Bermuda's culture: a garrison game for Emancipation Day

How cricket became the emancipation holiday

The National Museum of Bermuda traces Cup Match to a game in September 1901 at Garrison Field in St George's, played by two lodges, or Friendly Societies. It was exciting enough that the members decided to play for a cup every year, and the first Cup Match took place on 12 June 1902 at the Naval Cricket Field in Somerset. Bermudians had learned the game from the men stationed at the Dockyard and the St George's garrison. Friendly Societies had long marked emancipation, on 1 August 1834, with picnics, and once cricket took hold they marked it with matches.

The connection is less settled than the holiday now makes it look. The first Cup Match was in June, not August, and the museum records that as recently as the 1970s the historians Kenneth Robinson and Eva Hodgson could not establish a link between emancipation and the match. The fixed dates came from the Dockyard: in the early 1930s the two clubs agreed with officers there to play on the Thursday and Friday before the first Monday in August, a British bank holiday, and Dockyard workers took their holiday on those days.

The holiday itself took a year of argument. When the House of Assembly debated it on 6 November 1946, only 7% of the population could vote. Some white members and the few Black members backed it, one MP called it a perfect nuisance, the Upper House struck it out, and the House put it back. The bill passed on 27 May 1947 with Cup Match on the Thursday and Somers Day, commemorating the Sea Venture wreck, on the Friday. In 2020 legislation renamed the second day Mary Prince Day, after the Bermudian abolitionist whose narrative was published in 1831. The two days are now Emancipation Day and Mary Prince Day; in 2026 they fell on 30 and 31 July.

The match is the occasion for much else. The Bermuda Tourism Authority describes supporters dressed head to toe in their club's colours, red and navy or light blue and navy, games of Crown and Anchor, a dice game played in tents beside the field, camping, beach parties and a raft-up of hundreds of boats in Mangrove Bay.

Holidays were once kept strictly. Under the Public Holidays Act of 1947, public offices and shops closed, selling goods on a holiday was illegal, and even letting a customer into a shop was an offence, with licensed exceptions for hotel restaurants and pharmacies. An amendment in March 2005 allowed shops to open, provided staff were given at least seven days' written notice and the right to refuse without penalty. When a holiday falls on a weekend the Act moves it to the following Monday, so Boxing Day 2026 is kept on Monday 28 December.

Bermuda Day has its own rituals. A parade has been held in Hamilton since 1979, with a road race into the city from the west end, and families stake out stretches of pavement with rope or tape, or sleep there overnight. The day was 24 May until a change in the law in November 2017 moved it to the last Friday in May from 2018, and the law was changed again in 2020 for the arrangement used from 2021.

Why Gombeys dance to a military drum

The Gombey troupes are the most visible tradition on the streets. Dancers are covered from head to toe in costumes hung with tassels, mirrors and bells, with painted masks, capes and peacock-feather headdresses. The music combines a home-made bass drum, called the mother drum, with pairs of snare drums taken from British military practice, a kettle drum and a fife, and the leaders give commands with whistles. The Wikipedia account of the Gombey links the snare drum to the many enslaved people who worked on British military bases.

The dance was once a war dance. One member, the Bowman or Lead Indian, carries a bow and arrow and scouts ahead, and the Warriors carry tomahawks. When the Wampanoag and Pequot began reconnection festivals with Bermudians in 2000, their dancers recognised the steps. The name connects to the Bahamian Goombay and to a drum of African origin.

It was not always tolerated. On 10 January 1831 The Royal Gazette advertised a reward for two enslaved men who had left at Christmas following the Gumba, and called for such shows to be suppressed. Susette Harriet Lloyd, writing in 1835, described a Gombey on the lawn at Christmas with red and yellow paint, scarlet cloth, flowers and ribbons. The troupes still march all day on Boxing Day with crowds following, and appear on New Year's Day, at Easter, on Bermuda Day and at football and cricket matches. They have appeared on postage stamps, and old laws still require a permit to perform in the streets of Hamilton.

What Bermudians speak at home

English is the official language, and print follows British spelling. The spoken form is Bermudian English, which the Wikipedia account describes as a koiné, a dialect formed from contact between several varieties of the same language, never creolised. Harry Morgan Ayers, who made the first detailed study in 1933, wrote that it would attract little remark anywhere between Norfolk, Virginia, and Charleston, South Carolina, a reminder that Carolina was settled from Bermuda.

The sounds carry the history. The swap of v and w, once common in southern England, gives a local glossary its title, Bermewjan Vurds. The speech is non-rhotic, the th sounds can become f and v, and final consonant clusters are simplified. West Indian workers from the 1900s and Americans at the bases from 1941 to 1995 left their mark, and a creole close to Jamaican Patois is spoken by many younger Bermudians.

