(3) Kittitians did not like Anguillans, so affiliation with them would be to invite oppression and bloodshed;
(4) The Government in St. Kitts was restricting the free entry of foreigners, and this was already affecting Anguillans abroad; [The Anguillans feared that Kittitian restrictions against noncitizens traveling into the state would lead to reprisals by other islands against citizens of St. Christopher-Nevis-Anguilla. Anguillans, more than any other islanders in the area, travel and work in foreign lands; impose travel restrictions and what would happen to the remittances?]
(5) Anguilla was ignored generally—her name did not even appear on the number plates of vehicles; by contrast the term "Electricity Department of St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla" was a misnomer, since there was no public electricity in Anguilla; [There is no electricity on Anguilla. The Kittitian Government studied the problem at one time and decided it wasn't feasible to give Anguilla electricity because the houses were too far apart—no slums—to run an electric company at a profit. A government that refuses to furnish its citizens electricity unless it can do so at a profit is a strange government indeed.]
(6) Mr. Bradshaw the Chief Minister had threatened that Anguillans would have to eat one another's bones and that he would turn Anguilla into a desert;
(7) Anguilla would be subject to heavy taxation if she went into Statehood with St. Kitts; Anguilla should seek to join Mont-serrat or Tortola and remain with England as a Crown Colony; England would be bound to keep Anguilla as a colony since Anguilla was unwilling to associate with St. Kitts in Statehood: [The first part of this is a little ingenuous, since taxation in Anguilla is mostly import duties and Anguillans are known to be the premier smugglers of the Caribbean, practically nobody ever paying import duty for anything. The second part is the beginning of what would become a long string of alternate suggestions for Anguilla's future; Anguillans don't particularly crave association with either Mont-serrat or Tortola, but just about anything seemed better than Mr. Bradshaw's St. Kitts. As to the final clause, about England being bound to keep Anguilla since Anguilla didn't want to associate with St. Kitts, this was at least naive and showed an appalling lack of historical awareness; Anguilla hadn't wanted to associate with St. Kitts since 1822 and England had never given a damn at all.]
(8) The signing of the Report of the Constitutional Conference by Mr. Peter Adams did not indicate agreement with Statehood, but only gave members of the delegation "permission to negotiate for Statehood";
(9) The Chief Minister had held a committee meeting secretly for the purpose of negotiating local government with Mr. Johnston. [In other words, before the local-government expert ever even arrived in the Caribbean, the St. Kitts Government had managed to compromise him and condemn him to ineffectiveness by holding its committee meeting behind Peter Adams' back. This ineptitude is the Kittitian Government's only saving grace and has been the Anguillans' secret weapon from the very beginning.]
On January 27, 1967, Peter Johnston arrived in Anguilla, innocently expecting to talk about local government. They met him with everything but a rope.
Foui; hundred people were at the airport—a dirt strip with a shack to one side—and most of them were carrying signs. "We want no Statehood," one sign read, getting right down to business, and another one amplified, "We don't want Bradshaw and his Statehood." A long sign amplified the amplification: "Could we be united with Bradshaw who said he will turn Anguilla into a desert?" And another one, with simple but all-encompassing dignity, said, "No association with St. Kitts."
Johnston had a lot to read while getting off the plane. "No Trinity No Premier No Statehood," for instance.
Well, if they didn't want statehood or Bradshaw or the Trinity of St. Christopher-Nevis-Anguilla, what did they want? Other signs were glad you asked that question: "We want to be free," one of them said. "We don't want Statehood we want England," another said, and this was seconded by a sign reading, "No statehood for Anguilla seeking care of England." "God save the Queen," said yet another, to reassure Johnston that things were still all right between Anguilla on the one hand and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland on the other. "We will continue to be united Trinity with our Mother Country, England," announced another, using the word "Trinity" in a way I don't entirely understand; but the one that made the ultimate summation of the situation went as follows: "Seeking the choice of Mothers care ."
