Riches I hold in light esteem,/And Love I laugh to scorn;/And lust of fame was but a dream,

That vanished with the morn./And if I pray, the only prayer/That moves my lips for me is,

“Leave the heart that now I bear,/And give me liberty!” Yes, as my swift days near their

goal/’Tis all that I implore;/In life and death a chainless soul,/With courage to endure. - Emily Bronte, The Old Stoic

The time was the early 1950s. The setting North Africa. Eldon Trimingam was circumnavigating the Mediterranean basin in a rattle-trap Miles supermarket van shipped to North Africa for the purpose, the oceans of sand as unlikely a place as any to find a young Bermudian already establishing an international reputation for himself as a bluewater yachtsman. Along with two other Bermudians, he had embarked on a post-graduation adventure that was less grand tour than it was a grand awakening.

They skirted Algeria where French colonialism was embroiled in mortal combat with nationalism, the streets of some villages literally ankle-deep in blood .

They passed through Egypt where an absolute (and absolutely corrupt) monarch’s authoritarianism was in the process of being replaced by the military variety. He even paid an uncomfortable courtesy call on Major General<\p>Muhammed Naguib, the power behind a disintegrating throne, uniform dripping with gold braid and frogging, conversation dripping with .unspoken territorial ambitions.

Then they reached the deserts of Jordan. In the arid reaches just a few miles from what had, until recently, been British Mandatory Palestine, Eldon Trimingham and his traveling companions came upon the refugees. First trickles of them. Then in their hundreds and thousands. Homeless. Displaced. Dispossessed. The wretched of the earth. Palestinian Arabs who had flooded out from behind the newly drawn borders of the newly created state of Israel with what few pathetic possessions they could carry.

The epic scenes of human suffering that immediately followed on from the Israeli War of Independence made an profound impression on him. The human toll extracted by the conflict between Zionism and Pan-Arabism, with their absolutely non-negotiable counter claims to the small strip of land the British had gratefully abandoned to them, shocked him into a lifelong abhorrence of dogmatism.

It was, he said even many decades later, a form of shock therapy that most Bermudians, most people in fact, might benefit from. To bear witness to the terrible carnage that results when competing doctrines collide, when absolute certainties refuse to bow to the need for compromise or rapprochement, is to see just how costly a price is invariably paid in human misery.

If much of his leisure time in later years was spent navigating the sea, it’s fair to say the direction of his moral compass was permanently fixed in the wastes of North Africa and the Middle East. He always mistrusted those who dealt in what they claimed were absolute economic, political or social certainties, recognising their pristine theorising never, in practice, addressed all of the disorderliness and contingencies of real life. In fact, he believed such rigidly-held dogmas usually exacerbated the topsy-turviness of the world. He was quite right. Rollo May’s common sensical credo could have been Trimingham’s own: “People who claim to be absolutely convinced that their stand is the only right one are dangerous.<\p>Such conviction is the essence not only of dogmatism but of its more destructive cousin, fanaticism ... and it is a dead giveaway of unconscious doubt.”

There’s no getting away from the fact Eldon Havey Trimingham was a child of privilege. But unlike so many born with a running start in life, he recognised that with privilege comes responsibility. And he was always conscious of these responsibilities, putting back into our community his talents, time and tremendous compassion for his island home in ways which improved the quality of life for all who live here.

He was best known, of course, for helming Front Street’s flagship retailer, the family business that bore his name.<\p>The store was once synonomous with both belle epoque of Bermudian tourism and, less happily, with the old “shopocracy” which dominated Bermudian finances and politics a lifetime ago. But no one who spent more than a few minites in Eldon Trimingham’s company could possibly have caricatured him as a throwback to the old-style merchants of the 1920s and ‘30s, dividing their time between offering up prayers to the god of commerce, the golf courses and the Yacht Club.

