Westlake, Donald E - NF 01

by Under An English Heaven (v1. 1)

  The Kittitian Government replied in a Cabinet Statement on June 1. Since the Statement began by saying "that this is the very first occasion on which an approach of this sort concerning the wishes of the people of Anguilla has been made to the Government/' it came as no surprise to the Anguillans that the rest of it was also obtuse. The Statement presented the standard argument that since Peter Adams had been behaving himself in the Legislative Council all these years, and had signed the report of the Constitutional Conference, the Anguillans didn't have the right to a capricious change of mind. It also said there were constitutional ways to do this sort of thing, without explaining what they were, and finished by ordering the Anguillans to give back the guns to the policemen and start behaving.

  As the Wooding Report says of this Statement: "It held out no promise to the Anguillans. If it was intended as a call to the Anguillans to surrender it failed because it misjudged the tempo of feeling on the island and the fact that, if not world opinion, certainly the Press in Britain and in the Caribbean as well as the Caribbean Bar Association was on the side of the Anguillans."

  (Actually, the last part of that quote isn't entirely accurate. Nobody was on the side of the Anguillans yet—it was still too early as of June 1, 1967, for anybody to have picked sides at all—though a little later everybody would be on Anguilla's side, when the affair had been blown up into an international incident. At two days of age, however, the rebellion was still small potatoes. In fact, the press in Britain hadn't as yet even reported its existence, though the press in New York would do so the next day; The New York Times for June 2, 1967, under the headline "British Help Requested to End Anguilla Revolt," gave a brief six-paragraph summary of the events, in which each fact was just slightly off, like a color television set improperly tuned. The item took no sides.)

  The Anguillan delegation had already returned home when the Cabinet produced its Statement, so a British journalist named David Smithers carried the Statement from St. Kitts to Anguilla. Smithers also carried a letter he'd been given by the St. Kitts Government, which he'd been told was a note from Bradshaw to Peter Adams; but when he landed in Anguilla the envelope turned out to contain a copy of the Emergency Regulations, which in effect promulgated the regulations on Anguilla and made them legally effective there. Bradshaw had risked Smithers' neck in conning him this way (had the Anguillans been a bit less civilized or more irritated, they might have killed the messenger in the time-honored tradition), and as a result Smithers did take Anguilla's side, and he did so with great enthusiasm, one unfortunate result of which would be to create embarrassment for a couple of other journalists two years later. In the October 1967 issue of Venture, a British magazine published by the Fabian Society, Smithers did a pro-Anguilla piece that included the following paragraph: "In March Premier Bradshaw imported from Britain a yellow Rolls-Royce. His deputy, Paul Southwell, ordered a Bentley. The Anguillans—not least the sick ones—despaired." Partisanship leads to a certain selectivity of the eye; inadvertently or not, Smithers had left out the fact that the Rolls was vintage 1935 and had cost £700 ($1,680). By the time the Rolls-Royce item had passed through the hands of several other journalists, it had blossomed into a lovely work of fiction. The London Sunday Times of March 23, 1969, reported that Bradshaw "drives a canary yellow Rolls Royce which cost £8,000—the finance minister who oversaw the purchase drives a Bentley."

  Actually, the spirit of the Sunday Times piece was accurate, even if the facts were a little off. The annual per capita income in St. Kitts is £77 '($184.40) and the Rolls-Royce cost £700, which is either one man's salary for nine years or nine men's salary for one year. Adjusting the figures to an average Englishman's income, £8,000 is dirt-cheap.

  Let us return, however, to the beginning of June 1967 and the beginning of the Anguillan rebellion. The Cabinet Statement from St. Kitts did not have its intended effect; that is, the Anguillans did not give the police back their guns, and they did not decide to behave themselves. Peter Adams did, however, get in touch with the Kittitian Government again, hoping to keep some sort of diplomatic relationship alive. The result was a tentative agreement in early June that he and Deputy Premier Paul Southwell would meet for general talks on the neutral island of St. Martin. But when the Lieutenant Governor of Dutch St. Martin thought it over, he withdrew permission for the meeting. St. Martin is half French and half Dutch, and the Governor saw no reason to be dragged into a squabble between two islands belonging to the British.

