Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire

by Simon Winchester

  Up in the Caribbean, where the winds are from the east, colonial capitals were usually built on the western sides of the islands—protected by the lee of the land, accessible for sailing ships that used to bring and take the Imperial trade. Down in the Falklands, where the winds—and what winds!—are from the west, precisely the opposite is true. The eastern shores are those protected from the gales, and logic and prudence thus dictate that the trading vessels call and anchor there. The first township was at Port Louis, on the eastern side of East Falkland, but the approaches were shallow, and troublesome for the bigger ships of the day; and when the Royal Navy surveyed the nearby waters and tested the anchorages and decided on another spot, it too was on the eastern side of the archipelago. The place they considered most fit was a tiny settlement named Port William at the southern side of an inlet called Jackson’s Harbour. To honour the peer who was then Under-Secretary for the Colonies, it was renamed Stanley, and formally designated capital ‘with a turf hut and a small wooden cottage in progress’ in 1844.

  Like Bird’s custard and the shapeless cardigan, the design and structure of a British working-class town is quite unmistakable, utterly unexportable and—to the British, and only to the British—charming in a ghastly sort of way. As we bumped down the final hill into Stanley there could be no doubt that this was the creation of Britons, seeking familiarity and reassurance so far from home. It was a town that appeared to have paid no heed to its position so close to the Patagonian coast. (It is notable, though, that Stanley is at almost exactly the same latitude south—fifty-two degrees forty minutes—as Great Yarmouth, Stamford, Cannock, Oswestry and Barmouth are north, and it is similar to the poorer parts of all of those towns and has, in winter, a not dissimilar climate, too.) There is nothing like it anywhere in South America, though there are villages in the older parts of Australia and New Zealand that have the same ramshackle aspect—a blend of mining-town and fishing-port, Industrial Revolution and Prince Albert, memorial hall and cenotaph, red brick terrace and tiled roof, pebbledash and peeling paint, potting shed and allotment, conservatory and geranium and privet hedge. I was never to see another Imperial town quite like Stanley. The Caribbean capitals have more grandeur and permanence about them; the old garrison cities—Gibraltar, Hong Kong—have been subsumed by modern development, the mid-Atlantic colonies have in their capitals stone constructions that proclaim the might and main and dignity of Empire. But not poor Stanley. This is a truly forlorn and gimcrack little town, creaking and damp, and with the feel of impermanent permanence about it, as though it had been put up by a Ministry of Works to solve an immediate housing problem, and never removed. There used to be rows of what were called prefabs in some English towns, erected to ease the shortage of housing after the Hitler war. They stayed for years—ugly, and yet not hated. Stanley seemed to me rather similar—a town that has suffered from too little money, too little confidence, too little care taken in its design and its maintenance. It does have a certain charm—but that tends to derive from its people, rather than from its appearance. No historian, surveying the architectures of Imperial power, would ever select the Falklands capital as an exemplar of what the world’s greatest Empire had done. The Imperial ties that bound Chowringhee and Pedder Street and Albert Road, Hong Kong, never extended as far south as Ross Road, Stanley.

  Stanley was built on the northern flanks of a steep hill, its streets running down to the waters of Stanley Harbour. The light, in consequence, is intense—the sun always hanging in the northern skies and reflected back by the riffled and sparkling sea. As we turned down the hill the town suddenly became curiously luminous, everything bathed in the pastel brightness of a low sun and the sea. From here the town looked like a freshly painted water-colour of itself, shining with the damp. The rain had stopped, the sun had broken through and the gale had eased to a stiff breeze. There was washing flapping on the lines, the peat smoke rose half-vertically from a hundred chimneys, gulls were finding it possible to land on rooftops, and children, in oiled pullovers and Wellingtons, spilled out on to the streets, to play. This might have been a Scottish islands capital—Stornoway, perhaps, or Tobermory, on a brisk morning after a night of storms.

