Westlake, Donald E - NF 01

by Under An English Heaven (v1. 1)

  Webster returned to the island on April 10 and arrived in the middle of yet another blowup. The British had brought in a magistrate to get the courts moving again, and the magistrate they brought in was—inevitably, I suppose—a Kittitian. His connection was with the judiciary of the Associated States and not with the St. Kitts Government, but it was another of those subtleties hard for the Anguillan eye to see.

  When the magistrate showed up at court, there was more scuffling. Detective Inspector Harry Nicholls, he who had greeted Jack Holcomb, was hit in the head with a brick. The five defendants in the minor cases that were supposed to be tried that day were hustled away by the crowd, which also nailed the courthouse door shut. There were no legal proceedings that day.

  Later the same day, Dr. Spector quietly left the island of his own accord.

  The anti-Lee tone of the demonstrations was building up again. Lee had been put in charge of the island, he and Webster had clashed head on, and everything that happened was seen to be Lee's responsibility. The clamor to be rid of him was building and building. Lee told a reporter, "It's personal. They are after me for personal reasons."

  They were also, like the British, fighting among themselves. One of the strongest pro-British Anguillans was Walter Hodge, first Chairman of the Peacekeeping Committee and still the island's Treasurer; twice crowds tried to beat him up and Webster had to step in and protect him. But Webster's control was slipping again; even a messiah can't keep the Anguillans in check forever.

  Which everybody discovered the next day, when Lord Caradon arrived and the crowd wouldn't let Webster talk to him. The people had come to the conclusion it was impossible for an Anguillan leader to talk to the British without being either conned or sold out. So they took upon themselves the simple solution of keeping their leader from talking to the British. Lord Caradon went to the Administrative Building on the island, but when Webster tried to go in and meet him the crowd wouldn't let him do it. Instead, they surrounded the building and chanted, "Lee must go. Lee must go." Finally police and troops managed to get Webster through the crowd, and he met briefly with Lord Caradon. Webster told Lord Caradon that Lee really did have to go. Lord Caradon said, "It's impossible to have talks in a situation like this."

  The snarl in the situation was not the crowd, though, or even Tony Lee. It was Ronald Webster's lack of understanding of the diplomatic meaning of the word "understanding."

  Once again, as in Barbados, as with Fisher and Chapman, as with every British diplomat who'd ever tried to deal with Anguilla, diplomacy looked very much like the practice that when done in conjunction with selling a used car is called fraud. The British hand had once again been quicker than Ronald Webster's eye, but Webster doesn't take it like a good sport when he finds he's just been razzle-dazzled. He gets angry, he digs his heels in, he refuses to go along. As he said at one point, in what must be the most deeply felt remark of the whole affair, "You can't fathom British diplomacy. They use it to hit you."

  Webster, like the crowd, deals in simpler things. Such as that Lee must go.

  The-crowd was very strongly out to make this point to Lord Caradon. Having so far prevented Webster from meeting with him, the crowd then got into cars and trucks and headed east out the road to Tony Lee's house at Sandy Ground. Lee was home, guarded by one policeman. More than two hundred people showed up to chant "Lee must go" and shake their fists. A few of them grappled with the policeman, knocked him down, cut his forehead by hitting him with a stick, and bit him. Possibly that was done in retaliation by the woman bitten by Tony Lee.

  The policeman broke free and ran up the stairs to the front door of the house, where he pulled out a revolver; up till this point, the publicity had been full of "unarmed" London policemen taking the places of the armed paratroopers, but this particular policeman, Constable Jack Gooday of Essex, had a gun on him. It's probably just as well he did.

  Constable Gooday and his pistol held off the crowd until Marines were landed twenty minutes later from H.M.S. Rhyl, another frigate.

  The people had spoken; so did Webster. "The British representative must go, the troops must go, the regulations must go, the police must go and Lee must go."

  Lord Caradon at last responded. On the thirteenth, before departing once more, he announced that Lee would shortly be going on "leave"—"well-deserved leave," as he inevitably put it—and his place would be taken temporarily by John Cumber, a career Foreign Office administrator.

