Westlake, Donald E - NF 01 (30 page)

From
Puerto Rico
,
Webster went on to
New York
to
confront Lord Caradon, who agreed to go back to
Anguilla
later that week. But before he got there, things on the island took —incredible
though it may seem—a turn for the worse.

The British suddenly decided to
deport Dr. Spector, since he was an osteopath and osteopathy is not an adequate
medical credential under British law. Why the British decided to throw a
burning stick on that particular sheet of gunpowder at that particular moment
defies, like everything else in British behavior toward
Anguilla
,
rational analysis.

It was also defied by the
Anguillans. They met Dr. Spec-tor and his deporters at the airport, took the doctor
away with them, and hid him elsewhere on the island. This was not done without
scuffling, and during the scuffle
Commissioner Way
knocked a microphone out of the hand of BBC correspondent Barry Sayles and
ordered
him
to leave the island. Sayles declined and lodged a formal
complaint against
Commissioner Way
.
So now everybody was fighting with everybody.

Webster returned to the island on
April 10 and arrived in the middle of yet another blowup. The British had
brought in a magistrate to get the courts moving again, and the magistrate they
brought in was—inevitably, I suppose—a Kittitian. His connection was with the
judiciary of the Associated States and not with the St. Kitts Government, but
it was another of those subtleties hard for the Anguillan eye to see.

When the magistrate showed up at
court, there was more scuffling. Detective Inspector Harry Nicholls, he who had
greeted Jack Holcomb, was hit in the head with a brick. The five defendants in
the minor cases that were supposed to be tried that day were hustled away by
the crowd, which also nailed the courthouse door shut. There were no legal
proceedings that day.

Later the same day, Dr. Spector
quietly left the island of his own accord.

The anti-Lee tone of the
demonstrations was building up again. Lee had been put in charge of the island,
he and Webster had clashed head on, and everything that happened was seen to be
Lee's responsibility. The clamor to be rid of him was building and building.
Lee told a reporter, "It's personal. They are after me for personal
reasons."

They were also, like the British,
fighting among themselves. One of the strongest pro-British Anguillans was
Walter Hodge, first Chairman of the Peacekeeping Committee and still the
island's Treasurer; twice crowds tried to beat him up and Webster had to step
in and protect him. But Webster's control was slipping again; even a messiah
can't keep the Anguillans in check forever.

Which everybody discovered the next
day, when Lord Caradon arrived and the crowd wouldn't let Webster talk to him.
The people had come to the conclusion it was impossible for an Anguillan leader
to talk to the British without being either conned or sold out. So they took
upon themselves the simple solution of keeping their leader from talking to the
British. Lord Caradon went to the
Administrative
Building
on the island, but when
Webster tried to go in and meet him the crowd wouldn't let him do it. Instead,
they surrounded the building and chanted, "Lee must go. Lee must go."
Finally police and troops managed to get Webster through the crowd, and he met
briefly with Lord Caradon. Webster told Lord Caradon that Lee really did have
to go. Lord Caradon said, "It's impossible to have talks in a situation
like this."

The snarl in the situation was not
the crowd, though, or even Tony Lee. It was Ronald Webster's lack of
understanding of the diplomatic meaning of the word "understanding."

Once again, as in
Barbados
,
as with Fisher and Chapman, as with every British diplomat who'd ever tried to
deal with
Anguilla
, diplomacy looked very much like the
practice that when done in conjunction with selling a used car is called fraud.
The British hand had once again been quicker than Ronald Webster's eye, but
Webster doesn't take it like a good sport when he finds he's just been razzle-dazzled.
He gets angry, he digs his heels in, he refuses to go along. As he said at one
point, in what must be the most deeply felt remark of the whole affair,
"You can't fathom British diplomacy. They use it to hit you."

Webster, like the crowd, deals in
simpler things. Such as that Lee must go.