  The next event took place on June 6, and at first it didn't seem to have anything to do with the Anguillan rebellion at all. Bradshaw's Government emptied its main prison facilities on Cayon Street in Basseterre, shifting the prisoners to other locations and even sending some of them over to Nevis. For the first time in well over a hundred years, the cells of the Cayon Street prison were all empty. It seemed an odd thing to do, without much point or meaning.

  But then came the night of June 9. As The New York Times reported under the headline "Rebels on St. Kitts Attack the Police":

  Gunmen attacked police headquarters here before dawn today with small-arms fire 11 days after Premier Robert Bradshaw's Government had proclaimed a state of emergency. Policemen and members of the volunteer defense force rushed to guard government offices and installations. Police chief John Lynch-Wade reported that one defense force member had been wounded and at least two men had been detained.

  By the time the dust settled, many more than two men had been detained. On the morning after the attack, the Bradshaw Government arrested all the leaders of PAM, including Billy Herbert. In addition, two Britons were also arrested: James Milnes Gaskell, the young owner of the Montpelier Hotel over in Nevis, who had served as entree for Billy Herbert to the Conservative Party in England, and Miss Diana Prior-Palmer, then a guest at another Nevisian hotel.

  Milnes Gaskell had come over the previous night from Nevis and was planning to take a morning flight from St. Kitts to return to his home in England. A journalist at the hotel, a Reuters man named Ronald Batchelor, told Milnes Gaskell there had been trouble the night before and suggested that Milnes Gaskell could expect to be detained, since he was known to be a friend of Billy Herbert's and the rest of the PAM leadership. Milnes Gaskell thought not; at the worst, he expected to be deported, which he didn't mind since he'd been planning to leave anyway.

  Two Kittitian lawyer friends of Milnes Gaskell's accompanied him to the airport; one of these was named Robert Mc-Kenzie Crawford and he has a further role to play a little later.

  St. Kitts is serviced by Leeward Island Air Transport, generally known as LIAT, and the LIAT personnel at the airport knew Milnes Gaskell since he was a frequent traveler in and out of the island. This morning they looked at him oddly when he arrived, and the clerk on duty told him, "You can't travel today."

  "Why not?"

  The clerk, a friendly and peaceable man, was embarrassed but adamant. "I can't say. You just can't travel today."

  Outside, Milnes Gaskell saw a plane landing. He said to the clerk, "You mean to tell me, if I went out there and got on that plane, you'd stop me?"

  "No," said the clerk.

  However, there was a police corporal standing guard at the outer door, and more police were anticipated momentarily; so, rather than make a mad dash for the plane on the runway, Milnes Gaskell walked instead to a telephone, called Ronald Batchelor at the hotel, and said, "It looks as though I'm to be arrested."

  "Fine," Batchelor said, "I'll just add your name to this list here that I'm about to send out."

  At that point a Land Rover arrived at the airport, full of police, led by one Sergeant Edgings. This was the same Acting Assistant Superintendent Edgings whom we last met at the airport on Anguilla, when he was being sent away. Now, back to his permanent rank of Sergeant, he had come out to Golden Rock Airport to apprehend Milnes Gaskell. He and his four men were all armed with rifles, which was not standard, and they were wearing tin helmets, which were also an innovation. Edgings knew Mi
lnes Gaskell and seemed uncomfortable about this morning's duty. His four men took up positions around Milnes Gaskell, and the Sergeant said, "I'm sorry, sir, but I have to arrest you."

  Milnes Gaskell, a slender, quiet-spoken young man of impeccable manners, said he quite understood. He accompanied the Sergeant and his men in the Land Rover back to Basseterre.

  At the Cayon Street prison he was put through a long complexity of red tape and bureaucratic maundering. One young officer checked his height and weight, but seemed as baffled as Milnes Gaskell as to just why he was doing it. At another stop in the processing, an officer became irritable and impatient, and Milnes Gaskell told him, "I'm sorry, but I'm not familiar with the procedure." He might have been speaking for them all.

