the men back in those early days and said they were the nicest, most giving bunch she had ever come across.

Richard Selman, the spokesman for the group, recalled them being picked because they could handle the sea and any disaster.

Most of them, he recalled, were involved in the recovery of bodies and debris during the terrorist attack that brought down the Cubana Airline Flight 455 in 1976 and killed 73.

The other special memory was being on the George Fergusson and monitoring the passage of a Russia warship to the south of Barbados after it departed Cuba.

Bonded by those and other memories, the men remained in touch and last year formed a WhatsApp group that reunited them and led to yesterday’s event, the second outing since in a matter of months.

They are set to mark the golden anniversary with a more formal event.

Here, the first recruits and Dora cheer as they celebrate the birthdays of Chris Craig, Ishmael Pollard, James Harding, Stanfield Linton and Tyrone Clarke. (AC)

(Picture by Jameel Springer.)