Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire

by Simon Winchester

  The Anguillian leader, Ronald Webster, and a remarkably colourful and patriarchal figure named Jeremiah Gumbs pleaded their case to the world. Mr Gumbs appealed before the General Assembly of the United Nations. Over in St Kitts Mr Bradshaw, who drove around in a vintage Rolls-Royce, appealed to the British to whip the Anguillians into line, and to halt the unseemly rebellion.

  A parade of British officials came and went—one of them being brusquely turfed out because the Anguillians thought he was rude. He felt he was in danger of being lynched, so he gave an emergency message to the local Barclays Bank manager, who smuggled it through the islanders’ lines in his shoe: the note was addressed to SNOWI—the Senior Naval Officer, West Indies, and asked for help.

  In an act which half the world thought amusing, and which to the other half indicated that Britain was still an Imperial bully-boy, London decided to send in the troops. The second battalion of the Paras was alerted and sent to a holding base at Devizes. Forty policemen, members of the Metropolitan Force’s Special Patrol Group, were kitted out in tropical uniforms (though not all of them; their leader was reckoned too fat for any of the cotton drills to fit) and joined them.

  Fog delayed the group at their airfield in Oxfordshire, and Fleet Street found out all about Operation Sheepskin. Reporters met the plane in Antigua—a foolish place to land, since the Antiguans liked what the Anguillians were doing; they expressed their irritation by tossing out their Prime Minister in the following year’s election, saying he had ‘connived’ with the British.

  The troops and the policemen were put on the Minerva and the Rothesay, and left for the high seas. The reporters chose to invade at greater speed and in greater comfort: they flew across to Anguilla and waited. At 5.19 a.m. on the 19th March the first of the Red Devils landed. A series of blinding flashes greeted them as they reached the beach, and, as per their training, they threw themselves to the ground. They needn’t have worried. Fleet Street was merely photographing the landing, for posterity.

  Ronald Webster had no idea there would be a landing by British troops. He was in the bath when they arrived, and first got to learn of the invasion from a reporter, who asked him what he thought of it. Others were more prescient. An American lady confessed, with characteristic candour, that she had ‘spent the entire night in my brassiere to be ready for the invasion. I never did that before in my life.’

  If there were an armed rebellion brewing in a remote British possession, they never found the arms. Four old Lee-Enfield rifles, not very well oiled, and securely locked up, seemed to represent the total armoury. (It was later suggested that the rebel leaders had buried the guns in the mountains of Saint Martin, but they have never been found.) A few people were arrested and taken off to the warships for a little talk. Some reporters said a shot had been fired at a plane they had chartered, but it was probably the perfervid imaginations of Fleet Street at work. In fact the little war must have been the most peaceful ever prosecuted, anywhere; and it made Britain look very foolish indeed. ‘The Bay of Piglets!’ jeered one American headline. ‘The Lion that Meowed!’

  The Imperial power was made to look even more ham-handed a few years later, when Anguilla and her ‘rebel’ leadership were formally offered every last thing they had wanted. They were not forced to join up with St Kitts and Nevis. Kittitian policemen, and Englishmen who wanted Kittitian policemen, were not foisted upon the islanders. The island was given back its own parliament—larger than the Vestry, and with greater powers. And the British Government happily prised the island away from Mr Bradshaw’s clutches by making it a Crown colony (although, with the word ‘colony’ no longer thought proper, the actual technical term used was British dependent territory). The senior Briton dispatched to run the place was no longer to be called a medical officer, nor a resident, nor a senior British official, nor an administrator, nor a magistrate, nor a commissioner: from 1st April 1982, thirteen years and two weeks since the arrival of the two tiny warships off Crocus Bay, Anguilla could relax under the benign rule of Her Majesty’s representative, His Excellency the Governor, complete with white uniform, sword and a splendid hat, gold braid and feathers, all entwined. Nothing so grand had ever been seen.

  ‘Coffins for Sale—No Credit.’ The sign was the first I noticed as my car bumped its way slowly up from the quayside, and to The Valley. It was, indeed, another shabby island, its capital another shabby town. Not forlorn, though, in the way that Cockburn Town had been forlorn; this looked like a place that had been overlooked for a long while, but was just being discovered, and was on the edge of better times.

