"The old order changeth, yielding place to new; and God fulfills himself in many ways, lest one good custom should corrupt the world." Alfred Lord Tennyson — Morte d'Arthur The Death of King Arthur

History records that the Progressive Labour Party was never intended by its founders to be a "black political party".

It was in fact intended by those who inspired its creation and those who founded the Party that the PLP, as a political party, would meld basic Christian principles and ethics concerning how we should also treat and deal with each other, with the broader aims and goals of the Bermuda Labour Movement with a view to pursuing social and economic justice for all the people of Bermuda. All the people.

When he set out to organise Bermudian workers towards the development of trade unionism, and until his dying days, Dr. Edgar Fitzgerald Gordon sought the development of a Bermuda Labour Movement which would concern itself with the interests and concerns of all workers of all races and ethnic groups in Bermuda.

Dr. Gordon was only in his mid-fifties when he met his untimely (but natural) death in 1955. But he had already inspired the creation of the Bermuda Industrial Union, now Bermuda's largest trade union.

He had also in many ways inspired, by the example of his courage in standing up to the powers-that-were, the great theatre boycott of 1959, aimed at breaking down the barriers created by racial segregation in theatres, restaurants, hotels, the workplace and in politics.

Through his work in the labour movement, Dr Gordon had also inspired the likes of Roosevelt Brown (who passed away last year as Dr. Pauulu Kamarakafego) and the Committee for Universal Adult Suffrage (CUAS) in the struggle against a system which routinely denied to the vast majority of black Bermudians, well over a century after their "emancipation" from slavery, the right to vote for representatives in the Bermudian parliament.

It was also a system which gave white voters the "plus vote", that is to say a number of votes depending on the extent of their Bermudian property ownership. Blacks had historically rarely owned land in Bermuda; and thus could not vote at all until the aims of the CUAS were met. Perhaps worse than everything else, Bermuda's system of racial segregation wreaked havoc on the self-esteem of generations of black Bermudian, past and future.

The formation and establishment in Bermuda of "the political arm of the Labour Movement" was his dream, his ambition, his aspiration; but it was certainly not yet a reality. There was a foundation to be laid.

For a start, the achievement of universal adult suffrage, the right to vote on behalf of all adult Bermudians, would have to be accomplished first. Dr. Gordon's struggle in this regard, through the vehicle of the Labour Movement, was not realised until 1963 with the passage of The Parliamentary Election Act, following a bitter and earlier "Big Conversation" which Dr. Gordon and his followers had initiated years earlier.

It is said that Sir Henry (Jack) Tucker sometime in 1963 convened an emergency gathering of "the oligarchy", a name which Dr. Gordon had publicly given to the economic and political controllers of Bermuda. The meeting was convened against the background of serious industrial and social unrest and an unprecedented rise in black consciousness in the struggle for basic human dignity and social justice.

The Governor of Bermuda at the time was Sir Julian Gascoigne. (I met Sir Julian while I was student at the Berkeley Institute; the fact that we shared a first Christian name was a source of some amusement to both of us, as well as to some of my classmates who extended to me the honour of my own knighthood.)

Sir Julian Gascoigne, unlike some of his predecessors and certainly some of his successors, was well-liked and respected by all segments and groups within Bermuda. He openly hinted at the need for Bermuda to dismantle urgently its system of racial segregation. Undoubtedly, in private he was even more forceful.

In writing this piece, I have to acknowledge my reliance upon, and to pay tribute to, the brilliant scholarship and extensive research of my friend and fellow Bermudian J. Randolf Williams, the author of the definitive biography of former Sir Henry (Jack) Tucker "Man of Stature", Camden Editions, University of Toronto Press, 1987. Mr Williams, to whom Bermuda owes a great debt indeed, is also the author of biographies of Sir Edward Richards "Peaceful Warrior" and Dame Lois Browne-Evans.

There can be no doubt that Sir Julian passed on his views to his successor, Lord Martonmere, who arrived in 1964 and who had known Sir Henry Tucker for several years. 1964 was the year following the formal creation of the PLP as Bermuda's first active political party; an event which threw a number of white Bermudian political and business leaders into frenzied disarray. J. Randolf Williams reveals the effect of Lord Martonmere on the actions, and possibly the thinking, of Sir Henry Tucker at the time. There were a number of quite secret meetings of "the oligarchy" held at Government House itself.

Such meetings would have necessarily included (and be virtually exclusive to) individuals with last names such as Vesey, Trimingham, Spurling, Conyers, Pearman, and of course let's not forget Butterfield, to discuss Sir Henry's very simple proposition. Other leading Bermudian names like Cox and Dill might have absented themselves from any such gathering because of their well-established, and publicly disseminated, opposition to a party political system.

The proposition advanced by Sir Henry was that by giving up a little political power to the blacks of Bermuda, white Bermudians could continue as a racial grouping to maintain control of all economic power.

