Britain’s very own South Atlantic kibbutz

Press, 31 May 1985, Page 17

Britain’s very own South Atlantic kibbutz

COLIN SMITH,

winner of the “International

Reporter of the Year” award, reports on the mood of Falkland Islanders three years after the war.

There is a minor baby boom in the Falklands. It is entirely indigenous, nothing to do with the military presence. It is perhaps not what Timothy Renton, the junior Foreign Office Minister, had in mind when he spoke of “quite a lot of exciting things beginning to happen,” but it seems to reflect the renewed hope and optimism Lord Shackleton has found in his favourite place since he arrived to celebrate the opening of the airport he first recommended to be built when the islands were just a twinkle in General Galtieri’s eye. According to the registrar in Port Stanley, there were 10 births in the first quarter of this year, almost twice as many as during the corresponding period of the past four years. There are now 1910 Falkland islanders, including 53 immigrants and 117 people on contract. The biggest population the islands have ever had was about 2300 in the 19305.

Evidence of this new fecundity abounds. When I visited Pauline and David Hawksworth, immigrants from Barnsley, who run an excellent fish and chip shop called the Woodbine Cafe (named after the creeper, not the cigarette), I found they were expecting their third child in September. The Hawksworths were attracted to the islands when they saw Mr Ted Needham, chairman of the Falkland Islands Company, talking on television about selling 20ha plots for $2843 each. They have since bought three plots plus a small island with 800 sheep on it. You can't do that sort of thing in Barnsley, where they also ran a chip shop. They are both members of the Falkland Islands Defence Force, the local Territorial Army unit. Mrs Hawksworth is excused duties until the birth. The Hawksworths came out in 1983. David did a recce first and found the locals accepted strangers quite readily and that they have a very good social life in a place that has always been renowned for its heavy drinking and fragile marriages. The Falklands entry in the Guinness Book of Records is for

the highest divorce rate per capita in the world. The Hawksworths’ problem was not finding friends, but fish.

Mr Hawksworth has been in the fish and chips trade for some years, but despite his daily familiarity with fish he actually enjoys catching and eating them. He talks knowledgeably about the merits of the local hake and mullet, which apparently is not mullet as we know it in the other hemisphere. To his amazement he found that there is no tradition of commercial fishing in the Falklands. That is left to the Poles and the Japanese. At first he got what he could from local sportsmen and the odd box the Poles doled out to islanders for various favours rendered. “I even telexed the company concerned in Poland to see if they would sell us any but they didn’t even reply. Politics, I suppose.” Then the son of the resident manager of the Falkland Islands Company started to catch mullet for him with a beachnet and now he has two and a half tons of fish in his freezer. The Woodbine Cafe does a roaring trade, a lot of it with the military, of course. The only Latin American lady still living in the Falklands, the owner of a cafe called Rosita's, suggested that it would be nice if she could have a glass of wine with her meal. So now they serve wine. Imagine, a licensed chippy. Every immigrant I have met seemed to feel this tremendous sense of freedom as well as all the other satisfactions of pioneering in this vast, empty, beautiful, yet often extremely inhospitable landscape. It is almost as if the Falklands has become Britain’s very own South Atlantic kibbutz, with the same Phantoms screeching constantly overhead, the same readiness to contribute physically to your own defence, and the guilt provided not by a displaced native population, but constant nagging about being the most expensive Brits in the world.

“You don't owe Britain anything for what has been spent here any more than Scotland does,” a former Labour member of Parlia-

ment, Eric Ogden, who is chairman of the Falkland Islands Association, told a public meeting in Port Stanley town hall. “It seems a lot of money,” said Richard Cockwell when we met at Fox Bay on West Falkland, the more thinly populated of the two main islands, “but you have to remember there have been years of neglect.” Mr Cockwell came to the islands more than 20 years ago. He worked first as a sheep farmer and now runs the Falklands’ only woollen mill which was officially opened by Prince Andrew the day before he did his stuff at the new airport at Mount Pleasant. A camp of green huts houses a company of Royal Welch Fusiliers

at Fox Bay, on the edge of a peat bog that was looking more like Passchendaele by the minute. It was the worst winter weather so

far this year: ground mist on the ridges and wind-whipped drizzle below. In the guardroom the Fusiliers were writing letters and occasionally looking up to watch a video of Clint Eastwood in “Kelly’s Heroes” followed by a nasty about a school for torture in a Latin American

regime. “You always make a woman take off her clothes to humiliate her,” said the villain. Richard Cockwell said the Argentines had not treated him too badly during their stay among his little community, although once they shot at him for no reason at all. He had always had the feeling, however, that if anything had gone wrong the islanders would all disappear. They would not have left any witnesses.

