Witness seminar: The history, role and functions of the British High Commissions in the Caribbean

Witness Seminars:

The History, Role and Functions of the British High Commissions in the Caribbean Since the 1980s

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Witness Seminar The History, Role and Functions of the British High Commissions in the Caribbean Since the 1980s Edited by M.D. Kandiah, Department of Political Economy King’s College London & Sue Onslow, Institute for Commonwealth Studies With Assistance from Matthew Glencross, formerly King’s College London

Caribbean Witness Seminars

King’s College London

Introduction This volume examines the role and functions of UK High Commissions in the Caribbean, from the testimonies and perspectives diplomats who served in there from the 1980s onwards.

The participants included a selection of High Commissioners and Deputy High Commissioners to Barbados, Belize, Guyana, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago, which covers British representation across most of the region. This witness seminar, held in May 2017, was part of a series of witness seminars examining the history, role and functions of British Embassies and High Commissions. Most of these have been published, and they include: Beijing;1 Canberra;2 Latin America;3 New Delhi;4 Paris;5 Pretoria;6 and British Embassies and the Eastern European Revolutions of 1988-89.7 The origins of this series go back two earlier witness seminars that were held in the late-1990s that looked at the British Embassies in Washington8 and Moscow.9 The importance of understanding the work of embassies in the facilitation of diplomacy overseas has been identified by many scholars. For example, The Washington Embassy (2009), edited by Michael Hopkins, Saul Kelly and John Young, demonstrated precisely why it was necessary for those who study diplomacy to know more about how UK diplomatic missions operate. In the introduction to this volume, the editors argued that focusing on the work of an Embassy offered important insights, such as providing ‘valuable insights into change and continuity in British diplomatic practice’; showing ‘how the balance of attention … varied according to the pressure of circumstances, the current priorities of the government in London and the preferences of individual ambassadors’; and, the study confirmed ‘the pivotal role’ played by the Embassy and the Ambassadors in the conduct of day-to-day diplomacy. However, the editors have also pointed out that ‘there are real difficulties in studying the broad work of the embassy’—how it interacted with local staff; precisely how it performed day-to-day necessary social tasks; how they help project ‘soft power’; and so forth.10

1

M.D. Kandiah (ed), The Role and Functions of the British Embassy in Beijing (2013). See https://issuu.com/fcohistorians/docs/beijing_embassy_witness_seminar_tra [Accessed 3 Feb. 2020].

2 M.D. Kandiah (ed), The History, Role and Functions of the British High Commission in Canberra (2013). See https://issuu.com/fcohistorians/docs/canberra_witness_seminar [Accessed 3 Feb. 2020].

3 M.D. Kandiah and T. Mills (eds), British Diplomacy in Latin America at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (2017).

4 M.D. Kandiah (ed), The Role and Function of the British High Commission in New Delhi (2012). See https://issuu.com/fcohistorians/docs/new_delhi_witness_seminar_doc [Accessed 3 Feb. 2020].

5 M.D. Kandiah (ed), The History, Role and Functions of the British Embassy in Paris (2015). See https://issuu.com/fcohistorians/docs/the_history__role_and_functions_of_ [Accessed 3 Feb. 2020] 6 M.D. Kandiah (ed), The History, Role and Functions of the British Embassy/High Commission in Pretoria 1987-2013 & M.D. Kandiah & Sue Onslow (eds), Britain in South Africa, 1985–91 (2016). See https://issuu.com/fcohistorians/docs/fco736_witness_seminars_pretoria_v2 [Accessed 3 Feb. 2020].

7 Sue Onslow and M.D. Kandiah (eds), British Embassies and the Eastern European Revolutions of 1988–89 (2019). See https://issuu.com/fcohistorians/docs/witness_seminar_-_the_british_embas [Accessed 3 Feb. 2020].

8 Gillian Staerck (ed), ‘The Role of the British Embassy in Washington: Witness Seminar’, Contemporary British History, Vol.12 No. 3 (1998), pp. 115–38.

9 Gillian Staerck (ed), ‘The Role of HM Embassy in Moscow: Witness Seminar’, Contemporary British History, Vol.14 No.3 (2001), pp. 149–61.

10 Michael F. Hopkins, Saul Kelly and John W. Young, The Washington Embassy: British Ambassadors to the United States, 1939-77 (2009), p. 2.

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Furthermore, more work needs to be done specifically on the functions of British High Commissions because, while they are for all intents and purposes Embassies, they operate within the distinctive context of Commonwealth relations. Aside from Lorna Lloyd’s Diplomacy with a difference: The Commonwealth Office of High Commissioner, 1880– 2006,11 there have been few studies on these diplomatic missions.

The broader, public significance of history and the importance of gathering and utilising oral history and interviews has been identified in the report of the Foreign Affairs Committee, The Role of the FCO in UK Government (published 29 April 2011). In oral evidence the then Foreign Secretary William Hague stated that: ‘history is vitally important in knowledge and practice of foreign policy’. He further stated, ‘One of the things that I have asked to be worked up is a better approach to how we use the alumni of the Foreign Office, [and] … continue to connect them more systematically to the Foreign Office.’ He went on to say: ‘these people who are really at the peak of their knowledge of the world, with immense diplomatic experience, then walk out of the door, never to be seen again in the Foreign Office.’

Both witness seminars in volumes 1 and 2 reveal the extent to which British diplomats serving in the region have an enormous affection for the Caribbean and for the people who live there, and they feel a connection which is the result of a history that goes back to the Britain’s first interactions with the new world. According to their testimonies, the sense of connection is shaped commonalities such as shared love of sports (particularly cricket), and by recognisable cultures, and sense of shared norms and institutions.

To get these kinds of varied, personal, and hands-on insights, it is important to gather the memories of those FCO alumni who have worked at various Caribbean High Commissions, which is what these two witness seminars have sought to do.

Dr M.D. Kandiah Director, Witness Seminar Programme Department of Political Economy King’s College London

11

Lorna Lloyd, Diplomacy with a difference: The Commonwealth Office of High Commissioner, 1880–2006 (2007).

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King’s College London

Caribbean Witness Seminars

Format A witness seminar is like a group interview or conversation, led and moderated by the chair.

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There is an audience consisting of FCO alumni and current staff, academics and students of foreign policy. There are contributions and questions from the floor.

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The witness seminar is a public event, and it is recorded, transcribed and archived.

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All participants who speak are told that they will be identified in the recording, published transcripts, and in the archival holdings.

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All participants are informed that an agreed transcript of the proceedings, with speakers and their contributions identified, will be published or will be made available to researchers. This agreed transcript will be corrected for grammar, language, and to improve sense.

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Issues for Discussion: The following list is indicative of the broad areas for discussion at the witness seminar, and it was circulated prior to the event.

1.

What is the High Commission’s role: o As a local employer o In its interaction with Caribbean Society o During visits of the Queen, other members of the Royal family and UK Ministers.

2.

The wider role of the High Commission and the High Commissioner within Caribbean Society.

3.

The role of the British Council and other British agencies, and how has this changed over time.

4.

How have historical relations (e.g., business, sporting ties, etc.) shaped contemporary encounters?

5.

Investment, trade and economic relations: what were the key issues facing the High Commission?

6.

Relations with the Caribbean governments regarding: o Immigration / emigration o Tourism o Health o Security

7.

Interaction with the local Caribbean news media.

8.

Caribbean relations with: o USA o Canada o Mexico o Brazil o non-regional powers (e.g., Russia, China and EU).

9.

Inter-Caribbean relations

10.

The Commonwealth dimension.

11.

The relationship with other diplomats

12.

Which broad issues have dominated Anglo-Caribbean relations?

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Brief Chronology of Anglo-Caribbean relations since 198012 1981 1982 1983

1985

1986 1988

1989

1990

1991

1993

Barbuda, Redonda and British Honduras gained independence from the United Kingdom.

British Jamaican reggae group Musical Youth released ‘Pass the Dutchie’ which goes onto international success.

Elizabeth II visits Bermuda, Jamaica and the Cayman Islands.

Grenada: United States Marines and army rangers invaded the Caribbean island of Grenada and seized the country’s two airports and took Cuban and Soviet prisoners as part of Operation Urgent Fury. The invasion was criticised by several countries including Canada. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher privately disapproved of the mission and the lack of notice she received, but publicly supported the intervention.

Elizabeth II visits Belize, Bahamas, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Barbados, Grenada and Trinidad and Tobago as part of a Caribbean tour that included the 8th Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.

Jean-Claude Duvalier ‘Baby Doc’ was overthrown as President of Haiti and goes into exile.

Modern BBC Caribbean launched.

Haiti: Leslie Manigat became President, but was ousted in a coup led by Brigadier-General Prosper Avril, who installed a civilian government under military control.

Jamaica badly hit by Hurricane Gilbert.

Jamaica: People’s National Party ousted Jamaica Labour Party in elections, returning Michael Manley as Prime Minister.

Montserrat: Powerful Category 4 Hurricane Hugo devastated Montserrat and several other Caribbean islands.

Elizabeth II visited Barbados.

Balaquer re-elected in the Dominican Republic.

US forced elections in Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide elected.

The collapse of the USSR caused changes in Cuba.

Trinidad and Tobago: More than 100 Islamist radicals led by Yasim Abu Bakr blew up the police headquarters, seized the parliament building and held Prime Minister A.N.R. Robinson and other officials hostage for several days in an abortive coup attempt.

A military coup in Haiti ousted the reforming president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Jorge Blanco returned to the Dominican Republic and sentenced to 20 years in jail.

St Lucia: Derek Walcott won the Nobel Prize for literature.

Antigua and Barbuda: Vere Bird Sr resigned as Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda, and was replaced by his son, Lester.

EU/Caribbean Banana trade dispute. The protracted dispute is triggered in 1993 by US and Latin American companies over import preferences for

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Prepared by Sue Onslow and M.D. Kandiah. This is not meant to be a comprehensive survey of AngloCaribbean relations since 1980. The purpose is to give a brief framework of significant events.

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Caribbean Witness Seminars

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998 1999 1999

2000

2001

2002

2003 2004

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Caribbean bananas. This was to lead to an international trade dispute which only ended in 2010.

Balaguer re-elected in the Dominican Republic.

Aristide returned to power by US invasion.

Jorge Blanco released from prison early in the Dominican Republic.

Trinidadian cricketer Brian Lara sets a new world record, scoring 501 not out when playing for Warwickshire against Durham.

As part of a Commonwealth Caribbean tour Elizabeth II makes official visits to Anguilla, Dominica, Guyana, Belize, Cayman Islands, Jamaica, Bahamas and Bermuda.

Chances Peak volcano erupts on Montserrat.

BAFTA-winning Veteran Trinidad-born actor Rudolph Walker stars as Caribbean-born Cop Constable Gladstone in BBC sitcom the Thin Blue Line.

Hurricane Luis, a powerful Category 4 hurricane, slammed into St Maarten and several other islands causing considerable damage.

René Préval elected in Haiti.

Leonel Fernández Reyna elected in the Dominican Republic.

Puerto Rico ends tax exemptions for foreign investors.

Aruba was a top drug transit location.

Montserrat volcano erupted again.

Suriname: Dutch government issued international arrest warrant for former military commander and coup leader Desi Bouterse, on drug trafficking charges. Suriname refused to extradite him.

Bermuda: Jennifer Smith elected first female premier.

Haiti: Preval declared that the parliament’s term had expired and began ruling by decree following a series of disagreements with deputies.

Cuba: Cuban child Elian Gonzalez was picked up off the Florida coast with other refugees. A high-profile campaign by Miami-based Cuban exiles aimed to keep him with relatives in Miami.

Aristide won election in Haiti.

Grenada: Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up with South African help to examine political upheavals of the ‘Revolutionary Years’ between 1976 and 1983.

Caribbean Court of Justice: The CCJ established on 14 February and started functioning in 2005.

Cuba: US exported food to Cuba for the first time in more than 40 years after a request from the Cuban government to help it cope with the aftermath of Hurricane Michelle.

Caricom: The Revised Treaty of Grand Chagauramas committed to setting up the free trade Caricom Single Market and Economy (CSME).

The UK’s Privy Council decided to halt executions in some Caribbean countries. It declared the death penalty ‘crucial and inhuman punishment’.

HM Elizabeth II visited Jamaica.

Haiti: Voodoo recognised as a religion, on a par with other faiths.

Leonel Fernández Reyna became Dominican President.

For the second time President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced to flee from Haiti, after losing control to opposition rebels.

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Caribbean Witness Seminars

2005 2009

2010 2011

2015 2016

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St Kitts: Government decided to close the 300-year-old, loss-making sugar industry after the 2005 harvest.

According to official statistics, Caribbean to UK immigration resulted in 1.2 per cent of British children under 16 being Black Caribbean and 1.1 per cent mixed white and black Caribbean.

St Vincent and the Grenadines: Voters rejected the proposal to replace the monarchy with a republic in a constitutional referendum.

HM Elizabeth II visits Bermuda and Trinidad and Tobago the later for which for the twentieth-first Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.

Jamaica: Over 70 killed in operation to arrest alleged drug lord, Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke. He was extradited to the USA. In the 2011 Census of England and Wales, 594,825 individuals specified their ethnicity as ‘Caribbean’ under the ‘Black/African/Caribbean/Black British’ heading, and 426,715 as ‘White and Black Caribbean’ under the ‘Mixed/multiple ethnic group’ heading. In Scotland, 3,430 people classified themselves as ‘Caribbean, Caribbean Scottish or Caribbean British’ and 730 as ‘Other Caribbean or Black’ under the broader ‘Caribbean or Black’ heading. In Northern Ireland, 372 people specified their ethnicity as ‘Caribbean’.

United States reopened relations with Cuba after Vatican brokering.

HRH Prince Harry of Wales paid an official visit to the Caribbean acting on behalf of HM Elizabeth II, his grandmother. He visited a total of seven Caribbean nations.

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Caribbean Witness Seminars

The History, Role and Functions of the British High Commissions in the Caribbean Since the 1980s 4 May 2017 Programme Session 1: 13:30–15:00 Refreshments: 15:30 Session 2: 15:30–17:00 River Room, King’s Building King’s College London

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Caribbean Witness Seminars

The History, Role and Functions of the British High Commissions in the Caribbean Since the 1980s Session 1 Chair: Dr Sue Onslow, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London.

Panel: Michael E. Cook, CMG, Deputy High Commissioner to Trinidad and Tobago 1981–1984.

Sir Martin S. Berthoud, KCVO, CMG, High Commissioner to Trinidad and Tobago 1985– 1991.

R. Michael James, Deputy High Commissioner to Barbados 1987–1989.

Denis H. Doble, Deputy High Commissioner to Jamaica 1987–1991.

Audience: Gill Bennett, formerly, Foreign Office Historians.

Dr Jatinder Mann, Hong Kong Baptist University.

Professor Clem Seecharan, London Metropolitan University.

Dr Bartholomäus Zielinski, King’s College London.

Dr Sue Onslow: It gives me great pleasure to chair these two sessions on the role, history and functions of the British High Commissions in the Caribbean since the 1980s. It was a time when there was extraordinary change and enormous transition in the Caribbean region, not simply with the arrival of communism in the early 1960s in Cuba,13 but also because of the independence of British islands from colonial rule.14 We will be discussing today that, although there was no uniformity across the region, there was communality in British High Commissions and their realm of activities. I would like to thank King’s College London for their sponsorship of this particular occasion and I would also like to thank the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, particularly Patrick Salmon15 and Richard Smith,16 for their invaluable assistance in gathering together representatives of British High Commissions in this time.

The first panel will be discussing the broad period of the 1980s up to 1991, and after a short break we will be reconvening for a discussion with the second panel on the later period.

I will be asking each of the witnesses to comment for approximately 15–20 minutes on their particular perspective of the High Commission’s role, its relations with locally engaged staff,

13

On 1 Jan. 1959 Fidel Castro and his 26th of July Movement overthrew the Cuban government led by President Fulgencio Batista. This led to the establishment of the first communist state in the Americas.

14 Starting with Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago in 1962, the majority of British possessions in the Caribbean have achieved independence. Those that have not, such as Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, Monserrat, Cayman Islands, and Turk and Caicos Islands are part of British Overseas Territories.

15 Professor Patrick Salmon, Chief Historian, Foreign & Commonwealth Office.

16 Dr Richard Smith, Senior Historian, Foreign & Commonwealth Office.

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its interaction with Caribbean society and particular responsibilities with visits of the Queen17 and other UK ministers. Michael, would you like to begin?

