Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire

by Simon Winchester

  Government House, Stanley, was a pleasant and unpretentious Victorian villa, looking rather like a cross between a manse and one of the smaller railway hotels found by the junction stations of the Scottish highlands. It had brick chimneys and a tiled roof, and conservatories and offices had been tacked on later, as business flourished. It was next door to the Cable and Wireless office, and there were a couple of wooden houses nearby where junior officials from the Foreign Office lived. A flagpole stood on the lawn and a copse of Douglas firs, some of the very few trees on the islands, and planted as a windbreak, so that His Excellency could read old copies of The Times in the garden, and not risk having the court and social news blown out to Cape Pembroke. The house was wholly unprotected—there was no guardian fence, just a tall pine hedge, and pipework cattle grids, to keep the sheep off the lawns. No duty soldier was in evidence, either—odd, considering the fuss in London and Buenos Aires; even odder, when you think that even on an island as tranquil as Montserrat a white-uniformed soldier stands constantly in a sentry-box beside Government House, Plymouth; and that in Hong Kong armed police patrol the grounds, on eternal watch for possible assailants.

  Here there was no one. I strolled up the path, rattled the door, and the Governor and Commander-in-Chief opened it himself, as though we were neighbours calling in for a cup of Nescafé. He was wearing, as I recall, a cardigan; Mavis was sitting by the peat fire, drinking brandy and soda from a tumbler and reading a copy of the previous week’s Times. A Beethoven sonata was on the tape player, the velvet curtains were drawn, and on the spare armchair was a pile of mail from England, and a great number of recent London newspapers, all of which had come in with the diplomatic bag from Comodoro.

  ‘Governors,’ The Times wrote in the mid-Sixties, after the anonymous Latin American correspondent paid a visit, ‘are fleeting birds of passage in this out-of-the-way colony.’ Many would never have chosen to come to ‘these islands of peat moorland, where people are few and sheep are many’. The place had many shortcomings—the water ‘which the stranger finds has a peculiar taste and effect, looks like whisky’ the winds blow hard, trees are a rarity. Small wonder so many of Her Majesty’s men—none of whom had ever been high fliers in the Colonial Service, and were always paid indifferently—were so hostile. Governor Arthur kicked his stuffed penguin; Governor Moore forced his staff to go to church, banned drink, and could be kind about nothing Falkland except his garden, in which he once grew a thirteen-pound cabbage; Governor Robinson let it be known he loathed this tiny settlement ‘at the fag end of the world’. But Governor Hunt, who had paid his dues in the service of Empire—he had been a District Commissioner in Uganda, and had worked in Jesselton, Brunei and Kuala Lumpur, as well as flying Spitfires against Hitler’s air force—seemed to like the place. Mavis Hunt, a stalwart of a colonial wife who preferred warm places, was not so sure about the weather; and Tony Hunt, the tearaway teenager who rode his motorcycle furiously around the rutted Stanley streets, was not keen at all. But they all liked the scenery, and the people; and they had no doubt that they were loyal British subjects, and intended to remain so.

  The house was certainly very comfortable, with a kitchen big enough for a mansion, a billiards room, eight bedrooms, studies, drawing rooms, gun rooms and diplomatic offices. A small lair at the end of a corridor housed the communications centre, where there was a cipher machine and a telex for sending and receiving coded telegrams, and where Rex Hunt kept his one-time pads, the code books for those rare occasions when it was necessary to send messages in ultra-secret. The Government House secretary turned out to be a woman I had known some years before in Islamabad, in Pakistan.

  In the kitchens I met the Governor’s chauffeur, an islander named Don Bonner. He had been asked to stand by until I was ready to leave, and was nursing a cup of cocoa with one of the kitchen maids. He was a dignified man, grey haired and weather-beaten, with the manner and the accent of a countryman; he had been in the employ of the past three governors, both as driver and preserver of His Excellency’s dignity. ‘I make sure the flag’s the right way up—that sort of thing.’ He drove me back to the Upland Goose, in the little taxi with a crown in place of a number plate.

