Westlake, Donald E - NF 01

by Under An English Heaven (v1. 1)

  Pier, phones; the list goes on. No general electricity. Three hundred and fifty children in a one-room schoolhouse. Less than a mile and a half of paved road. Medical facilities that frequently had operations performed by the light of a hurricane lamp, and that gave funds to transport a maximum of two emergency patients a year to an off-island hospital.

  The Anguillans could complain, but all communication with Britain had to go through the St Kitts Government and complaints seemed to lose their force and urgency in transition.

  But even though the Anguillans couldn't officially speak directly to Great Britain, they were soothed somewhat by the knowledge that at least Great Britain was there. Bradshaw might stick his thumb in Anguilla's eye every once in a while, but so long as St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla was a part of the British colonial structure, Bradshaw had to be at least somewhat restrained.

  Then came independence.

  "Hurrah! hurrah! we bring the Jubilee! Hurrah! hurrah! the flag that makes you free!"

  —Henry Clay Work, "Marching Through Georgia"

  3

  As of 1966 the British had, for the moment, given up the idea of a federation in the West Indies. But only for the moment. Dr. Eric Williams, Prime Minister of Trinidad-Tobago, was quoted as recently as 1969 as hoping to see a new West Indies Federation in effect by 1975; it is known he has British support in his dream. But back in 1966 the British were temporarily weary of West Indies Federations, and as a result they began to cast about for some new way to cast off all those islands.

  The new idea they came up with was something they dubbed an Associated State.

  Generally speaking, the idea of an Associated State is that the nations internal affairs are to be handled by itself, while its external affairs are handled by Great Britain. Financial aid for development schemes also continues to flow to the Associated State from Britain, and the plan is that Associated Statehood is a temporary way station on the road to complete independence.

  Associated Statehood was offered to all the flotsam still floating after the capsize of the West Indies Federation, and six of the seven survivors agreed to it, only Montserrat choosing to remain a colony.

  An Associated State bears one ominous similarity to a federation; it is preceded by a conference. In London in May of 1966, a Constitutional Conference took place to consider the Associated State of St. Christopher-Nevis-Anguilla. February 27, 1967, was the target date for Statehood Day, so there wasn't very much time to make sure the suit fit. The conference delegates included Robert Bradshaw, Paul Southwell and Basil Dias from St. Kitts, Eugene Walwytt from Nevis and Peter Adams from Anguilla. Walwyn was one of the two Nevi-sian members of the Legislative Council on St. Kitts, and Adams was the Anguillan member of the Legislative Council. Remember the hurricane, the drought, the gale and the famine back in 1822? Remember the politicians' response to it all? They'd established an Anguillan representative in the St. Kitts assembly. As of 1966 that Anguillan representative was Peter Adams.

  The conference produced proposals for a constitution and all the delegates agreed the proposals were good and thereby signed the report, including Peter Adams. Later on, the British and Kittitians were to claim that Peter Adams, speaking for all Anguillans everywhere, had agreed to anything Robert Bradshaw might think up, but Adams himself insisted that he had merely signed a Conference Report that said that such-and-such proposals were worth looking into. And in fact, the Anguillans asked for direct administration from Great Britain twice in 1966, in June and October; they were ignored.

  The conference was followed by an election. In St. Kitts there are two political parties: the Labour Party, which Bradshaw leads and which is supported mainly by the black work force, and the People's Action Movement (PAM), which is supported mainly by the merchant middle class, the professional class and the fifteen or so rich white families who own almost all the land on the island. (For the most part, the natives live around the fringe of the island, in the narrow border between the road and the sea; nearly everything else is owned by the whites and is mostly given over to sugar.)

  On Nevis, there is no Labour Party, but there is the United National Movement, led by Eugene Walwyn, one of the London conference delegates, who declared after the election that he would support Bradshaw and the Labour Party in the Legislative Council. PAM put up a man to oppose him, and the division of support for UNM and PAM on Nevis was about the same as for Labour and PAM on St. Kitts.

