After 13 years as leader, Sir John Swan threw the dice and gambled his premiership in a bid to salvage a win for his wish to see an independent Bermuda.

And on the morning of the vote, August 15, 1995, the rumour mill swirled with speculation that Sir John’s wish to buy more time and delay the referendum by several months could be put in place — apparently fuelled by intemperate comments in a restaurant by a Swan ally.

Sir John and the pro-independence wing of the United Bermuda Party braced for a negative result after a boycott call from the opposition Progressive Labour Party leader, L. Frederick Wade.

The boycott call was proposed despite Bermuda’s oldest political party’s foundational advocacy of cutting formal ties with Britain.

Two months before referendum day, a Royal Gazette poll found a massive 80 per cent of voters opposed independence.

Of the 500 voters polled, 57 per cent were Black, 39 per cent White and 4 per cent classified themselves as “Other”.

On referendum day itself, it was not clear when the vote would take place as a tropical storm menaced the island.

There are surely few more dramatic moments in Bermuda politics than that mid-morning, as the Cabinet Secretary, Leo Mills, and the Attorney-General, Elliot Mottley, were summoned to see the Governor at Langton Hill.

By dawn that day, it was clear that Tropical Storm Felix had only brushed Bermuda overnight — a megastorm of 1987’s Emily proportions had failed to materialise.

While the Emergency Measures Organisation, Cabinet and Sir John and his closest advisers met throughout the day, with rumours flying that the vote would be postponed, by the time the sun began to set, the die was cast — independence would be decided the next day.

In all, 22,236 people voted of an eligible 37,841 voters, with 16,369 (73.7 per cent) saying “no” to independence and only 5,714 (25.6 per cent) voters supporting it.

Mr Wade claimed victory for the PLP and his stay-away policy, in which he campaigned extensively to convince members and supporters not to go to the polling stations.

One of Mr Swan’s cabinet ministers conceded Mr Wade had “single-handedly” influenced the vote with his abstention call.

For months, the PLP leader had openly said a “yes” vote would cement UBP rule — for ever.

His stump speech mirrored an opinion piece he wrote: “If independence is worth doing, it is worth doing properly.”

Mr Wade asked people to “refrain from voting and abstain … in order that Sir John Swan and the UK Parliament realise that he has gone about the move to independence the wrong way — and Bermudians are not prepared to participate in a clearly flawed process”.

Mr Wade said at the time: “I think our campaign paid off. If we have done well with the campaign, and I believe we have, it backs up what we said in the beginning, that the whole process the country has gone through is wrong.”

Only two years earlier, in the 1993 General Election, the turnout was 78 per cent, but for the referendum, just 58.8 per cent voted.

With the UBP’s increasingly vocal “Black caucus” and an equally loud — and biracial — conservative wing, Sir John had to offer to sacrifice his premiership on an issue that was dear to him. But, while his party had always maintained it had no official position on sovereignty, the writing was on the wall.

Polling stations were reported to be relatively quiet throughout the day, but in Sir John’s district, Paget East, turnout was above 70 per cent.

Throughout his tenure, Sir John hailed nationhood as the cure to Bermuda’s racial ills and continually chased that dream.

As far back as 1981, Sir John had publicly stated that he felt the island was “more ready for independence than the nations which attained independence in the last 20 years”.

In 1986, he was depicted as the driving force behind Senate president Hugh Richardson’s Private Member’s Bill, which sought to get an independence referendum. He later withdrew support for the Bill after a UBP backbench revolt.

The outcome foreshadowed his final bid, launched after Britain’s announcement in December 1993, that HMS Malabar, the last Royal Navy Base in Bermuda, would shut down.

Sir John had had a decade of diplomacy, negotiating the 1995 tax treaty with the United States with the tacit approval of London.

He often cited Bermuda’s relatively advanced constitution ― compared with other Overseas Territories ― as being indicative of its readiness.

In March 1993, Sir John gave a much criticised speech — during a gala Speaker’s Dinner in front of Queen Elizabeth II — in which he appeared to make a pitch for independence.

British media were incensed at the temerity. The BBC reported: “The Queen heard a speech from the island’s premier which surprised many with its blunt call for independence.”

Mr Wade characterised Sir John’s remarks as rude and distasteful.

Trained from childhood never to flinch, wince or weep in public, the Queen maintained a stoic silence as her head of government appeared to tell her it was time for Bermuda to shuck its British colonial ties and go it alone.