Michael E. Cook: Trinidadian and other regional staff were very important to us as a local employer, because we were expensive to bring out from the UK. They were less expensive, but we tried to be good employers; we did tests of the market to see where we stood, and we were never the top but we were certainly never the bottom. We did have a good record of retaining staff because we felt we treated them fairly. They also helped us in interpreting local customs and practices, especially during the Carnival,18 and also in dealing with some of the awkward visitors we had. I remember once we had two gentlemen come in with parrots on their shoulders which they had somehow poached from Brazil, and they got terribly upset when we said, ‘You can’t…’ They said, ‘Can you freight them back to Britain for us?’, and she said, ‘No, you got them illegally and you are going to be reported to the police,’ which they got rather nasty about but our local staff came and talked to them and calmed them down, because they accused us—the UK staff—of being racist, and they explained that no, it wasn’t racism, it was the law. It was a great help to have a black local member of staff talking to two belligerent gentlemen from Brixton who could not understand why we would not let their illegal parrots go back to Britain.

We also made it a point—well, I certainly did—to involve them in the social side of the High Commission. They were invaluable when we had parties with local people to show that it was not exclusive and separatist, that we were a team together. We kept the staff very much on board and we kept them throughout. We had very little need to dismiss people and very few resignations. There were temptations. The Americans paid far more than we did because they did not do the same test of comparability within the society.

Our interaction within Caribbean society, as in any post, depends on the individual.

Some people would shut themselves in and did not want to deal with the locals in any shape or form unless they had to as part of their job. Others, and I think I can claim to be one of the others, enjoyed exploring the society. I was once taken to a very scruffy and dangerous part of Port of Spain19 because I wanted to listen to some local music, and I went with a local musician who guaranteed my safety and told everybody, ‘Leave him alone because he is one of us.’ At our house in Elizabeth Street we used to have music sessions, use some of the calypso players who could also do good jazz; I am a jazz fiend, and it really did create a melding of society and gave you a lot of very useful contacts that you did not expect would be useful, so it was really up to you whether you mixed in with Caribbean society.

We did not have any visits from the Queen or the Royal Family, and I think we only had one junior minister in my time. He got stuck in a lift because there was a power cut, and he could not understand why Trinidad had power cuts. He said, ‘But you have all this oil,’ and I said, ‘Yes, they have all of this oil, but they do not have the transmission capability.’

What were important to us were naval visits; I was a great enthusiast for naval visits because they produced a focus. They produced integrated guest lists and they also had drink, which American ships did not, so that was another great advantage.

17

HM Queen Elizabeth II. The Trinidad and Tobago Carnival is held just before Ash Wednesday (the start of Lent).

19 Port of Spain is the capital of Trinidad and Tobago.

18

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Onslow: Would you like to elaborate on your particular recollections of your responsibilities as Deputy High Commissioner at the time?

Cook: I obviously shadowed the High Commissioner and therefore covered mainly the political side, which meant that I got to meet MPs and ministers. I did a lot on the security side because there was a great deal of nervousness in Trinidad at the time about Grenada20 and also a country you have not put on your list, Venezuela, because they were reviving claims to the islands and the region. I spent quite a lot of time with the coastguard, the defence force and the police, encouraging London to offer training and other facilities. We did hope at one time to sell Vosper Thorneycroft patrol boats,21 but the Swedes beat us to it, which was very frustrating. My late wife was Swedish, so she was quite happy. It was a very open society; you could call somebody and see them, go and have a drink with them and go to a local bar.

There were no barriers, as you would expect. There was a changeover: Eric Williams had gone; he was pretty dictatorial, and I think the island breathed out when he went. They had a new political regime which was far gentler, and they had overcome the fear that there would be some sort of coup, which of course did happen a bit later in Trinidad’s history.

That was one part of my job; another part was overseeing the administration of the office. We had a management officer, but there were financial and other decisions that had to be referred upwards. Something I initiated and was actually able to see the end of was to change our offices. We were down by the docks and it was not a very salubrious area or office. You could hear the pitter-patter of tiny feet running above your office ceiling, and I subsequently in the Foreign Office became head of the Estates Department, and was able to finish off what I had started by commissioning a new High Commission building in Port of Spain,22 by which time it was too big for our needs. We have hired it out to the Germans since, I have been told.

In addition, I had a close relationship with the police. It was not quite intended, but within 10 days of arriving I was woken up in the morning with two large gentlemen sticking a knife in my throat, saying, ‘Where’s your money, man?’ This shocked the police, it shocked the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but it launched my social life because they expected me to leave, and I said, ‘Well, it could have happened in London or anywhere else,’ and the Trinidadian reaction was, ‘Fine, well, come to a party’. It gave me an ‘in’ to the police that I was able to use to get some very useful information about their work, to try to counter the growing drug trade from South America through the Caribbean islands, which of course we fed to the appropriate authorities in London and elsewhere.

When it came to visitors, we did not have too many. We had senior members of the office come out and I think we only had one or two very junior ministers because the Caribbean was not high on the hit-list at that time, despite the nervousness about Grenada and so on. Obviously we dealt with them in the way we would deal with any ministers: we gave them a programme, arranged some entertainment so they could meet a cross-section of the community and briefed them on the key points, so that has not changed anywhere in the world, really.

20

In 1983, Granada was invaded by the USA. See volume 2.

Vosper Thorneycroft (UK) Limited were formed in 1966 through the merger of leading shipbuilders Vosper Limited and J.I. Thorneycroft & Company. For a full history see http://www.baesystems.com/en/heritage/vosper-thorneycroft [Accessed 3 Feb. 2020].

22 The capital city of Trinidad and Tobago.

21

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Onslow: You have particularly emphasised security and your relationship with the police as core recollections from your time as Deputy High Commissioner. What were the relationships like between the High Commission and other posts? You made mention of the Americans; what of the Canadians and others?

Sir Martin S Berthoud: I will be able to expand quite a lot on that.

Onslow: Okay, excellent.

Cook: We had good liaison. I went to Grenada when it was difficult and linked up by chance with some visiting colleagues from the American Embassy in Barbados and with our sole man in Grenada, Mr Kelly.23 We had a good exchange. We met at social functions, we met professionally. The American Deputy Head of the mission was a friend who shared the jazz evenings, and we had a very good interchange of information. There was not a huge diplomatic community there. Some of the biggest ones were the Nigerians, who, given their lavishness, spent most of the time dealing in illicit substances that came from South America.

It was not just the oil. We did go down to the oil fields in San Fernando and we used to have an annual cricket match down there with the Americans.

Onslow: Well, that is one thing you could be sure of beating them at! Did you have a particular realm of responsibilities in terms of trade, investment, economic relations and other sporting contacts? Did those issues also come under your job’s remit?

Cook: We had a commercial section, and as head of chancery equivalent and deputy it reported through me. As I had done a commercial job in Norway and Sweden, I was quite familiar with the commercial side. However, it was not huge; as I said, we tried to sell Vosper Thorneycroft patrol vessels, but it was service industries rather than items, because there were regional distributors and manufacturers. The Trinidadian industry was rum, bitters and some fabrication to do with the oil and increasingly the gas business; it was not a huge volume of trade from Britain that we had to deal with. Obviously when businesses came, we looked after them. Not all of them told us what they wanted before they turned up on our doorstep, but that is common throughout the world.

Onslow: Did you have any other active engagement, that you recall, with other British agencies such as the British Council, with Overseas Development Assistance (ODA)24 as it then was, or with the BBC World Service?25

23

John Kelly, UK Permanent Representative, FCO, Grenada, 1982–6. https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/official-development-assistance-oda--2 [Accessed 3 Feb. 2020].

25 The British Broadcasting Corporation’s international television news wing is called BBC World.

24

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Cook: The British Council was based in Barbados, so we did not have them. There was a stringer with the BBC but there was not a great deal of active contact; they came in if they needed to do something. ODA as such did not feature that much; there were some schemes—again, they were not based on Trinidad—where there was some money that was disbursed. We used to have something called the Head of Mission Gift Scheme, where you had a little pot which you could use for small scale projects. We did, on behalf of the British Council, maintain liaison with the university,26 St Augustine’s campus, and gave the odd book donations but nothing of any significant volume, because Trinidad was not reckoned a poor country because of the oil revenue. I think when I was there the average income—obviously it was in pockets—was something like US$3,000 to US$4,000 a year, which was quite a lot.

Onslow: Were you affected at all by redistribution of responsibilities in London? I know that there was a re-structuring and changing remit in terms of geographic coverage in the FCO back in Whitehall in the 1980s. Did that affect you in any way?

Cook: Not really; we had a clear set of responsibilities which we had to meet. If your reporting channel changes, your reporting does not so much, unless you are told, ‘We are breaking relations with that country,’ or, ‘We want you to cover this additional country.’ This is why I went to Grenada, because we were asked as the High Commission to go and sniff around for ourselves to get a regional perspective, so we could actually talk with our Trinidadian colleagues and give our broader overview of how we found things.

Onslow: Was that on a bilateral basis in terms of acting as an information conduit for your Trinidadian colleagues, or was this within a Commonwealth framework?

Cook: It was in a Foreign Office context, obviously, toward our friendly neighbours about what we had seen there. It was specifically a bilateral exercise. London said, ‘Can you go and have a look because we want some more in-depth reporting?’ because we had one poor chap who was all on his own and he had no perspective. It was not his fault, but he had nobody to talk to and it was a very difficult time in Grenada; people would not talk to him because of nervousness about the Bishop government. Funnily enough they talked to a stranger far more over a rum or a glass of wine than they would with somebody who is actually in the place.

Onslow: Did you make just the one trip?

Cook: Yes, because not long after it all changed.

26

University of the West Indies at St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago. See http://sta.uwi.edu/ [Accessed 3 Feb. 2020].

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Onslow: Indeed. Michael, thank you very much indeed for starting off with those reminiscences. Sir Martin, please could you expand upon the next six years from your point of view as High Commissioner?

Berthoud: Regarding our role as a local employer, a lot of this has already been answered very competently by the previous Deputy High Commissioner. One point that is worth emphasising is that our local Trinidadian employees were absolutely admirable in most respects, and I remember one or two of them were absolutely loyal right through the six and a half years that I was there. One driver in particular was absolutely brilliant in knowing his way around, which was something that was not always all that easy to do.

The next point relates to the visits by the Queen and other members of royal family. I will probably take a little bit longer on this than on the other points, many of which have already been answered, as it were. We did have a visit by the Queen in 1985 and I got there in about March of that year. By the time I got there the preparations for the visit were already going on and that was definitely the most important thing I did while I was in Trinidad, to help make this visit by the Queen really successful, which indeed it was. It only took two days, but during that time it was astonishing how much she managed to visit with the Duke.27 The Duke of Edinburgh actually paid his own little private visit to the Asa Wright 28 Centre, which is a big nature centre, so it was in a way a double visit, but of course the Queen was the absolute centre of everything. I managed to get her to visit my High Commissioners residence and we were able to have a garden party there, to which we were able to invite all the top members of the British community and also some of our Trinidadian friends. The biggest event was the big dinner on the royal yacht, which was attended by 52 members of society and endeavour in Trinidad. That was a very excellent visit. The Royal Marines played their part in the event and played a lot of tunes which some of the Trinidadians present remembered singing at school before the days of independence. There is no doubt at all that this visit played a tremendous part in cementing further and indeed enhancing the relations which the UK had with Trinidad and Tobago.

That visit was followed up quite a few years later by a visit by the Princess Royal, whom we are not allowed to call the Princess Anne.29 She paid a very successful visit in 1990 in which she displayed a fantastic ability to absorb all sorts of information about what Trinidad and Tobago was doing in the areas of education, for instance, and medicine. She was quite extraordinary; the degree of interest which she showed in so many subjects at various stages, even if this did have the impact on the timing of her programme, which actually got rather overlong, so various things had to be cut short. At the same time we were able to use her as another big flag-waver for the British connection, if that might not be quite the right word. It emphasised the strength of the connection which our two countries had.

These two visits were the two most important events during my six and a half years in Trinidad and Tobago, and do not forget that that did include visits to Tobago as well as to the island of Trinidad itself. I think that brings me to the end of the royal part of my statement, and I might then move on to the various other questions. The British Council has already

27

The husband and consort of HM Queen Elizabeth II is HRH, the Duke of Edinburgh.

The Asa Wright Nature Centre (AWNC) is located in the mountains of the Northern Range, Trinidad and Tobago. See http://asawright.org/ [Accessed 3 Feb. 2020].

29 HRH the Princess Royal is second child and daughter of the Queen.

28

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been dealt with; it does not exist in our relationship with Trinidad and Tobago to any important degree.

Sporting ties are something important where Trinidad and Tobago are concerned. Our own High Commission did have a potential role to play when it looked as though we might have been going to win for once in a test match between England and the West Indies.

Generally, we were being trampled on in the field of cricket to no mean tune. It actually looked as though we were about to win a Test match between England and the West Indies, because we were being trampled on in the field of cricket to no mean tune. It actually looked as though we were about to win a match, and therefore as High Commissioner it was my job to get the champagne ready at the residence, which I duly gave orders for. Everything was going fine, we looked as though we were going to win, but then alas it clouded over, so the match had to end in a draw because we were not able to finish off the game.

In terms of investment, trade and economic relations I was able to do what I could to foster our relations on the trade front, and especially on the oil and gas front, but most of the time there was not a huge amount going on.

I think I will move on now to something that was already touched on by the previous Deputy High Commissioner: the Trinidad and Tobago (T & T) relations with the United States and Canada. They were definitely strengthening those relations. Our own relationship with T & T remained very strong, but T & T were in fact also enhancing their relationship with the United States. The previous Prime Minister, Chambers,30 was a bit cool as far as the United States or Canada was concerned. Errol Mahabir,31 got much keener on the United States, and they thickened their relations with the USA and also with Canada during the time that I was there. I had good relations with all fellow diplomats while I was there, except of course for the Argentine Ambassador, who I was not allowed to talk to. I had a sort of love/hate relationship with him because we both knew we were not allowed to talk to each other.

Cook: In my day the Argentine Ambassador had an English wife, which made it even more complicated.

Berthoud: I think that brings me to the end of the kind of things which I might usefully say are most of the subjects which I have got in front of me here. Cricket was all-important and I did have very good relations with the Trinidad and Tobagan press, and I have written a book—which I am not advertising here—which is called Undiplomatic Episodes,32 which I will be able to display later. In it I talk about one aspect which I have not mentioned here in any detail, which was how my love of birds and birdwatching was something which was generally approved of by the Trinidadians. As I was leaving, one of the newspapers published a cartoon which is reproduced on the cover of my book; it was a cartoon of me with my big nose and a small hummingbird in the offing, and the inscription by the cartoonist is, ‘Thanks, Martin, for your love of our birds.’ I could actually show it now, although I am sure this should not be part of the proceedings.

30

George Chambers (1928–97), Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, 1981–6.

Errol Mahabir (1931–2015), Minister for Foreign Affairs, Trinidad and Tobago, 1981–6.

32 Martin Berthoud, Undiplomatic Episodes (2017).

31

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Onslow: Thank you very much, Sir Martin. If I may, I will draw you both back in to interact with comments from our other panellists. Moving on please, I will invite Michael James, Deputy High Commissioner to Barbados, to make your comments.

R. Michael James: Thank you, Chairman. I was happy to be invited to a seminar on the role of the High Commissions in the Caribbean, but then when I started to think about it, for my area, Barbados—and we also covered Saint Kitts, Saint Lucia, Dominica and Antigua where we had resident representatives as well—there are not many issues compared to Trinidad, Jamaica or Guyana. I had been posted to Guyana, 1971-73, as Deputy High Commissioner when there were real problems that made Guyana more interesting. I have to say it was much more interesting because the Prime Minister, Forbes Burnham,33 was unpredictable; somehow he had become Prime Minister, in which the US and the British had had a role, not Cheddi Jagan,34 the communist, but what was Burnham? There were issues there of nationalising British sugar, British bauxite; one just did not know what was going to happen next.

You do know what is going to happen next in Barbados. It has not had a revolution, the people like us and they do not get angry about very much. I remember immigration obviously mattered and Bernie Grant35—a sort of predecessor to Diane Abbott,36 but in the same mould—tried to stir the local press by saying how racist the British government were being. We did not have to whisper in his ear; a representative of the government quietly talked to him and the press said they were not interested. There is a handy checklist of issues you wish to cover; I will not go through them all in detail but I can comment very briefly.

The High Commissioner’s role as a local employer: I think we were good employers.

