Westlake, Donald E - NF 01

by Under An English Heaven (v1. 1)

  I mentioned the Governor in St. Kitts. Anguilla's connection with St. Kitts began in 1822, when Anguilla was stripped flat by a hurricane, then dried out by a drought, then swept bare by a gale, then decimated by famine. In response to all this, the English Secretary of State ordered the Governor of St. Kitts, through whom Great Britain more or less administered Anguilla, "to propose to the assembly of St. Christopher [the formal name of St. Kitts] that one representative should be received from the island of Anguilla which would enable the assembly to enact laws for the government of that colony." Laws, presumably, against hurricanes, droughts and gales.

  The St. Kitts Governor proposed instead that Britain rule Anguilla direct, a suggestion that has come up more than once since that time. But England would have nothing to do with direct rule of such a microscopic entity as Anguilla, and forced the Governor of St. Kitts to take the smaller island under his wing whether he liked it or not.

  The Anguillans disliked the arrangement as much as the Governor did. They sent a complaining letter to England, saying, "Can we indulge a hope that laws enacted particularly for this community, can or will be made with much regard to its interests, when they are to be passed by a body of men living in a distant and remote island, possessing no property of any kind here and having no connexion or relation whatever?" But the British blithely went ahead, setting up the legal framework in 1824, and the Anguillans obediently sent along somebody to St. Kitts to be present in the assembly every time St. Kitts planned to do something with, to, about or for Anguilla.

  But all that was simply rigmarole to satisfy the English; it gave them a neat colonial administration, nice chain-of-com-mand charts back home in London. On Anguilla, the islanders had their own government, the Vestry, which had eleven members elected by the people themselves. The Warden, the only official on the island from the St. Kitts Government, was invited to attend the meetings, and so was the Anglican rector, but neither of them could vote. The Vestry levied taxes, issued licenses, imposed export duties and generally ran the island.

  This too was a pattern that would be followed throughout the island's history; one government, usually through St. Kitts and always under protest, to satisfy the constructionary minds of the English, and another government of Anguillans at home to get things done.

  Fifty years later, in 1871, another political reshuffling took place, when the British created the Leeward Islands Federation, in which each island was to be its own presidency. Three years before, in 1868, phosphate had been found at Crocus Bay on Anguilla. It was being exported to Philadelphia, so the island was in one of its rare periods of financial well-being. The Anguillans appealed to Governor-General Sir Benjamin Pine, asking if they could be a separate presidency as long as things were being rearranged anyway, but when the dust had settled the combination of St. Kitts and Anguilla was one unit in the Federation.

  What is this St. Kitts, that Anguilla keeps being stuck into paper states with it? Is it an island at all similar to Anguilla? No; it is volcanic where Anguilla is coral, mountainous where Anguilla is flat, rainy where Anguilla is dry, plantation-ridden and slave-oriented where Anguilla has always sheltered the independent poor.

  Is it, then, the nearest island to Anguilla? No; the nearest populated island is St. Martin, three miles away; the next nearest is St. Barthelemy, twenty-five miles away; the next nearest is Saba, thirty miles away; the next nearest is St. Eustatius, fifty miles away. St. Kitts is seventy miles from Anguilla.

  There is no geographical connection between St. Kitts and Anguilla of any kind, nor is there any social connection between them. St. Kitts's population is limited almost entirely to upper-class whites and lower-class blacks while Anguilla has a multiracial population limited almost entirely to poor middle-class property owners. (As an Anguillan said to me, "They call us poor, but you have to go to St. Kitts to see a filthy slum." I saw it, and it was filthy. The water supply is a communal curbside faucet every block, and the sewage disposal is a gutter down the middle of the street.)

  There is only one connection between St. Kitts and Anguilla. On the maps and in the file drawers back in England, St. Kitts is the closest British colony to the British colony of Anguilla.

  Two years after St. Kitts and Anguilla became one presidency in the Leeward Islands Federation, the Anguillans complained to England again, saying the Kittitians were "utter strangers to us" and "this legislative dependence on St. Kitts can in no sense be called a legislative union, it has operated and continues to operate most injuriously against us, and is mutually disliked."

