We were sitting in the small den of Dickie Tucker’s South Shore Road cottage in Paget when he suddenly paused in the long narration documenting his life. It was an awkward pause because Tucker had spoken of the early years recounting his peregrinations to the United States, Canada and then finally back to Bermuda; yet, he was still trying to figure out why anyone would want to write about him. To Tucker, his life had been spent simply as it should, with a great deal of determination and sense of humour. That others should find it fascinating strikes him as being odd. Still, he was willing to participate in a narration that would provide him with the opportunity to indulge in one of his God-given talents – story telling. And as the hours rolled by his narration became a rollicking story about not only his life, but also about a Bermuda that is fast slipping into the abyss of history.
“I wouldn’t exactly say that I had a flair for being an undertaker, but I always understood it. Besides, I have always found it interesting and looked up it as a corporeal act of mercy as well,” Tucker says, resuming a story that began when he was born at the turn of the century to Canon Arthur Tucker in St. David’s, at a time when the only means of getting to the mainland was by boat.
Tucker prepared for these interview sessions by sifting through several empty Havana cigar boxes now filled with the barest outlines of stories written on index cards. He points out that he selects the stories to be recounted according to his audience, and quickly glances through a small select pile of cards before moving back in his chair and time.
Tucker’s early years discovered him to be much less a student than a person of his word. But while he never proved himself at academics, abandoning them finally following a year at a seminary in Wisconsin, he proved himself a true friend of seafarers. It was a long association that began when he promised, as a young boy of fifteen years, to care for the grave of a murdered sailor. It continued when he returned to Bermuda after several years spent in Canada as a cook and then investor, when he opened the Bermuda Sailor’s Home.
“My association with the sea started way back when as a young teenager my father used to take me out to the square riggers in St. George’s Harbour,” says Tucker. “My father was a very good seaman. He loved his boat and used to visit his people in it, including those on ships. His skiff was usually the last to be pulled out before hurricane season came because people always called for him and he used to go out in all weather across the harbour to see them.”
The Bermuda Sailors’ Home first occupied a single room in a building in St, George’s, offering a place visiting sailors could call home while on the Island. It was a meager living for a man who had just taken on a wife, and so Tucker also opened up a florist’s shop in Old Town. But in 1930 he faced bankruptcy in both ventures, and with a grant form the British Sailors’ Society opened a new Sailors’ Home in Hamilton. It proved eminently more successful, and the ensuing years spent operating the home provided the experience upon which Tucker later drew in turning his hand to undertaking.
“I remember one year a ship came to Bermuda which a dead sailor,” recalls Tucker, now in full flight, and speaking directly at a small tape recorder set down before him as if it were a deaf ant. In those days sailors who died at sea were brought to the nearest port to be buried. Without refrigeration and embalming methods, sailors’ bodies would decompose rapidly, and so they were buried where they were landed and often far from home. As superintendent of the Sailor’s Home, Tucker would make all the arrangements for burials, and through his Guild of the Holy Compassion, care for the graves in perpetuity.
“The captain of the ship dropped the body ashore, and without waiting went back out to his ship,” says Tucker, “I later called the captain on the radio and asked him about the man’s papers. He replied that they were on the body, so I went through his clothes and found out that he had been awarded the Victoria Cross (Britain’s highest gallantry medal instituted in 1856) during the First World War. I rang Admiralty House and got hold of the flag lieutenant. He told me that he would check the records and sure enough the man had been awarded the VC.
“I received a call later from the lieutenant telling me that he would send down three petty officers and a commanding officer for the funeral, and would also arrange for a gun carriage. Next day the whole army turned out. It was one of the biggest funerals that ever took place. But you see, I don’t think any more of myself for doing that. Something told me that it was the right thing to do, and the wrong thing to have done would have been to ignore the whole thing.”
What began as the right thing to do soon evolved into a close association with the A.J. Perinchief & Co. undertaking firm. “I always helped Mr Perinchief with the seamen’s burials,” says Tucker. “The shipping agents always used to come to me to arrange the funerals for them, and when Willis Perinchief died I joined partnership with his nephew Albert Perinchief. We were very successful.”
Like almost every other business in Bermuda, funeral homes cater to separate and distinct groups. The delineation is perhaps best described by William Zuill, quoted in the April 16, 1979 edition of the New Yorker: “You will find that (Perinchief) tends to do the older families. I always look for that, perhaps it comes from my days on the (Royal Gazette) paper, when people would call in death notices. Now, there’s the white undertaker, Bulley-Graham. Mr Bulley was an Englishman, and the other people who have arrived comparatively recently tend to go to his firm. But with the older families it will be Albert Perinchief…”
It was natural then, that it should be to Perinchief and Co. that the Royal Navy turned when former British Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald died aboard the Reina d Pacifico while en route to South America. As with most Bermudians, Tucker’s approach to the story is in-direct:
“There was a boy that got killed on a ship while using a winch. He put his foot against it and got caught in the rope, which flung him down and killed him. I was called out, and the captain asked me to get the boy off the ship as quickly as possible because the moral of the crew was very low. I rang up my partner, Albert Perinchief, and asked him to send a coffin down right away. But he replied that we only had a cedar coffin in stock. You see, in those days, as well as now, cedar coffins were terribly expensive. But I told Perinchief to send it anyway, and I fixed the boy up the best I could, and my father buried him the next day.
