Westlake, Donald E - NF 01

by Under An English Heaven (v1. 1)

  Primarily, it was the simple fact that a year and a half had gone by without a solution. Anguilla was a continuing aggravation and worry in everybody else's back yard, and the anticipated British handling of the problem hadn't worked out. Also, there was the usual terror of fragmentation. Colonel Bradshaw had been sending telegrams all over the Caribbean for a year and a half warning everybody about fragmentation, claiming that a successfully independent Anguilla would cause other subcolonies to act the same way, and it was actually beginning to happen. Though whether the discontent was caused by the example of Anguilla or more personal problems at home is another question.

  Still, at the very time the Heads of Government Conference was going on, there were stirrings and trouble in three places besides Anguilla. First there was Nevis, which was also starting to give Colonel Bradshaw a bad time; when Nevis had gotten its Local Council at long last, PAM had run candidates for five of the six seats and all five PAM men had won, a result that was sure to cause friction between the Nevis Local

  Council and the St. Kitts Government just about any time they'd meet.

  Then there was Barbuda. A smaller island than Anguilla, with a population of around two thousand, it was governed from Antigua, thirty miles away, and had much the same stepsister complaint about Antigua that Anguilla had about St. Kitts. Rumblings of discontent had become louder from Barbuda since Anguilla's successful secession.

  On the South American mainland, there was Guyana's trouble with the people of its own hinterland. While the Heads of Government Conference was going on, Guyanese troops were operating in the interior, breaking up a "Republic of Ru-pununi" that had been set up by some dissident ranchers there.

  At the moment, Trinidad wasn't having trouble with Tobago, nor was Grenada having trouble with Carriacou, but who knew when it might start? No, the best thing was to ignore the details of the Anguilla situation, look upon it not as six thousand people struggling against petty repression but as a "disturbance" having an "effect," and give the British the okay to go on in there and clean it up.

  Which the British didn't do. Instead, they announced in the middle of February that William Whitlock—whom Webster and Bradshaw had talked to separately in London last October —would be making a tour of the Caribbean at the end of the month and would hope to be able to produce some new proposals for both sides. As an editorial in the Beacon of February 15 said:

  It is a pity that this announcement came after Anguillans had gone to the polls and voted to be independent of the Crown and Commonwealth. Any talks that Mr. Whitlock can venture upon, would only serve a purpose, if he is prepared to start at a level where Anguilla's secession from St. Kitts is acknowledged. Although it is said that Mr. Whitlock will be visiting St. Kitts, no question is raised as to a possible visit to Anguilla. In 1967 when Mr. Lord Shepherd came to Barbados to try a settlement to the dispute, he was invited to Anguilla, to see the island first hand for himself, and he refused. This is no doubt why H. M. G. has continually misunderstood the whole situation.

  In the same issue of the Beacon, the further deterioration of Anguilla's domestic scene was shown in an angry reply by Atlin Harrigan to an attack against him by Ronald Webster, which had appeared both in the Windward Islands Observer over in St. Martin and in the Anguilla Observer, a short-lived newspaper competing with the Beacon and supported by the anti-British faction.

  This is a willful attempt [Harrigan wrote] to whip up anti-feelings against the Beacon and its Editor, in the eyes of the public . . . Will Mr. Webster level his reputation to that of Mr. Wallace Rey? After saying all this, it is expected that people will size the Editor (Atlin Harrigan) and Mr. Webster, as the two persons who started the revolution, now pulling apart. We may not share each other's ideas, but that does not give anyone the right to say one hand is working for the enemy . . . Our aim we felt would have taken us to the same destiny (Independence) but envisaged it taking longer, but on a sound basis. Mr. Webster's course was the short way, Independence immediately. The people accepted it, and we all must now make the best of it.

