Westlake, Donald E - NF 01
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By this time, however, Jamaica was pretty much on An-guilla's side. The chief Jamaican delegate suggested maybe Anguilla did have the unilateral right to secede after all. He compared it to Jamaica's own decision in 1961 to secede from the West Indies Federation, which had also been done in conjunction with a referendum.
But Lord Shepherd wasn't of a mind to listen to arguments that didn't aim at getting Anguilla back into the box where she belonged. And if Anguilla wouldn't go back, he threatened, then by thunder Great Britain would cut off all aid! (Considering the amount of aid that had been getting through to Anguilla when things were going good, this news didn't cause trembling in very many boots. As the Trinidad Guardian said, it was "about the most empty diplomatic threat in history.")
Colonel Bradshaw hadn't been invited to this particular conference, but he sent a telegram, in which he said that "gangster elements have taken charge in Auguilla" and that if the other Caribbean Governments didn't get his island back for him it would have "only the most shattering consequences for entire Leewards and Windwards who watch with interest."
Jamaica had been the first to say she wouldn't have anything to do with the peacekeeping force. Barbados was second and Trinidad-Tobago third. Guyana, which with Antigua represented about the only wholehearted support Colonel Bradshaw had in the Caribbean, said it was perfectly willing to take part in a peacekeeping force, but it wasn't about to be the peacekeeping force, and then there were none.
Lord Shepherd responded by suggesting Great Britain might send in troops of her own, but only if the four Governments made a formal request that she do it. Great Britain didn't intend to invade any part of the Caribbean without getting a commitment from the Commonwealth Caribbean first.
The Caribbean delegates visualized what their political futures at home would look like once it was learned they had asked a European colonial power to invade a brother Caribbean island. They chose not to take up Lord Shepherd's offer. Which meant that Great Britain, for the time being, abandoned the idea of invading Anguilla.
This third and final conference broke up on August 20, 1967, completely deadlocked. As the Wooding Report put it, "The Jamaica Conference achieved nothing." And a British Commonwealth Office statement explained that the idea of the peacekeeping force had "run up against local tensions and disagreements, about which we would rather not say too much."
Lord Shepherd didn't have quite the same attitude. On his way home he amplified his earlier comments about gangsters and hot money, saying that "outside organizations" were going to use the island as a base for "gambling and drugs," which is a nice combination and guaranteed to get a good response on both sides of the Atlantic. (What Communism is to the American Government and what fragmentation is to the British Government, the Mafia is to both Governments.)
It wasn't hard to believe, at that. Prime Minister Eric Williams of Trinidad-Tobago spoke for practically everybody when he said, "If the Mafia or any other sort of American crooks are not already in Anguilla, they soon will be. They are everywhere else in the Caribbean."
As it turns out, in this particular case there's Mafia and there's Mafia. Professor Roger Fisher had been trying to talk to Deputy Prime Minister Cameron Tudor of Barbados back in July, to ask his help in mediating the dispute between Anguilla and St. Kitts, and he had trouble reaching Tudor until he found out the British had warned Tudor that Fisher was from the Mafia and was a lawyer for gamblers in Miami. Fisher, whose background in international law is so sound and extensive that he doesn't even need to show pictures of himself with Hubert Humphrey, had no trouble convincing Tudor that the British had been selling gold-mine stock. But the same thing happened again a month later in New York, at the United Nations. People Fisher tried to talk to there had been told—by the British—that he was a dangerous man, a known agent of "Mafia-type" gangsters.
None of which is to say the Mafia is not in the Caribbean, only that it was not in Anguilla. The fact is, Eric Williams is right; the Mafia is everywhere in the Caribbean. Through either British indifference or British stupidity, the Mafia has taken over gambling in the Bahamas, for instance. And the American airline Pan Am, which owns three casinos on three islands in the area, found, when looking for managers to run them, that the Mafia were the people with the experience for the job. When Fidel Castro threw the Mafia out of Havana after the Cuban revolution, very few of the troops traveled all the way back to the States.
