In addition to all the newsmen who had shown up for the referendum, there were other outsiders present, principally Roger Fisher, a professor of international law at Harvard. Jerry Gumbs, through his eldest son, had met Fisher a couple of years earlier, in New York, and before flying down to Anguilla at the end of June, he had called Fisher in Boston and asked him to become the island's legal representative. Fisher had agreed and had followed Jerry Gumbs to the island.
On the evening of July 11, 1967, referendum day, while the votes were being counted in the Administrative Building at the Valley, Roger Fisher was next door composing a Declaration of Independence on a portable typewriter, with a pistol on the chair beside him. Confusion now exists as to whose original idea it was to have a Declaration of Independence, or how much help Professor Fisher might have had from various Anguillans in putting it together, but the bulk of the Declaration is probably attributable to Fisher. It was written in haste, to be done in time to be read to the people massed outside waiting to hear the results of the voting.
The vote count—also filmed by the television people— wasn't finished until one in the morning, at which time Peter Adams went outside to announce the tally, accompanied by Walter Hodge, who was carrying the Declaration of Independence. Adams told the crowd the numbers and 1,813 people cheered, while five presumably remained silent.
In a display of independence and personal bravery rare even among the brave and hardy Anguillans, those five nay-sayers had voted their consciences even though everyone was sure to know who they were. Three boots were stomped in the same election district, and everybody knew the Bradshaw supporters in that neighborhood; it had to be David Lloyd, owner of Lloyd's Hotel, which had been shot up so badly the night the replacement Warden was staying there back in May, plus his wife and son. David Lloyd, a barrel-chested, booming-voiced man of fifty-seven, whose second wife had presented him with his most recent child just three years before, had known Robert Bradshaw in his youth; in fact, he and Bradshaw had roomed together at one time. "In the evenings," he told me, "I'd take a girl or two and go dancing. Robert, he pick pick pick at all his books." Lloyd has a deep admiration for Bradshaw, the sort of admiration felt for him by the cane cutters on St. Kitts, and despite the events of the last several years he could never believe that Robert Bradshaw would set out purposefully to do wrong. When the time came to vote whether or not to reject Bradshaw, Lloyd could do nothing but vote the way he felt. "What they gonna do to me?" he cried when I talked to him in the spring of 1971. "I lived my life, I already lived my life, I had a good life. What they gonna do to me?"
Nothing, as it turned out.
After the cheering and the singing, Walter Hodge stepped forward and made a brief speech, followed by a reading of the Declaration of Independence, which began, "We stand before the Queen in the greatest humility, with the desire in our hearts to be faithful subjects to her." It went on from that self-destruct opening to a recountal of the wrongs done Anguilla by St. Kitts and ended on a high note of nobility, poetry and confusion: "We pledge our lives and hearts to create a true democratic government, however small. If, for financial want, we must suffer, then let us suffer in silence."
However small? A true democratic government, however small? What does that mean? It seems to work from the premise that the larger the government, the more democratic, an assumption that anyone who has ever dealt with the bureaucracies of the United States or Great Britain will regard with a certain skepticism. As to the final sentence about suffering financial want in silence, that was precisely what the Anguillans were not doing.
The Declaration of Independence was met with rousing cheers, and the next day telegrams were sent to Great Britain and the United States and various Commonwealth countries, saying,
overwhelming referendum confirms absolute and final independence of anguilla from the federation of st. kitts, nevis, anguilla. this leaves no legal ties with crown. we wish to explore status of associated state or other arrangement of freedom and local autonomy within the commonwealth.
No more shilly-shallying. Anguilla had firmly declared that she was/wasn't dependent/independent, had made an irrevocable decision and was willing to talk it over. And that's definite.
A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
—Oscar Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray
6
The middle of July 1967. The Caribbean, as usual, was sunny and hot. On Anguilla, Peter Adams was trying to figure out some way to attract the attention of the British Government. Walter Hodge was in charge of the day-to-day running of the island. Ronald Webster was keeping his patrols moving around the beaches. Seated on a bench in Bur-rowes Park was Roger Fisher, tapping away in the sunlight at his portable typewriter; he was writing Anguilla a constitution.
Seventy miles away on St. Kitts, the Cayon Street prison was hot and muggy and foul-smelling. The twenty-two detainees were still detained. Colonel Bradshaw was in the process of writing a little booklet, The Present Crisis in the State of St. Christopher-Nevis-Anguilla, which would be published in September and in which he would reveal a plot against his government worthy of a segment of Beowulf: "The plan/' he was writing, "involved the killing of the Premier, Deputy Premier, Attorney General and the Minister for Education, Health and Welfare, as well as the mutilation of the Head of the Civil Service, Mr. Ira Walwyn, and the Cabinet Secretary, Mr. Pro-byn Inniss, by chopping off their hands."
To save the hands of the Head of the Civil Service from being chopped off at the hands of the heads of the plot, Colonel Bradshaw had been reluctantly forced to take action. The action had included pushing those Emergency Regulations through the legislature, detaining the twenty-two detainees, and deporting some other people.