  If St. Christopher-Nevis-Anguilla were really the unitary state it's supposed to be, the same general political breakdown should exist on Anguilla as on the other two. There should be something, like PAM for the middle and upper classes and something like the Labour Party for the workers. But it doesn't work that way. Anguilla has never had any political parties at all; everybody runs for everything as an independent. That's Anguilla all over, that absolutely sums up the place. Everybody runs for everything as an independent. Shortly before the 1966 election Peter Adams did declare he'd joined PAM, but that meant very little on Anguilla.

  The elections didn't change much. The Labour Party had St. Kitts's seven seats on the Legislative Council before the election and still had them after. Eugene Walwyn was reelected to one of the two Nevisian seats, and a PAM candidate, Fred Parris, won the other. And Peter Adams beat out two independents (two other independents, that is) for the Anguilla seat.

  Now we have something strange. PAM is primarily a Kit-titian political party, led by a Kittitian named Dr. William Herbert. But Dr. Herbert didn't win a seat on the Legislative Council, nor did any other PAM candidate from St. Kitts, so by default the position of Leader of the Opposition fell to Peter Adams, the man from Anguilla, who had joined the party about two months before, had always been an independent, and had aligned himself with PAM only because of short-range considerations concerning the proposed constitution and independence. Still, it gave the British a reassuring feeling of familiarity to know that the St. Christopher-Nevis-Anguilla Legislative Council had a Leader of the Opposition; it showed that the concept of British democracy and parliamentary rule had taken root in this exotic soil.

  The Anguillans had been unhappy for 144 years about being governed from St. Kitts, and the Nevisians were themselves a little leery of the Kittitians' concern for their future. Therefore they were pleased that one of the proposals from the Constitutional Conference had been the establishment of some sort of local-government Councils for both Anguilla and Nevis, to operate in addition to the Legislative Council and the central Government on St. Kitts.

  The British had promised to send to the islands a "local government expert" to help set up the two new Councils. Since the British were going to send this man all the way across the Atlantic the St. Kitts Government decided he ought to have somebody to talk to, so on October 22, 1966, five months after the conference, a committee was appointed to talk to him. *

  The 1970 Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the problem of Anguilla (called the Wooding Report) gives the most succinct description of what did and did not happen next:

  No meeting of the committee having been convened for some time, Mr. Adams enquired of the Chief Minister (Robert Bradshaw) about the establishment of local government in Nevis and Anguilla. Later, when it became known that the local government expert would be arriving in January the committee was summoned to meet on 23 December, 1966. We were told in evidence that the meeting was called at short notice and, because Mr. Adams was then in Anguilla, he was not notified.

  On January 7, 1967, fifteen days after that meeting, the* committee sent Peter Adams a copy of the minutes, along with a letter explaining why he hadn't been invited. Adams had copies of the minutes made up and circulated around Anguilla, the people took a look at the token suggestions for local government they contained, and at that point the smoothly running railroad began to break down. A group of Anguillans went to PAM headquarters on St. Kitts and warned Dr. Herbert and the other PAM executives that if local government didn't become a hell of a lot more loca
l than this committee had in mind, Anguilla would quit its association with St. Kitts and that would be the end of it. The people from PAM said they would see what they could do.

  PAM's role in all this is just slightly murky. The party was started by Dr. Herbert, a tall young man with a narrow beard who looks and moves like a professional basketball player and -who talks faster than an encyclopedia salesman. Everybody who knows him at all calls him Billy, and the Dr. in front of his name simply means he has a university education complete with doctorate, not that he's a medical doctor. Billy Herbert is a lawyer, officially Dr. William V. Herbert, LL.B., Ph.D., a graduate of London University and the Institute for Advanced Legal Studies. His father, owner but not editor of St. Kitts's only opposition newspaper, was a prominent union mediator for years, which on an island like St. Kitts means that he carried the white folks' words to the black folks. Since the man carrying the black folks' words to the white folks was for many years the labor leader Robert Bradshaw, it's no surprise that a certain antipathy developed between Bradshaw and Herbert pere. Given the personality of Bradshaw, it is also no surprise that he would carry that antipathy into the next generation. When Billy Herbert came back from London and offered his services to Bradshaw and the Labour Government, Bradshaw in effect told him to go jump in Po-tatoe Bay. Instead of which, Herbert started PAM.