But with Mafiosi as common in the Caribbean as sand fleas, why would Lord Shepherd go out of his way to warn that a poverty-stricken little speck in the ocean with no electricity, no roads, no telephones, no hotels, damn little water and not one limbo dancer was about to be overrun by gangsters?
In any case, by the time he'd returned to Great Britain he'd eased back the throttle a bit and had something more vague and less ominous to say: "The island is wide open to strong-arm influences. There is no political organization and there are interested bodies, whose names I shall not mention now, who definitely feel that there is money to be made from these little islands."
Never mind skipping ahead; he never did mention their names.
Get money by fair means if you can; if not, get money.
—Horace, Epistles
10
But enough of real life! What about the San Francisco Group?
After Peter Adams departed for Barbados, the San Francisco Group was left with Jerry Gumbs, who was then calling himself Ambassador-at-Large. Scott Newhall and Howard Gossage and Dr. Gerald Feigen all sat down with Jerry Gumbs and gave him the Liberty Dollar pitch. He signed an agreement they'd drawn up, and they told him they'd be seeing him on Anguilla with the thousand silver coins. As Scott Newhall described it later, "Using these coins as a starter, Anguilla could get $80,000 without investing a penny. The risk would be ours. What we were getting out of it at the moment was the excitement of planning."
In the meantime, however, they didn't have ten thousand silver coins, they had fifteen hundred silver coins. They also didn't seem to have eighty thousand dollars. So they invented a company, the Anguilla Charter Company, and set about raising some cash for it. Newhall: "Gerry Feigen pledged to put up securities behind the company. He told the bank we would like to have $15,000—preferably in British West Indian currency." This, of course, is a bank in San Francisco, which incredibly enough didn't have fifteen thousand dollars in British West Indian currency. So they took the money—watch this, now—they took the money in one-dollar bills.
Why did they take the money in one-dollar bills? Think of it as though it were a movie, try to visualize it. Which would play better, a check for fifteen thousand dollars or a suitcase full of one-dollar bills?
Now the fourth San Franciscan in the San Francisco Group enters the picture. Newhall: "I called Larry Wade, a former promotion manager on the Chronicle, and asked him to help out ... So on Friday morning Larry went over to the bank and picked up this great canvas sack with 150 packages of $1 bills, 100 to the package. He came staggering in, looking as though he had a body in the sack."
Actually, the bills were divided into thousands. Each thousand was packed between wooden slats and wrapped around with iron straps, none of which made it any lighter. The Group removed the wood and iron, packed the paper in a case that had once held Eagle shirt samples, stowed the silver in six small canvas money sacks they'd had printed with a mermaid and the words "250 Anguilla Liberty Dollars"—God knows why; maybe to attract muggers—gave it all to Larry Wade, and headed for the airport.
At the airport Gossage bought two maroon Qantas canvas bags and put three of the moneybags in each. Gossage: "The redcap had to wheel the hand baggage—130 pounds of coins in two bags and the flat case with $15,000 in currency—onto the plane. At that moment, we turned and walked out of the place. The tension was over, and it was all so ridiculous, we began to laugh. We laughed all the way back to the fire-house." (Don't ask.)
Larry Wade and all the money had to change planes in New York, where people are les
s fun-loving than in San Francisco, and nobody would help him carry the money off the plane. So he found a wheelchair and wheeled it all to Pan Am.
Eventually, Wade and the money reached Anguilla, where he discovered he was supposed to go through customs. Rather than open the shirt case and display the fifteen thousand one-dollar bills, he opened his suitcase instead and distracted everybody by showing them Newhall's flag with the mermaids. Like bewitched mariners, the customs men gaped at the mermaids while Wade quickly scooted off to the only local bank, the Mid-Atlantic, and stowed the cash in the vault. Then he went looking for Peter Adams, to get him to sign the agreement Jerry Gumbs had already signed, but Adams was still on Barbados, at the first Barbados Conference.