  He admitted to being bewildered, and not a little alarmed, by all that seemed to be going on. ‘We’ve had all sorts of troubles with the Argentines over the years, you know,’ he said. ‘They landed a plane on the racecourse once. They built a base on Thule Island, and no one in London seemed to mind. No one even knew about it for the best part of a year! And now all this. Landing planes at our airfield again—they did that last week—and all this nonsense at Leith. We’ve seen it all before, I suppose. But it doesn’t sound good.’

  Don set me down, and waved me goodbye. ‘Cheers che!’ he cried. There are a number of such residual Spanish words and phrases in use on the islands. Every part of the colony outside Stanley is known as the Camp—from campo, the Spanish word for ‘countryside’. The islanders take a coffee-break each morning, only they call it ‘smoko time’ the sheepskin fleece on the farm horses is known by its gaucho word, the cojinillo, and the noseband is the recado, the halter is the cabezada, the harness is the apero. And farms, too—Rincon Grande, Salvador, and San Carlos. (But Lafonia, the huge southern part of East Falkland Island, did not get its name from the Spanish: Samuel Fisher Lafone was a merchant settler who bought vast tracts of land in the 1840s, and later sold out to the magnificently named Royal Falkland Land, Cattle, Seal and Whale Fishery Company—later to become the Falkland Islands Company, a subsidiary of an English firm of coal dealers. The firm’s greatest land asset is the soggy waste of Lafonia.)

  Next day dawned bright and clear, though the wind still stung, and as I walked by the sea after breakfast—Rice Crispies, bacon and eggs, damp toast and Chivers marmalade—droplets of salt spray whistled through the air like fine rain. Outside the hotel, mounted on a plinth on a patch of grass that ran down to the harbour, was the mizzenmast of the SS Great Britain, one of the many wrecks that litter the island. The Great Britain herself, built by Brunel in 1838 and one of the world’s first iron ships, was dismasted off the Horn, and ran to Stanley for shelter, where she lay for more than a century. Eventually enthusiasts had her brought back to Bristol, leaving only the mast behind.

  But there are other ships that remain intact: the huge ironclad Lady Elizabeth, with her three masts, lies on a sandbank near the airport; the Snow Squall, the Vicar of Bray, the Charles Cooper—and my own favourite, an East Indiaman known as the Jhelum, which was built in 1839 and now lies where she came to grief, in front of Government House. (I felt a certain affinity for this creaking old beauty, condemned and dangerous though she might be. I had been in Jhelum, in the Pakistan Punjab, only a week before leaving for Port Stanley: the symmetry seemed remarkable, to say the least.)

  Close to the hulk of the Jhelum was the colony’s most famous memorial—that commemorating the triumphal naval engagement of 8th December 1914, and which has ever since (despite later happenings) been known as the battle of the Falkland Islands. Admiral Sturdee and the battle cruisers Invincible and Inflexible were on duty, defending the Horn from the German grand fleet, under the command of Admiral Graf von Spee, in his battleship the Scharnhorst. The Falklands Volunteers, islanders mounted on ponies and armed with two machine-guns, were sent out on watch; and at seven thirty on the morning of 8th December saw the smoke of the approaching Germans. (A Mrs Melton, who worked on the farm at Fitzroy Settlement, managed to get a message to Stanley that three German warships were lying off Port Pleasant.) Admiral Sturdee, accompanied by a mighty squadron of British Imperial naval power, put to sea, and sank the marauding Germans, sending von Spee to the bottom. The islanders have always been proud of having helped trounce the Kaiser’s attempted domination of the South Atlantic, and celebrate the day each December—one of the few occasions when the Governor turns out in full Imperial rig, and the garrison steps out in style.

  I called on the garrison at their tiny base at
Moody Brook, a couple of miles along the sea-loch, to the west of Stanley. On the Wednesday the marines were said to be on yellow alert, but their officers seemed relaxed enough, and gave me tea and sandwiches from a silver mess teapot. There had been a small celebration, since one of their number—only forty in usual times, though more had come over from Montevideo since the South Georgia affair started—had married a local girl named Alana Cusworth. He was reckoned lucky by his chums, who saw their eighteen-month tour of the islands as 500 days and nights of excruciating sexual frustration. ‘We give them lots of training exercises, and they run around, and sail a good deal,’ their commander, Major Gary Noott, remarked over a piece of toast. ‘But it is still tricky for them.’ He took me to one of the marines’ rooms: an entire wall was covered with pin-ups from floor to ceiling—there must have been a thousand nipples on display, and still the man wasn’t happy.