We had the British Council and the development division based in Barbados, and they covered a large area of the eastern Caribbean. The British Council did an excellent job helping people to talk and teach English.

The development division: I used to go around my region, Antigua, Saint Kitts and Saint Lucia and talk to the prime ministers, but what did I have to say to them? They only wanted to see the head of the development division because he was the source of the money and aid.

Interaction with Caribbean society: again, Barbados and the islands are friendly people. Antigua was, to put it kindly, iffy; you would not be sure what the Bird family were thinking or doing, and drugs were one of the few issues in which the Caribbean islands cooperated well, but not Antigua. You would see very strange men in the surrounds of the Prime Minister’s office who may well have spent the previous 10 years in Alcatraz for drug running or other nefarious things. Antigua was a worry, but otherwise Barbados and these islands were friendly, and they liked us being there; if we were not there, they would be hurt.

They would be interested in what we wished to publicise or the information we wished to disseminate. It is interesting that in their press relations they would take what we fed them without discriminating very much about what we were saying, and that in fact was more worrying than encouraging.

How have historical relations, business and sporting ties shaped contemporary

33

Forbes Burnham (1923–85), Premier of British Guyana and then Guyana, 1966–80.

Cheddi Jagan (1918–97), Premier of British Guyana, 1961–4; and then President of Guyana, 1992–7.

35 Bernie Grant (1944–2000), Labour MP for Tottenham, 1987–2000.

36 Diane Abbott, Labour MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington since 1987.

34

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encounters; in Barbados? We are—it sounds a bit simple—the mother country. They think of us; they put us first. They relate almost everything they do to British relations, and so we have to be careful to be approachable and I think moral. How did other diplomats enjoy Barbados? It is a lovely place for holidays. They did not, I fear, feel they had very much to do, and they liked talking to us because we seemed to understand the way the Bajans thought and wished to behave. Relations with Barbados on immigration: as I say, they do not like the immigration restrictions, and quite understandably so, but it was a civilised exchange with them. Tourism: splendid.

Health: an interesting example of how well we get on with the Barbados authorities. I was asked by the Home Office to approach the Barbados government for a seminar to discover what the incidents and the prevalence of sickle cell, which affects black African people more than white. They said they could not run such a survey in British jails because they could not control the response, so they thought that Barbados would be safer, and they would not mind such a request. Happily, we did not have to pursue it.

Security: Barbados is a very orderly place. I do not know what it is like now, but in my day there were very few burglaries and robberies. You felt pretty safe there. Drugs was the big issue, but again Barbados—I hope I am not being naïve here—was safe, the other islands less so. Interaction with the Caribbean news media: as I said, not dynamic. The Central Office of Information, which was then very much alive, gave us very good material to disseminate and it was lapped up.

Caribbean relations with the United States: important. Canada: also important. I cannot remember any relations at all with Mexico or Brazil. Inter-Caribbean relations: aside from the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and the University of the West Indies, there did not seem to be much Caribbean cooperation apart from cricket and drugs. Commonwealth dimension: they liked the Commonwealth. Barbados and the islands were helpful on international issues at the United Nations.

Relationships with diplomats from other countries: as I said, most of the representatives from the other countries were not quite sure why they were there. I think that really concludes my comments now. Thank you.

Onslow: Thank you very much indeed. I would like to ask Denis Doble to make his remarks on the High Commission in Kingston.

Denis H. Doble: Of course, as a local employer, we were quite important in Kingston. I think we employed some 60 or 70 Jamaicans and local British staff too. People appreciated being employed and we were reckoned to be good employers, with not many resignations. People stayed as long as they could. We organised social events as well, which were useful to us in contacts with the local community. We also employed staff ourselves in our houses, so we were employers there. We also dealt with a security company called Marksman, security being very important in Jamaica. Marksman were a local company, and I think we kept them going for quite a long time with our security arrangements, and spending a lot of money, so we were also employers to that extent.

Interaction with Caribbean society: the High Commission were of course involved in most major political and social events, as you might expect. We did a lot of entertaining and receptions went down particularly well; the Jamaicans love parties, buffet lunches and suppers; we also arranged visits. Popular visits were by Jamaicans who had gone to Britain and become British; for instance, we had the Lord Mayor of Bristol, who was a Jamaican, 18

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and that was very popular. We had the Sheriff of Nottingham, who also turned out to be a Jamaican. We tried to spot potential politicians as well; I remember having lunch with somebody called Diane Abbott in Kingston. We had a very good lunch which I certainly enjoyed, and I hope she did; she has been in the news lately, as you know. We had the Princess Royal in 1990. She had a very good visit, meeting senior ministers and business people, was very well informed and interested in everything that was going on.

We had ministerial visits too in the early part of my time. Timothy Eggar,37 the Parliamentary Under-Secretary, came and visited the north coast. We had a good programme for him; I remember he swam in the Caribbean. We also had a more important visit, which was form Chris Patten,38 a Minister of State for Aid. We did have an aid programme, and that was one of our ways of interrelating, particularly with the main thrust on education. We had an elaborate textbook scheme which covered most of the secondary schools in Jamaica; it was very widespread in the island. I think both Jamaicans and the Education Ministry appreciated it. One or two matters with the textbooks were not quite accurate; there were problems that needed ironing out, and Chris Patten was certainly looking at that. It was actually one of the reasons why he came.

We had about 10 or a dozen Technical Co-operation Officers (TCOs) at one time, in various spheres; including two very senior police officers to assist with the organisation of the police and police training, which was something we could help with. We had health visitors to advise on cancer. Sickle cell has been mentioned; sickle cell had a major unit at University of the West Indies.

Drugs were always a huge problem in Jamaica. We had two lecturers assist the local authorities, and in the High Commission we had a drug liaison officer who liaised with the local authorities and helped them with training;, he hopefully helped to stem the flow of drugs to the UK, which was one of the reasons he was there. We had a defence advisor of course, interrelating with the Jamaica Defence Force, the strongest force in the Caribbean.

That was in fact commanded early on by, rather unusually, a white Jamaican called Neish,39 with whom we had a very good relationship.

Margaret Thatcher40 did actually visited in 1987 as Prime Minister on her way back from the US. It was a few days before I arrived; my predecessor stayed on to cover the visit; she came partly to boost the prospects of the Prime Minister at the time, Edward Seaga,41 who had lost ground badly in the 1986 elections and hoped to win in 1989. He wanted to take advantage of a certain economic upturn in the economy, not as big an upturn as it should have been, of course. It did not happen because in 1989 Seaga lost the election to Michael Manley42 in a reasonably peaceful campaign. It passed off reasonably well compared with what had happened in Jamaica in the 1970s, the huge violence in elections and so on.

I might also mention the British Council. There was no British Council when I arrived and I was involved in cultural events, particularly in my first year. We had a certain amount of success with the Jamaican group who came out called the Reggae Philharmonic—a very good name, the Reggae Philharmonic—who are still practising here. They were Jamaicans living in Britain, but they were extremely successful, and we got a lot of kudos with praise from Michael Manley and senior people. I think partly because of that we persuaded the 37

Timothy Eggar, Conservative MP for Enfield North, 1979–97; Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, 1985–9.

38 Chris Patten (Lord Patten of Barnes), Minister for Overseas Development, 1986–9.

39 Major-General Robert James Neish, Chief of Staff, Jamaica Defence Force, 1979–90.

40 Margaret Thatcher (Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, 1926–2013), British Prime Minister, 1979–90.

41 Edward Seaga, Jamaican Prime Minister, 1980–9.

42 Michael Manley (1924-97), Jamaican Prime Minister, 1972–80.

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British Council to come back. The British Council representative was based in Jamaica but visited Barbados and Trinidad. There was discussion as to whether the representative should be in Jamaica, Barbados or Trinidad and we actually won the day. I suppose we had slightly more going on, with a bigger island I like to think we played a part in getting the Council back into the Caribbean. I mention the BBC World Service43 as being quite important too.

The Caribbean being English speaking the BBC World Service could play a bigger role there than in many other parts of the world.

I cannot talk about Jamaica without talking about security. Jamaica of course has pockets of great violence. The main problem is downtown Kingston, which was a no-go area for us; we were in uptown Kingston. Downtown was a continuing problem with violent gangs of both political parties fighting each other. Violence spread to the rest of the country, certainly to uptown Kingston where we had to look after ourselves very carefully, and indeed to the north coast. But it was much more a Kingston problem, and we had of course a lot of personal security ourselves. Most of the staff lived on quite a large compound, fortunately, which was well protected. A lot of the junior British staff had houses, but we lived off-compound, as did one or two others, which was why we had a lot of personal security.

We had guards all day as well as at night. The Alsatian and the Rottweiler came at six o’clock to be on parade during the night. We had a push button system to a SWAT44 in the vicinity who would come to assist us if we needed them. We used marksmen for protection, and it was all pretty expensive. My wife could not really walk down the street on her own; even during the day. But she could drive a car. Security played a very big part in our lives there.

I mentioned the aid programme briefly, and we had a trade system of course. The banana trade continued successfully. There was bauxite production, mainly Canadian— Alcan45 and Alcoa46—but we had a British interest in that in the north of Jamaica; I went round a bauxite area two or three times.

One of the very big problems I should mention was Hurricane Gilbert,47 which happened in August 1988 at the end of my first year, which is mentioned in your chronology.

That was very traumatic, because practically the whole island was knocked out, and at one point the High Commission was the only point of radio contact on the island because our aerials remained intact, whereas the American ones did not. We were passing messages for the American Embassy back to their embassy in London, because they could not communicate. We had a very key role in that. Luckily our communications turned out to be rather good.

We had a huge programme of relief and rehabilitation after the hurricane. The island was divided into three: we had the western end; the Americans had the middle; and the Canadians had the eastern bit. We spent a lot of time and money; with quite a large team of a dozen or so people helping with the repairs e.g. restoring the telegraph wires and links. The Jamaicans were very amused to find the white men climbing telegraph poles, which they had never seen before. We spent about six months working on that part of the island, as did the Americans and Canadians. It was a hugely disruptive process. We came out of that rather well, with the role we played.

The British Broadcasting Corporation’s World Service is the world’s largest international broadcaster.

Special Weapons and Tactics Unit.

45 Now Rio Tinto Alcan, it was one of the world’s largest aluminium manufacturers over the twentieth century.

46 Based in Pittsburgh, the Alcoa Corporation is an American corporation and one of the largest aluminium manufacturers.

47 Hurricane Gilbert hit the Caribbean in Sept. 1988.

43 44

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On sporting ties, I do not think one can overemphasise the role of cricket in the Caribbean. At that time the West Indies were the top team in the world in the 1970s and 1980s, and that continued into the 1990s. We did have Graham Gooch48 actually winning a Test match in Jamaica for the first time, I think, since the 1950s. Sadly he did not go on to win the series; we lost it 2–1. It was close-fought with the West Indies. While I was there, we had all the main Commonwealth national cricket teams New Zealand; Australia; India, Pakistan South Africa, as well as England So it was of great interest, particularly to me as a life member of the MCC,49 I enjoyed that very much. Cricket was something which brought the Caribbean together, and they were extremely proud of their team.

On tourism, we could not be involved with our uninvolved consular role. Allinclusive tourist centres were set up, where people came on holiday but stayed in the centres, mainly Americans and Canadians on the north coast. Butch Stewart50 of the Sandals group was very instrumental in that, and Sandals has become very successful spreading to other parts of the Caribbean. This meant that there were relatively few incidents involving tourists, far fewer than there might have been. It meant that tourists did not really see the beauty and attractions of the island. They did not visit places like Port Antonio, the Cockpit Country, or Negril.

We had a number of conferences e.g. a governors’ conference; governors came from the small islands. I remember I attended a regional conference in Barbados at one point, and we had regional discussions in Miami, which started while I was there.

We had the Law of the Sea Conference once a year. It was based in New York, but they all came down to Kingston, Jamaica, for historic reasons. On Naval, we had the Caribbean frigate which came into Montego Bay quite frequently, under Captain Slim Taylor, whom I got to know. In fact, I met him again later when he came to Rotterdam on the ship.

The frigate was equipped to deal with hurricanes, and other natural disasters.

Jamaica had close relations with the Cayman Islands; in fact, we supplied their diplomatic mail. We used to visit as it was a rest post for some of our staff, taking the diplomatic bag to the Caymans. Otherwise for rest and relaxation most of us went to Florida, which was quite near as well. We encouraged the staff to go too.

One other thing I should mention: in 1988 we had the Commonwealth Games in Jamaica, which passed off reasonably well. There were no great incidents. We got involved with British athletes; it was a feather in the Jamaicans’ cap. The emergence of sprinters was apparent, and that has continued ever since, when you get to Usain Bolt51 and the rest.

I might mention we did cover Haiti from Jamaica. I went six or seven times. The first High Commissioner when I was there was more involved. British interests were not that great; we had a very small British community. There was very little trade and there was no aid programme as such. We reported the changes of government, after the overthrow of Papa Doc in 198652 and the arrival of Prosper Avril53 later, which was after Manigat54 in 1988.

Military control came in with Avril. After the elections of 1990 the reforming Jean-Bertrand

48

Graham Gooch was an English cricketer, whose professional career spanned from 1973 to 2000. As Captain of the English Cricket Team he toured the West Indies in 1988.

49 Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) is based at Lords cricket ground. See https://www.lords.org/mcc/ [Accessed 3 Feb. 2020].

50 Gordon ‘Butch’ Stewart, founder and Chairman of Sandals Resorts and Beaches Resorts based in Jamaica.

51 Usain Bolt was an Olympic and Commonwealth campion sprinter from Jamaica.

52 Jean-Claude Duvalier (1951–2014), known as ‘Baby Doc’, President of Haiti, 1971–86. His father was known as ‘Papa Doc’.

53 Prosper Avril, President of Haiti, 1988–90.

54 Leslie Manigat (1930–2014), President of Haiti, Feb.–June 1988.

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Aristide55 came in. He was ousted in 1991 and came back in 1994.

We did not see any Voodoo, let alone zombies, but it was obviously there, because Voodoo was recognised as a separate religion in 2004.

Onslow: Thank you very much indeed. Mr Cook and Sir Martin Berthoud, in that earlier period, were you involved in the emergence of regional meetings of heads of post that Mr Doble made reference to?

Berthoud: I do remember more than one such gathering, yes.

Onslow: Thank you. One thing that always strikes a visitor to the Caribbean is the division between the Francophone Caribbean and the Anglophone Caribbean. How important do you think those regional meetings were in terms of helping to bridge that divide, in terms of British representation across the Caribbean, and also in helping to build a sense of esprit de region/regionalism, as it were?

Berthoud: Yes, I thought they were very useful in getting us to pool our ideas and think of new ones.

Onslow: There is one country to which none of you made reference, although you did of course expressly mention the United States, Canada and Venezuela. What of your relations with your comparable French diplomatic representatives?

Berthoud: It tended to reflect the basic relationship between the UK and France at the time. I remember two different French Ambassadors, one of whom I liked quite a lot, one of whom I disliked quite a lot.

Cook: I think I would agree. I do not think they terribly enjoyed being in the British Caribbean. The locals may have complained about us, but they complained about them more because of perceived arrogance: ‘There’s nowhere as good as Martinique and Guadeloupe in the region.’

What was interesting, though, was the Dutch, because the Dutch had regional interests as well. You could have a much better discussion, a normal emotional discussion, with the Dutch about Caribbean regional issues. I do not know if you found that, did you?

Berthoud: Yes, I found I could have extremely good discussions with my American colleagues and also particularly, as it happened, my Canadian colleagues, who became and still are tremendous friends. That certainly did not happen with the French, as far as I was concerned.

Onslow: Mr James, does that correspond with your recollections?

55

Jean-Bertrand Aristide, President of Haiti, various times between 1991 and 1996, and then again 2001–4.

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James: I am afraid it does.

Onslow: Mr Doble, would you like to add anything?

Doble: The French were there, I think, mainly for trade. We saw quite a bit of them, as they were very good culturally. The Institut Culturel, which we used ourselves for example they showed French films. I think that was slightly more influential than the Embassy. I am not sure it was a posting which the French sought after too much. In fact, they withdrew from Jamaica some years earlier.

Onslow: I would like now to open the discussion to questions from the floor.

Gill Bennett: I would like to ask the entire panel about the Commonwealth element, particularly in the 1980s. There was a Heads of Government Meeting in Trinidad; was it in 1982?

Onslow In Nassau, it was 1985.56 Bennett No, there was one in Trinidad. There was a big Commonwealth meeting, yes. Was it not 1982?57 Berthoud: What was the question? I did not hear it.