One such deportee was Miss Diana Prior-Palmer, British-born but a naturalized American citizen. Miss Prior-Palmer was arrested at the same time as the twenty-two men, her property was searched, and her diary was confiscated. After two days she was deported, but Colonel Bradshaw kept her diary. Over ZIZ he announced several times that the diary was "juicy" and that it would play a key role in the upcoming trials of the twenty-two detainees. He also gave private readings in his office to journalists of passages he claimed to be excerpts from the diary. If Colonel Bradshaw is to be believed, Miss Prior-Palmer was a diarist in the modern manner; however, there's no way to be sure since the promised publication of the diary during the trials never did take place.
Other deportations followed. The manager of the local Coca-Cola bottling plant was deported to his birthplace, Barbados. Other West Indians were deported to their birthplaces, including one man who'd lived on St. Kitts since the age of four. A couple of Englishmen were deported, one unsuccessfully. Peter Keller, his name is; he was deported to Sint Maarten (the Dutch half of St. Martin), and the Dutch wouldn't accept delivery and sent him back.
Meanwhile, the detainees sat in jail. Stuart Roberts, the chief representative of Great Britain on St. Kitts, visited the prison almost every day because one of the detainees, James Milnes Gaskell, was a British subject. Milnes Gaskell gradually got the idea that the British Government preferred him to remain in detention, since it gave Roberts an excuse to come in, count heads and make sure nothing really drastic was being done to any of the detainees; Milnes Gaskell's attitude about this was, understandably, ambivalent.
There is a story that at one point in the course of the summer Colonel Bradshaw told Stuart Roberts that he would release Milnes Gaskell if Milnes Gaskell would promise not to make any statements to the press. Roberts brought this offer to Milnes Gaskell, according to the story, and Milnes Gaskell refused, which appeared to both please and relieve Roberts. However, when Milnes Gaskell asked Roberts, a year later, to verify that offer in writing, Roberts said he would have to check with the British Government first, and then returned to say that Milnes Gaskell must be mistaken about his facts, the offer was never made, none of it ever happened . . .
The Emergency Regulations under which the de
tainees had been detained required that they be told the reason for their detention within two weeks, and that they appear before a magistrate for review within one month. The reasons appeared within the time period and were very broad-ranging. One young attorney was charged with having written two published letters critical of the Government.
On the twenty-eighth of June, ten of the detainees appeared in Supreme Court on habeas corpus proceedings; but they had barely gotten started when they were adjourned, without explanation. When they resumed again several days later, the chief defense attorney, a Dominican, told the judge that his work permit for St. Kitts was up that day and the Government wouldn't renew it, which meant he couldn't defend his clients, which in turn meant they were being denied counsel of their choice. The judge responded with another adjournment.
Finally, on July 3, a habeas corpus hearing was actually completed on three of the detainees, and the judge ordered their release. (The judges, above the level of magistrate, are not Kittitians, nor are they responsible to the Government of St. Kitts; they work a circuit through the Associated States.) The three men were released, and the next morning they were arrested again and put back with their friends in the Cayon Street prison; this time, it was "preventive detention."
July seemed to be National Adjournment Month on St. Kitts, with much backing and filling in the law courts; it wasn't until August 11 that the Appeal Court decided that the detention orders weren't any good because the legislature hadn't properly enacted the Emergency Regulations.
It was a technicality, but a technicality is sometimes as good as a home run. Fifteen of the detainees were immediately released; five of them were just as immediately arrested again on different charges. One of the ten freed was Milnes Gaskell, who was at last deported, without protest. The remaining nine included Billy Herbert.
On August 13 six more of the detainees were supposed to be released on bail. The court proceeding began but was interrupted when the judge was called away to the phone. When he returned to the bench he had become extremely nervous. "I have just received a telephone call," he announced to the court, "from a voice I recognized, telling me that if I release these men I will be shot." So he didn't release them; he adjourned the hearing instead. And when an English reporter later asked him who had called, he would say only, "A member of the Cabinet."
That was Saturday. On Monday the fifteenth, Colonel Bradshaw whipped some new legislation through the House of Assembly to correct the flaws in the first batch of Emergency Regulations. Armed with the new Regulations he had six more of the freed men, including Billy Herbert, clapped back into prison.
Defense attorneys were being harassed in a variety of ways. Some had trouble getting to see their clients, some had trouble about work permits, all had trouble with the local radio station. But one had the worst trouble of all; he died.
Robert McKenzie Crawford, one of the two attorneys who had been with Milnes Gaskell out at Golden Rock Airport the day of his first arrest, was one morning suddenly rushed to the hospital. It happened to be a day when his wife was off the island, and it is said that nurses at the hospital heard Crawford loudly refusing to be operated on until someone could get in touch with his wife. Nevertheless, a stomach operation was prepared for and apparently took place. That night Crawford died. Because the Emergency Regulations waived inquests and autopsies, it was afterward impossible to tell what complaint had brought Crawford to the hospital or exactly of what he had died. The other defense attorneys knew that legally Crawford had died of natural causes. They were, nevertheless, not totally reassured.