The story, of course, was meat to the potatoes of covering a royal tour for the foreign press and the ripples cast spread far beyond the boundaries of Bermuda.

Sir John denied that it was a “pro-independence speech”, only that it spotlighted challenges facing the island.

He said it emphasised how the island would have to cope without the British, US and Canadian military bases.

The next day, he said: “The speech was nothing to do with independence and it was not coded in any way.”

As such, on the day of the referendum two years later, his close ally, Edgar Wilkinson, was heard telling people in the Buckaroo Restaurant, at the corner of Par-la-Ville Road and Church Street, that the referendum would be delayed until December, sources told The Royal Gazette.

But Sir John told a Commission of Inquiry that while he had had a conversation discussing delaying the vote with Maxwell Burgess, the transport minister, and Mr Wilkinson, he said he strongly felt he had a commitment to the island’s overseas students who had returned home that summer to vote.

Meanwhile, UBP backbenchers Ann Cartwright DeCouto, John Barritt and Trevor Moniz filed a writ against Marlene Christopher, the parliamentary registrar, seeking an order that returning officers be sent to their polling stations.

The Governor, Lord Waddington, having spent most of the 1980s as hardline Margaret Thatcher’s equally hard-nosed home secretary, and with more than three decades in politics under his belt, jumped into action.

He apparently read the political riot act to Sir John, seeing to it that the referendum would be held the next day.

He later appointed a Commission of Inquiry, headed by the Trinidadian jurist Telford Georges, who was no stranger to Bermuda, having been a member of the commission into the police drug squad in the 1980s.

The commission turned on laws on Cabinet secrecy, which resulted in Sir John and Mrs Christopher refusing to answer questions about allegations that there was an attempt to delay the referendum.

Mr Mills, the Cabinet Secretary, told the commission that Lord Waddington asked “whether in fact it might be possible to carry on”.

Lord Waddington was “very concerned about the constitutional implications of the delay” and pressed the civil servants that a way “should be found to bring this under the law … some attempt should be made to try to open the polling stations if that was at all possible”, Mr Mills explained.

Mr Wade told the commission he felt Sir John was “very anxious not to have the referendum”, because he had staked his political future on a “yes” vote, and “it was my view that he was controlling the whole operation”.

Sir John denied giving “any instruction to the Secretary of the Cabinet or the Parliamentary Registrar or any other public officer, as to what should or should not have been done”.

Valerie Pethen, the assistant director of Government Information Services, told the commission she was present at a meeting on August 13 with Sir John, Mr Burgess, Mr Mills and Mr Mottley, at police headquarters at Prospect, following a meeting of the Emergency Measures Organisation.

“I do recall [the premier] saying we could have it in December,” she said.

When pressed by Mr Moniz, she denied hearing Sir John say he would prefer it was put off by five months, repeating that it was the only option that Sir John had offered.

Mr Mottley told the commission he did not remember Sir John making such a comment.

Mr Mottley, a Barbadian and father of Mia Mottley, the sitting prime minister, added: “I don’t remember anything of the conversation at all.”

Ms Pethen could not recall Mr Mills’s exact words when he called radio stations to announce the referendum “had been cancelled or postponed”.

This contradicted Mr Mills, who said that despite his announcement, he always held out the possibility of triggering Section 44 of the Referendum Act later in the day.

UBP backbencher David Dyer was livid, saying the Government was engaging in “crazy, banana republic-like activity”.

“If there ever was an example of why this isn’t the time to go to independence, this is the example,” he said, adding that while the PLP was criticised for urging supporters to abstain, his party was “disenfranchising the entire island”.

“The law doesn’t allow this strange behaviour that took place this morning,” Dr Dyer said. “I would have thought that an investigation would be required to get to the bottom of this. It is unusual and I find it disturbing.

“The Government has put forward these position papers saying they’re going to enshrine certain things in the Constitution, yet we have an Act of Parliament being breached.”

The commission, under Judge Georges, found that political interference was not involved in the near-cancellation, but found Mr Mills and his “senior Civil Service advisers” did not give proper priority to holding the referendum “on the date fixed by law”.

The commission also found that Mr Mills had emerged from a meeting of the Emergency Measures Organisation and made a radio announcement.

The commission never determined exactly what Mr Mills, a lawyer, had said, but was satisfied that he left the public with the impression the vote was “off that day”.

