There has never been a white woman elected to the Bahamas House of Assembly. Not once. Not in the 64 years since women were given the right to vote in 1962. No white Bahamian woman in living memory has run. None has even been offered a nomination.
The first woman to sit in the House was Dame Janet Bostwick, who won her seat in 1982. Since Dame Janet, women have liberally served as parliamentarians. Black women. Only Black women. The chamber has never seated a white Bahamian female member.
In 1962, one tried.
Her motivation may have been in question. Her ambition was not.
In that year, Lady Greta Oakes — Danish-born, aristocratic by marriage, scorned by divorce — presented herself as a candidate for the Western District of New Providence. She sought the UBP nomination. Failing that, she would run as an independent. The party that had never nominated a white woman was now being asked to choose between two members of the same family: a baronet and his ex-wife.
It was the most combustible nomination contest no one remembers.
The House of Oakes That Crashed On Sir Harry’s Head
To understand 1962, one must understand the shadow Sir Harry Oakes cast over Bahamian political life — a shadow that outlasted his brutal murder by nearly two decades.
Sir Harry Oakes, the Canadian-born gold millionaire, arrived in Nassau in the late 1930s and promptly inserted himself into colonial politics.
In 1938, Sir Harry Oakes was elected to the House of Assembly for the Western District without lifting a finger for it. He did not campaign. He was in London when he was informed by wireless that his name had been put forward. He was still in London when he was told he had won.
His opponent in 1938 was a young Black grocer named Milo Butler. Sir Harry Oakes defeated Milo Butler 538 votes to 70.
Eleven months after that victory — won in absentia — Harry Oakes was created a Baronet of the United Kingdom, a hereditary title that would pass to the first son of the first son, in perpetuity.
In July 1943, Sir Harry Oakes was found bludgeoned to death in his bed at Westbourne, his Nassau estate. The murder was never solved. His Baronetcy passed immediately to his sixteen-year-old eldest son, Sydney Frederick Oakes. The boy inherited a title, a fortune, and a legacy. He became Sir Sidney.
Marriage, Divorce and the Fight For Significance
In 1948, Sir Sidney Oakes married Miss Greta Hartmann — daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Gunnar Hartmann of Manor Hall Avenue, Hendon, and Copenhagen — at St. Mary’s Parish Church, Hendon. She was a young Danish woman with English roots; her family straddled both worlds. The marriage lasted ten years.
The Tatler and Bystander (London) 14th July 1948
In 1958, Sir Sidney divorced Lady Greta. The grounds were plainly written. She had conducted an affair with a British army soldier — one of the peacekeepers stationed in Nassau during the general strike. The divorce was obtained in Mexico. Sidney won full custody of their three children. Greta, broken but unbowed, never accepted it.
White Women Remained In Relative Obscurity
White Bay Street was a male project. Women in the background administered its domestic infrastructure — the household, the charities, the church auxiliary, the family business— while men held the power.
When women’s suffrage came in 1962, it arrived as a UBP ceremonial gesture without structural access. And it arrived at the worst possible moment for white Bahamian women. The order their husbands had built in the previous 250 years was four short years from collapse. White Bahamian men fashioned no political pathways for white women.
Majority Rule came. With it came a different political culture — one in which Black Bahamian women like Doris Johnson riding a new momentum walked through.
White women on the other hand, while they had political identity in certain spheres, by and large, they had neither the progressive movement’s momentum nor the old oligarchy’s protection. They retreated. The charities continued. The back offices continued. The surnames remained on buildings. But the women themselves faded into a self imposed obscurity.
Greta is Great for the West; Then Sir Sidney Found His Pants
Whether Sir Sidney was quietly holding himself from the direct media limelight associated with the UBP’s White Knight party bloc or simply biding his time in the shadows until the very last moment, history has not recorded his reasoning — and history, frankly, does not much care.
What history did record was the woman who moved while the men deliberated. Greta Oakes saw April 1962 for what it was: not merely an election, but a door swinging open for the first time in the history of Bahamian womanhood. She walked through it without waiting for an invitation. She was one of the first candidates to publicly declare for the Western District. She knew women were getting the vote. She knew it before the men had finished congratulating themselves on granting it. And she intended to be standing at the front of the room when those women arrived.
By the time Lady Greta was holding court in the April 1962 world newspapers — composed, deliberate, ready — her ex-husband Sir Sidney, scion of one of the greatest fortunes the twentieth century Caribbean had ever produced, was still, apparently, looking for his pants. His candidacy for the Western District was not announced until September 1962.
After Sir Sidney Oakes obtained a divorce in Mexico, he did not linger long in widowhood. He quickly married Nancy Hoyt, an American socialite. Lady Greta, his Danish-born first wife and the mother of three of hischildren, never accepted the divorce. She refused to relinquish the title. She would be Lady Oakes. That was settled.