Cook: It was about a Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Trinidad in 1982, before your time, but I do not remember it during my time.

Berthoud: It was before my time, yes.

Bennett: Anyway, apart from that there was also a time when the Secretary General, Sonny Ramphal,58 was very much a Caribbean man. In my experience, there was a lot of Commonwealth activity during the 1980s, and I just wondered if the Panel could say something about that.

56

The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) was held in Nassau, Bahamas in October 1985.

57 The 1981 CHOGM was held in Melbourne; and the 1983 CHOGM was in held in New Delhi. The only time a CHOGM was held in Trinidad and Tobago was in 2009.

58 Sir Shridath ‘Sonny’ Ramphal, Secretary General of the Commonwealth, 1975–90.

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Berthoud: Well, certainly in Trinidad and Tobago I got on extremely well with my Canadian colleague but there were not really any other Commonwealth representatives to commune with that I can think of, off-hand.

Cook: I think there were visits from other Commonwealth countries, from Jamaica and so on, but I never experienced much perception in Trinidad and Tobago of the wider Commonwealth in Africa or Asia. It may have focused in Jamaica during the Commonwealth Games, but for the Trinidadians and Tobagans it seemed to be very much a bilateral issue and an inter-Caribbean regional issue rather than a conceptual issue of the Commonwealth as a global association.

Berthoud: I very much endorse that, because I talked all the time to my Canadian colleague. We were thinking not so much in terms of the Commonwealth, as of our own perception of Trinidad and Tobago. Certainly it was our individual perception rather than some generalised Commonwealth perception.

James: I would endorse that and so, I believe, Sonny Ramphal, former Secretary General of the Commonwealth, whom I knew when he was Foreign Minister in Guyana,59 and again in Barbados, where I believe he has retired in fact was the Foreign Minister in Guyana when I was Deputy High Commissioner there.

Doble: Yes, Jamaica benefited from Commonwealth organisations like the Telecommunications Union. Cable & Wireless were very big in the Caribbean. I mentioned the Commonwealth Games; it was something which they appreciated. They liked the Commonwealth, put it like that.

Onslow: Thank you very much.

Dr Jatinder Mann I am not sure if it would be best answered by Mr Cook or Sir Martin Berthoud; perhaps the latter, but I will open it to both of them. It is about Trinidad; I was wondering if you could possibly speak about the British reaction or involvement in the discussions about domestic ownership of the oil industry in Trinidad. I understand from Trinidadian friends that I met in Canada that there was quite a lot of popular pressure for the oil industry to be owned by Trinidad. There were oil interests in terms of companies, mainly perhaps US companies rather than British companies, but I was just wondering whether you could say anything about that.

Onslow: I will take a second question. Was that a question about the British High Commission’s view of domestic ownership of British oil interests in Trinidad and Tobago.

59

Ramphal was Foreign Minister of Guyana, 1972–5.

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Mann Not so much British oil interests but the Trinidad oil industry.

Professor Clem Seecharan I have a question for Mr James. I know your experience of Guyana was substantially different from your experience of Barbados. I am wondering what the position of the Foreign Office was with regards to Forbes Burnham and Cheddi Jagan, one of whom was a dictator and had rigged several elections, and the other was a pro-Moscow communist. What was your brief in terms of your dealings with these people, and what was your personal experience during your encounters with Forbes Burnham and Cheddi Jagan?

Cook While I was there the British share of the Trinidadian oil industry was quite small; it was dominated by American companies. During the time when oil began to diminish and gas was seen as the replacement there was a clear view that there should be better control and more ownership of the gas industry, because of strategic and national interests. Various measures were taken before I left—I was not there to see them all through—to ensure a Trinidadian stake. Of course, they are very highly expensive activities, and to mobilise the capital to take a big share, without nationalisation, which would have actually destroyed the investment incentive, there was a kind of partnership. I do not know where it was left; I think it was probably dominated by external interests, as they were in the majority. There was quite an understandable feeling that it was our oil, our gas, we should have a bigger stake in it than was the case for many, many years.

Onslow Sir Martin, would you like to add to that?

Berthoud No, I think that is admirable.

Onslow Mr James, please could you comment on both your brief and Foreign Office perception?

James I would say when I was posted to Guyana my brief was simply, ‘Get on with Forbes Burnham as best you can.’ My personal view was that I did not think we were quite sure the right result had happened. Jagan was renowned as an extremist; I think we underestimated how radical Forbes Burnham was, but he was interesting. He would summon one at five in the morning, I do not know why, rather than a normal hour. He was a fascinating and very able man, and I have to say attractive, but I just felt uneasy about what he was going to do next. Happily the worst did not happen but he did take some pretty unpopular measures.

Seecharan What was the position of the Foreign Office on this question of democracy, free and fair elections and so on?

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James I have to be careful here because the election happened before I arrived in Guyana, and certainly the press might say it was rigged but I have no comment on that. It did reflect, I am sorry to say, the split between Indians and Africans. I do not know what the situation is now but it was a difficult issue, and I am only too happy that, in the West Indian cricket, the Indians were selected as much as the Africans, but in other aspects of life there were certainly strained relations.

Onslow: Are there other questions that members of the audience would like to put to the panel?

Dr Bartholomäus Zielinski This is a question for all the Panel, really. Sir Martin referred to the working relationship with your American counterparts, and you were saying it was good and constructive. I was just wondering whether some or all of you could reflect on the working relationship, in terms of the Foreign Office or a diplomatic brief, that your counterparts possibly had and that you had.

Would you see yourself as being in a partnership or competing with your counterparts, and how did that play out in your daily professional relationship with your US counterparts?

Cook: We co-operated, there were areas of common interests: security, regional issues, the situation in Venezuela, the situation in Grenada and so on. Obviously there were also areas of competition: trade, playing baseball on the savannah, things like that. Generally it was a harmonious relationship; they did flash the money around quite a bit more than we were able to do, but there was sometimes a misunderstanding on their part that you could buy your influence with money, and it was far more subtle within Trinidad and Tobago for getting influence by talking the same language, if you like, and having closer ties than the Americans were able to achieve. Reflecting the earlier question, they were also seen by quite a lot of Trinidadians as exploiters through the oil industry. Many Trinidadians did not feel enough money came back to Trinidad from the profits of the oil industry. Certainly, on a personal basis there were very good relations. Without being arrogant, often they came to us for guidance and advice about how one dealt with aspects of society.

I have one very telling illustration: the American Embassy formed a large group of their people to take part en masse in the street carnival in Trinidad. We signed up to individual bands because we had friends in individual bands, but they went in a bloc, and they attracted quite a lot of criticism for not really being part of it and having a sort of tour of American diplomats and their colleagues in the carnival procession.

James: Again, our relations with the Americans were close because there were no huge issues that divided us. Regarding drug and police cooperation, the advantage of the Americans having more money was that we could cover our area in an American private plane, whereas if we had just used British resources it would take taken two days to visit each island; this way you could visit four islands in one day. That is a small point, but our relations were close because, at the time I was there, there was nothing that we really strongly disagreed about.

Doble: Yes, our relations with the Americans were very close in Jamaica. They sent senior Ambassadors and had a very large mission. US aid was substantial and very helpful to us. I 26

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used to raid their statistics bank from time to time and they were always forthcoming. The Canadians also sent senior High Commissioners, they had quite a big aid programme. They had a lot of American and Canadian tourists, more than British; I discovered the Americans could visit Jamaica without passports and the other islands of the Caribbean. Often they preferred places like the Cayman Islands, which were rather more tranquil and safer.

Regarding other representatives, the Australian High Commissioner was a good friend of ours, partly because he was a very good cricketer and played in our cricket team, which strengthened the team enormously. He used to get 100, and then we had to score the odd 20 or 30 to try to win the match. I still see him; he covered the whole of the Caribbean for Australia from Jamaica.

We also had an EU representative in Jamaica who was quite active. We celebrated 9 May every year, which I especially remember because it is my wife’s birthday. 9 May is not celebrated much here. They had an aid programme as well, covering a good part of the Caribbean from Jamaica.

Returning to the French again, I should mention that the French defence attachĂŠ was actually murdered there in 1987 shortly after I arrived, so again it was not a terribly popular posting for them. A Dutch diplomatic wife was murdered as well; as it was in her house, there was obviously a lack of protection somewhere. A British aid wife was raped; somebody got over the wall of her back garden I had to deal with that; bad enough, you can imagine. I managed to get a senior security officer out from London to speak to our staff, and the other embassy and High Commission staff, which I think was much appreciated after those particular incidents.

Onslow: Thank you very much indeed. I think we will take a break now, but I think this has been an excellent first panel discussion pointing to a multiplicity of factors affecting and directing British High Commissions in the Caribbean. Commonalities of issues that have been emphasised have been the illegal drugs trade, security and tourism, and also challenges of diplomatic representation. Please join me in thanking our panellists.

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Session 2 Chair: Dr Sue Onslow, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London.

Witnesses: Derek F Milton, CMG, High Commissioner to Jamaica 1989–1995.

Gordon Baker, British High Commissioner to Belize 1995-1998; and Barbados 1998–2001.

Edward C Glover, CMG MVO, High Commissioner to Guyana and Ambassador to Suriname1998–2002.

Peter G Harborne, High Commissioner to Trinidad and Tobago 1999–2004.

C John B White, High Commissioner to Barbados 2001–2005.

Stephen J Hiscock, Deputy High Commissioner to Guyana 1988–1993 and High Commissioner to Guyana 2002–2006.

Audience: Dr Jatinder Mann, Hong Kong Baptist University.

Professor Judith Rowbotham, University of Plymouth.

Onslow: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much indeed. It gives me great pleasure to open this second panel on which we have six witnesses.

I would like to follow this in a broadly chronological way and, as with the first panel, for each of our speakers to make their remarks guided by those general questions provided beforehand. There will then be more of a group discussion between the panellists. I will of course allow enough time for questions from the floor. Please could I ask each of our speakers to speak directly into the microphone? That will ensure that the sound quality for the audience is as good as possible.

Please could I please ask Derek Milton to begin, reflecting on his time as High Commissioner in Jamaica, and picking up on comments made by colleagues from an earlier period?

Derek F Milton: Thank you. First of all, I would like to say that I agree with just about everything that my colleague, Denis Doble, had to say about Jamaica with respect to the agenda. I will try not to duplicate anything he said, and indeed I will concentrate on some of the later points on the agenda that he did not have quite enough time to cover.

First of all, with regard to visits by the Queen, there was one to Jamaica in 1994. The Queen is generally very popular in the Caribbean but what happens in Jamaica is that a visit by the Queen re-opens the debate as to whether the country should remain a monarchy or become a republic. True to form, that happened again in 1994 and the debate continues to this day. The last Prime Minister but one announced, on taking office a few years ago, that she was going to change Jamaica from a monarchy into a republic and, to the best of my knowledge, that still has not happened.

It is also worth saying that a distinction needs to be drawn between those countries in the Anglophone Commonwealth Caribbean, which recognise the Queen as Head of State— including Jamaica—and those that do not, including Trinidad and Tobago. While Martin was host to the Queen when she visited, I was not host to the Queen when she came to Jamaica.

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Her host was the Governor General of Jamaica.60 I may say that I had great difficulty explaining this fine distinction to Jamaican friends not least because, by that time, I was Dean of the Kingston Diplomatic Corps, to introduce another role, and I was invited to the major events on the Queen’s programme by virtue of that. I had to say, of course, that I was present as Dean and not British High Commissioner, so you can see the confusion that can arise.

With regards to the British Council, I spoke at the weekend to the British Council representative in the Caribbean during my time, a lady named Gillian Roche. She was, to remove any doubt, based in Kingston. There had been a lively debate as to whether she should re-open the British Council office in the Caribbean which had been closed for many years and place herself either in Port of Spain or Bridgetown or Kingston. The vote went in favour of Kingston on the grounds, I was told, that Jamaica was ‘a more vibrant society’. You can draw your own conclusions from that.

I am sure Gordon can say a lot more about the British Development Division for the Caribbean. It was mentioned briefly in the first session. I happened yesterday, quite by chance, to see the Head of the Development Division during the 1980s and I asked him what he had seen as the role of the Dev Div, as it was popularly known, and he said it was principally poverty alleviation, which has remained so to this day with its successor department, the Department for International Development. Poverty manifests itself in many forms and the former head of the Dev Div said that the focus in his time was on promoting economic development and thus economic growth, employment and prosperity.

I will switch now to sport, only to say that there was another tour by England to the Caribbean in 1994, when Mike Atherton61 was the captain. The outcome was the same; the series was lost and this time the match at Sabina Park was lost. Cricket was mentioned in the first session, but it is worth repeating. It is one of the great unifying forces. There are not that many unifying forces in the Caribbean but one thing that unites people from one end of the Anglophone Caribbean to the other is cricket. As Gordon and I were saying during the break, one has to remember that Jamaica is approximately one thousand miles away from Trinidad.

We talk of the Caribbean as a region as though it was fairly compact, but it is nothing of the sort. There is great scope for division and diversity, but cricket has been a unifying force. I say it now with slight hesitation because the West Indies is certainly no longer the cricketing superpower that it was earlier on.

My next point would be security, which comes up under one or two of the headings.

Security was all important in the relationship between Jamaica and the UK. It manifested itself in all sorts of ways, some examples of which Denis Doble has given already.

Essentially it was about drugs and the trafficking of drugs through the Caribbean, including Jamaica. I do not think I am giving away a major secret when I say that, when I first called on Michael Manley to present my Letter of Introduction, he said to me after a few introductory exchanges that the most important issue for him was trying to prevent Jamaica from becoming another Colombia. A great deal of effort was put in by both the Jamaican authorities and the British authorities and others to try to stop that happening, in which the role of the Drug Liaison Officers, who were mentioned, was vital, as was the role of the West Indies Guard Ship, popularly known as WIGS, and its work in drug interception at sea and not just in paying goodwill visits around the Caribbean, important though those were as well.

WIGS also played a key role in natural disaster relief work, for example, in Jamaica’s case following Hurricane Gilbert in 1988.

I was twice asked, while in this country on leave from Jamaica, to see the

60 61

Sir Howard Cooke (1915–2014), Governor-General of Jamaica, 1991–2006.

Mike Atherton played English Test Cricket between 1990 and 2000.

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Metropolitan Police, and I do not think a lot of Heads of Mission around the Caribbean or, indeed, in other parts of the world would necessarily expect to be doing that. However, it was precisely in order to see what more the High Commission could do in helping to limit drugs trafficking at the Jamaican end in view of the flow of drugs to the UK and, in particular, the operations of the Jamaican Yardie gangs in the UK. There was a limit to what could be done, not least because of corruption in the security forces in Jamaica, though not in the Jamaican Defence Force.

I come now to relations with the US, Canada and others, which has been mentioned.

The three countries were regarded, certainly by themselves and probably by the Jamaicans and others, as the three most important countries for various reasons: the UK as the former colonial power, the US as a major market and source of investment and Canada for strong trading ties. All three are home to large Jamaican Communities. I can say that we three Heads of Mission met about every six weeks to talk over developments in Jamaica and exchange views. Mentioning Canada brings one to the point that, yes, there was a much looser group of Commonwealth High Commissioners who met from time to time generally together with either the Prime Minister of Jamaica—Michael Manley during part of my time or P.J. Patterson62 for the rest of it—or with another senior Jamaican figure.

So far as Mexico is concerned, and certainly Brazil, I rather agree with the comment that was made in the first panel that their representatives in Jamaica had some difficulty in understanding why they were there. They would say that because they had so little support from their capitals that they really had a most unproductive time.

Mention was made of the EU representative in Jamaica and indeed the EU aid programme but mention should also be made of the political co-operation among the EU Heads of Mission. There were about six EU countries represented in Jamaica and we met on a pretty structured basis, approximately once a month, to exchange views. The representative of the EU member state holding the Presidency chaired the meeting.

In terms of inter-Caribbean relations, it is probably worth mentioning CARICOM,63 the Caribbean Community, which was an attempt to bring about at least some form of economic co-operation. It never got as far, in my time anyway, as economic integration but that was the aim. Of course, the model was the European Union. CARICOM would have liked to move on to political integration but that has proved a step too far. It is worth reminding ourselves that back in the late-1950s and early-1960s there was the Federation of the West Indies,64 which brought together the whole of the English speaking Caribbean including the dependent territories, but which came to an end in 1962 when the issue of Jamaica’s continued membership was put to a referendum—a very uncertain procedure—and Jamaica voted to leave the Federation. Eric Williams,65 who was then Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, said, ‘Ten minus 1 does not equal 9, it equals 0,’ and the Federation was wound up. In a sense, CARICOM has been an attempt to go back to those days without this being openly admitted, as I see it.