  Major Noott seemed unbothered by the gathering storm. He had his orders, he knew what to do in case of a ‘threat’, but as he had almost no weapons (‘just enough to support a troop, spread among sixty of us’) he considered his presence more symbolic than useful. ‘If they were foolish enough to invade us,’ a brother officer remarked, ‘we have to remember that there are nearly 80,000 of them, and sixty of us, with just a few rifles and a machine-gun. I’d say our chances of success were—well, limited.’ Everyone in the mess laughed, but sardonically.

  It was a curious time. Diplomacy, away in London and New York and Buenos Aires, appeared to be staggering towards disaster. Ships were involved in complicated manoeuvres in the South Georgian waters: I managed to send a telex to HMS Endurance, asking the skipper, Captain Nicholas Barker, for some news on just what was happening, and he promised to reply on Friday morning. But here in the eye of the storm, all was uncannily calm. The Penguin News carried stories about the Horticultural Show (Harry Ford won a bag of fertiliser for displaying the ‘most outstanding potatoes’); Stanley beat the marines in the annual soccer match; Timmy Bonner from Port Howard won seven races at Port Stephen, on horses named Happy, Parker, Trigger, Matcho and Ulster. Someone had written from New Zealand to say that diddle dee berries, which grow in great abundance on the Falklands, could make excellent aftershave if mixed with alcohol. And one of Stanley’s little shops, the Kelper Store, was up for sale; its owner kept it open for only nine hours a week, and consequently found it woefully unprofitable.

  The store’s plight echoed one of the main troubles of the Falklands. There seemed a pathological lack of initiative and drive among the islanders. The shops were dreary, made no effort to compete with one another, never made a bid for excellence. There were no local industries—no whisky was produced, despite the ideal conditions for growing all the ingredients. No one tried to sell fresh vegetables to the marines, who had to buy their supplies from England. There were 600,000 sheep on the islands—yet no one tried to sell a single skin, or make a single coat, or spin a single ball of wool. There was but one restaurant in Stanley. (Its owners later upped and left.) There was no fishing industry—indeed, I found it hard to buy fish in any shop, or order it in any hotel. Nor was there a butcher’s shop: the meat supplies were brought in the back of a Land Rover, which called at houses only if a sign was displayed—‘Meat today please’.

  The marines had noticed it. The Governor had noticed it. A few of the islanders, and the more recent immigrants had noticed it. The place was dying on its feet. Islanders were leaving—a score or so each year, the population sagging now well below 2,000, the ratio of young women to young men declining rapidly, the social ills of a small, introverted group—alcoholism, divorce, depression—increasing fast.

  I liked the colony very much; but I had no illusions about it. This was no elysium, a remote and peaceful corner of the world in which the forgotten idylls of mankind were still performed. It was a place of change and decay, of decline and pointlessness—gentle, yes; harmless, yes; but a sorry kind of wasteland, the abode of the spiritually dying, and of the intellectually dead. It was, I realised after my first few days, a place that made me angry—that so much beauty and serenity had to be wasted on so many who were so unwilling or unable to reap the most from its natural goodness and potential.

  There were, of course, places and people I came to like. I loved Cape Pembroke Lighthouse, with its brass gleaming and its lenses sparkling, and its keeper (who had worked for twenty years on an Imperial light on South Georgia) proudly showing me the log book, and telling me of the various vessels he had watched over the years as, despite the warnings of his ten-mile beam, they hurled themselves on to the rocks below. I loved the penguins—the rockhoppers and the gentoos, the kings, the magellans, and the improbably named macaronis. I found much pleasure in the names of the animals and birds and plants these strange sub-Antarctic islands provided homes for. There were Cuvier’s beaked whales, Falkland foxes, South American sea lions. You could see steamers and loggerhead ducks, Johnny rooks and mollymauks, Pampa teal and Chiloe widgeon. You might walk across meadows of swamp rush and pigvine, the Cape Horn boxwood and the Christmas bush, the vanilla daisy and scurvy grass. And all under a wind so cool and fresh and clean that a quick turn of an evening left you feeling scrubbed down to bright metal, with the appetite of an ox and the fitness of an athlete. The Falklands felt a place that should have been good for the body and the soul, and it puzzles me still that so much was so evidently missing.