Now some people in the settlement use old Argentine ammunition boxes with “Commando Logistica ’ and other video nasty things stencilled all over them to grow flowers in. Again there was evidence of the islands’ population explosion in the form of five-week-old Samuel Cockwell, who was in the kitchen being breast-fed by his mother, Grizelda. There was also Mrs Carol Cant, formerly a hotel receptionist from Stow-on-the-Wold, Gloucestershire, who is due to have her first-born next month. She and her husband Martin, a tall young man with a full Saxon beard, emigrated to the Falklands last year and now work in the mill. “The only thing I miss.” she said, "is bird song in the

morning.” Despite ail the ballyhoo about immigration immediately after the conflict, they found no • official encouragement to go. Their freight charges, including $2917 for bringing their goods by ship from Port Stanley to Fox Bay. amounted to $7lOB. There were Tolkien and Laurie Lee on the bookshelf of the clapboard house that Martin, who last worked as a carpenter, was busy doing up. Neither of them appeared madly jingoistic. Like everybody else, they had watched the war on television and after a while, because they were unemployed and watching almost every bulletin, found themselves studying the scenery. “It reminds me of Bodmin Moor,” said Martin. “I know it is 12.800 kilometres away but it never feels that far." His wife added: “I feel I live the way you are

supposed to live here.” Fox Bay is the Falklands' future as it is seen by Mrs Thatcher's Government. Here, where a Mr Edward Packe started farming in 1860 and wiped out the local foxes, are several of the things Lord Shackleton has spent a lifetime fighting for. A large Falkland Islands Company farm was first sold to the islands' Government and then subdivided into four sections. Lord Shackleton is very disappointed that the company has not been made to relinquish all its farms as he blames it for most of the islands' ilis. Then there is the mill, for which the Cockwells went on a special course in Scotland and which will soon be exporting a few finished garments — scarves and sweaters — as well as varn.

Alongside the jetty with the little rails to run the bales of wool out on is the Hull-registered trawler Coastal Pioneer, which has been researching the inshore fishing potential. They think that a red crab called parlomis granulosa might be a winner, and another trawler is coming down to fish it commercially. Behind all this is the Falkland Islands Development Corporation.

which is run by Mr Simon Armstrong, a veteran of the Highlands and Islands Development Board. He is the kind of young man who answers three phone calls at once while giving you a run-down on his plans to introduce wildlife tours to the Falklands. In July, he hopes to meet a representative of the Chilean national airline in London. It would be good to have a link with that continent again. The Chileans, now they are not going to war with Argentina over the Beagle Channel, have joined the Latin American boycott of the Falklands. The real locals watch all this with something of a bemused air. Eileen Vidal, the descendant of a shipwright called Biggs who came to the islands in the 1840 s, is probably the best known voice in the Falklands. She is the radio telephonist who calls up people scattered around the sheep farms on the "Camp,” as the great hinterland is known. She went to the recent airport opening and for the first time on the Falklands was in a crowd where there were more strangers than familiar faces. "Gone are the days when you know' everyone,” she said. Of course, the airport would give her the opportunity to see Everton play at home again. At present she could not afford the $5687 the R.A.F. was demanding. It used to cost about $2274 through Argentina. But no, she would not want to see Argentine tourists back. She hadn't really hated them during the invasion. They were just boys, most of them, some mothers’ sons. She remembered seeing a dead one and the first thing she noticed was this little hand black with cold. Well, it didn’t do any good to feel sorry for them but she hadn’t hated them then. She felt sure she would if they came back, even as tourists. The radio came on. A voice speaking the Falklands’ peculiar hybrid of West Country and Australasian. wanted to congratulate Davina Peck on the birth of a daughter. "Births are quite an event around here," explained Eileen.