  Finally he was taken to his cell, which was actually the prison chapel. There were five others in it with him, plus eight more in a large cell across the way and another eight in a third cell. As Milnes Gaskell told me much later, "We were all detainees, rather than prisoners, and St. Kitts had never had any detainees before and didn't quite know what to do with us." None of the people in the cells had been charged with anything. Twenty-two detainees, aged between seventeen and seventy-one, none of them charged with any specific crime, all packed into three cells that had coincidentally been cleared of their regular prisoners just four days before.

  There have been several theories about the events of the night of June 9-10, but basically they sift down to three: (1) PAM tried to overthrow the Bradshaw Government by shooting bullets into the Basseterre police station; (2) Anguillans came over from their island and shot up the police station; (3) the Kittitian Government staged the whole thing itself as an excuse to arrest the PAM leadership and deport some troublous foreigners.

  The first theory, that PAM tried to overthrow Bradshaw by shooting at the police station, is absurd on the face of it. Though it was the Government's official theory it's doubtful that even Bradshaw ever believed it. Billy Herbert and PAM's other legal whiz kids and the families who own the plantations are very sophisticated people; if they were going to pull a coup d'etat, they would probably behave a little more effectively than the gunmen of June 9.

  The second theory, that Anguillans came down to St. Kitts to do some plinking, also has some problems with it, principally the fact that there wasn't any reason for them to do so. However, Trinidadian author V. S. Naipaul has reported this theory as fact in the London Sunday Times saying, . . the Anguillans raided St. Kitts and shot up the police station and Defence Force headquarters. The raid, by 12 men, was openly planned; people went down to the wharf in the afternoon to wave as the 50-foot cutter left for St. Kitts. Five and a half hours later the cutter tied up, quite simply, at the main pier in St. Kitts. Then the Anguillans discovered they hadn't thought about motorcars. They had intended to kidnap Bradshaw; they had to be content with scaring him."

  The third theory, that the attack was staged, certainly sounds like something the St. Kitts Government might do. And there are those cells so conveniently emptied three days ahead of time. And when I was on St. Kitts and went to the police station in Basseterre, I noticed that none of the bullet pocks in the wall were less than nine feet up from the floor; either the attackers thought they were shooting at giants or they didn't really want to hit anybody.

  However, the fact is, theory number two should stand up, because it's the truth. The Naipaul account is pretty accurate, except that it wasn't motorcars the Anguillans couldn't find; it was Bradshaw.

  A dozen of them, including three raffish young Americans, decided to kidnap Bradshaw and hold him for ransom. The ransom was to be Great Britain's acknowledgment of Anguilla's secession from St. Kitts. (They were still, of course, trying to attract the donkey's attention, and this was one time the burning-sticks-on-sheets-of-powder contingent got their way.)

  They sailed to St. Kitts, landed at Basseterre, and went roaming around town, a dozen men with rifles. They claim to have stopped a policeman at one point and asked him where Bradshaw was, but he insisted he didn't know.

  They never did find Bradshaw. In the old days, on hot nights when they had nothing to do but think about their aggravations, the boys on Anguilla used to go over and shoot up the police station, full of its uniformed foreigners from St. Kitts. Now in Basseterre, with time on their hands, they reverted to form, and before leaving gave Sergeant Edgings a nostalgic salute.

  (That wasn't all the shooting done that night. In addition to the police station and the Defence Force building and the electricity plant—one can empathize with electricityless Anguillans pumping a couple of bullets into the Kittitian electricity plant—there were shots fired at two dances. Did the Anguillans open fire on dances? Or did somebody else do some shooting that night, too, for reasons of his own?)

  And what of the jeep found blazing away in a cane field north of town near the dead body that had been buried there apparently for some months? And what about the boat stolen at Heldens Bay?

  The jeep and body have never been successfully explained, but the Heldens Bay boat was stolen by part of the group from Anguilla that had become separated from the rest. While the main party returned in the cutter they'd traveled down in, this second group, including the three Americans, stole the boat and lit out for the Dutch island of St. Eustatius, with the St.

