Hyacinth Ione Campbell

When Hurricane Gilbert tore across Jamaica in September 1988, Hyacinth Campbell unlocked the doors of her primary school in Montego Bay at four in the morning, lit every lamp she could find and told the sixty frightened neighbors who arrived in the dark: “Come in. Nobody here is a stranger.” She fed them for nine days on whatever the cupboards held, and nobody went hungry, though the rice and peas grew noticeably thinner.

Born in Savanna-la-Mar, Westmoreland, in 1949, the sixth of nine children of a fisherman and a seamstress, Hyacinth won a scholarship to Mico Teachers' College in Kingston, graduated in 1969, and taught in rural schools in Westmoreland and St. James for thirteen years before becoming principal of a primary school in Montego Bay in 1982. She completed a degree in education at the University of the West Indies at Mona while teaching full time, a feat she described as “mostly tea and stubbornness.”

She led that school for twenty-seven years, in a building where the roof leaked and the report cards glowed. She fed lunch to children whose parents could not afford it, taught reading in the evenings, and sent so many pupils on to high school and university that people said you could not throw a stone in Montego Bay without hitting one of Miss Campbell's graduates. In 1989, answering a call she had long ignored, she began studies at the United Theological College of the West Indies, and in 1992 she was ordained a minister of the Jamaica Baptist Union, serving pulpit and classroom together until her retirement from the school.

Her sermons were famously short and her dinners famously long. She cooked Sunday rice and peas for half the congregation, kept a jar of tamarind balls in her handbag for children, and followed the West Indies cricket team through every dark decade, saying faith and cricket both required you to keep believing after the second collapse.

Rev. Campbell died peacefully at home in Montego Bay on 4 September 2025, aged seventy-six. She is survived by her daughter Marcia in Miami, her sons Leighton and Dwight, her sister Verona, nine grandchildren and thousands of former pupils who say her name when they say their prayers.