AT first blush, he may have seemed a miscast warrior. A soft-spoken connoisseur of good food, better wines and the fine arts, a scholar possessed of a formidable and wide-ranging intellect, the model of courtliness, Dr. Stanley Ratteray might more easily have been pegged as a man of the world than a man of action.

But Stanley Ratteray also volunteered for service in the Canadian military while studying dentistry at McGill University in the 1950s. During manoeuvres as a Second Lieutenant with the steel cavalry of the Royal Canadian Armoured Corps, he came to absorb the precepts of strategy quite as effortlessly as he did the anatomy and engineering of the human jaw.

Military history became a lifelong passion, one of many this professional polymath pursued with his lightning-flash enthusiasm that illuminated whatever subject interested him in a clear, penetrating light.

His vacations were spent trudging the Napoleonic battlefields of Europe, following the campaign routes of his illustrious hero the Duke of Wellington and the great armies he commanded. He would study the terrain of these fields of combat, overlaying them with the 19th-century logistics maps he carried in his head. He would imagine the massive troop movements and the bold gambits that secured victory. He would relive these titanic struggles, the meticulous planning that went into them and the blood sacrifices that had been required in order to further a righteous cause.

Dr. Stanley Ratteray would spend days surveying those landscapes where the fates of peoples and continents were decided when great cataracts of men and horses converged into torrents of steel and fire. And it is not difficult to imagine him projecting Wellington's mastery over the ebb and flow of battle onto the tiny political arena of his island home where he spent the better part of half a century helping to direct events.

Like The Iron Duke, he was a consummate strategist. Stanley Ratteray could sense victory when others saw only deadlock or defeat. He was a man whose mind was a breech-loading gun into which he regularly slipped brass-cartridged convictions that he employed with devastating effect against the paralysising inertia and commonly-held conventions which tend to hold sway in Bermuda.

In an island where infirmity of purpose is the norm, Stanley Ratteray was a dynamic, almost elemental force who championed social reform and reason - reason that could never be channelled into the narrow strictures of an all-encompassing political dogma or subordinated to the lickspittle party, cultural and tribal loyalties that to some degree still define Bermudian society. He was that rare combination of idealist and pragmatist, visionary and hands-on social engineer.

He stooped to conquer armed only with his remorseless logic, his not inconsiderable personal courage and a code of honour as unyielding as a mountain. And conquer he did.

His ideals are the ones that Bermuda largely lives by now, his vision for the island has largely been fulfilled - he foresaw a bi-cultural community where the racial groups lived together, if not precisely in harmony, then with a degree of mutual respect, interdependence and shared prosperity unknown elsewhere.

Indeed, in a brilliantly rendered 1979 NewYorker pen portrait of Bermuda by Susannah Lessard, the writer saw the island largely through Stanley Ratteray's eyes. He acted as a combination tour guide/host/folk historian for her, introducing this superlative essayist to the successes, peculiarities and outright eccentricities of a Bermudian society he was in large measure responsible for remaking. She concluded that Ratteray was a social alchemist who could make gold from anger, mistrust and mutual suspicion, his Bermuda a template for all multi-racial communities.

The battles that Bermuda's Iron Duke fought were bloodless. The only casualties were malign ideas and ideologies. But his victories were no less glorious for that. By vanquishing the forces of reaction and radicalism, by checking the encroachments of folly whether they emanated from the right or left flanks of the political battleground, Stanley Ratteray played a pivotal role in the history of our times. He was that rare man who shaped the events of his lifetime rather than being shaped by them.

Beginning with the 1959 Theatre Boycott and culminating in his recent efforts to dissuade Government and Whitehall from engaging in acts of wanton constitutional vandalism, Dr. Stanley Ratteray was a leading actor in every major drama played out on the stage of Bermudian public life for more than 40 years. While the subject matter of these dramas varied, he was typecast throughout as a resolute and steadfast giant - the benign warlord who was built on an altogether more imposing scale than the ordinary run of men.

He viewed politics as a chivalrous adventure, an ongoing campaign for just causes.

In the 1950s, when he first plunged into public life, it was to challenge the odious colour bar that had formalised the pre-existing de facto separation of the races in Bermuda during that 30-year period when the island was administered as a large country club rather than a small country.

The barricades of officially sanctioned segregation had been thrown up in the 1920s, social partitions on the American model intended to placate the wealthy East Coast tourist clientele who viewed the island as their own sand-fringed playground. The petit apartheid that segregated public places, the more serious manifestations of discrimination that limited political, educational and economic opportunities, gradually radicalised black Bermudians, the predictable equal and opposite reaction to a series of actions designed to keep Bermuda an anachronistic ninth-century outpost in a 20th-century world.

BY 1959 the mounting anger of those who had been stripped of dignity, self-respect and opportunity seemed to militate against the peaceful dismantling of this grotesque social infrastructure which had been built on sand foundations. In a scene freighted with symbolism and significance, that year the Riot Act was literally read from the verandah of Trimingham's to striking dockworkers - some armed with machetes and two-by-fours - who had converged on Front Street.

