Westlake, Donald E - NF 01

by Under An English Heaven (v1. 1)

  The house of the Whitlock lunch is on the side of Sandy Hill, the place from which the Anguillans drove the French back into the sea in 1796.

  While relaxed good cheer was the order of the day inside the house, growing irritation and confusion were rampant outside it. So far as the Anguillans could see, Ronald Webster had been snubbed. No one was happy about it, but the most actively unhappy were the young hooligans of the Defence Force. They went home and got out their rifles and tried to decide how to even the score for Mr. Webster.

  The first thing they did was kidnap a turkey.

  Tony Lee had arranged for a turkey to be cooked and delivered to the Howard house for the ministerial lunch. As it was being delivered, the car containing it was stopped by a bunch of young men with rifles. They took the bird and sent the driver away.

  At the house, they finally gave up waiting for the turkey. The bank manager had some cold chicken, so they made do with that.

  Ronald Webster had been looking forward to Whitlock's arrival. He'd had to overrule the more strident supporters of complete independence in laying on such a lavish welcome, and all he'd gotten for his pains was humiliation in front of his people. He used the lunch hour to prepare a leaflet of his own, insisting on independence. "The hell with the British" was the basic attitude of the leaflet.

  At twenty after three the Whitlock party started organizing itself for a return to the center of the island and the four o'clock meeting with the Government that the Government hadn't been told about. Then somebody looked out front and saw that a chain had been put across the driveway and that a group of men had gathered on the high ground overlooking the house. One of them seemed to be an American in steel helmet and battle dress and carrying a carbine. (Probably one of the Haskins boys, dressed up to play War.)

  Anthony Rushford again: "Some very tough-looking fellows were putting stones in the road, and there were other people with firearms ... I saw some people who looked like Americans wearing steel helmets and carrying arms." If "some" means two, they were the Haskins boys; if more than two, I can t think who it might have been. Wheeler-dealer Jack Hol-comb? The Reverend Freeman Goodge? The veterinarian from Chicago?

  Rushford again: "I couldn't swear to the number in court, you understand, but I think there were ten to fifteen guns in the drive, and at least two rifles at a house on the skyline."

  One of the tough-looking fellows in the driveway went up to the house and told the people there, "Mr. Webster says he's coming to see you. You will not leave the house."

  Rushford says that after the tough-looking fellow had gone back down with the other tough-looking fellows, Whitlock suggested the English get into their cars and try to drive on through the blockade. But Rushford told him, "Sir, be careful, there are armed men around. You are a Minister of the Crown as well as a male human being."

  So they waited for Ronald Webster, who, says Rushford, "came down in a somewhat autocratic manner." He behaved, in other words, like a proud man who'd been humiliated in front of his followers and was determined to make up for it. He entered the house and said to Whitlock, "Sit down, I have something to say to you."

  Whitlock said, "Don't tell me to sit down. I have something to say to you. Listen to me. I am, after all, a Minister of the British Crown and you have threatened me with armed men. I wish to give you an extremely solemn warning that this will have extremely serious consequences for you."

  While the leaders bickered, the Englishmen in the house maintained a low profile and the armed men on the ridge of the hill maintained an ostentatious profile. Webster handed over his leaflet, and there was more sharp talk on both sides. Webster told them they should leave the island within thirty minutes because "I can no longer guarantee your safety."

  Rushford says he took that "as a threat. I am not quite a greenhorn after twenty-five years in the legal profession." But the statement was at least as much warning as threat. Although Webster denies it now, this group of armed boys and young men was out of his control by the time Whitlock arrived on the island, and remained out of his or anybody else's control until the British took over. The British had created a power vacuum in February of 1967, and it had taken two years for the island to be reduced to mob rule. All things considered, that's a very long time.

  As one of those whose ignorance and indifference had contributed to the mess on Anguilla, it's fitting that Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs William Whitlock was present on the island when its social structure hit bottom.