Upon arrival, Peter Johnston, the inadvertent representative of Mother, went first to Government House and then on to the Court House, where it was his intention to meet with the people—most of whom were following him, waving their signs—and talk about local government. "There," says the Wooding Report, "a group of Anguillans who acted as spokesmen showed a total disinclination to discuss local government. Instead, they took the opportunity to express views against Statehood." A dozen troublemakers took the lead in this, including Ronald Webster and Atlin Harrigan.
But Peter Johnston wasn't the man to talk to, as he tried to explain. However, he was the only one available, so they kept at him until finally he left, with dissatisfaction on both sides. He had not managed to communicate to them effectively about local government, and they had not managed to communicate to him effectively about their growing fear of the local Government at St. Kitts.
Four days later, on January 31, some people from PAM came to Anguilla to make speeches praising the Anguillans for their anti-statehood stand. Billy Herbert came and so did two of his party's executives. They held meetings at three spots on the island and were very enthusiastically received. The Anguillans had decided on their path already, but they found it nice to hear there was somebody else on their side.
Though not exactly. PAM and the Anguillans were united in opposition to Bradshaw, but the Anguillans had already gone a giant step beyond PAM, as those signs had demonstrated a week before. PAM wanted a broader range of local government in the separate units of the state; Anguilla wanted to get out of the state entirely. In fact, the only thing all Anguillans have ever agreed on, agree on now, or are likely to agree on in the future, is that they want nothing to do with Robert Bradshaw or the state he leads.
Well, almost all. Peter Adams, the only Anguillan actually plugged in to the Government in St. Kitts, continued to believe much longer than most other Anguillans that some sort of compromise could be worked out. PAM and Peter Adams were the moderates in this dispute, with Bradshaw and the St. Kitts Government and the British Government the extremists frozen on the one side and the mass of the Anguillan people the extremists frozen on the other side. As in most situations where passions really run high, it was ultimately the moderates who got the worst of it.
Two days after the PAM leaders went to Anguilla to declare solidarity with the Anguillans—even though the Anguillans had somewhat different goals from those of PAM—a letter was sent by PAM to Robert Bradshaw, listing the party's Nine-Point Plan for local government and demanding that Bradshaw implement it all. The letter was dated February 2, 1967, and so was Bradshaw's reply. This reply was brief, it was to the point, and it covered the territory.
Dear Sir,
Reference is made to a letter of instant date addressed to me and signed by yourself as "(Secretary, PAM)," "P. E. Adams MLC for Anguilla of PAM" and "William Herbert, President PAM" referring to "proposals as to the composition and functions of the proposed local government under our new Constitution."
There are no "proposals" before my Government.
Yours faithfully, Robert L. Bradshaw Chief Minister
Nothing could be plainer than that. Herbert and Adams went at once to talk to the Governor, Sir Fred Phillips. He told them there really wasn't very much he could do, nor did he see any reason for them to be so alarmed. He told them he'd received a report from Peter Johnston, the local-government expert, which had led him to believe that things either were basically all right now or very soon would be basically all right, and not to worry.
Herbert and Adams told Sir Fred they intended to
go to
London to try and persuade the British Government to delay Statehood Day until this mess could be straightened out. He told them he didn't think there was any need for them to go to London, but if they insisted he would be more than happy to warn the Secretary of State that they were on the way.
Meanwhile, back on Anguilla, the first incident was about to take place. Up till now, there had been no end of speeches and demonstrations and meetings, but no real trouble had yet occurred. Then, on February 4, things suddenly turned ugly.
It was perhaps inevitable on Anguilla that if things were to turn ugly it would happen at a beauty contest. St. Kitts, in a lunatic attempt to build enthusiasm among the populace for the fast-approaching Statehood Day, had created a beauty contest to choose a Statehood Queen—or Miss Associated State, nobody was quite clear about the title—with contestants from the three islands. Beauties from Nevis and St. Kitts were flown to Anguilla on February 4 to compete with local girls at The Valley Secondary School. The very mention of the word "statehood" by this point so inflamed some Anguillans—even when the word was used in conjunction with a beauty contest —that while the show was going on in the school building, a demonstration began to form outside. The demonstrators decided to abort the beauty contest by shutting down the generator supplying the school's electricity, which they did, and which brought the cops down on their heads.