The
^-
crowd was very
strongly out to make this point to Lord Caradon. Having so far prevented
Webster from meeting with him, the crowd then got into cars and trucks and
headed east out the road to Tony Lee's house at Sandy Ground. Lee was home,
guarded by one policeman. More than two hundred people showed up to chant
"Lee must go" and shake their fists. A few of them grappled with the
policeman, knocked him down, cut his forehead by hitting him with a stick, and
bit him. Possibly that was done in retaliation by the woman bitten by Tony Lee.

The policeman broke free and ran up
the stairs to the front door of the house, where he pulled out a revolver; up
till this point, the publicity had been full of "unarmed"
London
policemen taking the places of the armed paratroopers, but this particular
policeman, Constable Jack Gooday of
Essex
, had a gun on
him. It's probably just as well he did.

Constable Gooday and his pistol
held off the crowd until Marines were landed twenty minutes later from H.M.S.
Rhyl,
another frigate.

The people had spoken; so did
Webster. "The British representative must go, the troops must go, the
regulations must go, the police must go and Lee must go."

Lord Caradon at last responded. On
the thirteenth, before departing once more, he announced that Lee would shortly
be going on "leave"—"well-deserved leave," as he inevitably
put it—and his place would be taken temporarily by John Cumber, a career
Foreign Office administrator.

Nobody believed it was temporary.
Even Lord Caradon didn't work very hard to make anybody believe it. But in
London
,
Michael Stewart muddied the waters again by saying, "Mr. Lee has not been
fired. He will shortly be going on leave, during which time his place will be
taken by a deputy. But after his leave he will be returning to
Anguilla
."

Lee's response to this, when
reporters asked him what he thought about the idea that he'd be coming back
after his leave, was typical: "It's news to me." So was Webster's:
"It won't work."

But Webster wasn't pleased about
John Cumber either: "There's no difference between them." But in the
end he said he'd try to cooperate with him. "I don't want to embarrass Her
Majesty's Government too much because we may have to depend on these same
troops one day," he said.

He also said the demonstrations on
the island were getting too violent and he thought it time to calm everybody
down and try to make peace between the different factions of Anguillans. It was
the kind of sudden switch the British had come to expect from Webster, except
that it was rare for the switch to be in a direction they could be pleased
about.

On the fourteenth of April, Adam
Raphael made this report in the
Guardian:

Low
comedy made a welcome return to
Anguilla
today when the British authorities tried for the
fourth time to hold a magistrate's court. Most of the world's press was in
attendance, filling the rock-hard benches of the island's tiny courtroom, but
as none of the defendants bothered to turn up once again the proceedings were short.

After
Sergeant Ryan . . . boomed out the names of the defendants . . . the
magistrate, Mr. Roderick Donaldson, on loan from
St. Vincent
, strode into court dressed in a small black ceremonial vest . . . The
press stood, the magistrate nodded his appreciation, and he then strode out
again.

J. W. M. Thompson wrote in
Spectator
for April 18:

There
begins to be something almost uncanny about the manner in which nothing goes
right with our
Caribbean
adventure. The lesson that good intentions are not
enough in these matters has never been more plainly made. It is hard even to
laugh at this week's mess-up over the future of the wretched Mr. Tony Lee: it
is farcical, yes, but shaming too. It's bad enough being confused about the
identity of the supposed Mafia agents and about whether our intervention was
meant to bring down Mr. Webster or support him; but to slither into public
disagreement over the future of our own man is really a bit too much.

And on
Anguilla
,
Webster was actually making efforts to lead his people—not with total success.
After he'd made a strong plea for people to calm down and stop demonstrating
—explaining to them that the troops surely wouldn't leave until the threat of
violence had ended—a group of youngsters surrounded a nearby police car and
tried to overturn it.