  Nobody believed it was temporary. Even Lord Caradon didn't work very hard to make anybody believe it. But in London, Michael Stewart muddied the waters again by saying, "Mr. Lee has not been fired. He will shortly be going on leave, during which time his place will be taken by a deputy. But after his leave he will be returning to Anguilla."

  Lee's response to this, when reporters asked him what he thought about the idea that he'd be coming back after his leave, was typical: "It's news to me." So was Webster's: "It won't work."

  But Webster wasn't pleased about John Cumber either: "There's no difference between them." But in the end he said he'd try to cooperate with him. "I don't want to embarrass Her Majesty's Government too much because we may have to depend on these same troops one day," he said.

  He also said the demonstrations on the island were getting too violent and he thought it time to calm everybody down and try to make peace between the different factions of Anguillans. It was the kind of sudden switch the British had come to expect from Webster, except that it was rare for the switch to be in a direction they could be pleased about.

  On the fourteenth of April, Adam Raphael made this report in the Guardian:

  Low comedy made a welcome return to Anguilla today when the British authorities tried for the fourth time to hold a magistrate's court. Most of the world's press was in attendance, filling the rock-hard benches of the island's tiny courtroom, but as none of the defendants bothered to turn up once again the proceedings were short.

  After Sergeant Ryan . . . boomed out the names of the defendants . . . the magistrate, Mr. Roderick Donaldson, on loan from St. Vincent, strode into court dressed in a small black ceremonial vest . . . The press stood, the magistrate nodded his appreciation, and he then strode out again.

  J. W. M. Thompson wrote in Spectator for April 18:

  There begins to be something almost uncanny about the manner in which nothing goes right with our Caribbean adventure. The lesson that good intentions are not enough in these matters has never been more plainly made. It is hard even to laugh at this week's mess-up over the future of the wretched Mr. Tony Lee: it is farcical, yes, but shaming too. It's bad enough being confused about the identity of the supposed Mafia agents and about whether our intervention was meant to bring down Mr. Webster or support him; but to slither into public disagreement over the future of our own man is really a bit too much.

  And on Anguilla, Webster was actually making efforts to lead his people—not with total success. After he'd made a strong plea for people to calm down and stop demonstrating —explaining to them that the troops surely wouldn't leave until the threat of violence had ended—a group of youngsters surrounded a nearby police car and tried to overturn it.

  Still, the shouting at Tony Lee died down, and Webster even had friendly meetings with Cumber and Lee both present. The Anguillans had what they wanted and were just beginning to realize it. They had wanted to be a colony, and that's what they were, though the word wasn't being used. Army engineers were working on the roads, specialists in development were coming from England to talk about water and electricity and schooling and all the rest of it, and Anguilla's relationship to Great Britain was precisely that of a self-gov-erning colony to its mother country.

  On April 20, 1969, Tony Lee was given a farewell dinner by his remaining friends on the island. There aren't that many restaurants to choose from on Anguilla; the dinner was held at Jerry Gumbs's Rendezvous Hotel.

  Jerry Gumbs was there, though not as a guest; he had been one of the most loudly anti-Lee
people on the island. His role at Tony Lee's farewell dinner was that of host. He fussed around the twenty-four guests until they got settled and then went outside to talk with a London Times reporter. He told the reporter that Great Britain should be prepared to deal as equals with Ronald Webster and not try to boss him. "That is the way I work with Mr. Webster/' Jerry Gumbs said. "Humility has been my lifelong companion."

  People must not do things for fun. We are not here for fun. There is no reference to fun in any Act of Parliament.

  —Sir Alan Patrick Herbert, Uncommon Law

  28

  Defending himself in Parliament, Michael Stewart tried among other things to pass the buck to the other Caribbean Commonwealth countries: "We were bound to take on board the views of our friends in the Caribbean and bound to take action in the way they wished."

