Westlake, Donald E - NF 01

by Under An English Heaven (v1. 1)

Great Britain had after all been faced with just the two UDI's (shorthand for Unilateral Declaration of Independence, which in turn is longhand for revolt) in the nineteen-sixties, and they were Anguilla and Rhodesia. Comparisons were inevitable.

  Other comparisons were more vicious. The Chicago Tribune observed, "British valor has, at one stroke, wiped out the stain of Dunkirk, Singapore and other debacles of British arms of recent memory."

  "Brute Farce and Ignorance" was a headline in the London Sunday Times, and the London Evening News headlined its invasion story "This 'Wag the Flag and Flog the Wog'

  Farce." (In this story, by Stephen Claypole, reference was made to Whitlock's Mafia: "From the way Mr. Whitlock spoke I expected to find the island crawling with dark-jowled mobsters prowling the island with violin cases under their arms.")

  Time magazine's headline on its invasion piece was "Britain's Bay of Piglets," and Newsweek's was "The Lion That Meowed."

  New Statesman: "High Wind in Anguilla." Spectator: "War of Whitlock's Ear."

  But this wasn't the only reaction. Like a man adjusting his tie in an avalanche, there were reporters prepared to behave as though Anguilla were simply another sensible action in a calm and rational world. Two days after the invasion, Charles Douglas-Home, Defence Correspondent for the London Times, wrote a piece on Anguilla from the standpoint of military medicine, titled "Actions That Save Lives." In it he wrote, "Our natural relief at the bloodlessness of Operation Sheepskin might lead us to forget one of the most important officers in the Anguilla expedition—the medical officer. The fact that he has not had to tend battle wounds may be welcome both to him and to us, but there are many other most important aspects of his role in the operation which seldom receive recognition." The article then went blithely on to count the angels on the head of the pin.

  The next day the London Times ran another editorial that counted angels in a different fashion. In closely packed and utterly impenetrable reasoning, it dealt with the legal justifications for the invasion, worrying them like The People's toothless bulldog gumming a bone. It began, "The Anguilla (Temporary Provision) Order 1969 is likely to be discussed in the House of Commons on Monday. There are indeed a number of points about its propriety and even its legality on which the Foreign Secretary will no doubt wish to offer elucidation."

  The Times editorial also said such crystalline things as:

  In law the Government are covered by the later clause 18 (1) which empowers the Secretary of State to issue a certificate saying that in the Government's opinion . . . Yet when one looks at clause 3 . . . though the question whether an Order in Council goes beyond the power of the original Act is one the Courts can consider . . . Parliament must examine whether the order is not illegal, because ultra vires, as well as unjust, and should ask whether the original action of the Government was not also illegal as well as absurd.

  But deadpan reportage reached its apex in the following item from the Daily Telegraph for March 20, the day after the invasion: "It seems most unlikely that any campaign medal will be issued for the operation in Anguilla."

  The House of Peers, throughout the war, Did nothing in particular, Ancf did it very well.

  —W. S. Gilbert, lolanthe

  26

  And what of Parliament, through all this? What was going on in the House of Commons before, during and after the invasion?

  Before. On March 18, Michael Stewart, the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, was asked by various Conservative M.P.'s to tell the House what was going on, and explain these invasion rumors in the newspapers, and he said, "I shall be making a statement on Anguilla later this week." Since this was less than thirty-six hours before the invasion—a fact he didn't mention—it was a pretty safe bet he would be making a statement later that week, but a statement made after an invasion wasn't what his questioners had in mind.

  M.P. Stanley Henig pointed this out the next day, the nineteenth, very few hours before the invasion: "It would be most unfortunate if Britain were involved in a military intervention overseas and the House of Commons would only be presented after the event with a fait accompli."

  Other M.P.'s, both Conservative and Labour, chimed in. Edward Heath said, "The House of Commons seems to be the last place to be informed about this." George Brown, a onetime Foreign Secretary himself, said, "I do not press the Foreign Secretary for a statement; he should be the judge of when he should make it. But will he take into account that both he and I over a period of some years have refused to resort to what we scornfully called 'gunboat diplomacy' in issues which had much more interest for Britain than this."

