Westlake, Donald E - NF 01

by Under An English Heaven (v1. 1)

  Money, a flag. What else does a nation need? Letterhead stationery! Newhall gets some of that, too.

  Then he turns his attention to the imminent arrival of the delegation from Anguilla. He reserves a suite at the St. Francis, which like the Lombardy back in New York is not a cheap hotel. And whenever the representative of a foreign nation is in residence at the St. Francis—definitely not a cheap hotel— that nation's flag is flown over the entrance. Would the St. Francis please fly Scott Newhall's Anguilla flag, if it could be finished in time? That's the managing editor of the Chronicle asking, and he designed the flag himself, and it will get space in the paper. The St. Francis flew the flag.

  Newhall: "The Mayor was out of town, but the acting Mayor, enjoying the idea, agreed to meet President Peter Adams at the airport with his limousine. We invited people to a reception, as many people as the suite would hold, and Howard's secretary did a beautiful job of arranging for bordelaise snails, crab legs, and a tape recorder."

  City limousines—maybe San Francisco should secede— carried the Anguillans to the . "The reception went off swimmingly," said Newhall. "One guest jumped up and pledged $1,000 to Anguilla, and Peter Adams made a very moving speech."

  Once again Jerry Gumbs had a slightly different memory of the affair: "We went to San Francisco," he told me, "and we were met by the city fathers at the airport and had a big parade and there were flags, a flag of Anguilla with mermaids in it. All the city limousines, and a big party was thrown. Then we went to the and there was a big suite, and all the people, ranchers and everybody, were there. They had a big thing, all types of food, and everything. And all this big display. And people then started donating thousands and thousands of dollars toward the Anguillan situation, all promoted by Scott Newhall. To date, we have never seen a dollar from the money that those people promised to give."

  After the reception and the pledges of money, Newhall and Feigen showed Peter Adams three or four coins they'd run off on, their die press and explained the deal to him. He said he'd think it over.

  Oh, yes, the deal. The San Francisco Group wasn't going to give these "Anguilla Liberty Dollars" to the Anguillans, not at all; the San Francisco Group aren't millionaires. The idea was that the San Francisco Group would buy ten thousand silver-dollar-sized coins, which would cost one dollar each, and then counterstamp them all, which would cost another dollar each, making two dollars. Then the San Francisco Group would sell the ten thousand coins to the Anguillans at cost, that is, two dollars each, or twenty thousand dollars. Then the Anguillans, now legal owners of the coins, would declare them legal tender of Anguilla and sell them back to the San Francisco Group at ten dollars each, for a clear profit of eight dollars on each and every coin.

  Adams said he'd think it over. It seemed a roundabout way to donate eighty thousand dollars, but that was the pitch, and he'd think it over.

  But that night reality intruded, delaying things a bit for the San Francisco Group. The governments of the English-speaking Caribbean nations had been working in concert with Great Britain to find a way to calm this increasingly public and increasingly embarrassing problem of the Anguillan secession. Finally they had decided on holding a full-scale conference. It would meet on Barbados, it would have representatives from everywhere, and it would be charged with straightening out the mess once and for all. The Anguilla delegation to this conference would be headed by Peter Adams.

  No doubt but ye are the People.

  —Rudyard Kipling, The Islanders

  8

  The Barbados Conference was announced by Mrs. Judith Hart, Minister of State for Commonwealth Relations, on July 18. When the Conference got under way a week later, Mrs. Hart wasn't the Minister anymore; her job had been taken from her the day before by Prime Minister Harold Wilson and given to a man named Lord Shepherd.

  Well, this is what the telephone company does all the time. You call and call and get the name of the individual responsible for your exchange and talk to that individual day after day after day, and just at the point when you've finally made yourself understood, they have a reshuffling down at the phone company and you find yourself listening to a brand-new voice that says, "Well, now, what's the problem?"

