Where the Clocks Chime Twice Page 18
At this point it needs to be explained that not only had tax evasion itself been practised in the colony as a matter of course, but the assessment and collection of income-tax had been extremely slipshod. The post of C.I.R.O. (Chief Inland Revenue Officer) had been held by a resident of the colony who had had no training in what is, after all, an extremely technical profession, and there seems to have been a Gentleman’s Agreement among the members of the Taxpayers Association that whatever the official rates of tax might be, the amount required to run the colony was roughly £3,000 a year (the present yield is £15,000) and that if the sum subscribed fell short, those who were best qualified should ‘ante up’ till the required sum was realised. Seychelles was a happy easy-going colony, not bothering anyone and not expecting to be bothered, away from history and away from hurricanes; never appealing to the Treasury for grants. There seemed no reason for paying to the Government more than the Government required to conduct its business.
The consternation can be well imagined when it was discovered that the new Acting Attorney-General proposed not only to insist that tax be paid at the official rate but to issue claims for arrears of tax and supertax since 1930.
There ensued what James Cameron, the Daily Express correspondent, was to describe as ‘a reign of terror’. I should describe it as a panic. In the past no proper figures had been kept, the C.I.R.O. was untrained, and under Collet’s instruction demands were arbitrarily issued in terms of what Collet considered each individual should have paid over the past sixteen years. Every member of the Taxpayers Association was involved.
The planters not unnaturally were indignant. They believed that the Governor had been sent out by the Socialists to destroy their power and prestige. They quoted some of the more unfortunate remarks made by irresponsible ministers of the Crown. They asserted the first steps to Communism were being taken. The issue was not primarily one of colour, since several of Collet’s chief victims were men of African descent, but since Collet was a man of colour, they canvassed the necessity for a ‘Ku Klux Klan’, arguing that the blacks were being roused against the whites just as they had been in Haiti. The atmosphere in Victoria may be judged by a poster published with Government approval announcing that: “In two months eight persons have been compelled to pay 140,000 rupees. These gentlemen are not the small landowners or small merchants. The small owners and small merchants and their employees have nothing to fear.” The use of the word ‘fear’ appeared to justify the phrase ‘reign of terror’.
During the first six months of 1947, £2,000 were collected. During 1948, £48,000 were collected. To obtain so large a sum, powerful methods of persuasion had to be adopted. The story has been printed, and has not been denied, that one planter was set upon in the streets by the police and his pockets searched. No one knew whose turn it would be next. The planters felt they were defenceless. They had no confidence in the judge, a Sinhalese who was serving as a stop-gap. They had no one to plead their case. In addition to Charles Collet, there was only one available member of the Bar: Madame Collet. People competent to judge have assured me that the atmosphere in Victoria was so electric that anything might have happened. The basic cause of the trouble was, in my opinion, that authority had been put into the hands of one who had not been trained in the exercise of authority. Technically and legally Collet may have been in the right. From the point of view of practical politics he was in the wrong.
Finally the planters sent over to Mauritius for a barrister; and a test case was brought in which Monsieur Le Marchand alleged that he had been invited to the C.I.R.O.’s office to discuss his income-tax return for 1944—7, that on his arrival he had been sent up to Collet’s office; that he had been informed by Collet that he was due to pay £460 for excess of income-tax for the years 1930-44; that before the afternoon was over he had paid that sum. It was his contention that the sum had been illegally extorted from him under threat.
The case was heard before Mr. Justice Lyon, who had recently come to the colony to assume duty as Chief Justice. He is the second of the two remarkable men to whom I referred earlier.
In the first pages of this book I spoke of M. D. Lyon as one of the best cricketers who never played for England. He did not play for England because of his disagreements with authority; at the height of his powers he announced his retirement from the game, and though later he rescinded this decision and made many runs for Somerset, he was finished in the eyes of M.C.C.
