By Sheila Taylor. Article, 29 May 2026.
‘Listening to Joyce proved a fascinating experience.’
Listening to Joyce Trotman, our Friend from Croydon, has always been a fascinating experience. Born in 1927, she remembers every detail of her life and education in British Guiana. She can still sing the songs they were taught at school as ‘children of the empire’, and recounts how proud they felt to be British as they sang: ‘God bless the flag that so proudly waves over us / God bless the Empire, God save the King.’
But whenever I have asked Joyce about politics, she has always said, ‘Oh, you must ask my friend Eric about that. He was the political one.’ So I visited Eric Huntley before he died last year, at his home in Ealing. I heard him recount personal stories of the history which I had only read about in books.
As a young man Eric had become an activist and radical trade unionist. He campaigned for independence from British colonialism, co-founded the People’s Progressive Party, and spent a year in prison before fleeing to London in 1957 to avoid political repression at home.
One particularly memorable incident Eric told me about occurred when he was accompanying the Venn Commission, sent by Britain in 1948 to investigate the causes of worker unrest on the sugar plantations. Five workers had been killed during protests for better working conditions, and John Archibald Venn of Cambridge University headed a two-person enquiry, together with the Quaker landscape architect, Richard Sudell. Eric took them to visit a sugar estate, where they admired the lovely buildings in the grounds before discovering that these were for the animals and far superior to the workers’ accommodation!
In London, Eric and his wife Jessica quickly became leading figures in the African-Caribbean community, and in the struggle for racial and social justice. They set up a publishing house, opened a progressive bookshop, and played a key role in grassroots activism, including in the Black Parents Movement. Their legacy is lovingly preserved at the London Metropolitan Archives, and in a striking photo montage commissioned in 2022 at the National Portrait Gallery (see https://tinyurl.com/erichuntley and above).
When Joyce settled in England in the 1970s, she became firm friends with the Huntleys, who in 2006 published her academic study The Proverbs of Guyana Explained. They would often meet up at Guyanese gatherings in London, and, after Jessica died in 2013, Joyce continued to keep in touch with Eric by regular phone calls. In 2017, as a gift for her ninetieth birthday, he published her booklet on a Quaker abolitionist – Thomas Clarkson: My saint – dedicating it to her with love and appreciation, and describing her as ‘a repository of our culture and history which does not dim with age’.
I can personally testify that neither Joyce nor Eric dimmed with age! Last year I saw them both enjoying an event in celebration of the actress Carmen Munroe being made a dame, and some weeks later Eric attended Croydon Meeting House for the launch of Joyce’s autobiography (see review, 27 November 2025). But sadly in January he died, and in February the Guyanese diaspora turned out in their hundreds to mourn his passing. At the funeral Joyce read out a tribute that moved people to laughter, applause and tears, and prompted a big hug from Valerie Amos as they left the crematorium together.
‘I can personally testify that neither Joyce nor Eric dimmed with age!’
So how did Joyce describe Eric? With references to literature, patriotism, Quakerism and the Bible, all combining into one inspirational vision. First she quoted the US poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: ‘Lives of great men all remind us / We can make our lives sublime / And departing leave behind us / Footprints on the sands of time.’ It illustrated how Eric, by tackling social and political injustice, had left his mark on the lives of those he touched.
Joyce also referred to the famous words which Quaker George Fox wrote to his followers from prison in 1656: ‘Be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come, that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them; then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one.’ She said, ‘Eric has left us a legacy and become an example and a pattern of what service to his community should be.’ She had once listened to a Friend’s ministry in Meeting, saying, ‘If you acknowledge that of God in everyone, and act accordingly, nobody gets hurt.’ And, said Joyce, ‘I would add, everyone is blessed.’
The older generation at the funeral smiled in quiet recognition and agreement as Joyce recalled how they were all ‘conned’ into loyalty to the British empire, and how the Song of Guyana’s Children, by William Hawley Bryant (1931) made them realise that there could be an alternative: ‘Onward, upward, may we ever go / Day by day in strength and beauty grow / Till at length we each of us may show / What Guyana’s sons and daughters can be.’
When Joyce listed ‘that great cloud of Guyanese witnesses’ that Eric had gone to join, the famous names she read out were familiar to all the mourners at the funeral: Cheddi Jagan, Forbes Burnham, Martin Carter, Mollie Hunte, Thelma Lewis, Grafton Shepherd, Wilson Harris, Shridath Ramphal and Herman Ousley.
In closing, she echoed the words of Paul remembering David (Acts 13:36), and said that Eric, too, ‘after he had served his generation by the will of God, fell asleep’. And her tribute concluded, ‘As I give thanks for the example of your life and the way in which you enriched our lives, I say, “Goodnight, sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. Eric, my comrade, my neighbour, my friend, my brother, Rest in Peace”.’
Thus, once again, listening to Joyce proved a fascinating experience. Her funeral oration was characterised by that possibly unique combination of British colonial education and Quaker beliefs. Such a delight to celebrate Eric’s life with her and so many of their loving compatriots!
Sheila Taylor, 29 May 2026.
Quaker Socialist Society 