An Obituary in respect of the life of the Nor’wester’s Jim Graves

The late Jim Graves, editor
of the Nor’wester, pictured
in 1974

by David Graves

Friday,  January 6, 2006

Sadly we have to report that James Graves, a good friend of the Cayman Islands, has died suddenly at his home in West Wales in the UK where he retired in 1989. Jim was editor of the Nor’wester, the Cayman Islands’ groundbreaking news and features magazine, from 1972 until 1980. 

Born in 1922, James Frederick John Graves was a man of high standards – he set high standards in his own journalism and he set high standards for others. He and his wife Joan lived at Coral Gables at Northwest Point in the District of West Bay and during two extended periods of residency on Grand Cayman they enjoyed full and active business careers and a busy social life.

Jim was encouraged by a teacher at Huntingdon Grammar School to apply to the local paper and here he discovered a talent and an enthusiasm for creating concise prose. His early years as a cub reporter on the tiny Huntingdon Post were spent in the wide-open spaces of the Fen country of Eastern England, where he often cycled many miles on the office bicycle to cover parish meetings in far-flung settlements. 

And like many, before and since, he learned his craft at the knee of experienced regional journalists who scribbled their shorthand into bulging notebooks in court and at council meetings throughout the region.

These ‘elders and betters’ taught him that getting the facts straight always took precedence over a good angle or an imagined ‘scoop’. Although Jim’s family had moved to the Fenlands from Beverley in Yorkshire when he was an infant, at times during his career his characteristically blunt Yorkshire manner often got him into trouble.

In 1942 he left journalism temporarily to join the RAF and was assigned to basic flight training and then sent overseas under the Tower Scheme to train as aircrew for Coastal Command. He spent time in Canada and later at the US Navy facility at Pensacola, Florida where he gained certification on Catalina flying boats. 

Returning to the UK, he served during the final years of the war with 201 Squadron of RAF’s Coastal Command on the Sunderland flying boats which provided cover for transatlantic convoys from their base at Pembroke Dock in West Wales. Happily his retirement home directly overlooked Milford Haven where he had piloted these huge flying boats that took off and landed on this sheltered stretch of water. 

During his service career at Pembroke Dock he met a local girl, Joan Griffiths, who later became his wife.

After the war, Jim rejoined the East Midlands Allied Press group of newspapers where he worked his way up the ranks to become the editor of one of the region’s most respected weeklies, the Peterborough Citizen and Advertiser. Editorial differences with the firm’s owners and interference from what he termed ‘the money men’ soon led him to seek new horizons. 

In 1965 he took Joan and their two young children to Nassau in the Bahamas to work with Etienne Dupuch on the Nassau Daily Tribune where he later became editor.

He arrived in the Cayman Islands in 1972 to join Desmond Seales’ fledgling news magazine the Nor’wester and set about the task of recruiting writers here in the Islands and maintaining links with other journalists in this region, in the US and Europe. 

He encouraged a number of local writers in their early careers and enjoyed warm friendships with a wide variety of regular contributors, maintaining contact with many of these local people until his death.

Jim left Cayman briefly in the early 1980s when he was involved in the successful launch of the first pan-Caribbean news and feature magazine Caribbean Life & Times – another publication born out of Desmond Seales’ Diversified Services Group. 

When he returned to Cayman in 1985 it was as Chief Information Officer of Government Information Services and it was in this role that Jim was able to draw on his many years experience of the ever-changing Cayman media scene. He saw his role here as the friendly but firm voice of Government in the presentation of news and current affairs for a rapidly expanding local and international audience.

Jim is survived by his wife Joan who as we went to press was being comforted in her loss by their daughter Jane Beales and son David.

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