  That complaint went the way of the rest. In fact, when another administrative change was made nine years later (governments never last very long in the Caribbean), the paper linkage was formed even more tightly by combining the two islands with a third island, Nevis (which is the closest island to St. Kitts, which does have somewhat similar geography, and which does have a somewhat similar population), under a single presidency. But the portents were even worse than the action; the legal name for the combination of Anguilla and St. Kitts and Nevis was St. Christopher-Nevis. Not until seventy years later, in 1951, was the word Anguilla added to the name of the colony into which the island of Anguilla had willy-nilly been forced.

  By the end of the Second World War, the British held several hundred islands in the Caribbean, most of them small and unpopulated, all of them grouped into fourteen separate political entities. There were also two small colonies on the mainlands of South and Central America (British Guiana and British Honduras) and the islands of Bermuda off the North American coast.

  In 1958, the British Government attempted to unload practically all its Caribbean holdings, ten island colonies stuffed together into something resembling a loosely packed snowball thrown at a passing bus. This casserole was called the West Indies Federation, and it included Antigua, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica (with the Cayman Islands and the Turks & Caicos Islands), Montserrat, St. Christopher-Nevis-Anguilla, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and Trinidad-Tobago. It also included a lot of water, since the Federation was spread out over an expanse of Caribbean Sea 1,600 miles wide and 800 miles long. Jamaica and the Cayman Islands were a full thousand miles from the rest of the Federation, separated from the others not only by all that water but also by such trivia as Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The Turks & Caicos Islands were a little north of everybody else, the other side of Puerto Rico and Cuba. Spotted amid the remaining nine were a half dozen colonies of France and Holland and the United States. Between Jamaica and Trinidad lay fifteen hundred miles of open water, with nothing in it at all.

  This wasn't the first federation dreamed up by the British Colonial Office, but it was certainly the biggest. The Colonial Office loved the idea of neat packages, and federations make a charmingly neat package on paper. As Lord Caradon told me, "They've not done so well, federations, so far. I think they'll do better in future. I don't write off the federation idea." Lord Caradon, then Sir Hugh Foot, was Governor of Jamaica while the West Indies Federation was being organized and is generally considered a chief architect of the Nigerian Federation; his faith does seem to die pretty hard. Particularly since, of the half-dozen federations put together by the British since the end of the Second World War, not one has remained intact.

  The West Indies Federation began, as federations do, with a conference, this one held at Montego Bay in 1947. A Standing Closer Association Committee was formed to study the idea of mixing and matching all these islands and to work up a constitution for the result.

  It may be appropriate here to mention the old description of a camel as a horse designed by a committee, and to suggest that perhaps a federation is a country designed by a committee.

  The conference eventually came up with a report saying the federation idea was a good one, and the report was submitted to a second conference, this one in London in 1953. The second conference was pleased with the first conference's report, and in turn submitted it to the island gover
nments involved. Jamaica, by a unanimous vote in both houses, was the first to accept the recommendation, and all the other islands promptly followed suit.

  (The two mainland colonies, British Honduras and British Guiana, the latter now Guyana, were also invited in but declined, for private reasons of their own, not because the Federation struck them as an unworkable idea. There is a complex racial balance in those two lands, particularly in Guyana; federation would mean unrestricted immigration of blacks from the overcrowded islands, which would destroy the balance forever. A tie to the mainland had been put forward as one of the primary advantages of federation. This tie was now proved to be impossible, but the Federation lunged forward anyway.)

  A third conference took place, in London again, in 1956, and at this conference the irrevocable decision to federate took place.

  Now a year passes, in which everybody argues about where the capital should be. A full year. Finally, after enough bitterness and squabbling to convince anybody but a conference that these people are never going to live together, it is decided to build the capital in Trinidad. No reason why not.

