Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire

by Simon Winchester

  Ascension—which is very much an island of the space age today, festooned with aerials and chattering with computers and radar domes—was classified as a ship for rather more than a century. The Navy took it over in 1815 once it had been decided to exile Napoleon on St Helena, 700 miles to the south-east, and the Admiralty feared the French might try to take Ascension and use it as a staging base for helping the Emperor escape. (A garrison was established on Tristan da Cunha for the same reason.) It became a ship of the line a year later, with those few who lived aboard subject to the same rigours of ‘rum, sodomy and the lash’ as on any of Her Majesty’s vessels. One captain was sent a report to the effect that a member of his crew—a lady—had given birth to an infant. With mirthless propriety he jotted one word on the announcement—‘Approved’—and added his initials. (For years afterwards any children born on Ascension were officially deemed to have been born at sea, and registered according to custom in the London parish of Wapping.)

  The Crown took charge of the island in 1922, and made her what she is now—a dependency of St Helena. There is an Administrator, who lives in what was once the sanatorium high up among the clouds on Green Mountain; and there is no permanent native population. There is, however—and has been for many years—a very considerable clutch of transients—people whose nationalities and trades vary according to the use to which Ascension is being put at any one moment. At the time I arrived, in the aftermath of the Falklands operations, the island was crawling with Royal Air Force men and their planes, and all the paraphernalia needed for keeping the garrison in the far South Atlantic equipped with all it needs; but there have been at one time and another a bewildering variety of ‘users’ of Ascension. (The place is essentially run by a body known as the London Users Committee, who, since there is no native to inconvenience, do with the island more or less as they like, so long as they all agree it will do the users some good.) There have been missile-testing engineers, satellite trackers, radio broadcasters, spies (there are still lots of this particular breed) and those most indomitable guardians of the distant rocks, the men of the cable terminals.

  Ascension Island was one of the great cable stations of the Imperial universe. The Eastern Telegraph Company arrived in 1899, bringing the free end of a cable that its ships had laid from Table Bay to Jamestown, in St Helena. Within weeks, after the repeaters and amplifiers had been built on Ascension, and a staff left behind to maintain them in working order, so the line was extended—up to the Cape Verde Islands, and then on to England. More cables were fed into the sea—one from Ascension to Sierra Leone, so the Governor in Freetown could send messages to Whitehall without having to wait if a camel had munched its way through the line across the Sahara. A fourth was sunk to St Vincent, a fifth to Rio, and another to Buenos Aires. By the time of the Great War Ascension sat in mid-ocean like a great telegraphic clearing house, the hum of generators and the clack of the morse repeaters echoing across the silence of the sea. (Ascension had always had associations with communication. As soon as Alphonse d’Albuquerque discovered it, on Ascension Day, 1501, sailors travelling past in one direction started a custom of leaving letters there, for collection and onward transmission by ships sailing in the other. There still is a letter-box where passing vessels may drop notes; when someone looked in it recently there was a note dating from 1913.)

  Lonely places, cable stations. Islands like Fanning, in mid-Pacific, notable only because ‘it was annexed by Britain in 1888 as the site for a trans-Pacific cable relay station’ or Direction Island, on Cocos-Keeling, ‘administered by Britain for a cable relay point for the Indian Ocean’ or Ascension. The British saw cables as the vital synapses of the Imperial nervous system. They had to be utterly reliable. They had to be secure. And they had, all of them, to be British. (To illustrate the point it is worth noting that when the time came to construct a cable from Hong Kong to Shanghai the cable engineers built a relay station on a hulk in the middle of the Min River, rather than risk placing so critically important an Imperial nerve-ending on Chinese soil, where anything might happen to it.) The ultimate purpose of the cables was, of course, the unity, and thus the unassailability of the Empire, a theme Kipling was quick to recognise:

  Joining hands in the gloom, a league from the last of the sun

  Hush! Men talk today o’er the waste of the ultimate slime

  And a new Word runs between: whispering, ‘Let us be one!’