  They were also making the worst of it. The following week's Beacon contained this notice, without editorial comment:

  This is to certify that Mr. Jack N. Holcomb has been duly licensed as an Attorney to engage in the practice of Law, in the Republic of Anguilla, having been approved by the Government on 18th February, 1969. All privileges of Legal Practice are conferred hereby. This is to further attest that the Republic of Anguilla has certified Mr. Holcomb with the Courts to enjoy all Rights of Representation and confidence as an Officer thereof. 19th. February 1969

  Ronald Webster

  Chief Executive Gov't. Republic of Anguilla

  Holcomb's relationship with Anguilla had altered quite a bit since the Island Council had turned down his spiral binder the preceding fall. Holcomb was now claiming that he represented five big-money investors in Florida, two of them "in heavy equipment and the construction industry with Government contracts for air bases and things/' two in electronic manufacturing, and one "widely represented in insurance." He also said, according to Emile Gumbs, that he "had inside information from the White House that the United States would recognize Anguilla within ten days after the island's Declaration of Independence."

  As to the second, it didn't happen. As to the first, those five investors that Holcomb never stopped talking about but never named, there's this exchange between London Daily Express reporter Henry Lowrie and Holcomb's wife, Dorothy Jean, at the Holcomb home near Fort Lauderdale:

  What about her husband's link with Webster? "Oh, no. My husband is strictly on his own."

  Was he acting for a group of investors? "Well, if he did find something worth developing, I suppose he could bring in some investors who would back him."

  Mrs. Holcomb was asked by another reporter if she had a profession: "'No,' she said wistfully. 'Unless you could call tidying up after Jack a profession. I'm his sort of secretary.'"

  Asked to respond to a British official's charge that her husband was an "evil genius," she said, "He may be a genius, but he is certainly not evil." And as to his having been declared the first lawyer in the Republic of Anguilla, she explained that he had "an extensive law library."

  Having a lawyer of its own, regardless of the extent of his law library, didn't solve much for Anguilla. Trouble was starting on the island again. The guns were coming back out, and this time the enemy wasn't a callous but unreachable Government seventy miles away on another island; this time it was the neighbor next door. The sides were moving steadily farther apart, and the threat of Colonel Bradshaw was no longer real enough to keep the factions united.

  Anguillan individualism has one unfortunate side effect; Anguillans make lousy team members. "The common good" is a phrase that doesn't make any real sense to Anguillans. Once the immediate problem of Bradshaw was solved—political settlement or no political settlement, they were no longer being governed from Sc. Kitts—they were free to return to their natural state, and the natural state of Anguillans is to be independent from one another. If a public official wants to take the opportunity to work some private hustles, the majority of Anguillans couldn't care less; they have their own lives to think about. If their leaders want to make odd business deals with passing Americans, why not? If Webster and Harrigan, whose agitation had started the secession in the first place, want to squabble in public, the majority of Anguillans won t bother to take sides, they'll just enjoy the spectacle.

  The trouble with this kind of attitude is that things can be allowed tb get completely out of hand before anybody starts to worry. In the days when a Bradshaw invasion had seemed a possibility, Webster had imported some guns and had assembled the boys and young men of the island into a Defence Force. Elements of this Defence Force had now become a kind of teen-age gang, roaming the island and looking for action. The most justifiable action they could think of was to roust the opponents of Ronald Webster, and that's what they started to do. It's unlikely that Webster ga
ve them any orders, or that anything he could have told them would have made any difference. They were dumb kids looking for adventure and finding it right at home.

  So independence was turning out to be even more of a mess than the pro-British faction had suggested. On the one side, a promoter like Jack Holcomb was being made the new nation's first lawyer, and on the other side, some bored boys were practicing to be vest-pocket terrorists. While Ronald Webster, with undiminished conviction in his own infallibility, was going around quoting from the Bible, lashing out at anybody who disagreed with him, and building a sixty-five-room hotel.

  Where you see a jester a fool is not far off.

  —Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia

  18

  "The time spent has not been wasted, and Mr. Whitlock will have gained a deep knowledge of the personalities and problems involved, which will stand him in good stead on the final day of reckoning." That's what the Beacon said in summing up the deadlocked talks in London between Webster and Bradshaw in October of 1968. The final day of reckoning for William Whitlock came on the eleventh of March, 1969, and it turned out the Beacon was wrong; the time had been completely wasted insofar as giving Mr. Whitlock a deep knowledge of the personalities and problems was concerned. Particularly the personalities.

