The Dead Yard

by Ian Thomson

  Thomas Clarkson, a clergyman’s son, was Wilberforce’s chief lieutenant. In search of evidence against slave-ship brutality, he scoured the waterfront taverns of Bristol and Liverpool. His famous diagram of a seagoing ‘Guineaman’ - the top, side and end views of the Jamaica-bound vessel tight-packed with Africans - became an iconic image of the abolitionist movement. Clarkson submitted his findings to the House of Commons and, after years of lobbying, a Bill was passed on 25 March 1807 that outlawed the carrying of slaves by British ships. The Bill marked the beginning of the end of slavery. Jamaican planters, fearing that abolition would precipitate the collapse of the British Empire (and loss of profit for them), burned Wilberforce in effigy, while Jamaican slaves prayed to ‘Saint’ Wilberforce.

  Abolition was hastened by the Haitian slave uprising. In the New Year of 1804, to the alarm of British Jamaica, slaves toiling on the neighbouring island of Saint Domingue finally overthrew their French masters after more than ten years of revolt and declared independence. The French name of Saint Domingue was replaced by the aboriginal Indian word Haiti (‘mountainous land’) and the white band ceremonially ripped from the French tricolour to create the modern Haitian flag. French planters were massacred but many escaped to Jamaica, where their descendants can be found to this day.

  The prospect of a free black state founded on the annihilation of its white community horrified slave-owning Britain. Planters in Jamaica, outnumbered ten to one by their slaves, spread stories of black (but not white) cruelty in Haiti: infants impaled on pikes, pregnant (always pregnant) women raped. Quite suddenly it seemed the whites were on the defensive. And in 1793, fearing that the ‘contagion of revolution’ in Haiti would spread to Jamaica, King George III sent 27,000 troops from Kingston to Saint Domingue. The occupation turned out to be one of the greatest (if still least known) catastrophes of British imperial history. Tropical disease killed the king’s Redcoats in their thousands before they capitulated to the freed slaves. The defeat was the first time that a European army had surrendered to black troops. It inspired William Blake’s abolitionist poem ‘America: A Prophecy’, dated 1793:Let the slave grinding at the mill run out into the field;

  Let him look up into the Heavens and laugh in the bright air

  The Abolition Bill, long awaited, was thrilling to slaves and abolitionists alike. ‘Well, Henry, what shall we abolish next?’ Wilberforce asked a staunch Evangelist cousin. ‘The lottery, I think,’ came the reply. Abolition of the trade, however, did not mean emancipation of the slaves: Jamaica would have to wait another thirty years until its slaves were actually liberated by the 1834 Emancipation Bill. Even then, they had to serve a four- to sixyear apprenticeship before becoming quite free.

  Dissenting voices were heard long before Wilberforce. In 1752, a full half-century before abolition, Samuel Johnson took on a freed black Jamaican slave as his valet. Francis Barber, a ten-year-old orphan, had been entrusted to Dr Johnson by an English planter with connections in Jamaica. By employing Barber, Dr Johnson could put into practice Britain’s fundamental principle of liberty (as he saw it) and realise the idea of ‘imperial trusteeship’ for the betterment of so-called native societies. His hatred of slavery was genuine. Sugar-rich Jamaica, in Dr Johnson’s formula, was ‘a place of great wealth and dreadful wickedness’, and slavery a stigma on the British national character. Earlier he had shocked a dinner party in Oxford by proposing a toast to ‘the next insurrection of Negroes’ (after Haiti) in the British Caribbean.

  The Jamaican waited on Samuel Johnson at table, answered his door, and provided him with a distraction from his habitual low spirits, while Dr Johnson, for his part, indulged his West Indian charge in a way that few eighteenth-century Tories would have considered proper. He refused to let Barber buy fish for his cat as he did not want him to have to attend on an animal; he paid for his education and, after thirty years of service, made him the principal beneficiary of his will. In gratitude Barber named his first son Samuel, and later settled in Samuel Johnson’s birthplace of Lichfield, where he achieved some note; his son became a Methodist minister. Incredibly, Barber’s descendants still live in the Lichfield area - but they are all white now.

  Denzil Johnston is a black Jamaican living in Hull. Each August on the anniversary of Wilberforce’s birthday he visits the emancipator’s house to pay his respects. Johnston had never imagined that he would end up in the abolitionist’s home town. ‘It’s a strange irony, isn’t it?’ he said in his Jamaicanised east Yorkshire accent. ‘Me being down the road from Wilberforce.’