  Having at last attracted Mrs. Judith Hart's attention, the Anguillan delegation arrived in Barbados to discover they had to start all over again. And from farther back than before; whereas Mrs. Hart had simply spent a long time ignoring Anguilla, Lord Shepherd apparently arrived in Barbados convinced that he already knew everything about Anguilla it would ever be necessary to know. It proved very hard for the Anguillans to get new words into a head that was already full.

  The Anguillan delegation to the Conference originally consisted of five men, led by Peter Adams. The other four were Walter Hodge, Chairman of the Peacekeeping Committee, and three Committee members.

  In addition to the British delegation led by Lord Shepherd, and the Anguillan delegation accompanied by its Barbadian attorney, and a Kittitian delegation composed of Colonel Bradshaw and Eugene Walwyn, there were delegations to the Conference from Jamaica, Trinidad-Tobago, Guyana and the host island, Barbados. The main meeting of the Conference was planned for July 29, but in the days prior to that all sorts of small informal meetings were held, with everybody being very low-key and earnest and concerned about getting this problem solved to everybody's satisfaction.

  Almost everybody, that is; Colonel Bradshaw gave an interview to a local newspaper in his usual style, full of storm clouds and rolls of thunder. The editor of the paper was persuaded by some of the conferees to expurgate the interview before publication, but Colonel Bradshaw's voice comes through all filters, and the Anguillans began to feel their hackles rise.

  Then there was the pressure. Afterward, the Anguillans were to claim that the pressure on them had been continuous from the very beginning of the Conference and had grown more intense with every day. The threats, like Salome, lost their veils as time went along and became blunter and harsher every day.

  Some Anguillan delegates claim the British threatened an embargo if they failed to agree to return to St. Kitts; for an island like Anguilla, which imports practically everything it uses, an embargo could be a fearful thing. There was already that Kittitian/British embargo on mail deliveries, cutting off the remittances by which the island kept itself healthy and alive, as well as the embargo on medical supplies, so a broader embargo was certainly a possibility.

  The reason for the pressure was the Anguillan delegation s insistence that they couldn't sign anything until the people back home had had a chance to look it over. As the Wooding Report put it, one of the "factors which contributed to the failure of the Barbados Conference" was "the apparent practice in Anguilla that all important issues must be resolved by reference to the people." Which sounds very much like a definition of democracy.

  Whatever it sounds like, the British didn't like the sound of it. Like the San Francisco Group, they wanted the Anguillans handy so they could control the situation. Pressuring five men in a hotel room was one thing; pressuring six thousand people on their own island would be something else again.

  After several days of informal diplomacy, the Conference had its first formal session on July 29. The Anguillans were still saying they couldn't make any binding commitments until they talked it over with the people at home. Everybody else leaned very hard, and finally the Anguillans asked for a postponement until they could bring up some more delegates.

  Three Anguillans flew home. They had some meetings, and flew back with five reinforcements, which brought the full Anguillan strength up to ten men, plus the Barbadian attorney. This was greater than any other delegation, but ten men is still only .0017 per cent of a population of six thousand.

  The new men contained some not-so-new faces. Anguillan defense chief Ronald Webster and editor Atlin Harrigan were there, and so was Jerry Gumbs, and the team was rounded out by two more Peacekeeping Committee members, Alfred Webster and John Rogers. Only Ronald Webster and John
Rogers were considered full delegates, the others being along in an observer capacity. Rogers is a cabdriver, usually to be found down by the airport when he doesn't have a fare. He is a tall, well-built man, with a square face and the look of a boxer about him, and he is a firm believer in the politics of conspiracy. Still, when it comes to immediate practical political questions he has a fast intuitive mind, and he has been connected with most post-rebellion Anguillan governments.

  The Conference had its next session on July 30. The Anguillans, perhaps feeling safety in their new numbers, began to get snappish. They'd been leaned on for a week, they hadn't had enough sleep, they'd been threatened in ugly ways, and nobody seemed to care that what they had back home on Anguilla was a democracy and not a republic. They couldn't sign for everybody because they weren't everybody.

  Lord Shepherd wouldn't accept that. "A failure of your representatives to accept the very favourable terms worked out in these talks, and to return to constitutional rule," he told them, "is an exceedingly grave step."