The next day Adams came back to Anguilla to get reinforcements—Ronald Webster and John Rogers were now added to the delegation at Barbados—and Larry Wade tried to talk to him about the money, "but," as he later wrote, "they were so preoccupied with their political concerns, understandably, that they hardly heard me."
Preoccupied they might be, but Wade had all that money to think about, so the next day he followed Adams and the rest back to Barbados.
Wade bearded Adams in his hotel room. Wade: "I gave him a letter from Scott and the presentation coin set, and he said 'Thank you rather abstractedly. He could talk about nothing but the great pressure he'd been under. He said he felt as if he were on top of a mountain with guns pointing at him from every side. He seemed exhausted and defeated. I left him the flag, as a memento of his visit to San Francisco, and was about to turn to the coinage agreement when the phone rang."
Wade left the coin agreement and came back the next day to ask if he'd signed it. He hadn't, but he had signed the Conference report. Wade: "I was stunned. I decided that my principal mission now was to get the money off Anguilla before the St. Kitts government could seize it."
Wade hitched a ride with Jerry Gumbs in one of his own Anguilla Airways planes. Back on Anguilla Wade and Gumbs headed together for the bank. (Gumbs had no intention of being anyplace where that money wasn't.) Wade: "Jerry Gumbs tried very hard to get me to deposit the money in his account so he could give it to the government of Anguilla. Mr. Rogers went to the vault, and there were the coins and the suitcase full of cash, just as I had left them. Gumbs wanted the money so badly that finally, as a last flourish, I opened the bag of dollar bills and gave him $100 for his expenses."
Wade is not only magnificent at distracting the opposition, he also knows precisely what to use in every situation. The customs men he mesmerized with mermaids, and now he clouds Jerry Gumbs's mind with one hundred dollars in one-dollar bills.
Leaving Jerry Gumbs struck to stone, Wade next carted his cash to the airport. Here he met Ronald Webster, who had just taken over the island leadership. Wade: "I told him I was going to leave with him a bag of 250 coins, if he wanted to put them in circulation, and $2,000 to cover their redemption."
(Now, I don t understand that. Either Wade left the coins or he redeemed them, but he couldn't very well do both. And if he redeemed them, he was supposed to pay twenty-five hundred dollars—ten dollars per coin—not two thousand. So what he says he did, he says he gave Webster one of his six bags of coins, paid him the wrong amount of money to get them back, and didn't ask for them back. Did the master mesmerist meet an even more master mesmerist?)
Now Wade went from the airport to Lloyd's Hotel, where he'd been staying, and, he says, "I paid my bill to [Mrs. Lloyd] in Anguilla Liberty Dollars, which pleased her." (Now, since this is the Mrs. Lloyd who was one of the five no votes at the referendum three weeks earlier, and since the hotel—in which she lived—had been shot up by the rebels at least twice, I truly doubt that the Anguilla Liberty Dollars pleased her. But the relationship between Anguilla and San Francisco is one long unrelieved saga of misunderstanding anyway.)
At last Wade left Anguilla, carrying with him 1,250 silver coins (less his hotel bill) and 12,900 one-dollar bills, all of which he stuffed in a hotel safe as soon as he reached St. Thomas, about two hundred miles away.
Wade stayed in St. Thomas two days, until Jerry Gumbs came to see him. His mind apparently had cleared, and he was back for more money. Wade: "He carried a letter from Ronald Webster—a plea to send back the rest of the money, since they now had a new government."
(A mark of their desperation for money by this point can be seen in the fact that they had just broken into the Warden s safe. For two months after the rebellion they didn't touch that safe. It was the Queen's property and not theirs. But at last they were in such desperate straits they were forced to do it, despite their qualms. Rebellion had been one thing; breaking into the Queen's safe was something else again.)
