Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire

by Simon Winchester

  The girl waited only a few minutes before her full lips breathed ‘Good night’ and she slipped towards the house.

  ‘Shall I come to see you again?’ I called softly.

  She may or may not have answered ‘Yes’. If she did, it was probably from politeness.

  Derrick Booy saw her many more times, and they held hands before the fire in the Hagans’ old house, Emily’s face bright in the guttering light of a bird-oil lamp. And then, as war so often demands, the young sailor had to leave, suddenly, and with no notice and no alternative. A ship arrived to pick the party up, and the pair—if such they ever could be called—were forced to say farewell:

  The watchers on the beach were all very still, the women sitting again in their gaily dressed rows, as if waiting primly to be photographed. None of them waved or cheered. They just sat watching. All looked very much alike, young and old. But there was one at the end of a row, in a white dress with a red kerchief, bright red, over smooth, dark hair. She sat perfectly still, staring back until she became a white blur. Then her head went down, and the woman behind her—a large one in widow’s black—put a hand on her shoulder.

  Emily Hagan married Kenneth Rogers ten years later, and the BBC once broadcast a programme from the island, and included her voice—a woman with ‘a nice face’, the interviewer remarked. I wanted to complete the story by talking to Emily, and made my way to her house. Kenneth, a bluff, kindly man who pours beer in the island’s only pub, knew what I wanted the moment I stepped up to his neat, fresh-painted door.

  ‘You’se wanting our Hem’ly,’ he said. ‘Well, I don’ wish to be unfriendly, sir, but I’d be grateful if you’d respect our wishes and forget all you’d read in that book. It hurt us all. It was all a long while ’go, and we’d jes’ as soon fergit.’ He was gracious and polite, but firm. And other islanders told me the same story—about ‘our Hem’ly’, and about themselves. They did not care for people writing about their private lives, and publishing the detail in ‘the houtside warl’. They—the 300 Swains and Hagans and Rogers, Greens, Repettos, Lavarellos and Glasses—were an intensely private people, who wanted their privacy protected. There was no hostility towards the curiosity of outsiders—far from it; the friendliness of the islanders is memorable, their hospitality to their tiny annual crop of visitors has become an ocean legend—but they all wished it would never happen. And they knew I was there to write: there are two ham radio operators on Tristan, and they knew all about me and the purpose of my voyage, long before I had even flown to Tenerife. ‘Mr Winchester—you’ll be careful with us now, won’t you?’ one man said, when I recounted Mrs Rogers’ reluctance. ‘We’ll have to live with what you write for years to come. We’ll read your words a thousand times. So be careful, for our own sakes.’

  I went back aboard the ship that evening to collect some night things, and had a brief encounter that reinforced the notion that the Tristanians are a uniquely private group, uneasy with too great an outside interest. I had arranged to spend the night ashore, and was about to climb down the pilot ladder into the dinghy, when a powerful arm stopped me. Albert Glass, the chief islander and the colony’s only policeman—though he is unneeded as such, except for ceremonial tasks, since there is no crime on the island—wanted to know where I thought I was going. Ashore, I said. ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘I’m not letting anyone ashore. We have limits. We have rules.’

  I was dismayed. All this way, and not even a night on the island! And yet he was so reasonable and kindly about it, I felt I had no option but to do as he had said, and try and get back the following morning. But at that moment there was a strange interruption of the Fates. A strangled cry came from the dinghy below, and a shout went up, for the doctor.

  One of the islanders, it seems, had drunk a few beers too many, and had staggered backwards off the gunwales and into the freezing sea. I started at this news, since only a few minutes before I had seen a hammerhead shark cruising hungrily around our ship, looking for such morsels as a six-foot Tristanian in non-resisting mood. The man had been crushed briefly between dinghy and ship’s side, and was unconscious when they hauled him out of the water and dumped him on the decking.