  And so between them the sailors and the cable men built a society on Ascension, and a tiny Imperial city, which they called Georgetown (though it was always known as Garrison). A tradition grew up that every sailor—and later every cable man—brought something to render the moon-scape a little more like home. The Royal Navy and the Royal Marines, who from time to time were also posted aboard HMS Ascension, carried in scores of tons of earth and thousands of sapling trees (yews from South Africa, firs from Scotland, blue gums from New South Wales, castor-oil bushes from the West Indies); marines built a farm and brought a herd of cows (the milking shed, robustly Victorian and made from stone, has a crest and the letters ‘RM’, which the lowing herds blithely ignore); sailors dug a pond at the very top of Green Mountain, and stocked it with goldfish and frogs; and they built greenhouses and a home garden, and grew bananas and paw-paws, grapefruit, grenadillas and tomatoes, roses and carnations and all the familiar vegetables of an English Sunday luncheon.

  Over the years the colonists have tried so very hard to impose the contented ways of a London suburb on this monstrously ugly pile of clinker and baked ash. There was probably no place on earth that can have seemed less like home, no atoll or hill station or desert oasis that can have been less sympathetic to the peculiar needs of the wandering Englishman and his family. But, like the good colonist that he was, he did eventually manage to fashion the place into an approximation of Surrey-in-the-Sea. The little houses each have a neat garden and tiny patch of lawn, most of them with a round plastic swimming pool, a child’s swing and a snoring dog (‘we inherited the old boy from the Parker-Bruces, you know. Eats us out of house and home. Can’t think why he doesn’t roast, with all that hair. Goodness knows what will happen when we go. He’s getting on a bit. I suppose he’ll just go to whoever takes our place. Poor old devil. Lucy’s quite attached to him now. But then she was positively transfixed by that old mutt we had in the Seychelles. Got over him in time, of course. But it can be tough on the kids…’). There is a library and a hairdresser for the wives, and there are drinks parties most evenings—a lot of drinks parties, a lot of drinks, and the usual alcoholic haze of tropical solitude.

  The Islander newspaper has been coming out each week, thanks to the labours of any number of Our Lovely Wives, since 1971. Take a riffle through the pages of one recent March issue. There’s old Brian presenting a teak tray and a couple of tankards to Margot and Dennis, who have just left after their two-year stint; Pearl Robertson has won the whist competition up at Two Boats, yet again! (The road up to Green Mountain has sawn-off gigs stuck into the clinker to act as milestones—One Boat is lower down, Two Boats is up at the 700-foot mark—and small communities, and telephone exchanges, have grown beside them. The boats act as splendid shelter from the occasional violent rainstorms.) Now, what else? Margaret Lee will give a manicure demonstration on Wednesday at the Two Boats Club. Suzanne will host a Tupperware patio sale in Georgetown on Saturday. Communion will be at nine thirty this Sunday at St Mary’s. Novice bridge players are welcome at the Exiles Club library every Wednesday at 8 p.m. Irene Robinson wrote to say she was leaving the island and would miss the Church, the Scouts, the Gardening Club and the Tennis Club. A vote of thanks had been organised for Ernie Riddough, who was also leaving: his term as public health officer had been a great success, and ‘the island had not suffered from plague and pestilence’. The Messmen would play the Supremes in the island darts league on Tuesday, and there would be a soccer match, Georgetown versus the Forces, the day after. And—best news of all—the Ascension Cricket Associ
ation has just received two dozen balls from St Helena, the cricket league can now get under way, and a meeting would be held on Tuesday night beside the Volcano Radio Station to discuss the season’s fixtures.

  There is no hotel on the island. Visitors are not encouraged—the lack of hotel room being the official excuse. I have stayed in a variety of places. The Americans have huts they call ‘concertinas’ they are shipped over quite flat, like sandwiches, and then the ends are pulled apart and a fully-equipped room appears, with mirrors on walls, lights in ceilings, tables clipped to floors. Each time I slept in Concertina City—which was difficult anyway, because of the heat—I started to wonder if the whole room might revert in the night, and I would be flattened out of all recognition, as though I had been trapped in the boot of a car sent to the crushers.