So Wade phoned Newhall, back home in San Francisco, and Newhall said sure, go ahead, give them the money. Wade promptly turned over all the dollar bills to Jerry Gumbs and went home to San Francisco with the five moneybags full of coins. He had just made a ten-thousand-mile journey, carrying 108 pounds of silver coins, and at last delivered them to the spot where he'd picked them up. Mission accomplished.
colin rickards
the new york times
Colonel Bradshaw
Ronald Webster
colin rickards
atlin harrigan
Atlin Harrigan
Peter Adams
Walter Hodge
Wallace Rey
the new york times
Jeremiah Gumbs would like to take a moment of your time to discuss the Anguilla Liberty Dollar.
Anguilla Pier (on St. Kitts) during the rush hour.
donald e. westlake
Left: In June of 1967, the rebels raised the—uh—the rebel flag.
Below left: Colonel Bradshaw and Paul Southwell in London.
Below: Colonel Bradshaw and Michael Stewart touching.
two pictures: colin rickards
press association ltd.
keystone press agency ltd. two pictures: colin rickards
Above: Tony Lee
Above right: Tony Lee and Ronald Webster getting along with each other.
Right: The school building in which the children learned the names of the English counties, but not the names of the Caribbean islands.
Above: Ronald Webster, in martial mood, displays his military might to the press—four rifles and four shadows of rifles.
Below left: The Anguillan Artillery, present and accounted for.
Below right: Official photo of Mr. William Whitlock, M.E
Top: The Marines meet the photographer.
Center: Ronald Webster meets the Press.
Bottom: Commissioner Way weighs in.
Below: Ronald Webster, awaiting the British forces, scans the seas from an Anguillan height.
Top: Colonel Bradshaw, with Rolls Royce and bodyguard, reviews his troops ...
Center:... while Ronald Webster, ever a man of peace, counters the invasion by walking his children to school...
Bottom:... and a British soldier walks past a goat without recognizing it
wide world photos, inc.
Jack Holcomb departs, escorted by London police.
"Her Majesty's Government have therefore taken the necessary measures to appoint Mr. Lee as Her Majesty's Commissioner so that there can be peace, stability and progress in the Island. He comes as your friend . .
—The Invasion Leaflet
"Unimportant, of course> I meant" the King hastily said, and went on to himself in an undertone, "important—unimportant—unimportant—important—as if he were trying which word sounded best.
—Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
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The Anguillans, their rebellion already being fought on two fronts—the Caribbean and San Francisco —now opened a third front: the United Nations. This campaign didn't get into full swing until August, after Lord Shepherd had given up at the Jamaica Conference, but its first shot had been fired U.N.-ward back at the very beginning, two days after the Kittitian police were sen
t packing, when Peter Adams had gone to Puerto Rico and sent a telegram to U Thant. It had said, among other things, "Anguillans prefer death to the oppression of St. Kitts." Adams sent Thant a few more telegrams during his tenure, but Thant never replied.
In the middle of July, when Adams and Jerry Gumbs had traveled up to New York, Adams had announced his intention of going to the U.N., but the San Francisco Group had come along at that point with Howard Gossage's butterfly net and whisked the Anguillans away to be controlled in San Francisco. Then in August came the first real onslaught at the U.N.
Jerry Gumbs traveled to New York on August 5 (while the peacekeeping-force idea was still alive back in the Caribbean) intending to breach the U.N. and demand international assistance in his homeland's quest for freedom; he had been spending a lot of time with the San Francisco Group recently and was therefore full of heady talk about independence. At first he got only as far as a telephone interview with a reporter from The New York Times, but he made the most of it. "I have been asked by the people of Anguilla to tell Secretary General Thant that they desire to be free," he announced. "After three hundred years of neglect as a British colony, the people feel they are able to take care of their own affairs, and that all they need to prosper is to be independent." He also made a pitch for the San Francisco Group's Anguilla Liberty Dollar while he was on the phone and explained just how independence was going to make Anguilla prosperous: "There are a lot of things a little island can do to raise money if it is free. We can sell flags."