By late August there were thirteen men left in prison—not an encouraging number—still waiting for the trials to start.
While the legal war struggled along, Colonel Bradshaw's Government was trying to get another land of war off the ground. The 70-man Defence Force and 110-man police force had been armed with new guns by the British, and the old guns had gone to the newly created 162-man Special Volunteer Constabulary. This gave Bradshaw 342 men more or less under arms, ranged against a people who were known to have the weapons they'd taken from seventeen policemen, plus a dozen or so shotguns. (Later the Anguillans would go out and buy some rifles of their own, but as of the summer of 1967 they were ill prepared to defend themselves.)
Which Robert Bradshaw didn't know. Every time Peter Adams or any other Anguillan leader got close enough to a reporter to make a statement, the statement always included some boast about the island's defenses. At one time they claimed to have bought an American Navy surplus PT boat, and at another time they announced they now possessed an antiaircraft gun. Every bit of this was moonshine. There was no PT boat, there was no antiaircraft gun.
The capstone of the actual Anguillan arsenal was a cannon left over from the Napoleonic Wars. Not the whole cannon, actually; not the wheels and carriage; just the barrel, lying on the sand. The Anguillans tucked some more sand under the front of the barrel to give it a better trajectory, found an old cannon ball, opened some shotgun shells for powder, and had artillery practice. They'd load the cannon and fire, and then trot down the beach to pick up the ball and bring it back and fire it again.
But one cannon is not a barrage. All the declarations of strength were bluff, and every journalist visiting Anguilla knew it; yet all the bluffs were reported as undoubted facts.
One newsman told me why. "I went around the island," he said, "and visited a beach with only one house on it. Two eighty-year-old ladies, retired schoolteachers, lived there. I asked them what they would do if Bradshaw's soldiers landed on their beach, and they showed me cane-cutting knives they had behind the door. We'll chop their heads off,' they said, and I knew they meant it. Any soldiers landing there would have had to kill those two old ladies. No choice. That, or get their heads chopped off."
Knowing the defenselessness of the Anguillans, and their determination, the reporters to a man went along with the bluffs and did their own small bit to discourage a Kittitian invasion. And it worked. Bradshaw, who at that time could probably have swept the island clean with ten determined men, hung back to build up his strength.
First he sent Paul Southwell to London to ask the British for more guns. The British looked at their files, saw they'd just given St. Kitts full armament for its regular uniformed forces, and decided not to overburden Basseterre's storage facilities.
Next, Southwell flew to Washington to ask for rifles, machine guns, ammunition and, please, two PT boats. The United States also said No, and it began to look as though St. Kitts was going to have to struggle along with just the weapons it had.
But then the Kittitian luck changed. A contact was made with some people in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, who would be more than happy to supply guns and ammunition, though no PT boat.
The group in Fort Lauderdale assembled the arms in Miami and put them in crates marked "Intransit, Excess Baggage for the Government of St. Kitts," a declaration that made them immune from customs inspection at any point in their travels. The crates were then put on regular Pan Am passenger flights and flown to Coolidge Airport in Antigua. If you traveled from Miami to Antigua during the month of July 1967, the odds are good that you flew with hand grenades.
And you thought you had nothing to worry about but hijackers.
Once on Antigua, the crates of guns and ammunition were loaded after dark onto a plane belonging to a non-scheduled cargo carrier. This plane was then flown to St. Kitts.
At St. Kitts, security was very tight, but not very bright. Every evening for a week, at just about the same hour, a security lid was clamped on the airport, all civilians were excluded, thje place was all lit up, and armed guards were everywhere. Into the middle of this movie set would stream the plane, settling down amid guns and lights. Mysterious crates would be taken off the plane and stacked in a waiting truck and then the truck, itself under heavy guard, would be driven out of the airport and down into the town of Basseterre and into the Defence Force headquarters compound.
The Anguillans
, of course, learned about these shipments early in the game. Some of the more imaginative among them suggested they fly one of their own planes over to Antigua one night, claim to be the parcel service to St. Kitts, collect the mysterious crates, and bring them home to Anguilla instead. (Throwing burning sticks on sheets of powder again.) More gentlemanly heads, however, once more prevailed.
And so, over the long summer, the detainees of St. Kitts danced an endless quadrille with the courts and jailers, while Colonel Bradshaw assembled his armed might, read excerpts of Diane Prior-Palmer s diary to visiting journalists, and wished there was some place he could get hold of just one PT boat.
Speak not of my debts unless you mean to pay them.
—George Herbert, Outlandish Proverbs
7
The publicity attendant on Anguilla's declaration of independence had attracted a flow of outsiders, most of whom were a little strange. There was the kilt-wearing, cigar-smoking Jewish Chinaman from the United States who wanted land for some sort of ill-defined "thousand-year-old European religious sect," which the Anguillans decided translated into "free-love farm plus abortion clinic." There was the young American hippie couple who appeared on the island one day with nothing but a tent and a shotgun and began cadging food from the natives. There was the American in a business suit who seemed impervious to heat and who promised to solve all the island's economic problems in two weeks if he were simply given a free hand and the title "Economics Minister."
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