Portuguese is the other community language. Immigration from the Atlantic islands began on 4 November 1849, when the Golden Rule arrived from Madeira, and most later arrivals came from the Azores. About 25% of the population reported Portuguese ancestry, and the anniversary in 2019 was declared a public holiday. Since 2010 Portuguese has been taught as an optional language in schools.

Who makes up the population

The 2016 census recorded the population as 52% Black, 31% white, 9% of mixed race, 4% Asian and 4% other, by self-identification. The Wikipedia account notes that many who answer Black have mixed ancestry, and native-born Bermudians made up 70% of residents. Britannica gives a similar split in its own terms: about three fifths of full or mixed African ancestry, about a third of European ancestry, including the descendants of Portuguese labourers.

The older layers are harder to see. Hundreds of Native Americans, Pequot and Wampanoag among them, were shipped to Bermuda in the 17th century, and families in St David's still trace descent from them. A genetic survey of Black residents of St David's in 2009 found that most of their African maternal lineages came from a band across southern Africa from Angola to Mozambique, a pattern the Wikipedia account compares with Latin America more than with the United States or the English-speaking West Indies. Native American lineages were 1%, which the Wikipedia account explains by genetic drift over generations.

Where Bermudians worship

The 2010 estimate counted 46.2% of residents as Protestant, including 15.8% Anglican, 8.6% African Methodist Episcopal and 6.7% Seventh-day Adventist, with Roman Catholics at 14.5% and 17.8% reporting no religion. The Anglican Church of Bermuda is its own diocese, separate from the Church of England, and runs St Peter's Church in St George's, the oldest non-Catholic parish in the New World by the Wikipedia account. Catholic worship was outlawed in Bermuda, as in England, until 1791; Catholics are now served by the Diocese of Hamilton in Bermuda. The first African Methodist Episcopal congregation, St John's in Hamilton Parish, was built in 1885.

How the islands dress and build

The architecture is the plainest sign of Bermuda. UNESCO's description of St George's records that the basic elements have changed little since the end of the 17th century: separate houses of one or two storeys, walls and roofs of the soft local limestone, both whitewashed, and roofs stepped to carry rain into cisterns. About 65% of the buildings in the town predate 1900.

Dress follows its own code. In Bermuda, the culture article notes, Bermuda shorts are formal wear, worn with a jacket and tie, and Bermuda Day in May is traditionally the first day they are worn to work and the first day residents go into the sea. Bermuda's team marches in Bermuda shorts at every Olympic opening ceremony, summer or winter. Manners are formal as well: a request for directions without first saying good morning is taken as abrupt.

Who wrote and painted Bermuda

The first notable book by a Bermudian was The History of Mary Prince, a slave narrative published in 1831. The novelist Brian Burland, who died in 2010, wrote nine novels about colonialism, family and race, and Angela Barry has been recognised for her fiction. Writers from elsewhere, John Smith in 1624 and Edmund Waller in 1645 among them, described the islands long before Bermudians did.

Painters have worked the same scenes for a century. Alfred Birdsey painted watercolours of Hamilton, St George's and the bays. The Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art, founded in 1986 and rehoused in the Botanical Gardens in 2008, began by collecting work about Bermuda by visiting artists such as Winslow Homer and Georgia O'Keeffe. The sculpture We Arrive, unveiled in Barr's Bay Park in 2010, commemorates the enslaved people freed in 1835 from the American brig Enterprise.

Music arrived with each wave of visitors and migrants. West Indian musicians brought calypso when post-war aviation expanded tourism, and the Talbot Brothers played it for decades in Bermuda and the United States. Reggae took hold from the 1970s with Jamaican immigration; Mishka and Collie Buddz came out of it.

What sports the garrison left behind

The Royal Navy and the army introduced the sports they had learned at school: cricket, association football, rugby, tennis and rowing. Football became popular with Bermudians only after the Second World War, and the national team reached the CONCACAF Gold Cup in 2019. The cricket team played at the World Cup in the West Indies in 2007.

The water has its own forms. The Bermuda Fitted Dinghy is raced nowhere else, and International One Design racing began on the islands. The Newport Bermuda Yacht Race from Rhode Island has run for more than a century.

Two Bermudians have won Olympic medals: the boxer Clarence Hill, a bronze, and the triathlete Flora Duffy, who won the women's triathlon at the 2020 Summer Olympics, the territory's first gold. Bermuda hosted the Island Games in 2013.