Realising this is the last day of yet another eventful Heritage Month we decided to go into the memory bank we’ve been accumulating during my own involved professional career that extends more than 75 years, for the one person who could be cited as the most impactful, overriding, heritage icon.

It turned out to be none other than the Great Earl Cameron.

Born in 1917, and very much a contemporary national and international personality, still going strong — at least that was the case the last time we saw Earl face-to face.

It was two years ago when he and Barbara, his wife arrived from London for the most significant honour.

‘New-Order’ Hamilton City Fathers bestowed upon him dedicating and renaming the Theatre at City Hall, ‘The Earl Cameron Theatre.’

We considered that event, to be ‘most historic’ considering the archaic, centuries old political system set in place generations ago, in the capital city, with a mantra rooted in the features of gerrymandering, race, class and privilege.

It was even more significant, considering that the honour fell on a former, ‘back of town’ boy, who grew up in Angle Street, a couple of blocks away from City Hall.

Earl recalled how the greatest; one whose greatest ambition of most black youth like himself ‘back in the day’, was to sell The Recorder newspaper and The Mid-Ocean News (both of which are now extinct) and to get a job on one of the two Furness Withy Liners, Queen of Bermuda and or Monarch of Bermuda plying weekly between New York and Bermuda.

Earl got a job on The Queen of Bermuda, and with great foresight when the 1939 War clouds were gathering, he joined the British Merchant Navy, crewing a ship making regular runs between New York and South America.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Earl’s ship was ordered back to the UK by the Admiralty.

It was October 29, 1939 that Earl arrived in London. We must take note of how history has a way of repeating itself, because it was exactly 76 years later he was brought back to his native Bermuda, accolades as one of the greatest movie, stage and television stars of his time.

He is credited most famously as the actor who broke the ‘colour bar’ in British film industry with his leading role in the film Pool of London in 1952.

However much had happened to shape the Earl Cameron for other fantastic roles that have catapulted him to the fame he now enjoys; and for the ultimate consideration when he was invited to receive from The Queen, the CBE.

He was stranded in the extreme sense of the word after he arrived in London at age 22. First of all he was without a passport.

Bermudians did not need a passport to enter the US when he worked on The Queen of Bermuda.

Confronting the compound racial discrimination that was the lot of blacks in Britain at the time, the only job he could secure was as a dishwasher in a hotel.

Unaccustomed to the harsh British winter weather, Cameron caught pneumonia and ended up in hospital.

Upon his release, he travelled to Liverpool hoping to work his way back to Bermuda, but no captain, not even aboard the liner Monarch of Bermuda which was being converted in the UK for service as a troopship, would sign him on without a passport.

In desperation he got a job aboard a ship that took him all the way to Calcutta, India.

Earl later described the ship with its English captain as terrible; and the journey, with he having to stoke coal all the way on the high seas to India as ‘hellish’.

Bermudians of the present generation may not even be able to imagine what a coal-burning ship was like.

He managed to get himself repatriated back to London as a passenger, and without compunction, sought out his old job as a ‘pearl diver’ or kitchen porter.

That’s what put him in position for his break into the theatre.

Because of his distinctive, mid-Atlantic, Bermudian accent, Earl acting on a tip off, was lucky enough to get a speaking part in a stage play when the regular actor failed to show up for work.

The play was Chin Chin Chow, which became the longest running West End musical at the time of its closing in 1946.

Cameron had made his mark, getting roles in other big West End productions such as Petrified Forest, Anna Lucasta and The Respectable Prostitute. Then followed the lead role in Deep Are the Roots.

By the 1950s Earl Cameron was an established stage star.

His breakthrough into the movies came in 1952 with his performance in Pool of London as Johnny, a ‘coloured’ merchant seaman engaged in a platonic romance with a white woman.

That was unheard of in British filmography up to that time. Cameron gained rave reviews in London and New York.

The movie was shown in theatres all over the world, except in his native Bermuda.

That was a time when racial discrimination was peaking in Bermuda and the 1959 Theatre Boycott, that ended officially sanctioned discrimination in public against black people and Jews, was yet to take place.

During the next decade even more spectacular films featured Cameron, including The Heart of the Matter in 1953; Simba 1955; Sapphire 1959; Killers of Kilimanjaro 1959. Ten years after Pool of London, Flame In the Streets featured Earl Cameron, based on the 1958 Notting Hill race riots.

The movie highlighted domestic difficulties that developed in a working-class family when their daughter fell in love with a Jamaican seaman, played by Earl Cameron.

Mr Cameron also became a familiar face on television in such popular shows as Danger Man, Doctor Who, and The Prisoner.

A 15-year career break for Earl followed a life-changing event in 1963 when he became a Baha’i.

He went to the Solomon Islands in the Pacific with his family to assist the Bahá’í community there.

He recounted his decision to go to the Solomons with considerable humility, saying he almost came back immediately after being shown sleeping quarters that were also home to several families of rats.

“I can’t stand being near rats. And I thought, ‘No way am I going to sleep there!’,” he later recalled.

Fortunately, a Bahá’í couple from the US also living in the Solomons offered him a room in their home.

He went on to buy a local ice cream shop, which he renovated with new equipment and decor into the “B Cool Dairy,” which quickly became a focus of social life in Honiara, the capital city of the Solomon Islands.

Mr Cameron left the Solomons in 1994, shortly before his first wife, Audrey, passed away from breast cancer.

He had met Audrey in the early 1950s when both were working in the theatre in Halifax, Yorkshire, UK.

They married in 1954 — another step which was unusual at the time, inasmuch as she was white and Jewish.

“In England, they don’t make a big deal about mixed marriages,” said Mr. Cameron. “But, in any event, I met with a lot of prejudice before I was married. When I first arrived in England in 1939, for example, it was just impossible for a black person to get a job.”

Significant among the accolades bestowed on Mr Cameron during his long career include a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Bermuda Arts Council in 1999 and a retrospective by the prestigious National Film Theatre of London.

In 2007 he was presented with the Prospero Award by the Bermuda International Film Festival.

Most recent and highly significant was the Doctorate conferred on the Great Earl by the University of Warwick in Britain.