There was also the Association of Caribbean States which was formed towards the end of my time. I frankly do not know what has happened to it, but this was a grouping of both Anglophone and non-Anglophone Caribbean basin countries, including some of the states around the Caribbean such as Mexico and Venezuela, aimed at enhancing cooperation

62

P.J. Patterson, Prime Minister of Jamaica, 1992–2006.

See http://www.caricom.org/ [Accessed 3 Feb. 2020].

64 British possessions in the Caribbean were brought together in the Federation of the West Indies between 1958 and 1962.

65 Eric Williams (1911–81), Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, 1962–81.

63

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in all forms.

There was also the Caribbean Basin Initiative,66 if I am not confusing you too much.

This was a US programme to provide aid and trade benefits to the countries of the Caribbean and also Central America. That was one of many examples of US support for the region.

In terms of the Commonwealth dimension, we should remember that the Commonwealth Caribbean makes up something a quarter of the total membership of the Commonwealth. There are 12, if I recall correctly, independent Commonwealth Caribbean countries out of the 52 or 53 members of the Commonwealth as a whole. This matters, if not so much in terms of economic or political weight, then in terms of lobbying in support of British interests such as votes at the United Nations. If you could get the Commonwealth Caribbean to act as a group—which you would be lucky to do but you could try—that could be a significant number of votes in support of one’s position.

The Commonwealth has manifested itself in the Caribbean, as has been mentioned, by the Commonwealth Games on one occasion. There was also a Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Kingston, long before my time, in 1976 when Harold Wilson67 was the British Prime Minister. During my time, there were two meetings of the Commonwealth Finance Ministers in Kingston. These meetings rather happened because the Commonwealth Finance Ministers got together before the annual meetings of the International Bank and the IMF and they were looking for somewhere convenient to Washington to meet. Twice they met in Jamaica and once in Trinidad in my time. The Chancellor of the Exchequer68 came out for one of the Finance Ministers’ meetings. We had a meeting of Commonwealth Law Ministers, slightly before my time, for which the Lord Chancellor came out. We had members of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association visited. One such was Gerald Kaufman,69 who has recently died. He took a keen interest in Jamaican prisons. In other words, the Commonwealth link and the bilateral link manifested itself in considerable visits from the UK, but there were visits the other way for example by the Prime Minister of Jamaica and his Ministerial Colleagues. Non-governmental links were also strong.

The next point is the relationships with diplomats of other countries. In a sense, I have pretty much covered that, but it is probably worth saying that Venezuela counted for a lot because, if I remember correctly, it supplied oil at subsidised rates to the countries of the Caribbean and Central America. I happened to get on particularly well with my Israeli colleague, but he was one of those who rather wondered what he was doing there in Jamaica (The Israel Embassy closed down shortly after I left). Diplomatic representation in Jamaica had built up in the 1970s when it was a prominent member of the Non-Aligned Movement,70 in Michael Manley’s less successful time as Prime Minister. Some of the countries that had opened diplomatic missions then kept them going.

I could say that, with regards to diplomatic representation in the region, the French Ambassador before I left put to me the proposition that it would be sensible for the EU country with the strongest interests in any particular country in the region to represent the whole of the EU. He was thinking was that the British, for example, would be in the lead in Jamaica, and probably in Barbados and Trinidad as well, but on the other hand the Spanish would be in the lead in the Dominican Republic, the French in Haiti and so forth. I put this

66

See https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/trade-development/preference-programs/caribbean-basin-initiative-cbi [Accessed 3 Feb. 2020].

67 Sir Harold Wilson (Lord Wilson of Rievaulx, 1916–95), British Prime Minister, 1964–70; and 1974–6.

68 Denis Healey (Lord Healey, 1917–2015), Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1974–9.

69 Sir Gerald Kaufman (1930–2017), Labour MP from 1970 to his death in 2017.

70 For the history of the Non-Aligned Movement see http://www.nti.org/ 31

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idea to London, but I do not think anything has come of it.

The final point is about what broad issues have dominated Anglo-Caribbean relations.

I have emphasised security. That was key in my view. After about 18 months or so in Kingston, I came to the conclusion that I was better off supporting the effort we were making on security than anything else I was doing. This tied in, of course, with the issue of immigration, which was a bugbear to us. We had a number of unpleasant incidents involving Jamaicans being removed from the UK which caused difficulties at the Kingston end.

I might perhaps finish by mentioning Haiti. The British High Commissioner to Jamaica was, from the mid-1960s until shortly after the end of my time, also accredited to Haiti, where we had a locally engaged officer who kept us informed. I went to Haiti when I could (twenty times in all). In fact, I rather enjoyed going there; it was a different culture and a different language from Jamaica, and it was an escape from the sometimes claustrophobic confines, if I may say so, of Kingston. When it came to British interests in Haiti, they were of course minimal. Generally one could say that the UK was in favour of any steps that supported stability, political and economic, in Haiti, not least because there was a problem with Haitian refugees turning up on the beaches of the British dependent Turks and Caicos Islands and, to a lesser extent, the Cayman Islands. We also took an interest in Haiti because it was very important to the Americans who were putting a major effort into Haiti during my time, as they have done before and since. As the US is a global partner, we have seen ourselves obliged to take an interest in a country that was important to them. During my visits to Haiti I was very reliant for information and advice on the US, French and Canadian Ambassadors.

On that note, I will conclude.

Onslow Thank you very much indeed. Could we now move to our second speaker, Mr Gordon Baker?

Please could you comment both on your time in Belize and also in Barbados?

Gordon Baker Thank you, Chairman. Belize and Barbados are very different. If I may start by pointing out that, in Barbados, I was also the non-resident High Commissioner to the six states that make up the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States, those being Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.

All of those countries, including Barbados but except Dominica, were Her Majesty’s Realms.

The Queen was still Head of State. Dominica was a Republic within the Commonwealth, as is Trinidad and as is Guyana. I therefore represented, in most of those countries, the British Government but not the Crown; there was a local Governor General. The same applied in Belize, the Queen is still Head of State.

I would echo everything that has been said about local staff. We had a very small local staff in Belize; much bigger in Barbados, though numerically not that significant in terms of the total population. They were very loyal, they were very proud to work there, they had some personal standing in the community, and they were a great asset to us in terms of continuity. We rely more and more, I imagine, on local staff nowadays as the UK-based staff are cut.

Interaction with the Caribbean society is absolutely vital. It is fairly easy to get to know the key people in a small society. The atmosphere in Barbados was fairly friendly towards us because Barbados had been British throughout from the very early part of the seventeenth century until independence, whereas other Eastern Caribbean islands had changed hands between Britain and France in various wars in the 18th century. I cultivated 32

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the government, the opposition, business and local organisations. It was very important to get out and about and see and be seen and to be on the local media, which, on the whole, was pretty receptive. Much of my time in Barbados was spent visiting the other islands, problemsolving. I had good access to key people because they are small islands.

In Belize I was actively supporting UK aid projects as well as voluntary programmes such as VSO,71 Raleigh International,72 The Natural History Museum’s Research Station and others. The impact of those small projects is very great, especially if one ensures that they get attention from Government and the media. Visiting those projects involved a lot of rough upcountry travelling. Belize had a residual gratitude to Britain because we had retained the UK garrison until 1995, long after independence, to protect Belize against the Guatemalan threat.

Although, by the time I arrived the garrison had been reduced to a British Army training and support unit, training companies of British soldiers in jungle warfare and carrying out joint training with the Belize Defence Force, their presence was still well-regarded. I made sure their presence was well known and visited them frequently. Through their helicopters and other services, they made a positive contribution to the society of Belize.

There were no royal visits to Belize in my time but the Queen’s visits in 1985 and 1994 are well and warmly remembered. The Duke of Edinburgh came to Barbados twice in my time, one time in his capacity as head of the Commonwealth Ex-Servicemen’s Organisation and once as Head of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme. Barbados is quite keen on organising conferences. There were a number of Commonwealth conferences in my time such as Commonwealth Health Ministers, which was attended by the British Secretary of State. There were very strong links between the professions of the Commonwealth, especially legal and medical. There was also a private visit by the Duke of York,73 which he extended to our Royal Navy Training Unit in Antigua, and then a very successful official visit by the Princess Royal to Dominica in 2001 when she very ably supported our efforts to amicably resolve the problems over the withdrawal of Lomé subsidies for the local banana industry. Her knowledge as a farmer and her sympathy for farming went down very well.

There were also private visits by Princess Margaret74 to Mustique.

The British Council had a minimal impact in Belize and in the Eastern Caribbean.

There were no programmes as such; just the odd exhibition. The Jamaican-based representative never visited. We had a privately organised Celtic festival in Barbados, which had a great deal more impact. The closure of the British Council library many years ago was much regretted by the older generation.

The role of DFID, or ODA as it was originally known, through the Development Division for the Caribbean that was run from Barbados, was very important. I had close links with them not only in keeping an eye on their programmes but also because I worked closely with them in developing our dialogue with the neighbouring islands over the phasing out of Lomé subsidies for sugar and, especially, bananas. That was an important relationship. As my other colleagues have mentioned, there was a drugs effort with drugs officers from HM Customs and Excise based in the High Commission, for whom I was diplomatically responsible. There were also anti-drug training and equipment programmes. We had a Royal Navy Training Unit training the regional coastguards in Antigua and we had a very close relationship with the Regional Security System which was set up in Barbados in the wake of

71

https://www.vsointernational.org/ [Accessed 3 Feb. 2020]. https://raleighinternational.org/ [Accessed 3 Feb. 2020].

73 HRH Duke of York is HM Queen Elizabeth II’s second son and third child.

74 HRH Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon (1930–2002), daughter of HM King George VI and sister of HM Queen Elizabeth II. 72

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the Grenada crisis but which had shifted its focus by then to anti-drugs work. We had extensive programmes of training for the local islands, especially the small islands. We trained the Barbados police, coastguard and customs as well. We presented the islands with coastguard vessels and radios. We had a policy which I would describe as being that of an aid donor in that we tended to give them training, material and kit but in a small islands like Saint Lucia there was never enough money in The National Treasury to provide diesel for the boats at the end of the financial year. Anyway, we did our best on that and it is very important and, as has already been mentioned, the West Indies Guard Ship played a vital part in that. All the UK Government employees in Barbados had diplomatic status and I was diplomatically responsible for them.

If I can just turn quickly to relations with other countries, I would echo everything that has been said about our relationships with the United States. It was a very close relationship.

We were regarded as a vital partner. On the whole, the American Embassy was wellinformed. We had a regular exchange of information with them. We participated actively, jointly, in the anti-drugs programme. There is a large Caribbean community in the USA. Many people wanted to get Green Cards to get there. Canada was also important. They had no representation in Belize, but I had an active, well-informed partner in the Eastern Caribbean through their High Commission in Barbados and, again, some anti-drugs collaboration. There was also an Australian High Commission with whom I had close links.

Of the other countries that have been listed here, Mexico was vitally important in Belize. It had a very active embassy and cultural centre and helped to restrain Guatemalan ambitions. We had a very close relationship indeed with the Mexican ambassador.

Brazil had no presence or apparent interest in Belize. They had a small mission in Barbados, which made no impact whatsoever and made no attempt to cultivate the cultural links that they could have had between Brazil, with its huge Afro-Caribbean based population, and the local people. That was just not something they did.

Cuba was active in trying to warm up relations. We had an active Cuban ambassador in Barbados and Castro visited Barbados in 2000; a visit which had quite a lot of impact.

China was increasingly active in land investment and in aid projects in the Eastern Caribbean. These were quite expensive projects that were very unpopular because they always brought out Chinese labour to do the work. However, they did quite a lot of infrastructure work there. Within the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS)75 islands, there was a bit of competition. Some islands were accredited to Taiwan and others to China, and that was the same in Belize, which supported Taiwan in my time.

Japan was very active in lobbying and attempting to buy influence in the OECS over whaling through the International Whaling Commission.

I must also stress that it was very important that we had a close relationship with the EU. I was the sole EU Head of Mission in Belize; likewise, in Barbados and all the OECS countries except Saint Lucia, which had a resident French Ambassador. I was the permanent EU president in all the other countries and I took it upon myself to lead the groups which went from the EU to discuss with the local banana industry and local governments the phasing out of bananas which was a major crisis for those islands, which were still bananaproducing at that time.

I also made good use of the FCO governance programmes in Barbados which brought together professionals, particularly lawyers and judges, from the Overseas Territories and the independent CARICOM countries. An important aspect to remember is that we still have five Overseas Territories in the Caribbean that are part of our policy.

75

http://www.oecs.org/ [Accessed 3 Feb. 2020].

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The broad issues which dominated in my time included drugs and financial services regulation. The latter was quite a tricky relationship particularly in Barbados which regarded itself as having a well-run regime, but which was regarded by the IMF as being potentially blacklisted.

Belize/Guatemala was a constant threat in my time in Belize, although things had improved from how they were before. I was also very active in protecting, in particular, the interests of Cable & Wireless over telecommunications regulation in the Eastern Caribbean.

The Eastern Caribbean Governments were waking up to the fact that Cable & Wireless had a monopoly and they were trying to break that monopoly.

On trade, it is a small market and one in which the DTI76 took very little interest because it is small. Traditional trade with the region had declined as British industry had declined. Foreign competition was quite strong. Very much of the day-to- day business was done through Miami, but I did help to cultivate some activities; for example, we did a £2 million sale to the Barbados Fire Service through a British company that had been active there for a very long time. We also had substantial business with the catering trade and some sales of UK products for British tourists. However, on the whole, the economic relationship focussed on protecting British investments like Cable & Wireless,77 Fyffes78 over bananas and Tate & Lyle79 over sugar.

We also protected the interests of the British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL),80 over the shipment of nuclear waste to the Caribbean. This was a major contention with all the Caribbean countries, especially Barbados, because they felt that the threat of a shipload of nuclear waste going ashore on one of those islands would ruin their tourist trade. I well remember taking a high-level representative of BNFL to meet the Barbados Foreign Minister81 and he explained to her how safe and unsinkable their ships were. She turned to me and said, ‘High Commissioner, what film is running at The Globe this week?’ It happened to be Titanic.

Those were the major issues. I would just mention that, on human rights in the Robin Cook period,82 there was a certain amount of low-key lobbying on the death penalty, which had, of course, already been abolished by Order in Council in the Overseas Territories in 1991. I had the interesting situation of the dual national on death row in Saint Kitts. In that he was partly British, I felt an obligation to go and visit him. Although clearly he was a Kittitian who had committed his crimes in Saint Kitts and was subject to Kittitian law, the main issue there was the length of time for which he was on death row trying to get a decent lawyer to represent him, though I did make clear to the Prime Minister of Saint Kitts that, were he to be convicted of that crime in the United Kingdom, as a British national he would not of course be hanged. There is still a lot of local feeling on the death penalty.

Good governance really manifested itself in terms of financial services regulation, which was important in the Oversees Territories and which we tried to encourage through our conferences and links with the Oversees Territories through the Eastern Caribbean.

On CARICOM, when I took over as Head of the West Indian and Atlantic Department, as it then was in the FCO, one of the questions I asked in my first meeting with the staff was, ‘What about the common external tariff of CARICOM?’ and I was told that it 76

The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI).

Cable & Wireless was a British multinational telecommunications service.

78 Fyffes is a fruit and vegetable wholesaler.

79 Tate & Lyle is a British-based agribusiness. https://www.tateandlyle.com/ [Accessed 3 Feb. 2020].

80 British Nuclear Fuels, owned by the British government, operated between 1970 and 2010.

81 Dame Billie Miller, Barbadian Minister for Foreign Affairs, 1994–2003 82 Robin Cook (1946–2005), UK Foreign Secretary 1997–2001.

77

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varies from island to island. CARICOM matters to the Caribbean countries but actually making something more of it is still difficult for them. Similarly, I am not sure they really know where they stand in the Commonwealth although they can be lobbied for support on Commonwealth issues just as they can at the UN. It is important to remember that these small countries all have a vote in the UN as they do in the Commonwealth, and lobbying is part of our activity there.

I have probably said more than enough.

Onslow Thank you very much. I must say that your remark by the Barbadian Foreign Minister is vintage Dame Billie Miller!

Gordon Baker Absolutely.

Onslow: Many thanks indeed. Please could we now move to the third speaker, Mr Edward Glover?

