Island in a Mess

By DAVID MITCHELL

\FrEa. a short stay in Britain, most of the i

Tristan da Cunhans cannot wait to get back to their lonely rock and the sanities of a sub- s:sterice economy. It is doubtful if many of the inhabitants of the sister island of St. Helena feel such a touching attachment to their birthplace.

Ever since the Colonial Office took over from the Honourable East India Company in 1834, St Helena has been in the shadows and the doldrums. A mixture ot meanness (successful stamp issues have been followed by correspond- ing cuts in the United kingdom's grant-in-aid), bad luck and sheer bad management has pro- duced some odd situat.ons, but none odder than the recent crisis, when the island was brought to the verge of starvation, with all stocks of flour, butter cheese and fruit exhausted, vegetables dangerously scarce and a meat ration of one and a half ounces per week per person. All depended on the arrival of a cargo ship, despite the tact that the Government has extensive farms and lands, with an agricultural staff estimated at sonic 200 full-time employees.

One of Britain's oldest, smallest (forty-seven square miles) and most isolated colon:es (nearest land Ascension Island, 700 South Atlantic miles north), St. Helena's 5,000 inhabitants derive mainly from British settlers and soldiers and African ex-slaves, with a contribution from Chinese labourers. Indians, Dutchmen, Portu- guese and even Norwegians. In days gone by the island was of vital strateg:c importance as a refitting and revictualling point for the East India fleets, but the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 put paid to this. Today, only fourteen calls a year (seven passenger ships, seven cargo) are made by ships of the Union Castle Line at Jamestown, the picturesque capital, and even they have to be paid to stop: yet they represent the only contact with the outside world and an trnportant source of transitory tourist revenue. The economy is desperately unbalanced. A Yearly grant-in-aid of £120,000 (less than the East India Company spent nearly two centuries ago) barely keeps things ticking over at near- starvation level. Spectacular erosion has left two-thirds of the island barren. The main crop ls flax, brought down by donkeys from the steep hillsides to five mills, which employ about 300 lon. Workers ati or 25 per cent. of the working popu- The quality of the flax is not high, the market Price fluctuates alarmingly, and there is a. constant worry that the mills, already sub- srdised by the Government, may have to close down. The only other substantial employer is the (-6vernment itself, in its very restricted farm- ing u

and forestry projects. Lace-making and inlaid woodwork keep a few people occup:ed, but a quarter of the island's labour force has

exist on relief, doing odd jobs—e.g., on the roads_r_r fewer than thirty shillings a week. islanders the surrounding sea teems with fish, the 1 'Anders do not have enough to eat, partly be- cause no one can afford proper boats and other equipment.

Education is dismal. Schools are largely staffed by men and women who started their careers as pupil-teachers at the age of fifteen. Pupils have no chance of reaching even GCE standard, and most leave school at fourteen to try to im- prove the family budget. The few teachers who have been trained in Britain on a meagre grant have left St. Helena with all possible speed be- cause of the derisory salaries: £180 rising to £250 for men, less for women.

Into this discouraging situation, four years ago, came Mr. Cledwyn Hughes,, Labour MP for Anglesey and the first MP ever to visit the island. Behind the pretty, eighteenth-century facade of Main Street he found people sleeping twelve to a room in the slums of Jamestown (where the Salvation Army operated a soup kitchen); families of up to ten struggling to live (if they were lucky) on a wage of £2 5s. a week; a touching loyalty to the Crown (photo- graphs of the Queen were pinned to the walls of the most ramshackle hovels); and an illegiti- macy rate so high that 'spares,' as they are known, are accepted as full and unpenalised members of almost every family.

He toured the island speaking and listening to complaints. Arn,d intense excitement, a general trade union was formed, representing virtually the entire working population. Mr. Hughes left behind him, as general secretary, a Mr. Fred Ward, a small shopkeeper and former merchant seaman who for several years had been anxious to set up a movement for reform.

There was some improvement. The govern- ment labourer's standard wage was raised from 455. to 50s., the flax-mill worker's pay (for a forty-five-hour week) to 45s. for a man, 33s, 6d. for a woman. But the feudal if benevolent tone of an adrninistraton where the Governor's word is, Lterally, law (he is also Chief Justice) was un- impaired. The tercentenary celebrations on November 5, 1959, were climaxed by a firework display, held in the gardens of Plantation, the Governor's residence. Apart from official guests, islanders had to be content with distant flashes.

'He's a natural.' The general feeling was summed up in the calypso-like rhyme pinned to a small boy's guy: Here comes our guy, Looking amazed and quite shy, Because it's St. Helena's tercentenary,

Not even a bun or a cup of tea was given to me,

Not a can of beer to celebrate its 300th year.

Mr. Ward found himself up against stone- walling tactics, with plenty of reference back to Wh:tehall; and the natural inclination of the islanders to let things slide was almost as dis- heartening. After a time, even the comical at- tempts of a government official's wife to gate- crash union meetings in order to take shorthand notes seemed sinister. He wrote a furious, im- mensely long letter to the then Colonial Secre- tary, Mr. Macleod, pointing out that a St. Helenian doing the same job as a European got only a third of the pay; that little or nothing was being done to improve the housing shortage; and that unless the promise of constitutional reform was kept he would be forced to ask the United Nations `to take us under its trustee- ship.' He found the money to send a telegram to the Queen protesting against the dismissal of the popular medical officer (for about a year after he left there was no one qualified to per- form major surgery; patients had to be shipped to Capetown, and one woman died while waiting for a ship).

Mr. Ward now spends much time in court defending islanders summoned for inevitable arrears of rent, pleading poverty and demand- ing mercy—as in the case of a woman with six children whose El a week poor relief was can- celled when it became known that her husband's workmates had made a collection for him. His most spectacular success as a people's advocate came when, with the help of funds from the TUC in Britain, he appealed to the High Court in Nairobi and had a rape sentence quashed. For two years he worked for nothing, covering the island on an ancient motor-cycle, investigat- ing, educating. chivvying. Now the union pays him £3 a week.

For all his industry and determination, Mr. Ward feels he is achieving almost nothing. There is no sign of plan or purpose for St. Helena. Things are drifting—and so are people. In the last ten years, 1,500 have emigrated, most of them women, most of them to domestic service in Britain: not surprisingly, when a recent World Health Organisation team sent to investigate malnutrition reported that St. Helenian child- ren are two and a half inches shorter than English children of the same age, that at six and a half years they are seven pounds lighter and at thirteen and half years twenty pounds lighter. WHO has conic to the rescue with a quota of dried milk and fish-oil capsules, but nothing more has been attempted.

In the meantime, the Colonial Office's sole gesture has been to approve the introduction of an elected Advisory Council. It took four years of parl:amentary prodding to produce this, the first concession to the idea of political democracy since the first settlers landed in 1659 with a supply of West African slaves and a charter from Richard Cromwell. It will probably take at least a volcanic eruption to produce any more radical reform: that, or a decision to turn St. Helena into a strategic missile base, as has been done—by the Americans—on Ascens:on Island.