Lyon was born in April 1898. He was educated first at Rugby, then at Trinity College, Cambridge. He served in France in the first war with the R.F.A., and although well over military age he spent the second war in uniform, most of it in the field, in command of an anti-aircraft regiment. He is a big man, a little overweight : a good mixer, who can consume considerably more than the average man’s share of gin and behave as though he had been drinking barley-water. He has a loud laugh and a sense both of fun and humour. He is many-sided. He was under contract to Chariot to write music for his revues. He wrote songs for Gwen Farrar and Norah Blaney; he is the author of Beatrice Lillie’s ‘Girls of the Old Brigade’. If there is a piano at any party he attends, that party is a success. He is politically an Imperialist, a stout anti-communist, a good Churchman; he has a pretty and keen-witted wife, several years younger than himself, and three sturdy sons, the eldest of whom was born in ’43. He is more than well-liked; he is a much-loved and much-respected person. At the same time, many people stand in awe of him. He is belligerent: when he believes that an injustice has been done, he will not pull his punches, and in this particular situation he came to believe that an attempt was being made to subserviate the course of justice to political necessity.
This was a test case, after all, in which the prestige of the Government was at stake, and when, during its hearing, he received an invitation to dine at Government House, he asked to be excused on the grounds that, as he was at that moment hearing a case against the Government, his presence at Government House would be embarrassing. H.E. replied that as the King’s representative, he was outside and above controversy. Lyon attended the dinner. It was a small and intimate party, to which the Collets had been invited. When the ladies left the room he found himself actually sitting next to Collet. As the whole case turned on whether Collet in his position as Acting Attorney-General had or had not used threats, and whether or not the Court could accept Collet’s evidence, Lyon interpreted this dinner party as an attempt to make Collet and himself ‘understand each other’, an attempt, in other words, to interfere with the impartial course of justice.
A few days later Lyon gave his judgment, for the plaintiff: he ruled that “the Attorney-General had employed methods and menaces amounting to duress to obtain the £460 and that the money had been illegally obtained”. For the Government this was a serious decision. Both for prestige and revenue it could ill afford to lose the case, and it promptly filed a Note of Appeal before the Supreme Court in Mauritius. The appeal, however, was withdrawn, the Government presumably recognising on reflection that it did not possess a strong enough case to argue. Lyon’s judgment therefore stood; and the announcement of the Appeal’s withdrawal was followed by a spate of cases in which members of the Taxpayers Association protested against the methods used to obtain their arrears of tax. The 1949 balance-sheet for the Colony shows a refund of income-tax amounting to £11,000.
The case was a victory for the taxpayers and a rebuff for the Government, but even so it would have remained a strictly parochial matter had Lyon been a different kind of person, had he been in fact less belligerent. In the course of his judgment he inflicted upon Charles Collet as violent a verbal castigation as can ever have been delivered from the Bench upon a member of the Bar. The issue, he pointed out, was largely a case of one man’s word against another’s, with certain corroborative evidence for the plaintiff. The only witness that Collet could have called was the C.I.R.O., who had been present at the interview. The C.I.R.O. had, however, returned to England a few weeks before t
he case was heard. Lyon commented adversely on his absence. His verdict for the plaintiff, in fact, amounted to his inability to believe Collet’s word on oath. So merciless indeed was his condemnation of Collet that the Opposition at home which was always on the look-out for any slip made by its Socialist adversaries decided to ask questions in the House.
The reply to these questions was made by the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, the Gallant and Honourable member for South Croydon, Colonel David Rees Williams, who has since been enobled and enjoys the dignity and obscurity of the Upper House. The Colonel had been well briefed for his reply. At the end of his reply, however, he gave himself fuller rein than his office warranted. He did not agree, he said, that the language used by the judge was justified; it was ‘extreme and flamboyant’ and not of the kind ‘one would expect to be used’ in the case of one who had been ‘rather over-zealous as a public servant’. This reply not only made the headlines but invited trouble. The propriety of a Minister of the Crown criticising the conduct of one of His Majesty’s judges is extremely doubtful; the man who as a young country cricketer had challenged the august authority of M.C.C. was not likely, as a judge, a quarter of a century later, to allow himself to be ridden over rough-shod in the House of Commons.
