Frederick and Margaret Misick
PIONEERS
‘Flying visit on ship for MP and activist wife’
1891 - 1976
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A total of 168 passengers boarded the Empire Windrush at Bermuda and all except 10, including Frederick Misick and his wife Margaret, travelled in first class. Frederick, better known as ‘Freddie,’ was a Bermudian MP from a prominent West Indian colonial family, while Margaret, a Canadian, was a leading member of the local suffrage movement.
Dropping anchor at Grassy Bay on June 8, 1948, the Windrush had spent a few days in Bermuda for repairs to the engine before finally heading to Tilbury from Hamilton on June 11. The couple’s trip to England would be brief. Towards the end of September, they were making their way back to Bermuda.
Frederick Clark Misick was born in Somerset, Bermuda, on October 27, 1891. His wife Margaret, née MacDonald, was born in Montreal on January 3 of the same year. Freddie was the son of Terence Misick from the Turks and Caicos Islands and Thalia, née Wells, from British Guiana. His sister was Gladys Misick-Morrell, a leader of the Bermuda Woman’s Suffrage Society and named as one of Bermuda’s eight National Heroes in 2015 (Bermudan women did not get the vote until 1944.)
Margaret was also a suffragette and fought against plans, announced by the governor of Bermuda in 1936 to check the growth of the Black population through targeted birth control clinics. She had been previously married to a Canadian, Major William Edward Steacy, who was killed in France during the First World War. They had one child, Margaret, known as Peg.
In 1908 Freddie went via New York to study at the Ontario Business College in Canada. He qualified as an accountant, giving this as his occupation when he visited England in 1915 and again in 1916. During the First World War, from June 1917, he was an acting lieutenant in the Royal Engineers.
Freddie travelled to Canada to marry Margaret in 1921. That time he was recorded as a journalist, but by February 1923 when he sailed from Nassau to Miami, the passenger list showed him as Secretary of the Board of Trade in Bermuda.
In March 1925, Freddie and Margaret arrived in Avonmouth, Bristol, from New York with their two-year-old son John and Peg, nine. Freddie was recorded as a member of the Bermuda House of Assembly and a journalist. The couple had another son, Michael, who was born in Hamilton in April 1927.
When Freddie made a presentation to the Rotary Club of Edinburgh in September 1931, he was introduced as an MP and trade commissioner of Bermuda. The following year he founded the Bermuda Bridge Club.
In 1958, Freddie was appointed as a nominated member of the Legislative Council of the Bermudas or Somers Islands. He died, aged 85, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in November 1976. Margaret died shortly afterwards, also in Nova Scotia.
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