On 24 July Gilly and I went to Buckingham Palace for an audience with the Queen, and on the next day we flew to Singapore and on to Australia to stay with Robbie and Jenny. Back in England we had exactly one week to move out of our London house which we had decided to sell, do our final packing and leave for Bermuda, which for the next few years was to be our home.
I was to be sworn in on the morning after our arrival, so had to have with me in the plane both my uniform and my ceremonial sword. The carrying of swords on planes was, however, strictly forbidden, so arrangements had to be made for me to hand over the sword to the captain of the aircraft for safe keeping during the journey. Another problem was our dog Basil: somehow or other it was arranged that at Gatwick he could have a bit of exercise on the tarmac between two parked planes before he was put back in his cage and handed over to the chief steward on the aircraft bound for Bermuda.
Arriving at Bermuda, the plane landed on the American base which, along with other land on the Island, had in 1940 been leased to America but was available for use by civilian aircraft. Then, after being greeted by the Premier and members of his Cabinet, the Chief Justice, the Anglican and Roman Catholic bishops and sundry other dignitaries, we set out for Government House. Across the causeway which links the base and St George’s to the main island there was a little knot of people holding a banner calling for independence. The children in the group had not been properly trained in the technique of protest and waved merrily. On we went for a few more miles and up the drive to Government House – a mansion in the Italianate style built of Normandy stone in the last decade of the nineteenth century. According to Jan Morris, author of three volumes describing the rise and decline of the British Empire, the explanation for there being such a magnificent Governor’s residence in such a tiny place lies in a foreign office memorandum of the 1890s which reads: ‘The keeping up of an outward appearance of power will in many instances save the necessity of resort to the actual exercise of it.’ And the outward appearance of power certainly humbled us as we went up the drive and onto the forecourt, past the four cannons lined up opposite the front door. We were not too dismayed by the sight of the Governor’s standard and the Union Jack bearing the Bermuda coat of arms flying upside down, and we knew as soon as we were inside that we would come to love the place. After a quick dinner we went upstairs to our magnificent bedroom with a balcony overlooking the sea and soon fell asleep in the four-poster bed. The next day I got into my uniform, and we set off down Langton Hill and into Hamilton, riding in the landau kept for such occasions. In Front Street there came a cry from one of the balconies: ‘Hello, David, we are from Clitheroe,’ and no longer did I feel a stranger in a strange land. On we went to the Senate House where, after I had inspected a guard of honour to the accompaniment of a seventeen-gun salute and music from the band of the Bermuda Regiment, I was sworn in as Governor by the Chief Justice.
Larry Mussenden, who had been the previous Governor’s aide-de-camp, was to stay on with us for a month or two before going to the University of Buckingham to read law*. And after the swearing-in he took us on a tour of the seven islands linked together by bridges and causeways which make up Bermuda.
First we went to St George’s Island and the town of St George, Bermuda’s capital until the mid-nineteenth century, and from there along the coast to St Catherine’s Bay where, on 28 July 1609, the Sea Venture was wrecked and the 150 on board struggled ashore. In St George’s we saw a replica of the Deliverance, which in 1610 carried those who had been on the Sea Venture over to Virginia. We also visited the beautiful church in which, after the Island was formally settled, Bermuda’s first Parliament met.
Close by in Tobacco Bay we met for the first time Jennifer Smith – later to hold a painting exhibition with Gilly and then, after the 1998 general election, to become Premier. Then it was on to Tucker’s Town where, after the First World War, land was compulsorily purchased to build two hotels and golf courses and houses for rich Americans. A road built by the military in the nineteenth century then took us along the south shore to beautiful bays where the coral comes almost to the shore. And eventually as the islands curve back towards the north we came to Dockyard, built at the beginning of the nineteenth century as part of a chain of fortifications from Canada to the Caribbean to meet the threats posed by newly independent America and Napoleon.
We then had the chance to explore the Government House garden, thirty-two acres of it – big by any standards but particularly by the standards of Bermuda. A flight of steps took us from the top lawn to the first terrace and to the cedar planted by Winston Churchill in 1942 after he had travelled to America to meet President Roosevelt. This tree survived the blight which at the end of the 1940s killed off most of the cedars on the Island – a blight brought to Bermuda by an American who bore the curious name Carbon Petroleum Dubbs. Next to the Churchill cedar stood a princess palm planted by Haile Selassie in his last days as Emperor of Ethiopia. People in Bermuda will tell you that when the then Governor, General Gascoygne, who was a very tall man, was escorting the Emperor down the steps he had to bend low to converse with him. The result was that he tripped over his sword and shot down the remaining steps on his bottom. The general was one of Bermuda’s most popular Governors which makes it hard to believe that this tale was told out of malice, but sadly I have to report that his daughter, Merida Drysdale, a neighbour of ours, says that there is not a scrap of truth in it.