  Princess Margaret officiated at the first session of the West Indies Parliament on April 22, 1958. It was planned that for the next four years the new nation would be half-free and half-colony, with Mother Britain keeping one hand on the reins while the boys got used to running things themselves. As of May 31, 1962, the West Indies Federation would be a completely independent nation, and Great Britain would have rid itself of ten colonies at one fell swoop.

  But it didn't turn out that way. The first thing that happened, there was trouble about the capital. Chaguaramas, the site on Trinidad they'd finally chosen, was leased to the United States for a naval base and the United States wouldn't vacate. So after all that bickering about the capital, and finally coming to a decision, everybody had to go back and start all over again.

  Then, on September 19, 1961, Jamaica had a referendum; should it stay in the Federation or get out? The decision was strongly to get out, which Jamaica promptly did. The first island in became the first island out.

  Trinidad was the second, early in 1962. And on May 31, 1962, the date originally planned as Independence Day, the West Indies Federation was dissolved.

  And they never did find a site for the capital.

  The West Indies Federation wasn't a total loss, however. The practice had been good for the bigger islands, and in August of 1962 both Jamaica and Trinidad-Tobago became independent. So the British had at least managed to cut their colonial responsibilities by two.

  But that was a far cry from the ten they'd been trying for, so the British came right back in again, with a new idea— a federation.

  This time the federation would be composed of the "Little Eight"—Antigua, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Montser-rat, St. Christopher-Nevis-Anguilla, St. Lucia and St. Vincent. Conferences were held, of course, both on Barbados and in London, and on November 1, 1964, a cheerful announcement was made that a new improved West Indies Federation would appear some time in 1965. It didn't, though, and on November 30, 1966, Barbados went off by itself and became an independent nation, and then there were seven.

  Back in 1960, during the half-life of the West Indies Federation, the Anguillans had asked through their elected member of the St. Kitts Legislative Council if they could please be separated from St. Kitts; they were ignored. On January 22, 1965, while the "Little Eight" conferences were going on, seventeen leading citizens of Anguilla signed a request that their island "remain outside the proposed Federation of the Eastern Caribbean and be administered from the Colonial Office"; they were ignored.

  The requests from Anguilla for political separation from St. Kitts had never stopped since 1822, but from 1958 on they became ever more frequent, more urgent and more plaintive. General independence was in the air, and the Anguillans knew it and did not want independence from Great Britain if it meant they would remain under the authority of St. Kitts. And the reason for that was mostly a man named Robert Llewellyn Bradshaw.

  Robert Bradshaw is a Kittitian, born in 1916 and destined to be a cane cutter on the plantations like the generations before him. In a special report on the Leeward and Windward islands in October of 1968, the London Times gave the background that altered Robert Bradshaw s destiny:

  A fairly consistent pattern can be seen in the islands. Political awareness began in the late 1930s, when depression in world commodity prices, particularly sugar, hit the whole West Indies hard. With the help of the British Labour Party and trade unions the workers came together. For the first time there was a basis for popular power. Mr. Bradshaw, of St. Kitts—the doyen of island politicians—and Mr. Bird, of Antigua, rose in this manner. They were union organizers and spoke for labour—the cane cutters, the dock workers and public employees. This became general in the islands, and today most of the ruling parties have Labour somewhere in their title.

  Bradshaw's first job was in the St. Kitts sugar factory, where he formed the island's first union. He came to real prominence in 1948, when he was thirty-two years old and led the first major sugar workers' strike anywhere in the Caribbean. It blossomed into sixteen weeks of rioting and ended with some small concessions gained from the plantation owners. With universal suffrage on all the islands, union men were moving into government, and in 1952 Bradshaw became St. Kitts's Minister of Trade and Production. In 1956 he ran for Premier, got all the sugar-worker votes, and won.

  There are, however, no sugar workers on Anguilla, which may be one of the reasons Bradshaw got practically no votes from Anguilla. This move may have been both democratic and honest on the Anguillans' part, but it wasn't very healthy.

