Simon Hancock, BBC News, St. Helena, 19th January 2010
 Some sights are familiarly British |
The British government has postponed plans to build an airport on the tiny south Atlantic island of St. Helena. What is it like living on one of the most isolated settlements on the planet?
The RMS St. Helena is the only way anything - people or cargo - gets to St. Helena.
It is the last remaining dedicated Royal Mail ship and as it slowly ploughs its way through the south Atlantic, sailing between Cape Town, Ascension Island and St. Helena, it would be tempting to say it represents the island’s lifeline, only for St. Helenians it is even more than that.
Among the passengers, Robert Newman is on the way to attend the funeral of his father, the former chief of police John Newman, who recently passed away on St. Helena.
“My dad died much quicker than we expected,” he says. “I came to see him last month and I’ve been very lucky that the transport has worked out so that I can be here for the funeral.”
“I’ve really only managed it at all because of my contacts at the MoD.”
Mr Newman left the island to join the British Army and now lives in Hereford and serves with the Royal Signals.
He has taken a long-delayed RAF flight from Brize Norton to Ascension Island, meeting up with RMS St. Helena for a three-day sail to the island. Fortunately the boat waited for the late-running plane.
It’s rare for the journey to be even this easy. Often there can be weeks between sailings, and when the ship is being serviced, none at all.
Ford Escorts
The return flight costs more than £1,000 and the return boat trip from Ascension to St. Helena about £1,600.
Perhaps because the island is so hard - and costly - to get to, St. Helena is often said to have been frozen in time, a slice of yesteryear Britain, and arriving on the island, it’s easy to see why.
Steep rocky slopes rise almost from the sea, but nestled in a gully in the otherwise rocky terrain lies sleepy Jamestown.
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Part incongruously-hot Yorkshire village, part colonial outpost, ancient Ford Escorts pootle up and down its short High Street while people - seemingly for hours at a time - park themselves on benches to chat and look on.
There are no chain stores here and the handful of local shops knock off for the day at 4pm. Wednesday is a half-day and few businesses open at all at the weekend.
Inside the Star supermarket, despite the ship’s recent arrival, there are still many empty shelves. Only carrots, marrows, cucumbers and potatoes are for sale in the vegetable section.
“This actually isn’t too bad,” says shopper Bronwen Yon. “Some days the whole place is empty. In two weeks, there’ll be nothing left again.”
She explains the kind of strategy you need on an island served by just one boat.
“You have to plan when you’re going to buy things. If the ship comes in from Cape Town, you’ll know it will have things like butter, cheese and sugar.”
“It’s probably hard to get your head around if you’re not from here but even simple things like this you need to stock up on when you can.”
“You’ll know exactly how long after the ship arrives the goods will appear on the shelf and you’ll buy a month’s worth. You learn these things.”
But not everyone is prepared to put up with such a life. Once St. Helena used to be a service station on the oceanic motorway, receiving a thousand ships a year.
But since the aviation age arrived and with such poor modern communication links, the economy has been slowly throttled. There is a saying that every time the RMS leaves, it takes two families with it.
‘Expensive’
The average salary on the island is just £70 a week and one in four so-called Saints have moved away in the last 10 years to seek better-paid employment overseas.
And when they do it is the older members of the older generation - like Melvina Caeser - who are left holding the baby.
She is raising four of her grandchildren while their parents are away working. Such an informal foster arrangement is common on the island. And when these children grow up they too will almost certainly leave.
“It’s difficult but there’s no choice,” she says. “Food is expensive, clothes are expensive. That’s why people have to go away. It’s hard for the children as they don’t have their mummy here but I still love them like my own.”
When the airport was originally promised it was with the idea of stemming this human tide.
St. Helena currently costs the UK about £20m each year to administer and while the airport would cost £300m, it was hoped that it would enable the island to become sustainable.
There was some resistance to the plan, from those who thought an influx of people would risk the island’s close-knit atmosphere.
But in December, the UK government announced it was to postpone a decision for the second time, a move that was greeted with some anger.
“Some people are stuck in their ways - they don’t like change. They’re afraid an airport might bring terrorists to the island or something,” says Annabel Plato, a hotel worker.
Annabel herself moved away to the UK, working as a housekeeper at Althorpe House, but airport or no airport she’s glad she came back.
“It’s like a village. People say hello to each other and always try to help one another,” she says. “If there is a funeral or a wedding for instance and there’s a shortage of flowers, people will cut them from their gardens to help out. It’s really nice and it’s something you appreciate much more after you’ve been away.”
No smoking ban
Despite the lack of links with the outside world, Annabel says she doesn’t feel cut off, pointing out that there are landlines, television and the internet.
True, but the internet bandwidth for the entire island is less than that of many individual households in the UK, and costs £6 an hour, while locals say the phone lines - all with retro four-digit numbers - run out of capacity at times.
In the Standard pub, the regulars puff away around the bar. There is no smoking ban here.
They agree that it’s only in emergencies that St. Helena’s remoteness is really brought home.
“A friend of mine became seriously ill while the ship was back in the UK, ” says Geoff Stevens. “By the time the ship got back and took him to Cape Town it was too late. He died on board.”
For visitors, like Mike and Lynda Vincent, the remoteness makes St. Helena special.
“You’re completely incommunicado. It’s one of the few places in the world where that’s the case. It’s definitely an attraction,” says Mr Vincent.
Attracting more tourists is the only plan for the island economy, but Jamie Roberts of the National Trust sees a paradox here.
“Remoteness is one of the major appeals. It’s one of the things that made me want to come here. There aren’t many places left in the world that can take you six days on a boat to get to.”
“If people could fly here to the UK in seven or eight hours, it would definitely take away from the romance.”
From the ‘comments’ section . . .
"I believe that at one time residents of Saint Helena held British passports that entitled them to live on Saint Helena and nowhere else. They were basically in the same situation as Napoleon. Is that still true? Another question. What about hospitals on the island? Are there any?"
Our reply: Saints are now once again freely able to live and work in the UK, and thereby anywhere in the EU, though British and EU residents need a work/residence permit to live and work here. And, yes there is a fully functioning hospital - only the more complicated cases are sent to Cape Town.
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