  Webster, having delivered his threat—or his warning—left the house. The Whitlock party tried to decide what to do next. The suggestion of blasting through the blockade had already been made and rejected; now another idea came up. The bank manager, their inadvertent host through all this, was an American and not a part of the fracas, and would therefore not be bothered by the tough-looking fellows outside; at least that was the theory. He could carry a message through the enemy lines to Snowi!

  Of course, Webster had told them they could all go. In fact he had suggested it was a good idea. But this is what they did instead. They drafted a message to Snowi and the bank manager carried it out in his shoe.

  The message is full of a kind of pedantic hysteria, even to the point of giving the latitude and longitude of the house—the latitude twice—and mentioning the next day's date in a parenthetical aside. It reads:

  To SNOWI repeated FCO

  (Flag)

  Minister and party, 9 persons in all, now surrounded at SANDY HILL BAY (Howard's house) on southeast shore of island (latitude eighteen degrees thirteen minutes forty-five seconds north, longitude 63° 00' 30" West Lat 18° 13 mins 45 sees N. by armed Webster supporters. Communications base at THE ROAD (3 men) also behind similarly cut off. Minister has seen Webster who called at Howard House and he warned him of consequences of his action. We may be forced off the island, although we shall try to avoid this.

  Please reconnoitre SANDY BAY and THE ROAD areas first light tomorrow (12 March)

  "Snowi?" Senior Naval Officer, West Indies. "(Flag)" means flagship. "FCO" is the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, to whom Whitlock wanted a copy of the message sent.

  Two words from the original were crossed out and replaced, both of them in the first line. The phrase "9 persons" had originally read "seven," meaning that somebody had been a little to*o shaky to count heads right on the first try. And the word "surrounded," with all its implications of melodrama and derring-do, had been put in place of a much odder and perhaps more accurate word—"isolated." Whitlock, and his misconceptions, and his assistants handing out oranges at a children's party, had been isolated. Which happens to rude people the world over.

  Not long after the bank manager had slipped through the enemy lines by the clever stratagem of getting into his car and driving to the bank, Sergeant Thomas Ryan of the Anguilla police went to the Howard house and told Whitlock that Webster would like to see him.

  A word about Sergeant Ryan and the Anguilla police generally. The people of the island had had their fill of hard-nosed Kittitian cops. The Peacekeeping Committee, forming its own police force, had gone out of its way to find peaceable friendly men who could be relied on to calm disturbances rather than start them. When I was on the island in the spring of 1970, the police motor pool consisted of one green Volkswagen beetle, which would start only with a push. Twice in three days I saw that beetle rolling slowly down the road, one blue-uniformed policeman seriously at the wheel and another earnestly pushing from behind. On both occasions I was in my rented jeep and was able to give them a push. I have never been as fond of any police force as I was of those two cheerful indefatigable officers, and I was happy on my visit in 1971 to see that they now had a black Volkswagen capable of starting with no outside assistance at all.

  So we have Sergeant Ryan, a slow-moving and soft-bodied man with a round face and cherubic smile, a man who likes peace and dislikes trouble. Sergeant Ryan is not your typical terrorist agitator.
r />   Webster had gone to Howard's house and talked to Whitlock, and Whitlock had done most of the talking. Now Sergeant Ryan was there to say that Webster wanted Whitlock to come up to the house on top of the hill. Whitlock said he definitely was not going up there to talk to Webster in the middle of an armed mob. Ryan stepped out front and bellowed this news up the hill.

  Rushford tells us what happened next. "Someone blew a whistle and there was a fusillade of shots fired from the house on the height. They may have been fired into the air. I don't think they were aimed at the house. You can hardly miss a house, can you? There were at least four distinct shots. Someone said to us: 'The General wishes you to leave.'"

  So they left. They got into their cars and drove to the airport and flew away.

  Or, as Whitlock himself was later to describe it, "After several threats and the bringing of more and more nasty armed men and the firing of shots I was hustled off the island."

  Man is made for error; it enters his mind naturally, and he discovers a few truths only with the greatest effort.