Still, the shouting at Tony Lee
died down, and Webster even had friendly meetings with Cumber and Lee both
present. The Anguillans had what they wanted and were just beginning to realize
it. They had wanted to be a colony, and that's what they were, though the word
wasn't being used. Army engineers were working on the roads, specialists in
development were coming from
England
to talk about water and electricity and schooling and all the rest of it, and
Anguilla
's
relationship to
Great Britain
was precisely that of a self-gov-erning colony to its mother country.

On
April 20, 1969
, Tony Lee was given a farewell dinner by
his remaining friends on the island. There aren't that many restaurants to
choose from on
Anguilla
; the dinner was held at Jerry
Gumbs's Rendezvous Hotel.

Jerry Gumbs was there, though not
as a guest; he had been one of the most loudly anti-Lee people on the island.
His role at Tony Lee's farewell dinner was that of host. He fussed around the
twenty-four guests until they got settled and then went outside to talk with a
London
Times
reporter. He told the reporter that
Great
Britain
should be prepared to deal as equals
with Ronald Webster and not try to boss him. "That is the way I work with
Mr. Webster/' Jerry Gumbs said. "Humility has been my lifelong
companion."

People must not do things for fun. We are not here for fun. There is
no reference to fun in any Act of Parliament.

—Sir Alan Patrick
Herbert,
Uncommon Law

Defending himself in Parliament,
Michael Stewart tried among other things to pass the buck to the other
Caribbean
Commonwealth
countries: "We
were bound to take on board the views of our friends in the
Caribbean
and bound to take action in the way they wished."

But Mr. Stewart's friends in the
Caribbean
were not unanimous in their applause. Prime Minister Hugh Shearer of
Jamaica
said he was absolutely opposed to what had happened: "The Anguillan
situation involved the right of every state to self-determination. We will not
support the Government in any course that is contrary to basic rights in
keeping with the charter of the United Nations. We call for prompt withdrawal
of British forces from
Anguilla
."

Prime Minister Eric Williams of
Trinidad-Tobago said, "What I want to know now is, what is
Britain
going to do about
Rhodesia
?"

Even Mr. Stewart's true friends in
the
Caribbean
couldn't speak with very loud voices.
Antigua
's
Premier Vere Bird was on his way out of office, and who else was left?

As to the next-door
island
of
St. Martin
, both the Dutch and
the French halves sided with
Anguilla
. When a boatload
of British policemen followed Ronald Webster over to Mari-got, the French
capital, local citizens wouldn't let them land, but threw bottles and garbage
at them instead, while gendarmes stood around and laughed.

But facts don't seem to discommode
Mr. Stewart. On April 23, he tol
d the House of Commons
that there were "undoubted cases of arson and—somewhat earlier—of murder
on the island . . ." There
was
suspected arson in three cases on
Anguilla, two of them houses and one an airplane, but since no criminal
prosecutions ever followed, the word "undoubted" is, if nothing else,
premature. There were all together three
alleged
cases of arson, but
there were no
undoubted
cases of arson. And the most recent had happened
one year and eleven days before the invasion. What other country could claim as
good a firebug record in a three-year span?

About the undoubted cases of
murder. The only even alleged case of murder in the entire Anguillan rebellion
was the death of Kittitian attorney Robert Crawford at the alleged hands of an
alleged pro-Bradshaw surgeon, and not many people have alleged that one. But
that happened on St. Kitts, not on
Anguilla
, and Michael
Stewart has never expressed any interest in murder and arson—or disreputable
characters—on St. Kitts.

It took a week for Parliament to
ask about those undoubted cases of murder, and then it was William Whitlock who
replied, saying there were no cases of murder after all, but there was one
pending case of manslaughter. Interested M.P.'s then rooted that one out and
discovered the amiable young man who perhaps had or had not shot his girl
friend-not an entirely political activity. After that, Stewart finally changed
his statement about murders.

