Outposts

by Simon Winchester

  This was her second visit. She had had some dresses made, along the lines of those worn by Josephine. A hairdresser had shaped her blonde hair in ringlets, just like the most famous painting of Josephine. And thus armed and fashioned, this otherwise normal young lady from San Mateo would glide around Longwood, or sit on the empty grave beneath the willows with wildflowers in her hand. She would read, and dream, and compose odd poems about the inhumanity of Sir Hudson Lowe and Britons involved in the defeat and humiliation of her hero.

  She had ample reason to dislike the Government a few weeks after I first met her. An order was issued from the Castle dismissing her from the island, and though she hid in a clump of bushes, two policemen dragged her out and forced her on to a ship. I saw her in London a few weeks later: she was deeply hurt, and considered she had suffered as awful an injustice as had Bonaparte. The islanders had a soft spot for her, too, and were sorry to see her go. ‘Pretty girl,’ said the old man who drove me around. ‘A bit touched. But ’armless enough. Very American, I s’pose.’

  The Crown took over all the running of the island in 1834; of all the disasters attendant upon St Helena’s history, this was quite probably the worst. None of the islanders wanted the change; most were appalled at the cavalier way King William’s men dismissed faithful Company servants, slashed budgets, reduced the status of the island to a mere cipher in the grand colonial roll. Hundreds left the island for good, and settled in Cape Colony, or came to England. The Governors chosen to rule on the Sovereign’s behalf—no longer, that is, as representative of the Court of Directors—were henceforth the pygmies of Empire, paid less money, and less attention, than any other Excellency in any other colony. (The Governor of Nigeria by tradition always received the highest salary; the man in Jamestown Castle took home about a sixth as much.)

  The tradition of exile and imprisonment of Her Majesty’s enemies, evidently spurred on by the success of Napoleon’s banishment, took hold; the Chief of the Zulus stayed there with his two uncles, and learned to play hymns on the piano; 6,000 Boer prisoners, including General Cronje, were put into huge prisoner-of-war camps up on the high meadows. Both groups evidently loved the island and its inhabitants, and one Boer baker was still alive and working in Jamestown sixty years after the end of the war. There was an elderly Zulu living on the island in the 1980s. The prison industry did brief wonders for the Saints’ economy: it was said that during the Boer War the place was crowded, rich and extraordinarily happy. But then the Boers went away, peace returned, and the old habits of neglectful superintendence once more held sway.

  There were all manner of brave but brief agricultural experiments. St Helena coffee was briefly famous, particularly as Napoleon had said he liked it. A London firm was sent samples: ‘we find it of very superior quality and flavour, and if cultivated to any extent would no doubt amply repay the grower.’ It wasn’t. Admiral Elliot ordered cinchona trees to be planted, and for a while the island produced quinine. But later Governors wearied of the idea, and the plantation was allowed to run wild.

  Only New Zealand flax did well. The huge plants, with their spiky leaves that often grew ten feet long, covered thousands of the island’s upland acres. The Colonial and Fibre Company built the first mill in 1874: seven more were put up over the next twenty years, and a rope factory was built in the 1920s. The familiar whine of the flax scutchers, stripping the long fibres from the leaves, echoed across the hills for half a century. At its peak the noble Phormium tenax gave employment to 400 men, and the little factories made cloth, rope, tow and hemp, which was sold to the British Post Office to make string for tying up bundles of letters. A fifth of the hemp went to make Admiralty ropes—the Manual of Seamanship still quotes the breaking strain of St Helena hemp.

  But this reliance on the flax industry proved, ultimately, as injurious to the St Helenian economy as was the making of lime juice to Montserrat or the milling of sugar in Barbados—too much of a concentration in one product meant, inevitably, that the colony became a prisoner of its customers’ whims. In this particular case the fatal day came when the Post Office decided it would be cheaper to use nylon twine for its bundles, and abandoned its contract with the faraway Saints. At about the same time the world price of flax and hemp dropped—St Helena’s crop no longer had a ready market.