  Kitts Revenue Cutter in hot pursuit. It failed to catch up. The Dutch authorities wouldn't permit Kittitian police to make arrests on Dutch soil, so Group Two took a plane to St. Thomas, where they did enough blabbermouthing for the St. Thomas Daily News to be able to print the names of the three Americans in its issue of June 16.

  But what about those fortuitously empty cells? The answer, I think, is that Bradshaw knew his opponents and anticipated that sooner or later the Anguillans would do something that would give him the opportunity to clap PAM in the clink. I doubt he anticipated that PAM would do anything; the Anguillans would act, and PAM would pay the consequences. And so it was.

  An additional result of the spree of June 10 was that Bradshaw once again asked all his neighbors, plus Britain, for armed help to put down the Anguillan rebellion. Once again he got a series of polite refusals, and from the British the first indication that the donkey might be listening; Bradshaw was told by the British Government that "unless some firm understanding could be reached with the Anguillans about their problems it is difficult to see how far a military operation could solve the situation."

  Closer to home, the Prime Minister of Jamaica offered to set up a "Caribbean Fact Finding Mission" to try to find out what was wrong between St. Kitts and Anguilla, or, as the Mission put it, "initiate discussions between Mr. Bradshaw and leaders of opposition factions in an endeavour to find a basis for an amicable settlement to the dispute."

  But Bradshaw said no thank you to fact-finding missions; what he wanted was men and guns and ships. He was having trouble about the ships, but the other two he was getting, one way and another. He already had an army, called the Defence Force and consisting of seventy men; Bradshaw now declared himself a colonel in charge of this army, put on a khaki uniform complete with Sam Browne belt and holstered pistol, got a rather stout lady with a rifle to be his bodyguard, and went out in his Rolls-Royce to watch his army pass in review. (In the American Army, by way of contrast, seventy men is slightly larger than one platoon, usually led by a lieutenant.)

  Then there were the police. Great Britain, before the Anguilla rebellion, had agreed to replace the old arms of the St. Kitts police with new weapons, and now these started coming in. The police force numbers 110 men, and the British sent along guns enough for the entire crew, plus the Defence Force. Colonel Bradshaw promptly invented a new militia called the Special Volunteer Constabulary, found 162 volunteers, and gave them the old Lee-Enfield .303 rifles that the police and army had been using until the new guns had arrived from England. This* Special Volunteer Constabulary was a very scruffy group of men, built around the nucleus of a street gang called The Breadfruit Tree Boys, who had been cre
dited with much rape and burglary in the Basseterre area before blossoming into constables. (One Kittitian police inspector stated in court, under oath, that some of the volunteers would have been facing criminal charges if they weren't in the Constabulary.)

  Meanwhile, back on Anguilla, an uneasy week followed the invasion of St. Kitts. Boys and men patrolled the beaches at night, armed with conch shells and toy walkie-talkies. By day the Peacekeeping Committee, led by Walter Hodge, a local builder who was later to emerge as the island's financial wizard, gradually altered itself from an emergency organization into a government. Rebellion or no rebellion, life had to go on. The schools had to run, the airport had to be maintained, customs duties had to be collected (whenever possible), and the general public operations of society had to continue without interruption. Almost all the members of the Civil Service had chosen to stay at their jobs, so what the Peacekeeping Committee did was move naturally into the vacuum left by the removal of St. Kitts s authority. But Anguilla couldn't go it alone. The Anguillans really did want to get back somehow with Mother Britain; they were rebelling, after all, under the British flag. But the English apparently wanted nothing to do with them. And so, reluctantly, the Peacekeeping Committee turned elsewhere.

  On June 16, just a week after the foray into Basseterre, Peter Adams flew again to San Juan, Puerto Rico, to send some more telegrams. One went to U Thant at the United Nations, asking for "guidance" in the current troubling situation. Another went to President Lyndon Johnson, asking the United States to accept Anguilla as an American territory in a status similar to that of the American Virgin Islands. While on Puerto Rico, Adams also made an attempt to round up some medical supplies, which by now were nearly half a year overdue on Anguilla.