  The ship’s doctor, resplendent in what the daily circular had called ‘Red Sea Rig’, with black tie and black cummerbund over a crisp white shirt, was down beside him in an instant, pumping his chest, clearing his throat, resuscitating, injecting, bandaging, warming. I passed some things down for him into the heaving dinghy, and got a grin of thanks for my little help—and Albert Glass suddenly relented. ‘Hall roight,’ he said. ‘Foine for you’se to go. But make sure you’rs careful with us. No nonsense. We won’t forget you, you knows.’ And off I went, thumping over the swells in the night, visiting the drowned rat in hospital (he had no more than a couple of cracked ribs, and a stiff warning not to drink again while on such seas as this), taking drinks with the islanders at the Prince Philip Hall, and listening to the padre and his wife, and the teacher and his, recount innumerable tales of Tristan life. No one, it seemed, had a harsh word to say.

  Tristan makes a profit—and a very handsome one indeed. The crawfish—frozen and sold to the Americans as rock lobster—fetch more than two hundred and twenty dollars a case, and with sixty fishing days a year, and eighteen boats that go fishing, and each boat pulling in a hundred pounds of the crustaceans a trip, money comes flooding in to the island.

  Two islanders meet each morning at the pier head to look at the weather and decide if this is, or is not, a fishing day. If it is, they ring the ‘bell’—an old gas cylinder suspended from a gantry near the village hall—and all those men who are designated fishermen take the day off whatever other work they may be doing, and set out with the longboats for the fishing grounds. If that makes for some inconvenience to those islanders who remain behind—perhaps a plumbing job goes unfinished, or a vital letter passes untyped—no one seems to mind. The crawfish bring in the money, and money, despite the isolation and other-worldliness of the place, is a much-respected commodity in the colony.

  Perhaps the most unexpected—and, I have to say, most dismaying—result of the comparative wealth of the island is that, since 1984, there is an island television service. Most houses have a cable providing them with programmes from a small video tape centre (our ship was bringing a new amplifier, which was greeted with considerably more enthusiasm on the dockside than were any of the visitors, rams included), and at seven each Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday evening the cassettes begin to unroll, and the delights of the ‘houtside warl’ begin to pour into the little Tristan houses. At seven each Sunday the island is quite immobilised: Dallas is being shown—and the islanders watch every frame with adoration, amazement and delight. (There is even less worthy fare than this: the proud, private, fearless Tristanians, heirs to the traditions of egg-gathering on Inaccessible Island, and bird-collecting on Nightingale, now watch shows like Mannix, Jabber Jaws, and Fraggle Rock. To that small extent Tristan Island is beginning to resemble Staten Island, and it somewhat saddened me to find no real opposition, anywhere, to the trend.)

  But there are other, less questionable benefits of the wealth. Every islander is allowed to keep, and slaughter, two cows a year, and ten sheep, and so there is fresh meat, and lamb, and milk the whole year round. Tristanians, however, have a loathing for fillet steak, and any new expatriate finds himself weighed down by pounds of prime fillet given free in exchange for chocolate, or cigarettes, or tumblers of brandy which some island women drink during colder weather as though it were lemonade.

  Women have an unusually prominent role in Tristan society. True, they spend much time in the traditional island pastimes of carding wool, knitting ‘ganzeys’ for the fishermen, or socks (adorned with bands of colour for a man to give the girl he is courting, the more bands signifying the more ardour), or mittens. But the island shop manager is a woman, and the day I arrived it was announced that Jean Swain had been appointed Colonial Treasurer—one of the few ‘natives’ anywhere in the
remaining Empire to hold such a post, and certainly the only woman.

  There is, I was assured by one of the island men, a rational explanation for the influence of the women. All office jobs on Tristan are classified by the Government as permanent, which means that men who regard themselves as fishermen are not allowed to take them, lest they have to drop pen and paper and take off in the longboats every time the village bell is chimed. Most office jobs are thus held by women, who can assure the Government they will remain in harness, whatever the weather, however low the swell.

  But for all the slow changes, the introduction of television, the peculiar division of labour between the sexes, the introduction of money to the colony (thirty years ago all trade was by barter, and the local stamps were given a value in potatoes), the temper of Tristan life remains unaltered and, I would like to think, unalterable.