<$>Trimingham recognised long before many of his contemporaries that atttemping to keep a little society like Bermuda divided with the colour bar in the second half of the 20th century was as absurd as it was dehumanising. When World War Two opened Bermuda up to the outside world, he was vocal in his belief Bermuda had to adapt to its new circumstances and could no longer run itself as a sort of quaint Edwardian time capsule for the benefit of upmarket visitors. It had to begin running itself for the benefit of Bermudians, particularly those Bermudians who had been economically and politically disenfranchised in the past. Failure to adapt would be tanamount to signing the death warrant of a community that then only had its charm to sell to the world.

While he was a Bermudian traditionalist, it was in the sense he believed the only traditions worth preserving were those that were dynamic, fluid and continuously developing. He never subscribed to or defended those traditions time made obsolete, whose supporters fought modernity by attempting to barricade themselves off from it. His pragmatism did not always make him popular with his peers; but it usually made him right.

The murderous sectarian conflicts he witnessed as a young man, his own wide reading of history and the dictates of his conscience, all combined to create in Eldon Trimingham a sense of decency that is quite as welcome to find in upper echelon business leaders as it is exceedingly rare.

Since his death last week he has been described more than once as the pluperfect gentleman and although he would have scoffed at such a term, his face crinkling into a trademark, slightly lopsided grin, it’s close enough to the truth to pass muster. And while no one, himself included, would ever have said he boasted more than a middleweight intellect, he continually fought above his weight because of a doggedness that made him into a living embodiment of his old English boarding school’s motto - “I persist, therefore I excel.”

During his long tenure as chairman of the Bank of Bermuda, Trimingham was able to yoke to some of his more progressive notions to a corporate engine that translated them into reality, The bank did not yank people’s mortgages under Eldon Trimingham’s stewardship, it granted them in record numbers. Working with the bank’s then general manager W.T. (Billy)<\p>Wilson, one of the unheralded architects of modern Bermuda, Trimingham demonstrated a committment to Bermuda and Bermudians that entirely transcended any shop-worn concepts of noblesse oblige. He genuinely believed it was vital for the Bank of Bermuda to empower the powerless, to give the working poor and the once disenfranchised the financial tools to better their lives and those of their children, to become stakeholders in the Bermudian community. In his own quiet way, he was something of an economic statesman, recognising that while there was tremendous inherited wealth in this country, there was also inherited poverty. And unless those in positions to do so actively addressed these inequities, then Bermuda’s generally enviable way of live could never long be maintained. This explains his implacable opposition to a Government tax regime based largely on import duties, a tax system that means Michael Bloomberg and Ross Perot end up paying the same for a head of lettuce or a tankful of gas as your grandmother. He believed it to be is inherently regressive. And penal. And increasingly destructive to the island’s social fabric

When it became clear to all but politicians who much prefer denying reality than dealing with it that<\p>Bermuda had priced itself out of the tourism market by the mid-1980s, a phenomenol growth spurt of the financial services sector precluded the collapse of Bermuda’s economy. Trimingham recognised early on this overemphasis on international business would exacerbate the stress lines in Bermudian society.

The bottom line is that.Government’s consumption-based revenue is dependent on Bermuda’s employees spending their pay buying dutiable goods. nsport and shopping and on the payroll of the tourism-related sector’s numerous employees. The financial services sector’s success was based on the self-evident premise any business not based on imports would escape Bermuda’s primary tax. As a consequence, its product would be tax free in Bermuda and thus unbeatably priced internationally.

“By moving to Bermuda, they would also escape earnings taxes their competition must pay at home <\m> how could they then lose?” said Trimingham. “Let the locals and their employees pay the taxes, we’ll make the money. The problem is, among many other inequities, the growing demands of the financial sector for public services, has led to an unsupportable increase in tourism’s taxation on payrolls and land tax, further pricing tourism out of business. The solution to the overpriced tourism product is for the financial services sector to finally step up to the plate and shoulder even a little of the excessive tax burden now paid daily by all local residents, restaurateurs, taxi drivers and, of course, the retailers.”