(An interpolation. Government employees on Anguilla tended almost exclusively to be Kittitians, and that definitely included the police. The seventeen-man Anguilla Police Force, at this time, contained no Anguillans.)
The police decided to disperse the demonstrators with tear gas, without first checking to see which way the wind was blowing. It was blowing toward the school. The tear gas dispersed the demonstrators and then drifted over to the school and dispersed the audience and then drifted up on stage and dispersed the beauty queens. End of beauty contest. End of first incident, with beauty queens diving headfirst out windows.
The next day, the police went out to the east end of the island and picked up three of the men they thought had taken part in the anti-beauty-contest demonstration, intending to bring them back to headquarters. On the drive back to the center of the island, some other cars joined the police car, everybody stopped, a rational discussion ensued, and the police agreed they didn't feel like arresting these three fellows after all. End of arrest. Second end of incident. But not the last.
After the attempted arrest, Ronald Webster and Atlin Harrigan took to sleeping out in the bush, and after a while they went over to St. Martin and sent a telegram to the Commonwealth Relations Office: we are being hunted down by
the police and five thousand people in anguilla are demonstrating. There was no reply.
A week after the second ending of the beauty-contest incident, British Marines landed on Anguilla. This isn't the big invasion; that won't happen for another two years. This is a small quiet landing; so quiet, in fact, that no announcement was made of it at the time, and when the question was first brought up, the British Government denied it had ever happened.
But it did. After the second act of the beauty-contest incident, the Kittitian police on Anguilla asked the central Government on St. Kitts to send reinforcements. Fortunately, there turned out to be no particular urgency about being reinforced since it took the extra police a week to get there. It is one of the minor absurdities of this affair that all of the ships and planes in the nation of St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla were owned by Anguillans. As of February 1967, there were two Anguillan-owned airlines and many motor-driven fishing boats and launches. The St. Kitt<> Government had no airplanes at all, and only two non-sail ships: the Revenue Cutter and the Christiana, a lumbering tub on a regular ferry service to Nevis.
(The Christiana eventually sank on one of her two-mile runs to Nevis, killing a hundred people.)
After a week of looking around for some vehicle that would take reinforcements from St. Kitts to Anguilla, Bradshaw at last convinced the British to help. They laid on a warship, H.M.S. Salisbury (the same name as the capital of Rhodesia), which brought the reinforcements—variously reported as numbering forty, seventy and one hundred—to Anguilla. They landed at Island Harbour, an out-of-the-way corner of the island not too far from where some of the alleged demonstrators lived. The Kittitian police were escorted ashore by a detachment of Royal Marines wearing steel helmets and carrying rifles—they had been led by their superiors to expect trouble.
(Those in authority on the British side consistently failed to understand that the Anguillans like the English; it's Bradshaw they don't like. The British perhaps have reduced Anguilla to a desert, but they never said they would; Bradshaw said he would.)
The Kittitian police and British Royal Marines were met on the beach by people living in the area, who had come down to find out what that big ship was all about. They ignored the Kittitians but greeted the Marines with big smiles of welcome, plus candy bars. Yes, the natives gave the soldiers candy bars.
The Marines took their rifles and helmets back to the Salisbury, picked up some candy bars of their own to give the Anguillans, and returned for a swim with the local citizens, while the Kittitians poked around the scrub, looking for Ronald Webster and Atlin Harrigan and the other beauty-contest troublemakers, who weren't there. The police did find a shotgun in one house and confiscated it. (A later news report would say, "Illicit arms were found on the island.")
Finally the Kittitians gave up. They went off to join the regular police detachment and the Marines got back into their boats, and as they set off toward the Salisbury the Anguillans stood on the beach behind them and sang out a chorus of
"God Save the Queen."
Now, that's an invasion.
