IT was a time when the most violent noise to disturb Bermuda's all-prevailing air of tranquillity was usually the backfiring of a two-stroke Mobylette engine.

But on the night of March 10, 1973 at least three men infiltrated the grounds of Government House, simply stepping over the waist-high wall that surrounds the perimeter of the 45-acre property.

They made their way to the terraced gardens outside Government House's main entrance, hiding themselves in the shadows.

Inside Government House a dinner party was breaking up. The guests were departing. Governor Sir Richard Sharples was, if he followed his usual routine, about to take his Great Dane Horsa outside for a walk before bed.

The killers had made dry-runs before, familiarising themselves with the property, calculating the most risk-free escape routes, prowling outside the shutterless Government House windows and committing Sharples' evening activities to memory.

Two of the intruders were professional criminals, small-timers who had fallen under the spell of a political guru from the now-decimated ranks of the paramilitary Black Beret Cadre (BBC); the third man is believed to have been their Rasputin, Beret Yellow (pseudonym) who exerted an almost mesmeric hold over the young thugs ? convincing them they were the vanguard of a revolutionary movement that would eradicate the vestiges of British colonial rule in Bermuda and usher in the dawn of a quasi-socialistic Utopia.

There was minimal security at Government House; there had never been any need for it. In his Christmas message the previous year, Sharples had joked about finding a young boy wandering the grounds of Government House one afternoon. The young intruder told Sharples he had trespassed on the property on the off-chance of meeting the celebrated Government House dog rather than the Governor.

At 11.45 p.m., as was his wont, Sharples strolled onto the terrace, accompanied by his 25-year-old aide-de-camp Captain Hugh Sayers and Horsa, a hound of Baskervillean proportions.

The two men and the dog turned south and walked directly into the gunmen's line of fire.

Apparently Horsa, a good-natured animal but one capable of producing blood-chillinghowls if alarmed, did not sense the killers' presence. There were no warning barks from the dog.

There was no noise at all except for the silver-bell chiming of tree frogs and the exchange of small talk between the Governor and his ADC until the gun roared.

At least four shots were fired.

Sayers was killed instantly, hands buried in his dinner jacket pockets; he did not even have time to reach for the sidearm he had routinely carried since arriving in Bermuda the previous October, a precaution the ADC was advised to take given the still unsolved murder of Police Commissioner George Duckett in September, 1972

Two rounds mortally wounded Sharples, who died before reaching King Edward VII Memorial Hospital. The dog also died. The angry fusillade ended in seconds. But the echoes of gunfire reverberated across Bermuda for years to come.

Erskine Durrant (Buck) Burrows confessed to his role in the Government House killings as well as his role in assassinating George Duckett; Larry Winfield Tacklyn was acquitted of involvement in the Sharples/Sayers killings but was convicted along with Burrows of murdering supermarket executives Victor Rego and Mark Doe in April, 1973. Burrows and Tacklyn were executed in December, 1977.

Beret Yellow was never charged in connection with any of the killings. He now lives abroad.

HREE thousand miles and four time-zones away, British Prime Minister Edward Heath awoke to news of the Bermuda double-murder. At Chequers, the British Prime Minister's country residence in the rural county of Buckinghamshire, an urgent telex from the duty clerk at 10 Downing Street Office was slipped into the dossier of papers Heath would scan over his spartan breakfast ? several cups of strong coffee supplemented by a meagre ration of dry toast ? on the morning of Sunday, March 11.

"News has come through from the Foreign Office that Sir Richard Sharples, Governor of Bermuda, has been shot and killed," reads the message. "The ADC has also been killed, but Lady Sharples is quite safe. There are no details as yet of the assassination."

A copy of the initial urgent communiqu? Deputy Governor Ian (Tim) Kinnear sent to the FCO in the hours following the double-killing was attached to the message Heath received from Downing Street.

A close personal friend of Sharples, a former Conservative MP who shared the Prime Minister's passion for yachting, Heath was doubtless more concerned with news of the Bermuda murders than the other briefs in that morning's file including a communiqu? on the new constitution Morocco had adopted.

"The murder of Sir Richard Sharples and the ADC appears to be an isolated incident on the same pattern as the murder of the Commissioner of Police last Sept.," said Kinnear. "The strong presumption must be made that the murders are political but there is no unrest and no ? repeat no ? indication of an insurrection.

"It may be necessary to detain a no. of people, including the hard core of the Black Beret Cadre. It will only be possible after the declaration of a (State of) Emergency and I am holding a meeting of Executive Council (now the Cabinet) at 0900 to consider this.

"Scotland Yard are sending a murder squad. It is most important that they get today's BOAC flight. If there is any difficulty getting them on, I would be grateful if BOAC could be asked to make room for them by turning other passengers off."

