For instance. Bradshaw agreed to the interim period because he thought he would get Anguilla back when the year wTas up. On the other hand, the Anguillans thought the idea was a step-by-step breaking of the link with St. Kitts, with the interim year to be followed by an adjustment either to Crown Colony or Associated State. As Atlin Harrigan put it in an editorial in the Beacon a month later:
We are like a man sitting down to a many-course dinner at a big hotel. He knows that by the time dinner is over he will have had all he can eat, but it will be served to him course by course, and the next course will come when he is ready for it. The whole dinner is not put on the table at one time. No, Mr. Bradshaw, we have got all we want for the present, and we are sure that at the end we will be quite satisfied, and not the least because everything has not been handed out on a plate, but we are going to have the satisfaction of working for it ourselves.
Meanwhile, Bradshaw was announcing, in a speech on Nevis, "The people of Nevis are saying, 'See, Anguilla has got what it wanted, and we have to get what we want, too.' But I want to go on record as saying, Anguilla has not got what it wanted, and Nevis will never become another Anguilla."
Also, the Anguillans had been left with the impression that Colonel Bradshaw's clutch on their savings in Kittitian banks would be loosened and that the island's Land Registers would be turned over to the Island Council by the St. Kitts Government; two things Bradshaw hadn't the slightest intention of doing. In fact, Chapman himself, a year and a half later, pointed out that the savings and the Land Registers were Bradshaw's "trump cards, and if he gave them all away he would never get Anguilla back."
A short while after the Interim Agreement had been worked out, Lord Lambton, a Conservative M.P., visited both St. Kitts and Anguilla, and wrote, "Anguilla believes that its independence has been established. St. Kitts believes that Anguilla will be returned to it by the British Government at the end of the year. A settlement based on such misunderstanding will do more harm in the long run than an unpopular decision would have done now."
Fisher and Chapman disagree. "No one was misled in any way about the interim solution," Fisher says, and Chapman says, "There were no misconceptions about the interim settlement."
This perfect understanding was attained by December 18. Nigel Fisher has since described the windup on Anguilla, saying, "The Anguillans are not at all easy people to negotiate with, because, perhaps through lack of political experience, they are not politically very sophisticated. Mr. Webster is honest but not very articulate, deeply religious but rather obstinate, an ^ardent patriot for Anguilla but not a very self-confident leader of his own people. He was nervous of leadership and wanted always to carry his followers and the people with him at every stage of the negotiations. He had no idea of negotiating privately, and even when agreement was reached we had to obtain all the signatures from all the leading people all over the Island of Anguilla ourselves. We also had to announce at a great public meeting the solution that had been agreed. It was rather embarrassing that we should have to do that, but we did it because Mr. Webster was unwilling to do it himself until he saw that the agreement was acceptable to the people."
Another English politician had here run into the thorny problem of Anguillan democracy. We dwellers in the metropoli have been calling our republics "democracies" for so long that we tend to be baffled and uneasy when we run across the real thing. We are more comfortable with somebody like George Thomson, Secretary of State for Commonwealth Affairs, who announced the Interim Agreement to the House of Commons at the end of January (six weeks after Fishers embarrassment in Anguilla) with the words, "We have made some progress towards finding a solution to this difficult problem. I think in some ways the less I say about some of the details the better."
"I'll be judge, I'll be jury/' said cunning old Fury; "I'll try the whole cause, and condemn you to death."
—Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
15
Back in September, three months before Fisher and Chapman's Caribbean trip, Colonel Bradshaw had gone to England. He had told reporters in London, "I am going to tell the Commonwealth Office that Britain should act with military force to disarm the rebels and land a force on Anguilla. We must go back and disarm the people who have the guns there." He also said Anguilla was controlled by "a group of gunmen financed by dirty money."
Shortly after his arrival in London, a solicitor's clerk interrupted these pronouncements by serving several writs on him; one from James Milnes Gaskell and two from Diane Prior-Palmer. Milnes Gaskell wanted damages for false imprisonment and Miss Prior-Palmer wanted her diary back.
