Westlake, Donald E - NF 01 by Under An English Heaven (v1.1) Read Free Book Online

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