Meanwhile, on the thirteenth of February, despite the British Administrator's assurances that everything was really all right, Billy Herbert and Peter Adams left for London. Statehood was due to arrive in exactly two weeks, and Herbert and Adams were desperate to have it held off. From their manner when they arrived in London, they seemed more like men trying to get a stay of execution than delay national independence.
In London, they spoke to Mrs. Judith Hart, then Minister of State for Commonwealth Relations, who promised them something would be done very quickly about local government. They also spoke with reporters, and the result was another first: Anguilla made the headlines. In the London Times of February 18, 1967, under the headline "Police Landed on Anguilla by Frigate," appeared an item in two distinct parts. The first part, which announced the Salisbury's deposit of Kit-titian police, missed accuracy on a few points; the British landing wasn't mentioned, the Kittitian force was reduced to four men, and Anguilla was placed in the Windward Islands instead of the Leeward Islands. The final sentence of this part was, if nothing else, extremely hopeful: "The Commonwealth Office announced yesterday that the situation in Anguilla was now normal."
The second part of the item told about Billy Herbert's meeting with Mrs. Hart, said that PAM was "discontented," and failed to mention the man from Anguilla, Peter Adams, at all.
Back at the Commonwealth Office, Statehood Day had taken on the inexorability of the birth of Christ. There was no possibility in British minds that it could be delayed past its prophesied arrival.
The Labour Party was then in power in Great Britain, so Herbert and Adams turned to the Conservatives for help. They had entree via various Englishmen who had connections in
Nevis, principally old Etonian James Milnes Gaskell, owner of that island's Montpelier Hotel.
The natural ally of middle- and upper-class PAM was the middle- and upper-class Conservative Party, just as the natural ally of Bradshaw's Labour Party was Harold Wilson's Labour Party. Circumstances would eventually alter these cases to some extent, but the natural political flow was Labour to Labour and PAM to Conservative.
The result was, on February 14, Lord Jellicoe raised in the House of Lords the question of whether or not it was a bad idea to give independence to a nat
ion simultaneous with its breaking apart. Speaking in reply for the Government, Lord Beswick said he understood things were really all right, the necessary legislation for local councils on Nevis and Anguilla had already been drafted. This answer combined vagueness with inaccuracy in perfect proportions to stifle the discussion.
However, Mrs. Hart, either wanting to make a token gesture to please Herbert and Adams or else belatedly worried that perhaps they were right, sent out an Under-Secretary, Mr. Henry Hall, to look things over. Hall arrived in St. Kitts on February 20, one week before Statehood Day, talked with some people in the Government, and the next day left to visit Anguilla. When he arrived, there was some shouting and perhaps some jostling. The last Englishman the Anguillans had been able to talk to, Mr. Peter Johnston, the local-government expert, had so far as they could tell left without having heard a word they'd said, so they raised their voices a bit while talking to Mr. Hall.
Much later, in a letter to the London Times, James Milnes Gaskell described that situation, and some of what had led up to it, and wrote:
Mrs. Hart sent Mr. Henry Hall to Anguilla to explain Statehood. On February 23 Mrs. Hart issued a press release saying: "I am told that there is a very much calmer atmosphere in Anguilla. My official has toured the whole island and he tells me that his reception has been most friendly." But on February 22 I had received a cable from St. Kitts saying that Hall had been booed in Anguilla, demonstrated against and shot at.
On the same day that Henry Hall was failing to hear himself be booed, demonstrated against and shot at, the beauty-contest incident was moving into a new stage. Sir Fred Phillips, Governor of St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla (a primarily ceremonial position), himself a West Indian, had gone to Anguilla to talk quietly with Atlin Harrigan and Ronald Webster. He was the only Kittitian official they would agree to meet. They had a secret meeting in the bush, and Phillips promised them they would only be fined, not given jail terms, if they surrendered in re the beauty contest. They surrendered at once, were tried in a court on Anguilla, and both were charged with throwing stones. Harrigan was also charged with indecent language. They pleaded guilty and were fined and that was that.
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