I often during the 1920s had the pleasure of watching Lyon bat. I recall especially an innings of some ninety-odd played against Surrey at the Oval, and the skill with which on a tricky pitch he kept his forcing shots off his pads along the ground. This was an occasion on which he could afford to lift his head. He treated the Colonel’s reply as, in his heyday, when his eye was in, he would have treated a ball bowled from the pavilion end that pitched, just short of a length, on the leg stump, with a slight off break. His head went back and the ball landed on the tavern balcony.
He made his reply in court, in a public statement. “I do not recognise the right of any political spokesman of the executive to question the finding of this or any court. Complete divorce of the judiciary from the executive is a fundamental principle of British justice. Whenever a faint shadow of executive pressure falls upon the judiciary, the door is opened to tyranny.”
Seychelles made the news again. Further questions were asked in Parliament, this time in the House of Lords. The Earl of Listowel as spokesman for the Government suggested that there might be a difference between a colonial and a supreme court judge, since colonial judges were appointed by the Colonial Office. But the matter was not allowed to rest there. Lord Simon, the greatest contemporary jurist, rose to ask the Lord Chancellor to give the House his assurance that everywhere under the British flag British justice was independent of executive control. The assurance was given and an important constitutional point established. It is in this way, indeed, that the British Constitution has been safeguarded and maintained ‘broadening down, from precedent to precedent’. There is a quarrel, a commotion, harsh words are used, black headlines splash across double columns, then there is a compromise, and another ‘authority’ established. There have been several revolutions in Britain since 1649, but they have not been called revolutions: they have been called the Reform Bill of 1832 or the Parliamentary Reform Act of 1911.
Like most British colonial disputes, the Collet incident had a happy ending. An experienced lawyer was hurried out from Gibraltar to serve as Attorney-General. A trained Inland Revenue Officer was despatched with whose reasonableness and good manners the public was so delighted that it contentedly agreed to pay away forty per cent, of its income for the upkeep of government. The colonial independence of the judiciary has been confirmed, and though Collet sits no longer upon the legislative council, he and his wife are conducting their private practice with every appearance of prosperity. There was only one unfortunate legacy to the dispute, and that is one which has already ceased to concern the colony—the personal animosity between as good a Chief Justice as Seychelles is ever likely to have and the Governor who has done more for the colony’s welfare than any of his predecessors since the ingenious Chevalier de Quincy maintained the liberties of his fellow islanders a century and a half ago.
I have not, however, told this story as an example of British Colonial administration, but for the light it throws on a far bigger and international problem whose gravity we are only now beginning to recognise—the problem of the transplanted Africans who were shipped to the New World as slaves through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The slave trade was about as big a crime as Europe ever committed—and when we wonder how our present acts will appear to posterity, it is as well to remember that in an enlightened period—the Augustan age of reason—very few people in public life considered the slave trade criminal.
Every crime brings its own ultimate punishment, and we are to-day reaping the harvest sown in that series of forts along the Guinea coast. The descendants of those slaves are now free-born citizens; they are educated and they are enfranchised; they mix in many states and countries on equal terms with white men. But the colour question is no less actual on that account; it survives in the emotions that were engendered under the old plantation system; in the rancour that ate into the hearts of the slaves, and in the fear and distrust that persist in the hearts of the planters, who knew themselves to be outnumbered by their slaves. The history of every West Indian island contains episodes of savage massacres when the slaves rose against their owners. What happened in Haiti on a large scale happened on a smaller scale in St. Lucia, Grenada, and Jamaica. It happened between three centuries and a century and a half ago, but changes come slowly in the tropical and sub-tropical countries where the tempo of life is retarded by the heat.