  In his front room off Beverley Road, among the tiny model Spitfires and the display of gold Victory medals, was a studio portrait taken of Denzil in royal blue RAF fatigues: ‘Kingston, 1945’, the caption reads. Many young Jamaicans had fought and suffered in the Second World War and witnessed death on an unusual scale. At the outbreak of the conflict, RAF trucks had driven round Kingston with the words ‘Give Unto Britain and Britain Will Give You More’ stencilled on the side.

  As the war with Hitler approached, Jamaicans were exhorted to donate scrap metal to help build planes for Britain. Johnston’s father spent a good deal of time listening to the short-wave radio broadcasts from England which brought news of the sinking of HMS Hood, then later of Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain. In Kingston there was constant patriotic activity of all kinds. But was it right for Jamaica to back a European war for democracy, when its own people had been denied the right to self-rule?

  Every Jamaican family in Johnston’s circle gave up kettles, colanders, zinc baths, clothes-hangers for the mother country. ‘We did all we could to help keep Jamaica British and keep Britain out of Hitler’s harm,’ Johnston recalled; Jamaica, a subject country, was going to fight to the death for the freedom of Poland. At Barclays Bank in Kingston, the imperial administration set up an account under the name ‘Jamaica Plane Fund’: money poured in from the scrap metal sales, and with it Jamaica was able to buy a Spitfire for the Battle of Britain. Housewives were proud to imagine that it was their saucepan - the silver-melt of their cookware - that had made part of the Spitfire, recalled Johnston. ‘We Jamaicans were Britishers at heart and it would have been incredible if we - if Britain - had lost the war.’ To be an Anglophile and a Jamaican was not, for Johnston, a contradiction.

  He was in Wiltshire for the VJ (Victory in Japan) Day celebrations. ‘Women came up to kiss me - they were thanking me - me! - for my service to Britain.’ After training with the RAF as an engine-fitter, Johnston’s first job took him to Hull, where for three decades he worked for British Aerospace, ‘cheering’, as he put it, ‘for Wilberforce’.

  With his Guyanese wife, in the drab city on the Humber, he raised a family but as the years went by he began to feel let down by Britain. Johnston could not believe that Britain’s drift into irrelevance as an imperial power was the reward for his and his comrades’ sacrifice. Why had Jamaican airmen never been invited to march past the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday? Surely they could be allowed to lay a wreath. ‘Back in my short-pant days,’ said Johnston, ‘I was proud to run round waving the Union Jack.’ But the British lion must have become a minor power - bankrupt, played-out - to ignore his contribution and that of thousands of other black service personnel to the Allied war effort. ‘It’s like we’ve been forgotten,’ Johnston concluded.

  Self-government was not British policy in post-Second World War Jamaica. Yet the winds of change were blowing through Jamaica, as they were through swathes of red on the imperial map. As Greater Britain (the United Kingdom and its imperial domains) evolved from Empire to Commonwealth, it was obliged to consider self-determination for Jamaica.

  In 1938 a firebrand politician emerged as the leader of a social revolution in Jamaica. Over six feet tall with a shock of unruly hair and flashing eyes, Alexander Bustamante exuded a Lincoln-like gravitas and (when not drunk or swinging revolvers) a gift for oratory. Rumoured to be illiterate (‘I come from the gutter of poverty’), Bustamante was born in Jamaica in 188
4 as Alexander Clarke; he changed his name to Bustamante apparently while in Spanish-speaking Cuba. On his return to Jamaica in 1932 he made himself champion of Jamaica’s dispossessed: the lowly sweating out their lives on the cane fields, at the Kingston docks, in canneries and freighters, on banana farms, without rights, without tenure - Bustamante proclaimed himself their Messiah. He would lead these people out of colonial servitude and into nationhood.

  Before long, all the British West Indies were fighting for their rightful independence. Between 1935 and 1938, in what the colonial administrators termed the ‘somnolent Caribbean’, a series of strikes in oilfields, cities and sugar plantations turned into island-wide riots. In Jamaica the riots were fuelled by anger at British neglect. The British Empire seemed to be unmindful of its poor, yet costly to administer, dependency. Most Jamaicans had no vote, no voice; they felt as impotent, politically, as their forebears had done under slavery. The riots were no sooner under way, however, than the British jailed Bustamante on sedition charges.