The detectives arrived on schedule.

In conjunction with the Bermuda Police Special Branch, they had tentatively identified the killers and the likely motive for the assassinations within weeks.

But what the investigators learned and what they could prove in the Bermuda courts were not always the same. As a result, police pursued two separate lines of inquiry into the Government House killings ? lines that ran in parallel but which did not always converge.

With the help of informants from Bermuda's criminal underworld and evidence that would be deemed inadmissible in a courtroom, a scenario soon emerged. It suggested the Government House killings were planned only indirectly as a against the colonial regime but more as a decisiveby one of two rival camps attempting to consolidate power within the ranks of the Black Beret Cadre.

In the weeks leading up to his murder, Sharples had presided over meetings of the Government House intelligence committee where he was briefed by senior police officers on the activities of the now decimated rump of the BBC.

All but dissolved, the radical group with a paramilitary agenda for Bermuda was in the midst of a bitter round of internal bloodletting. BBC founder and strongman John Hilton Bassett had fled the island late in 1972 after being implicated in the theft of a cache of surplus Bermuda Regiment rifles.

Bassett's abrupt departure for Canada had left a vacuum in the BBC leadership.

Charismatic, persuasive and personable, Bassett had run the BBC in classic steel-hand-in-velvet-glove manner, holding together the conflicting personalities ? and agendas ? of his diverse membership through sheer force of will.

Now there was a power struggle raging between the ambitious and ruthless Beret Yellow and Beret Black (pseudonym), another ideologue whose strident Black Power/Marxist-Leninist dogma and didactic personal manner had resulted in most BBC members drifting away from the organisation in the months following Bassett's decision to exile himself from Bermuda.

"The members of the remaining small hardcore of the BBC held a number of meetings during the month (February, 1973), three of these being held at a private house," reported Sharples in the last of his monthly communiqu?s to the FCO on Bermuda's internal security situation.

The memorandum is dated March 6, 1973 and reveals in prescient detail the radical thinking that provided the impetus for his own murder.

"Beret Yellow seems to regard Beret Black (as) the last obstacle to him becoming the acknowledged leader of the Cadre," said Sharples.

"He has become increasingly vocal and is understood to be planning to acquire a new headquarters for the group.

"He is reported to have said that the BBC is to be reorganised and to have urged other members to gather weapons 'in preparation for the struggle'.

"Beret Yellow is also reported to have said that once the BBC was reformed a member would be sent to Cuba or Tanzania for guerrilla training. Although Beret Yellow's previous attempts to revive the Cadre have met with little success, the present frequent contacts between certain members suggest that he could be more successful this time and a close watch is being kept on developments . . .

"(The reorganisation) of the hard core of the Black Beret Cadre and the possibility of further arms being in the hands of (members) is a disquieting development."

Four days after dictating this memorandum, the power struggle between Beret Yellow and Beret Black for control of the rudderless BBC likely culminated in Sharples' own murder.

ITHIN days of the Government House murders, Tim Kinnear ? now serving as Acting Governor ? forwarded the police working theory on the killings to the FCO. He shared confidential information with the FCO to the effect that the Sharples assassination was probably intended to telegraph a message to the community that the BBC was back, bolder than ever and under unchallengeable new management.

"The evidence available suggests that young Beret Yellow, the present leader of the hard core of the Cadre, knew what was going to happen (on March 10)," said Kinnear. "His behaviour on the night in question was most uncharacteristic as he went out of his way to be conspicuous and to be seen by people not connected with the Cadre and with whom he would never mix normally.

". . . Unlike the occasion of the murder of the previous Commissioner of Police, there is no wall of silence. There is a good deal of information coming in and everyone interviewed in the house-to-house enquiries being conducted has been most co-operative . . ."

"In the absence of any firm evidence, I must proceed on certain basic assumptions.

"I think these must be that Sir Richard's murder and the murder of the Commissioner of Police were connected: that the motive must be political (although there may be a criminal element involved); that if the two murders are connected they establish a pattern of assassination of the principal symbols of colonialism and law enforcement and we can, therefore, expect a further attempt or attempts."

Kinnear said if the motive was in fact political, then the island's decision-makers had to consider what the perpetrators ultimately hoped to achieve.

"In the days when the BBC was an overt organisation, its philosophy was a mixture of the need to overthrow the 'system' and attacks on the 'invisible' (colonial) Government, which stood in its way," he reported.

"Its thinking was revolutionary, but woolly; it had no clear idea what it would replace the system with. It is not unreasonable, therefore, that if the small hard core of the Cadre is the moving force behind the murders, this arises out of a sense of frustration at their failure to achieve change and gain public support by overt methods; and an attempt on their part, therefore, to eliminate the 'invisible Government' which stands in their way.