  Some newcomers were not as disappointed as I, and did indeed find the islands a source of perfect peace and spiritual inspiration. A small community of Ba’hai had been started there in the mid-Seventies; I became friendly with one young Californian family, the Sheridans, Jeannie and Duffy. Duffy Sheridan worked by day writing road signs for the Government, and at night turned his talents to oil painting. He was good enough to be given an exhibition in London, devoted to portraits of the island people, and he made a considerable amount of money.

  It was mid-afternoon on Thursday, All Fools’ Day, when things started to go visibly wrong. The news from London was bad that morning, and when we stood in the kitchen, wreathed in porridge steam, and listened to the World Service, the girls clenched their fists until their knuckles turned white. Mrs King was from the Pitaluga family, well known in Gibraltar, and she knew a thing or two about the travails of Empire. She looked up from her cooking and scowled at the radio. ‘Something’s happening,’ she said. ‘Something’s going wrong.’

  That afternoon I made a brief attempt to get a ride to South Georgia, so that I could see exactly what was going on between the Royal Marines and the sailors on board Drummond and the Granville. There was history of a sort being written out there, and I felt I wanted to take a squint into the epicentre of the moment. A steel sloop had slipped into harbour overnight, sailed by a young Czech who was on a single-handed circumnavigation. He had left the Baltic a year ago, had wandered down the Atlantic to Montevideo, and was now crossing to Cape Town in the roaring forties, and had stopped in the Falklands for shelter from the storm, like thousands of sailors before him.

  He said he would take me to Grytviken. It was on his way, and he was bored with his own company. So we sailed out into the harbour, and swung the compass for an hour or so, tacking back and forth along the length of the loch. Two others came for the ride—Raphael, the Argentine photographer, and a stray Polish seaman who had jumped ship a few days before, and wanted to give his fellow crewmen a wave as we cruised cheekily close to the factory vessel. I rather fancied that the Czech planned to go back home when his journey was over, and might not look too kindly at his Polish friend thumbing his nose at fellow Pact-members, but he was a relaxed sort of fellow, as most lone yachtsmen have to be, and seemed not to worry.

  It was about five, and we were sailing close to the Narrows when, with a roar of exhaust and a plume of spray, three uniformed Royal Marines shot by in a rubber boat. I had seen them the night before, and I waved. They did not wave back, but sped ahead with a look of rather grim purpose. They landed at the westerly
entrance, just by the tiny green navigation light, and began unloading weapons—a light machine-gun, and a pair of mortars. One marine remained behind, his colleagues sprang away again and unloaded more weapons at the other side of the entrance. Something, I said to myself, was definitely up.

  When we got back to the tiny dock by the Upland Goose there was a telegram waiting for me. My masters in London had decided that, in view of the deteriorating situation, I should remain in the Falklands, and I was asked not to sail on to see the scrap men 800 miles to the east. Then I spied Dick Baker, the Colonial Secretary, striding purposefully to his car, which took off in a screech of rubber towards Government House. A friend who had had an appointment with him followed: it had been cancelled, he said. There was something urgent afoot.

  At five minutes to eight, while I was struggling through another of Mrs King’s ten thousand ways with mutton (though there was the promise of red mullet on the morrow) the Governor telephoned. He was calm, but in deep earnest.

  He had requisitioned five minutes of radio time at eight fifteen, he said. Would I come round immediately afterwards, please? It was a matter of great urgency. He would not say what the matter was, other than there was trouble in the offing.

  I put down the telephone. All of the King family stood around in silence, waiting for a word. They looked shrunken, and frightened. I told them all I knew, and went back to the dinner table, where one of the girls served me my ginger sponge, her hand shaking as she did so. ‘Balloon going up, I expect,’ bellowed the Shropshire farmer from across the room. ‘Nasty business. Had to come one day, I suppose.’