Westlake, Donald E - NF 01 (11 page)

(During the time the five were on
Anguilla
they very nearly got Jerry Gumbs, though only by indirection. Armed patrols
were spending every day searching for the five invaders, and one afternoon two
of these patrols spotted each other across
Burrowes
Park
, mistook one another for the
enemy, and both opened fire, though without hitting anything. Jerry Gumbs and
reporter David Smithers were at the airport nearby, and both went running
toward the sounds of shooting. It was late in the day, and both were wearing
white shirts; they quickly became the most visible moving objects in the park,
and both patrols at once started shooting at
them.
Gumbs and Smithers
jumped behind a tree until passions cooled and they could identify themselves.)

With the several five-man missions
having proved impossible, the Anguillans decided to hold a referendum on the
independence they'd already declared. They aimed to prove it was really a
popular rebellion, and to counter Colonel Bradshaw's charges that
Anguilla
was being terrorized by gunmen on the Peacekeeping Committee. (Considering what
had happened to Jerry Gumbs, the truth was just the other way around.)

Walter Hodge, Chairman of the
Peacekeeping Committee, explained the referendum, saying, "We are breaking
away from St. Kitts because we must. And through this act we know that we are
technically breaking away from
Britain
.
But by doing so—and becoming Independent—we hope to show the British Government
that we mean business. Then maybe Mrs. Judith Hart will take some notice of us
and perhaps we will get what we are asking for, and have asked for all along.
Our
Independence
will, we hope, be
our currency and we will have something with which to negotiate."

Independence
,
in other words, wasn't really independence at all, but was simply an effort to
switch sovereignties from poor and hated St. Kitts to wealthy and well-liked
Great
Britain
.

The referendum was announced for
July 11, and a proclamation was issued four days earlier to acquaint the people
with what was going on. There would be two questions on the referendum, both to
be answered either Yes or No:

"(1) Are you in favour of
secession from St. Kitts?

"(2) Are you in favour of
setting up the interim Government?"

The second one meant that the
Peacekeeping Committee didn't look upon itself as a government but would be
prepared to organize one if the people did vote for independence.
"Interim," of course, meant until such time as
Great
Britain
would take over or regular elections
could take place.

Although Anguilla has 75 per cent
literacy—high for the West Indies—symbols were used on the ballots in addition
to the printed words "Yes" and "No"; a picture of a hat
stood for "Yes," a boot stood for "No." I don't know why
they chose the hat to represent secession, but when I think of that lone
policeman's boot found on the beach at
Limestone
Bay
I think I know why they chose a
boot to symbolize a continued link with St. Kitts.

The regular Electoral Roll of
qualified voters from the last legal election was used to determine
eligibility, and just about every registered voter turned out. The results:
1,813 hats, 5 boots.

Although Paul Southwell had claimed
over ZIZ the night before that "terrorized" Anguillans would be
"forced to vote at gunpoint," it was probably the most thoroughly
observed and uncorrupted election in modern times. Reporters were there from
the major wire services and two British papers. In addition, a British
television unit from
Granada
's
World in Action
was in the area and spent the day on
Anguilla
filming the voting; the film was shown on British television the following
week, under the title "Duel in the Sun." A duel without guns,
however; none of the reporters present saw any voters being terrorized. What
they mostly saw was voters standing in line at the five polling places, smiling
happily in the hot sunshine and singing a new calypso that started, "Papa
Bradshaw, run you run." Never was a father so cheerfully disowned by his
children.

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

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 a
ttract 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 detainees 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.