Brixton, Handsworth, Toxteth ... Alderney?
It will for ever be known as the Alderney riot. Future generations of islanders will ask their parents where they were that fateful night; at some point, when the bitter memories have dimmed, a plaque will be unveiled; Kenneth Branagh will make a film – part tragedy, part comedy – about it; the riot will pass into legend.
At first, a crowd of 25 were said to be involved, but that will swell. Channel TV’s Monday evening news reported the figure as 40, and the number is expected to increase daily. The storming of the Bastille was probably like this. Alderney has a population of 2,400, and within a year or two most will be implicated. So before the myths harden into facts and the facts pass into folklore, let us examine what really happened in the early hours of last Saturday morning – and why.
This is a rigorous piece of investigative journalism; it is also, I am the first to admit, a pub crawl. This is inevitable with anything written about Alderney – the place is simply crawling with pubs. Most of them stay open about 15 hours a day – in the winter. In the summer, the drinking and partying get really serious. Drink certainly played a part in Saturday morning’s riot; it is also contributing to the curiously free-form nature of this investigation.
The Jersey Evening Post (“at the heart of island life”) is in no doubt about what occurred on the island. “Riot in Alderney” screamed the front-page headline in Monday’s paper. “A 30-strong mob bombarded Alderney’s police station at the weekend, injuring two police officers… the Guernsey police have been called in to help with investigations into the riot, which sent shockwaves through the island.”
By the time I arrive, aboard a juddering plane from Jersey on Monday evening, the shockwaves are subsiding. The sun is setting and the only sound is birdsong. The cabbie who helpfully drives me the 78 yards from the airport to the Rose and Crown hotel is philosophical. “People have a way with words,” he says. “What is a riot?”
I get to the Rose and Crown just as Channel TV’s six o’clock news is starting. The riot is the main headline and the station’s ace reporter – who looks about 16 – is broadcasting live from the scene. He says islanders are “tight-lipped” about the incident, and that Guernsey’s chief of police – who is about to fly into the island – has appealed for calm. The drinkers in the bar – which is surprisingly full so early in the evening – snort with derision, apart from one middle-aged man who insists it is no laughing matter and will damage Alderney’s tourist trade.
The derision in the bar is not shared by those who represent the island. Ilona Soane-Sands, Alderney’s euphoniously named head of public affairs, turns up unasked to brief me, gives me a brochure (“the island for every season and every reason”) and offer me a guided tour of the island, whose history encompasses Normans, Nazis, puffins and John Arlott.
“This was a one-off incident,” she insists. “We now need a fact-finding exercise that will identify the source of the trouble – who started it and why. It’s totally out of character for the island. I’ve lived here for 12 years and there’s never been anything like this.” I sympathise. The Times has already talked of “an island in turmoil” and has now dispatched a reporter to check that the facts are true. Soane-Sands has a busy couple of days ahead. “Headlines such as ‘How anarchy came to Alderney’ are very upsetting,” she says.
In search of some anarchy, I head for the Albert House pub, where the riot allegedly began. The locals, despite what Channel TV says, are not at all tight-lipped, especially once I’ve bought them all drinks. The owner of the pub, Martin Butterworth, is the first to describe what happened as a “melee” rather than a riot. He insists that the trouble didn’t start in his pub, though a few of those leaving when it closed after midnight may have been caught up in the fracas. “You get some kids who can be a little boisterous, but nothing more than would happen in a small village in England.” Butterworth is a bucolic, easy-going, cricket-loving man, and this assessment may be over-generous.
After several hours, and numerous drinks, a picture – albeit somewhat blurred – of the events of Saturday morning is emerging. The man at the centre of the affair was Joe Hamon, a 33-year-old, violin-playing free spirit who, in the words of his friend Mark Ashton, “just doesn’t care” about the rules and conventions that the stuffier part of the population holds dear. On Alderney this – plus his musicianship – is enough to make him a countercultural hero.