  But Mr. Stewart's friends in the Caribbean were not unanimous in their applause. Prime Minister Hugh Shearer of Jamaica said he was absolutely opposed to what had happened: "The Anguillan situation involved the right of every state to self-determination. We will not support the Government in any course that is contrary to basic rights in keeping with the charter of the United Nations. We call for prompt withdrawal of British forces from Anguilla."

  Prime Minister Eric Williams of Trinidad-Tobago said, "What I want to know now is, what is Britain going to do about Rhodesia?"

  Even Mr. Stewart's true friends in the Caribbean couldn't speak with very loud voices. Antigua's Premier Vere Bird was on his way out of office, and who else was left?

  As to the next-door island of St. Martin, both the Dutch and the French halves sided with Anguilla. When a boatload of British policemen followed Ronald Webster over to Mari-got, the French capital, local citizens wouldn't let them land, but threw bottles and garbage at them instead, while gendarmes stood around and laughed.

  But facts don't seem to discommode Mr. Stewart. On April 23, he told the House of Commons that there were "undoubted cases of arson and—somewhat earlier—of murder on the island . . ." There was suspected arson in three cases on Anguilla, two of them houses and one an airplane, but since no criminal prosecutions ever followed, the word "undoubted" is, if nothing else, premature. There were all together three alleged cases of arson, but there were no undoubted cases of arson. And the most recent had happened one year and eleven days before the invasion. What other country could claim as good a firebug record in a three-year span?

  About the undoubted cases of murder. The only even alleged case of murder in the entire Anguillan rebellion was the death of Kittitian attorney Robert Crawford at the alleged hands of an alleged pro-Bradshaw surgeon, and not many people have alleged that one. But that happened on St. Kitts, not on Anguilla, and Michael Stewart has never expressed any interest in murder and arson—or disreputable characters—on St. Kitts.

  It took a week for Parliament to ask about those undoubted cases of murder, and then it was William Whitlock who replied, saying there were no cases of murder after all, but there was one pending case of manslaughter. Interested M.P.'s then rooted that one out and discovered the amiable young man who perhaps had or had not shot his girl friend-not an entirely political activity. After that, Stewart finally changed his statement about murders.

  But in October of 1970 I interviewed Mr. Stewart, and he started talking about murders on the island, in the plural. When I asked him if there had really been more than one, he backtracked and said, oh, well, perhaps there was only one, but even one life was sacred, et cetera. So I asked him if that one death wasn't actually a girl and the accused killer wasn't her boy friend, and did that really have anything to do with the rebellion, and he said he wasn't sure of the details but the killing had happened in the course of the rebellion.

  But other odd things were being said in the days after the invasion. Minister Without Portfolio George Thomson said, "Some critics at home and abroad are treating this as a matter of laughter and farce. What would they have preferred-tragedy and tears? . . . That it has worked out this way is a tribute to the prudence with which the policy was planned and executed . . . The peaceful use of military power is a rare international skill in our dangerous world."

  Now the Government was giving itself tributes for having rare international skills. Thomson was also saying, whether he meant to or not, that the British Government's brand of prudence had worked things out to laughter and farce.

  The laughter and farce continued. In a debate on March 25, M.P. Eldon Griffiths told Parliament, "The Government have been quick to say that they have had support from some of our allies, but they should understand that the private sentiments of important Americans on this matter are of bewilderment and derision. I shall not go into that at length. I simply make one short quotation from the words of a distinguished person in Washington. When discussing this matter, he said that, as far as he could see, the Prime Minister had 'lost his marbles.'"

  On the same day, M.P. Neil Marten asked, "Did we need so many policemen? I suggest that perhaps twelve or fifteen could have gone out on a BOAC aeroplane to Antigua, disguised, insofar as police can disguise themselves, as civilians."