  But that was not the only reason. No one disputes that the Colonial Office must take the responsibility for its lamentable decision to turn St Helena into a one-crop island; but its sorry management of the finances of that crop contributed also to the economic disaster that followed, as a brief explanation will show.

  Fluctuations in the price of hemp gravely affected the island, and it was agreed after the Second World War that the Government would help. It did so in a cunning manner. If the market price fell below a certain level, the millers would receive a subsidy. If it rose above the level, however, the Government would charge export duty. The net result was that more duty was paid in than subsidy was paid out—so the Government’s ‘support’ was carried out at no effective cost.

  Nevertheless, the subsidy was regarded as irksome—not so much by the Castle, who tried to support the sole industry, but by London. On New Year’s Eve 1965 the then Governor, John Field, called the two major mill-owners to his office: from the next day the basic wage of government workers on the island would be doubled (to two pounds fifty a week—well below the poverty line, and about a tenth of the wage then paid in England), and to help finance the increase, and at the insistence of London, the flax subsidy would be removed, instantly, and with no right of appeal.

  The industry collapsed. The Government had no other ideas for the mills, and one by one, they all closed. The last scutcher sounded its rasping note in midsummer 1966. The Foreign Office, at whose behest the industry essentially collapsed, was accused of ‘grave irresponsibility’ by one miller; but appeared to show no remorse.

  Coffee, quinine, flax—and shipping; a litany of failures and mishaps, poor planning, bad decision-making, the steel-eyed rule of uncaring accounts-men and faraway time-servers. Nothing could be done, of course, to help the island when the Suez Canal opened in 1869 and the steamers bound for India no longer called at this convenient mid-ocean coaling station; when the Navy switched to oil the need for St Helena diminished further, and the last vessel recorded as having taken on some tons of Welsh steam coal for some Imperial adventure, or duty, was in the 1920s. Even before that there seemed to the War Office no real point in maintaining a garrison at the top of Ladder Hill once the coal was gone and the island’s strategic value was devalued.

  And nothing could prevent the Union Castle line—‘Intermediate Vessels carrying First and Tourist class passengers are despatched at intervals from London for Cape Town, proceeding via Grand Canary and with calls with Mails at Ascension and St Helena’—from withdrawing its service. There had been two cargo vessels, one each way each month. But they were cancelled in 1967, and the final lifeline, the Cape Mail Service, was ended a decade later. Since then a single ship run by a firm in Cornwall, helped by a huge and grudgingly given government subsidy, has provided the colony’s only means of physical contact with the outside.

  All the enginework of Empire remains on St Helena. In the Castle there are vast airy rooms hung with the oil paintings of past Governors—Robert Jenkins (of the War of Jenkins’ Ear—there is a plaque on his cottage at Sandy Bay), Charles Dallas, Sir Harry Cordeaux, Sir Edward Hay Drummond-Hay. There are shelves of leather-bound books of great age, rubbed with beeswax and fragrant still. Clocks tick gently and when they strike, the booms shake the bougainvillaea and the banana fronds beyond the ever-open windows. There are great silver inkwells and blotters to match; in His Excellency’s office there is a spyhole so that his assistants—such as the Colonial Treasurer, the last to hold that title in the Empire that remains—can see if he may be disturbed. One expects periwigs and vellum, sealing-wax and quills, and the courtly language of Victoria’s diplomats, and the prosy essays to the Court of D
irectors. If there is a telex (and there must be, since the Foreign Office lists a number, 202) its vulgar presence is well concealed.

  Plantation House, where Governors have lived since the East India Company built the mansion in 1792, is a gem—perhaps the loveliest house available for any senior British diplomat anywhere, though it is neither as large, nor as smartly furnished as some of the residences elsewhere, as Paris, Singapore, or Vienna. When I arrived the Deputy Governor was busily moving in; His Excellency had departed for home leave, and his Deputy wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to spend a few weeks in the place. ‘Best thing about the job,’ he said. ‘Pay’s rotten, as you know. But did you ever see such a perfect place as this?’

