Published August 12, 2005

EDWIN Leather was not the British Government's first choice to succeed the murdered Sir Richard Sharples as Bermuda's Governor. Nor was he the second or third choice. In fact, Sir Edwin's name was last on a final short list of 12 possible Governors compiled by the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office in the weeks following Sir Richard's March 10, 1973 killing.

Better known in the UK as a radio and TV personality than a political figure, Canadian-born Sir Edwin had stayed in Britain at the end of his World War Two military service. He did not boast a particularly distinguished wartime record.

"After the declaration of war in 1939, he went overseas with the Canadian Artillery," reported The Daily Telegraph in the droll obituary it published following Sir Edwin's death in April.

"But after being hurt in a training exercise, he concentrated on organising gym, and baseball and football games, in southern England to occupy the bored troops waiting for action.

"This led to a weekly broadcast on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and, later, the job of commentating on the two Canadian-American football matches held at White City (in London) before the Normandy invasion in June, 1944."

After a post-war stint as a stockbroker in the City of London, Sir Edwin was approached to run for Parliament as the Conservative Party candidate in North Somerset in 1950.

"His success was built, above all, on his skills as a forceful and witty public speaker," reported The Telegraph. "His smooth Canadian accent made his voice immediately recognisable and he became a firm favourite with the Tory faithful for his forceful interventions at party conferences and his contributions to the radio programme Any Questions."

He was less successful, however, in charting anything resembling a coherent political philosophy and never left the backbenches for a Cabinet role during his 14-year stint in the House of Commons. His sometimes embarrassing detours into logical cul-de-sacs were the stuff of Commons legend.

"When the Royal College of Physicians produced a report on the health risks of smoking he dismissed it as unscientific tosh and described Lord Hailsham's support for it as 'hysterical nonsense'," said The Telegraph.

"Denying that he was influenced by the fact many of his North Somerset constituents worked for Imperial Tobacco, Leather said: 'I propose smoking until the day I die, just as my grandfather did until he was 95'. However, he later gave up."

Sir Edwin resigned from the House of Commons in 1964 at the age of 45, citing ill health.

He returned to the public eye in Britain in the late 1960s, first as vice-chairman of the Conservative Party (he proved an adept fund-raiser), then as chairman of Tory party conferences, a role which resulted in him once being unflatteringly described as "unofficial cheerleader-in-chief" for then-Prime Minister Edward Heath.

It was perhaps the well-publicised volte-face Sir Edwin had made on Britain's diminishing imperial role in the 1950s ? along with his friendship with Heath ? that led to him being plucked from near-obscurity and considered for the post of Bermuda's Governor in 1973.

"Leather began as an unflinching champion of Britain's imperial role and was a scathing critic of the Americans, accusing them of undermining Britain during the 1956 Suez crisis," said The Telegraph. "Yet, ever responsive to changing public opinion, he accepted that the empire of Queen Victoria was dead and became a passionate opponent of racism.

"Championing the granting of colonial Independence, he reminded his fellow backbenchers that the Queen was Head of a Commonwealth in which half the citizens were not white: 'Of course, the pace of change in Africa is going dangerously fast,' he commented at the height of the decolonisation period in the late 1950s, 'but thousands of dead French soldiers and civilians in Algeria testify to the folly of going too slow'."

But Prime Minister Heath had privately favoured the former Conservative MP and wartime intelligence operative Sir Fitzroy Maclean (1911-1996) for the Bermuda post.

Maclean, a confidante of Britain's wartime Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill, had served as the UK's liaison with then guerilla leader Josip Broz Tito in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia.

Tito and his partisan forces, although Communists, remained ardent nationalists and did not want to see a post-war Yugoslavia dominated by Moscow. Maclean is credited with drawing them away from their original Soviet sponsors and into the West's orbit.

Following the war, when Tito emerged as that fragmented Balkan nation's strongman cum president, Yugoslavia was never absorbed by the Soviet bloc.

Tito assiduously maintained Yugoslavia's non-aligned status during the Cold War while clearly leaning in favour of the West during major crises with his former backers in Moscow.

Maclean continued to serve as an unofficial conduit between Tito and the West up until the Yugoslav president's death in 1980.

Maclean, charismatic, intelligent and a renowned author (his autobiographical account of his wartime years with Tito, Eastern Approaches, was a multi-million-copy best-seller in the 1950s), was unofficially approached by the FCO and sounded out about the Bermuda post.

Heath believed Maclean's forthrightness, complete lack of pretence and international standing as an honest broker made him the ideal candidate to represent British interests in an island then riven by racial and sectarian divisions ? divisions that had culminated in the emergence of a Black Power revolutionary cell and the assassinations of both British-born Police Commissioner George Duckett in 1972 and Governor Sir Richard Sharples in 1973.

Maclean, while initially enthusiastic about the prospect, ultimately declined the Bermuda post. He cited the out-of-pocket expenses required to supplement a Government House housekeeping and entertainment budget inadequate to maintain the rambling Victorian property.

"I simply cannot afford the outlays that would be required of me to do the job," he said in a hand-written note included in an FCO docket on the search for a new Bermuda Governor.

When Maclean bowed out of the search to replace Sir Richard Sharples, the FCO proceeded to draw up a list of possible Governors drawn from the ranks of Britain's diplomatic corps.

These professional civil servants, all with impeccable foreign service pedigrees, did not necessarily have either the personalities or the strength of character for what was considered a highly sensitive ? and very high profile ? posting in the wake of the Sharples murder.

And when some of the names were run by then Premier Sir Edward Richards for his input, there was less than positive feedback from Bermuda's Cabinet Office.

The FCO then drew up another list of contenders, most drawn from British public life. Topping it was the Parliamentarian, military historian and broadcaster Alun Chalfont (1919-), a Minister in the FCO from 1970 to 1974 and a Privy Councillor ("He's a journalist; journalists aren't popular in Bermuda," reads a handwritten notation on a CV the FCO compiled while Chalfont was under consideration to be Governor).

Sir Edwin Leather's name was the final one on the revised list of possibilities. The bare-bones CV compiled by the FCO reads: "Sir Edwin Leather. Knighted 1962. Aged 53. Of Canadian origin. Served with the Canadian Army 1939-1945. Member of Parliament for North Somerset 1950-1964. Executive Committee British Commonwealth Producers Organisation 1960-1963. British Institute of Marketing 1963-1967. Director, William Baird Ltd. and Hill, Samuel & Co. Ltd. and other business interests."

When the other contenders either declined the offer to become Bermuda's Governor or proved to be non-starters, Sir Edwin was offered the position. He accepted immediately. He took up his post here in July 1973.