  Bradshaw was a strong supporter of the West Indies Federation. In 1958, at its inception, he won a seat in the Federal Parliament, turning over the reins of Kittitian government to his Deputy Premier, Caleb Azariah Paul Southwell, a burly man who is not a Kittitian by birth, but a Dominican. Bradshaw became Federal Minister of Finance and a vice-president of the West Indies Federal Labour Party, but when the West Indies Federation crumpled he returned to St. Kitts and eventually took his old job back, with Paul Southwell reverting to the Number Two spot.

  The key to Robert Bradshaw may simply be that he wants to be loved. A small and slender man, with a huge moustache that he seems to have rented from Groucho Marx, Bradshaw likes to dress up in ways that have been called "outlandish," "odd" and "quaint." He has been known to appear in public in gaiters, in buckle shoes, in wing collars, in powdered wigs. He will take any opportunity to slap on a top hat. He wears uniforms the envy of every doorman along Central and Hyde parks, though according to the London Daily Express he also "delights in donning British military khaki and strutting around the indoor lily pond at Government Headquarters with pistol and peaked cap." Wearing one or another of his costumes, he likes to drive around his domain in his canary-yellow 1935 Rolls-Royce, occasionally tending his moustache with its special golden brush. For years he had on his office wall a cartoon showing John Foster Dulles on the toilet, with the caption: "The only man in Washington who knows what he is doing."

  Bradshaw sees himself as a father to his people, a stern and knowing and loving father who knows best for his children. The violent aspects of paternalism are strong in him; when St. Kitts became semi-independent in 1967, he reintroduced flogging for criminal offenses.

  There is nothing a father likes less than being rejected by one of his children, and Robert Bradshaw has felt like a spurned father in re Anguilla ever since 1956. "I will not rest," he was quoted as saying, shortly after the election, "until I have reduced that place to a desert." He said this at a speech in Basseterre's Pall Mall Square, at one time the largest slave market in the West Indies. He always makes this sort of remark in public, either in speeches at open meetings or over St. Kitts's Government-controlled radio station ZIZ; but then afterward, when he's feeling calmer, he denies he said any such thing. His political opposition on St. Kitts has taken to tape-recording his announcem
ents—but that's all right, he denies them anyway.

  He denies, for instance, that he ever said of the Anguillans, "I will put salt in their coffee, bones in their rice and sand in their sugar." Or that he varied the formula slightly on another occasion by saying, "I will put bones in their rice and pepper in their soup." Or that his suggestion for Anguilla's future development was that "they will have to suck each other's bones."

  None of these statements, despite the subsequent denials, encouraged the Anguillans much. The London Sunday Times remarked in 1969, "The culmination of Bradsliaw's increasingly idiosyncratic rule has been his boast that he is the spiritual descendant of Henri Christophe, the 19th century dictator of Haiti. Since Christophe achieved, even in that country's bloodstained annals, a unique notoriety for his cruelty, he is not perhaps the most reassuring hero."

  How did it affect the Anguillans, over the years, having Robert Bradshaw as their Premier? Well, for example, the British had installed a telephone system on Anguilla shortly after the First World War—fourteen phones, hand-cranked. When Hurricane Donna flattened the island in 1960, all the poles were knocked down. The St. Kitts Government sent up some repairmen, but instead of fixing the poles they took away the central-office equipment. Anguilla went without telephones for twelve years.

  Then there was the pier. Anguilla has never had a cargo pier where seagoing vessels could be off-loaded; everything delivered to the island—and everything except weeds has to be delivered—had to be brought in by small boat from ships anchored offshore. As the Anguillans tell it, they asked Canada for aid money to build a pier. The money was sent to the central Government on St. Kitts, and the pier was built— on St. Kitts. It was named Anguilla Pier.

  While on St. Kitts in 1970, I visited Anguilla Pier, which wasn't all that easy to do. It's at Sandy Point, on the opposite side of the island from the capital of Basseterre and all the shipping. There are no storage sheds, there is no industry in the area, there isn't even a town there. I couldn't swear to it, but the crane didn't look operable; my impression was that it had rusted into place. Some young boys were playing around the pier and the ocean was empty as far as the eye could see.