  Visitors—if invited, and deemed at all important—arrive by black Jaguar (a silver crown in place of a number plate, and a small Union flag with the St Helena arms on the fly), which whispers up the gravel drive scattering the four tortoises which are, invariably, busily munching up the lawn. The tortoises are named Emma, Myrtle, Freda and Jonathan, the last—the biggest—said by experts to be 255 years old. Whether he has attained that great age—and he is blind, and staggers more than tortoises usually do—he is documented as having munched across the lawns for at least a hundred summers, and doubtless did the same on lawns in Mauritius for some years before. A Rothschild tried to buy one to take home, but was refused, whereupon the animal he wanted threw itself over a cliff. But however Methuselan the qualities of the Plantation House Quartet, they are not, by St Helena standards, as big as some of the local turtles. Many islanders remember an 800-pounder being landed—it provided soup for two regiments for three days, and the shell was used by a soldier as a roof for a new house he was building for his family.

  Plantation House, staffed by a dozen servants decked out in starched uniforms of white and sky blue, is quiet and fragrant. As in all colonial government houses there are portraits of the Queen and Prince Philip, and a photograph of the Prime Minister; there are acres of polished oak floors and polished mahogany tables, of silver salvers and Spode china dinner sets, each with a crown and a dark blue rim. The older rooms have brass plaques above each doorway—Governor’s Room, Admiral’s Room, General’s Room—dating from the Company days, and there is one room with a plaque saying ‘Chaos’ outside, and which is said to house a friendly poltergeist who hurls chairs about at night.

  There is also a quite magnificent library, built by Sir Hudson Lowe during Napoleon’s stay—presumably to occupy his mind with other than the vexing matter of his dangerous neighbour. Distinguished visitors were often asked to address St Helenian society in the library: Joshua Slocum, who called in on his solo circumnavigation in his tiny boat Spray, recalled meeting Paul Kruger in Pretoria. When he told him he was going around the world Kruger snorted and said, ‘You mean across the world, young man!’ The crusty old Boer still believed the world was flat.

  Every nut and bolt of the Imperial machine remains in St Helena, preserved in the amber of her isolation. There is a colonial policeman, in charge of a police force known as the Toys. The last chief came from Birmingham, and by marrying a local girl quite scandalised the island Establishment (though the Attorney-General did the same, and promptly took the stunningly pretty Saint off to a new posting on the Caribbean island of Anguilla). One advantage of the chief’s marriage is that he became wholly accepted by the island community, to the point of being given a nickname. Islanders take nicknames quite seriously: there was a Conger Kidneys, a Cheese, a Fishcake, a Biffer and a Bumper. The police chief, for reasons perhaps better known to his wife, was called Pink Balls.

  There is a fully-fledged bishop, too, and a cathedral that was prefabricated in England and brought out to the island on a ship. The bishop presides over the smallest diocese in the Anglican communion (though the largest in area—it extends all the way up to Ascension Island, and while only having 7,000 souls, looks after an almighty stretch of ocean). He and his priests, who are recruited in England for thirty-month contracts, seem not the slightest bit reluctant to marry off young islanders who quite cheerfully bring a baby or two along to the wedding ceremony. Half the children born on the island are, technically, illegitimate. The islanders who dote upon all children call them ‘spares’, and if they are old enough to take part in the bacchanal that usually follows an island wedding, are welcomed like old and much-favoured relatives. Since the ceremony legitimises them they, too, have something to celebrate.

  Both police and church worry about the growing crime rate. Some blame the fact that many islanders now work on Ascension, and come back full of American ideas (many of the jobs on the dependency being for the US Navy, or NASA, or PanAm). Some say video cassette recorders, of which there are a number on the island, bring evil in their train. Whatever the cause, there has been a dismal increase in misbehaviour. There have been three murders since 1980 (the previous killing was eighty years before; in some intervening years so little crime was committed that the magistrates were presented with white silk gloves as a token of island innocence). Murder trials, almost without precedent in living memory, are major events: a judge has to come from Gibraltar, defence lawyers must be brought out from England, and on conviction the prisoner must be taken to Parkhurst to serve his time—the island prison being too small and insecure. The St Helena Governor petitions the Home Office in London under the terms of the Colonial Prisoners (Removal) Act.