But in that same Bermudian annus mirabilis - the year of miracles - Stanley Ratteray led the Progressive Group to its peaceful victory over segregation with the Theatre Boycott. In three heady weeks in June and July, 1959 the entire rotten structure of officially sanctioned segregation collapsed.

Though it would take decades for the detritus of all the legal and psychological segregationist indemnities to be cleared away, the Theatre Boycott was the catalyst for a largely peaceful, largely fast-paced and largely successful social transformation that changed Bermuda beyond all recognition during the 1960s and '70s.

Stanley Ratteray recognised the reality that evolution was more likely to succeed in Bermuda than revolution, that some of the economic features of the old oligarchic system needed to be retained if the new democracy was to succeed. He embodied what might best be described as progressive conservatism, seemingly a political contradiction in terms but in reality a pragmatic course of action in an island like Bermuda- conserving the best of what has gone before to use as the foundations for progress.

Dr. Ratteray felt an obligation to help end the obsolete and counter-productive quarrel between the races in Bermuda. He believed fervently that institutionalised segregation should not be dismantled only to be replaced by voluntary resegregation along racial lines and strived throughout his life to prevent such ghettoisation.

Consequently, from the Progressive Group he in very quick order became active in the Committee for Universal Adult Suffrage. From there segued into an active political role as a founding member of the United Bermuda Party. He went to London in 1966 for the watershed Constitutional Conference that was the culmination of his efforts to bring about genuine reform in Bermuda. There he laboured to carpenter and frame a constitutional system that incorporated all of his fundamental ideals for democratic, responsible and accountable Parliamentary Government in Bermuda.

While never an elected Member of Parliament, he served in the Legislative Council and its successor, the Senate, as Education Minister, Planning Minister and Minister Without Portfolio.

A leading light in the UBP Black Caucus in the early 1970s, Dr. Ratteray quietly pressured then- Premier Jack Sharpe to place more emphasis on Government policies aimed at improving the lot of Bermuda's majority population - chiefly in the economic and educational spheres. Sharpe's failure to take this advice on board led to Dr. Ratteray becoming a founding member of the "Magnificent Seven", the rebel faction of UBP MPs who engineered Sharpe's removal as Premier when the party lost fully one-fifth of its Parliamentary seats under his leadership. Sharpe had ignored the advice of Dr. Ratteray and like-minded colleagues such as Jim Woolridge and Gloria McPhee; but neither he nor they could not ignore the consequences of his decision to ignore them.

Sharpe stepped down in 1977 after a protracted and bitter internal split in the UBP and, while naturally hurt by his fall from political grace, finally came to understand the underlying causes. Their political enmity never soured personal relations between Sir John Sharpe and Dr. Ratteray.

Similarly, long after he had left active political duty but was still serving as a counsellor to Sir John Swan, he publicly broke with his long-time friend and came out publicly against his Independence initiative (more on the grounds that it was ill-conceived rather than being an intrinsically ill-omened constitutional development for Bermuda). Given that Dr. Ratteray could have provided the gold standard for personal integrity in Bermuda, again there was no permanent damage done to his relationship with Sir John Swan.

Even during the sadly abbreviated epilogue of his life, Dr. Ratteray was still participating in public life as attested to by his involvement with the Committee for Due Process & the Constitution. He was still devouring news of world affairs with the insatiable appetite of a born political omnivore. He had in recent months read a small library of academic and popular books on Central Asia and the Middle East, the major faultline running through world affairs, and could speak far more authoritatively on the region than most people not attached to Colin Powell's staff.

HIS death last weekend reduces the "Three Musketeers" of Bermuda politics to just one, Harry Viera. Along with the late Dr. John Stubbs, these hypo-manic political adventurers forged the closest of political and personal friendships, leavening the serious business they were engaged in with inexhaustible supplies of wit, cameraderie and a swashbuckling sense of romantic optimism about Bermuda's future. Sculptor Billie Lange once proposed a statue of the trio be placed on the lawn outside City Hall facing due east, where the sun rises. They would represent, she said, the three bloodlines of Bermuda, marching together shoulder-to-shoulder into the future.

On the eve of one General Election, when Dr. Ratteray was serving as the UBP's campaign co-ordinator, they embarked on what turned into an all-night strategy session at Harry Viera's home. Dr. Ratteray drove home at dawn. While clambering into the driver's seat, he left the briefcase containing the party's election masterplan on the roof of his car. It was the only copy. By the time he got home, the case was no longer there.

Dr. Ratteray, Stubbs and Viera spent the next few hours scouring Harbour and Middle Roads to no avail. While they were searching, terrified the missing document would find its way to Alaska Hall, a stranger dropped by Dr. Ratteray's office to return the case, which he had found by the side of the road.

"If this was the army I'd be shot," Dr. Ratteray kept repeating after this blood-chilling incident.

Stubbs and Viera finally reassured him that if this was indeed a military campaignhe would be commander in chief, the victory already won and the routed enemy swimming towards North Rock. The next day's lopsided outcome of the election tended to bear out his friends' exalted view of Stanley Ratteray's abilties. So has history.

Dr. Ratteray was, in fact, something more than just a man of action. He was a man of destiny.