Mistaken Policy

It was early in 1925 that the Pioneer finally dropped me at Ocean Island and returned with Lambert to Fiji. Those were the difficult days before we had the Chinese and Gilbertese labourers living and working in areas well apart from each other. The Gilbertese were housed in a location immediately above a small railway line used for the transport of phosphate; the Chinese location lay immediately below it. At one point, nothing but the breadth of the permanent way and a public footpath—less than fifty paces in all—divided the lower boundary of the one from the upper boundary of the other. That was not nearly enough for peace of mind between races of men who withdrew from each other every evening savage from having had to work cheek by jowl throughout the day.

The policy of bundling irreconcilables like the Chinese page 160and Gilbertese hugger-mugger together in mining field and workshop was as cruel as it was dangerous. For an oriental, deeply sensitive to losses of physical dignity, the schoolboy horseplay of the islanders—the upsetting of his wheelbarrow, the spilling of his paint pot, the jogging of his elbow, the uproarious barging around—made something like a nightmare of his working day. To an islander, incapable of imagining a shame more horrible than incest, the stock Chinese retort about his relations with his grandmother (which he had learned to recognize by the sound of it) was an insult that screamed for blood-letting. There was constant friction between yellow and brown. It was madness, in the face of all the facts, to keep the two races housed side by side without even enclosing fences to prevent them from prowling around each other's locations at night.

Although, in all other respects, the British Phosphate Commissioners were notably thoughtful employers, they had to pay heavily for that one big standing mistake. It kept the Chinese in such a constant state of nervous tension that they were ready to lay down tools on the slightest provocation. The reason for one memorable strike was the non-arrival from Hong Kong of a consignment of tinned lily shoots. The ration scale in the contract of employment said lily shoots twice a week; so, when the stock ran out, eight hundred coolies sat down and remained sitting until the delayed supply arrived.

In those days, the duty of settling strikes usually fell to the resident commissioner. The Gilbertese labourers expected his intervention as of right when they had a grievance, and about 50 per cent of the Chinese coolies tolerated it amiably enough as a guarantee that the administration was interested in their side of affairs as well as the employer's. On the other hand there were always plenty who distrusted official meddling altogether, and attended our meetings with strikers only to guess aloud at uncomfortable moments how much the B.P.C. paid us for cheating them back to work.

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Reggie McClure, humorous, kind and never at a loss for an answer, showed superb technique in dealing with this sort of sabotage. He replied once that the reward offered to him personally for cheating them in any way at all was £1,000. "But," he added, "as you are much too clever to be deceived by any trick of mine, I have never pocketed a penny up to date." Every face in his audience was illuminated with instant delight at this extraordinarily courteous tribute to their superior cunning. They plainly thought it worth a thousand-pound response, for they returned to work the next morning without further parley.

But anxious times came for all of us when they hit on the device of striking work in order to secure attention to their grievances against the police. Not that they ever brought a charge against an innocent man; they had no need to do that, for, although our Ellice Islanders and Fijians could be trained to the patient perfection of London's own metropolitan force, our Gilbertese—alas!—had not their marvellous restraint under provocation, and too often manhandled abusive coolies. But it did seem rather unfair that their impatience should be visited upon the pocket of the wretched employer, however blind his labour policy.

Reggie McClure used to say, looking at tilings from the angle of the local manager, that not even an archangel would have liked to have eight hundred coolies sitting down on him idle for as long as it took the O/C police to go into the charges against his constables. To which Stuartson Methven would reply that not even an archangel trying his best to get at the truth of things would have liked to have the blanky manager breathing down the back of his neck until he found it.

Thus completely did those poor, illiterate, helpless victims of imperial exploitation, the coolies, contrive to range their exploiter on their own side against the government and then to split the government party into two contending factions. I personally failed so often to satisfy them as an arbitrator, or to understand the hidden ways of their thought, or to get page 162them within a mile of understanding what I liked to regard as my open ways, that I came at last to believe there could be no possible bridge of shared sentiment over which they and I might ever approach one another across the abyss of our mutual ignorances. Yet, in the long run, it was the generous sensitiveness of their response to a purely private gesture of mine that settled the most serious anti-police strike I ever had to face.