Pax Britannica (18 page)

There was a Temporary Government Lunatic Asylum, whose attendant was paid
£
3 per annum, and the Government also sold ice at 1d a pound, ran a savings bank and administered estates. St Lucia issued its own postage stamps, but since 1841 English coinage had been currency on the island, replacing a queer old currency called, in a mixture of Spanish and old French,
fonds,
Mocos
and
dogs.

A mile or so from Government House, on the plateau of the Morne above Castries, a monument recalled the great day in May 1796 when the men of the old 27th Regiment, under Sir John Moore’s command, had stormed and captured Fort Charlotte from the French, fighting so well that before the British colours were raised above the fort the regimental flag was allowed to flutter there in glory for an hour. The 27th had since become the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, but the battle had never been forgotten, and once a year the regimental flag was hoisted up there again, keeping alive the pride of the Inniskillings, and helping to give an air of ancient continuity to the presence of the British in St Lucia.

The island was both a miltary and a naval base, and service affairs were very important to its character. Strongpoints, forts and storehouses studded the environs of Castries, and the town was overlooked by the rambling yellow barracks of the Morne, whose bricks had been brought out from England as ballast, and whose long low buildings, with their shallow roofs and wide verandas, were built to an Indian pattern long since distributed all over the Empire. In a deep trough around the Morne lay the great guns, embedded in stone, with their ammunition bunkers burrowed in the hill behind, and a field of fire commanding the harbour entrance.
Generations of British servicemen, mostly victims of tropical disease, slept in the old graveyard on the flank of the hill, shaded by feathery Caribbean trees, and all around Castries stood the bungalows of the senior officers, in whose dusty yards, we may suppose, giggling St Lucians in blinding fineries were jollied by orderlies towards a swifter peeling of the Colonel’s potatoes. Thirteen British regiments bore the name of St Lucia on their colour: the Northumberland Fusiliers wore a white plume in their hats because here, in 1778, their men had triumphantly plucked the white favours from the headgear of the defeated French.

To the Royal Navy, St Lucia was no less familiar. Castries was one of the finest natural harbours in the world, and St Lucia was traditionally the key to the command of the Caribbean. ‘His Majesty’s squadrons stationed in St Lucia’, Rodney had written, ‘will not only have it in their power to block every port in Martinique, but likewise the cruisers from St Lucia can always stretch to windward of all the other islands and intercept any succours intended for them. St Lucia in the hands of Britain must, while she remains a great maritime Power, make her sovereign of the West Indies.’ St Lucia was an Imperial Naval Coaling Station, and fifteen ships of the Royal Navy called at Castries in an average month.
Statio
Haud
Malefida
Carinis
was the island’s motto—the Never Unfaithful Anchorage; it was a familiar but always stirring sight to see a British warship steaming in through the narrow harbour entrance, flags flying everywhere, respectfully saluted by the passing merchantmen, and glittering with the special white and brass éclat of the North America and West Indies Station.

Hazily, perhaps lazily, with a love for old traditions and familiar stations, the imperial strategists still thought of St Lucia as the key to West Indian sovereignty, kept those guns greased in their mountings and sent their cruisers proudly down to Castries for fuel and a night ashore. The old bogy of the French still haunted the British military mind, especially in the West Indies—on a clear day you could see Martinique, the birthplace of Napoleon’s Josephine, from the barracks on the Morne. Also the British supposed that if ever the Panama Canal were completed the island might give them some control over its entrance, as Cyprus and Aden covered Suez
and Port Said. It was true, as Admiral Fisher used to say, that the British naval forces in the Caribbean were generally too weak to fight and too slow to run away, and that the island garrison was so small as to be meaningless: but there, St Lucia had a proud military tradition, its installations might come in useful one day, and though the soldiers were not encouraged to go sea-bathing, in case it caused malaria, still it was a popular station. Besides, the garrison would be sadly missed, in an island neither rich nor very worldly. Often the Garrison Adjutant invited tenders for the supply of oats, green forage, kerosene oil, wicks, or the purchase of empty biscuit tins: and sometimes the officers gave a ball in their suave mess above the harbour, with smooth soft lawns above the sea, a string band, and pleasant terraces for sitting out and cursing sand-flies on.

