Westlake, Donald E - NF 01 (8 page)

The
day after the Anguillans realized they'd rebelled—which is to say, two days
after the rebellion-Peter
Adams
sent a telegram to
U
Thant at the United Nations. It outlined the problem and asked the "United
Nations and men of goodwill everywhere for help."

Never
has a rebellion turned so consistently
to
authority rather than
from
it. The rebel flag, flying at the airport and all over the island, was
Great Britain
's flag, the Union Jack.

Adams
followed his message to U Thant with a personal visit, at the head of a
delegation of four, to Robert Bradshaw. They met with Bradshaw, Paul Southwell
and Eugene Walwyn, Bradshaw's Nevisian supporter who was now the Kittitian
Attorney General. Adams handed over a memorandum stating the current Anguillan
position—it said, among other things, "Anguillans are not prepared to accept
NO for an answer"—after which he and his delegation went back home.

The
Kittitian Government replied in a Cabinet Statement on June 1. Since the
Statement began by saying "that this is the very first occasion on which
an approach of this sort con
cerning
the
wishes of the people of
Anguilla
has been made to the Government/' it came
as no surprise to the Anguillans that the rest of it was also obtuse. The
Statement presented the standard argument that since Peter Adams had been
behaving himself in the Legislative Council all these years, and had signed the
report of the Constitutional Conference, the Anguillans didn't have the right
to a capricious change of mind. It also said there were constitutional ways to
do this sort of thing, without explaining what they were, and finished by
ordering the Anguillans to give back the guns to the policemen and start
behaving.

As
the Wooding Report says of this Statement: "It held out no promise to the
Anguillans. If it was intended as a call to the Anguillans to surrender it
failed because it misjudged the tempo of feeling on the island and the fact
that, if not world opinion, certainly the Press in Britain and in the Caribbean
as well as the Caribbean Bar Association was on the side of the
Anguillans."

(Actually,
the last part of that quote isn't entirely accurate. Nobody was on the side of
the Anguillans yet—it was still too early as of
June 1, 1967
, for anybody to have picked sides at
all—though a little later everybody
would
be on
Anguilla
's side, when the affair had been blown up
into an international incident. At two days of age, however, the rebellion was
still small potatoes. In fact, the press in Britain hadn't as yet even reported
its existence, though the press in New York would do so the next day;
The
New York Times
for June 2, 1967, under the headline "
British
Help Requested to End Anguilla Revolt
,"
gave a brief six-paragraph summary of the events, in which each fact was just
slightly off, like a color television set improperly tuned. The item took no
sides.)

The
Anguillan delegation had already returned home when the Cabinet produced its
Statement, so a British journalist named David Smithers carried the Statement
from St. Kitts to
Anguilla
. Smithers also carried a letter he'd been
given by the St. Kitts Government, which he'd been told was a note from
Bradshaw to Peter Adams; but when he landed
in
Anguilla
the envelope turned out to contain a copy
of the Emergency Regulations, which in effect promulgated the regulations on
Anguilla
and made them legally effective there.
Bradshaw had risked Smithers' neck in conning him this way (had the Anguillans
been a bit less civilized or more irritated, they might have killed the
messenger in the time-honored tradition), and as a result Smithers did take
Anguilla's side, and he did so with great enthusiasm, one unfortunate result of
which would be to create embarrassment for a couple of other journalists two
years later. In the October 1967 issue of
Venture
, a British magazine
published by the Fabian Society, Smithers did a pro-Anguilla piece that
included the following paragraph: "In March Premier Bradshaw imported from
Britain
a yellow Rolls-Royce. His deputy, Paul
Southwell, ordered a Bentley. The Anguillans—not least the sick
ones—despaired." Partisanship leads to a certain selectivity of the eye;
inadvertently or not, Smithers had left out the fact that the Rolls was vintage
1935 and had cost £700 ($1,680). By the time the Rolls-Royce item had passed
through the hands of several other journalists, it had blossomed into a lovely
work of fiction. The
London
Sunday Times
of
March 23, 1969
, reported that Bradshaw "drives a
canary yellow Rolls Royce which cost £8,000—the finance minister who oversaw
the purchase drives a Bentley."

Actually,
the spirit of the
Sunday Times
piece was accurate, even if the facts
were a little off. The annual per capita income in St. Kitts is £77 '($184.40)
and the Rolls-Royce cost £700, which is either one man's salary for nine years
or nine men's salary for one year. Adjusting the figures to an average
Englishman's income, £8,000 is dirt-cheap.

Let
us return, however, to the beginning of June 1967 and the beginning of the
Anguillan rebellion. The Cabinet Statement from St. Kitts did not have its
intended effect; that is, the Anguillans did not give the police back their
guns, and they did not decide to behave themselves. Peter Adams did, however,
get in touch with the Kittitian Government again, hoping to keep some sort of
diplomatic relationship alive. The result was a tentative agreement in early
June that he and Deputy Premier Paul Southwell would meet for general talks on
the neutral
island
of
St. Martin
. But when the Lieutenant Governor of Dutch
St. Martin thought it over, he withdrew permission for the meeting.
St. Martin
is half French and half Dutch, and the
Governor saw no reason to be dragged into a squabble between two islands
belonging to the British.

