Westlake, Donald E - NF 01 (23 page)

So independence was turning out to
be even more of a mess than the pro-British faction had suggested. On the one
side, a promoter like Jack Holcomb was being made the new nation's first
lawyer, and on the other side, some bored boys were practicing to be
vest-pocket terrorists. While Ronald Webster, with undiminished conviction in
his own infallibility, was going around quoting from the Bible, lashing out at
anybody who disagreed with him, and building a sixty-five-room hotel.

Where you see a jester a fool is not far off.

—Thomas Fuller,
Gnomologia

"The time spent has not been
wasted, and Mr. Whitlock will have gained a deep knowledge of the personalities
and problems involved, which will stand him in good stead on the final day of
reckoning." That's what the
Beacon
said in summing up the
deadlocked talks in
London
between
Webster and Bradshaw in October of 1968. The final day of reckoning for William
Whitlock came on
the eleventh of
March, 1969
, and it turned out the
Beacon
was wrong; the
time had been completely wasted insofar as giving Mr. Whitlock a deep knowledge
of the personalities and problems was concerned. Particularly the
personalities.

William Whitlock made two trips to
the
Caribbean
in the early part of 1969. The first had
been spent in talking with various Caribbean Governments, trying to find out
what solution would please all of
Anguilla
's neighbors.
Also on that trip, Whitlock talked with Colonel Bradshaw and one way or another
managed to get from the Colonel concessions he'd never been willing to make
before. There were a number of development schemes for St. Kitts, involving
British money, being considered in London at the time—updating Golden Rock
Airport to take jumbo jets, turning Frigate Bay into a tourist area—and one
doubts that Whitlock failed to make reference to these things while chatting
with Bradshaw. Whitlock himself later explained that Colonel Bradshaw had shown
a "statesmanlike recognition o
f the strength of
feeling in
Anguilla
," and that "because of
this statesmanlike recognition by the Government of St. Kitts,
Nevis
and
Anguilla
that there was this terrific feeling in
Anguilla
,
my proposals were agreed to by the State Government."

The Colonel agreed to let another
Interim Agreement be set up, except that this time the interim would be
open-ended, and instead of the Senior British Official advising the Island
Council, the British official would be in charge and the Island Council would
advise
him.
(This was the transfer of authority from St. Kitts to
Great
Britain
that the Anguillans had been
requesting for 147 years.) He also agreed to let the British arrange for an
Associated States' magistrate on the island, which would permit the Anguillans
to have the court they'd been wanting without forcing them to accept Bradshaw's
authority through Bradshaw's selection of the magistrate. And he further agreed
to let
Great Britain
handle the Land Registry, which was one of what Donald Chapman had called his
"trump cards."

Technically,
Anguilla
would remain part of the Associated State of St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla, but for
the indefinite future the administration would be handled totally by the
English.

Which was a good 90 per cent of
what
Anguilla
had been asking for.

So all that remained was for
Whitlock to go back home to
London
,
have the new proposals put down on paper in careful proper form, take the paper
to
Anguilla
, and show it to the people. That's all that
had to be done, and it doesn't seem as though anything could possibly go wrong.

That fellow seems to
me to possess but one idea, and that is a wrong one.

—Samuel Johnson

Anguilla
Rebels Fire
at British Minister By Ian Ball

St. Johns
,
Antigua
—Warning shots were fired at Mr. William Whit-lock,
50, Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, in a tense
confrontation with rebel leaders on Tuesday on the breakaway
Caribbean
island
of
Anguilla
in the
Leeward
Islands

London
Daily Telegraph
,
March 13, 1969

Now
what went wrong?

On March 9, Tony Lee arrived on
Anguilla
with his radio and radio operator, just as he had done in advance of Fisher and
Chapman. This time, he was in advance of Whitlock, and when he told Webster and
the Island Council that Whitlock was coming with new proposals, almost
everybody was delighted, including Webster. Independence had been a very bad
strain on Webster, whose increasing uncertainty had shown both in his inability
to control his followers and his growing dependence on Jack Holcomb and Wallace
Rey and a few others. He would be grateful for some reliable help if he could
take it without seeming to surrender.

Webster went so far as to have a
luncheon prepared for the Whitlock party. He had the best cars on the island
cleaned and polished and made ready for a motorcade that would take Whitlock
from the airport to Jerry Gumbs's Rendezvous Hotel, where the luncheon would be
held.

Whitlock was due at
noon
on the eleventh. The motorcade was there
at the airport, and so were Webster and the rest of the Island Co
uncil (which was now calling itself "the Provisional
Government"), all dressed up in morning coats and white gloves; they were,
after all, about to meet a representative of the Queen.