The Colonel returned to St. Kitts.
The detainees had been there all along. After popping in and out of jail all summer, life had quieted for them, too, until at last the trials started on October 16, four months and six days after the detentions began. Judge Eardley Glasgow, who was to have presided, asked to be excused for "certain reasons," which he didn't go into, and was replaced by Judge St. Bernard, from the island of Grenada.
The first defendant was an Anguillan, Collins Hodge, who was charged with "shooting with intent" while wearing a plastic Batman mask. A confession was introduced, but Hodge said he'd signed it while a pistol was being held to his head. The trial ended in an acquittal. A "spontaneous demonstration" objecting to the verdict was immediately delivered to the Blake-ney Hotel, where the judge and the defense attorneys were staying. The judge immediately got in touch with the Government and said that if something wasn't done about that mob at once he'd contact England and ask them to send in a warship. The spontaneous demonstration spontaneously went away.
The Beacon had some interesting things to say about the trial of Collins Hodge. From the issue of October 21:
On the Monday afternoon of October 16th we were all tuned in to the radio station of St. Kitts, feeling sure we would hear some news of the trial. All we heard were some trivialities and advertisements, but of the trial—nothing. But thanks to Radio Antilles we heard the truth; that the Government of St. Kitts had been reprimanded for keeping the accused in prison; for not letting their counsel see them; and that they were all released on bail. We have heard eyewitness accounts of the ovation they received as they joined the crowd outside the court; the kisses from the women; the handshakes from the men.
A week later:
With great joy we welcomed back to Anguilla Mr. Collins Hodge, the first of the accused in the St. Kitts trials to be found not guilty. Dr. Herbert's father took him to the LIAT plane at St. Kitts, bound for St. Martin. He then came on a chartered plane to Anguilla on Wednesday, the 25th. He was taken on a motorcade through the island, visiting the homes of the other accused. Asked what his plans were, he said that he would take a few days' holiday and have some sea bathing, and then go back to work at Expan Company here in Anguilla.
And in an editorial the week after that:
With the return home of Collins Hodge, freed, every true Anguillan rejoices, and feels a change in the heavy atmosphere which has hung over our little island during the last few months. Earnest lawyers from St. Kitts and other Caribbean countries are diligently employing legal procedure, well-learned from British jurisprudence. Before this onslaught, false implications and lies are withering away.
The falsity apparently included bribery and coercion of prosecution witnesses. One police officer testified he'd been ordered to lie in court. An Anguillan, Clarence Rogers, told of being bribed to give false statements about Billy Herbert. According to an affidavit signed by Rogers, the bribe was paid in a hotel room on St. Thomas, and the bribers were two men connected with the St. Kitts Government, plus an American couple, John and Vera Randall.
Enter the Randalls. Not long before the rebellion, the Randalls had bought a piece of land on Anguilla from the St. Kitts Government. Apparently they'd used most of their savings to do it and were planning to build guesthouses as well as a home for themselves. They got their own house built, the rebellion broke
out, and they put their money on the wrong horse. They backed St. Kitts, and apparently even took an active role once or twice on St. Kitts's behalf. The fact that four years later they were still alive and intact and living in the same house on Anguilla—particularly after the Clarence Rogers story and some other rumors that traveled around the island-is a fair indication of the savagery of the Anguillans.
But back to the trials. In addition to the spontaneous demonstration, the judge also got a telephone call and a letter threatening him with death if there were any more acquittals. So there were more acquittals.
The second trial, with five defendants, was simply a choral repeat of the Collins Hodge solo, and all five were found not guilty. Three of those acquitted were Anguillans; as they left the court on November 13 after the acquittal, these three were immediately rearrested and charged with taking policemen's rifles back on May 30. The crowd outside the courthouse was pro-defendant, but the police held it at bay with cattle prods.