  William Whitlock made two trips to the Caribbean in the early part of 1969. The first had been spent in talking with various Caribbean Governments, trying to find out what solution would please all of Anguilla's neighbors. Also on that trip, Whitlock talked with Colonel Bradshaw and one way or another managed to get from the Colonel concessions he'd never been willing to make before. There were a number of development schemes for St. Kitts, involving British money, being considered in London at the time—updating Golden Rock Airport to take jumbo jets, turning Frigate Bay into a tourist area—and one doubts that Whitlock failed to make reference to these things while chatting with Bradshaw. Whitlock himself later explained that Colonel Bradshaw had shown a "statesmanlike recognition of the strength of feeling in Anguilla," and that "because of this statesmanlike recognition by the Government of St. Kitts, Nevis and Anguilla that there was this terrific feeling in Anguilla, my proposals were agreed to by the State Government."

  The Colonel agreed to let another Interim Agreement be set up, except that this time the interim would be open-ended, and instead of the Senior British Official advising the Island Council, the British official would be in charge and the Island Council would advise him. (This was the transfer of authority from St. Kitts to Great Britain that the Anguillans had been requesting for 147 years.) He also agreed to let the British arrange for an Associated States' magistrate on the island, which would permit the Anguillans to have the court they'd been wanting without forcing them to accept Bradshaw's authority through Bradshaw's selection of the magistrate. And he further agreed to let Great Britain handle the Land Registry, which was one of what Donald Chapman had called his "trump cards."

  Technically, Anguilla would remain part of the Associated State of St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla, but for the indefinite future the administration would be handled totally by the English.

  Which was a good 90 per cent of what Anguilla had been asking for.

  So all that remained was for Whitlock to go back home to London, have the new proposals put down on paper in careful proper form, take the paper to Anguilla, and show it to the people. That's all that had to be done, and it doesn't seem as though anything could possibly go wrong.

  That fellow seems to me to possess but one idea, and that is a wrong one.

  —Samuel Johnson

  19

  Anguilla Rebels Fire at British Minister By Ian Ball

  St. Johns, Antigua—Warning shots were fired at Mr. William Whit-lock, 50, Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, in a tense confrontation with rebel leaders on Tuesday on the breakaway Caribbean island of Anguilla in the Leeward Islands

  London Daily Telegraph, March 13, 1969

  Now what went wrong?

  On March 9, Tony Lee arrived on Anguilla with his radio and radio operator, just as he had done in advance of Fisher and Chapman. This time, he was in advance of Whitlock, and when he told Webster and the Island Council that Whitlock was coming with new proposals, almost everybody was delighted, including Webster. Independence had been a very bad strain on Webster, whose increasing uncertainty had shown both in his inability to control his followers and his growing dependence on Jack Holcomb and Wallace Rey and a few others. He would be grateful for some reliable help if he could take it without seeming to surrender.

  Webster went so far as to have a luncheon prepared for the Whitlock party. He had the best cars on the island cleaned and polished and made ready for a motorcade that would take Whitlock from the airport to Jerry Gumbs's Rendezvous Hotel, where the luncheon would be held.

  Whitlock was due at noon on the eleventh. The motorcade was there at the airport, and so were Webster and the rest of the Island Council (which was now calling itself "the Provisional Government"), all dressed up in morning coats and white gloves; they were, after all, about to meet a representative of the Queen.

  Also present were the usual crowd of demonstrators, carrying posters reading "We Want Britain" and "Welcome Mr. Whitlock" and "Britain not Bradshaw." And there was a bunch of school children, let out for the occasion and just waiting to rip into a rendition of "God Save the Queen."

  It still looks as though nothing can go wrong.