  All the institutions that provide a link with ‘home’ are lovingly nurtured. There are Boy Scouts (the 1st Jamestown Troop, shorts still worn, and socks with flashes) and their Guides, an Armistice Day parade, an Agricultural Show, a St Helena Band and a specially composed St Helena march. And there is cricket, played on the only piece of level ground on the island, about the size of a postage stamp (one of the island’s only ways of making money is through the sale of stamps) and with deep ravines on all four sides. (They say that if they could find another piece of level ground they would build an airfield, which might solve the island’s problems overnight.) The ravines have caused problems in the past: during one match a fielder, running backwards for a high ball, fell off the edge and was killed. The scorecard, as laconically as befits the sport, recorded his passing by writing ‘Retired, Dead’. The Governor of the day built a fence along the boundary, and a ball that falls down the cliff scores six.

  And along with the trappings of Empire, so also a real affection for its leaders. It is rare to find a house in St Helena, no matter how humble a shack, without its picture of the Queen, or the Queen Mother, or Princess Diana and Prince Charles, pinned over the mantel. Sometimes it is an official portrait, bought from Solomon’s store; more usually it is a gravure print torn carefully from the likes of Woman’s Own. Once I called at a small house on Piccolo Hill and asked the woman, in passing, if she had a portrait. She reddened, and looked briefly terror-struck. ‘I’m terrible sorry but I’ve not,’ she stammered. ‘I had no idea they’d be sending anybody up to check.’ It took some time to convince her I was not from the Castle, testing the loyalty of Her Majesty’s most distant subjects.

  In every apparent way, then, St Helena is, or seems to be, British. The people, from whatever ethnic origin, all sound like friends of Sam Weller; they have their own version of the BBC relayed down to them each day; they get the Telegraph and the Observer at the local library; there are still Humbers and Veloxes and Minis parked on the streets; people eat marmalade, and fishcakes, and stop in mid-afternoon for tea.

  But there are two signal differences between the citizenry of St Helena and Her Majesty’s subjects back home in Britain.

  The Saints, first, are poor. There is no work for them, barring a few jobs in the vestigial fishing industry (an industry which by rights should take off—the island is surrounded by rich fishing grounds, and one day I sat next to a man with a bamboo pole and a hook and who pulled tunny out of the sea at the rate of one every two seconds). Almost all capable males, aside from those who go to Ascension, or crew ships away at sea, are employed
by the Government—digging holes and filling them in again, in effect.

  London complains that its aid to the island amounts to about a thousand pounds per head—more than to anywhere else on earth (except the Falkland Islands since the 1982 war). But in effect most of that money is paid out in wages—and, by British standards, derisory wages they are, too. I spent some time with a man who lived in a tiny cottage overlooking Sandy Bay. His family of ten and his eight cats lived with him. He worked as a labourer for the Public Works Department, and was paid twenty-six pounds a week—‘hardly enough’ he admitted. The nearest shop was five miles away, and sometimes one of his daughters walked the entire way barefoot. Living, he said, was ‘very hard’.

  And yet he was loyal, did have a picture of Prince Charles hanging in the living room, thought the Falklands War was an excellent thing and was sorry not to have gone himself. He would have done anything to fight for Her Majesty, to show how British and loyal he was. The only thing was…

  And then he raised the second point—a point which came up again and again during my stay. Why—just why—were the islanders not counted as Britons by the Government back home? The Falklanders and the Gibraltarians were: why not the Saints? ‘These are not primitive tribesmen or coolies,’ as the South African, Lawrence Green, put it two decades ago. ‘These are a unique and truly multi-racial community of considerable natural intelligence and loyalty…’ So why does Britain not take them in—more precisely, why, by the passage of the British Nationality Act, did Britain seek to exclude them from the privileges of Britishness, and yet still rule them?

  After all, islanders would keep mentioning to me—the Charter was our guarantee. The Charter promised we would have rights.