  During. Stewart at last made his statement, in which he talked about what had happened to Whitlock. "After this reception, an armed minority decided that the proposals must not be further discussed with the people of the island."

  Since nobody had been killed, and since nobody knew yet whether Stewart was telling the truth or not, the discussion mostly centered on the legality of the invasion. If St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla was an independent nation, hadn't the United Kingdom just invaded a friendly nation and muscled into that nation's civil war?

  The Mafia was mentioned, and Stewart began to backpedal from that one. "As to the use of the word 'Mafia,' I think this is an exaggerated term. I draw attention to the phrase which I used, 'disreputable characters.' They were disreputable characters, and had arms."

  Conservative M.P. Nigel Birch asked Stewart, "Will you convey to the Prime Minister the congratulations of the House on at last taking on somebody of his own size?"

  Stewart said a remark like that "illustrates the contrast between the greatness of the issues involved and the littleness of the right honorable Gentleman."

  Another M.P. suggested that Prime Minister Harold Wilson was "a sheep in sheep's clothing."

  It was left to George Brown to mention Rhodesia, indirectly, as he'd done the day before. Today he said, "How are we, on the basis of the arguments you seem to use today, going at the United Nations to answer those who demand that we should do exactly the same on exactly the same grounds elsewhere?"

  To which Stewart replied, "Whenever you consider the use of armed force, you consider what the results of it would be. An attempt to try to solve the Rhodesia question by force would have resulted in such a destruction of life and wealth, and such bitterness throughout Africa, that the end we all want in Rhodesia of a just regime for men of all colors would have been indefinitely postponed."

  To which Brown replied, "Are we going to say we can do it where there is only a rusty gun?"

  After. The tone the House would take, once its surprise and relief were over and the Members had time to think about things, was pretty well established by Mr. Goodhart, Conservative for Beckenham, who said on the twenty-first, as reported in the London Times, that "all M.P.'s were anxious that British forces on Anguilla should draw every penny to which they were entitled. There was, for instance, two shillings six pence a day payable for other ranks for Arctic or tropical experiments. Clearly the Anguilla expedition was a tropical one and in the nature of an experiment. He suspected the lesson to be drawn from it was that it was far less expensive in blood and treasure to invade one's friends than to get into serious conflict with one's enemies. Would the troops on Anguilla be entitled to an entertainment allowance?"

  On the twenty-fourth, nearly a week after the invasion, Anguilla was shoehorned into a debate on the general subject of British foreign policy. The M.P.'s began by questioning Whitlock about his experiences, and not showing much sympathy for him. Mr. Martin: "What evidence has the honorable Gentleman actually adduced which has been corroborated by other sources of these undesirable elements before sending over two hundred parachutists to deal with them?" Mr. Rose: "Will my honorable Friend in due course give an undertaking to let the House have full details of these Mafia-like elements in Anguilla . . . ?"

  Whitlock: "There will be a debate on foreign affairs at a later stage today, and no doubt all those points will com
e out during the debate."

  Edward Heath, Opposition Leader, said, "So far, however much we may have disagreed with some aspects of policy or the implementation of policy, they can be fitted into a pattern, but I think the imagination boggles at the task of doing that with the recent operation in Anguilla." He then proceeded to raise six questions about the handling of the Anguilla affair, covering the past, the present and the future. Stewart replied with a quick gloss on the past, a spirited defense of the present, and a promise of joy and contentment and universal understanding in the future.

  Several M.P.'s felt there were more questions to ask. They included Sir Dingle Foot, the brother of Lord Caradon (Hugh Foot) and uncle of Private Eye's Paul Foot. Sir Dingle Foot spent most of his time arguing against federations—no two Foots seem to have the same attitude about things—and concluded with a suggestion that a Commission of Inquiry be put to work to sort the whole mess out.