  The "very favourable terms" gave some very minor concessions to the Anguillans, brought out the local-council proposition in its usual vague and dateless way, and arranged for a "peacekeeping team" of policemen from Jamaica, Trinidad-Tobago, Barbados and Guyana to be stationed for an indefinite period on Anguilla. Whether these police were supposed to protect Bradshaw from the Anguillans, the Anguillans from Bradshaw, or the Anguillans from one another wasn't spelled out.

  Finally the Anguillans agreed to sign the Conference report, but only to acknowledge the existence of the proposals, not to consider the report binding. Great Britain and St. Kitts and the others would sign the report and would consider it binding.

  Of the seven Anguillans classed as full-fledged delegates, only four actually signed the report. These were the most "political" and the most moderate of the delegates: Peter Adams, Walter Hodge, Emile Gumbs and John Rogers. But in the middle of the signing, there was a small gesture, and the history of Anguilla pivots upon that gesture; there was everything before it was made, and there was everything else after it was made.

  The scene was this: The Conference report was a bundle of papers, a thick stack of documents, and it was being carefully passed from hand to hand as each delegate from each nation signed his name to it. The bundle was placed before Ronald Webster. Without pausing, Webster picked it up and casually tossed it to the next man, Attorney General S. S. Ram-phal of Guyana, as though it were wastepaper for baling.

  In that small gesture, Anguilla found her hero.

  When constabulary duty's to be done, to be done,

  The policeman's lot is not a happy one.

  -W. S. Gilbert, The Pirates of Penzance

  9

  Ronald Webster and the other dissidents got home from Barbados a full day before Peter Adams and the other signers of the Conference report. Webster called a public meeting to announce the Conference decision. The enraged reaction was immediate and general and not unexpected: Foreign policemen on Anguillan soil? Back to Bradshaw after finally getting away from him, with practically nothing changed? No, No, six thousand times No.

  Bradshaw himself had also rushed home before the Conference finished its closing formalities. He made a speech over ZIZ in which he announced that Anguilla had "surrendered." It sometimes seems Colonel Bradshaw must have an Anguillan for a speech writer. He couldn't possibly make all those tactical and tactless errors without help.

  The four Anguillan signers stayed till the end of the Conference, returned home, and found a group of very irritable people waiting for them at the airport. Ronald Webster showed up before tempers got too thoroughly frayed and explained that the signatures had committed Anguilla to nothing but an agreement to look the proposals over. Everybody went away to decide what to do next, and gradually they came to the conclusion it was time for a change in leadership.

  Up till then, there had been four leaders in the island. Peter Adams had been in charge of external affairs, maintaining contacts with the outside world. Walter Hodge had been in charge of internal affairs, running the domestic side of government. And Ronald Webster and Atlin Harrigan had together composed a kind of informal leadership of activists, whose pushing and prodding had paved the way to rebellion, with Webster thereafter in charge of island defenses.

  Now both of the primary political leaders, Peter Adams and Walter Hodge, had compromised themselves in the eyes of the people by signing the report of the Barbados Conference. Harrigan was too young, his fieriness not yet seasoned, and he had only been an observer at Barbados, not a full-fledged delegate. That left Ronald Webster, whose gesture at Barbados had been the first signal of what the true Anguillan response to the proposals was to be.

  So now, two months after the bloodless rebellion began, there came about a bloodless change of leadership. In a very informal way, later ratified by the Peacekeeping Committee, the overwhelming majority of Anguillans chose Ronald Webster to take over the reins.

  Their choice, as it turned out, was a wise one; Ronald Webster was rich, he was dedicated, he was tireless, he was uncompromised, he was determined, and he had guts.