  My happiest nights were spent at the old Zymotic Hospital. It had been built by the Navy more than a century ago, perched on a cliff of slag, facing west; it has thick stone walls, and gently turning fans, and the windows and the doors are always open. It is perfectly cool, and I would sit there with the crews of the transport planes, sipping whisky and watching the sunsets, and listening to stories of airborne exploits in every Imperial corner of the world. I found one pilot whom I had known at school; another who had once given me a lift during the rescue operations following a hurricane, from British Honduras to Costa Rica; and a third who had been a member of the Queen’s Flight and had spent the last summer shuttling the Queen Mother back and forth from Windsor to Glamis.

  One day I flew with my schoolfriend to the Falkland Islands. He was the pilot of a Hercules carrying several tons of freight and fifty Fusiliers down to Stanley. We rose at three—it was still hot, and a warm wind stirred the ash beside the roads—and had breakfast in a tent by the runway. There were innumerable briefings, weather checks, radio messages, orders. At five, while it was still dark, we clambered up into the aircraft.

  Two Victor jet bombers, old-fashioned, strangely shaped monsters, zoomed into the air a few moments later; and when they were safely airborne we lumbered off and into the twinkling dawn. The bombers were the first of our refuelling tankers. They met us out in mid-ocean, after we had been going for three hours. One fuelled us, the other fuelled him, and both then turned away for home. Six hours further south, when we were well down in the latitudes, and the sea below was covered by low storm clouds, the bombers met us again—three of them this time, one for us, one for him, and the third to top up the second. Then they wheeled away and back up to their cinder-topped base, and we trundled wearily on to Stanley. It took nearly fourteen miserable hours to get us and our cargo from Ascension to the Falkland Islands; five refuelling tankers had been needed, and a small army of logistics men and planners; and had the British not been able to use Ascension the operation would not have been possible at all. I was not entirely convinced the effort on this occasion had been entirely worthwhile: one of the objects we were carrying was a fan for the desk of an army officer—a man who might have thought he was being sent out to deal with an insurrection in the Sudan, but was in fact stationed in one of the coolest, and windiest, parts of the Empire ever known.

  Since the Falklands War the island has become furiously busy. Planes howl in and out every day, at any hour. The mess at the American base serves gigantic meals—steaks, jello, milk, instant potatoes—to pilots and technicians all day and all night. Generators rattle, bored soldiers shine machine-guns, warships slip in and out of harbour, replenishment vessels come and lie at anchor two miles offshore, and let a litter of smaller craft suck hungrily at their nozzles of petrol, or water, or aviation spirit. Up on the volcano-sides radar dishes and strangely shaped aerials whir and nod; and wherever the clinker is nearly flat there are graders and bulldozers levelling it still further to make way for yet more new housing, new headquarters buildings, new mess centres. There has never been anything like it—except that there is no one who has lived on Ascension long enough to be able to compare the daily rounds of 1984 with those of the time before April 1982, when the colony underwent the greatest sea-change of its short career.

  Away from the military operations centres, though, much is unchanged. The cable operators still have an office on Ascension, though they run the world’s conversations through satellites today, and the dozens of men who were needed to maintain the circuits of old and keep each other company have dwindled to a very few. In their place there are the men with the very ordinary names—Mr Dunne, Mr Turner, Mr Evans, Mr Davies, Mr Little—who have a very extraordinary job: they work for what is called the Composite Signals Organisation, a secret British Government organisation that makes it its business to find out what other interesting traffic is passing through the satellites and around the ether, and which may be of some use to the West. Messrs Dunne, Turner, Evans and their scores of colleagues, who maintain a polite but scrupulous guard on everything they say, are electronic spies, and Ascension is full of them. There are American spies too, working for a much bigger organisation called the National Security Agency. But while the existence of the British CSO staff is officially acknowledged, the American technicians are not admitted to being on the island, not by anyone.