Often, when a merchant ship approached the entrance to Castries harbour, a pair of pinnaces were to be seen racing each other boisterously to meet it, oars flashing rhythmically in the sunshine, spray sweeping from their bows. These were the salesmen from Messrs Peter and Messrs Barnard, ferociously rival establishments, competing for a fuelling order. With water at 3s a ton and the best South Wales coal piled high on the wharves, there were handsome profits to be made: a constant watch was kept on the lighthouse at the head, where the approach of a ship was signalled, and so much depended upon being first alongside that racing oarsmen were specially imported from Barbados, and more than once the crews came to fisticuffs as they arrived in dead heat alongside a client.

To the Administrator in his little palace St Lucia was perhaps a far-flung gem in the imperial diadem. To the merchants, the planters, the few professional men—to the five English officials of the Colonial Bank—to MacFarlane Moffatt and Co, the Oldest Establishment in St Lucia, Special Agents for John Brown’s Selected Three Star Whisky—to Messrs Peter’s and Barnard’s anxious sales managers—to the business and commercial classes the island was essentially a coaling station. Since the decline of the sugar industry it had lived chiefly by its coal, placed as it was safely and
conveniently on the trade routes between North and South America, with the best deep-water docks in the West Indies. In 1897 947 ships entered Castries, 620 of them steam, and in tonnage handled Castries was the fourteenth most important port in the world. Night and day the stalwart island women, singing jolly shanties, trudged up and down the gangplanks with baskets of coal on their heads—109 lb of coal apiece—and to thousands of sailors St Lucia meant above all the smell, filth and back-breaking toil of a coaling ship.

The pace of business was set by the handful of British merchants in Castries—resented often by the old French landowners, not always welcomed by the snootier officers of Government, but doggedly making their fortunes none the less. Socially St Lucia tended to dwell upon a past that seemed to get more gracious every year—a whirl, it appeared, of balls and soirées, carriages perpetually at the door, French comedies, mazurkas swinging among the fireflies and duels in the blush of the morning, in the days when the planters lived in paternal and cultivated ease among their slaves and sugar-canes. Now it was mostly coal. Balls were infrequent, except in the mess, and were rarely graced, as the old ones had so often been, by visiting Marquises of exquisite sensibility. The Peters, the Barnards and MacFarlane Moffatt set more down-to-earth standards, and the creole landowners had withdrawn into their own inbred society, seldom appearing at functions in the town. The polo field and the racecourse existed mainly for the garrison. The British community was there either to rule or to make money: or else it always had been.

For many of the most British inhabitants of the British West Indies had not been born in Britain. Some were planters themselves, men of substance, relics of the days when these sugar islands were the most valuable possessions of the Crown. Jamaica had its own English aristocracy, living in decayed splendour in lovely old country mansions: Barbados had provided several eminent soldiers for the Empire, besides bishops, statesmen and an editor of
The Times
. Many more of the island British were poor white, scattered through these golden territories like castaways of history. These people were coloured a chestnut brown, from generations in the sun, and they talked with a gentle and baffling lilt, a dialect very nearly proper
English, but somehow not quite. There was often some Negro in them, and they were often to be found gaunt and high-cheeked on the verandas of rickety sun-bleached cottages, sunshine parodies of Englishmen, washed up on these shores by war, commerce or exile—for many of Monmouth’s supporters had been banished to these parts, and other ‘unruly men’ from England, sold as servants for seven years’ service, never went home again.

A small educated middle class had also come into being, over the years, and few expatriates need now be summoned from England to fill the middle ranks of business and official life. The Peters and the Barnards were fast becoming St Lucians themselves, and the Rector of Castries was John Robert Bascomb, a tall brown man with a patriarchal beard, whose father had been a clergyman in the neighbouring island of Grenada, and who had been born in the West Indies himself, and educated at a school for clergy’s sons in Barbados. Bascomb had married into a well-known Castries family, the Coopers, and was as absolute a native of these parts as any creole patrician or wild voodoo-man of the forests.