At the bottom of the third terrace was the royal poinciana planted by the Duke of Windsor in 1940 when on his way to take up his appointment as Governor of the Bahamas. On the way down to the planting ceremony a member of the press asked the Duchess what she thought of her husband’s appointment, and she replied: ‘It is not so much an appointment as a disappointment.’ There was then a royal palm planted by the Duke of Kent when honeymooning in Bermuda in 1934; and on the left of the drive on the way back to the house a grove of trees planted by American Presidents and British Prime Ministers when summit meetings had taken place in Bermuda. There had been a Bush/Thatcher meeting in 1990 and a Bush/Major one in 1991.
The drive from Langton Hill up to the house runs through a cutting in the rock and above and across the cutting bougainvillea grew in great abundance until the dreadful day when a dead rat fell from the foliage onto the lap of a Governor’s wife riding in the landau on her way to the opening of Parliament.
In our day the garden was in the hands of Manuel and a team of five fellow members of the Portuguese community. When Gilly had the temerity to suggest to Manuel how a plant might be better tended, he replied: ‘Lady, we know what we are doing,’ and, for the next five years, she had to find other pastimes than gardening.
A barrier manned by the police stood across the drive as it turned towards the front entrance and, one morning after we had been in Government House for some time, there were found painted on the gate post on the house side of the police barrier a number of doom-laden messages. I remember in particular ‘prepare to meet your doom’ and ‘the end of the world is nigh’. An investigation was launched. Clearly some villain had crept up through the garden, and without doubt, said my aide-de-camp, the messages were threatening and there was a real risk of my going the way of Richard Sharples if something was not done and done swiftly. It was some days before the investigators got round to questioning the policeman in the box that night, but he eventually declared with more pride than remorse that he had had a summons from heaven during the night and in accordance with a divine command had gone off to find a paint pot.
But now we were in the house, which proved far more comfortable and far less forbidding than we expected; and beyond the drawing room and dining room there was a swimming pool which was certainly well used in our time – not least by Basil who on particularly hot days would sit on the top step at the shallow end with water up to his neck. For the pool we were indebted to Lord Martonmere, a former Governor who was inordinately rich, having had the good sense to marry an American heiress.
Upstairs there were two fine bedrooms with balconies looking towards the sea and plenty of other bedrooms on that floor and in the towers. In one of those one of my predecessors had spent his time playing trains.
During the next few weeks, when many people including the Premier were away on holiday, I had plenty of time to find that, although small, Bermuda was home to some great people; and we soon got to know some of them. Harry Cox was one of the first to call at Government House and took us back to Sunnylands in Devonshire to meet his wife Jessica. Harry was an underwater treasure hunter, businessman, politician and raconteur and, with his barrel of white rum under a tangerine tree in his backyard, an exhausting companion. Geese guarded the rum and at the end of the garden in a shed now full to overflowing was what Harry had bought at the agricultural show as ‘a miniature racing pig’ but which had never stopped growing.
We also soon met Willie Frith, later Mayor of Hamilton, and his wife Sally. Willie’s ancestors were privateers. His most famous forebear Hezekiah had sailed in a ship of that name to make his fortune on the seas off Hispaniola, but he was apprehended by the Spanish who sent him home with his head but without his sword. One of Harry’s best stories was of Willie’s ceremonial visit to St David’s with his unofficial aide-de-camp, Colonel Craigen Curtis. As his hosts stirred the fish chowder with ceremony, the spoon met with an obstruction and eventually there emerged from the soup Ginger the cat who had gone missing some days earlier. Then there were Michael and Elaine Darling who, like Willie and Sally, never uttered an unkind word about anyone. Richard Thornton and his wife Susie also became great friends. They were on the Island temporarily having leased a house from Dick Butterfield, who was immensely kind to us, letting us have a mooring for our boat off the bottom of his garden.
Richard Thornton played golf almost as badly as I did but sailed with great competence his Scandinavian folk boat Larkspur. On one occasion Richard, who like all of us was getting old, was fussing about in the boat as we tried to make progress in the teeth of a roaring gale and while he searched for a piece of rope he handed me the tiller. He then tripped and disappeared headfirst into the scuppers. I tapped him on the nape of the neck to see if he was alive and when he responded with a whimper I begged him not to expire, explaining that I was not much of a sailor and knew not how to make land. As the storm raged about us I held the tiller with one hand and seized the seat of his pants with the other. I hauled and hauled and eventually Richard came upright.
Harry kept some of the treasure which he had picked up off the bottom of the sea in the Bank of Bermuda, and when Bishop (Bill) Down was due to leave the Island Harry said he would get the treasure out of the bank and, as a farewell gesture, show it to him. The Bishop and Richard went out to lunch at the Yacht Club and then turned up at Sunnylands at the appointed hour. They then settled themselves down on a sofa and to Harry’s fury nodded off, missing any sight of the treasure.
The agricultural show in the spring was a great institution. The Governor and his wife were driven to the agricultural show in the landau, the Governor heralding the arrival of spring by wearing his summer uniform. Then on or close to St George’s Day there was the Peppercorn Ceremony in St George’s, when the Governor received a peppercorn as rent for the Old State House in the town: and in the winter months there were tennis tournaments, a rugby tournament, often featuring a team from the All Blacks, and golf championships with big names from America lured to Bermuda by the prospect of prize money and a mini-holiday in warmer weather. So there was no reason for anybody to be bored.