  The Upland Goose Hotel, made famous by the events of that autumn, was rather less of a hostelry than would be found in a Scottish fishing town. It was more like a youth hostel—spartan, old-fashioned, worn out. The name comes from the wild goose that island sheep farmers loathe, regarding it as an absolute pest. They call it ‘Magellan’s grass-eater’, and claim that seven geese can wolf down as much grass each day as the average healthy sheep. There was a plan to slaughter 15,000 a year and offer a bounty of fifteen shillings for every hundred beaks, but the conservation lobby won the day, and the geese remain, to be shot for food, and served with redcurrant jelly and slices of orange.

  I had a cup of instant coffee and sat in the conservatory, basked for a while in the afternoon sun and read old copies of Weekend and Titbits, and smelled the geraniums and the roses. Mutton, too: it was lamb for dinner at the Upland Goose, as it is so often that the islanders call the meat three-six-five (or so it is said; I never actually heard anyone call it anything but mutton).

  There was a purr of heavy tyres on the road outside, and a new, bright green Land Rover shot past. Royal Marines, members of Naval Party 8901, the Falklands garrison. I might have supposed they were bent on some secret military expedition—setting up fortifications, perhaps; or making a last-minute reconnaissance. But as I strolled out into Ross Road to look, it turned out to be much more mundane. They had stopped at the grocer’s, and were inside buying Mars bars. They were curious when I told them I had come all the way from London. Everything was pretty relaxed, they said. No crisis, except that a few lads had come across from Montevideo and were crowding out the barracks up at Moody Brook. Come over and have tea, they said. Or even a drink. The major’s a pretty decent sort, be glad to see you.

  And off they rumbled, westwards, towards their little headquarters camp at the head of the sea-loch. Up in London matters were fast moving to a head; down here, 8,000 miles away from the diplomatic argument, the marines whose task was, in theory, to defend the integrity of the Colonial Government, were blithely unconcerned, or at least appeared to be.

  As the sun began to slip its way westwards, and ease itself down behind the Saddleback and Mount Longdon, I strolled through town. (The 800-foot peak directly south from Stanley is called Twelve O’Clock Mountain, and islanders set their watches by it, when it is not raining, and covered with cloud.)

  Christ Church Cathedral—‘the most southerly Anglican cathedral in the world’—was the only structure of any real Imperial value, it seemed to me, even though its roof is made of red corrugated iron. The first Falklands church had been wrecked in 1886 when a river of liquid peat had roared down from the hills; Sir Arthur Blomfield designed its replacement, and it might have been particularly grand had the Austrian stonemasons he employed not walked out after a year, leaving the tower half-finished, and forcing the abandonment of plans for a thirty-foot steeple. But what resulted was pleasant enough: a chunky, well-buttressed tower, and an impressive expanse of red roof—proof, if any were needed, that the Imperial deity was of the Church of England, and could survive even among the winds and the waves of the far south Atlantic.

  I liked the cosy Britishness of it all, too. The altar had been carved by masons in Yorkshire, the kneelers had been embroidered by the good ladies of the parish, and there was a tiny stained-glass window in the south corner, dedicated to the memory of the island nurse, Mary Watson, who pedalled the rough roads of Stanley on her ancient Raleigh bicycle, visiting the new mothers and the old men and the sickly children, and who was much loved by her people.

  Yes, there were the grander memorials, too—a battle ensign from the Achilles, which had streamed behind her as she tackled the pocket battleship Graf Spee off Montevideo in 1939, and a plaque for the sailors who died at the battle of Coronel, in 1914. But it was the
gentler, less strident memorials that seemed more suited to this most gentle of colonies—like that to the old Dean, Lowther Brandon, who had travelled by horse and by ship to every corner of the islands (a complete tour took three months) bringing the post, books, his own Falklands Islands Magazines, and his magic lantern, which sat on the saddle of his second horse and with which he would entertain the island children. ‘In appreciation of many years of faithful service’ reads the memorial. No hectoring monuments to conquering generals here, and only one governor (the splendidly named Herbert Henniker Heaton) gets a mention.