Edward C Glover: I was High Commissioner in Guyana and Non-Resident Ambassador to Suriname between 1998 and 2002. In respect of Guyana, we had one of the smaller UK Caribbean missions in a country with a delicate ethnic balance, and where moreover there had been, for historical reasons, a somewhat ambivalent—and on occasions difficult—relationship between Guyana and London since the country’s independence. That was the backdrop to the period of my appointment.

The High Commission’s role as a local employer was limited. We had a small local staff but nevertheless the balance of the staff between Indo-Guyanese and Afro-Guyanese was extremely sensitive. It was necessary to do everything possible to demonstrate that we were preserving an ethnic balance. The High Commission’s role with local Caribbean society was extensive and I will come back to that in a minute.

In terms of royal visits, HRH The Prince of Wales visited in 2000. The following year, the then Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw,83 came to chair a meeting of the UK-Caribbean Forum. We also had visits from Baroness Amos84 and from Baroness Scotland.85 The wider role of the High Commission and the High Commissioner within the Caribbean society was difficult and sensitive. I would be honest in saying that during this period there existed, as had been the case before, a lingering perception amongst some Guyanese that the UK historically had been a contributing factor to Forbes Burnham’s long tenure of power as a result of the constitution put in place by the UK a year or so before Guyanese independence in 1966. Therefore, it was very important that the High Commission and its staff did everything possible to show that, whatever may have happened in the past, we were absolutely even-handed in our dealings with all Guyanese.

There was no British Council and the role of DFID was limited during my time there.

We had a small sub-office of DFID, primarily there to oversee a number of practical projects.

Historical relations, business, supporting ties and other connections were at times substantial but I think, in a wider context throughout my period of time, the link between the

83

Jack Straw, British Foreign Secretary, 2001–6.

Baroness Amos, Secretary of State for International Development, 2003–8.

85 Baroness Scotland, Attorney General for England and Wales, 2007–10.

84

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UK and Guyana weakened. For example, fewer and fewer lawyers were trained in London, which meant that the important legal link between London and Guyana was not as effective as it had been in the past. However, we obviously had visiting cricket teams. The Guyanese always beat us but that was helpful grist to the mill.

What were the key issues in terms of investment, trade and economic relations? I would say one was overriding—sugar. The Guyanese economy was historically based on sugar and, during my time as High Commissioner, there was growing alarm and despondency at the policies of the European Union which were seen to be undermining the sugar industry.

At the same time, there was an intensive effort on the part of the Guyanese Government to receive recognition under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative.86 As I said openly at the time, the World Bank gave Guyana a really hard time. There were a number of occasions when I advised representatives of the World Bank who visited Georgetown that Guyana was a Caribbean country where they had in the first instance to listen to the Government’s plans for poverty reduction and development. Finding solutions should be a co-operative effort. I am not sure that we made a tremendous amount of progress on that score.

In terms of immigration, any Guyanese who wanted to go to the UK had to have a visa. UK tourism to Guyana was limited. Health was not a decisive issue. Security was crucial against a backdrop of ethnic tension.

In terms of interaction with the Caribbean news media, the newspapers and TV reflected the ethnic divide. Therefore it was extremely important for me as High Commissioner, if I made any public statement, to make sure that at the press conference the media had a copy of my script in front of them so I was able to say after the event that where my remarks had been represented. I also took steps from time to time to alert the Government in advance that I was going to make a statement not because I wanted them to ask me to make changes but for them to be absolutely clear that I was going to make this statement and the reasons why.

Relations with the USA were close but often problematic. Relations with Canada were warm. I was little aware of any contact with Mexico. The relationship with Brazil was highly sensitive on account of illegal mining and illegal cross-border activities and, of course, the plan to build a road from Brazil to Georgetown. The Cubans were active as well as the Russians but the major developing player in Guyana during my time was China. The EU also had programmes. The Americans, the Canadians and we were members of the so-called ABC Group which often acted together.

Inter-Caribbean relations were often prickly. Sometimes Guyana did not like perceived interference with its internal affairs, and the relationship between the University of Guyana and the Government of Guyana on the one hand and the University of the West Indies on the other was sometimes problematic. The Commonwealth dimension was very important but Guyana often found it difficult to make its voice heard. Relationships with diplomats from other countries on the whole were good.

Lastly, what broad issues dominated Anglo-Caribbean relations? In no particular order, I would list: sugar on account of the perceived failure of the UK to use its influence within the EU to work towards maintaining an effective and productive sugar industry and exports to Europe; development assistance, particularly in areas such as water and police reform; security assistance; and drugs. However, the principal issue for me during my four years there was the preparation for the 2001 election, its conduct and what has happened afterwards. There was a prolonged period of violence after the 2001 election but the UK was 86

See http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/debt/brief/hipc [Accessed 3 Feb. 2020].

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instrumental in arranging an impartial international audit which was able to show that the elections had been conducted in a free and effective way.

All I would add is that, because of the ethnic sensitivity, it was always essential for the High Commissioner, his deputy and everyone else, to appear absolutely even-handed at all times. During my time there, I would have regular meetings at the residence with the then President, but I always went out of my way to demonstrate, afterwards, I would in due course have a meeting with the leader of the opposition because I wanted everyone—the guards on the gate of the residence and others—to know that we were even-handed. There could be absolutely no perception that we were favouring one side or the other.

That is all I want to say at the moment.

Onslow: Mr Glover, thank you very much indeed for those very interesting reflections. Please could I now ask Mr Peter Harborne to add his comments to the discussion?

Peter G. Harborne: My colleague, Derek Milton, pointed out how far the Caribbean is from the top to the bottom.

Jamaica is clearly the biggest of the islands but a thousand miles further south you have Trinidad and Tobago, which, as Martin Berthoud I am sure would testify, is very different from any of the others. It is roughly 40 per cent Afro-Caribbean, 40 per cent Indo-Caribbean, about 19 per cent mixed race and 1 per cent who are White, Chinese and Syrian. It does not have the racial tension in politics that has been referred to elsewhere, nor in what is—at least in my day—a very vibrant print media.

In terms of our role as a local employer, people were very proud to work for the British High Commission. Our local staff were vital to us, particularly in visa work and on the consular side. There was very little consular activity in Trinidad; the bulk was in Tobago—a very different place from Trinidad. In Tobago, a personage who has not been alluded to hitherto was immensely important for us: viz., the Honorary Consul; a local Tobagonian but with UK antecedents, who was very much the eyes and ears of the High Commission, and our guide on the why’s and wherefores of Tobago’s characteristics. The Honorary Consul was vital when a British tourist got into some sort of trouble, both for them and for us in Port of Spain.

Sir Martin also referred to the driver. Mine was a legendary figure in Port of Spain, who was able to introduce me to all sorts of people whom I would otherwise not have met, and all sorts of parts of Port of Spain that I would never otherwise have ventured to, particularly during the Carnival season—a key part of Trinidad culture, where seeing and being seen was central to your effectiveness.

Thus, as Sir Martin has suggested, Trinidad and Tobago is not the place for the shrinking violet. They are party creatures. If you like to party—to host a party or go to their parties—they will take you to their hearts. That very much suited me and, equally importantly, my wife. For us it was the best of our diplomatic postings. The British High Commissioner is a very high-profile position. You are very much in the public spotlight. If you get involved in their activities, as we both did, then they will embrace you, and they embraced us.

During my time, we had three Ministerial visits: two Ministers of the Caribbean, Baroness Scotland and Baroness Amos, and Alan Johnson,87 who was responsible for trade

87

Alan Johnson, Labour MP, various ministerial portfolios between 2003 and 2010.

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union relations during the Blair88 Government. I remember his primary concern when I took him round for a formal meeting with the local equivalent of the TUC was, ‘Will they call me comrade?’—my conclusion being that any press report where he had been referred to as ‘Comrade Johnson’ would not have been appreciated by the New Labour Government of the day!

So far as Royal Visits are concerned, Sir Martin referred to HM the Queen’s visit in 1985, which was absolutely seminal. The visit of HRH Prince Charles, early in my posting, provided a further boost. It was on the eve of Carnival, so, as well as to the meetings that are part and parcel of such visits, we were able to take him to the Pan Yards, to listen to the wonderful steel bands, and to one of the carnival Mas camps,—all of which produced massive positive publicity. One really good legacy was that we were able to leverage his visit and set up a local equivalent of the Prince of Wales’ youth business initiative, Youth Business Trinidad and Tobago (YBTT).89 YBTT is still going strong, providing microfinancing and mentoring for young would-be small entrepreneurs.

The British Council had a very low profile—much less so than the Institut Français— but was nonetheless crucial in administering the FCO Chevening scholarship scheme,90 which, for those not familiar with it, facilitates postgraduate work for young people who, it is hoped, then go on to become leaders in local society in years to come and always think fondly of the United Kingdom.

Sport played a big role in my job. As a member of MCC, I had died and gone to heaven because, literally, on the other side of the road from the British High Commission is the only cricket club in the Caribbean that, like the MCC, is owned and run by its members, i.e., the Queen’s Park Cricket Club.91 I was thus able, with a clear conscience, to say to my staff during any test match or one-day international, ‘you know where I am if you need me,’ because everybody who was anybody was ‘at the cricket’; you could sit down and talk to the Prime Minister, or any other minister, or any local business leader, because they were all there. You could interact with them in a way that was completely impossible across a desk in an office.

When I arrived in Trinidad and Tobago, the Football Association and the Government were of the view that, even if we reneged on an earlier assurance of support given by the FA to its German counterparts in return for being allowed (after some years of misbehaviour by travelling England football supporters) to re-join the European family of civilised footballing nations and compete in the European Cup, we might nonetheless get a 2006 World Cup that was earmarked to Germany. My instructions were accordingly to get alongside, as quickly and as closely as possible, to someone who is now of global notoriety; namely, then (and now very much former) FIFA92 vice-president Jack Warner.93 That nonetheless led to some tremendous occasions, including a visit by Newcastle United, then managed by Sir Bobby Robson, who, as a West Bromwich Albion supporter, was one of my childhood heroes.

Against this background, main job over my four years was twofold. The oil industry has been around in Trinidad since the mid-nineteenth century: but when I was there, it was all about natural gas, and particularly liquefied natural gas (LNG), which was then becoming a big money-earner for Trinidad and Tobago: exploration, extraction, liquefaction, shipping to

88

Tony Blair, Prime Minister, 1997–2007. http://ybtt.org/ [Accessed 3 Feb. 2020].

90 http://www.chevening.org/ [Accessed 3 Feb. 2020].

91 http://www.qpcc.com/index.asp [Accessed 3 Feb. 2020].

92 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA). See http://www.fifa.com/ [Accessed 3 Feb. 2020].

93 Jack Warner, Trinidadian politician and member of the FIFA Executive Committee 1983–2011.

89

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Charleston or Boston, re-gasification and then into the very hungry American pipeline system (this, of course, pre-dated the shale-gas revolution). For British Gas and BP, the gas fields they were involved in were key company assets, so a close supportive relationship with them was central to my job. Ditto with the many smaller UK companies, most of which were Scottish-based, who worked with them and the other ‘majors’ involved in the exploration, extraction and gasification processes.

The other major part of my job was ‘drugs and thugs’. As was alluded to earlier, the chain was Colombia, Venezuela, Trinidad and Tobago and then, as they used to say locally, ‘up the islands’, either by boat or by airplane. Tackling this required constant close collaboration between the relevant agencies of three governments—Trinidad and Tobago, US and UK. A close relationship with my American colleague was thus always very important: in addition to anti-drug running work, it was not long after the BP-Amoco merger, and there were still a lot of Americans working in the merged company, and big American involvement in the LNG project.

I also had very close relations with the Canadians. When I arrived in Trinidad, the upper reaches of the Civil Service and the legal profession were dominated by immensely capable people, all of whom had come to the United Kingdom for their undergraduate and/or postgraduate training. But this was withering on the vine. The relationship with my Canadian colleagues was always personal; the chemistry worked with the individuals concerned. But it was important too because Canada was more and more the destination of choice for young Trinidadians when it came to education and seeking a better life.

Brazil, Costa Rica, Mexico and Venezuela were active but not especially effective. As noted earlier, the Chinese were coming into the region at the time; in the 14 years since I left Trinidad, they have been very much involved in the rebuilding of downtown Port of Spain.

During my time, the EU became increasingly important in the areas of traditional diplomacy because of the growing practice of political cooperation and the search for common EU positions on the foreign-policy issues of the day. When such issues arose, my work was thus very much in conjunction with local EU colleagues—France, Germany, the Netherlands, depending upon which Members State was in the Presidency at that time—and the European Commission. The only difficulty the Trinidadians had was to understand that the Head of Delegation was not the EU representative, but the representative of the European Commission, whose job was not related to EU foreign policy but was, essentially, to administer Commission-funded aid projects. They never did quite manage this fine but nonetheless important distinction between the Commission and us, who were representatives of the EU Member States.

Something missing from this discussion on issues, which might come into the wider discussion, was the High Commission’s role in the eyes of the FCO. My biggest frustration was getting the FCO to take a sustained interest in the Caribbean. I had come from seven years in central Europe, where I had been very engaged in trying to re-build democratic institutions in post-communist Hungary and then in post-communist and newly independent Slovakia. I had thus become familiar with the EU government-to-government twinning programme, where people from a Member State government department will work with counterparts in a non-EU country to help them develop their public administration in particular. I was very keen to get something like that going in Trinidad and Tobago: as noted earlier, all those very distinguished civil servants were moving off into retirement and there was very little coming along of similar distinction to replace them. Helping a gas-enriched Trinidad and Tobago’s government to invest this bounty wisely was, in my view, a clear win/win at a time when our influence was otherwise waning.

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In the early part—the Blair 1 Government94—there were two Ministers of the Caribbean; after that, it seemed to be radio silence for a lot of the time. That was my biggest frustration: a sustained, long-term interest on the part of the FCO; otherwise, as I have said, it was the posting of a lifetime.

Onslow: Thank you very much indeed, particularly for that reflection on how the Foreign Office viewed the High Commission in post and the region as a whole. I would now like to ask John White to make his comments.

C John B White: Thank you very much. I arrived in Bridgetown on what the Americans would call 8/11. A month later, of course, was 9/11. In 2003, there was the invasion of Iraq. In 2004, Hurricane Ivan—a Category 3, very fierce and very damaging hurricane—wiped out Grenada and moved on to affect Jamaican and the Cayman Islands. I mention these three external events because, in many ways, they coloured a lot of what happened in my time in Barbados and the eastern Caribbean. As Gordon Baker has made clear, the High Commissioner in Barbados wore several hats when accredited to all the Leeward Islands governments and, therefore, spent a great deal of time travelling between them, lobbying, meeting people and meeting our staff. The management structure that we had to cope with was not only a base High Commission but the resident British Commissioners in four other countries—Antigua, Grenada, St Vincent and St Lucia—in offices, three of which have, I think, subsequent been closed, rather sadly.

I join colleagues who have spoken before in applauding the long service, the dedication, the loyalty and the access that our locally employed staff very often provided for us. Of course, the locally engaged staff came from two sets of backgrounds: there were local nationals and there were UK nationals. A common characteristic that colleagues have mentioned was long service—a function partly of status and partly of the fact that it paid well and provided a decent set of circumstances. This, of course, was a strength and also, in some ways, a weakness because it meant that there was great reliance on locally engaged staff.

They were the people who knew. You would come in and they would see you go. I can think of people still in the High Commission in Bridgetown who saw Gordon off and saw me off, and they are still there. They do provide this tremendous sense of institutional memory.

Viewed from HMG’s perspective, while a strength, in some ways, it also makes us vulnerable and is something that we should not forget.

Interacting with Caribbean society was one of the great joys for me in being in the eastern Caribbean, and I think the interest and energy of the High Commissioner and the staff really determined how far, how fast and where you go in that respect. Much has been said about the role of entertainment. The residence, of course, looking at it in business terms, was our working capital, and how you made that work was, of course, one of the acid tests of success.

It was not hard to run a party of 600 people when the guests of honour were the England cricket team. Nobody refused and I am happy to say that, while many colleagues have spoken with great regret about test matches lost, the 2004 series, which I had the pleasure of watching quite a lot of, was one that we won. Peter and I take a lot of credit for this, as High Commissioners in the area at the time—at least we provided a certain amount of help in liquid refreshment to keep the England team going.

94

Tony Blair’s first administration ran from 1997–2001.

