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:

I wrote to Mr Dynes protesting at this nonsense and to my astonishment he wrote back saying that he was very much more aggrieved than I was because the paragraph about which I had complained had not been written by him at all. Without his knowledge or consent it had been tacked on by some sub-editor at The Times to add a bit of spice to his otherwise very serious piece.

A few weeks after my arrival Captain Eddie Lamb took over as aide-de-camp, and a fine one he turned out to be. He was a St David’s islander and everyone in Bermuda will tell you that those who come from St David’s are very different from anyone else. In the old days, before the arrival of the Americans, St David’s was very cut off from the rest of Bermuda and there was a good deal of intermarriage between the comparatively few families with roots there. The best known surnames on the Island are Fox and Lamb and it was said that St David’s is the only place in the world where the fox lies down with the lamb. Anyhow, Eddie decided that we must pay a visit to St David’s, and as we were driven in the Daimler towards the centre of St David’s there were quite a few people at the side of the road waving merrily. Eddie sat proudly in the front seat helping us to wave back; and it seemed that patriotism in St David’s knew no bounds. Then we began to pay attention to what the crowds were shouting. ‘Hi Eddie,’ they cried as they welcomed home their favourite son. We visited St David’s Primary School, and events followed a similar pattern. ‘What would you like to ask the Governor, Malika?’ said the headteacher to one child. ‘Where’s your hat?’ said the little girl. ‘Now, Raymonde, you’ve got your hand up. What would you like to ask the Governor?’ and Raymonde replied: ‘I don’t want to ask the Governor anything. I just want to say “Hi, Uncle Eddie”.’

At the far end of the US naval base was a NASA station from which in October 1992 we watched a space shuttle launch in the presence of an astronaut who had made a trip earlier that year. More memorable that autumn was a visit by Raine, Countess Spencer. I warned her that on the Saturday we were going sailing. She said she did not like sailing. I told her that I had accepted on her behalf an invitation to go sailing, that considerable offence would be caused if she cancelled, that it was a big boat and she could bring her knitting. She had to come. Reluctantly she agreed.

The day dawned and punctually at two minutes to nine Raine came down the stairs wearing a party frock, white lace gloves and high-heeled shoes, and carrying a parasol. I had not the energy to argue and off to the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club we went. The commodore looked at Raine in astonishment and queried whether she was in yachting form. He thought she looked nervous. ‘Nonsense,’ said I. ‘If you have any trouble, lash her to the mast.’ But a few discreet words were exchanged, and the next thing I knew she was tottering back along the jetty to the car; she and Gilly returned to Government House. At 3 p.m. I came back from my sail with a guilty conscience. What, I wondered, had they done for lunch? The staff had been told we were going out and had been given the day off. I need not have worried. They had had a wonderful time. Raine had talked all day about her romances, and Gilly had sat alongside open-mouthed forgetting all about food. But by then the Countess was peckish and I packed them in to our little Ford and took them to a pub in St George’s for a ham sandwich.

Our next visitor was Prince Michael of Kent. He really did want to sail and although he could not come out himself Nicky Dill* provided his boat, Dillightful, together with a skipper. We bowled down to St George’s for lunch, but by the time we set off back the wind had strengthened. In spite of that, the skipper gave the wheel to the Prince and directed him to round Spanish Point via Cobbler’s Cut instead of steering out towards Dockyard and taking the longer but very much safer way home. A gust of wind hit the boat and drove it on to the rocks. For a moment I thought we were going over but the skipper turned on the engine and threw it into reverse; and we came off and righted ourselves. That evening a local police officer said to the Prince’s detective, ‘I hear you had a near miss today.’ ‘No,’ replied the detective. ‘The Prince never misses.’ Very sportingly Nicky Dill protested that little damage had been done to Dillightful, but I have reason to think that that was short of the truth.

I opened Parliament at the beginning of November and it took me half an hour to read the speech from the throne. It would have taken even longer had I not spotted that at page eighteen there was a long passage identical in every respect with three paragraphs on the first page. I also excised a number of Americanisms. (The government had ‘gotten’ this and ‘gotten’ that.)