  —Frederick the Great

  20

  "Force is the only solution to the problem," said Colonel Bradshaw. "Minister Whitlock's expulsion from Anguilla, part of my country, is tantamount to an expulsion of Britain herself. The dastardly act fully substantiates what I have been saying for two years, namely that the Anguilla rebels are the front men of a sinister external gangster element and that only the use of force can properly bring Anguilla back to constitutional rule within the State."

  For two years, Colonel Bradshaw had been practically alone in talking about gangsters and Anguilla in the same breath. But now watch the Mafia come leaping center stage, in its black shirts and white ties and snap-brim hats.

  The first claim in the British press that Anguilla was run by mobsters came in the magazine Private Eye, a satirical muckraker that is a kind of cross between the American magazines Ramparts and Mad. In its issue for January 17, 1969, two months before the Whitlock visit, Private Eye offered this little item:

  The controversy between plucky little Anguilla and the tyrant Brandshaw, Premier of the St. Kitts Federation, has its roots in the American underworld, notably in the so-called Mafia, led by Meyer Lansky in Florida. Lansky has recently been making a bid to break British monopoly control over gambling casinos in the Bahamas, and has already taken some of the casinos over. It was Lansky's "mechanic," Dino Cellini, who visited Anguilla the year before last with an offer to build a casino there in opposition to the Bradshaw plan to build a casino on St. Kitts. The "independence movement" is, in the main, financed by Lansky and is believed to be not entirely a question of freedom.

  That came from a young man named Paul Foot, who is the son of Hugh Foot, whom we have already met under his more official name, Lord Caradon. The question arises: Does Paul Foot talk too much to his father or too little?

  In a full-page piece called "Last Year s Bradshaw" in Private Eye for March 28,1969, Foot offered the following:

  Hardly anyone reported a meeting on 2nd August 1967 between Bradshaw and Peter Adams the elected MP for St. Kitts, in which Bradshaw undertook to establish an Anguillan local council. Adams, delighted with the agreement, sailed for Anguilla to promise his people everything they had been asking for. He was thrown out of the island by armed thugs. He has not been able to return since.

  I don't know which Peter Adams he has in mind. The one I've met was never thrown off the island, never delighted with anything about Bradshaw, and never able to sail to Anguilla from anywhere with a promise that his people were going to get everything they had been asking for.

  In the same article, Foot had this to say about the trials on St. Kitts: "The other prisoners came to trial after six months in jail (only marginally more than the average wait-for-triaT period in Britain). Their trial evoked a quarrel between Bradshaw's Government and the judges, as a result of which the trial was suspended, and the prisoners released."

  Suspended?

  Here's Foot on Ronald Webster. First he mentions the Dino Cellini visit to the island, and then: "Several months after the visit, Ronald Webster, the self-styled leader of Anguilla, told Lord Lambton, Tory MP, that the island's monthly deficit was £3,000 and that this had been bridged 'by sale of property.' (Evening Standard: 19.2.68) He did not say to whom the property was being sold."

  I guess we're all supposed to leap to the assumption that the land was sold to Dino Cellini. However, since the land was on St. Martin, Foot's concern seems a little curious. Even if it was Dino Cellini who bought that land on St. Martin—it wasn't —what good would that do Meyer Lansky in his evil plan to take over Anguilla?

  One final bit of Footwork. In Private Eye for April 11, 1969, appeared the following item:

  More light on the "arms for Anguilla" rumours. In the July of 1967, a BBC producer, working on a film in Havana, made the casual acquaintance of a rich entrepreneur with a large loud pseudo-American accent and three passports (Canadian, Israeli, Dutch) called Van Gurp. Van Gurp entertained the producer on his 85-ft. luxury yacht, and showed him round the inside of the hold. Proudly, he uncovered cases of Ml carbines and repeater rifles.

  "This was God-Damn full to the brim," boosted Van Gurp. "Full to the brim. But I've just got rid of almost all my stock doing a roaring trade in a little island not far from here . . . somewhere I'd never heard of before . . . called Anguilla."