  Mr. John Hynd spoke mostly about the imperfections of associated statehood, and said, among other things, "This problem is one of the many Imperial chickens coming home to roost."

  Sir Cyril Osborne followed Hynd and said, "In the earlier part of the rather long speech of the hon. Member for Sheffield, Attercliffe (Mr. John Hynd)-"

  "It was no longer than any of the others," Hynd said.

  Sir Cyril Osborne: "It lasted twenty-five minutes."

  Sir Cyril wanted to talk about Rhodesia and other matters. The debate ranged around the world for a while, to be brought back to Anguilla by Viscount Lambton, who said, "I think it is worth digressing for a moment upon the personality of Mr. Bradshaw. This, again, is something which has been ignored. When I saw this Prime Minister he struck me as being a man who was in very bad health indeed, to put it mildly. He had the strangest delusions: he always supposed he was about to be poisoned. He dressed up in fancy dress clothes; he parades around the island; and he is served by men who really are not fit to be in any Government in any country in the world."

  The House of Commons would get the range better a little later, but in this first long debate little was accomplished. In fact, the whole day was best summed up early on, in the middle of Mr. Heath's opening statement:

  Mr. Heath: There was no sign of the Government's endeavoring to tackle what they must have realized to be very fundamental difficulties in the relationships between Anguilla and St. Kitts.

  Mr. Roy Roebuck (Harrow, East): On a point of order. Is it in order for the hon. Member for Walsall, South (Sir H. d'Avigdor-Goldsmid) to be asleep during the speech by the right hon. Gentleman his leader?

  Mr. Deputy-Speaker: That is a frivolous-point of order.

  Every hero becomes a bore at last.

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men

  27

  The war is over. Anguilla won, in the first second of play, but it took the British two years to fall down. They had more mistakes to make first.

  Beginning with Tony Lee. He knew from early in the Interim Agreement Year that nothing would ever reattach Anguilla to St. Kitts, yet he failed to communicate this awareness to his superiors. Perhaps nobody could have broken through their complacence and their obtuse determination to live theoretically, but the point is that Tony Lee didn't.

  When the Interim Agreement Year ended, Ronald Webster desperately wanted the connection with Great Britain to be kept alive somehow, as long as it could be done without it seeming to his people that he'd sold out. Tony Lee knew that and must have told his superiors so, but not in any way that made them listen or understand.

  When Whitlock arrived on the island in March, Tony Lee had been there for two days. He knew about the motorcade-and-lunch arrangements Ronald Webster had made. There is no question of that, because Lee had made no other arrangements for either transport or lunch.

  A great muffled silence seems to hang around Tony Lee, through which messages have a great deal of trouble traveling. It begins to seem he is simply a man who doesn't want to disturb his bosses. He will tell them what he knows, but quietly, without a great deal of emphasis, and if they fail to act on what he has told them, he seems to let it go at that.

  But the largest blunder involving Tony Lee is yet to come.

  The troops had invaded before five-thirty in the morning; by eight o'clock, Tony Lee was on the island. Had he come in two or three days later, he would have been the islanders' old friend, come to rescue them from the paratroops. But coming in with the paratroops, and with his name on the leaflets fluttering down from the helicopters, he became—permanently and forever—the Anguillans' enemy.

  Ronald Webster told reporters, "I don't trust Mr. Lee. I no longer trust the British." As usual, what he said reflected the feelings of the people of the island.

  Ronald Webster is not really a leader. In a way, he is the ultimate follower. He senses which way the majority of the people are going and then gets out front and shouts, "Follow me!" He may be the world's first hesitant fanatic.

  Webster had liked and admired Tony Lee for a year and a half, but the British bungled with Lee, and the people of Anguilla turned against him. So Webster turned against him.

  Jean Campbell of the London Evening Standard reported this remark by an Anguillan named Charlie Gumbs, referring to the Whitlock visit: "Of course, we blame Tony Lee for all this, for he knew the island and was supposed to understand our feelings. Whitlock was a stranger."