It was grand to learn that Bermuda still observed Armistice Day; indeed, it was a public holiday. A service took place at the Cenotaph below the Senate House and afterwards there was a lunch for the veterans in Number One Shed on Front Street. On parade with the veterans was a contingent from the Bermuda Regiment, a uniquely Bermudian institution. Young men of eighteen were liable for three years part-time service. They had to attend drills on one or two nights a week and while the first year’s ‘boot camp’ was fairly arduous, in the second and third years the soldiers thoroughly enjoyed a fortnight’s training abroad either in Jamaica or Fort Lejeune in North Carolina. The regiment performed ceremonial duties, but, more importantly, it was a disciplined force ready to help in national emergencies – hurricanes as well as riots. The camps in Jamaica did no end of good. Young men saw how poverty-stricken was much of Jamaica, and many must have realised how lucky they were to live in Bermuda even though it was not an independent country.

We were joined for Christmas by various members of the family and afterwards were due to go to Barbados for a Governors’ conference. On the day we were due to leave for Barbados and Victoria was due to go back to university, Basil our Norfolk terrier, who had earlier distinguished himself playing the Government House piano, suffered a terrible misfortune.

I was looking for him after lunch to take him for a walk and found him sitting under a chair in the little drawing room. His ears were pricked and he seemed to be saying ‘I don’t know how to explain this, but something rather embarrassing has happened.’ Indeed it had. His back looked like something on a butcher’s slab. As we rushed him to the vet, I was thinking he had been run over; but, in fact, he had been savaged by a dog or dogs and thirty-five stitches were needed to repair the damage.

The news of his misfortune swept round the Island and the ‘get well’ cards began to arrive – scores of them. The Royal Gazette reminded the citizenry that St Basil – known as Basil the Great (330–379 AD), whose feast day is 2 January – was inclined to be headstrong and, among other ‘biting’ remarks, had voiced the opinion that a merciless attitude should be adopted towards bureaucrats; and the paper hinted that Basil possessed some of his namesake’s attributes and that might have led to his downfall. His reputation was, however, vigorously defended by a body calling itself Basil’s Press Office.

After the conference in Barbados we flew to St Vincent and then, with the British representative in St Vincent and his wife, sailed down through the Grenadines in a small yacht with a skipper and a so-called cook. On our way home we had an unfortunate experience in Miami Airport. The queues at immigration were immense and we were going to miss our onward flight unless something was done. When I got to the immigration desk I asked the immigration officer (a woman) to be as quick as possible as we were in trouble and before you could say knife she had called to some thug standing nearby who catapulted us into a room full of Haitians and Cubans. I complained to another woman who appeared to be in charge and demanded to ring the British Consul. That resulted in our immediate release. Most of the staff at the airport seemed to know no more than a smattering of English and were thoroughly unpleasant. We decided to avoid Miami in any future travels.

Easter was by tradition the time to send lilies to the Queen and in April 1993 off Gilly went to pick them. Then there was a St George’s Day Service in the Salvation Army Citadel in Hamilton. The proceedings commenced with the Scouts coming up to the front and handing in their banners. At the end they knelt to receive them back and marched down the centre aisle towards the main doors. Suddenly there was the sound of circular saws and splitting timbers as each banner pole came into contact with the fans in the ceiling and was quickly decapitated. The Scouts’ motto ‘Be Prepared’ may not have been observed but the Scouts themselves did not flinch. They picked up off the floor the shattered remains of their poles and with considerable dignity processed on to the street.