“The captain of the ship was very impressed with the funeral. We even had a proper railing around the grave, and he came up to me and offered his thanks, adding, ‘Magnificent coffin, magnificent. I’ve never seen such a coffin.’
“’Well,’ I told him, ‘it was built for the late Ramsay MacDonald former Prime Minister of England. He and his daughter set out for South America, but he died half-way there, and so he was brought ashore to Bermuda and we had orders to get the best cedar coffin we could find. And oh, my God, we French polished that coffin. It was the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. But when Ramsay MacDonald’s body got here, the order was cancelled because they had found a coffin on board, a rough box with all the nails adrift. God have mercy it was an awful looking box, but we put a flag over the coffin and they took him to Westminister Abbey and then Scotland where they cremated him.’
“So we had the cedar coffin we made just for MacDonald, and nobody would buy it because it was so expensive. So it lay up there for God knows how long until that poor boy was killed. When we got the order for the boy, I called up Albert and I said for God’s sake send Ramsay down because I thought I’d never put anybody in it. So I told the captain of the ship, ‘You see, a little humble deck boy is put in the ex-Prime Minister’s coffin that’s never been used. If that’s not democracy, nothing else is.’”
Tucker’s long association with the men of the world’s oceans grew from the days when times were different. During his childhood, Tucker would see great numbers of barques and schooners come into St. George’s Harbour, where they would lay up for weeks and even months before leaving port. Today, it is vastly different, with the regular visits of container ships coming into port for only a day or two at most.
“Things on ships have changed so much because of technology and automation,” says Tucker ruefully. “Ships used to come alongside for weeks at a time and we would get to know the sailors before they left.” Tucker remembers the days before ships were equipped with wirelesses, when local shipping agents would keep a keen eye out on the horizon for the sails of ships, and later for their tell-tale wisps of smoke. As soon as a ship was sighted, the agents would send “runners” to sail out to see if an agent was needed.
“You’ve got to realize that communications were very, very bad,” says Tucker. “For example, a German tanker came up her to take on bunkers in 1914; came right up to Five Fathom Hole and the crew didn’t know that war had broken out. So the Royal Navy ship stationed here at the time went out and took her prisoner. It was the easiest capture of the war.
“One elderly lady who heard that the ship was here wouldn’t take off her clothes the night it arrived. She wore her best black all night because she wasn’t going to have the Germans catch her in her night gown. And she took all her silver out and buried it in a banana patch – now that’s what they call being ready.”
Tucker’s narration soon becomes a mosaic depicting a Bermuda that was different in almost every respect, not the least of which was the undertaking business. “In the old days funeral directors were little more than carpenters,” says Tucker. “You used to order the coffins to your house where loving friends and family did the rest.”
And like almost every other human endeavour, there were the occasional slips. Tucker recalls how a deceased woman once found herself in a water tank when her family tried to ship her out of the house through a window and the coffin slipped out of their hands and fell into the tank. Or the time when a box of bricks arrived from Britain instead of the remains of a dead husband. Tucker’s father insisted the only way to minimize such catastrophes was to ignore them.
“My father, he was very, very solid, and if any mishap took place at the grave he always used to say, ‘Don’t draw attention to it. If you draw attention to it becomes worse’,” Tucker recalls with the same equanimity his father obviously recommended. One supposes that Tucker gleaned the ability to remain oblivious in the face of catastrophe from his father, whom he often observed first hand from the front pew of St. Peter’s Church.
“I remember one Friday, my father asked his sexton to fetch him a snapper from town,” recalls Tucker. “The young boy went right off, got the fish and came right up to the window of the church which was right beside the altar where my father was preaching service. And he shouted to my father that he couldn’t find a snapper but he got a rock fish instead. My father made a most worthy ecclesiastical bow and went right on with the service. Those things never bothered him.”
But there were times that a stiff upper lip did no good in covering up mistakes, and after a bit of prodding Tucker remembers such an instance.
“I was out on a ship called the Elisa one night when she was hove to in Five Fathom Hole,” Tucker begins not at all sure he should repeat this tale. His hesitancy is not so much the result of concern for the repercussions of putting such a story in print as it is for the veracity of embellishments added over the years.
“I’ve been telling this story for so many years now that I’m beginning to wonder if it really did happen.” But Tucker continues, pausing only momentarily before granting himself literary licence, and launches himself fully into the past:
“It was rough as hell out there in the open water, and as I was coming down the ladder of the Elisa, a wave came up and give me a good one. Well, I was drinking in those days and if your pants were full of salt water that was good excuse to have a drink. So I went to the Black Horse tavern and inside was an old school contemporary.
“He asked me if I had been away, and of course I replied that I had just returned from Canada. ‘Oh, by de vay,’ he said suddenly looking up from his drink, ‘Mama’s dead. Course, you know papa and mama never got along too vell ‘cause she owned de house. Being de youngest I had to be careful after her death ‘cause de vay tings vere my brother could get avery’ting.'