  The lights were coming on all over Stanley as I strolled back to the hotel, and out in the bay, too, there were the pinpricks of lanterns on the few ships at anchor. Two fixed lights showed the Narrows, the entrance to the wonderfully sheltered anchorage; and beyond it there was the bulk of a vessel that, according to a passing policeman, was a Polish fish-factory ship. Polish and East German fishing vessels crawled all over Falklands waters, he said, ‘stealing our hake’. But, he added, ‘we steal the Poles’, so it all works out fair.’ It turned out that whenever a Polish vessel came into Falklands waters a number of seamen jumped ship, and asked the colonial authorities for asylum. There were six in the police station outhouse just now, he said, and they were being taught English by one of the local wives.

  There were as many Poles as policemen. The force in Stanley is smaller than in any other colony—one chief, from the Colonial Police Service, an inspector, a sergeant and four constables. One member of the thin blue line for every 300 colonists, a number that Falklanders like to think compares favourably with an island like St Helena where there is one policeman for every hundred Saints. There is almost no crime—a little drunkenness, the odd bout of sparring between spouses, and assorted beastliness with sheep (of which there are three-quarters of a million—400 for every islander). The task of the police force, then, is limited to handing out licences for islanders wishing to collect penguin eggs, and making sure dogs are regularly inoculated against a worrying local ailment called hydatidosis. ‘A pleasant sort of life,’ said the constable. ‘Boring, though.’

  The dinnertime rituals at the Upland Goose would have been familiar to a travelling brush salesman who had ever worked his way through a wet Wednesday night on the Ayrshire coast. The dining room was cold, the furniture cheap, the ugly floral wallpaper was scuffed and the glasses on each table were made by Duralex, in France. The passengers from the plane were seated at separate tables, and were not encouraged to talk to one another, but to munch solemnly at small clumps of congealed mutton and instant mashed potatoes, boiled carrots, and Bisto. The waitresses caught the glumness of the hour, and moved with a sullen weariness from kitchen to table, finding it difficult to smile, impossible to talk. An excited babble of Spanish came from an adjoining room—a dozen workers for the Argentine natural gas combine were staying, someone explained; they were building a gasworks down by the docks.

  I had met, and had dinner with, one other Argentine who was staying locally. He was a photographer named Raphael Wollman, and he had been on the island for a week. Des King, the owner of the Upland Goose, was very suspicious of him. ‘Big coincidence, I’d say,’ he remarked. ‘All this talk of trouble, and we have an Argentine photographer here. Funny business.’ And he shook his thin head with distaste. He didn’t care much for the Argentines, he said. Impossible to trust. Unpredictable. Very emotional.

  The radio was on in the kitchen, and at eight—midnight in London—the familiar jauntiness of Lillibullero cascaded through the static, and the BBC newsreader came on air. All conversation stopped, forks hovered in mid-route. The South Georgia saga was the first on the list, and hotting up: Lord Carrington, the British Foreign Secretary, had broken off a trip to Israel and had made a statement to Parliament. ‘The question of security in the Falklands area is being reviewed…’ It was almost the first time the name of the colony had been mentioned, other than as a mere adjunct to the trouble 800 miles to the east. I felt the adrenalin pump briefly into my system, and my hands shook slightly with excitement.

  There was more. Some newspapers in London were reporting that submarines had been sent south. The Navy High Command in Buenos Aires had declared its force ‘in a high state of readiness’, and there were reports that the Argentine flagship, the aircraft carrier Veinticinco de Mayo, had put to sea. (It was forty years old, built for the Royal Navy as HMS Venerable. But elderly or not, it was still a carrier, and sending a carrier to deal with a gathering storm on South Georgia suggested that someone in Buenos Aires had decided it was time to stop playing games.) There was said to be a row brewing between Britain and the United States over which side the Americans were on.

  And to complicate matters still further, riots were breaking out all over the Argentine capital. The rioters were angry with the military government. Raphael Wollman, listening solemnly to all this, shook his head sadly. ‘Madness,’ he said. ‘This will all come to no good.’

  Everyone on the islands would have heard the news from London. Every house—and not merely those in Stanley, but in all the outlying settlements dotted across the vast expanse of countryside they called ‘the Camp’—was equipped with a brown walnut box, a gold-coloured grille on the front, and a single black bakelite knob below. This was ‘the Box’, the radio-rediffusion system that had been introduced to the islands in the Thirties, and which conveyed, by land-line and telephone circuit, every piece of news and gossip a remote colonial community was ever likely to need.

