Pax Britannica by Jan Morris Page B

British at all. The cultural loyalty of the St Lucian élite was still to Paris rather than London.
    The colony celebrated none the less. ‘We lack not loyalty’, declared the editor of the Voice in his Jubilee poem:
    We’ll try what’s in our power to do‚
    Our love and loyalty to show
    At this thy Jubilee!
    The pulpit at Holy Trinity Church had been draped in Union Jacksby the Misses Cooper, when the five hundred men of the West India Regiment (‘the Westies’) marched in for the celebratory service—dropping their Catholic comrades off at the church of the Immaculate Conception, and their Wesleyans at the Mission House. Father Claustre, in his sermon, said it was a matter of pride to feel oneself a part of ‘such a great nation, which sent up that day a united prayer of thanksgiving from every corner of the earth’, while the Reverend Thomas Huckerby, at the Mission House, observed that the progress of Great Britain was based upon ‘that righteousness which maketh a nation’.
    In the evening there was a soirée at the Government Buildings in Castries, with clog dancing and singing, and everyone turned out to see the big picture of the Queen in Columbus Square—some of the remarks heard in the crowd, the newspaper reported next morning, being ‘quaintly pathetic, while the demeanour of all was affectionately reverent’. Donkey and sack races were run, and baskets of buns were distributed among the children. There were bonfires on the beaches, drums in the dusk, dancers frolicking into town out of the mountains, children singing Rule Britannia. Hundreds of poor people sat down to a free Jubilee dinner, many others sent along their pots and pans to be filled, and the streets rang, we are told, with ceaseless cries of Vive La Reine Victoria! All through the night the guests danced up at Government House, and there the Queen’s health was drunk in bumpers of champagne, ‘to the accompaniment of subdued but fervent ejaculations of “God Bless Her”’. Mr J. T. Rea celebrated the hour with an apostrophic ode:
    O world historic isle, where sea and shore
    Resound with echoes of the bugle ’s call
    And clamour of ancient strife and all
    The bloody combats of the days of yore!
    —and the whole was capped with a monumental bonfire on the top of the Morne, with a feu de joie by the garrison.
8
    But then a feu de joie ‚commented the Voice sourly, was ‘the only formof explosive rejoicing which red tape permits on this island’. The Jubilee was not greeted in St Lucia with a welcome unalloyed. The British islands of the West Indies all had grievances, for in a sense they were the has-beens of Empire. They had been left high and dry by a succession of circumstances—the abolition of slavery, the adoption of free trade, the collapse of the sugar market. Most of them were no longer of real importance to the Empire, and some the more hard-headed imperial administrators in London would happily have abandoned (the British did not yet know that ridding oneself of an Empire is at least as difficult as acquiring one).
    St Lucia, as a base and a coaling station, still had an imperial function, but it shared with the other islands a bitterness that had never quite subsided since the emancipation of the slaves, when the interests of the local white people and their distant imperial overlords had for the first time diverged. St Lucia itself had never enjoyed representative government under the Crown, but several other Caribbean colonies had, losing or giving up their privileges because of the long depression and uncertainty that followed emancipation, and St Lucians of the old school perhaps harboured a sense of unfair deprivation, and a premonition of racial troubles to come. French St Lucians still resented the British conquest. British St Lucians thought they might do better left to their own devices. The unofficial community sniped enviously at the official—at the Jubilee Races the Colony Cup had been renamed the