  What a lovely picture that makes: an itinerant arms seller traveling back and forth in the Caribbean in a yacht loaded with rifles, shooting off his mouth to passing strangers and making deals with people he'd never heard of before. Does Paul Foot really think that's the way illegal arms are moved from seller to buyer in this world? And if the mob was running things on Anguilla, don't they have weapons sources of their own? Is the Mafia really dependent upon some passing nut with a shipful of carbines? Van Gurp says he'd never heard of Anguilla before; does Foot contend that if Van Gurp hadn't stumbled on Anguilla in July of 1967 the whole Anguillan rebellion wouldn't have happened?

  Nearly two-thirds of "Last Year's Bradshaw" is devoted to PAM. Foot suggests PAM is dominated by evil landowners trying to bring down an upright trade unionist (Colonel Bradshaw) and that PAM created the Anguillan rebellion itself as a roundabout way to defeat Bradshaw. Private Eye's Foot behaved here like what has been called a "knee-jerk liberal"; he leaped to his liberal political stance before being sure of his facts. On the one side he saw a black (check) who was a union leader (check) and head of something called the Labour Party (check). On the other side he saw white exploiters of black men (check) with upper-class English friends (check) and supporters in the British Conservative Party (check). That's all Paul Foot needed to know, and I think it's obvious it's all he ever found out.

  In the course of preparing this book I spoke with or wrote to several journalists, needing clarification on things they'd reported or attempting to unravel contradiction between different reports on the same event. Of them all, only Paul Foot showed any reluctance to talk to me. I phoned him and I visited the offices of Private Eye on Greek Street, and I got nowhere. It had all been a long time ago, he didn't remember the articles well enough to talk about them, and he wasn't really that interested.

  So the Mafia, which had first been talked about by Colonel Bradshaw and then very briefly mentioned by Lord Shepherd, entered British print in January of 1969 via Paul Foot and Private Eye. The next mention was by William Whitlock in an interview on the BBC: "I think there is a danger that in certain islands at any rate, undesirable elements can take over. Remember that there are so many small islands in the Caribbean scattered around which might be occupied or taken over by almost Mafia-type elements who would form a threat to the security of the Caribbean."

  Whitlock made that remark in February, before the first of his Caribbean trips and almost a month before he landed on Anguilla. It suggests attitudes that might already have been in his head when he did land there.

  We know what was in his head after
he left. "I will say, unhappily," he told the first reporter he met, "that a small number of people dominate the affairs of Anguilla, and that they are armed." He was asked about the Mafia, and said, "I have no doubt at all that this type of organization is on the island."

  When he got back to London he called a press conference at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and said, "The Anguillan people are completely dominated by gangster-type elements." He also said they were "gangster-like characters who are holding the Anguillans in complete subjection." When he was asked about the Mafia he was only slightly more restrained: "This I don't know. I think the phrase which has been used is 'Mafia-type elements.' We have no proof that in fact they are members of the Mafia. The general feeling throughout the Caribbean—I don't know if anyone has proof-is that they are somehow like Mafia characters. We know their names. But we have no knowledge that they are part of the Mafia at all. All that we do know is that Webster is accompanied and advised much of his time by an American."

  That was Jack Holcomb, of course.

  But saying "Mafia-type" and "gangster-like" is a little too subtly seedy; it's like calling a non-sports car "sporty" or a dog food full of cereal "meaty." The British press simply dropped the shabby qualifiers and had a field day.

  From an editorial in the London Daily Telegraph for March 14: "Anguilla finds itself in the grip of a bunch of about 50 gangsters of American origins who want to set up gambling and other rackets."

  From the London Sun for March 13: "American gangsters linked with the Mafia have made approaches to Mr. Webster, hoping to set up gambling casinos on Anguilla."

  A headline in the Sun on March 14: "Gangsters 'Control Breakaway Islanders.' "