  The Secretary of State for Defence, Mr. Denis Healey, answered a question in Commons as to why the troops on Anguilla had been equipped with CS gas, a strong kind of tear gas, saying, "The reason why we were able to deal with extremely violent civil disturbances in Hong Kong and Cyprus in the past with so little loss of life was the ability to use this type of weapon rather than guns and machine guns, as were used in similar situations in the past." To which M.P. Edward Taylor responded, "Would not supplies of laughing gas have been more appropriate for this particular episode?"

  A month later, Sir John Rodgers told the House of Commons, "If we were to send to a stranger a complete record of all that has happened since the creation of the Associated State, he would think that he had been given a hitherto undiscovered manuscript of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera."

  The Conservative Party published a pamphlet on Anguilla by M.P. Neil Marten, titled Theirs Not to Reason Why, in which he said, "On 28th April, over five weeks after the Forces had arrived, Mr. Whitlock informed the Commons that 8 rifles, 22 shotguns and 4 pistols had been handed in, while 2 rifles, 2 carbines and an old anti-tank rifle had been discovered by the searching Forces. A total of 39 weapons between 6,000 West Indians!" He called it a "derisory quantity" of arms.

  In Spectator for March 28, Auberon Waugh speculated on the real reasons for the invasion:

  One is almost tempted to imagine that the whole invasion was mounted in order to save Mr. Whitlock's face. Of course, Mr. Healey's face received a much worse affront on Monday night, when it was pelted with flour and tomatoes at the East Walthamstow by-election meeting; and Mr. Healey is a more important Minister of the Crown even than Mr. William Whitlock. But Mr. Healey's assailants were Englishmen, while Mr. Whitlock's were nig-nogs. It may seem unjust to impute such a distinction to an upright, pink-faced schoolteacher like Mr. Stewart . . .

  But enough. The invasion was an embarrassment, and no matter how much talking Government spokesmen did it just went on being an embarrassment. Something had to be done about it, and William Whitlock was just the man to do it. On April 3, fifteen days after the landings, he told the House of Commons: "There was no invasion of Anguilla."

  The quarrel is a very pretty quarrel as it stands; we should only spoil it by trying to explain it.

  —Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Rivals

  29

  The normal state of Anguilla is apoplectic. Very soon after the departure of Tony Lee, Anguilla returned to normal.

  One of the first things the British gave Anguilla after the invasion was a radio station, and very soon Ronald Webster delivered a speech over it. His talk rambled a bit but said in part, "We are not thinking of complete independence anymore, but to work in association directly with the Commonwealth ... I am with you and will remain with you until I am no longer required . . . Friends and fellow Anguillans, have confidence in me
. I have nothing to hide from you, so do not sell your leader's birthright for a dish of porridge. Remember what Judas did to Christ. So be wise, be fair-minded, be determined, be honest, be brave, be true, be sincere, be calm and beware of false prophets and wolves in sheeps' clothing." He also said, "Humility has been my lifetime companion."

  The split between Ronald Webster and Atlin Harrigan was by now complete. Barely an issue of the Beacon appeared without some criticism of Webster. For his own part Webster was trying to unload Harrigan from the Council. That didn't work so he did the next best thing; he doubled the Council size to fourteen members, with the additional seven being mostly Webster supporters.

  Things were getting rougher for Harrigan, as his July 12 editorial shows:

  I have purposely refrained from printing many things that would make some of us look like idiots . . . For this I am in the damnedest position; being an editor, it is my duty to comment on anything I see fit. I do not claim to be an expert, but rather far from it. But certainly I can see a pitfall . . . Every time I attempt to recommend something that conflicts with Webster's ideas, it is used as if I am the enemy and not Bradshaw . . . Someone other than I would probably pack up the whole thing and leave the problem to the Hot Heads. No consistency whatsoever.

  Some days Webster felt like getting along with the new Commissioner, John Cumber, and some days he didn't. Cumber knew that Webster could chop his head off just as he'd chopped Lee's head off—the Commissioner had the responsibility for keeping things quiet, but only Webster had the choice whether quiet would reign or not—and it was no real surprise when Cumber, on the twenty-fifth of July, resigned as Commissioner. "At his own request for personal reasons," the official announcement read.