  Racial tensions and unrest had long simmered in the western parish of Westmoreland; it was there, in 1938, that the most serious Jamaican riots occurred. John McIntyre, a planter, was visiting friends on Masemure sugar estate there when it was set ablaze and looted. He spoke of the episode to me from his retirement home in Mandeville, not far from Kingston, a thin white Jamaican in his early nineties. ‘We were very fearful,’ he said in clipped tones. ‘The rioters had gone mad, they were setting fire to the cane fields and burning the very thing that they depended on!’ McIntyre recalled that he locked himself in the estate office and dialled for the police.

  The police arrived and barricaded the office doors to protect the staff cowering inside. The strikers were now marching in their hundreds on the Masemure estate: McIntyre could see the dust rising from the long road to the office. The strikers first of all raided the rum storehouse, and ‘got completely soused’. Then they threw the distillery manager, a Mr Saddler, into a ditch of black malodorous ‘dunder’ sludge (made of the lees of rum-still). The humiliated manager had to crawl out of that ditch in his soiled white suit. ‘It was a disgrace,’ McIntyre recalled. Elsewhere, managers were shot.

  On day three of the Masemure riots, the British army arrived from Kingston in open touring cars - ‘huge American things’ - commandeered from motorists along the way. At the sight of the khaki-vested troops the strikers ran off into the cane fields, while their ringleader was marched off at bayonet-point to a waiting car and sped to Kingston. ‘To this day we don’t know what happened to him,’ said McIntyre. Jamaica in 1938 was a dependency maintained by British bayonets.

  Three weeks later, on 21 May, Kingston was brought to a standstill when stevedores went on strike along the wharves. The colonial government, fearing greater unrest, released Bustamante from jail. From that time dates the painful birth of modern Jamaica. Bustamante formed a trade union which he named the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union. His cousin Norman Washington Manley, a former Rhodes Scholar and Jamaica’s most brilliant lawyer, simultaneously launched his People’s National Party, or PNP. Through trade unionism and party politics, Bustamante and Manley sought to channel the grievances of the Jamaican poor, and they each advocated representative government.

  Yet by temperament if not by birth (both Manley and Bustamante were of mixed race), the men could not have been more different. Manley was a man of measure and reason, whose soft sardonic smile was seen by his supporters as a tonic to ‘Busta’s’ devilish allure and self-cultivated image of the pistol-packing condottiere. Manley’s policies of extensive public ownership, industrial development, mass education and social welfare were influenced by the British Labour Party; Bustamante, more conservative, had a personal dynamic and a shrewd pragmatism lacking in his quieter opponent.

  In the weeks following the riots, Bustamante and Manley travelled round Jamaica urging calm and were hailed as national leaders. Jamaica was poised to become the first British colony to achieve full adult suffrage: every Jamaican man and woman was to have the right to vote. Reform at last was on the way. In the build-up to the general elections of 1944, however, ideological differences between Manley and Bustamante emerged. Bustamante had founded his own political party, the Jamaica Labour Party, or JLP, which was by now effectively conservative.

  Jamaica found itself in a halfway house of compromise, with a dilute form of self-government subject to ‘fatherly dictation’ from Whitehall. Ultimate power was still vested in the governor, who was answerable to His Britannic Majesty the King. A small black middle class was fortunately emerging, and it was in this class that the principles of nationalism and the desire for independence bit deepest. Michael Foot was one of several liberal-minded British politicians who were delighted by Jamaica’s progress towards self-rule. When Foot first visited the island in December 1944, his brother Hugh ‘Pussyfoot’ Foot was about to become the island’s colonial secretary.

  As the 1944 elections drew to a close, Michael Foot witnessed the final exchanges between Bustamante and Manley on the Kingston hustings. ‘Busta’s party had pretty well cleansed itself of its socialist leanings by the time I arrived, and was championing a middle course,’ Foot told me. ‘Still, Busta was a most effective public speaker. I remember him swigging from a rum bottle while his supporters sang “If God Be With Us, Who Could Be Against Us?” Rousing stuff - Jamaicans can sing as well as anybody else in the world, you know.’ The 1944 election was a consequence of the fatal damage that the Second World War had done to Britain’s position as a great power; Jamaican nationalism was filling the void left by an increasingly moribund ‘civilising mission’.

