Phillip Bridges

Early life

Bridges was born on 9 July 1922 near Bedford, the son of Sir Ernest Bridges, a commodore of Royal Mail Lines. Bridges was educated at Bedford School.

Military service

After leaving school, Bridges was commissioned into the Royal Artillery. He was posted to the Royal West African Frontier Force and served with them in the Burma Campaign. During the Arakan Campaign in Burma, he was involved in a five-month journey that involved crossing ten rivers. He reportedly recalled one occasion when the man standing next to him was killed, and another when he escaped an ambush only to encounter the enemy again running in the opposite direction. He was demobilised in 1946.

Legal career

After being demobilised, Bridges qualified as a solicitor. In 1954, he was posted to the Gambia as a lands officer. He later became Solicitor General in 1963, and then Attorney General in 1964 until 1968, being the only European in the Gambian cabinet. He became a Queen's Counsel in 1964 and helped to draft its constitution for its independence from the United Kingdom in 1965. He stayed on after independence and became Chief Justice in 1968, serving until 1983. He was appointed CMG in 1967 and was knighted in 1973.

During his time in the Gambia, he learned the Wollof language and earned a reputation for "fairness, tolerance and, above all, kindness." Among the anecdotes relating to his time there, at one point he earned the anger of the President of the Gambia, Dawda Jawara, by recalling Latimer's warning before being burned at the stake: "Corruption bringeth rebellion."

Retirement and death

After retiring to England in 1983, Bridges became the representative of The Gambia Legion in the UK and an honorary legal advisor to the British Ex-Commonwealth Services League. He contributed a chapter to The Gambia's Studies in Politics and Society, published in 1991.

He died in December 2007 in Suffolk.