Ruth Thomas was an educator in search of a career change in 1984 when she was asked to run Government’s Department of Community and Cultural Affairs for a year.
It was a natural fit for Thomas, who was well known in the community as a singer and actress.
Thomas never returned to her old job. She became Government’s first cultural affairs officer and achieved prominence as an authority on Bermuda’s culture and an advocate for the arts.
Thomas retired in 1997, but programmes she initiated are now mainstays of the department. They include the television shows Treasures, which profiles seniors, and The Learnalots, a children’s programme. She also launched the Premier’s Concert, an annual showcase for talented young musicians, dancers, artists and writers.
Oral interviews of seniors recalling their past were published in 1993 as Bermuda Recollections. She also instituted the annual Emancipation service, which is held on the eve of Cup Match.
During her 12-year tenure as chairman of the Bermuda Arts Council, she established the Council’s Lifetime Achievement Awards. She would herself become the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award as well as a Founders Award.
She was also a founding trustee of the Bermuda National Gallery (BNG), which opened in 1992. As the spokeswoman for Bermuda’s culture, she was often asked to give talks about the island’s traditions and idiosyncrasies to tourists and newly arrived expats. The BNG has for many years been a forum for her informal lunchtime chats.
Her lively ‘mosaics’ about Bermuda’s history, culture and traditions, presented by Ruth Thomas and Friends, usually during Heritage Month, have a strong following.
Thomas, an only child who never married, remembers the Prospect, Devonshire neighbourhood where she grew up as being culturally rich. The sounds of music permeated her home, her church and her school.
Her grandparents who raised her were good singers. British military bands based at Prospect Garrison and community bands such as North Village rehearsed outdoors. Thomas took piano lessons and sang in the choir at Central School, where the formidable teacher and choir mistress Edna Mae Scott made it one of the Island’s best.
She attended Berkeley Institute, then Ottawa Teachers’ Training College and returned home in 1957 to begin her career in education as a primary school teacher. She worked her way up the ladder, obtaining additional qualifications along the way including a bachelor’s degree in English and drama and a master’s degree in educational counselling.
In London, she studied educational broadcasting at Goldsmiths College and the BBC and qualified as an early childhood specialist. Between 1967 and 1968, she helped to set up Government’s first pre-schools. She was appointed the first education officer for pre-schools in 1972 and was serving in that post in 1984 when she was asked to fill in for Lowdru Robinson, the head of the Department of Community and Cultural Affairs, for a year.
The Department of Community Affairs had been established in the wake of the 1978 Pitt Report, which had investigated the causes of the 1977 riots and produced a string of recommendations aimed at bridging the racial divide.
It coordinated activities for the May 24 Bermuda Day holiday and Heritage Week, which later expanded into Heritage Month.
Culture was added to the Department’s title the same year that Thomas joined the department. When her year was up, she stayed on in the newly created post of cultural affairs officer.
Thomas created and narrated Bermudian Profiles, television shorts about notable Bermudians. Budding writers and thespians received support in the form of workshops presented by respected international writers and directors. A big boost for the visual arts came in 1995 when a UNESCO travelling exhibition Carib Art was presented at the Bermuda National Gallery. Thomas’ attendance at a UNESCO conference was the impetus for that show.
While not an artist, Thomas has always had an interest in the visual arts. She has never taken formal voice lessons for an extended period, but had often been selected for solo singing parts from her Berkeley days. She sang at churches and community halls and developed a repertoire of classical songs and spirituals, which stood her in good stead in Canada, London and on her return to Bermuda. A mezzo-soprano, she figures she has sung in every church in Bermuda.
In 1965, respected director Hastings Saltus invited her to attend an audition for an upcoming play. She showed up, expecting to be asked to sing and Saltus thrust a script in her hand. That led to her acting debut In White America. Numerous roles followed. She has performed in James Baldwin’s Amen Corner, August Wilson’s Fences and for virtually every theatre company on the Island from Saltus’ Studio Foundation for the Arts, the Bermuda Musical and Dramatic Society (BMDS) to the Gilbert and Sullivan Society.
She has also worked in Bermuda with respected overseas professionals, including Mike Leigh, now a top and widely respected British film director, and Shauneille Perry, an American director and playwright. Meaty roles have been coming her way for 40 years. In 2001, she played the lead role in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, in a production where the main characters were played by members of the opposite sex. In 2003, she played the nurse in Romeo and Juliet, and in 2004, she took on the role of a homeless woman in Jean Hannant’s one- woman play Special Person, which was staged as part of the BMDS’s Famous for 15 Minutes Festival.
Thomas, who served as chairman of the Bermuda Arts Council from 1980 to 1992, has been the recipient of a Bermuda College Fellow and Rotary International’s Paul Harris Fellow. She was awarded the MBE in 1994. When she retired from the civil services three years later, there were a multitude of tributes and a belief that Bermuda’s doyenne of culture could never be replaced.
While her days are now less hectic in her retirement, the arts and culture retain their importance in her life.
Ruth Thomas and Friends, a troupe with began with six members in 1985, and is now down to four, is still going strong, with presentations, entitled Mosaic, that are a lively mix of narrative, music and dance.
They have staged more than 60 Mosaics to date, and Thomas says she has no plans to quit.
