CHIEF Justice Richard Ground invited all members of the judiciary, magistry, and the Bermuda Bar to join him yesterday, in a special sitting of the Supreme Court honouring the memory of Dame Lois Marie Browne Evans.Regrettably, I was unable to attend, having booked a flight weeks in advance to Cardiff, Wales, having left the island on Tuesday, a national holiday declared to mark the funeral of Dame Lois. I will be in Wales for an event of interest.

The Supreme Court and Parliament for decades were focal points during my career at the old Bermuda Recorder<$> newspaper and as news director of the original, Monty Sheppard ZFB radio and television stations.

Similarly, I regretted being unable to attend the four-hour joint session of the House and Senate last Friday honouring Dame Lois. Reason for that was the invitation to address an assembly of students and staff of Sandys Secondary Middle School honouring Dame Lois.

I told the gathering the ‘Dame-ship’ was a deserved manifestation of a near 80-year-old legend, a life well spent. But the true significance of the contributions of Dame Lois would not and could not be fully appreciated without a comprehension of the times impacting on those of us like Lois Browne who grew up in the 1920s and 1930s.

We had to pay to go to elementary school and most definitely to high school if you were lucky enough to gain entrance to one. The vast majority of black people and poor white Bermudians were dominated by a few aristocratic first families, descendants of former slave masters and slave mistresses who delighted in carrying on the notions of superiority they had inherited.

They were the all-powerful, well-financed oligarchs, most of whom for generations each had from four to 36 votes, while others had none, at least up until 1968.

Specifically, black girls were predestined to be domestics. Don’t dream of entering the professions, except to be a nurse or a teacher. To be a lawyer was utterly out of the question, even for black males; and most incomprehensible for a female. Imagine young Lois in 1949, at age 22 setting off for London to study law.

That enabled me to go directly to the courts to show just why it was a big day in Bermuda when Miss Lois Browne in 1953 became the first woman lawyer, and black at that!

And how most significant it was more than 40 years later, when a mellowed Dame Lois became Bermuda’s first elected political Attorney General. During all the years from 1900 up to 1953 the system enabled only four black Bermudians to be admitted to the Bermuda Bar.

The first was Eugenius Charles Jackson, who was enrolled in 1901. Thirty years elapsed before the next Bermudian, David Tucker, was called. It took two more decades before Arnold Francis, quickly followed by Walter Robinson (now deceased) became lawyers. Mr. Francis, now a QC, is the most senior member of the Bermuda Bar.

On the other side of the racial divide, white Bermudians, the Dills, Conyers, Applebys, Spurlings, Smiths to name just a few, dominated the Bar.

I am sure I had the attention of my audience at Sandys Middle School when I quoted from research I had done for my book, Freedom Fighters, From Monk to Mazumbo.>

I alluded to how the AME Minister, Rev. Monk, was thwarted in his efforts to get a prominent black lawyer from Jamaica to defend him in his famous trial for libel in 1902.

Rev. Monk pointedly inquired how he, a black man, or anyone else for that matter could get justice in a Supreme Court presided over by Bermuda’s aged Chief Justice, Sir Brownlow Gray. The Assistant Justice on the bench was his cousin, the Hon. R.D. Darrell, and the prosecutor, Sir Brownlow’s son Reginald.

Rev. Monk referred to them as “the Father, the Son and the Un-holy Ghost”. And Monk alleged that all other members of the judiciary, magistry and Bar were either kith or kin, or not inclined to take issue with the establishment.

Unethical matters that surfaced during Monk’s historic trial resulted in representations to the Colonial Office in London, especially relating to an attempt by the powers-that-were, to fill a post of Assistant Justice by a man related by marriage to the Attorney General.

The then-Governor was severely rapped over the knuckles for not keeping the Colonial Office fully informed. And one Commissioner, the Duke of Marlborough, declared there was no doubt and very troubling that “the law in Bermuda was too much in the hands of a family party”.

The decision was then made in London to “appoint a new Chief Justice entirely unconnected to the Colony”. There was a lot of haggling over the golden handshake Chief Justice Gray felt he was entitled to. However, Bermuda got another Chief Justice. A new breed, and a different order prevailed, that of the colonial judges.

I was able to tell my audience how from my personal observation, I saw the contempt that was shown to Lois Browne back in those days. The body language of some court officials spoke volumes.

One judge was famous for interrupting, saying with a scowl: “I can’t hear you Miss Browne.” So that was the environment out of which the future Attorney General evolved, having persevered and handled some landmark legal cases en route.

I would have been anxious to see if any of the foregoing, documented facts were cited during yesterday’s special sitting of the Supreme Court. Perhaps it would not have been more kosher to delve into the Dame Lois facet of her career than that of the early Lois Browne.

Of course, I would have noted the most interesting paradox of a white-only, male-dominated Bar back in the early days of a bold young woman named Lois Browne to the present-day situation where out of 350 lawyers enrolled in the Bermuda Bar, 175 of them are women.

And, historically enough, the latest addition to the Bar, just last month, was Larissa Burgess, who is on staff in the chambers of the Attorney General’s Department.

Remembering Dame Lois . . .