By failing to give up some political power, they would lose both political and economic power, and Bermuda would disintegrate into an isolated island of starving, infighting has-beens of both races. Those were the stakes; and, expressed in that way, they were of course very high indeed.

By 1963, Jack Tucker had become a towering figure, physically, financially, socially and politically, on the Bermudian scene. Head of the Bank of Bermuda Ltd., director of a vast array of local and international companies (including The Bermuda Electric Light Company Ltd. (Belco), the Elbow Beach Hotel, and multi-billion dollar overseas funds incorporated in Bermuda, to name a tiny fraction of his holdings and interests), he had already succeeded in amassing for himself a tidy financial fortune and had earned a place of deep respect and high esteem, from "coloureds" and whites alike, on the island.

The line between public service as a Parliamentarian and a member of Bermuda's Executive Council (precursor to the modern Cabinet) was at best blurred, if a line existed at all. This was clearly an era in which patronage mattered; and arguably no one was in a better position to bestow patronage than Jack Tucker.

No one questioned the "leadership style" of Jack Tucker; at least not in the press over which he and his friends, indeed some of his cousins, held shareholder control.

And no one, including those many whites who vigorously, but almost always behind closed doors, opposed Sir Henry's new-found attachment to "racial integration" dared accuse Jack Tucker, the leading, and obviously one of the most oratorically gifted, parliamentarian in Bermuda's House of Assembly before 1963, of behaving " like a dictator".

Jack Tucker's message to the rest of "the oligarchy", and in general to white Bermudians could be summed up in a simple phrase: "adapt or perish". It goes without saying that many millions of British pounds and American investment dollars were at stake.

The full panoply of white supremacist notions and assumptions, including primarily the assumption that blacks would inevitably form a corrupt government, blacks would inevitably form an incompetent government, blacks would scare away, not attract- tourists, black government would deter, not encourage, the growth of international business, were brought to bear.

Black Bermudians in great numbers were particularly open to these suggestions; they had after all been inculcated, as though it were now truly hard-wired into their DNA, with these same self-hating and anti-communal notions. And whites, well they were just either apprehensive or angry or both.

The House that Jack Built would include the entire white population of Bermuda. Whites would go nowhere else politically.

Any who did would feel the wrath of the oligarchy, one way or the other; and the lives and struggles of Dorothy Thompson and Dr. Barbara Ball, to name only two whites who suffered vicious personal attacks and scorn as the direct result of their affiliation with the Labour Movement and its political arm (PLP) bear witness to this.

It was the fundamental objective of all anti-Labour propaganda that it must become unthinkable for whites to support "the black party" which is the way the press, with deadly aim and intention, labelled the PLP from the outset. Never mind that this was not the way in which the early PLP sought to label itself. Poor working class whites and Portuguese Bermudians, regardless of the fact that the Labour Movement sought fervently to better their working and living conditions, had to be convinced as well.

Many became more bigoted than the most diehard of segregationists. For whites too, just like blacks, were imbued for generations with all of the assumptions and notions of White Supremacy. The House that Jack Built would also include a select group of "nice coloured Bermudians" (not my phrase, but a phrase which we shall see came directly from our own history).

Not necessarily too many nice coloureds, but certainly sufficient in number to inspire a perpetual majority of the voting population into extending the shelf life of this 300 year old party for at least five or six, if possible generations more. In a flash of Madison Avenue brilliance, the UBP called itself "the Partnership That Works". And, for a time, it worked.

Never mind, as Sir Henry Tucker himself observed, that the two parties would ultimately have pretty much the same political beliefs and objectives.

A front-page article in the December 12th 1964 edition of the Bermuda Sun read thus: "Sir Henry pointed out that there may be little difference between the parties' platforms, but the UBP want to achieve the objectives 'without jeopardising the economy'. (He continued) that one of the major differences between the two parties was the factor of 'basic experience'' and he felt that it was safer for Bermuda to trust its future to experienced people."

A columnist on page 6 of The Royal Gazette edition of August 17, 1964 put it this way: "Although it appears to us to be partaking unnecessarily of a cloak-and-dagger atmosphere, the genesis of a new political party in our midst surely need occasion no surprise. There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat."

And so, there it is, the UBP started as, and has remained throughout, an overcoat for the protection of the white Bermudian oligarchy and its entirely system of social organisation against an east wind called the Progressive Labour Party.

History will ask, and ultimately will answer, some fundamental questions: Was the overcoat sufficient? For how long was it effective? History has already confirmed that the underlying philosophy behind the creation of the United Bermuda Party was, despite its rhetoric and its marketing, the division of Bermuda into all the whites and some, but only some, of "the nice coloureds", a phrase which I repeat is not of my making, but the invention of one of the directors of the Island Theatre in response to the great boycott of 1959.

In the third, and final, installment: "All You Need is Love". Not just a Beatles tune.