The next day, Colonel Bradshaw did an odd thing, considering there were more trials coming up. He called his House of Assembly, led a debate on the trials, broadcast live on ZIZ, in which matters that hadn't been decided yet by any court were presented as facts, and rammed through a resolution that said that the House of Assembly of St. Kitts felt a "lack of confidence in the administration of justice in this State." Colonel Bradshaw also caused to be created a document called "Complaint Against the Judge," accusing Judge St. Bernard of "bias," "maladministration," "perversion of justice" and corruption. The document was sent to the Chief Justice of the Associated States Supreme Court, who replied six days later by slamming the St. Kitts Government up, down and sideways, accusing St. Kitts of contempt of court, attempting to prejudice a fair trial, using the Government-controlled radio and newspaper as clubs against the court, and general lack of decent behavior. The Chief Justice also said he was making his response public with the full knowledge and approval of all the other judges on the High Court.
At the third trial there were seven defendants, including Billy Herbert. But the prosecution announced it didn't have any evidence to offer beyond what had been presented in the first two trials, so they might just as well find the defendants not guilty right at the beginning. Which they did.
Thus ended the trials—or almost. There were still the three Anguillans who'd been rearrested behind cattle prods and charged with taking policemen's guns away from them. They were out on bail, and so was a fourth Anguillan, Lemuel Phillips, who had been detained from the beginning but had never been tried for anything. The bail money had been raised from friendly Kittitians and legally the Anguillans were required to stay on St. Kitts until the Government could figure out some way to try them, but one dark night they stepped aboard a northbound schooner and went away from there. (After a short rest in Anguilla, they headed farther north, to St. Thomas, to earn enough money to pay back to their Kitti-tian friends the bail money that had been forfeited.)
Just after the final trial, the six-month period of the Emergency Regulations was up. As expected, Colonel Bradshaw got his House of Assembly to renew them for another six months. He also announced that all Kittitians who had been defendants would have their passports withdrawn. This was reasonable and justifiable, he explained, because the defendants had been charged with plotting against the state. That they'd been found not guilty didn't matter.
He also expressed again his irritation with the way the trials had gone and increased his reputation as a statesman by saying, "Next time, evidence will be picked up in blood in the street."
But nobody was entirely happy about the conduct of the trials. The Bar Associations of ten Caribbean islands had a meeting to discuss the trials, at the end of which they published a paper condemning the St. Kitts Government's actions "as being contrary to the principles of the Rule of Law and being inimical to the due administration of Justice and as constituting an affront to basic human rights and dignity." They documented their charges with six specific points and sent the paper around to lawyers and judges and government leaders all over the world.
But the legal profession wasn't through with Colonel Bradshaw. The next thumping was delivered by the International Commission of Jurists in a report on the St. Kitts trials; it said, among other things, "The indictment against the St. Kitts Government is a long one: it has repeatedly shown contempt for the courts, has refused to accept their decision and has flagrantly attempted—by threats and the misuse of the mass media —to use the courts as an instrument of its policy. When the courts proved to be instruments of the Rule of Law, it resorted to government by emergency regulation and trial by 'Commission of Inquiry.'"
But let s give the last word on the St. Kitts trials to Atlin Harrigan, in the Beacon:
There lingers in the minds of thinking Anguillans a feeling of shame, shame that we have ever been associated with St. iStts' Government as it stands today; a system so deteriorated that a police state has resulted . . . That Government is one of hate which uses its laws as weapons to castigate, muzzle and punish any hapless individual brave enough to stand up against the system . . . Did we really rebel? Or did the St. Kitts Government, weakened by ailing politican conditions, lose its wavering grip on us and slip back into its quagmire of corruption (with just a little local help)?
Nouns of number, or multitude, such as Mob, Parliament, Rabble, House of Commons, Regiment, Court of King's Bench, Den of Thieves, and the like.