Also present were the usual crowd
of demonstrators, carrying posters reading "We Want Britain" and
"Welcome Mr. Whitlock" and "
Britain
not Bradshaw." And there was a bunch of school children, let out for the
occasion and just waiting to rip into a rendition of "God Save the Queen."

It still looks as though nothing
can go wrong.

The plane carrying Whitlock and his
five assistants was nearly an hour late, but that didn't much matter; planes
are almost always late in the
Caribbean
, and so are
people. As Whitlock stepped from the plane, everybody sang "God Save the
Queen" and there were smiles on all faces, on the faces of Whitlock and
his party and on the faces of the Anguillans there to greet him.

Everything is still okay.

Now Webster stepped forward and
shook hands with Whitlock. The two had gotten along well together the previous
fall in
London
, and in fact Webster
had subsequently written to Whitlock, thanking him for everything he had tried
to do on
Anguilla
's behalf. Meeting again, they
exchanged brief hellos, and Webster offered Whitlock the terminal steps from
which to address the crowd if he liked. Whitlock made a short speech, thanking
everybody and saying he'd brought along proposals that he thought they would
all like. The response was more cheers and another round of "God Save the
Queen."

Things are about to go to hell now.

Whitlock had brought with him some
leaflets explaining the new proposals, and he decided to distribute them at the
airport,
before
talking to the Provisional Government. "They were
distributed by members of my party," he said later, "and the crowd
scrambled eagerly for them."

They had to, considering the way
the leaflets were "distributed." Anthony Rushford, the Legal
Counsellor with the Whitlock group, described it this way: "It was like
handing out oranges at a children's party. Mr. Whitlock's private secretary
stood up and tried to scatter them over the crowd in a perfectly good-humored
way. They came down like great snowflakes. There was something quite comic
about it. Nothing derogatory."

Nothing derogatory. Handing out
oranges at a children's party; nothing derogatory. Something quite comic, but
nothing derogatory.

The
Anguilla Observer
described it this way: "Whitlock literally threw his pamphlets at the
crowd as a farmer might throw corn to fowl."

Ronald Webster later said of the
leaflets that Whitlock "threw them at the people."

There was also nothing derogatory
about Whitlock's refusal to ride in the cars Ronald Webster had had polished
and spruced up, nor in his refusal to have lunch with Webster.

The Whitlock party hung around the
airport for forty-five minutes while Tony Lee made some last-minute
arrangements to get them fed without forcing them to see Anguillans at table.
Lee set up an alternate lunch in the home of the manager of the Bank of America
(called the Howard House) and rounded up different cars, and the Whitlock
group, having finished its first lesson of the day in the arts of diplomacy,
went off to lunch.

Various British Government
officials later explained that this is always the way a British minister enters
other people's countries. "Protocol," they call it. The minister
arrives, shakes hands with whoever among the "locals" has come to
greet him, and then goes off for lunch with the Senior British Official (in
this case Tony Lee) to get an "appreciation" from him before talking
with local leaders. But
is
that protocol? On his earlier trip through
the
Caribbean
did Whitlock really leave one Government
official after another standing around at one island airport after another,
with nothing to show for his day but a handshake and a leaflet and egg on his
face? If that's protocol, give me rudeness.

Whitlock was later to say he hadn't
known about the Webster lunch, but surely
somebody
at the airport in
those embarrassing forty-five minutes must have mentioned the luncheon and
pointed to the very shiny cars out there in the sunlight. *

Did Whitlock think Webster and the
other Council members always wore white gloves? In the
Caribbean
?

It is now approaching
two o'clock
, and the Whitlock party—including
Tony Lee—has gone off to the bank manager's house for lunch. Whitlock intended
to meet the Provisional Government at the Administrative Building at four
o'clock, but there's some question as to whether anybody told the Provisional
Government or not.

Which raises the question of Tony
Lee's part in all this. He knew the island and its leaders by now better than
any other Englishman, and his role in this day's activities was essentially
liaison between the British and the Anguillans, but the depth of ignorance that
each side showed about the other's plans and attitudes makes one wonder. Maybe
Tony Lee actually did fail to give Whitlock an accurate picture of the
circumstances on the island. Or maybe Whitlock thought so little of Lee—a
"diplomatic mercenary," as Sir John Rodgers later called him—that he
didn't bother to listen. Or maybe it was both, with Lee soft-pedaling anything
that would conflict with Whitlock's preconceptions and Whitlock busily giving
him less than half an ear. One recalls that Lee's reports about
Anguilla
had been ignored in
London
for
something over a year.

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.