He was one of independent Jamaica's founding fathers - an outstanding man who played an important part in the framing of the nation's Constitution. But underneath the veil of greatness and statesmanship, National Hero Norman Washington Manley was really just an ordinary man.

Well, at least he was to his granddaughter, Rachel Manley, who shared her thoughts on growing up in the household of the People's National Party (PNP) stalwart with students at the University of the West Indies law school at the 2009 Norman Manley Lecture Monday night.

Her presentation made her grandfather seem, in some ways, a little less than ordinary at times, remembering him as merely a hypochondriac who one day mistakenly drank a sample of urine from his doctor's office to cure his perceived indigestion.

Sampling 'medication'

"He was a man of crazies," Rachel recounted with humour. "He used to go to Ludlow's office (his doctor) and just take [medication] because he thought that he might have high blood pressure and then he would take a lot of aspirin because he might get a headache. He was quite a hypochondriac.

"One day, he was looking for something for his indigestion and when he got back home, he tried the thing. He said it really wasn't working, it was the most horrible medicine," she recounted.

"Ludlow calls and my grandmother answers and she says: 'Norman isn't feeling well, he has this indigestion and he got this medicine from you.' He (Ludlow) responds that: 'He never got any medicine from me'.

"My grandmother responds, 'Yes, he went down there and you weren't there but he took the medicine. Ludlow responds: 'He never took the medicine, he took Mrs Simpson's urine sample."

That revelation elicited an eruption of laughter from the audience of law students at Monday night's lecture.

Passion for deep-fat fryers

NORMAN Manley

The stories did not end there. The audience also learnt that Norman Manley had a passion not only for politics and the trade union movement but also, strangely, deep-fat fryers.

"He was a man of extremes and I can remember when he came back from some trip to New York where he had gone to see the Jamaica Progressive League and he was very excited - and it never seemed to me he was excited about the Progressive League - because he had bought a deep-fat fryer," Rachel said.

Everything, she remembers, went into the fryer, which he filled with coconut oil - even eggs for boiling. Naturally, Manley's waistline grew more rotund as a result of this high-cholesterol diet.

He eventually suffered a severe heart attack which forced him to switch to a fat-free diet. But that would only lead to the beginning of a different obsession with a new kind of pot.

"My father (Michael Manley) went off this time to somewhere in the United States with the mine workers ... and he came back with this latest thing - it was Teflon," Rachel recalled.

Like the deep-fat fryer, it became the chief cooking utensil. From Sunday beef to coffee - everything and anything was cooked in the single Teflon pot and it never stopped until he developed a bad allergic reaction to the synthetic resin.

"That's the child in me that just remembers him and loves him and misses him," Rachel said as the audience laughed.

"I hope I'm not doing any damage to your national hero," she said facetiously.