Thorold Masefield, High Commissioner in Nigeria, was named as my successor. He was to take up his duties in June after our departure at the end of April 1997. Meanwhile Gilly had taken off for Australia, Jenny having given birth to James Charles, and Victoria enjoyed herself riding in the landau to the opening of Parliament.
The regiment earned itself some bad publicity. A recruit at ‘boot camp’ who claimed to be a Rastafarian had his head shorn while handcuffed to a chair in the middle of the barrack square; a lawyer, who the previous year had himself escaped military service by claiming a conscientious objection, threatened to take the regiment to court. A hurried meeting of the Exemption Tribunal was summoned, and there the man was asked to explain why he objected to serving in the army when almost every photograph of Emperor Haile Selassie (whom the Rastifarians claimed as their leader) showed him in uniform. Indeed, when he had visited Bermuda, he had been taken to inspect a guard of honour of the Bermuda Regiment. The recruit’s somewhat feeble reply was that he would be happy to serve in an army commanded by Haile Selassie but not an army led by the Queen. The tribunal, in spite of this, held that Private Harvey had a genuine conscientious objection to serving in the regiment and when the matter came before me I was advised that (a) I had to accept the tribunal’s conclusion and (b) I had no power to order the man to render some other form of public service.
The Mental Health Foundation (Gilly’s baby) staged the second annual Dick Wilkie Memorial Lecture at Government House. The commissioner of prisons, Ed Dyer, was the speaker, and when at Question Time there was a deathly hush, I asked Ed whether he thought there was any connection between the behaviour of prisoners and their diet, commenting that: ‘When we fill people up with junk food, hamburgers and all that rubbish, it would be surprising if there was not a connection.’ The next morning I found my off the cuff remarks were headline news in the Royal Gazette, having unwittingly strayed into a debate about whether a company headed by John Swan should be allowed to operate a McDonald’s restaurant on the Island. I was well on the way to being accused of taking sides on the issue.
At about this time there was an exchange between the Foreign Office and the UN decolonisation committee. The Foreign Office was rightly of the view that it was pretty cheeky of the committee not to accept that the remaining dependent territories were perfectly free to change their status if they wished and the dependent territories should not be on the so-called ‘Committee of Twenty-Four’ list. Officials thought that it might be possible to reach agreement with the committee that there should be one last visit from the committee to satisfy themselves that the people of the dependent territories had a free choice, after which the territories would be delisted. I was not happy with what officials proposed, fearing that we might not be able to control the agenda; and if public meetings were held, there would be an opportunity for malcontents to reopen what at the moment was a dead issue. No visit had been arranged by the time I left the Island.
The Bermuda Red Cross asked me to invite HRH Princess Alexandra to come to the Island to open their new headquarters and when she and Sir Angus Ogilvy arrived, Sir Angus took me aside and said that he had only just discovered that the Bermuda Red Cross had paid for their first-class tickets. He thought many people who had worked hard to provide funds for the Red Cross might not be happy at the money they had earned being spent in this way and he was giving me a cheque for £10,000 to cover the cost of the tickets. The next day I handed the cheque to Ann Spencer-Arscott, the Secretary of the Red Cross, with Sir Angus’s instruction that only those who needed to know should be told what had happened. I fervently hoped that his wishes would be ignored.
We then visited Arcadia House which had been bought by the Mental Health Foundation which Gilly had helped to start. After that we went to Fair Havens, a home for young women who have fallen foul of drugs. There were nine residents, most still in their teens and virtually all of them with a background of prostitution. Princess Alexandra could not have handled the situation better. She sat down with the group and then questioned them, sympathetically but without any false sentiment or pulling of punches, as to how they had finished up homeless, destitute and dependent on drugs and how they were going to avoid drifting back into the mess from which they had so recently escaped.
It was a very successful royal visit and HRH could not have gone to more trouble talking to people and making them feel that she was interested in them and in Bermuda.