The commission confirmed that it was only Lord Waddington’s intervention that saw returning officers sent out to open their polling stations and adjourn voting until the next day.

Otherwise, Parliament would have had to be reconvened to set a new date.

In the end, only three recommendations were made by the commission: two of them being a new Referendum Act and amendments to the Parliamentary Election Act to account for an “Act of God”.

It further recommended that it should be made clear that future EMO recommendations for the public to stay home did not apply to emergency workers.

At the time of its release, Mr Mills said he was generally pleased with the report, adding: “Hopefully, my successor won’t be having to operate in a vacuum, like I was.”

The report added that the situation was not “total anarchy” as Mrs Cartwright DeCouto had described it, and that there had not been “a deliberate and perverse intent to flout the law”.

The commission concluded that not only was there no “smoking gun”, as Mr Moniz had claimed in his testimony, “there was, indeed no gun at all”.

“In the final analysis the system of government worked properly and there was no disregard shown for the rule of law,” the commission explained. “It is fair to state that the importance of holding the referendum on the date fixed by law was not given proper priority by Mr Mills and his senior Civil Service advisers.”

The commission concluded that there were no contingency plans for a change of course by the storm.

Once returning officers were sent out to open and then promptly close the polls, the delay in making the public announcement until after a 5.30pm Cabinet meeting “predictably magnified the suspicions that something devious was afoot”.

Voters did not formally learn of the postponement until 7pm.

The commission could not hear evidence about what was said in that Cabinet meeting, but even if an attempt had been made to put the vote off until Christmas, “the fact that it did not succeed, proves that the system had worked”.

The commission made three recommendations — new legislation and amendments to the Parliamentary Election Act to provide for an “Act of God”

Mr Mills maintained that conditions on August 15 were still “quite dangerous” and that he “took a different view” as to whether returning officers should have been sent out on schedule that morning.

One commentator wrote of the 1995 referendum: “Once again, we proved ourselves to be the laughing stock of the post-colonial world, as we made the extraordinary decision to remain a British territory — the only Black majority in post-colonial history to reject national independence in a free vote.”

Sir John was perceptive, however: “I have no regrets though, that the subject came up or, as party leader, of leading the direction taken by Government.

“I would rather have gone through this process than have sat by and avoided what was obviously going to be — and has been — a rather vindictive and vituperative attack on myself.

“I do not equivocate on independence being good for Bermuda and for Bermuda’s future.

“My only regret is that the party, through some of its members, was not able to hold the integrity and the morality of the system intact.”

Sir John formally resigned from the premiership on August 25.

Speaking in the wake of the rejection of the referendum, Sir John said: “Other former colonies sought independence to allow them to borrow money.

“We don’t need to borrow. We are well-off, we have a sound infrastructure, an educated population and hard-working people.

“Thus, comparatively speaking, we do seem to be ready. The question of whether we should go independent or not, though, is a matter for the people to decide … I’d like to see the Government and people prepare for it, even though we do not necessarily exercise the option of independence.

“I think we had a very strong abstention from the Opposition and a strong campaign launched by the anti-independence lobby,” he said. “It was difficult to imagine how such an event could actually produce a positive result. But what you’ll find out is that many leaders have done the same thing.

“Charles de Gaulle [of France] put his career on the line over a referendum, I think. And [The] Mahatma Gandhi [of India] was assassinated because he wouldn’t abandon principles that were dear to him, even though they were unpopular with many of his fellow countrymen.

“Ghandi tried to bring his country together — a country made up of literally hundreds of different religious, ethnic and linguistic groups.

“He tried to bridge the gaps between the different communities. And he paid for his principles with his life.

“You have to stand up for something. It was a question of believing in something and not just asking others to stand up for it; saying, ‘I’ll stake my political career on it’.

“[Anwar] Sadat [of Egypt] was a man who was prepared to sacrifice his whole career for probably one of the greatest challenges that anybody could take on … I think he was a man with a very strong commitment and at the same time, a man with a great deal of conciliation.

“It’s now in place and up to the party to pick a leader,” he said. “Once picked, we tell the Governor and I will formally resign as Premier. It could take as short as a week. I’ve asked them to do it as soon as possible.”

After the August 16, 1995 referendum, Sir John remained in Parliament, representing Paget East, until prorogation before the November 1998 election, when he chose to not contest the seat he had been handed for the 1972 election, as the only choice of former government leader Sir Henry Tucker.