  The size of the population remains much the same: in 1984 there were four births, and three deaths. There are almost exactly 300 islanders. In 1961, when the volcano forced the evacuation of the entire island, there were 264 of them. As an embarrassed Britain well remembers—and much of the rest of the Western world too—all but five of them eventually decided to go back to Tristan. They didn’t care for the pace or the style of ‘civilised’ life; as the Daily Mirror was to remark as their ship pulled away from the quay to make the long journey home, their decision was ‘the most eloquent and contemptuous rebuff that our smug and deviously contrived society could have received’.

  There was, however, a coda to that story. The majority of Tristanians did, indeed, go back to Tristan in 1963. But over the next ten years a number who had evidently found a taste for a faster life during their sojourn in Britain, left Tristan again and headed back up north. About fifty have abandoned the island at the time of writing, although some of those have indeed returned yet again, an ebb and flow of humanity—now little noticed by the press, to the islanders’ relief and delight—that displays the uncertainty and indecision that exposure to the ‘houtside warl’ brought in its train. A sociologist, Peter Munch, has noticed that many of those who returned to England had the surname Glass, and speculates on the possibility of an unspoken schism between the Glasses (not that all people called Glass belong to the same family) and the other leading island group, the Repettos. But whatever the reason for the tidal movement within the community, the total population—300—remains fairly constant. This ebb and flow, which was a feature of the late Sixties and early Seventies, can no longer continue, however. The British Nationality Act, passed in 1982, saw to that. Tristanians, like St Helenians and Bermudians and Anguillians and all the rest (but not, as we shall see later, like the people of the Falklands and Gibraltar) are barred from permanent residence in the United Kingdom. A Tristanian who arrives at the immigration counter at Southampton docks might, for all his loyalty and distant patriotism, be a Mongolian, a Uruguayan, or a Turk. Any man from Tristan who feels like a spell in the industrialised world has only South Africa for a temporary home; and then, to his certain dismay, he will find himself classified as coloured, and will suffer all the indignity and ignominy of being on the wrong side in the system of apartheid.

  Their language remains strangely accented—a sonorous amalgam of Home Counties lockjaw and nineteenth-century idiom, Afrikaans slang and Italian. ‘Gie us a pound o’ happles,’ a woman will say. ‘I gone done shopping today, Harn’ld,’ she will report, when back home. They may eat ‘German’s nuts’—a kind of potato pudding—drink ‘Old Tom’, a rough cider made from the apples they’ll pick round at Sandy Bay, and finish off with ‘pot-of-all-kinds’, a fruit salad. They will wear ‘ammunitions’, or heavy boots, upon their feet, ‘ganzeys’—pullovers—on top, and hope to keep ‘fresh’, and free from ‘brocks’—healthy, and with no broken bones. ‘Hashmere’ is still the main ailment; even a young man, a ‘blow-up’ as he is known, may be susceptible, especially when the volcano is puffing out its sulphurous fumes.

  The old Tristan Times appears a few times each year, usually to coincide with the boats that arrive three or four times a year. There are messages from Buckingham Palace, notes from the Administrator, and small items of news that will almost certainly have become established gossip for many weeks before: thirty people went on a bird-collecting trip to Inaccessible Island; the radio station (from which the island sends a daily signal to Cape Town by morse code, assuring the world it and its people are still there) needs a new roof; a cattle egret has been spotted on the cliffs near Hottentot Point; the newspapers for last December have just arrived in the library (it is now April); the swimming pool is well under way, and children are warned not to play near it until it is filled with water; the cost of hiring the government launch goes up by forty per cent.

  The St Helena Governor brings two pieces of legislation with him: a constitutional amendment allowing for an election for chief islander, to be held in three months’ time; and the new motor vehicles law, which calls on drivers of all cars to keep to the left on the only road—the law had to be introduced since, a few weeks before, a new car was landed on the island, bringing the total number to two, with the possibility of collision. Rules, the British believe, are the essentials of an ordered society.

