Westlake, Donald E - NF 01 (3 page)

There is no geographical connection
between St. Kitts and
Anguilla
of any kind, nor is there
any social connection between them. St. Kitts's population is limited almost
entirely to upper-class whites and lower-class blacks while
Anguilla
has a multiracial population limited almost entirely to poor middle-class
property owners. (As an Anguillan said to me, "They call us poor, but you
have to go to St. Kitts to see a filthy slum." I saw it, and it was
filthy. The water supply is a communal curbside faucet every block, and the
sewage disposal is a gutter down the middle of the street.)

There is only one connection
between St. Kitts and
Anguilla
. On the maps and in the
file drawers back in
England
,
St. Kitts is the closest British colony to the British colony of
Anguilla
.

Two years after St. Kitts and
Anguilla
became one presidency in the Leeward Islands Federation, the Anguillans
complained to
England
again, saying the Kittitians were "utter strangers to us" and
"this legislative dependence on St. Kitts can in no sense be called a
legislative union, it has operated and continues to operate most injuriously
against us, and is mutually disliked."

That complaint went the way of the
rest. In fact, when another administrative change was made nine years later
(governments never last very long in the Caribbean), the paper linkage was
formed even more tightly by combining the two islands with a third island,
Nevis (which
is
the closest island to St. Kitts, which
does
have
somewhat similar geography, and which
does
have a somewhat similar
population), under a single presidency. But the portents were even worse than
the action; the legal name for the combination of
Anguilla
and
St. Kitts and Nevis
was
St. Christopher-Nevis
.
Not until seventy years later, in 1951, was the word
Anguilla
added to the name of the colony into which the
island
of
Anguilla
had willy-nilly been
forced.

By the end of the Second World War,
the British held several hundred islands in the
Caribbean
,
most of them small and unpopulated, all of them grouped into fourteen separate
political entities. There were also two small colonies on the mainlands of
South and
Central America
(
British Guiana
and
British Honduras
) and the islands of
Bermuda
off the North American coast.

In 1958, the British Government
attempted to unload practically all its
Caribbean
holdings, ten island colonies stuffed together into something resembling a
loosely packed snowball thrown at a passing bus. This casserole was called the
West
Indies Federation
, and it included
Antigua
,
Barbados
,
Dominica
,
Grenada
,
Jamaica
(with the
Cayman Islands
and the Turks & Caicos
Islands),
Montserrat
,
St.
Christopher-Nevis-Anguilla
,
St. Lucia
,
St. Vincent
and Trinidad-Tobago. It also included a lot
of water, since the Federation was spread out over an expanse of
Caribbean
Sea
1,600 miles wide and 800 miles long. Jamaica and the Cayman
Islands were a full thousand miles from the rest of the Federation, separated
from the others not only by all that water but also by such trivia as Haiti,
the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The Turks
& Caicos Islands were a little north of everybody else, the other side of
Puerto
Rico
and
Cuba
.
Spotted amid the remaining nine were a half dozen colonies of
France
and
Holland
and the
United
States
. Between
Jamaica
and
Trinidad
lay fifteen hundred miles of open water,
with nothing in it at all.

This wasn't the first federation
dreamed up by the British Colonial Office, but it was certainly the biggest.
The Colonial Office loved the idea of neat packages, and federations make a
charmingly neat package on paper. As Lord Caradon told me, "They've not
done so well, federations, so far. I think they'll do better in future. I don't
write off the federation idea." Lord Caradon, then Sir Hugh Foot, was
Governor of Jamaica while the
West Indies Federation
was
being organized and is generally considered a chief architect of the Nigerian
Federation; his faith does seem to die pretty hard. Particularly since, of the
half-dozen federations put together by the British since the end of the Second
World War, not one has remained intact.

The
West Indies
Federation
began, as federations do, with a conference, this one
held at
Montego Bay
in 1947. A Standing Closer
Association Committee was formed to study the idea of mixing and matching all
these islands and to work up a constitution for the result.

It may be appropriate here to
mention the old description of a camel as a horse designed by a committee, and
to suggest that perhaps a federation is a country designed by a committee.

The conference eventually came up
with a report saying the federation idea was a good one, and the report was
submitted to a second conference, this one in
London
in 1953. The second conference was pleased with the first conference's report,
and in turn submitted it to the island governments involved.
Jamaica
,
by a unanimous vote in both houses, was the first to accept the recommendation,
and all the other islands promptly followed suit.

(The two mainland colonies,
British
Honduras
and
British Guiana
, the latter now
Guyana
, were
also invited in but declined, for private reasons of their own, not because the
Federation struck them as an unworkable idea. There is a complex racial balance
in those two lands, particularly in
Guyana
;
federation would mean unrestricted immigration of blacks from the overcrowded
islands, which would destroy the balance forever. A tie to the mainland had
been put forward as one of the primary advantages of federation. This tie was
now proved to be impossible, but the Federation lunged forward anyway.)

A third conference took place, in
London
again, in 1956, and at this conference the irrevocable decision to federate
took place.

Now a year passes, in which
everybody argues about where the capital should be. A full year. Finally, after
enough bitterness and squabbling to convince anybody but a conference that
these people are never going to live together, it is decided to build the
capital in
Trinidad
. No reason why not.

Princess Margaret officiated at the
first session of the West Indies Parliament on
April 22, 1958
. It was planned that for the next four
years the new nation would be half-free and half-colony, with Mother Britain
keeping one hand on the reins while the boys got used to running things
themselves. As of
May 31, 1962
,
the
West Indies Federation
would be a completely
independent nation, and
Great Britain
would have rid itself of ten colonies at one fell swoop.