Hamon had been playing that night at the Harbour Lights pub, near the bay, and when it closed at 12.30am he had driven his rusty old Volvo (cars on Alderney don’t need MoTs) up the cobbled road into St Anne. Police in a Land Rover followed him and stopped his car near the Albert House. They tried to arrest him on suspicion of drink driving. He allegedly resisted, and a group of youngsters in the entrance to the neighbouring churchyard joined in the struggle. When Hamon was bundled into the Land Rover, the group/mob/liberation army (delete according to your age and political persuasion) gave chase up the hill to the police station about 200 yards away.
The two arresting officers were young and here on a two-week tour of duty from Guernsey; they had also been slightly injured in the fight near the Albert House and were very frightened. But the crowd outside the police station were throwing stones – the building has a cracked window to prove it – and demanding Hamon’s release. The Guernsey men called in the two resident Alderney policemen, who in turn called up special constables, the fire brigade and the harbour master’s staff in an attempt to lift the siege. (The police back in Guernsey were also called, but their plane was fog-bound and they only arrived by boat early the next morning.) When reinforcements arrived, the police waded into the crowd, using CS gas and arresting five people, who have been charged variously with assault, obstruction and disorderly behaviour. Special courts sat over the weekend: Hamon and 19-year-old Christopher Watt were remanded in custody and sent to Guernsey (Alderney has no properly equipped jail), and the other four were granted conditional open remands.
So was it a riot? The police are in no doubt that it was. “It was certainly riotous behaviour,” says Mike Wyeth, Guernsey’s chief police officer. “For a time you had three officers with the prisoner inside the police station and a large crowd outside throwing stones – it was a siege and the officers were very fearful. This incident would be serious in any community, but it is even more serious here because the police officers are so isolated. It is the thinnest of blue lines.”
That is not the way some of the local youth see it. By a nice irony, Wyeth and his investigation team are staying at the Belle Vue Hotel, which has one of Alderney’s most boisterous bars and a youthful clientele that has no time for the police, whom they call heavy-handed. I talk to one young woman who was part of the besieging crowd. She prefers to remain anonymous. “It really began a couple of weeks ago, when a group of us were involved in an incident with the police at the Island Hall.” She says they overreacted. Discontent simmered and the Hamon arrest was the trigger for an event that was part revenge, part defence of their hero, part an expression of the frustration felt by young people on the island, especially in winter. Wyeth counters that view. “This wasn’t a popular uprising against heavy-handed policing,” he insists. “It was a criminal act.”
The individualism of the inhabitants of Alderney, as perhaps with all islands, is striking: it attracts people who have in some way rejected mainland values and mainstream thinking. Those individualists live alongside second-homers and retired people who have the best of both worlds. It is a potent brew.
“Alderney is a very special place,” says Bill Walden, who represents the island in the pompously named States of Deliberation, the legislative body for Guernsey, Alderney and the nearby islands. “Some people can’t take a single winter here. One of the main problems is that the social life is too good – it’s very hard to say no. There are a lot of people here who would be classified as eccentric, perhaps even a little mad, if they lived in the UK, but we learn to put up with them because we have to live with them.”
Walden, a weather-beaten builder with tattoos on his thick forearms, has represented Alderney for just over a year. He is learning the politics game fast, being very cautious about what he says and calling for an inquiry. One reason that Wyeth is here is to address Alderney’s general services committee – explaining the political structure of this crown dependency would take another 10,000 words – and to promise them that an inquiry will indeed take place. That is likely to be internal, though he does not exclude the possibility of an investigation by another force.
I interview Walden in a pub, which seems somehow appropriate. Alderney runs on booze and Wyeth says it always has. “The drinking culture dates back to the time when fortified wines were brought over from the Iberian peninsula and stored here before being smuggled into England,” he explains. “But it doesn’t normally manifest itself in violence.”
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