A leading voice in Black independent journalism held a lead role at the iconic Bermuda Recorder newspaper, chronicling the lives as well as the news of a Bermuda largely ignored by the establishment of the day.

Lefroy Brownlow Sinclair Place, who would have turned 108 yesterday, joined the newspaper as a teenager.

The passing last year of Myrtle Edness, who was 108, left Mr Place as the island’s oldest resident.

The Recorder had been founded in 1925 by his father, Alfred Brownlow Place, with supporters Henry Hughes, David Augustus, Joaquin Martin and James Rubaine.

Mr Place’s tenure at the newspaper, which moved from Angle Street to a headquarters on Court Street in Hamilton, spanned four decades of Bermuda’s history.

He told The Royal Gazette in a 2022 interview, just before his 106th birthday, that the Recorder offered the first chance for Black Bermudian readers to get ”news of themselves”.

The newspaper was inspired in part by the political activist Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League.

The Garveyite movement notably emphasised Black self-sufficiency and Mr Garvey’s views made him unwelcome in Bermuda.

When he visited the island by ship in 1928, Mr Garvey was not permitted to disembark — speaking instead from the vessel to a crowd gathered at the Hamilton waterfront, with Mr Place among the witnesses.

Mr Place counted himself among the followers of the movement.

“We were looking for leadership because we didn’t have any Black leadership,” he explained.

“So, we followed the Marcus Garvey movement. In doing so, the movement in Bermuda grew quite rapidly.”

His father, a devoted Garveyite, was the newspaper’s driving force.

A.B. Place, as he was known, also ran a commercial printing business alongside the Recorder.

Mr Place’s newspaper career included the collapse of Bermuda’s racial segregation, the emergence of trade unionism, the political and civil advances of the 1960s, including universal adult suffrage in 1968, and the more radical 1970s culminating in the bitter social unrest of 1977.

He worked alongside his father, retiring from the Recorder shortly after A.B. Place left.

The younger Place, who was known to all by the nickname “Brownie”, subsequently kept the story of the newspaper alive for interviewers and historians.

Mr Place went on to work at the Corporation of Hamilton for 30 years, as a custodian and a mail courier, until his retirement at the age of 85.

He made a name for himself by arriving an hour early for work. He told the Gazette: “In life, you can’t afford to be late. You’d miss too much.”

Mr Place grew up in Ewing Street, Hamilton. He recounted his childhood in 2023 to author and friend Cecille Snaith-Simmons.

When he left school at age 13, Mr Place’s father insisted that he train as a plumber. He cycled to work alongside the late Earl Cameron, a school friend, who grew up in the same neighbourhood.

He was able to join his father at work in the 1930s.

The Recorder was a cash-strapped operation. Print newspapers typically financed themselves through advertising but many Black Bermudians at the time were not running their own businesses.

Mr Place recalled in 2016 how the paper was able to secure advertising from White businesses.

“I think White folks allowed the paper to exist because it allowed them to keep tabs on what was going on in the Black community.”

He said his father was determined to maintain the paper because “in those days The Royal Gazette and Colonist Daily never wrote about Black people unless they were in trouble”.

Mr Place married Sadie Marguerite Bassett in 1940. The couple met in a restaurant that her father ran below the newspaper’s office.

The Places had three children: Brownlow Tucker-Smith Place, Glenda Walker and Charlene Tyrrell.

His wife died in 1999, just shy of 60 years of marriage.

Mr Place was a supporter of the Progressive Labour Party from its formation in 1963.

He hailed from a long-lived family. He kept himself fit and was still driving at age 100. He said there was no secret to his longevity, telling the Gazette: “God doesn’t have a secret, so he didn’t share anything with me.”

Mr Place was a staunch Somerset fan when it came to the annual Cup Match Classic, which he attended from boyhood in the 1920s. He remembered when the Annual Classic was played at Royal Naval Field.

His Somerset roots came from his mother’s side of the family.

Mr Place was a living history book of the match. He told the Gazette in 2014: “I can recall the time when the Cup Match teams would only pick players from the parishes; no outsiders could get into those teams.”

He could list off the names and personalities of top players ‒ and lamented that Cup Match had grown “commercialised” in recent years.

“The sportsmanship is not there like it was in those days,” he said.

“When it was played in Somerset, it didn’t matter who won the cup, the Somerset band used to escort the St George’s cricketers to the boat after the game and there were crowds of people.”

Joan Dillas-Wright, the President of the Senate, spoke among tributes to Mr Place yesterday in the Upper House.

She said Mr Place once informed her that they were related as they chatted during a wait in a doctor’s office, when he told her that her mother was his cousin.

“He was incredible, when you talk about his memory,” Ms Dillas-Wright said. “A fine gentleman.”

She said Mr Place lived “a very long, very full life”.

• Lefroy Brownlow Sinclair Place, a mainstay of the Bermuda Recorder, was born on July 24, 1916. He died on July 23, 2024, aged 107