David Waddington Memoirs (27 page)

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.

I
t 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.