  I was ushered into Foot’s north London home by his housekeeper. ‘Michael’s waiting for you downstairs, sir,’ she said with old-fashioned deference. Foot, an elfin-faced man in a threadbare jumper and creaky black shoes, had lost the sight in one eye, but my impression was of a man who was not unhappy to be in his ninetysixth year. (His dog Dizzee had been named not, as I assumed, after the Victorian Disraeli but the London rapper Dizzee Rascal.) Foot’s interest in Jamaica stemmed from his father, the Liberal Party MP Isaac Foot, who as chairman of the British Cromwell Society was interested in the Protector’s conquest of Jamaica. The Foot family’s last link with Jamaica was Oliver Foot (younger brother of the late campaigning journalist Paul Foot), who had been public relations officer for Air Jamaica until he died in 2008, at the age of sixty-one.

  The erosion of Britain’s will to occupy Jamaica, according to Michael Foot, was overshadowed by the prospect of administrative breakdown in the Raj. ‘Jamaica and India - two countries coming out of British control at the same time,’ he said. Inevitably the destiny of the two colonies was independence. Why? ‘Because the British Empire was past it,’ said Foot, and self-government was a ‘natural adjunct’ of imperial decadence. ‘Unfortunately the Empire with its blinkered, unimaginative types was getting in the way all over the bloody place - preventing Manley and Busta from implementing their reforms.’ Foot sighed: ‘In some ways, Jamaica was too small to accommodate two leaders of such magnitude and such immense style.’

  To Michael Foot’s disappointment, Bustamante won the 1944 election decisively. Even then, independence did not come to Jamaica for another eighteen years, as Britain continued to deny Jamaicans a proper say in their own affairs. So freedom arrived late for Jamaica - fourteen years after India’s. By the time it finally did come in 1962, Jamaica had lost much of its reformist zeal, the enthusiasm for change tempered by years of colonial prevarication.

  ‘Now of course Jamaica has gone to the American camp, and it’s partly our fault - we’ve abandoned Jamaica,’ said Foot. The United States had not only superseded the British Empire, it had become (in Foot’s view) a world-wide anti-revolutionary movement in defence of ‘dollar-colonialism’, ‘coca-colanisation’, and other sinister interests. ‘Bloody Americans.’ Foot rocked back and forth in his chair, raising his voice crossly. ‘They’re too powerful.’

  Pr
esident Obama may yet restore America’s battered image abroad, but did Foot lament Greater Britain’s fading into nonexistence? ‘Of course not!’ he countered; it was only such a ‘shame’ that, as the British Empire passed away, so the United States began to practise its own imperium, subjugating peoples in the name of democracy. The Ronald Reagan administration of 1980-87 made Jamaica the fulcrum of its Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI), loaning an average of US$125 million a year, money that Jamaica was unable to repay.

  Foot was nostalgic then, not for Britain’s colonial stewardship, but for ‘all that was best’ (as he construed it) about British public life. By which he meant free speech, good governance, faith in progress, liberalism; qualities which certainly exist in Jamaica today, but in attenuated form. In the four decades since independence, Jamaica presents a world of ‘fear and distrust’, said Foot, where each week a new crime of ‘hideous proportions’ makes the headlines. And that was partly due - Foot clarified his position - to a ‘diminished British influence’ in the years following independence. In the first years after the Union flag came down Jamaica seemed to be infused with a new glamour and a sense of purpose. ‘Jamaicanisation’ meant well-intentioned displays of pan-African national costume and post-colonial culture. And now? ‘Now,’ Michael Foot concluded, ‘Jamaica’s in a fix.’

  In Westmoreland parish, where the 1938 riots had flared up, stands a former slave village called Bethel Town. A recluse known locally as ‘Squire’ Cooke was rumoured to live in the hills above it. Chester Castle, his home, was said to have gone wild, gone back to bush. There was no telephone. So if I wanted to visit I would have to do so unannounced.

  Up the hill to the slave mansion the bamboo groves radiated a jewel-like lustre. Locals called this a wild place; a green light filtered eerily through the forest canopy and strange-looking thorns caught at my trousers. Before long I was standing outside a two-storey Jamaican merchant’s house of the mid-1700s, built of cut stone, with an open veranda at one end. The house, with its trailing bougainvillea, was shuttered and silent in the afternoon heat. A Land Rover lay abandoned in the tractor yard, the chassis white with bird droppings.