But in October of 1970 I interviewed
Mr. Stewart, and he started talking about murders on the island, in the plural.
When I asked him if there had really been more than one, he backtracked and
said, oh, well, perhaps there was only one, but even one life was sacred, et
cetera. So I asked him if that one death wasn't actually a girl and the accused
killer wasn't her boy friend, and did that really have anything to do with the
rebellion, and he said he wasn't sure of the details but the killing had
happened in the course of the rebellion.

But other odd things were being
said in the days after the invasion. Minister Without Portfolio George Thomson
said, "Some critics at home and abroad are treating this as a matter of
laughter and farce. What would they have preferred-tragedy and tears? . . .
That it has worked out this way is a tribute to the prudence with which the
policy was planned and executed . . . The peaceful use of military power is a
rare international skill in our dangerous world."

Now the Government was giving
itself tributes for having rare international skills. Thomson was also saying,
whether he meant to or not, that the British Government's brand of prudence had
worked things out to laughter and farce.

The laughter and farce continued.
In a debate on March 25, M.P. Eldon Griffiths told Parliament, "The
Government have been quick to say that they have had support from some of our
allies, but they should understand that the private sentiments of important
Americans on this matter are of bewilderment and derision. I shall not go into
that at length. I simply make one short quotation from the words of a
distinguished person in
Washington
.
When discussing this matter, he said that, as far as he could see, the Prime
Minister had 'lost his marbles.'"

On the same day, M.P. Neil Marten
asked, "Did we need so many policemen? I suggest that perhaps twelve or
fifteen could have gone out on a BOAC aeroplane to
Antigua
,
disguised, insofar as police can disguise themselves, as civilians."

The Secretary of State for Defence,
Mr. Denis Healey, answered a question in Commons as to why the troops on
Anguilla had been equipped with CS gas, a strong kind of tear gas, saying,
"The reason why we were able to deal with extremely violent civil
disturbances in Hong Kong and Cyprus in the past with so little loss of life
was the ability to use this type of weapon rather than guns and machine guns,
as were used in similar situations in the past." To which M.P. Edward
Taylor responded, "Would not supplies of laughing gas have been more
appropriate for this particular episode?"

A month later, Sir John Rodgers
told the House of Commons, "If we were to send to a stranger a complete
record of all that has happened since the creation of the
Associated
State
, he would think that he had
been given a hitherto undiscovered manuscript of a Gilbert and Sullivan
opera."

The Conservative Party published a
pamphlet on Anguilla by M.P. Neil Marten, titled
Theirs Not to Reason Why
,
in which he said, "On 28th April, over five weeks after the Forces had
arrived, Mr. Whitlock informed the Commons that 8 rifles, 22 shotguns and 4
pistols had been handed in, while 2 rifles, 2 carbines and an old anti-tank
rifle had been discovered by the searching Forces. A total of 39 weapons
between 6,000 West Indians!" He called it a "derisory quantity"
of arms.

In
Spectator
for March 28,
Auberon Waugh speculated on the real reasons for the invasion:

One
is almost tempted to imagine that the whole invasion was mounted in order to
save Mr. Whitlock's face. Of course, Mr. Healey's face received a much worse
affront on Monday night, when it was pelted with flour and tomatoes at the
East Walthamstow
by-election meeting; and Mr. Healey is a more
important Minister of the Crown even than Mr. William Whitlock. But Mr.
Healey's assailants were Englishmen, while Mr. Whitlock's were nig-nogs. It may
seem unjust to impute such a distinction to an upright, pink-faced
schoolteacher like Mr. Stewart . . .

But enough. The invasion was an
embarrassment, and no matter how much talking Government spokesmen did it just
went on being an embarrassment. Something had to be done about it, and William
Whitlock was just the man to do it. On April 3, fifteen days after the
landings, he told the House of Commons: "There was no invasion of
Anguilla
."

The quarrel is a very pretty quarrel as it stands; we
should only spoil it by trying to explain it.

—Richard Brinsley Sheridan,
The Rivals