Later in the spring we visited our Consul-General in New York and then our Ambassador in Washington. I also had the opportunity to talk to American officials about issues affecting Bermuda. In Washington I was most anxious to get a feel on the future of the American base and do what I could to dissuade the Americans from a precipitate withdrawal: I spent some time talking to key people in the State Department, the Pentagon and Congress. I then received an astonishing phone call from an irate John Swan who asked me what right I had to be interfering in matters which were his responsibility. I pointed out that under the Bermuda constitution I had responsibilities for external affairs, but it made me realise that I was dealing with a Premier who previous Governors and others had encouraged to believe was in entire control of Bermuda’s fortunes – which was nearly, but not quite, true. Without doubt he looked a national leader, capable of speaking with great sense and authority and he was a first-rate Ambassador for his country while travelling abroad, as well as a very able leader at home. It was, therefore, scarcely surprising that people like Ebersole Gaines, US Consul-General until the end of 1992, who probably did not understand the constitutional position, thought John of sufficient standing to deserve dinner at the White House. That might have helped to persuade John that matters like the future of the American base were his responsibility and his alone.

In July I visited London, principally for talks with Mark Lennox-Boyd, then the minister in the Foreign Office responsible for Bermuda, but I went to the Lords to see what was going on and in the Lobby was greeted by Lord (Oulton) Wade who cried out in his broad Cheshire accent: ‘Hello, David. Are you brown all over?’ Back in Bermuda my golf was going badly but my excellent aide-de-camp, Eddie Lamb, was beginning to perform for me the function Eb Gaines had performed for John Swan. He was a morale booster, and it was as a result of his efforts that I won my one and only golf trophy. Eddie set up a regimental golf championship. Sixteen agreed to play, four teams of four. Only fourteen players turned up on the day because the second in command of the regiment and Larry Mussenden were recovering from a hangover. My team was second and Eddie had arranged for everyone in the first three teams to get a prize.

In September I was asked to dissolve Parliament for a general election on 5 October. The campaign was not inspiring and when the result was declared, the UBP had survived with a reduced majority, winning twenty-two seats against the PLP’s eighteen, with its lowest ever share of the vote (50% compared with 54% in 1989 and 62% in 1985).

The Opening of Parliament provided the PLP with their first opportunity to expose John Swan as a leader weakened by the election result. The Speaker in the 1989–93 parliament, David Wilkinson, had not stood for re-election. He was a splendidly laid back, some might say idle, figure from an old white Bermudian family and John Swan could not stand him. One reason for this antipathy was that on one occasion when in the Speaker’s Chair David awoke from a deep sleep and feeling something was required of him announced ‘this House is now adjourned.’ Everyone got up and left except John Swan who was just about to deliver a great oration. John was determined that he would now have a Speaker of his own choosing and he decided on a black Bermudian, Dr David Dyer. On the day before the opening of Parliament I went down to the Senate House for a rehearsal and Dyer was there, also being put through his paces. That night there was the usual eve-of-session party at Government House and from the sniggering of some members of the Opposition I concluded that something was afoot.

The next day I arrived at the Senate House. My first duty was to inspect the guard of honour and I then went up into an anteroom on the first floor to wait for the members of the House of Assembly to answer Black Rod’s summons and begin to process down the hill to the Senate Chamber to hear the speech from the throne. I waited and waited but there was no sign of the procession, and after ten minutes or so I began to worry. Perhaps the PLP had actually hatched some plot to boycott the opening of Parliament. So I sent a messenger up the hill to find out what was going on. And, just as in 1983 Margaret Thatcher’s plan to install a Speaker of her choice had been derailed by Conservative backbenchers who thought the right man for the Chair was the Deputy Speaker – Jack Weatherill – so had John Swan’s plan to install David Dyer. A group of UBP members had sided with the PLP and they and the PLP, a party not known for its sympathy for the Portuguese, had succeeded in getting voted in as Speaker the Portuguese Deputy Speaker – all for the sheer joy of annoying John Swan.

David Dyer of course had been made to look a complete fool and rather unfairly blamed it all on the Premier. It cannot be said that he at once set about engineering John’s downfall but I have little doubt that from that time onwards he wished it most fervently.

* Nicky was a barrister and a partner in Conyers, Dill & Pearman. He was also the Danish Consul and Chancellor of the Bermuda Diocese.