  ‘Bank of Nova Scotia’ was the second sign I saw, and notices for banks and insurance companies turned out to be more numerous than any others. Small armies of workers were sawing and hammering away at rows of shops, twenty shops to a row, two rows to a complex. But on looking more closely the shops turned out to be little banks—some of them very odd banks, and from countries a very long way from Anguilla. But the building of them evidently gave the Anguillians work, and the Chief Minister—the same Ronald Webster who was sitting in his bath when the Red Devils burst in—promised me that many more would be invited over the coming years. (Mr Webster was defeated in an election soon afterwards, but the policy of turning Anguilla into a tax-haven was still being pursued with great energy.)

  Hotels, too, were springing up. Anguilla’s coastline—seventy miles of it, almost untouched—had just been discovered by American entrepreneurs (and by a Sicilian, who had been flung out of Saint Martin and who was hoping to salt away his millions in a beach under the protection of the British Crown; he was asked to go elsewhere) and by a growing number of wealthy tourists. I fell in with a curious crowd one afternoon: he was a Greek-American, from Boston, and he said he was one of the leading potato brokers on the East Coast. He would keep me in close touch with happenings in the world of American potatoes for months thereafter, going so far as to send me a laudatory book about the Idaho variety, called Aristocrat in Burlap. We sat on a pure white beach, under an umbrella, and spent a good hour watching a pelican as it flew lazily over the endless blue rollers. It was a wonderful, faintly terrifying sight as the bird did its trick. It would be flying along, quite calmly, rising and falling in the thermals. Suddenly without warning, it would crumple up, all bones and wings and disordered brown feathers, just as if it had been shot. Down, down it fell, into the sea. At first we thought it had died, but after ten seconds or so it would emerge from the sea with a splash and a shower of spray, like a watery Phoenix, and would fly off in happy triumph, with a blue-and-gold fish clamped in its beak. It repeated its act time and time again, and each time the Greek potato king would laugh till the tears came; and we looked further along the beach and other pelicans—Eastern Browns, the book said—were doing the same thing, raining down into the sea and flying off with their flapping harvest of fish. We wondered who was enjoying the more perfect idyll—we two, or the birds.

  I had a friend on the island, a man who had been the Attorney-General on St Helena and who had married a Saint of exquisite and serene beauty, and had then decided to leave and look for work on another colonial possession. They had given him the job of ‘A-G’ on Anguilla, and he was having a rare old time—no murders on the island perhaps (the only prisoner in The Valley had been sent there for using bad language) but an exquisite dilemma over a drugs case in which he was deeply involved.

  Off the eastern tip of Anguilla lies Scrub Island—a couple of miles long, with two low hills, a tiny lake and a rough grass airfield. The latter had no obvious legitimate use, since no one lives on Scrub Island, and hardly anyone goes there (the Baedeker lamely reports Scrub Island as having ‘much fissured coral rocks’ and little else). But the airfield did have an important use for the classic non-legitimate business that has become a mainstay of Caribbean commerce—the trans-shipment of cocaine. A plane would fly out from Florida, empty; another would fly in from Bogota, full; there would be a hurried mid-night transfer, whereupon the two airc
raft would return to their respective lairs, and plan to meet again later. Scrub Island, Anguilla, became, in the early 1980s, one of the great unsung drug markets of the Western world.

  Until one evening in November 1983. The American drug enforcement agencies got wind of a big transfer plan, and called Anguilla, and spoke to my friend who had just arrived from Jamestown. He alerted the Royal Anguilla Constabulary, advised them to draw guns from the armoury, sailed them out to Scrub Island and hid them behind the clumps of loblolly pine and seagrape that grew beside the airstrip.

  A man arrived in a launch, and set about lighting small fires to mark the strip. Then the aircraft arrived, as expected—one from the west, one from the south. Two men climbed from the Colombian craft, one from the American machine, everyone shook hands, and the policemen could see bags being humped from one hold to another. They drew their service revolvers, switched on their arclights—and made the most spectacular arrest Anguilla had ever seen. Four big-time drug smugglers, and a haul of a quarter of a tonne of cocaine—the largest and most valuable capture ever made in the Caribbean. It was worth one thousand million dollars.