  I toured around the island by helicopter one day—buzzing the lush slopes of Green Mountain, the satellite station on Donkey Plain, the tracking station on the Devil’s Ashpit, the strange volcanic rings of the Devil’s Riding School. We arrived above a cluster of white aerials on the eastern side of the island, near a cliff called Hummock Point. I pointed down, and asked the pilot what they were—and he started, and whirled his craft away, and we roared back to the north of Ascension, leaving the aerials to their secrets. It is said—but then it is always said—that there are vast underground bunkers, crammed with electronic code-breaking machines, and staffed by pale-skinned troglodytes who rarely surface into the sun. All that can be said with certainty is that Ascension is an important little island, and that it derives its importance for more than being a convenient staging post, halfway between the training grounds of Salisbury Plain and the fighting grounds of East Falkland. It is manifestly not an island that Britain—or America, for that matter—would abandon without a struggle. Happily no one—least of all the island population, which comes on short-term and highly lucrative contracts—wants Ascension to break away from the motherland. (Some of the more radical St Helenians, however, wonder why Britain cannot persuade the Americans to pay rent for their bases on Ascension, and thus help the crippled St Helena economy. Britain refuses even to discuss the matter.)

  But HMS Ascension is not all warship. It is a floating radio programme, too. On the northern tip, beside one of the few bays that is protected from the man-eating sharks that roam the coastal waters, is a smart white office building with a tall white warehouse next door. This is the Atlantic Relay Station of the BBC; the office teems with administrators, the warehouse with transmitters, and the men sent out to keep them running. There are six short-wave transmitters which broadcast the World Service and the various foreign languages of the oceanside countries (Spanish and Portuguese for Latin America, Hausa, French and Swahili for Africa). I had expected the transmitters to be compact, rather unimpressive machines, all solid-state and disc-driven; instead there were six monstrous grey cabinets, which looked like refugees from a Victorian power station, and which opened to reveal a mass of hot, humming valveware, with long and curiously shaped horns that snap in and out depending upon which frequency band the Corporation wishes to use for transmissions that day. Some of the valves are two feet tall, weigh a hundred kilogrammes, cost thousands of pounds each and put out showers of vivid blue sparks and flames while they are busying themselves with getting the News in Swahili to the far side of Africa, or sending Calling the Falklands to the sister colony halfway down the same cold ocean.

  The last time I arrived in Ascension I came by boat. A school of dolphins had joined us two hours before, and had played joyously under the bows as we ploughed ponderously towards the small speck of
Imperial volcano. We dropped anchor in eight fathoms, a mile off the Georgetown jetty; for fully five minutes I stood enthralled at this strange sight—this mass of reddish-brown rock, rising abruptly from the ocean, its peaks festooned with delicate filigrees of radio masts, with globes and radar dishes and odder, inexplicable devices for talking and listening to the outer reaches of the cosmos. The additions had made the island look unreal, as though it were an outlandishly shaped submarine that had briefly come to the surface to take on air, and would soon sink into the depths once more and sidle off on some mysterious mission.

  But I went ashore—nearly drowning myself as I leapt for the rope at the bottom of the Tartar Steps, missed, and slipped on the slime—and took a car to the Residency, up on the slopes of Green Mountain. (It was not always so easy. The wife of a resident naval officer once arrived at the same jetty and haughtily demanded of a rating where on earth Government House might be, and where was the carriage she had expected would be awaiting her pleasure. ‘There’s the captain’s cottage, ma’am,’ returned the sailor, ‘and this here is the island cart.’)

  The Residency here was once the Mountain Hospital, for as soon as Napoleon had died Ascension was turned into a huge sanatorium, dotted with hospitals and sick bays where men of the West Africa Squadron could be taken if they fell sick while on anti-slaving duties off the Guinea Coast. It was used as a coaling station, too—yellow-fever and coal being the principal colonial ‘industries’ until the cables came at the end of the century. To get to the Residency involves a long climb—I went past One Boat, past Two Boats, past a water tank called ‘God-Be-Thanked’ and up a helter-skelter of ramps and slopes and hairpins more fearsome than any this side of the Alps.