  Some other members of PAM are, like Billy Herbert, "people who have been frozen out of politics by personal whims of Bradshaw and who want to see a governmental structure a little less autocratic and more diverse. Some middle-class members of PAM would like to see participatory democracy in which more than the sugar workers participate. And the rich whites want PAM in because it's the only alternative to the Labour Party, and they want the Labour Party out because —Bradshaw's idiosyncrasies aside—it is a Labour Party; that is, socialist. Creeping socialism threatens the landed class throughout the Caribbean, particularly when combined with local independence (a total parallel with the situation several years ago throughout Africa).

  But if PAM itself is slightly ambiguous, there has been nothing ambiguous about Robert Bradshaw's reaction to his Opposition's existence. The only radio station in St. Kitts is ZIZ, which is owned and operated by the Government; PAM has not been permitted use of the station. (There was no television station on St. Kitts, but the islanders could pick up three channels from other islands if they had television sets; unfortunately, the Government prohibited them from having television sets.) PAM was forbidden to hold public meetings without first getting the approval of Bradshaw's chief of police, which wasn't all that easy to do.

  If Bradshaw was determined to reduce Anguilla to a desert, he seemed determined to reduce PAM to something less than a desert; possibly because it drew 35 per cent of the vote its first time out, in the 1966 election, as opposed to Bradshaw's Labour Party vote of 44 per cent. Bradshaw was operating with less than a majority and resented it.

  Few Anguillan events directly affect any of the goals desired by the St. Kitts political party called PAM. But indirectly they can have quite an effect. That is, if disturbances on Anguilla were eventually to sour Great Britain on Robert Bradshaw personally, and if they were sufficiently to embarrass his Labour Party among its own rank and file, it just might do PAM some good in the next elections. And in any event, if Bradshaw could be kept distracted by Anguilla, it might be possible to delay a bit longer some of that creeping socialism.

  Which is not to say that PAM is anti-socialist, though some of its supporters certainly are. Nor is it to say that PAM cynically fanned the flames of discontent on Anguilla, though it's unlikely that PAM or any other political party on earth doesn't contain at least a few cynics. Besides, whether PAM fanned the flames or not is essentially irrelevant. PAM's existence had nothing to do with the fact of Anguilla's rebellion; Anguilla had had enough no matter what interior squabbling went on in St. Kitts. PAM's leaders could have made agitative speeches nonstop for a month and it wouldn't have had as much influence on the Anguillans as Robert Bradshaw saying, just once, "I will not rest until I have reduced that place to a desert."

  Anyway, by the time the local-government expert arrived from England, the third week in January 1967, it was a little too late to discuss the issue. The trouble in the air wasn't something that could be straightened out by adjusting some phrases in a constitution.

  The expert, a man named Peter Johnston, was scheduled to visit Anguilla on January 27. The day before, the Anguillans had some public meetings to talk things over, and to decide they didn't like any of the options offered to them. Peter Adams was off with the local-government committee, and two of the leaders of these meetings on Anguilla were men who would become increasingly prominent in the affair: Ronald Webster and Atlin Harrigan.

  Atlin Harrigan, young, slender and serious, left school at fourteen to earn his way in the world. He was a tailor, a fisherman, a carpenter and a deck hand before leaving home, in the traditional way of Anguillans, to seek greener pastures elsewhere. He lived in England fpr a while but didn't like the English winters and returned to the West Indies, where he became a skilled electrician on the American island of St. Thomas. When trouble flared up at home, Harrigan went back to Anguilla and has lived there ever since, frequently in the forefront of resistance to St. Kitts. He speaks mildly, with a combination of humor and despair best summed up in his remark at a public meeting in 1968: "If I told half what I know, the British would never give us self-government."

