From the moment when I had arrived in Bermuda the politicians had stressed the importance that they attached to ‘Bermudisation’, i.e. filling job vacancies with Bermudians rather than foreigners whenever that was possible. We were not doing much for that policy in Government House, with an English butler and English chef, an English Governor’s secretary, a Portuguese maid and a Filipino maid, and five Portuguese gardeners. Indeed it was only the scullery maid, a downstairs cleaner and the woman who did the laundry who were Bermudian. When, therefore, the butler, Michael Schubert, was due to leave at the end of his contract I was determined to get a Bermudian replacement. The post was advertised but very few applicants put in for the job. One seemed reasonably good – a sergeant in the regiment whose wife was on the regiment’s permanent staff – and Andre Nesbitt was duly recruited on a probationary basis.

It was soon clear that we had made a serious mistake. As the royal visit had drawn nearer Andre’s nerves had got the better of him, and Eddie had to take away virtually all his responsibilities and bring in people from outside to do his work. After the royals had gone I had Andre into my room and told him that he had proved completely useless during the visit and, as far as I was concerned, he could leave there and then. But foolishly I then added that if he really wanted to stay I would give him a last chance and extend the probationary period for another six months. Andre agreed to stay on those terms. Unfortunately there was no improvement and the time came when I told him he would have to go. For that the PLP branded me a racist. I pointed out that it was hardly racist to dispense with an English butler so that I could recruit a Bermudian and the fact that I was now looking for another Bermudian did not look particularly racist either. But that got me nowhere, and soon the story had been sold to the English press where it appeared suitably embroidered and embellished.

Then the time came when I had to recruit a new commissioner of police and things went from bad to worse. There had always been difficulty in recruiting Bermudians for the police. In good times higher wages could be earned in other jobs and Bermudians were not particularly keen on doing a job which involved night work and might even make them unpopular in the communities where they lived. Consequently, many police officers were recruited from the Caribbean and from Britain. Often the Caribbean officers found it difficult to get themselves accepted and were heavy-handed in their dealings with the local community. The British officers, being white, were seen by young blacks as an alien element. Furthermore, these different groups in the police often did not get on with and did not trust each other. Jack Sharpe, a former Premier, told me that after the Sharples murder a very pleasant Bermudian officer showed up to give him personal protection. The next day he told Jack that he was going off duty for a while but was worried about his replacement: ‘He comes from St Kitts and hates all white men.’

When I arrived in Bermuda Lennett (known as Lenny) Edwards, a black Bermudian, was commissioner of police and Alec Forbes, of Scottish origin who had acquired Bermudian status, was his deputy. Both were old-fashioned in their approach to policing and saw no need for change. Complaints against the police, if dealt with at all, were dealt with months after the event and then often not properly. Morale in the police was at rock-bottom. An exercise in crowd control was held at the US naval annexe. Members of the regiment were detailed to act out the role of rioters. The police approached the rioters carrying their shields. The ‘rioters’ lobbed a few missiles and the police broke ranks and fled.

The Foreign Office employed an overseas police adviser to go round the police forces in the dependent territories, carry out reviews and make suggestions as to how efficiency might be improved, and in May 1994 Lionel Grundy, the then adviser, visited Bermuda. His report was damning. There was no leadership or sense of purpose in the police and no attempt had been made to prepare people to fill the top ranks. Lenny could retire on full pension the following May on reaching fifty-six; Forbes was due to go on 1 March 1995, but there was no one to follow them. There were two assistant commissioners. One of them, Harold Moniz, was of Portuguese descent and was rated both unpopular and inefficient. The other, Wayne Perinchief, had only been promoted a month or two before and, having no experience at all of high office, could not possibly be considered a candidate for deputy, let alone commissioner at that time.

I discussed the matter with the Premier and with John Irving Pearman, the Minister for Home Affairs, and we decided to replace both Lenny (who had by then become ill and wanted to retire) and Forbes on his retirement, with a commissioner and a deputy commissioner recruited from abroad. Big trouble followed. The PLP declared that as there were two Bermudians qualified to be commissioner I had again been guilty of racism. The Leader of the Opposition, Frederick ‘Freddy’ Wade, and a number of his supporters brought a petition against overseas recruitment up to Government House, and in front of the cameras I made the mistake of telling Freddy that the decision to recruit had been made and there was no question of it being reversed. At the time I thought it right to be firm. If I had given the impression that I was prepared to reconsider, I would have been letting down the minister who had shown some courage in accompanying the deputy governor to London and seeing the applicants for the two posts. But it was a mistake to have been so forthright. According to the PLP I had not shown due respect towards the six thousand people who were alleged to have signed the petition, and there were calls for my salary to be cut. In due course the PLP tabled a motion in the House of Assembly reducing it to one dollar. It was rather discouraging that when such a motion had last been tabled it was a matter of hours before my predecessor Sir Richard Sharples was murdered. Indeed, the next day the Royal Gazette printed the report of the debate alongside the report of the assassination.

The motion, like the one in 1973, was, of course, really no more than a procedural ploy, a method of getting at the Governor as the symbol of British authority, and after a vote on party lines, with every government supporter voting ‘no’, the motion was defeated. But this did not deter someone on the Royal Gazette (who had earlier caused us trouble selling false reports to the British press) from telling this story in lurid and wholly inaccurate terms to the Sunday Times where it appeared under the headline: ‘LOCALS ARGUE WADDINGTON WORTH JUST ONE POUND.’ The article began:

The article then went on to relate, with sundry embellishments, the story of Andre the butler before concluding:

Insofar as the article painted a picture of an island reduced to a state of turmoil as a result of a headstrong Governor meddling in affairs that were none of his business, it was a complete fabrication. But it was also a fabrication perpetrated by a journalist living on the Island and employed by the Royal Gazette and his name appeared at the head of the article, along with someone called Andrew Malone. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when on the very day of publication I received a telephone call from another journalist on the Royal Gazette saying that the Gazette was going to publish the article and the paper would like my comments on the contents. I told the journalist that I had never heard such cheek in my life. If an article in a British paper was repeated in the Royal Gazette people were entitled to assume that they were being given the opportunity to see how other journalists in Britain were viewing the scene in Bermuda. When the article was nothing but a fabrication perpetrated by one of the Gazette’s own employees, I reckoned that I and their readers had something to complain about.

The only good thing about the whole incident was Peter Woolcock’s cartoon in which Basil was pictured saying: ‘Well, it was his constitutional right to choose the police commissioner and then this Mr Morton proposes cutting the boss’s salary to one dollar, having just voted a nearly 28 per cent wage increase for himself – and so I bit him.’ Well not quite the only good thing. Six months on and the politicians of the UBP were claiming that bringing in the officers was their own brilliant idea and the politicians of the PLP, while not going quite so far, were saying what grand chaps the British officers were and how successful they, the PLP, had been in building up a very special relationship with them. Colin Coxall and Michael Mylod did a splendid job and not so long afterwards were beginning to get a grip on crime on the Island and were the toast of those who had been so critical of the appointments.