“ ‘Surely those things weren’t going through your head even before you buried your mother', I asked him, appalled at what he had just said. 'Vell,' he replied, taking a good long pull of the beer he had cupped between his hands, 'I had a lot of time to think about it ‘cause we had hitches burying mama right along de line'."
Long since known fro their individuality, St. David Islanders have always occupied a unique position in this tiny colony. Seafarers for as long as anyone can remember, they were born with the taste of salt in their mouths and a nose for weather. And they still cling stubbornly to the ways of the past in a changing world, including their manner of speech – an idiom that can alter a simple, "Hello I remember you but not your name" to "I recollect your wisage, but I can't quite calc'late your title". To whom Tucker was talking those many years ago was such a St. David’s Islander, and coming from the eastern island himself, Tucker has no difficulty recreating that dialect:
"'First of all'," Tucker continues taking up the take of his friend in the Black Horse. "'When mama died I thought my older brother vas going to call Mr Villis Perinchief for a cedar coffin fully dressed. I vaited for it to arrive out vhere ve lived on St. David’s Island. I vaited for it and I vaited and I vaited until I couldn’t vait any longer and I said to my brother James, did you ring up Mr Perinchief to see ‘bout de coffin ‘cause you know de funeral’s pitched for three o’clock. My God, my brother replied, I forgot all 'bout it.
'So I got hold of Mr Perinchief and explained to him that it vas too late to send de coffin on de ferry from St. George’s because it vould arrive 'long wiff de first mourners. I’ll tell you vhat ve’ll do, Mr Perinchief, I said, yoo bring mama’s coffin down in de cart and ve’ll come up to Longbird Island and get it, my brother and I.
'I said that ve got to put mama’s coffin fore and aft on de boat, but my brother vanted to be different. He vanted her put 'cross the bow. But I argued dat if ve put her 'cross de bow, people from shore – knowing mama vas dead – vould look out and say, Damn wuffless hounds, ther' they are hauling fish pots on de very day mama’s buried. Nah dat ain’ gonna do, I told him, but seeing he vas older he got his vay, 'sides I vas still thinking ‘bout de inheritance, you know.
'Vell, coming back, my brother and I vere a sculling when all of a sudden de boat struck a sand bar and mama's coffin vent clean to hell overboard. But you know, even though the warmish on de outside turned all vhite and spotty on account of de salt vater, inside she didn’t leak a drop. They made dem coffins real good up dere in de country. Ve fished her out and put de coffin back on de boat and took her up to de boathouse vhere ve licked on some warnish, and you know, when ve boys vere finished wiff dat coffin she looked a damn sight better than she did at first, and ve took it home vhere they coffined mama.
'But dat vasn’t de end of our troubles. Ve had ordered a hearse, but it never come – de driver had forgotten clean 'bout de funderal and vent dahn to de cricket metch instaid. So ve had to walk mama all de vay to church, a mile and a quarter and de coffin was a little bit too big, you know. An' going up Valer's Hill, all you could hear as we carried the coffin was a flip-flop, flip-flop, and it vas poor mama's feet'."
For hours Tucker recites stories that have delighted hundreds from St. George’s to Somerset. They roll from lips that can imitate the speech of a fisherman, doctor, or governor. No one escapes the litany of his tales, no one save Tucker himself, who as cook, investor, humanitarian, undertaker, and preserver or seaman’s graves has kept one step ahead of moral scrutiny.
“What would I consider my greatest contribution?” Tucker asks in response to my question. “That’s a rather pointed way of putting it. To tell the God’s truth I’ve never really given it much consideration because I never felt that what I did was more than I should do. It’s expected of us to do something. We have the benefit of a beautiful country, and though we have our troubles we’re allowed to grumble without being shot, and we can do as we like – we have freedom.
“If I were to be remembered, I would like it by someone else carrying on the work of the Guild of the Holy Compassion – caring for the graves of merchant seamen buried here. But as far as putting up a memorial, I’ve got something for my gravestone written up already. It hasn’t been put up, but I’ve got the blueprint in my safety deposit box. All that has to be done is have the date filled in. That doesn’t mean I’m going to die now, though sometimes I wonder whether or not I ought to put it up myself because I don’t trust anyone else. They might put it up crooked.”
Tucker cocks his head sideways, and from behind a drifting spire of cigar smoke he lets loose a chuckle and smiles. Shaking his head he repeats, “What do I wan to be remembered by – that’s surely a hell of a question,” and pointing to the tape recorder set before him, he asks if it is still running.
He leans back in his chair and draws deeply on his cigar before saying, “I’ll tell you a story,” and with a wink of an eye he’s back into the not so distant past, one which is being left to be repeated mostly by mouth. When there is no one to tell those stories first hand they will live on only in the memories of those who once heard them. And then when those people die, so will a bit of Bermuda’s history.
But that day is not yet here, and Tucker carries on once again, “There were three grand old ladies of Somerset…”