  With the local Anglican minister, an Englishman named Canon Guy Carleton, Harrigan founded The Beacon, Anguil-la's only newspaper, a weekly, in September of 1967. The editorial in the first issue, over Harrigan's signature, began:

  For the first time in the history of Anguilla, we have found it possible to publish a newspaper, THE BEACON, whereby the people of Anguilla and the world outside Anguilla can learn what is happening on the island, and whereby they can voice their opinions.

  A little later in the same editorial he explained the new papers name:

  I have chosen the name THE BEACON, because all the big ships passing to the north of Anguilla are grateful to Anguilla for her beacon at Sombrero to guide them to their destination. So, too, many people all over the world are grateful to Anguilla for the stand she has made for freedom and democracy. Like the BEACON may this paper be a help to guide Anguillans to pick out the good from the bad, so that they may have nothing less than the best.

  Ronald Webster, not quite forty-one years of age at the point he enters our story, was born on Anguilla March 2, 1926, the son of a fisherman. He had an elementary school education and then emigrated to the nearby island of St. Martin, where he spent his youth as gardener and then farm foreman for a Dutch couple who were so taken with him they later named him prominently in their will, leaving him money and land sufficient to make him the richest of all Anguillans. Returning home, he opened a general store and bought some land, gradually increasing his wealth. Although he is probably not a millionaire, he likely doesn't miss by much.

  A short and slender man, with long-fingered hands, Ronald Webster gives an impression of wiry strength under rigid control. In photographs he looks mild and meek, and some interviewers have come away describing him as shy; neither the photographs nor the interviewers are wrong, but they are incomplete. Webster is mild, with a soft-speaking voice and a sudden gentle laugh, and some manners of personal shyness, but there is an element in him that photographs never seem to catch. He seldom looks directly at the person he's talking to —that's the shyness, not guile—but when he does, everything changes. His eyes are deep-set and intense and very dark, and they gleam out like unwinking black stars. He has a thin face, the milk-chocolate skin taut over prominent bones, and what rays out from that face is an absolute and total sense of conviction. Ronald Webster is altogether certain of his own destiny.

  A part of this is ordinary self-assurance, but another part is tied in with Webster's religious beliefs. He has changed his religion twice, most recently becom
ing a Seventh-Day Ad-ventist at the age of thirty-four, conversions that suggest a restless yet thoughtful mind, and he has embraced each of his religions in turn with the same intensity. Throughout the An-guillan rebellion he was to read from his Bible every day and continue to do no work from sundown Friday till sundown Saturday.

  Webster had spent his first four decades as a silent, personal man, concerned only with his religion, his business, his family—he had a wife and five children—but he would soon find a more public use for his qualities of self-conviction and intensity.

  In the meetings led by Webster and Harrigan and one or two other Anguillans on January 26, 1967 (the day before the local-government expert, Peter Johnston, was due to visit the island), a broad vista of complaint was gradually winnowed into nine sections, as given in the 1970 Wooding Report:

  (1) Between 1948 and 1967 membership of the Legislative Council had increased from 3 to 7 for St. Kitts, from 1 to 2 for Nevis, but for Anguilla it had remained at 1: [Seats on the Legislative Council were apportioned by population, and the population of Anguilla remains fairly constant at around 6,000, with the excess leaving to find work and advancement in other parts of the world. It has been said that Anguilla's principal export is Anguillans; since most of the expatriates send money back to help support their relations at home, John Updike has written, "Fundamentally the economy runs by remittance."]

  (2) St. Kitts had made progress—she had a radio station, a cigarette factory and a "beer factory," but Anguilla still had one doctor and a Warden-Magistrate;'