  The sheer scale of the haul posed one immediate problem. The Governor, a pleasant and very quiet Scotsman who had been brought to Anguilla from a lowly post in the British Embassy in Venezuela, was deeply alarmed. What, he wondered, if the Mafia tried to get it back? A billion dollars’ worth of drugs would make it worth some gangsters’ while to take almost any steps imaginable. They might land in force, at night, armed with heavy weapons. He might be captured, the Chief Minister might be assassinated, the colony might revert to the suzerainty of some Lower East Side capo. It was too horrible to contemplate. He wondered whether to ask for a frigate to stand off the coast, but then decided the evidence would be much safer under the care of the Americans, and had it all shipped off to Florida, and breathed a sigh of great relief when it had gone.

  The four prisoners, on the other hand, represented a very considerable windfall. All were released, on half a million dollars’ bail. They were told to come back for trial three months later, and when I met my friend he was praying hard that they would decide to skip bail—he would take great pleasure in leading their prosecution, of course, but he and the colony would very much like the money as forfeit. And in any case—what if they were found guilty? Where could they be kept? What if their Mafia chums tried to free them? And the drugs would have to be brought back as evidence, too.

  In the event they never did show up. The Government of Anguilla made a clear profit of half a million United States dollars, and was able to tell the British Government, which wearily and reluctantly hands out grants to poor islands like Anguilla each year, that on this occasion at least it would need less of a grant than normal. It might even be able to afford a new school, or an extension for the hospital, out of the proceeds. It is, my friend remarked, an ill wind…

  In one classically Imperial sense, Anguilla is a colony of some importance. Because of where she is, the colony controls—or, put another way, Britain controls—a vital sea lane. And this has come about because of a clever piece of sleight-of-hand which Whitehall played when St Kitts became independent, and Anguilla refused.

  Thirty-five miles north-west of Anguilla is a tiny islet, two miles long, shaped like a Mexican hat, and called Sombrero Rock. It has a large deposit of phosphate, and because of that has been visited by quarrymen from time to time, and a few tonnes have occasionally been shipped away. The true importance of Sombrero is that it lies directly athwart one of the busiest deep channels between the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, and it has a lighthouse. The Admiralty bible, Ocean Passages for the World, lists Sombrero among the world’s great reference points (and gives specific routes from Sombrero to, among others, Bishop Rock, the Cabot Strait, Lisbon, Ponta Delgada and the Strait of Gibraltar).

  The light on Sombrero—157 feet high, visible from twenty-two miles, and exhibiting a white flash every five seconds through the night—has always been British. It used to be run by the Imperial Lighthouse Service; it was one of the final three in use when the Service was abolished (the others were Cape Pembroke on East Falkland, and Dondra Head in Ceylon).

  But Sombrero belonged to the presidency of St Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla, and, so logic dictated, should have moved to the newly independent St Kitts in 1967, since it had no population, other than a British lighthouse keeper. But—and here was the cunning move—London decided that Sombrero should remain British, and remain attached to Anguilla. For this one reason Britain was well pleased with the Anguillian rebellion—it enabled her to keep control of a lighthouse, and a sea lane, that would otherwise have fallen under the less predictable rule of a newly independent state.

  The Board of Trade took over the light, turned it into an automatic station, and brought the keeper home. And then in 1984 Trinity House, which looks after all British home waters’ lights, as well as Europa Point off the southern tip of Gibraltar, assumed control over Sombrero, too. Thanks to the existence of Anguilla and her minuscule limestone possession to the northwest it was still true, technically, and on a very small scale, that Britannia ruled the waves, or at least a small portion of them. No ship could pass conveniently between Europe’s great ports and the Panama Canal without coming under the unseeing scrutiny of a lighthouse that belonged, firmly and for the foreseeable future, to Britain.

