The real Death in Paradise
ITWAS like an opening scene in the hit TV series Death in Paradise.
A war hero and his aide-de-camp peel off from a dinner party in the sub-tropical grounds of the governor’s mansion on Bermuda to walk his Great Dane Horsa.
They amble through manicured lawns and clumps of palm and banana trees while the azure sea laps at a white sandy beach.
It was the night of the annual police ball and only a solitary officer on duty heard the flurry of shots. He rushed through the scent of the native flowers to find the bodies of the two men and the dog. Their assailant had fled.
Dead on the ground 50 years ago this week was the Governor of Bermuda, Sir Richard Sharples, 56, Captain Hugh Sayers of the Welsh Guards, 26, and the Great Dane.
Unlike the TV series starring Ralf Little set on the fictional Caribbean island of Saint Marie, there was no humour or romance in this tragedy.
It implicated the Black Power movement, sparked riots as the remnants of the Empire crumbled, and would end on the scaffold.
Roadblocks were swiftly set up, but by then the killer or killers had disappeared, this despite the British Overseas territory being a land mass of just 21 square miles spread over a myriad of small islands, some connected by bridges.
Sparking a global sensation, the killings came six months after the then-unsolved killing of Bermuda Police commissioner George Duckett, who was shot while checking a security light at his home.
The Troubles in Northern Ireland had seen the terrorist targeting of British officers, but this time suspicion fell on the Black Panthers who were engaged in violent civil rights campaigns across the US.
Sir Richard was the epitome of the stiff-upper-lip British soldier.
During Second World War service as a major in the Welsh Guards he was, in December 1940, awarded the Military Cross for “gallant conduct in action with the enemy” during the retreat to Dunkirk.
In 1945 he was mentioned in dispatches for services in Italy and shortly after the war was awarded the Silver Star, America’s thirdhighest military combat decoration.
By the time he left the army in 1953 he was a lieutenant colonel.
He was elected Conservative MP for Sutton and Cheam the following year and a mutual love of yacht
ing led to a long-lasting friendship with future Tory Leader Ted Heath.
On becoming prime minister in 1970, Heath made his pal a minister of state in the Home Office.
He resigned his seat and ministerial job in 1972 to take the Bermuda governorship. Sharples was made a Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George.
But such trappings of imperial power put a target on his back.
Two thirds of Bermuda’s 53,000 population were black. Although it was ruled by the black-led United Bermuda Party, it was seen by poorer citizens as a puppet of the white Establishment. A campaign was growing to follow the Bahamas and seek full independence.
The assassinations in the grounds of Government House in the town of Hamilton could, it was suspected, be part of that campaign.
Seven months later 26-year-old petty criminal Larry Tacklyn was arrested for a gun raid on a supermarket which left the co-owner and a bookkeeper dead. Tacklyn implicated a criminal confederate, Erskine Durrant “Buck” Burrows.
The 33-year-old was linked to a militant Bermudian black power group called the Black Beret Cadre.
Burrows remained on the run, robbing a bank of £28,000. When he was caught he confessed to shooting Sharples and Sayers and at his trial was also convicted of murdering the police commissioner Duckett the previous September and the two supermarket executives in April 1973. He was sentenced to death.
In his confession he wrote: “The motive for killing the Governor was to make the people, black people in particular, aware of the evilness of the colonialist system in this island. Secondly, it was to show that these colonialists were just ordinary people – who eat, sleep and die just like anybody else – and we need not stand in fear and awe of them.”
He invoked the Black Berets’ agenda to achieve “freedom by any means necessary”. Taking their cue from the Black Panthers, the Berets exhorted members and Bermudian youth to prepare for “the coming conflict between blacks and whites”.
Co-accused Tacklyn was acquitted of assassinating Sharples and Sayers but convicted of taking part in the supermarket killings.
The killers remained in jail while the case was appealed in London.
But both men were hanged on December 2, 1977, the last people to be executed under British rule anywhere in the world.
Three days of rioting followed. Sharples had in 1946 married and had two sons and two daughters. His widow Pamela was made a life peer as Baroness Sharples.
After long service in the Upper Chamber she died last year.
On Bermuda, independence was decisively rejected in a 1995 referendum. It remains a British Overseas Territory and a major tourist destination.