Then there was dramatic news on the political front. David Saul announced his intention not only to resign as Premier but to give up his seat. The hunt was on for a new leader of the UBP, but David Saul had prepared the ground carefully and it soon became apparent that a great effort was going to be made to avoid a contested election and have Pamela Gordon acclaimed leader without a contest. So it worked out. On the following Monday when nominations closed she was the only candidate. Pamela Gordon was articulate, friendly and tough and in my view an inspired choice as leader. Her father was Dr E. T. Gordon, the Trinidad-born civil rights and trade union hero, and the fact that she had surmounted difficulties in her life of the kind faced by many women in Bermuda – she had had a child when a teenager and then after getting married had quite quickly become divorced – helped her to relate to people and, with some justice, she put herself forward as someone who really understood Bermuda and the Bermudians.
My remaining tasks were social rather than political and enjoyable if exhausting. We went boating with Ray Moore and played boules on a cold beach. A special concert was given in our honour by the choir of St Mark’s Church, the Thorntons gave us dinner, as did the Bishop and my splendid aide-de-camp Eddie Lamb and his wife.
We threw two parties at Government House – a buffet supper for 150 and, for the very old, a lunch. There was a golf match in my honour and a special game with the pros from both Mid Ocean and St George’s. I was hugely embarrassed when off the first tee I really whacked the ball and holed in two. But the Lord was kind to me and the tut-tutting and suggestions that I was pretending to an incompetence which I did not deserve faded away when for the rest of the match my performance was abysmal.
The Town of St George then gave us a farewell reception, as did the National Trust and Masterworks. The Dinghy Club was not to be outdone and gave us dinner, and there followed dinner with Bob Farmer, the US Consul-General. That was kind of Bob who was still smarting from Gilly’s refusal to sit down to dinner with Edward Kennedy who, as far as Gilly was concerned, was consorting with and apologising for IRA terrorists and was not a person to be indulged.
Tom Butterfield threw a marvellous picnic on Long Island; and the Peppercorn Ceremony at St George’s was rather special as our friend Colin Curtis, in his capacity as Grand Master of the Lodge, was responsible for handing over the peppercorn as rent for State House. He coated the peppercorn in gold. The Premier gave a dinner for us at Camden and presented us with a fitted dinghy in a bottle.
We went out to lunch with Ann Smith Gordon and she showed us a very special walk over to the south shore. We paid our normal visits to the Agricultural Show and had a goodbye dinner with the Darlings. We were driven up to Government House in Patsy Phillips’s donkey cart. The donkeys came to a sudden halt where a line of bricks crossed the drive and took some coaxing to finish the journey.
The last Sunday involved farewells at St John’s in the morning and the presentation of a painting of the church, the St George’s Day Scouts’ service in the afternoon at St James’s, Somerset and a visit from Malcolm and Debbie Butterfield and their horse-riding son Raymonde in the evening.
On Tuesday 29 April 1997 we went down to the Senate House in the carriage for the official leave-taking. After the inspection of a guard of honour from the regiment and speeches from Pamela Gordon and myself, Gilly and I said goodbye to literally hundreds of people who were formed up in groups on the grass – politicians, civil servants, workers for charity, our own Government House staff and personal friends. We then drove back to Government House, changed and set off for the airport, and at ten past eight we were in the air on our way home.
When given the chance to be governor I did not doubt that I was being very privileged; and as I prepared to go, quite over-whelmed by the warmth of the leave-taking ceremony, I knew what a lucky man I had been to have spent the best part of five years in such a place. Bermuda’s history, quite apart from its present, will never cease to fascinate me. It seems so wonderful that the passengers and crew of the Sea Venture under the leadership of Sir George Somers never lost sight of their duty and that in two tiny new ships they should have struggled on to Virginia to get fresh provisions to the colony. After being formally settled Bermuda did not provide an easy living for the adventurers who had braved the perils of the sea to get there. They suffered many hardships and set-backs but no one can doubt that in building a great little country they achieved far more than most. Of course, there are bound to be strains when so small an island is shared by people with very different backgrounds. Of course, the scars of slavery will never be entirely healed, but I met plenty of people in the black, in the white and in the Portuguese communities who found no difficulty working in harmony with people of different races; Bermuda is a pretty successful multiracial society.
I was very lucky in the two deputy governors who served with me, John Kelly who went on to be the Governor of the Turks and Caicos Islands and Peter Willis who retired to play golf in France. I had with me a wife who carried a hefty burden of work and was a tower of strength throughout and, in particular, in times of difficulty. I look back on my time in Bermuda with great joy and thankfulness to the people of the Island.