Westlake, Donald E - NF 01 (6 page)

Two days after the PAM leaders went
to
Anguilla
to declare solidarity with the
Anguillans—even though the Anguillans had somewhat different goals from those
of PAM—a letter was sent by PAM to Robert Bradshaw, listing the party's
Nine-Point Plan for local government and demanding that Bradshaw implement it
all. The letter was dated
February 2,
1967
, and so was Bradshaw's reply. This reply was brief, it was to
the point, and it covered the territory.

Dear
Sir,

Reference is made to a letter of instant date
addressed to me and signed by yourself as "(Secretary, PAM),"
"P. E. Adams MLC for Anguilla of PAM" and "William Herbert,
President PAM" referring to "proposals as to the composition and
functions of the proposed local government under our new Constitution."

There are no "proposals" before my
Government.

Yours faithfully, Robert L. Bradshaw Chief Minister

Nothing could be plainer than that.
Herbert and Adams went at once to talk to the Governor, Sir Fred Phillips. He
told them there really wasn't very much he could do, nor did he see any reason
for them to be so alarmed. He told them he'd received a report from Peter
Johnston, the local-government expert, which had led him to believe that things
either were basically all right now or very soon would be basically all right,
and not to worry.

Herbert and Adams told Sir Fred
they intended to go to

London
to try and persuade the British Government to delay Statehood Day until this
mess could be straightened out. He told them he didn't think there was any need
for them to go to
London
, but if
they insisted he would be more than happy to warn the Secretary of State that
they were on the way.

Meanwhile, back on
Anguilla
,
the first
incident
was about to take place. Up till now, there had been
no end of speeches and demonstrations and meetings, but no real trouble had yet
occurred. Then, on February 4, things suddenly turned ugly.

It was perhaps inevitable on
Anguilla
that if things were to turn ugly it would happen at a beauty contest. St.
Kitts, in a lunatic attempt to build enthusiasm among the populace for the
fast-approaching Statehood Day, had created a beauty contest to choose a
Statehood Queen—or Miss Associated State, nobody was quite clear about the
title—with contestants from the three islands. Beauties from
Nevis
and St. Kitts were flown to
Anguilla
on February 4 to
compete with local girls at The Valley Secondary School. The very mention of
the word "statehood" by this point so inflamed some Anguillans—even
when the word was used in conjunction with a beauty contest —that while the
show was going on in the school building, a demonstration began to form outside.
The demonstrators decided to abort the beauty contest by shutting down the
generator supplying the school's electricity, which they did, and which brought
the cops down on their heads.

(An interpolation. Government
employees on
Anguilla
tended almost exclusively to be
Kittitians, and that definitely included the police. The seventeen-man Anguilla
Police Force, at this time, contained no Anguillans.)

The police decided to disperse the
demonstrators with tear gas, without first checking to see which way the wind
was blowing. It was blowing toward the school. The tear gas dispersed the
demonstrators and then drifted over to the school and dispersed the audience
and then drifted up on stage and dispersed the beauty queens. End of beauty
contest. End of first incident, with beauty queens diving headfirst out
windows.

The next day, the police went out
to the east end of the island and picked up three of the men they thought had
taken part in the anti-beauty-contest demonstration, intending to bring them
back to headquarters. On the drive back to the center of the island, some other
cars joined the police car, everybody stopped, a rational discussion ensued,
and the police agreed they didn't feel like arresting these three fellows after
all. End of arrest. Second end of incident. But not the last.

After the attempted arrest, Ronald
Webster and Atlin Harrigan took to sleeping out in the bush, and after a while
they went over to
St. Martin
and sent a telegram to the
Commonwealth Relations Office:
we are being hunted down by

the police and five thousand people in
anguilla
are demonstrating.
There was no reply.

A week after the second ending of
the beauty-contest incident, British Marines landed on
Anguilla
.
This isn't the big invasion; that won't happen for another two years. This is a
small quiet landing; so quiet, in fact, that no announcement was made of it at
the time, and when the question was first brought up, the British Government
denied it had ever happened.

But it did. After the second act of
the beauty-contest incident, the Kittitian police on
Anguilla
asked the central Government on St. Kitts to send reinforcements. Fortunately,
there turned out to be no particular urgency about being reinforced since it
took the extra police a week to get there. It is one of the minor absurdities
of this affair that all of the ships and planes in the nation of St.
Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla were owned by Anguillans. As of February 1967, there were
two Anguillan-owned airlines and many motor-driven fishing boats and launches.
The St. Kitt<> Government had no airplanes at all, and only two non-sail
ships: the Revenue Cutter and the
Christiana
, a lumbering tub on a
regular ferry service to
Nevis
.

(The
Christiana
eventually
sank on one of her two-mile runs to
Nevis
, killing a
hundred people.)

After a week of looking around for
some vehicle that would take reinforcements from St. Kitts to
Anguilla
,
Bradshaw at last convinced the British to help. They laid on a warship, H.M.S.
Salisbury
(the same name as the capital of Rhodesia), which brought the
reinforcements—variously reported as numbering forty, seventy and one
hundred—to Anguilla. They landed at
Island
Harbour
, an out-of-the-way corner
of the island not too far from where some of the alleged demonstrators lived.
The Kittitian police were escorted ashore by a detachment of Royal Marines
wearing steel helmets and carrying rifles—they had been led by their superiors
to expect trouble.

(Those in authority on the British
side consistently failed to understand that the Anguillans
like
the
English; it's Bradshaw they don't like. The British perhaps
have
reduced
Anguilla
to a desert, but they never said they would;
Bradshaw said he would.)

