He was born on 11 October 1842, the youngest son of John Diston Powles by his second marriage, and was educated at Harrow School.
[3] A case in the Nassau Police Court, in which Powles sentenced James Lightbourn to jail for beating a maid, Susan Hopkins, caused controversy.
When Lightbourn was sentenced to a month's imprisonment, he appealed to Henry William Austin, Chief Justice of the Bahamas.
Powles being a Roman Catholic, on good terms with the local Anglican cleric Charles Carthew Wakefield, he aroused a furore based on nonconformist feeling.
Blake felt that Powles had raised racial tensions, in a counter-productive fashion and after due warning: and wrote in those terms to the Colonial Office.
[4] Blake in June 1887 offered Powles a choice: formal dismissal, or three months medical leave, followed by resignation on health grounds.
Drysdale was a journalist for the New York Times, who wrote travel colour pieces, and had published articles of 1884–5 about the Bahamas as part of In Sunny Lands: Out-Door Life in Nassau and Cuba (1885).
[16] Craton and Saunders wrote: Only L. D. Powles among nineteenth-century writers came close to providing an accurate explanation for the less fortunate aspects of Nassau's social life [...][17]They further state that his analysis was "perceptive" and based in part on his personal observations; and they mention that his views from the judicial bench, "comparatively liberal", put him at odds with white residents.
He noted the Afro-Bahamian adaptation of ballroom dancing in Nassau, and on Fortune Island at a wedding celebration the merengue and jigs, with music from fife, accordion and tambourine.