  It was customary to keep it switched on all the time—the Box in the Upland Goose was always burbling away in the background, a combination of Muzak and a pictureless telescreen that I half-suspected would bring me news of increased chocolate rations and successes against Oceania. The feeling was enhanced by the acronym used by the Falkland Islands Broadcasting Service, FIBS. ‘All they tell,’ Des King laughed. The usual fare was music, very much from the Fifties, with interleaved snippets of news read by a man named Patrick Watts, and announcements—who would be on the next morning’s float-plane departure to Fox Bay and Port San Carlos, who had flown in on the afternoon flight from Comodoro, what His Excellency the Governor was doing for the remainder of the week. ‘And now—Edmundo Ros…’ The BBC broadcasts were relayed, and were much listened to—particularly a brief fifteen-minute programme each Friday, ‘Calling the Falklands’, which generally consisted of birthday greetings of the ‘to little Janice at Walker Creek from her Auntie Jill and Uncle Bert in Southampton’ variety, and usually ended with sad promises that they would try to get down to see everyone ‘before you’re too much older’, and which everyone seemed to know would never be fulfilled.

  These days, of course, it was the news that stopped most islanders in their tracks. The names of the BBC readers—Roger Collinge, Michael Birley, Barry Moss—were as familiar in this bleak corner of the ocean as were the Cronkites or the Days of the outside world. ‘Always worry when Mr Collinge is reading the news,’ said one man in the hotel bar afterwards. ‘Reminds me of Frank Phillips in the last war. He always seemed to be given the bad news to deliver. Collinge seems the same. If it’s grim stuff, give it to old Collinge.’ Mr C—I had seen a picture of him once; he looked very gentle, and wore dark glasses—did seem to be on a lot these days.

  The radio service, antique though it may have been, was the very soul of modernity when compared to the Falklands telephone system. I had decided to call the Governor. The telephone was enormous, made of bakelite, weighed twenty pounds and had a hand crank on the side. Not for the first time I felt that I had whirled backwards in time, and that I was playing a bit-part in a Rattigan play, all seedy gentility, brilliantine, ration cards and Utility furniture. But I followed the instructions on the card—picked up the ‘instrument’, twirled the handle—it rasped alarmingly—and was connected to a cheery lady whose name, I had read, was Edith. ‘Thirty-eight two rings,’ I said somewhat diffidently offering the number of Government House. ‘His Excellency’s havin
g dinner,’ said Edith, without a moment’s pause. ‘Can you try in ten minutes? Give him time to have his coffee.’

  Rex Masterman Hunt, Governor and Commander-in-Chief of the Falkland Islands, Governor of the Falkland Islands dependencies and High Commissioner of British Antarctic Territory, presided over what is by far the biggest remaining land acreage of British Empire. The Falklands, which cover just under 5,000 square miles, are but a morsel. The dependencies of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands (which Governor Arthur, in the Fifties, represented by a stuffed king penguin at one end of his office, and which he kicked every so often to remind himself how irritating the dependency problems could be) add another few thousands of square miles; and the Antarctic Territory—the South Orkneys, South Shetlands and a massive wedge of Antarctica claimed by Britain—represent 100,000 more.

  Despite the rigours of having to rule such a mighty Imperial domain, Mr Hunt said he would be delighted to have company, would I please come over right away, coffee was being brewed, and Mavis keen to hear all the gossip. Did I need a lift?

  He had a red London taxi, just like the Governor on Grand Turk Island. Taxis were considered eminently suitable for gubernatorial transport because, the Foreign Office had said, they were unmistakably British, impressive-looking, and tall enough inside to allow governors to keep their plumed hats on their heads while on ceremonial drives. The Falklands taxi, I was glad to learn, did not suffer the depredations of its Caribbean colleague, which was always being gnawed to bits by inquisitive wild horses. Here the only snag was that the car got a little rusty.