There were plenty of people on the Island having a lot of fun, but there were also plenty of people full of good works and public spiritedness making a great contribution to Island life. There was a National Trust, with a big membership and an income far greater per head of the population than in Britain, and with these resources able to keep in immaculate condition a number of historic properties. One of the leading lights was Patsy Phillips, sister of David Gibbons, a former Premier. In the winter months there was an arts festival to both attract tourists and keep the locals amused, and there was never a shortage of people prepared to work flat-out to make it a success. Sir Edwin (Ted) Leather had founded the festival and he had also persuaded Yehudi Menuhin to lend his name to a foundation which helped pay for young musicians to come out from England and work in Bermuda schools. There was a Bermuda Philharmonic Orchestra, duly fortified by these teachers and other visiting musicians.
During our time Yehudi, then Lord Menuhin, came to stay at Government House. He wanted to see and perhaps give some instruction to a young Bermudian learning the violin, and one was chosen and brought up to Government House. Gilly and I sat on the terrace and could hear something of what was going on above us. Three or four hesitant notes were played, the violin was handed over to the maestro and a few haunting phrases followed. In the evening he went down to the City Hall and, up on the platform and bent almost double, he set about coaxing something like music out of the Youth Orchestra.
* He has done extremely well and became adjutant of the Bermuda Regiment and then Attorney-General.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Testing Times
Hail to Bermuda, my island in the Sun.
Sing out in glory to the nation we’ve become.
We go from heart to heart, and strength to strength.
The privilege is mine, to sing
‘Long live Bermuda’, because this island’s mine.
Hail to Bermuda, my homeland dear to me.
This is my own land built on faith and unity.
We go from heart to heart, and strength to strength
For loyalty is mine, to sing
‘Long live Bermuda’, because this island’s mine.
It was now time to get serious and write my first dispatch to the Foreign Office. The Bermuda song did not, of course, state the constitutional position with accuracy, and the maps displayed in the schools showing Bermuda in the centre of the world might have been thought by some to be somewhat misleading, but both the song and the maps exemplified the enormous pride the people had in their tiny but immensely prosperous island home. And I wanted to try and reflect all that in what I wrote. At that early stage I seemed to have grasped that independence was going to be the big issue throughout my stay. John Swan, the Premier, wanted it, I wrote, for a mixture of reasons. Being a man of considerable stature it was obviously galling for him to have to watch lesser men strutting on the world stage as full-blown Prime Ministers or even Presidents while he remained a mere Premier of a dependent territory, but it would have been grossly unfair to treat his motives as being purely selfish. He genuinely believed that with independence would come a spirit of national togetherness and a bridging of the racial divide which was very real – with the white Bermudians, a small minority, holding all the levers of economic power. And he wanted to steal the PLP’s (the Progressive Labour Party’s) clothes, they having for long had independence on their own programme for government. Rarely from 1982 onwards had John missed an opportunity to force independence on to the agenda. He had come close to losing the leadership of the UBP (United Bermuda Party) not long before by being over-enthusiastic about independence, but he had not abandoned his ambitions or conviction that eventually the whole Party would come round to his way of thinking. Many, however, feared that those running international companies, looking as they did upon the present constitutional set-up as a guarantee of Bermuda’s stability, would in the event of independence soon lose their enthusiasm for Bermuda as a base and turn to places like the Cayman Islands – a very serious consideration when the number of international companies on the Island was continuing to grow and was replacing more and more of the revenue lost through a decline in tourism.
I finished my dispatch with some comments on race and said that I had felt somewhat discouraged when the white winner of the Miss Bermuda Islands contest was booed by the black audience (even though the unfortunate girl had been picked by a panel of
judges all except one of whom were black). I had been at the event and not being one of the judges had had a relaxed evening, dressed, I think, in blazer and slacks, but a week or two later there appeared in the British press a story about how I had made myself a laughing stock by picking a white girl as the winner and then crowning her in full uniform complete with hat and feathers. A few weeks passed and then there was another story, this time about my having fallen in love with my Bermuda shorts to the extent that I had turned up in them at a white-tie affair to the fury of my host. It was only after a very much more serious incident following the recruitment of a new police commissioner in the early part of 1995 that we discovered that the purveyor of these falsehoods was a senior journalist on the Royal Gazette who was supplementing his income by ‘stringing’ for papers in London. The trouble with stories of this sort is that they find their way into the cuttings files of newspapers and incompetent and unscrupulous journalists regurgitate the inaccuracies from time to time. Much later, in May 1993, a piece appeared in The Times under the name of Michael Dynes which was supposed to be an intelligent contribution to a debate about the cost of British representation abroad. The article began:
Shortly after his appointment as Governor of Bermuda, Lord Waddington agreed to judge the Miss Bermuda competition. Dressed in his plumed hat he presided over the choice of a white girl as the island’s greatest beauty. Her Majesty’s representative was immediately in trouble. The plumed hat made everything worse. Was this the image that John Major’s classless Britain wished to display to the world?’
David Waddington Memoirs Page 25