The
next event took place on June 6, and at first it didn't seem to have anything
to do with the Anguillan rebellion at all. Bradshaw's Government emptied its
main prison facilities on
Cayon Street
in
Basseterre
, shifting the prisoners to other locations
and even sending some of them over to
Nevis
.
For the first time in well over a hundred years, the cells of the
Cayon Street
prison were all empty. It seemed an odd
thing to do, without much point or meaning.

But
then came the night of June 9. As
The New York Times
reported under the
headline "
Rebels on St.
Kitts Attack the Police":

Gunmen
attacked police headquarters here before dawn today with small-arms fire 11
days after Premier Robert Bradshaw's Government had proclaimed a state of
emergency. Policemen and members of the volunteer defense force rushed to guard
government offices and installations. Police chief John Lynch-Wade reported that
one defense force member had been wounded and at least two men had been
detained.

By
the time the dust settled, many more than two men had been detained. On the
morning after the attack, the Bradshaw Government arrested all the leaders of
PAM, including Billy Herbert. In addition, two Britons were also arrested:
James Milnes Gaskell, the young owner of the Montpelier Hotel over in
Nevis
, who had served as entree for Billy Herbert
to the Conservative Party in
England
, and Miss Diana Prior-Palmer, then a guest
at another Nevisian hotel.

Milnes
Gaskell had come over the previous night from
Nevis
and was planning to take a morning flight
from St. Kitts to return to his home in
England
. A journalist at the hotel, a Reuters man
named Ronald Batchelor, told Milnes Gaskell there had been trouble the night
before and suggested that Milnes Gaskell could expect to be detained, since he
was known to be a friend of Billy Herbert's and the rest of the PAM leadership.
Milnes Gaskell thought not; at the worst, he expected to be deported, which he
didn't mind since he'd been planning to leave anyway.

Two
Kittitian lawyer friends of Milnes Gaskell's accompanied him to the airport;
one of these was named Robert Mc-Kenzie Crawford and he has a further role to
play a little later.

St.
Kitts is serviced by Leeward Island Air Transport, generally known as LIAT, and
the LIAT personnel at the airport knew Milnes Gaskell since he was a frequent
traveler in and out of the island. This morning they looked at him oddly when
he arrived, and the clerk on duty told him, "You can't travel today."

"Why
not?"

The
clerk, a friendly and peaceable man, was embarrassed but adamant. "I can't
say. You just can't travel today."

Outside,
Milnes Gaskell saw a plane landing. He said to the clerk, "You mean to
tell me, if I went out there and got on that plane, you'd stop me?"

"No,"
said the clerk.

However,
there was a police corporal standing guard at the outer door, and more police
were anticipated momentarily; so, rather than make a mad dash for the plane on
the runway, Milnes Gaskell walked instead to a telephone, called Ronald
Batchelor at the hotel, and said, "It looks as though I'm to be
arrested."

"Fine,"
Batchelor said, "I'll just add your name to this list here that I'm about
to send out."

At
that point a Land Rover arrived at the airport, full of police, led by one
Sergeant Edgings. This was the same Acting
Assistant Superintendent Edgings whom we last met at the
airport on
Anguilla
, when he was being sent away. Now, back to
his permanent rank of Sergeant, he had come out to
Golden
Rock
Airport
to apprehend Milnes Gaskell. He and his
four men were all armed with rifles, which was not standard, and they were
wearing tin helmets, which were also an innovation. Edgings knew Milnes Gaskell
and seemed uncomfortable about this morning's duty. His four men took up
positions around Milnes Gaskell, and the Sergeant said, "I'm sorry, sir,
but I have to arrest you."

Milnes
Gaskell, a slender, quiet-spoken young man of impeccable manners, said he quite
understood. He accompanied the Sergeant and his men in the Land Rover back to
Basseterre
.

At
the
Cayon
Street
prison he was put through a long complexity of red tape and bureaucratic
maundering. One young officer checked his height and weight, but seemed as
baffled as Milnes Gaskell as to just why he was doing it. At another stop in
the processing, an officer became irritable and impatient, and Milnes Gaskell
told him, "I'm sorry, but I'm not familiar with the procedure." He
might have been speaking for them all.

Finally
he was taken to his cell, which was actually the prison chapel. There were five
others in it with him, plus eight more in a large cell across the way and
another eight in a third cell. As Milnes Gaskell told me much later, "We
were all detainees, rather than prisoners, and St. Kitts had never had any
detainees before and didn't quite know what to do with us." None of the
people in the cells had been charged with anything. Twenty-two detainees, aged
between seventeen and seventy-one, none of them charged with any specific
crime, all packed into three cells that had coincidentally been cleared of
their regular prisoners just four days before.

There
have been several theories about the events of the night of June 9-10, but
basically they sift down to three: (1) PAM tried to overthrow the Bradshaw
Government by shooting bullets into the Basseterre police station; (2)
Anguillans came over from their island and shot up the police station; (3) the
Kittitian Government staged the whole thing itself as an excuse to arrest the
PAM leadership and deport some troublous foreigners.

The
first theory, that PAM tried to overthrow Bradshaw by shooting at the police
station, is absurd on the face of it. Though it was the Government's official
theory it's doubtful that even Bradshaw ever believed it. Billy Herbert and
PAM's other legal whiz kids and the families who own the plantations are very
sophisticated people; if they were going to pull a
coup d'etat
, they
would probably behave a little more effectively than the gunmen of June 9.