Sir Harry Oakes

Sir Harry Oakes was an American-born mining entrepreneur who made a large fortune from gold discoveries and investments in Canada. He later settled in the Bahamas, became a British subject and was created a baronet in 1939. His wealth and position made him one of the most prominent residents of wartime Nassau.

Oakes was murdered at his Nassau home in July 1943 in a case that immediately became an international sensation. The Duke of Windsor, then governor of the Bahamas, became involved in the investigation, and Oakes's son-in-law Alfred de Marigny was tried and acquitted. No one else was convicted, and the murder remains unsolved.

In Kate Furnivall’s The Far Side of the Sun, Oakes’s murder provides the real historical crime around which the fictional stories of Dodie Wyatt and Ella Stanford develop. The novel also uses the Duke of Windsor’s governorship and wartime Nassau to place the unsolved case within the social and political tensions of the Bahamas in 1943.