By Claudia Gardner:
Many Hanoverians are not aware of the reason the Arthur Wint Basic School on Millers Drive in Lucea, Hanover was so named.
Many Jamaicans are not aware either, that Jamaica’s first Olympic gold medalist the late Dr. Arthur Wint O.J., the man who brought glory to Jamaica, and made the world stop to pay attention to this island nation, spent his happiest post-athletics retirement years in Lucea as a medical officer. Wint, is the Great Alpha of Jamaican track.
The lanky Wint, at six feet and five inches, was just an inch taller than sprint legend Usain Bolt. At the London Olympics in 1948, where he was captain of the team, he created history for the land of sprint legends, when he blazed to a world record of 46.2 seconds to take home the gold medal ahead of his team-mate Herb McKenley. He later went on to take the silver medal in the 800 metres.
A national holiday was celebrated in Jamaica as a consequence of Dr. Wint’s historic feat which jump-started Jamaica’s indelible sprinting legacy.
Four years later he also ran the lead leg on Jamaica’s legendary 4X400 metres Olympic team, which took home gold at the 1952 Games in Helsinki. Wint, Les Laing, George Rhoden and McKenley formed Jamaica’s history-making quartet that won the gold medal in the 4x400m relay in dramatic fashion at the 1952 Games in Helsinki, Finland, setting a world record of 3:04.04.
Wint ran his final race at the Wembley Stadium in London in 1953. After his retirement from athletics, he studied medicine in Britain.
Upon returning to Jamaica, he lived in Kingston. However, his happiest times came when he went to live in Lucea, Hanover where he served as Senior Medical Officer at the Noel Holmes Hospital, according to his daughter Colleen Wint-Bond. For many years, was the only doctor in the entire the parish, serving Lucea and deep-rural clinics between 1963 and 1973.
Nevertheless, Wint was not “foppish” fellow. Despite his “very respected position”, and his legendary status as a track hero, he would go down to the beach and play dominoes with the other men, and mix and mingle with everyone.
6 feet 5 inches tall, because of his quiet demeanour he was affectionately referred to as the “Gentle Giant”
“He would go through the formalities and the motions but the occasions he enjoyed the most were just the community ones with regular folks,” Colleen explained to the Jamaica Observer in a 2011 article.
The people of Hanover have attested to how pleasant and jovial Dr. Wint was when he served the parish. In fact, the first word uttered when asked what kind of person the Olympian was is: “nice!”
Loretta Grant a former patient of Dr. Wint said she always felt highly comfortable going to Dr. Wint for check-ups.
“Nice! Tall and slim, well tall and slim. Nice man. With the patients, he talked to you nice and things like that. It’s a long time and I don’t remember that much but him talk to you nice. Him no rough and thing like that. He was a nice doctor,” she said.
She also recounted fondly one instance when she went to him for an antenatal check-up in her third trimester of pregnancy and he made an unforgettable quip.
“It was time for me to have the baby so me go to him and ask him. Hear him to me now nuh: “when mango ripe, weh it do, nuh drop?” she said laughing at the memory.
George Leon recounted that he visited Dr. Wint’s office in Lorenton avenue in Lucea on about two occasions, one of them for a dog bite.
“He was a nice man, one thing me remember seh him smoke whole heap,” Leon said.
“Him treat me good. And I can remember seh him give mi one injection,” he added.
On the Arthur Wint Centenary website, is an amusing story an occasion when, the usually jovial surgeon became annoyed at a patient.
According to the tale, Dr. Wint usually had his surgery on the ground floor of his house, but on one occasion, this particular patient decided to enter the house and go up the stairs to the doctor’s bedroom to wake him up, because “he wanted to be seen early and first”.
That patient was forced to flee as an irritated Wint who was jolted from his slumber, hurled his bedroom slippers at him and told him to “go and sit in the waiting room like other patients!”
Arthur Wint was extremely active in Hanover where he, was very involved in the social development of the parish.
The goodly doctor, who was also a founding member and first President of the Jamaica Association of Sports Medicine, helped to raise funds for a Children’s Ward at the Noel Holmes Hospital, was a founder and member of the Hanover Chamber of Commerce; founder and President of the Hanover Garden Club; founder of the Hanover Parish Choir.
He also served on school boards, on the board of the Negril Land Authority, and also as member, and later president of Hanover Charities.
Dr. Wint also raised funds for the construction of an early childhood institution operated by the Salvation Army, which was named the “Arthur Wint Basic School” in his honour.
Arthur Wint was born in Plowden, Manchester March 25, 1920, and was the second of five children born to Presbyterian minister Reverend John Wint and his wife Hilda. He attended Calabar High School initially, but later transferred moved to Excelsior where he excelled in sports, particularly athletics.
He established himself as a champion at age 18 at the 1938 Pan Am Games in Panama, where he won gold in the 800 metres.
He became a part of a group of the first men from the West Indies to be recruited by the British Royal Air Force (RAF) in 1942. He commenced pilot training in Canada and went on to receive his wings in 1944 and served as a Spitfire pilot in World War II. Wint left the air force in 1947 at 27 years old, after gaining a scholarship to train as a doctor at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London.
After the 1952 Olympics, he went on to complete his final year of medical school and internship at St Barts, graduating as a medical doctor in 1953. It was during this time that he competed in his last race at the Wembley Stadium. A year later he was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II.
Dr. Wint was awarded the Order of Distinction in 1973 and the order of Jamaica in 1989. After his stint in Hanover, he served as Jamaica’s High Commissioner to Britain and Ambassador to Sweden and Denmark from 1974 to 1978.
He was inducted in the Black Athlete’s Hall of Fame in the United States, the Jamaica Sports Hall of Fame in 1989 and the Central American and Caribbean Athletic Confederation Hall of Fame in 2003.
Dr. Arthur Wint, the legend, the icon, died on National Heroes Day in 1992 in Linstead, St Catherine, at the age of 72.
