Grantley Herbert Adams was born at Colliston, Government Hill, St. Michael on April 28, 1898. He was the third child of seven born to Fitzherbert Adams and the former Rosa Frances Turney. Grantley was educated at St. Giles and at Harrison College in Barbados. In 1918 he won the Barbados Scholarship and departed the following year for his undergraduate studies at Oxford University. He was married to Grace Thorne in 1929 at St. John's Church. Their only child, Tom, himself won the Barbados Scholarship, attended Oxford and became a lawyer. Tom Adams later became the second Prime Minister of Barbados.
Grantley Adams was a barrister-at-law of Gray's Inn and one of Her Majesty's Counsel. He was knighted by the Queen in 1957. He became the first Premier of Barbados and had a term in office which lasted from 1954 to 1958.He then served as the Prime Minister of the West Indies Federation from 1958 to 1962.
It was the established practice for the Attorney General to be the Leader of Government Business in the House of Assembly. When Grantley Adams became the Leader of the House, he did so, not by virtue of any such office but by virtue of his demonstrated electoral support. Though he was not the titular leader of the Barbados Labour Party when it was formed in March 1938, he was always regarded as the real leader of the Party by the people of Barbados. However, by the end of the year he had become the Party's titular leader.
Grantley Adams was the first President of the Barbados Workers' Union when it was formally created in October 1941. More importantly, its formal creation by the Barbados Labour Party, was the inescapable result of the philosophy that identified the political entitlement of the mass of the people and the legitimacy of economic advancement for the workers as two parts of an indivisible whole. That was the philosophy of Sir Grantley and the Party he led. It explains why, in the face of an oppressive and entrenched oligarchy, the fight of the Party and that of the Union were the same and why therefore the Party and Union had to work together.
For many years, more particularly between 1945 and 1955, he was the British Caribbean's dominant political personality and it was his influence that gave new dynamism to regional collaboration in trade union matters. He was President of the Caribbean Labour Congress and it was through this body that he argued and won support for Federation. He was the only Prime Minister of the Federal West Indies. Federation, when it came, was a colonial form of Government with strong powers reserved to the Governor General and to the British Government. It was not the Federation with full dominion status, an independent Federation within the Commonwealth, that Sir Grantley had spent so many years trying to achieve. When the Federal Government of the West Indies was instituted in 1958, Sir Grantley's pre-eminent role as Premier of Barbados came to an end. When the Federation was dissolved in 1962, he returned to the electoral politics of Barbados. However, he was now the leader of the Opposition, the first leader of the Opposition in an independent Barbados. He served from 1966 until the time he retired in 1970. Sir Grantley Adams died the following year.