St Lucia’s Diamond Jubilee accordingly had a tang very different from the overwrought festivities of London. The island was a long way in space from Buckingham Palace, and a long way in temperament from the pomp of the New Imperialism. The triumphs of Benin or the tribulations of the poor Afridi must have seemed inconceivably remote, seen through the columns of the
Voice
of St
Lucia.
The pioneers of St Lucia had not been British at all. The cultural loyalty of the St Lucian
élite
was still to Paris rather than London.

The colony celebrated none the less. ‘We lack not loyalty’, declared the editor of the
Voice
in his Jubilee poem:

The pulpit at Holy Trinity Church had been draped in Union Jacks
by the Misses Cooper, when the five hundred men of the West India Regiment (‘the Westies’) marched in for the celebratory service—dropping their Catholic comrades off at the church of the Immaculate Conception, and their Wesleyans at the Mission House. Father Claustre, in his sermon, said it was a matter of pride to feel oneself a part of ‘such a great nation, which sent up that day a united prayer of thanksgiving from every corner of the earth’, while the Reverend Thomas Huckerby, at the Mission House, observed that the progress of Great Britain was based upon ‘that righteousness which maketh a nation’.

In the evening there was a soirée at the Government Buildings in Castries, with clog dancing and singing, and everyone turned out to see the big picture of the Queen in Columbus Square—some of the remarks heard in the crowd, the newspaper reported next morning, being ‘quaintly pathetic, while the demeanour of all was affectionately reverent’. Donkey and sack races were run, and baskets of buns were distributed among the children. There were bonfires on the beaches, drums in the dusk, dancers frolicking into town out of the mountains, children singing
Rule
Britannia.
Hundreds of poor people sat down to a free Jubilee dinner, many others sent along their pots and pans to be filled, and the streets rang, we are told, with ceaseless cries of
Vive
La
Reine
Victoria!
All through the night the guests danced up at Government House, and there the Queen’s health was drunk in bumpers of champagne, ‘to the accompaniment of subdued but fervent ejaculations of “God Bless Her”’. Mr J. T. Rea celebrated the hour with an apostrophic ode:

—and the whole was capped with a monumental bonfire on the top of the Morne, with a
feu
de
joie
by the garrison.

But then a
feu
de
joie
‚
commented the
Voice
sourly, was ‘the only form
of explosive rejoicing which red tape permits on this island’. The Jubilee was not greeted in St Lucia with a welcome unalloyed. The British islands of the West Indies all had grievances, for in a sense they were the has-beens of Empire. They had been left high and dry by a succession of circumstances—the abolition of slavery, the adoption of free trade, the collapse of the sugar market. Most of them were no longer of real importance to the Empire, and some the more hard-headed imperial administrators in London would happily have abandoned (the British did not yet know that ridding oneself of an Empire is at least as difficult as acquiring one).

St Lucia, as a base and a coaling station, still had an imperial function, but it shared with the other islands a bitterness that had never quite subsided since the emancipation of the slaves, when the interests of the local white people and their distant imperial overlords had for the first time diverged. St Lucia itself had never enjoyed representative government under the Crown, but several other Caribbean colonies had, losing or giving up their privileges because of the long depression and uncertainty that followed emancipation, and St Lucians of the old school perhaps harboured a sense of unfair deprivation, and a premonition of racial troubles to come. French St Lucians still resented the British conquest. British St Lucians thought they might do better left to their own devices. The unofficial community sniped enviously at the official—at the Jubilee Races the Colony Cup had been renamed the Makeshift Stakes, reported the
Voice,
‘because the Honourable Members of the Legislature had refused to vote a cent to the Race Fund’. The commonalty fell back upon an old St Lucian proverb,
‘Duvan poul
ravett
pa
ni
reson’
—‘In front of a big man, little men are never right’.