  The plane carrying Whitlock and his five assistants was nearly an hour late, but that didn't much matter; planes are almost always late in the Caribbean, and so are people. As Whitlock stepped from the plane, everybody sang "God Save the Queen" and there were smiles on all faces, on the faces of Whitlock and his party and on the faces of the Anguillans there to greet him.

  Everything is still okay.

  Now Webster stepped forward and shook hands with Whitlock. The two had gotten along well together the previous fall in London, and in fact Webster had subsequently written to Whitlock, thanking him for everything he had tried to do on Anguilla's behalf. Meeting again, they exchanged brief hellos, and Webster offered Whitlock the terminal steps from which to address the crowd if he liked. Whitlock made a short speech, thanking everybody and saying he'd brought along proposals that he thought they would all like. The response was more cheers and another round of "God Save the Queen."

  Things are about to go to hell now.

  Whitlock had brought with him some leaflets explaining the new proposals, and he decided to distribute them at the airport, before talking to the Provisional Government. "They were distributed by members of my party," he said later, "and the crowd scrambled eagerly for them."

  They had to, considering the way the leaflets were "distributed." Anthony Rushford, the Legal Counsellor with the Whitlock group, described it this way: "It was like handing out oranges at a children's party. Mr. Whitlock's private secretary stood up and tried to scatter them over the crowd in a perfectly good-humored way. They came down like great snowflakes. There was something quite comic about it. Nothing derogatory."

  Nothing derogatory. Handing out oranges at a children's party; nothing derogatory. Something quite comic, but nothing derogatory.

  The Anguilla Observer described it this way: "Whitlock literally threw his pamphlets at the crowd as a farmer might throw corn to fowl."

  Ronald Webster later said of the leaflets that Whitlock "threw them at the people."

  There was also nothing derogatory about Whitlock's refusal to ride in the cars Ronald Webster had had polished and spruced up, nor in his refusal to have lunch with Webster.

  The Whitlock party hung around the airport for forty-five minutes while Tony Lee made some last-minute arrangements to get them fed without forcing them to see Anguillans at table. Lee set up an alternate lunch in the home of the manager of the Bank of America (called the Howard House) and rounded up different cars, and the Whitlock group, having finished its first lesson of the day in the art
s of diplomacy, went off to lunch.

  Various British Government officials later explained that this is always the way a British minister enters other people's countries. "Protocol," they call it. The minister arrives, shakes hands with whoever among the "locals" has come to greet him, and then goes off for lunch with the Senior British Official (in this case Tony Lee) to get an "appreciation" from him before talking with local leaders. But is that protocol? On his earlier trip through the Caribbean did Whitlock really leave one Government official after another standing around at one island airport after another, with nothing to show for his day but a handshake and a leaflet and egg on his face? If that's protocol, give me rudeness.

  Whitlock was later to say he hadn't known about the Webster lunch, but surely somebody at the airport in those embarrassing forty-five minutes must have mentioned the luncheon and pointed to the very shiny cars out there in the sunlight. *

  Did Whitlock think Webster and the other Council members always wore white gloves? In the Caribbean?

  It is now approaching two o'clock, and the Whitlock party—including Tony Lee—has gone off to the bank manager's house for lunch. Whitlock intended to meet the Provisional Government at the Administrative Building at four o'clock, but there's some question as to whether anybody told the Provisional Government or not.

  Which raises the question of Tony Lee's part in all this. He knew the island and its leaders by now better than any other Englishman, and his role in this day's activities was essentially liaison between the British and the Anguillans, but the depth of ignorance that each side showed about the other's plans and attitudes makes one wonder. Maybe Tony Lee actually did fail to give Whitlock an accurate picture of the circumstances on the island. Or maybe Whitlock thought so little of Lee—a "diplomatic mercenary," as Sir John Rodgers later called him—that he didn't bother to listen. Or maybe it was both, with Lee soft-pedaling anything that would conflict with Whitlock's preconceptions and Whitlock busily giving him less than half an ear. One recalls that Lee's reports about Anguilla had been ignored in London for something over a year.