Londoners and New Yorkers do not realise the conditions that exist south of the Mason-Dixon Line; they are indignant over books like Kingsblood Royal and Cry the Beloved Country, over the lynchings in the South and the racial discrimination in South Africa. They meet educated and cultured negroes—the members of the West Indian cricket team, for instance—and they say that it is all nonsense to pretend that the colour of the skin makes any difference. But in countries where the colour problem is still existent—in the West Indies, in the Southern States of America, and in South Africa—dark passions lie very near the surface; a sense of proportion disappears; the whites are easily frightened, and in their fright behave childishly in absurd reaction : the blacks are easily roused, mob passions are not easily allayed; men unused to the exercise of authority lose their heads when they are given power; the memory of a need for revenge is quickly reawakened.
We have to move very warily: the crust over the marsh is thin. It is worth while to examine with care every instance where headlines have been made out of a situation in which ‘colour’ is the actual if unnamed issue. That is why I have felt that this incident was worth recounting at such length.
5. Praslin
Many Years before the Vicomte Moreau des Seychelles assumed control of Louis XV’s finances, there had been periodically washed up on the shores of Western India and the Maladive Islands large heart-shaped nuts weighing as much as forty pounds. When the husk was removed there was revealed a double coconut, formed like the unlegged extremities of a woman—mulieris corporis bifurcationem cum natura et pilis representat.
So detailed and exact was this reproduction that the nut was held to have magic properties. As no one knew its origin, it was called coco-de-mer. Not until the end of the eighteenth century was it discovered that the parent tree grew wild in a horseshoe-shaped valley in the island of Praslin, twenty miles from Mahé. The tree from which it falls is a very straight, thin, tall palm; its growth is very slow, and as some of the trees rise to a height of a hundred feet, it is impossible to compute their age. The male palm reproduces with accuracy, but with considerably increased proportions, the masculine apparatus. Nowhere else in the world is this tree found.
General Gordon, a literal-minded man, was convinced in view of these facts that the coco-de-mer was the original tree of good and evil, and produced an ingenious genealogi
cal argument that the colony of Seychelles was part of a submerged continent, and that the Valle de Mai must be the Garden of Eden. He even found there an unusual serpent.
A few years later an equally literal-minded gentleman, a Monsieur M. Murat of Mauritius, opposed this theory on the grounds that Eve could not have climbed so high, that the husk was too tough for her to have broken, and that Adam would have found the taste of the nut insipid. This final argument is not in my view convincing; the nut when green contains a white jelly that is palatable in itself and excellent when mixed with brandy. Whether of divine origin or not, the nuts remain a source of profit to the island. Though the Indians, now its origin is known, can no longer regard it as holy, some three or four hundred nuts are annually exported. The kernel is ground up to form the basis of Nux Medica, while the shell serves a variety of purposes. The Moslems on their pilgrimages to Mecca are not allowed to take manufactured articles, and the double nut is a useful and unique receptacle. It is also used for baling out canoes.
Close though Praslin is, the days are not so many on which from the hills behind Victoria its outline stands out clearly. Cloud and rain intervene. And the journey there is not one to tempt the unadventurous. You make it in a fifteen-ton motor-launch that presents every appearance of discomfort. A gale was blowing when I set out at seven in the morning in company with the new C.I.R.O. As I watched the launch rock against its moorings, I recalled the villainous Moneka in which, two years earlier in the Caribbean, I had suffered so grievously between Montserrat and Antigua; luckily this time I was supplied with dramamine. It was the first time I had had occasion to take this much-vaunted drug, and when I arrived at Grande Anse three hours later, rested and refreshed, I felt that a whole new world was opening for me. Never again need I feel nervous of small boats. Cruising in the Caribbean, an activity I had previously avoided, would now hold no qualms for me. I am grateful for the trip to Praslin for that lesson. The launch rocked and rolled: everything and everyone was soaked: the groans of the suffering were louder than the creaking of the woodwork: children lay supine in their vomit. But I was ready on landing for a three-mile walk along the coast. It was well worth the journey to learn that.