But it didn't turn out that way.
The first thing that happened, there was trouble about the capital.
Chaguaramas, the site on
Trinidad
they'd finally chosen,
was leased to the
United States
for a naval base and the
United States
wouldn't vacate. So after all that bickering about the capital, and finally
coming to a decision, everybody had to go back and start all over again.

Then, on
September 19, 1961
,
Jamaica
had a referendum; should it stay in the Federation or get out? The decision was
strongly to get out, which
Jamaica
promptly did. The first island in became the first island out.

Trinidad
was
the second, early in 1962. And on
May
31, 1962
, the date originally planned as Independence Day, the
West
Indies Federation
was dissolved.

And they never did find a site for
the capital.

The
West Indies
Federation
wasn't a total loss, however. The practice had been
good for the bigger islands, and in August of 1962 both
Jamaica
and Trinidad-Tobago became independent. So the British had at least managed to
cut their colonial responsibilities by two.

But that was a far cry from the ten
they'd been trying for, so the British came right back in again, with a
new
idea— a federation.

This time the federation would be
composed of the "Little Eight"—
Antigua
,
Barbados
,
Dominica
,
Grenada
,
Montser-rat,
St. Christopher-Nevis-Anguilla
,
St.
Lucia
and
St. Vincent
.
Conferences were held, of course, both on
Barbados
and in
London
, and on
November 1, 1964
, a cheerful
announcement was made that a new improved
West Indies Federation
would appear some time in 1965. It didn't, though, and on
November 30, 1966
,
Barbados
went off by itself and became an independent nation, and then there were seven.

Back in 1960, during the half-life
of the
West Indies Federation
, the Anguillans had asked
through their elected member of the St. Kitts Legislative Council if they could
please be separated from St. Kitts; they were ignored. On
January 22, 1965
, while the "Little
Eight" conferences were going on, seventeen leading citizens of
Anguilla
signed a request that their island "remain outside the proposed Federation
of the
Eastern Caribbean
and be administered from the
Colonial Office"; they were ignored.

The requests from
Anguilla
for political separation from St. Kitts had never stopped since 1822, but from
1958 on they became ever more frequent, more urgent and more plaintive. General
independence was in the air, and the Anguillans knew it and did not want
independence from
Great Britain
if it meant they would remain under the authority of St. Kitts. And the reason
for that was mostly a man named Robert Llewellyn Bradshaw.

Robert Bradshaw is a Kittitian,
born in 1916 and destined to be a cane cutter on the plantations like the
generations before him. In a special report on the Leeward and
Windward
islands
in October of 1968, the
London
Times
gave the background that altered Robert Bradshaw s destiny:

A
fairly consistent pattern can be seen in the islands. Political awareness began
in the late 1930s, when depression in world commodity prices, particularly
sugar, hit the whole
West
Indies
hard. With the help
of the British Labour Party and trade unions the workers came together. For the
first time there was a basis for popular power. Mr. Bradshaw, of St. Kitts—the
doyen of island politicians—and Mr. Bird, of
Antigua
, rose in this manner. They were union organizers and spoke for
labour—the cane cutters, the dock workers and public employees. This became
general in the islands, and today most of the ruling parties have Labour
somewhere in their title.

Bradshaw's first job was in the St.
Kitts sugar factory, where he formed the island's first union. He came to real
prominence in 1948, when he was thirty-two years old and led the first major
sugar workers' strike anywhere in the
Caribbean
. It
blossomed into sixteen weeks of rioting and ended with some small concessions
gained from the plantation owners. With universal suffrage on all the islands,
union men were moving into government, and in 1952 Bradshaw became St. Kitts's
Minister of Trade and Production. In 1956 he ran for Premier, got all the
sugar-worker votes, and won.

There are, however, no sugar
workers on
Anguilla
, which may be one of the reasons
Bradshaw got practically no votes from
Anguilla
. This
move may have been both democratic and honest on the Anguillans' part, but it
wasn't very healthy.

Bradshaw was a strong supporter of
the
West Indies Federation
. In 1958, at its inception,
he won a seat in the Federal Parliament, turning over the reins of Kittitian
government to his Deputy Premier, Caleb Azariah Paul Southwell, a burly man who
is not a Kittitian by birth, but a Dominican. Bradshaw became Federal Minister
of Finance and a vice-president of the West Indies Federal Labour Party, but
when the
West Indies Federation
crumpled he returned to
St. Kitts and eventually took his old job back, with Paul Southwell reverting
to the Number Two spot.

The key to Robert Bradshaw may
simply be that he wants to be loved. A small and slender man, with a huge
moustache that he seems to have rented from Groucho Marx, Bradshaw likes to
dress up in ways that have been called "outlandish," "odd"
and "quaint." He has been known to appear in public in gaiters, in
buckle shoes, in wing collars, in powdered wigs. He will take any opportunity
to slap on a top hat. He wears uniforms the envy of every doorman along Central
and Hyde parks, though according to the
London
Daily Express
he also "delights in donning British military khaki and
strutting around the indoor lily pond at Government Headquarters with pistol
and peaked cap." Wearing one or another of his costumes, he likes to drive
around his domain in his canary-yellow 1935 Rolls-Royce, occasionally tending his
moustache with its special golden brush. For years he had on his office wall a
cartoon showing John Foster Dulles on the toilet, with the caption: "The
only man in
Washington
who knows
what he is doing."