". . . The first priority, clearly, is to find those responsible for the murders. Arising out of this is the need to improve our (police) intelligence organisation and to improve protective security at Government House and other houses. We will also have to maintain a police guard on a number of people for a considerable time to come. These measures are designed to prevent another assassination; except in so far as improved intelligence may help to find (the individuals) responsible, they do not really get to the root of the problem.

"You have in Bermuda a country which contains the inevitable frictions of any multiracial society but which, by standards elsewhere, works pretty well with the races living alongside each other harmoniously enough.

"It is too wealthy, and the wealth is well enough distributed, for it to provide fertile ground for revolutionary philosophies. Its main weakness, paradoxically, lies in the fact the fact that it has so far been too successful as a multiracial society, with the result that the two-thirds black majority, quite contrary to the normal pattern elsewhere, is not reflected in a wholly black Government.

"This, coupled with the reluctance of the 'establishment' to think about Independence and the ineffectiveness of the Progressive Labour Party's performance, produces a sense of frustration among the young black people which is directed primarily at the symbols of colonialism ? more particularly as they are also the symbols of law and order.

"There is a resentment not only because these symbols are foreign but because there is a mistaken belief that Britain is actually responsible for holding Bermuda back from Independence (you will remember that even PLP leader Walter Robinson said he found it hard to believe that Britain would willingly give Bermuda Independence).

Kinnear said while he believed police would successfully solve the murders of Sharples, Sayers and Police Commissioner Duckett, he did not feel Britain could ever resolve the underlying social tensions that produced the assassinations short of granting the island Independence.

"It is difficult to say whether this frustration goes so deep that it alone could be responsible for the recent murders," said Kinnear. "Certainly there is a known small number of bitter young men . . .

"Whatever proves to be the case, I am quite convinced that the frustrations that do exist among black youth and elsewhere (in the community) are going to grow rather than diminish; and that for every person who considers the Governorship an expensive anachronism now, there will be two in two to three years' time."

N FCO official dispatched to Bermuda for the funerals of Sharples and Sayers on March 16, 1973 recorded his impressions of an island that was still in a state of shock following the assassinations. "The island is completely quiet and 'normal' save for the two murders in the background," said the FCO officer. "The funeral of Sir R. Sharples, while admirably organised and conducted, was watched by considerable crowds. The people were subdued and orderly but their real mood (apart from one or two groups of young blacks who had obviously positioned themselves deliberately to mock) was difficult to assess.

"The atmosphere is a mixture of shame, embarrassment, a desire to shed responsibility ("This is totally out of character for Bermuda"), apathy, anxiety about loss of confidence and the effect on the tourist trade, and (on the part of at least some members of the white establishment) fear of possible physical danger to themselves."

The FCO official said coming to any definitive conclusions on the tensions underlying the island's superficial calm was next to impossible: Bermuda was akin to a socio-political Rorschach inkblot test, lending itself to any number of divergent interpretations.

"What lies below the surface is a matter of speculation and argument," he said. "The Chief Justice, for instance, said it was a sick society with marked racial tensions. The Police Commissioner, on the other hand, thought race relations were good and that the trouble was confined to some 250 youngsters inclined towards crime, drug-taking and the general indiscipline of modern youth.

"Mr. Kinnear's assessment, with which I would agree, is that despite prosperity and some recent progress in communal relations, there may well be continuing resentment among some of the black community (which the Progressive Labour Party is perfectly willing to exploit for political purposes): but there does not appear to be that state of general, seething dissatisfaction which is the prelude to disorder."

The FCO official, who informally interviewed Bermuda Government and Opposition figures during his flying visit as well as British officials posted on the island, returned to the UK having formed a mental picture of an island in the throes of a cultural identity crisis.

"The two murders are in a way strangely dissociated from the political background," he said. "On available intelligence, however, it is reasonable to assume the existence of a small 'revolutionary' cell, formed of members of the Black Beret Cadre movement gone underground, who are known to possess arms, and to have as their target what might be described as the removal of the symbols of colonial authority in Bermuda . . .

"The three senior expatriate officials (Mr. Kinnear, the Chief Justice and the Attorney General), whom I met together, were unanimous in expressing grave concern over the continuance of the present constitutional situation in Bermuda. Mr. Kinnear said that he knew that Sir R. Sharples' mind had also been moving in the same direction. The colonial set-up was an anachronism, positively disliked by a section of the community and no more than tolerated as a necessity by most of the rest."

The FCO official concluded that British interests would be best served by beginning a policy of "quiet disengagement" from Bermuda ? and positioning the island for eventual Independence.