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Visits from other VIPs were very frequent in my time. Members of the Royal Family came on official visits and, quite often as not, on non-official visits. Mention has been made already of the Duke of Edinburgh, who came to Barbados promoting the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme and holding meetings more than once. The Earl of Wessex95 was a frequent visitor for the same sort of business. The Duke of York also came. They provided, of course, opportunities for wider access into the community, who, in a sense, who helped reward people who were keen to meet members of the Royal Family and who would not have the opportunity to do so often.

Barbados was a place that ministers liked to come to. Prime Ministers came for their summer holiday—Mr Blair three years in a row. Mr Major96 came after he had been Prime Minister. We had the Foreign Secretary visiting. We had many ministers from DFID and the Treasury, and junior ministers from the FCO. We particularly welcomed Baronesses Scotland, Amos and Howells, all of whom had strong Caribbean roots and understood the communities with which they were reacting in a way that provided tremendous insights for us in the High Commission, as well as being very effective in the way in which they promoted British policies to the governments with which they interacted.

The High Commission was able to play a distinctive role in its interaction in Caribbean society. My wife and I decided that the one thing that had struck us very forcefully was the attitude that we found to people with disabilities. It is not going too far to say that people with disabilities were shunted to the back row, ignored and not helped in the way that they deserved and needed. With the help of the Lord’s Taverners, we set about raising some money. They gave us a van that was converted for us by disabled people, which is still, I am very pleased to say, on the road in Barbados—I saw it only 18 months ago. That helped to raise the profile and it helped people to get around. We started wheelchair tennis and also blind cricket—another dimension to the cricket story, about which we have been hearing a lot this afternoon.

For that, we owe a great debt of gratitude to the England Blind Cricket team, who, at a World Cup—and I bet you did not know that there was such a thing as a Blind World Cricket Cup—told me that they were amazed that there was no team from the West Indies. They wanted to do something about it and asked to come and try to introduce blind cricked to the Caribbean, which they have done with great success. One of the promotional games that we helped organise featured some of the great names in past West Indies cricket. Cricket fans will know the name of Desmond Haynes,97 for example, who I had the great pleasure of watching being clean bowled for not very many runs by a 100 per cent blind English bowler, which did not happen very often with a fully sighted one.

Of the other British agencies that have been mentioned, no one has mentioned the BBC Caribbean Service, which broadcast and was well-respected by many. Sadly, it was cut off from the air in about 2010-11, after my time. It and the World Service were very much respected. I have to say that one failure that I had was trying to persuade BBC World TV that, when they showed their weather map that encompassed northern South America and the southern parts of North America, they never said what the weather was like in any of the Caribbean islands, even though millions of British tourists were in the area at any time.

Our interests in the eastern Caribbean were many and various. Investment in the area was a mix of private investment in hotels, property and resort development. A lot of high-networth individuals had major stakes in property there. The tourism industry in Barbados and

95

HRH, Earl of Wessex, the third and youngest son of HM Queen Elizabeth II. Sir John Major, Prime Minister, 1990–7.

97 From Barbados, Desmond Haynes was a West Indian international cricketer.

96

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other parts of the eastern Caribbean was at the top end of the market. It was, therefore, very vulnerable, and this is why I mentioned 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. 9/11 led to a very steep drop in tourism and wrecked the 2002 season. The Iraq invasion took place in the middle of the high season of 2003. When you are reliant, as Barbados certainly is, on high-end tourism, and this is a discretionary expenditure, when people decide to stay away, that means jobs suffer and the island’s foreign-exchange earnings fall. Tourism was both vulnerable and very sensitive. One of the areas in which HMG was frequently criticised was, whenever we changed travel advice, however slightly, I would get a call from the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs saying, ‘What are you doing? You are trying to sabotage our industry.’ I said, ‘No, we are not. We are pointing out truths and facts that affect potential visitors.’ There was huge sensitivity about this.

Because the number of tourists coming to Barbados in a year is roughly equal to the population of the island, we had a considerable, ongoing consular problem. I am afraid that, when you have that sort of number of tourists, inevitably some do silly things, some end up in prison and some get into trouble and so on. Our consular business was constant and meant that we had very close liaison with the police and other authorities.

The general issue of security has been touched on by many colleagues and, during my time, the threat of terrorism was, of course, an added extra to the drug-trafficking and moneylaundering types of problem that others have already alluded to. The drug-trafficking issue was very real and getting more and more obvious in the islands during my time. This was a factor of several things: the ongoing skills of the smugglers but also because the ease of access to guns, particularly from the US, was leading to an increase in gun crime in some of the smaller islands and, as the drug-traffickers started to pay the couriers in kind as well, one had emerging local drug problems as well as the international drug-trafficking problem. This whole area was one in which we sought and were given good cooperation by most governments in the region. It was an area that was and remains of great importance and one where we had very close cooperation with American counterparts.

The West Indies guard ship was mentioned earlier—that is another aspect of the security issue—but not in relation to its role in disaster relief. When Hurricane Ivan struck in 2004, it was a dramatic demonstration of what having an asset like that in the region can do for you. Poor Grenada was utterly flattened by this very powerful hurricane, and HMS Richmond, which was the guard ship at that time, was able to follow the hurricane, be on stand, get its helicopters in, find the Prime Minister, who had spent the night watching his house disintegrate around him, get him onboard and allow him to run his country from one of Her Majesty’s ships for at least several hours before any semblance of order could be established on the island. The crew did enormously good work, I have to say, thereafter, in opening up airports and putting the hospital back onto power etc.

Of course, hurricanes come every year in this part of the world, and where they hit and who they hit is only a matter of lottery. Grenada, for one, had never thought it was going to get a hurricane: ‘It is too far south. They do not hit here’, I was told. Well, it did, and thank goodness we had the guard ship there at the time.

Like many colleagues, interaction with other diplomats in the area was very variable.

Our relations with our American colleagues were very close, particularly with the very professional members of the State Department, who tended to be number twos, erroneously, largely because number ones were political appointees throughout my time, who were of variable skills. One extremely good colleague was a very experienced politician; another did not last very long. We had a close relationship with our Canadian colleagues. Like others, we saw not much of the Brazilians. The Venezuelans were very active. Our Chinese colleague was increasingly influential and increasingly active over four years there. The Dean of the 43

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Corps was the Cuban, who had been there forever and remained for a long time. He was a very genial, very nice man, but I do not think he was very influential in local political terms.

One inter-Caribbean organisation that I do not think anybody has mentioned yet was the Caribbean Development Bank, which had its headquarters in Bridgetown. It did—and continues to do, as far as I am aware—extremely good work in investing in a whole range of infrastructure and economic activities throughout the region. It had a good rating in international-banking term for the quality of its control and for the portfolio that it put together.

As somebody once said to me, the only two pan-Caribbean organisations that worked were the University of the West Indies and the West Indies Cricket Board. Alas, while the former still goes strong, the latter is in a state of disarray, as far as I can see as an outsider.

The University, with its campuses in Trinidad, Barbados and Jamaican, is still a very influential and powerful force, bringing people from the region together, educating them well and providing the high-level manpower the region needed.

To sum up, some of the big issues that I had to deal with in my time included this whole area under the security/terrorism umbrella and the impact of external events on small islands that were vulnerable and that felt that they were suffering—which, indeed, they did— as their tourism revenues fell for things that had nothing to do with them and were not caused by them. The human rights issues, many of which Gordon and others have spoken about, were ones that I tackled too. One aspect of this and of the societal interaction that we had, which I have not mentioned but which was growing in importance, was the interaction between people in the Caribbean and Afro-Caribbean communities in the UK. That was an interesting two-way relationship and one in which I saw, at first hand, an example from Dominica: returning nationals. These were people who had been in the first wave of immigration from the Caribbean, made some money—sold a house perhaps in London—and were settling back into their communities. They brought with them not only money but also some of the good sides of our society, such as volunteering and things of that sort. I saw some very good examples of returnees who were, for example, helping the elderly by providing services that were not available elsewhere.

I share with Peter, to some extent, the frustration that the Government did not give high priority to the Caribbean in our time, but if you think of the other pressures on the Foreign Office votes at that time—trying to scrabble around and find posts to fill in the Middle East and other parts of the world—it was a time of short resources and we got the short straw. I will stop at that point. Thank you very much indeed.

Onslow: Thank you very much indeed. Our final contributor is Stephen Hiscock.

Stephen J. Hiscock: Of my last 18 years in the Diplomatic Service, I spent nine years and three months in Guyana. I think I was bribed with promotion to go there in 1988. I had a 12-month-old child and I was told that mine was the first child to be allowed to be posted to Guyana in 15 years. I am very envious of Michael James for having had the experience of the Burnham years, because I did not arrive until Desmond Hoyte98 was President and had been so for three years.

When I arrived, I asked to see the list of British citizens, which comprised 83 souls, 82 of whom were returned dual-national pensioners who were living off their well-earned 98

Desmond Hoyte (1929–2002), President of Guyana, 1985–92.

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RAF and other pensions and had served their time in the UK. There was no expatriate British community whatsoever. My wife and I decided immediately that we would need to understand and know the Guyanese if we were going to have a good time in Guyana. We were told when we were posted that we were to have two tours of one year and we could choose not to take the second one. I stayed for five years and three months and, having dangled promotion over me to go there in 1988, there were nine volunteers for my job when I left in 1993. People decided that, if Hiscock was idiot enough to stay in Guyana for five years and three months, and have two children whilst there, there must be something about it—and there was.

One of the big problems in Guyana is that the two sides of politics do not talk to each other. They never talked to each other. They still, to a large extent, do not talk to each other.

During my time as Deputy, I used to invite all sides to my house, and they came. Clement Rohee,99 who became Foreign Minister in Cheddi Jagan’s first independence government, said to me one night, outside on the front lawn, ‘This is the only house in Georgetown where people are invited from both sides of politics, and they come.’ I said to him then—and I am talking about 1989 now—‘It is because you do not talk to each other. You need to talk to each other.’ Their Parliament then had no bar - not even a restaurant. There was nowhere for politicians to sit down and talk to each other, and it was a major problem.

Maybe there is an element of Stockholm Syndrome here. I had done nine years and three months in a country. My son, who by the time I finally left, had lived half his life in Guyana has been honoured with Guyanese citizenship and lives there still. The reason for that is because he saw that there was an enormous amount of opportunity and wonderful scope in Guyana for personal development.

What has happened in Guyana is that they think they have a Westminster constitution but what they have is their third constitution since independence which was written specifically for Forbes Burnham. It is a Presidential constitution. Parliament has counted for nothing in Guyana. They finally discovered this when the opposition won a majority in the House but did not have the Presidency. The President was able to scupper anything that he (or his party) did not like. It took the two sides of the parliament, many of whom were legal professionals, a very long time to accept the reality that their constitution gave the Presidency to the party with the most votes. It took the opposition groups some three elections agree to have one presidential candidate so that they could change, for the first time, the swing of the pendulum between the People’s National Congress (PNC) and the People’s Progressive Party (PPP). The government now has a President and a majority in Parliament.

I became High Commissioner in 2002, after Edward Glover had done a tremendous job on security cooperation. He had arranged for four senior policemen to go to the UK for training, so that the GOG could decide, from the reports on those four policemen, who would become the Commissioner of Police in Guyana. It became very clear who it should be. It was also very clear to the Police Authority, whose chairman was absolutely desperate to appoint the right Police Commissioner. The government vacillated but the appointment was eventually made about three and a half years after Edward had sent them there towards the latter end of my appointment. Within a year, they had managed to ease him out.

One of the major policy difficulties that we have had is that Edward started a very good and detailed security assistance programme which has only now, under the current President, been accepted and is to be developed. Just to be clear - it is the third High Commissioner after me who is taking that programme forward.

Everybody has talked about local employees. The driver in Guyana was not only my 99

Clement Rohee, Guyanese Minister of Foreign Affairs, 1992–2001.

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best mate—he took me everywhere into the back streets, just as has been said about Trinidad—but also all our local staff appeared really very proud to be working for us and very happy to do so. When I was Deputy High Commissioner, I was able to change our working hours. We used to work 9–12 and 1–5, which meant that all staff had to come in when everybody else was coming into Georgetown and the minibuses were very difficult to get on. They also had to go home at the same time as everybody else. In consultation with them changed the working hours to 7.30-2.00, which meant that they had no competition for the minibuses in the morning or the afternoon. That was perhaps a consequence of me being selfish in wanting to work those hours, but it happened that we had the best and the most loyal locally engaged in the town because they never had to fight for a bus to go home.

In terms of the High Commission’s interaction with Caribbean society, we had to get on with everybody; otherwise, it would be a very miserable time. We had, whilst High Commissioner, visits by Prince Andrew and Prince Edward as add-ons to their major tours to Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago. We had no British Council. DFID worked in our building, but they were supervised from their regional office was in Barbados. They became very political in the period I was there and thought they knew more about Guyana politics than those of us who lived there.

We had sporting ties. Cricket, of course, with some very good one-day victories, including in 2004 at Bourda, when Bourda was still the Mecca for Guyanese cricket.100 Somebody talked about Michael Atherton in Jamaica. When he came to Guyana, it was a washout. He spent some time with David de Caires,101 the founder and owner of Stabroek News, and his daughter is now Mike Atherton’s life partner.102 David de Caires had a father who in the 1930s was a test cricketer for the West Indies, so Michael Atherton’s son could be said to have test cricket genes on both sides of the family.

On aid, going back to 1989, Desmond Hoyte came to London and called on Mrs Thatcher. She did a Gorbachev103 on him, in that she decided that he was serious about wanting free and fair elections and she put money on the table, much to the chagrin of the then aid minister because there was no money for that in the budget. That started a spark with everybody else in Guyana wondering what Mrs T had seen in Hoyte. She was proved to be very right in the end. At the end of the day, when he lost the election on 5 October 1992, some of his own party had still not realised that Hoyte was serious about having free and fair elections. They started causing problems and it was Desmond Hoyte who went out into the streets and stopped them. That election was monitored by the Commonwealth—the Canadians, ourselves and a team that came out from London—and by the Carter Center.104 When the problems started in the evening—when the stone-throwing started at the Election Commission—Jimmy Carter105 called all of his team back to the Pegasus Hotel, and the Commonwealth team, including myself—with no crash helmet on—stayed out in the stonethrowing. It was the Commonwealth team that really helped that election get over its major hurdle.

Visits that had been an advantage to us included Operation Raleigh. Blashford106 Snell came out and there was a very good Raleigh operation in Guyana whilst I was

100

Bourda Oval at the Georgetown Cricket Club Ground (GCC) was the home of cricket in Guyana between 1930 and 2015, when it closed.

101 David de Caires (1938-2008), Editor-in-Chief of the Stabroek News, 1986–2008.

102 Isabelle de Caires.

103 Mikhail Gorbachev, leader of the Soviet Union. 1985–90.

104 See https://www.cartercenter.org [Accessed 3 Feb. 2020].

105 Jimmy Carter, American President, 1997–81.

106 Colonel John Blashford-Snell, founder of Operation Raleigh and the Scientific Exploration Society.

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Deputy High Commissioner. They left much their equipment behind which helped the Guyana Defence Force (GDF). Land Rover then came out with the Camel Trophy, with a number of Land Rovers which they drove from Brazil into Guyana. They left some of them for the GDF. We had managed to get a Royal Marines team in to train on the Essequibo with the GDF and they left their spare equipment behind for the GDF too. It may have been some of that joint training which helped Joe Singh, Head of the GDF,107 bring peace back to the streets of Georgetown on 5/6 October 1992 and make the election result acceptable to everybody. In the Bourda cricket ground, there is a picture of the handover of the Presidency to Cheddi Jagan at State House. A very memorable day. In the picture, a very junior diplomat is leaping up and down and I can just be seen, as head-and-shoulders, behind everybody else trying to get into the picture.

By the time I became High Commissioner, I had some very senior and long-term Guyanese friends—some of the politicians, some of them in the private sector and some of them in the parastatals that were left. The only two major parastatals that appeared to be working well at the time of Cheddi Jagan’s takeover in 1992 were Guyana Stores and the Guyana Pharmaceutical Company. Both of those, coincidentally, were run by ChineseGuyanese and appeared to me to be run very well and very successfully. Within weeks, however, the two leaders were dismissed by the new administration.

The aid package that Mrs T had put together was used for reforming the Civil Service, which, by that time, after 28 years of PNC rule, had been thought to be totally politicised. In some Ministries, it may have been but, in a number of other areas, it was not. The Permanent Secretary programme that we devised was working really well, and a number of Permanent Secretaries had been appointed who were much younger and very well trained.