  When you arrive in Montserrat they stamp your passport with a shamrock. The signs say, ‘Welcome to the Emerald Isle’, and the coat of arms has a blonde lady holding a cross in one hand, and in the other a harp. There is a volcano called Galway’s, a farm called O’Garra’s, a town called St Patrick’s and a mountain called Cork Hill. You can be forgiven for thinking that you have landed in altogether the wrong place.

  It is even said that the islanders speak with a thick Irish brogue. A story is still told in the island pubs of a man from Connaught who arrived in Montserrat and was astonished to hear himself greeted in his native tongue by a man who was as black as pitch.

  ‘Thunder and lightning!’ exclaimed the newcomer. ‘How long have you been here?’ ‘Three months,’ said the native. ‘Three months! And so black already! Blessed Jesus—I’ll not stay among ye!’ and he got back on to his boat, and had it sail all the way home to Connaught.

  Ireland has the distinction of being known as a redoubtably anti-Imperial nation—struggling for most of her history against the rapacity of the English and the Scots. But early in the sixteenth century the Irish did colonise the island of Montserrat. They didn’t discover it—Columbus did that, in 1493, and named it after a Catalonian monastery, because he thought the rugged hills and the needle-sharp peaks looked similar to the mountains beyond Barcelona. (The monastery of Santa Maria de Monserrate was where Ignatius Loyola saw the vision that prompted him to form the Jesuit movement—the island’s name thus seemed an ideal refuge for Catholicism.) But the Spaniards made no attempt to annexe the little island, and it was left to Irishmen, in 1633, to take the place over.

  They did so precisely because the name suggested refuge from the intolerance of Protestantism. There were Irishmen in Sir Thomas Warmer’s newly growing colony on St Kitts—but Sir Thomas was a bluff Suffolk squire, not particularly eager to mingle with wild Irishmen, and he made life difficult for them. A party left by boat, and were blown by the trade winds to an island in which they saw ‘land high, ground mountainous, and full of woods, with no inhabitants; and yet there were the footprints of some naked men’. The countryside was fertile, the weather pleasant, and, best of all, the place even looked like Ireland. So they named their landfall Kinsale Strand, and set about making the island into a new Irish home.

  For a while it became a sanctuary. Irishmen arrived from Virginia, where the Protestants were busily establishing an ascendancy in that new colony; and they came from Ireland, too, once Cromwell had started to busy himself there. By 1648 Montserrat had ‘1000 white families’—all of them Irish. There was an Irish Governor named Mr Brisket,
and the islanders were eating Irish stew, which they called—and still call—goatwater. Montserrat goats are said to have flesh tasting like the best of Galway mutton. (‘Mountain chicken’, another local dish, is actually breadcrumbed frog.)

  But charming though the idea of an Irish Caribbean colony might have been—think of the mournful ballads that might have been sung under a summer’s moon to the lilting music of the harp and the steel drum, or the sad sagas of the O’Flahertys’ sugar mill, the tales of Irish tobacco and Irish rum, the hurricane shelters at the shinty matches—it had not the wit to last. The Irish tried cunning, and it failed. They formed an uneasy alliance with the French, hoping that they might together drive the English out of St Kitts. But the English kept hold of St Kitts, and drove the French—who by this time had taken over Montserrat completely, having merely made use of the Irishmen—out of the area totally. Three years later, in 1667, the French were back, but then the Peace of Breda was signed, and England was given the island in perpetuity.

  The French in les Indes de l’Ouest were extraordinarily determined. They tried three times more to lay hands on Montserrat—in part for simple territorial ambition, in part because it was a stronghold of Catholicism, and thus more amiably disposed to the ways of France than the English or Dutch islands nearby. They attacked in 1712, and caused so much damage to British property that a special clause was inserted into the Treaty of Utrecht; and they attacked again in 1782, and captured the island (along with most of the Leewards), but were ordered off under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The final French invasion came in 1805, when Montserrat was forced to pay a ransom of seven thousand five hundred pounds. After that everyone left the island alone, and the British ruled untroubled by any foreign rival. Including, of course, the Irish, who by now had been all but forgotten, except in the names of the towns, the stews, the shamrocks, and the strange habit of many Montserratians—which remains today—of adding the words ‘at all’ to the end of most sentences.