By the Spring of 1961–62, all three — Sir Sidney, Nancy, and Greta — were living in Nassau. The proximity was not accidental; Greta’s children were there. The tension, one imagines, was considerable.
The London Daily Express reported on the situation on 29th April 1962:
Lady (Greta) Oakes, the Danish-born first wife of Sir Sydney Oakes, was on her way back to England from the Bahamas last night full of plans to enter Caribbean politics. Sir Sydney, 34-year-old son of the murdered Sir Harry Oakes, shocked her by getting a Mexican divorce and marrying Nancy Hoyt, an American socialite. Through the winter they have all been living in the Bahamas, and now the first Lady Oakes hopes to secure a seat in the island legislature.
The Express noted that Greta was travelling with her nine-year-old daughter Felicity, who was to be enrolled at a convent school in Hove, Sussex. She had been canvassing for support among friends at Nassau airport before departing.
“Women get the vote for the first time in Nassau’s election, due in December,” she said in New York yesterday. “I am standing for the Western district on an independent ticket.”
The Express added a telling observation: the “local tip” was that a leading political party, aware of her potential, wanted to back her.
That party was the UBP.
There is one detail that history has largely overlooked.
Lady Greta Oakes was Danish-born. Unless she had acquired British citizenship subsequent to her marriage to Sir Sidney Oakes, she would not have met the basic qualification to stand as a parliamentary candidate. The law required a candidate to have been born within the British realm. A Danish national, however aristocratic, however well-connected, would have been disqualified at the threshold. Whether Greta had naturalised by 1962 is not established in the record. If she had not, her candidacy — bold as it was — was a legal impossibility dressed as a political ambition.
Sir Sidney’s political announcement came in September 1962
Sir Sydney Oakes, Bt., a member of the United Bahamian Party, has announced his candidacy for the Western District of New Providence in the forthcoming general elections. The 35 year-old businessman expressed the view that labour and capital can and will unite success. fully, stressing that “our mutual aid in developing the Colony will not be aided by our fighting among ourselves.” Sir Sidney, who was born in To ronto, Canada, is the eldest son of the late Sir Harry Oakes and Eunice Lady Oakes, who came to the Bahamas in 1935.
By contrast, Lady Greta had long made her political intentions known in April 1962
Aftermaths and Endings
In 1938, Milo Butler ran against Harry Oakes in the Western District and lost — 70 votes to 538. In 1962, he was back. This time the Oakes on the ticket was Sidney, not Harry. This time the result was different.
Butler and Paul Adderley swept the Western District, taking the Senior and Junior representative seats respectively. Round Two went to the PLP.
The drama of the Oakes nomination contest was prologue. The real scandal of the 1962 General Elections was structural. It was architectural. It was deliberate.
The PLP won the popular vote. Let that settle. The Progressive Liberal Party received 32,261 votes — 44 percent of every ballot cast in the colony. No other party came close. They were the democratic choice of the Bahamian people. They received 8 seats in the House of Assembly.
The UBP received 26,500 votes — 36 percent of the total. They won 18 seats. They formed the government.
Independents polled 11,516 votes winning 6 seats.
The UBP needed 1,472 votes to win each seat. Independents needed 1,919. The PLP needed 4,033.
DEATHS
Sir Sidney Oakes never completed his political journey. In August 1966, he crashed on the airport road. He died instantly. He was 39 years old.
Lady Greta Oakes outlived her ex-husband by eleven years. She remained active in The Bahamas until the end. In 1967 — the year Majority Rule came to The Bahamas — she was named Honorary Danish Consul, a position she held until her death. She died of cancer in 1977. She never stopped calling herself Lady Oakes.
Sir Harry Oakes came to The Bahamas and never left — not even in death. His murder remains unsolved. His name haunts the colonial record.
Sir Sidney Oakes inherited everything his father built and lost it all on an airport road at thirty-nine. He never saw 1967.
Lady Greta Oakes came to The Bahamas as a bride. She stayed as a baroness, attempted to be a political candidate, became a diplomatic consul, and finally a widow of a marriage the courts had dissolved but she never had. She outlived them all. She died here.
The Western District of 1962 was not simply a contest between candidates. It was a collision between a dying order and a rising one — between the world Bay Street had built and the world Milo Butler and Paul Adderley were about to dismantle. The Oakes name, deployed once more as a political instrument, could not hold back what was coming.
In 1967, Majority Rule arrived. The UBP was finished. The map that had stolen the mandate of 1962 was redrawn. The people whose votes had been worth thirty-seven cents on the dollar collected the full price — with interest.
Milo Butler, the young Black grocer who lost to Harry Oakes 70 votes to 538 in 1938, became the first Governor-General of an independent Bahamas.
Some reckonings take thirty years. They come nonetheless.
Bahamian Lives, Bahamian Legacies is dedicated to the memory of the Rt. Honourable Bradley B. Roberts, who believed that a people who do not know their history are destined to repeat its worst chapters.
