Welcome to Bermuda Biographies - People Who Made a Difference

W.L. “Bip” Tucker played a leading role in business and politics during the turbulent 1950s and 1960s.

Bermuda’s white leaders were coming under intense pressure from blacks—and from the United Kingdom government—to abolish segregation and its outdated voting system.

The battle for full voting rights for all adults, or universal adult suffrage, was played out on two fronts. Roosevelt Brown mobilized the public and Tucker led the fight in Parliament. He is known as the ‘Father of the Franchise Bill’ for piloting the bill through Parliament that led to all adults over 25 receiving the right to vote in 1963.

Tucker made his mark in other areas: he was the first black person appointed to the Executive Council, the forerunner of Cabinet, and the first black president of the Bermuda Employers’ Council.

Tucker and his twin sister Nina Louise were the only children of Frank Robinson Tucker, a police constable and a shopkeeper, and Catherine Frances (born Sondy) Tucker.

Tucker went by the first name of Roy and his close friends called him “Bip”. He was born in Hamilton—his father owned a store on Court Street—and attended Miss Matilda Crawford’s primary school on Till’s Hill and the Berkeley Institute.

He displayed entrepreneurial tendencies from an early age. He attended Ontario Business School in Belleville, Ontario, Canada, and on returning to Bermuda, took up employment with a black-owned company, the Quality Bakery, eventually working his way up to the post of manager. He married Cecilie Gilbert of Somerset in 1934. He left Quality Bakery around 1935 to start a wholesale business, Tucker Commission House.

Seen as a strong candidate for Parliament, especially during a time when whites outnumbered blacks in the House of Assembly, Tucker was elected on his first attempt in 1953.

In 1958, shortly after his re-election to Parliament, he called for a review of the voting system. Blacks had been pressing for changes for years so that all adults could have the right to vote, not just the small mostly white minority who were property owners. Parliament agreed to the review and appointed him chairman of the committee.

The bill that was eventually passed by Parliament in 1962 was based on the work of Tucker’s franchise committee. It fell short of full universal adult suffrage, but excluding the bill that gave female property owners the right to vote in 1944, it was the first major change to Bermuda’s voting system in 300 years.

He was an inspiration to blacks, both in and out of Parliament because of his success in business, despite the barriers thrown in his way, and his integrity and commitment to public service. As chairman of the franchise committee, he battled a wall of white resistance, but he was determined to stick to the task at hand, even after his health declined.

“I had to finish the job,” he was quoted as having said in the Bermuda Recorder’s report of his death on August 28, 1963. “I did not want it to be said that as a coloured man I had started something I could not finish.”

Members of Parliament, black and white, paid tribute to him in the House, and Governor Sir Julian Gascoigne, who had been sent to Bermuda from London to get things moving on the racial front, led the mourners at his funeral.

Check out the full biography of W. L.Tucker, those of other parliamentarians with whom he served, Dr. E. F. Gordon and Sir Henry Tucker, and the biography of his primary school teacher, Matilda Crawford.