The rebel behind the ‘Bay of Piglets’
Revolutionary monarchist ensured the tiny Caribbean island of Anguilla remained with Britain
In 1967, when Britain was shedding the vestiges of its empire, Ronald Webster emerged as the George Washington of the tiny Caribbean island of Anguilla — in reverse. He plotted a revolution to embrace the mother country rather than to break with it.
Having been a British colony for three centuries, Anguilla was loosely linked by the crown with its dominant larger neighbour, St. Kitts, since 1822. But in 1967, Britain incorporated Anguilla in a largely self-governing federation with St. Kitts and Nevis.
Disgusted Anguillans voted 1,813 to 5 against the proposed federation, although their formal declaration of independence bore little resemblance to the anti-monarchical one adopted in Philadelphia in1776.
“We stand before the queen in the greatest humility,” it began, “with the desire in our hearts to be faithful subjects to her.”
After demanding to be severed from the federation, Webster, as the island’s leading political figure, did the unthinkable: He all but insisted that Parliament declare Anguilla a British dependency again.
The British dispatched William Whitlock, the undersecretary of state for foreign and commonwealth affairs, to administer the island temporarily. But he was no diplomat. Rudely greeting his new constituents, he was ushered back to his homebound plane. Fearing political chaos and even gangsterism, the British then staged their comic-opera coastal assault, mustering a strike force of about 200 paratroopers and nearly 100 London bobbies.
“We shall resist with prayer,” Webster proclaimed. “We are not a bloodthirsty or trigger-happy lot.”
Indeed, the island was captured during the pre-dawn assault without a shot fired. Frightening blasts of light from the beach turned out to be flashes from photographers’ cameras. Residents of Anguilla, a 90.6-square-kilometre spit of land in the eastern Caribbean, which two years earlier had threatened to invade St. Kitts, offered no resistance. Webster, whom a provisional Anguillan government had declared the first president of the world’s smallest republic, brandished a Bible.
The world press playfully derided the landing as the Bay of Piglets, a sly reference to the failed Bay of Pigs assault on Cuba in 1961 by counter-revolutionaries backed by the United States.
After two years of circuitous negotiations, however, London largely granted the restive Anguillans’ request to secede from the federation with St. Kitts and Nevis and return to the mother country as a representative democratic dependency of Britain. It took until late1980 for London to formally sever Anguilla from the three-island federation and designate it a dependent territory.
Webster later acknowledged that his more or less successful rebellion was all part of a strategy to “twist their arms.”
Webster went on to serve as chief minister until1984. He had led the island for11 of the preceding 14 years.
Like Washington, he is considered the father of his country.