Unfortunately, the new administration could only think that they were part of the old PNC administration and dismissed most of them, so most of that aid was, unfortunately, lost.

For me, a big negative for the politics of Guyana was that Cheddi did not survive that first term as President. If he had survived the first term, I think he would have really believed that the change had come to Guyana. When he died his wife, Janet Jagan,108 the Americanborn ideologue in the PPP, took over and, from then on, there appeared to me to be a slide down to dictatorship of the Burnham ilk. I am afraid that that was the sort of situation that I perceived when I arrived back in 2002.

The President had been appointed by Janet Jagan. The person who, under the constitution, should have been President—Samuel Hinds109—was just pushed aside. The constitution was absolutely specific that Samuel Hinds should have been President but she assumed it for herself. At the next election, she threw a court order over her shoulder and dismissed it. But she was ageing, as Cheddi had been too, and she decided not to complete her term and appointed Bharrat Jagdeo110 as President mid-term.

Bharrat was a young, Russian-trained economist who I had seen in the Ministry of Finance back in 1992, around the time of the election. He knew where every file in that Ministry of Finance was. He ran everywhere and he never sat down. He was a great enthusiast. When he was appointed President, I was sitting in my study in Australia and I yelled to my wife that they had appointed Jagdeo as President. I wanted to go back because I thought he was going to be the best thing ever for Guyana. President Carter told me that he did too.

107

Major General Joseph G. Singh, Chief of Defence Staff of the Guyana Defence Force, 1990–2000.

Janet Jagan (1920–2009), President of Guyana, 1997–9.

109 Samuel Hinds, President of Guyana, 1997.

110 Bharrat Jagdeo, President of Guyana, 1999–2011 108

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The difficulty, now that they have true democracy, is sustaining it. It is going to be very difficult, but I hope for the sake of their long-suffering population that they can.

During my time as High Commissioner, we had the ABCE,111 because the EU Representative had joined us by that time. The Government had asked us, through the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), to help with their next election, so we met and worked regularly together—the Americans, the EU, the Canadians and ourselves to discuss electoral assistance with the Government and the Election Commission. Mexico was not represented in Guyana at that stage but it now is and seems to be a very valued partner in Guyana.

In terms of Brazil, I had never before known the two sides of politics in Guyana agree on anything: but, clearly, they did not want the Brazil road. I could never work out why. I was told, several times, by various interlocutors that it was because they believed that there would become a third, Brazilian, Portuguese-speaking, political group to contest elections with them. The reality is that the road from Manaus to Georgetown is an ideal route for the manufacturing base in North West Brazil, which is developing at a rapid pace. They want to get their manufactured goods out to China and the US, and black-topping that road from Lethem to Linden has to be a priority for any government that wants to develop that route.

The reality was that the Brazilians came anyway. They came to mine gold and diamonds and they came to run restaurants—beautiful and very tasty restaurants—in Georgetown. It is very difficult. The bridge has been built. The Brazilians paid for and built the bridge three or four years ago. The Customs and Immigration post is in place. They are there and they could be a stalwart ally for Guyana against the Venezuelan claim to nearly two thirds of Guyanese territory.

Onslow: Thank you very much indeed. I am now very keen to allow questions from the floor.

Mann: First, a few of you have touched on the fact that there are certain variations between specific countries in the Caribbean where you were based. Could you perhaps say a bit more about that? For those of us who are not familiar with the region, we often refer to it as the Caribbean and think it is a monolithic grouping when it is perhaps the opposite, with different histories and different conditions. It would be good, then, if you could speak about the differences between the various countries where you were posted.

My second question is about India. China has been mentioned quite a bit in terms of a great power in the region. Could India have increased its involvement, particularly in those countries that have populations descended from India, such as Guyana or Trinidad and Tobago?

Glover: My answer to your first question is that, while I was High Commissioner, the President of Guyana and his government were very anxious to promote greater co-operation between Guyana and other Caribbean states. Guyana was also equally passionate that its own independence and its own freedom of operation with CARICOM should not be adversely influenced. The Indian High Commission in Guyana was important and active.

111

American, British, Canadians and Europeans.

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Milton: If I understood the first question, you were asking about nuances between Anglophone and non-Anglophone countries in the region.

Mann: It was more about what differences there are between the British Caribbean countries, which a few of you touched on. Given what you have heard from your fellow panellists and your own experience of where you were posted, what differences come to the surface between, for example, Barbados and Jamaican, and Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago.

Milton: Rather considerable, I suppose, is the answer to your question, based partly on distance, which was mentioned before, and the different histories of the islands. One illustration is that, when I went to conferences in Barbados of the British Heads of Mission in the region, Bajans who I came to meet at cocktail parties or elsewhere would say, ‘Good heavens. You have come from Jamaica. How can you survive there? How can you get on? Is it not a sort of jungle?’ In comparison, I had been to Barbados on holiday with my family many years before and though it a paradise. That is a rather superficial answer to your question, I am afraid, but although there were these unifying factors such as cricket, which has been mentioned time and again, and the University of the West Indies and the labour movement, there was great diversity. Looking across the Caribbean as a whole, there is the Spanish-speaking, the French-speaking, the Dutch-speaking, the American-speaking and the English-speaking Caribbean. The Association of Caribbean States, which was an attempt to pull all these together, was a very ambitious task.

On India, there was an Indian High Commission in Jamaica but, with the greatest of respect, I never quite worked out what their objectives were. I do not wish to be rude and, indeed, we met as a Commonwealth Group from time to time, but they were not, with respect, a significant player.

Gordon Baker: I would certainly echo the point about distance. Jamaican is a very long way from the eastern Caribbean. Barbados and the eastern Caribbean nations do have a rivalry and a certain sense of commonality. The smaller islands look upon Barbados as being over-dominant and are somewhat cautious of it. The Bajans perhaps think of the smaller islands as being less wellrun than they are. History comes into it. Barbados was British from the word go in the earlyseventeenth century, whereas some other countries changed hands. There is very little effective co-operation between the CARICOM English-speaking countries and the French and Dutch territories on the whole.

I cannot remember whether there was an Indian High Commission in Barbados during my time, but certainly there was very little impact, although there were some Indian business people who are active there.

White: My recollection is that there was no resident Indian High Commissioner in Barbados, but one did visit very occasionally. I do not think I can add any more about the differences other than to mention history, distance and culture. St Lucia, for example, was French, then British and then French etc., so one has multicultural differences there which you simply do not get in Barbados. The example of other islands is very similar. Also, do not forget that the distance

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from the Bahamas to Trinidad is roughly the same as from London to Istanbul, so it would be pretty strange if there were no differences between places along the way.

Harborne: In my remarks, I began by stressing how different Trinidad and Tobago is, in my experience, from the other Caribbean islands and even Guyana. There are none of the racial politics and racial tension—on the contrary. Because of the strong Indian component in Trinidadian society, the Indian High Commissioner was always active. He was a good and well-respected colleague. I also briefly alluded to the difference between Trinidad and Tobago: even, to this day, there is bitterness on the part of Tobago towards Trinidad, going right back to the beginning with Eric Williams and the PNM, whom they regard as having discriminated against them because they did not support him.

Hiscock: On the regional question, it is the headquarters of CARICOM. When I first arrived, Roderick Rainford, a Jamaican, was Secretary General of CARICOM in Georgetown, and then Edwin Carrington from Trinidad and Tobago took over. There was a relationship out in the Caribbean but, of course, as Secretary General, they used to travel quite a lot. Roderick used to spend most of his time in Jamaican, as far as I could make out, and Edwin in Trinidad too.

Georgetown was the headquarters and the Deputy Secretary Generals are always resident.

Frank Abdullah, who was formerly Trinidad High Commissioner to the UK, was Deputy Secretary General when I first arrived. He is still a personal friend now and I will be visiting them next week when I go to Port of Spain. There are long, traditional links between the Caribbean through CARICOM, but CARICOM has a sort of love-hate relationship with Georgetown, which is very difficult. Because of the problems that Guyana went through politically, the fact that the headquarters of CARICOM are there is a bit of a difficulty for some of the islands. It is a problem.

The Indian High Commissioners have always been very visible in Guyana. They have an Indian conference centre and seem much easier and more relaxed after Cheddi Jagan came into power. There was much more Indian music on the radio and a lot more of the culture of India was being developed. For a lot of Guyanese Indians, their difficulty was understanding where they came from originally. The Indian High Commission was very helpful for them in trying to discover where they were within the Indian subcontinent and their cultural links too.

I always found the Indian High Commissioner very informed and very helpful.

Professor Judith Rowbotham My PhD was on the politics of British imperialism in the 1860s and 1870s. Listening to the comments that you have just been marked about the relations of Caribbean colonies, I was looking at the days of Governor Benjamin Pine112 and Governor John Pope Hennessy.113 You pretty well confirmed that the gap between the islands, which was very visible in the Victorian period, is not much different now. Equally, I have to say that the Colonial Office, as it then was, did not see the Caribbean, except when there was a crisis, as much of a priority. Plus ça change.

My question, however, for the panel is: my first teaching job was the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). I then found myself, in the 1990s and early 2000s, in

112

Sir Benjamin Pine (1809–91), Governor of Antigua, 1869–71; Governor of the Leeward Islands, 1871–3.

Sir John Pope Hennessy (1834–91), Governor of the Bahamas, 1873–4; Governor of Barbados and the Windward Islands, 1876–7.

113

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Nottingham. I worked with colleagues, including Stuart Hall114 briefly at Birmingham, and with various other academics who were consistently concerned, as were colleagues in Nottingham, about the issue of racial tensions. The Caribbean communities in this country were seen by many of my colleagues as being unfairly treated, so how did that play out in terms of what was perceived? Does this reflect itself with issues that you had to deal with in the Caribbean? What about the racial tensions in this country? How did they reflect and play themselves out in your experience in your different High Commissions?

Onslow: A number of people have referred to local points of racial friction, but you are talking about the treatment of Caribbean communities in this country and how it rolled back into the region in Britain’s relations.

Rowbotham: Nottingham was one of the areas that was most problematic with Yardies and various race riots.

Glover: During my time as High Commissioner, I made it my business when I was in the UK to have regular conversations with the Guyana High Commission in London. As a result of that, there were a number of occasions when I was invited to events at the Guyana High Commission.

You may not know that, after I left Guyana as High Commissioner, I was chairman of the Iwokrama International Rainforest Centre115 between 2005-12. So, my relationship with the High Commission continued. My observation—and this is purely anecdotal—is that there was a reasonable balance of Afro- and Indo-Guyanese at events organised here in London.

Iwokrama organised events in London and we did exactly the same. We worked very hard to ensure an adequate balance.

Milton: In the case of Jamaica, it is worth saying that despite its numerous economic and social problems, racial tension is not an issue. The country’s motto, as I am sure you know, is ‘Out of many, one people’, and one is entitled perhaps to be a bit sceptical about that when you first hear it. Broadly speaking, however, in my experience, that is true. Any tensions in this country within the Caribbean community, or more specifically the Jamaican community, I am not qualified to speak on. I do, however, recall that, when Jamaican Prime Ministers from way back came to the UK, they would make a point of visiting the Jamaican communities around the UK. This was originally to show support for them on any issues that they had with the British authorities. More recently, I think it has to do with encouraging investment in Jamaica by Jamaicans in this country. The problem that I alluded to earlier was more to do with lawlessness on the part of the Jamaican community in this country, which manifests itself as a clash not, as it were, within the Jamaican community but between members of the Jamaican community and the law enforcement agencies in the UK.

114

Stuart Hall (1932–2014), a Jamaican-born cultural theorist based in the UK and one of the founders of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies.

115 Iwokrama International rainforest Centre https://iwokrama.org/ 51

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Baker: On the whole, I do not think that black/white racial tensions were a problem for me in Barbados and the eastern Caribbean, nor indeed in Belize. There was a minority movement in Barbados to promote reparations for slavery. Some elderly Bajans related to me how they had been treated in the colonial days and still bore those memories, but there was no particular resentment. Nowadays, the Barbados community in the UK, with which I had contact through the High Commission and other organisations, does not seem to suffer particularly from the problems of lawlessness. There is some interest in the Barbados community in returning home to Barbados when they retire. Some attempts were made to get investment in this country but it has not really been very successful. It is not really much of an issue in the eastern Caribbean.

Adding to the previous points, Belize values the support that it has had politically from CARICOM countries in its difficulties with Guatemala over the years, but Belize is increasingly a Central American country, conscious of its links with its Central American neighbours and with Mexico. It is increasingly Spanish-speaking and so its links with the Caribbean, other than at a broad political level, are much less.

White: The Bajan community in Britain is relatively small, centred largely in Reading. Radio Berkshire does a very good job of keeping it in touch with the homeland, so much so that, for example, they invited me to comment and record a piece on what Independence Day was going to be like in Bridgetown, which they could put out the following day. In the course of this interview, they asked me what the weather was like, which was a bit of a challenge, as I could have been saying, ‘Yes, it is a lovely day, as always’, and then, when it was broadcast, it was pouring with rain or some such.

As Gordon has said, the impact of racial tension within British society did play back.

It was understood and known about. One manifestation was that some members of the Bajan community in Britain sent children back home to relatives, so that they could get a decent, proper education, learning to read and write, disciplined and in school uniforms etc. The local primary school next to our residence was a very good example of this, so there was interaction.

One other small linkage between the Afro-Caribbean society in London and basically came via Croydon Chamber of Commerce—an unlikely vehicle, you might think, but it had a very dynamic leader who understood the needs of small businesses in the Afro-Caribbean community in that part of London and how could they develop in what was, in many ways, a trailer export market that was unthreatening, where they would see familiar things. That link was surprisingly strong and very profitable and was a good example of how interaction between the two communities could work for mutual benefit.

Harborne: Trinidad and Tobago is a very homogenous society. Pace the recently departed Darcus Howe,116 racial tensions in the UK at no point—during my time at least—played back into Trinidad and Tobago. On the contrary, a Tobagonian and a Trinidadian—unlike the Jamaican Yardies—were very much positive role models: Dwight Yorke117 and Shaka Hislop,118 who were very big figures at Manchester United and West Ham, when Manchester United were

116

Darcus Howe (1943–2017), Trinidad-born broadcaster and activist.

Dwight Yorke, football player for various UK teams.

118 Shaka Hislop, football player, based mostly at Newcastle United.

117

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winning things left, right and centre. There was no negative feedback at all into Trinidad and Tobago from its wider diaspora—on the contrary.

Hiscock: I do not recall any time when any of the incidents in the UK were played back to me in Georgetown at the time. The concept in Guyana that there is racial tension there all the time is well-overblown. It is very clear at election time, but both the major parties have had ministers of the other race in their line-up and have always tried to balance it out. A lot of the racial tension in Guyana was artificially created prior to independence, when Cheddi Jagan and Burnham were split. It becomes entrenched at election time but, when it comes to cricket or playing any game, or most social situations, I am used to multiracial crowds in Georgetown. With the diaspora, I have not had a lot of time with diaspora in the UK, but in Miami and Toronto I have had quite a lot of time with the diaspora, and it is always multiracial. It is never one race over the other, so it does not play back.

Onslow: Gentlemen on the panel, are there any questions that you would like to put to each other? I will take that as a ‘No’. My thanks to you, the audience, but my particular thanks to our highly informed and very large panel, and also to the speakers on the first panel, for the extraordinary range of recollections that you have offered us from your personal and professional diplomatic roles as High Commissioners, Deputy High Commissioners and leading diplomats across the Caribbean, and the many ways in which you have use that working capital of your position. You really have covered an extraordinary range of issues, emphasising the importance of institutional memory and of local staff, and the benefits that you have drawn personally and professionally from their engagement and their loyalty to the British High Commissions.

I was particularly struck by your shifting emphasis on the emerging role of different diplomatic and institutional actors of the EU and China, and the hints that you pointed to of the role of Venezuela, particularly in the 1990s and 2000s under Hugo Chávez,119 and the complications that it would have caused for your diplomacy. You pointed to issues of race and racism, the needs for historians, such as myself, not to slide into easy analysis and the importance of understanding the local dimension as well as prevailing perceptions at the time.

Thank you, too, for adding in the reflections on the role of the Foreign Office towards the region and the problems, to which you have alluded, that continue to confront Caribbean regionalism. Thank you so much for sharing some of your recollections. I realise that we have tapped only a small amount of your professional knowledge, but we are enormously grateful. Thank you.

119

Hugo Chávez (1954–2013), President of Venezuela, 1999–2013.

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gov.uk/fco