  The shifting of leadership was done smoothly and with no unnecessary loss of face. While Ronald Webster became the new Chairman of the Peacekeeping Committee, Walter Hodge became Finance Minister, a job he turned out to be very good at, and Peter Adams was appointed Magistrate. (There had been no legal judiciary on the island since the rebellion, and Adams couldn't sit for cases much more complex than drunk-and-disorderly. He couldn't settle land disputes, for example, without the strong possibility that his decision might someday be set aside by a recognized court after Anguilla's secession had come, one way or another, to an end. Still, so long as the rumshops were open, even a magistrate with limited powers was a good idea, and Adams, a careful and sympathetic man, was a good choice for the job.) Only Atlin Har-rigan remained outside the political structure, as observer and critic, a role that would crystallize the next month with the founding of the Beacon.

  Meanwhile, Anguilla was full of rumors and misunderstandings and apprehensions, all brought about by the Barbados Conference. To calm things down and get everybody back to an orderly condition, the Peacekeeping Committee published on August 7 a document titled Statement to the People of Anguilla by Their Government. Roger Fisher, who had written the Declaration of Independence, was back on the island at this time and probably had a hand or two in the Statement's composition.

  The Statement officially announced the changes in the leadership and went on to speak very gently and carefully about the Barbados Conference report. It explained that the report wasn't binding on Anguilla, that the signers had simply "believed that these were the best terms that could be obtained from that conference, and that they should be brought home for serious study by the people," and that the people hadn't had a chance to study them yet, so therefore couldn't be said yet to have either accepted or rejected them. It described the report as "a complex document of 21 pages with four appendices," and said that it "contains intricate proposals concerning a Commonwealth peacekeeping force, economic aid, local self-government and proposed legislation." It suggested that everybody study the proposals and then, "if the people are unwilling to accept them as they stand, we should come back with specific proposals of our own designed to provide adequate self-government for the people of Anguilla."

  Ronald Webster then went over to St. Martin and phoned the Conference chairman on Barbados. He said the Anguillans were thinking about the proposals, would be happy to talk them over informally with anybody sent by Barbados or the other Governments involved, and that they definitely hadn't as yet come to a decision one way or the other.

  The Governments of Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad-Tobago and Guyana were having second thoughts themselves about this peacekeeping force they were supposed to be sending to Anguilla. The Anguillans were getting a reputation for not suffering fools gladly, and nobody likes to get a bloody nose in somebody else's fight. There were ne
wspaper reports about Ronald Webster training a "defense force" of two hundred ten men, and the Statement had said that "a hasty use of force by any other island would be most unwise"; in the context of-such a calm and rational document, that warning seemed very tough indeed. The British had a frigate, H.M.S. Lynx, waiting nearby to carry forty policemen from the four other Governments over to Anguilla, but all at once no one was in a hurry to go.

  Instead, they called another conference in Barbados, this one on August 12, 1967. It was attended only by those four Caribbean Governments that had been left holding the baby. The stated purpose of the conference was to "iron out certain snags in the plan to send a Peacekeeping force to Anguilla."

  Everybody agreed that things looked a little trickier now than at the first Barbados Conference. It was decided to take up Ronald Webster's offer, send a couple of Civil Servants to the island to have a chat, and wait a while with the forty policemen.

  Hugh Shearer, Prime Minister of Jamaica, then announced that none of his police would be among the forty. "I have never liked the idea," he said. And the day after that, when two officials from Jamaica and Barbados did respond to Ronald Webster's invitation by going to Anguilla, they found that things were not as calm there as the Statement had suggested. Speaking of their visit, the Wooding Report says they "appear to have been discomfited by a large and noisy crowd." They took their discomfiture back to their respective Governments and suggested that Great Britain be left to pull her own chestnuts out of the fire.

  Time for yet a third conference. This one was held in Kingston, Jamaica, with the four Caribbean Governments that were supposed to be doing the peacekeeping, plus Lord Shepherd, who'd organized it all.

  Lord Shepherd made a speech in which he suggested gangsters had taken over in Anguilla—Colonel Bradshaw had been the only one to make this kind of remark up till now— and that the rebellion was supported by "hot money." He also talked about "fragmentation," that awful bugaboo that seems to take the place in official British minds that Communism does in official American minds; it refers to countries and areas that break into pieces too small to survive economically or politically or militarily on their own.