  There is a message from the ship: bad weather has been forecast, the harbour will be closed by eleven, and the anchor will have to be weighed at noon. Those few islanders who are leaving Tristan begin to scurry down to the quayside, carrying cases and boxes, and talking excitedly of the first visit—perhaps for years, quite probably the first time ever—to the outside. The post office opens, and a last few letters are posted, and sacks of mail are tied up and bundled on to the back of the island tractor, to be trundled down to the dinghies for transfer to the waiting ship.

  Morning service at the church of St Mary the Virgin is taken this day, as it has been every Sunday for the last two years, and will every Sunday for the next two, by David Pearson, the bluff, bearded padre who gave me dinner the night before.

  The church, a long, blue-and-white painted hut with a tin roof, is the repository of many of Tristan’s most cherished mementoes. Here is the picture of Queen Victoria, signed personally by her and given to the islanders’ chieftain in 1896, as a tribute towards the Britons, surviving in so merciless an environment so very far from home. There, beside the altar, is the island flag, ‘presented to HMS Leopard for the safe keeping in the evacuation, 19th October 1961, returned by HMS Apollo to the islanders of Tristan da Cunha, 13th April 1973.’

  The organ, upon which Mrs Repetto plays so very nicely, was given by our present Queen. The Bible was given to the island by the son of a woman lost on the good ship Blenden Hall, wrecked on Inaccessible Island in 1821. There are plaques to missionaries and other worthies, including the Rev Dodgson, who served in the late nineteenth century, and memorials to those who died—nearly all the island men—in the great lifeboat disaster of 1885.

  The congregation is all women, aside from Johnny Repetto, that fine-faced man who, when finer and younger than now, came back with five others in 1962 to make the island habitable again after its desertion, and has been regarded as a hero ever since. All the women wear headscarves and long skirts, and sing and pray fervently, especially when they intone the customary requests for the protection and preservation of Her Majesty the Queen and all the royal family, for Her Majesty’s ministers in London, and for those who, like all their husbands and brothers and sons, go down to the sea in ships and conduct their business in great waters.

  And then it is time to go. The sun is shining outside, and the women hurry back to their homes, and their Sunday lunches of roast beef—the like of which few in the mother country can now ever afford. I walk back down to the harbour, past the canvas longboats—the British Lion, the British Trader, the British Flag, each painted white, with blue and red stripes, symbols of the membership of an ancient and a proud Empire.

  I say my farewells to the islanders who are at the quay, and to a young British couple, Richard and M
argaret Grundy, who stand, windswept and bereft and tearful, knowing it will be fully four months until they see outsiders again, or hear first-hand news from their homes. There are no flags, nor Scout parades. The cliffs loom behind, sturdy in their grand indifference. The mist is swirling in fast-flowing ribbons, and fresh swells are crashing between the piers. I jump into the boat—Lofty is at the tiller, smiling warmly—and we roar out into the sea. Within seconds the water is too deep beneath the prow even to think of a return: it took months to reach here, it will take years before I could ever think of coming back, and I feel a sudden stab of sadness.

  And then we bump against the rusty hull of the RMS St Helena, and clamber up the ladder, and the dinghy turns away with a whoop and a wave from the men aboard. And, with a speed and a suddenness that is as kind as it seems brutal, we sound our valedictory sirens, the telegraphs clang to full ahead, and the island, a tiny cone of rock set in a wild and heaving sea, recedes to a mere shadow in the sky, and then a speck on the horizon, and then but a memory.

  Behind us, night and day, gale or calm, for a thousand miles and more flies a great white albatross, a bird that was probably born in the Tristan islands, and is amusing herself by following us, her adopted, sea-bound friends below. But then as we draw near the African coast she suddenly turns and wheels away, and soars up into the leaden skies, back to the lonely mysteries of the South Atlantic, to her companions of the colony set far from everywhere, and utterly alone. And when she has vanished in the great empty skies, I know all my links with Tristan have been severed, and that the most difficult and longest of the journeys is done.