The Kittitian police and British
Royal Marines were met on the beach by people living in the area, who had come
down to find out what that big ship was all about. They ignored the Kittitians
but greeted the Marines with big smiles of welcome, plus candy bars. Yes, the
natives gave the soldiers candy bars.

The Marines took their rifles and
helmets back to the
Salisbury,
picked up some candy bars of their own to
give the Anguillans, and returned for a swim with the local citizens, while the
Kittitians poked around the scrub, looking for Ronald Webster and Atlin
Harrigan and the other beauty-contest troublemakers, who weren't there. The
police did find a shotgun in one house and confiscated it. (A later news report
would say, "Illicit arms were found on the island.")

Finally the Kittitians gave up.
They went off to join the regular police detachment and the Marines got back
into their boats, and as they set off toward the
Salisbury
the Anguillans stood on the beach behind them and sang out a chorus of

"God Save the Queen."

Now,
that's
an invasion.

Meanwhile, on the thirteenth of
February, despite the British Administrator's assurances that everything was
really all right, Billy Herbert and Peter Adams left for
London
.
Statehood was due to arrive in exactly two weeks, and Herbert and Adams were
desperate to have it held off. From their manner when they arrived in
London
,
they seemed more like men trying to get a stay of execution than delay national
independence.

In
London
,
they spoke to Mrs. Judith Hart, then Minister of State for Commonwealth
Relations, who promised them something would be done very quickly about local
government. They also spoke with reporters, and the result was another first:
Anguilla
made the headlines. In the
London
Times
of
February
18, 1967
,
under the headline
"
Police Landed on
Anguilla by Frigate
," appeared an item in two distinct parts. The
first part, which announced the
Salisbury
's
deposit of Kit-titian police, missed accuracy on a few points; the British
landing wasn't mentioned, the Kittitian force was reduced to four men, and
Anguilla
was placed in the
Windward Islands
instead of the
Leeward
Islands
. The final sentence of this part was, if nothing else,
extremely hopeful: "The Commonwealth Office announced yesterday that the
situation in
Anguilla
was now normal."

The second part of the item told
about Billy Herbert's meeting with Mrs. Hart, said that PAM was
"discontented," and failed to mention the man from
Anguilla
,
Peter Adams, at all.

Back at the Commonwealth Office,
Statehood Day had taken on the inexorability of the birth of Christ. There was
no possibility in British minds that it could be delayed past its prophesied
arrival.

The Labour Party was then in power
in
Great Britain
,
so Herbert and Adams turned to the Conservatives for help. They had entree via
various Englishmen who had connections in

Nevis
,
principally old Etonian James Milnes Gaskell, owner of that island's Montpelier
Hotel.

The natural ally of middle- and
upper-class PAM was the middle- and upper-class Conservative Party, just as the
natural ally of Bradshaw's Labour Party was Harold Wilson's Labour Party.
Circumstances would eventually alter these cases to some extent, but the
natural political flow was Labour to Labour and PAM to Conservative.

The result was, on February 14,
Lord Jellicoe raised in the House of Lords the question of whether or not it
was a bad idea to give independence to a nation simultaneous with its breaking
apart. Speaking in reply for the Government, Lord Beswick said he understood
things were really all right, the necessary legislation for local councils on
Nevis
and
Anguilla
had already been drafted. This answer
combined vagueness with inaccuracy in perfect proportions to stifle the
discussion.

However, Mrs. Hart, either wanting
to make a token gesture to please Herbert and Adams or else belatedly worried
that perhaps they were right, sent out an Under-Secretary, Mr. Henry Hall, to
look things over. Hall arrived in St. Kitts on February 20, one week before
Statehood Day, talked with some people in the Government, and the next day left
to visit
Anguilla
. When he arrived, there was some
shouting and perhaps some jostling. The last Englishman the Anguillans had been
able to talk to, Mr. Peter Johnston, the local-government expert, had so far as
they could tell left without having heard a word they'd said, so they raised
their voices a bit while talking to Mr. Hall.

Much later, in a letter to the
London
Times
, James Milnes Gaskell described that situation, and some of what had
led up to it, and wrote:

Mrs.
Hart sent Mr. Henry Hall to
Anguilla
to explain Statehood. On February 23 Mrs. Hart issued
a press release saying: "I am told that there is a very much calmer
atmosphere in
Anguilla
. My official has toured the whole island and he tells
me that his reception has been most friendly." But on February 22 I had
received a cable from St. Kitts saying that Hall had been booed in
Anguilla
, demonstrated against and shot at.

On the same day that Henry Hall was
failing to hear himself be booed, demonstrated against and shot at, the
beauty-contest incident was moving into a new stage. Sir Fred Phillips,
Governor of St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla (a primarily ceremonial position), himself
a West Indian, had gone to
Anguilla
to talk quietly with
Atlin Harrigan and Ronald Webster. He was the only Kittitian official they
would agree to meet. They had a secret meeting in the bush, and Phillips
promised them they would only be fined, not given jail terms, if they
surrendered in re the beauty contest. They surrendered at once, were tried in a
court on
Anguilla
, and both were charged with throwing
stones. Harrigan was also charged with indecent language. They pleaded guilty
and were fined and that was that.

On February 22, the day following
his ambivalent meeting with the Anguillans, Henry Hall went back to St. Kitts
to talk things over with Bradshaw and some other people, and the day after that
he went back to
Anguilla
with eight statements from the
central Government. These statements narrow in on the Anguillans' specific
complaints much more than anything that had happened before in the 317 years of
British rule.