—William Cobbett, English Grammar
16
The most dramatic event of 1968 took place on January 1; that's the kind of year it was. The event itself was dramatic enough: a mysterious murder. A nineteen-year-old girl, Robena Diego, was shot by a bullet from a .38-caliber gun and died on the way to the hospital. She had been walking along the road with her boy friend, a twenty-year-old former Kittitian. His story was that they had been strolling together, he pushing his bicycle with the hand that wasn't holding hers, and suddenly she fell down. However, as there didn't seem to have been anyone else in the general vicinity, the boy was arrested by the Anguillan police and charged with murder.
The gun was quickly found; a revolver in a brown paper bag behind a low wall thirty feet from where the girl was shot. Roger Fisher's young assistant, Frank McDonald, spent a few days flying around the Caribbean with this gun, trying to get some island's police force to check it for fingerprints, but nobody wanted to cross Colonel Bradshaw, so he finally had to give up. Also, since a murder charge was far above Peter Adams' even theoretical jurisdiction, and since the Anguilla Police Department had no experience or training or equipment for investigating a case like this, there was little anybody could do. The boy friend stayed in jail, the gun was locked away in the police safe, and Robena Diego was buried.
Meanwhile Tony Lee was on the island, waiting for Lord Shepherd in England to finish the formalities of setting up the Interim Agreement. This finally happened on January 16. Now everybody had a year in which Anguilla would be run more or less directly from Great Britain, with Tony Lee as our man in Anguilla under the title Senior British Official.
Nothing had been changed legally—the murder charge, for instance, still couldn't be tried anywhere but in St. Kitts—but there was'a temporary period in which everybody had agreed not to raise a fuss, the idea being that the Interim would be spent trying to find a solution with some permanence in it.
Very very slowly passed 1968. On March 8, the anniversary of the burning of the Warden's house, Dr. Hyde's house was burned. Dr. Hyde understandably took his wife and mother and children and went home to England. Anguilla was at loose ends for a doctor until an American, Dr. Felix Spector, arrived to take over. Dr. Spector was a Philadelphian with twenty-five years' medical experience, but he had run into some trouble with the law concerning an operation that is legal in some parts of the world but not in the particular place where Dr. Spector performed it. He was tried and convicted, and the judge sentenced him to two years' practice in an undeveloped part of the worl
d in lieu of jail.
Also in 1968 Burrowes Park underwent a name change. This was the place where Ronald Webster made all his public announcements, and several of his followers decided the park should bear his name. And so it was done, and Burrowes Park became Ronald Webster's Park.
It was also the year that British journalist Colin Rickards asked Colonel Bradshaw why, since Anguilla was a financial drain on him and he didn't like Anguillans anyway, he didn't let them go ahead and secede, to which the Colonel replied, "That would not be statesmanlike. There would be fragmentation throughout the West Indies. Barbuda would secede from Antigua, Tobago from Trinidad, possibly Carriacou from Grenada and even Bequia from St. Vincent. It is up to me as a Caribbean statesman to prevent this from happening. I must shoulder my responsibilities. Anguilla is the cross that I must bear."
It soon became obvious that what the British intended with the Interim Agreement Year was to play a game of Masterly Inactivity, waiting for the Anguillans to calm themselves and march obediently back to St. Kitts, as though this were simply a case of hysterics. Tony Lee soon came to understand that there was no way to make the scenario run like that and kept telling his superiors so, but there must be something peculiar in the air of Anguilla—Great Britain can t hear anybody from there.
Possibly because a connection with Great Britain now seemed so much more hopeful, or possibly because of tensions aggravated by the passage of time, various relationships on the island began to undergo a change; practically none of them for the better. The Island Council decided it didn't want Frank McDonald around any more and also told Roger Fisher they'd let him know if they ever needed him again. Relations between Ronald Webster and Atlin Harrigan became increasingly strained as they moved more and more into new roles, Webster becoming the solitary leader, shrugging off the restrictions of working with the Island Council and eventually packing the Council with yes men, and Harrigan becoming the island's— and Webster's—Jiminy Cricket, sniping away at local errors and peccadilloes via the Beacon. On March 2, for instance, he wrote, "What is happening to our Council Members? How many more pieces of bad legislation will be passed? Cannot any of them think before they make a move?"
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