ANOTHER old landmark has bitten the dust, and what could be burned was reduced to ashes just over a week ago.

We are referring to 'Tin Top', that hoary old wooden structure with a tin roof on Sound View Road in Somerset. It was a sprawling building that intrigued generations of Bermudians throughout the 20th century and into the present one.

Old timers used to say, "If only walls could talk," much of the history about Tin Top that has been shrouded in mystery and drama would be revealed.

Tales about Tin Top are legendary. When and why it was built no one seems to know exactly. But what is certain is that it served throughout most of the 1900s variously as a school, club house, apartment building, home of the first gypsies known to come to Bermuda, and in more recent years as a workshop.

The name probably will go forward, but the way is now cleared for a modern two-storey complex that will serve as the home of WEBS, the wholesale and retail business the Walter E. B. Stevens Family has been operating for the past two decades or more on the main road in Ely's Harbour, just beyond the Willowbank Resort.

Tin Top, it seems, enjoyed its heyday during the late 1920s and '30s when it housed the West End Social Club and the Bertha Higgins Progressive School. It was the hub of much of the parish's social and cultural life and a focal point for the aristocratic black people who were considered to be a cut above the hoi polloi; those who could afford to sent their children to school there.

The ladies and gentlemen of leisure played lawn tennis by day at Tin Top and 'tripped the light fantastic toe' there at night.

From earliest times Tin Top was used by members of British Forces stationed in Bermuda and their families, who together with white Somerset residents formed the Heathcote Hill Tennis Club. It was also known as 'the white school', or Lines School, during those days of complete racial segregation of schools.

ORIGINAL owners of the property were the Lines family. During the late 1800s Mr. J. Lines was known to operate a school for white children that carried his name. The late Somerset District Nurse Bridges, in one of my old 'Personality of the Week' interviews, said the well-constructed building was acquired from the old British Naval Dockyard at Ireland Island and erected by her father, a shipwright, who resided in the area.

When the student body outgrew Tin Top, the school moved to the site now known as Somerset Primary School. It was called 'the white school' until desegregation.

By the end of the First World War, Tin Top was used, among other things, as a dwelling and a dance hall. Mrs. Gladys Bailey Edwards (now deceased), who was born in 1919, related to this writer that as a little girl she remembered when her parents lived there until around 1930. A Lee family then moved in.

Around 1925 a band of gypsies caused consternation when they arrived from Egypt by way of America. They pitched their tents on the lawn at Tin Top and occupied part of the building. Crowds used to gather to gawk at the strangers and have their fortunes told. The gypsies proved to be nuisances to the neighbours who suspected them of stealing their livestock and vegetables at night.

Mrs. Bertha Higgins was a widely acclaimed, all-round teacher when she came to Bermuda from Antigua in the 1920s. She was an accomplished artist, musician, dramatist and mathematician. She taught at Sandys Secondary School which opened in October 1927, and then at Flat Top, the original West End School. At that time children were not permitted in Government schools until they were aged seven. Miss Higgins took them from kindergarten through to senior high.

The Progressive School opened at Tin Top in 1932 under Miss Higgins. That school closed just before the outbreak of the Second World War when Miss Higgins returned to Antigua. She eventually represented her country in the Parliament of the short-lived West Indies Federation.

During an interview that I conducted some years ago for a Tin Top feature, Miss Louise Robinson told me she was 13 years old when she transferred to Tin Top from Sandys Secondary School.

It was her merchant father, William H. Robinson, who was one of the school's founders. Robinson, incidentally, was also the man responsible (during one of his trips to the West Indies to purchase stock for his shops) for getting Dr. E. F. Gordon, later known as Mazumbo, to come to Bermuda to fill the void caused by the death of Dr. Packwood.

The doctor was married to Robinson's sister, and was the man who left his residence in Ely's Harbour which became the Packwood Old Folks' Home.

Miss Robinson, who at this writing is in her late eighties, related to me how quick thinking averted a potentially deadly fire at Tin Top. The place was packed for the 1933 Christmas concert the Higgins School was staging.

Louise was acting as Santa Claus. Several children were on stage depicting various characters of the Christmas legend when she made her dramatic arrival. She passed one of the students, Leonard Harney, who held a lighted candle. In a flash her cotton wool Santa Claus beard caught fire and spread to the padded clothing she was wearing to make her look fat.

In the ensuing panic, a parent, David Harris (who was one of the few black Englishmen to be sent to Bermuda from the UK to work in the Dockyard) and a senior student, "Winkie" Tatem, managed to smother the flames by wrapping Louise in a Union Jack.

Gasping for breath and with severe burns to her throat, Louise was carried into another room and later rushed by horse and carriage to her home at Somerset Bridge, where she still resides. Every day for weeks Louise said she was attended by Dr. Sweeney, a Canadian who had an office at Willowbank.

Tin Top got a new lease of life as a school when it became the Infant Department of the West End School. It was headed first by Mrs. Ermine Walters Cann. Others who taught there were Miss Portia Bean, Mrs. Lucy Adams Raynor, Miss Louise Tankard, the former Eunice Cox, Mrs. Eunice Joell Simons and Miss Vistula Durrant. Miss Tankard, I believe, is the only one still surviving.

MORE anecdotes and history I have written about Tin Top can be found in a soon-to-be published book on Wooden Houses in Bermuda, by Dale Butler; and in a feature I wrote in 1991 on Landmarks in Somerset, for a booklet commemorating the 118th anniversary of Allen Temple AME Church. The church is situated 100 yards across the street from the old Tin Top site.

An authoritative source for much of my information about Tin Top also came from the late Heron Bay School principal Miss Winnie Tatem.

Former Bermuda Senate President Albert Jackson had an intimate connection with Tin Top. In 1940 the Department of Education assigned him to convert the western end of the building into the West End Manual Training Centre, while the remainder continued to be used for infants. Boys from all black schools westward from Purvis in Warwick journeyed by train, or otherwise, to Somerset, for training there.

Mr. Jackson left in 1944 for studies at Columbia University in New York. He was succeeded at Tin Top by Miss Eleanor Joell, one of whose assistants was Mrs. Mary Jackson Hayward, wife of the late musician Lancelot Hayward.

THE Stevens family acquired the Tin Top property more than 25 years ago. A family spokesman said the proposed new complex, which will include a couple of one-bedroom apartments, will begin coming out of the ground in a matter of weeks.

Postscript: I almost forgot mention that more than 70 years ago I entered school for the first time, at Tin Top, where my teacher for a short while was Mrs. Ida Trott. She was a white English lady, who married into the family of one of the first two black men to become members of the Bermuda Parliament in the 1800s.

She was an accomplished Anglican Church organist. When she came to Bermuda and due to prevailing racial proscriptions, she was denied the opportunity to play in the Anglican Church, and became organist of Allen Temple AME Church.