  In the spring of 1971 I talked with Ronald Webster. I mentioned the number of people whose careers or reputations had been damaged in the four years of the rebellion. Neither of us named any names, but Webster said, "Oh, yes," and explained to me that there had always been a plan, every step through this maze had been part of the same master plan, and that some people had been useful in the plan only up to a point. When they began to steer a course away from the plan, he explained, "We had to put them to one side." Seated in a chair, he gestured down and back with both hands, as though pushing a bag of laundry around behind him. "To one side, you see," he said.

  Of course the British had the same thing in mind for Webster. He would be treated as a "prominent citizen," no more. As Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart told the House of Commons, "We cannot, of course, treat him as the president of an independent Republic of Anguilla ... we can treat him as one would any other Anguillan." As Whitlock, for instance, had treated him.

  When Tony Lee arrived on the island two and a half hours after the troops had landed, the job he had been given by his superiors was to supplant Webster. Apparently, at the time, he thought it was possible.

  While Lee was setting up a temporary headquarters in the schoolhouse, Webster was holding a press conference, telling reporters, "I had ordered the Defence Force not to resist. But we will not surrender. We will not accept Mr. Lee unless the people decide they will have him." Very few leaders with no army behind them and with their entire nation occupied by foreign troops would have the brass to announce, "We will not surrender."

  Ronald Webster has no previous political experience and very little experience of the outside world. His own speaking manner is stiff and awkward, and he tends to listen with perhaps too much naive confidence to people who speak more fluently than he. He contradicted himself dozens of times in those four years, partly because of the contradictory shifts of mass opinion and partly because of his tendency to move on the basis of whomever he has talked to last. Senior British diplomats were complaining after a while that they had never had to deal with so erratic a personality in their lives.

  Webster himself sees no contradictions in his performance. He started out with certain objectives in view, he never doubted he would win them, and eventually he won them. In the spring of 1971, with no consciousness of the extravagance of the statement, Ronald Webster seriously told me that he had never been wrong.

  Most Anguillans agree with him. In the symbolic family surrounding the Anguilla affair, in which Bradshaw is the stern father (Papa Bradshaw, run you run) and Great Britain the neglectful mother (Seeking the choice
of Mothers care), Ronald Webster is not exactly a member of the family; he's the family priest. He moves always with the assurance that God has judged his plans and found them good. And when Tony Lee landed at Wall Blake Airport on Anguilla in the wake of the paratroops, one of the signs being held by the inevitable crowd of demonstrators read, "God first, R Webster after."

  Lee, naturally, now assumes the inadvertent role of Pontius Pilate. Originally, he had been Senior British Official and his role was to advise the Island Council led by Webster. Now, he was to be Commissioner and the Island Council was to advise him. In fact, it would be called the Advisory Council.

  Since Lee isn't the sort of man to throw his weight around, this technical shift in power wouldn't have changed much, but British officialdom decided to go farther. Apparently they had the idea that Webster should be punished for what had been done to Whitlock. So Lee, in addition to being Commissioner, would be Chairman of the Advisory Council. In other words, he was to take Webster's job as well as his own.

  Webster, unsurprisingly, told him to go to hell. He announced to his people that he had been deposed and they rallied round him at once.

  Way back in 1967, on Statehood Day, there had been an anti-independence demonstration in which a small coffin draped in black had been carried around the island bearing a sign saying "Anguilla Is Dead." Now that same coffin was brought out by the same demonstrators, but with a new sign: "If Lee Don't Go Anguilla Dead."

  The invasion had come on Wednesday. On that same day

  Webster and Lee had a couple of cool meetings. Pro-Webster demonstrators accompanied Lee wherever he went. By Thursday, Webster knew he still had a majority with him so he announced it was impossible to negotiate with Lee. In fact, he said, it was impossible to negotiate with any Englishman until the troops left. Then, on Friday, Webster fled the island.

  The flight had clear Biblical and symbolic overtones. It was also good public relations; it's impossible to have a triumphal return unless it's preceded by a flight. In addition, at the time, Webster thought there were also more practical reasons for escape, since he believed he was about to be arrested.