Baroness Sharples
Made lively contributions to politics for decades after her husband was assassinated in Bermuda
BARONESS SHARPLES, who has died aged 99, made an energetic contribution to the House of Lords for 44 years after the assassination in Bermuda of her husband, the Conservative Mp-turned-colonial governor Sir Richard Sharples.
Well into her 90s Pamela Sharples, still playing golf and sustained by a nightly glass of pink champagne – “it’s a very nice drink but I must get back to whisky” – spoke and voted in the Upper House, only retiring in 2017.
In 2009 she took a swing with her handbag at a cyclist who had ignored a red light and narrowly missed her. Two years later – having survived a near-fatal bout of pneumonia – she urged the public to stop feeding urban foxes after seeing one “happily trotting around” the entrance to Westminster Underground station.
Lady Sharples also made a memorable contribution in 2011 to a debate on why peers’ wives received a title, while husbands of peeresses did not. Exasperated by its poor quality, she declared: “I have killed off three husbands. Aren’t there more important matters the Government should be concerned with?”
She was married first to Richard Sharples, then to the businessman Group Captain Patrick de Laszlo, and finally to Douglas Swan, who also predeceased her.
“I was quite happy being married to Mr de Laszlo,” she told the Lords, “and going to hotels as Mr de Lazlo and Baroness Sharples. A few eyebrows were raised, but that didn’t matter.”
She was born Pamela Newall on February 11 1923 to Lieutenantcommander Keith Newall and the former Violet Ashton; she lost her only brother during the war.
Educated at Southover Manor, Lewes, and in Florence, Pamela grew up in Hampshire, and also at St James’s Palace. After her father died when she was 15, her mother married Lord Claud Hamilton, comptroller and treasurer to Queen Mary until her death in 1953.
After war broke out, Pamela helped the Red Cross with prisoners of war at St James’s Palace – “we lived there anyway” – then in 1941 joined the WAAF, learning to drive an articulated lorry.
Every weekend she went to the 400 Club in Leicester Square. “I always drank milk,” she told the Daily Mail in 2011, “which by the end of the war was disgusting because it was so watered down. I didn’t drink any alcohol until I married.
“I had quite a few boyfriends before Richard. I behaved myself, though; I was quite happy to say no, so they were able to go and find someone who’d say yes.”
Once the war ended, she met Major Richard Sharples of the Welsh Guards. “He won the MC and had a large part of his leg blown off – he was lucky not to lose it. But he was a super chap and very nice looking, and a bit taller than me.”
They married in the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace in 1946, with Queen Mary – who during the war had taken Pamela shopping and to the theatre – in attendance. “One on one, she was fine,” she would recall of King George V’s widow.
The couple settled in Hampshire, where Richard worked for Field Marshal Montgomery. Pamela played billiards with Monty – “I always won, rather embarrassingly.”
Her husband was elected for Sutton & Cheam in 1954, and for the next 18 years she was the wife of a backbench MP. Richard was not a political high-flyer, but he became a sailing friend of Edward Heath, and when in 1972 the governorship of Bermuda fell vacant, Heath offered him the job with a knighthood. He accepted, and Pamela took up a new role as a colonial governor’s wife.
Heath’s decision proved a disaster. The Conservatives lost the subsequent by-election at Sutton & Cheam to the Liberal Graham Tope on a 32 per cent swing, and, on the evening of March 10 1973, Sir Richard was gunned down outside the Governor’s mansion, along with his ADC, Captain Hugh Sayers of the Welsh Guards, and Horsa, his Great Dane.
A small informal dinner party had just broken up, and the governor – still in his dinner jacket – had decided to go for a stroll in the garden with Captain Sayers. Just yards from their front door, they were ambushed by Black Power militants.
The murdered men’s coffins were taken by the frigate Sirius to St George’s, where six days later they were interred – with Horsa – in the graveyard of St Peter’s Church.
A manhunt was launched, leading to the arrest of Erskine Durrant “Buck” Burrows. He confessed to the shootings, and at his trial was also convicted of murdering Bermuda’s police commissioner George Duckett and the owner and bookkeeper of a local supermarket.
In his confession, Burrows wrote that his motive was to “make the black people aware of the evilness and wickedness of the colonialist system on this island”.
A co-accused, Larry Tacklyn, was acquitted of killing Sharples and Sayers but convicted of the supermarket murders.
Both men were sentenced to death. Burrows did not care about his fate, but Tacklyn expected a last-minute reprieve from the Privy Council in London.
On December 2 1977 both were hanged at Bermuda’s Casemates Prison– the last people executed under British rule anywhere in the world. Three days of rioting followed, causing damage estimated at $2 million. The Bermuda Regiment was unable to cope, troops from the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers being flown in as reinforcements.
Lady Sharples was left devastated. “Richard was doing such a good job, and so was Hugh. He was a very nice young man. And Horsa was a lovely dog. Our four children adored him.”
Yet she refused to be bitter: “How does bitterness help you? I just felt what a terrible waste of lives it was.”
Over the next few weeks she wore white and insisted the killings were a “temporary insanity” rather than anything more sinister. The day she left for England, she made a point of saying goodbye to the local fishermen – “such nice people – they always chatted to me when I bought my fish.”
The family did not return to Bermuda for many years, though they did eventually buy a house there.
Returning to England was an ordeal. “I was 50, my four children were grown, and I didn’t know what I was going to do.” Moreover, the Inland Revenue refused to accept that Sir Richard had been killed in the line of duty, so Lady Sharples had to sell the family home at Chawton, Hampshire, to meet death duties.
However, her courage was recognised by Heath, who had her created a life peer in July 1973. This gave her a new interest – despite the tedium of some of the debates – and senior Tory peers took her under their wing.
She was still grieving for her husband when in 1977 she met Patrick de Laszlo at a lunch party. They married soon after, but then de Laszlo was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer; within three years he was dead.
In 1983 she married her third husband, Douglas Swan. For a while they ran a pub at Horsington, Somerset, winning an Egon Ronay award for their salmon fishcakes topped with prawns. But Swan developed heart problems, dying in 1995.
Lady Sharples incurred unwelcome publicity in 2016 as one of three British politicians – along with Lord Ashcroft and Michael Mates – named in the “Panama Papers”, the leaked documents from a law firm in Panama about the offshore holdings of the world’s super-wealthy.
Alongside the concealment of billions by others, the papers showed that since 1995 Lady Sharples had been the sole owner of Nunswell Investments, an offshore investment company in the Bahamas.
Her lawyers notified the Lords’ authorities of “Baroness Sharples’ oversight in registering her interest as a director of Nunswell Investments Ltd” and that she received “no remuneration, nor any income or capital from that company”.
Lady Sharples was a member of the review body on Armed Forces’ pay in 1979-81, a director of TVS television between 1981 and 1993, and a trustee of the Wessex Medical Trust.
She is survived by her two sons and two daughters from her first marriage.
Baroness Sharples, born February 11 1923, died May 19 2022