17/07/2008

Over the next few weeks, allmediascotland.com is to publish, each weekday, extracts from the memoirs of Scottish war correspondent, Paul Harris. ‘More Thrills than Skills: A Half-life in Journalism’, is being scheduled for publication next year.

Soon, Jeremy Thompson arrives and I am, of course, now a back number in the glamorous world of broadcasting. He is generous in his thanks for what I’ve done for Sky but that’s it. There is a full crew on the scene, a star broadcaster and no room left for yours truly and his breathless style of reporting. I’m not really bothered. The best of the story has now been and gone in my view.

But I can afford to be generous. I take Sky and WTN (Worldwide Television News) up to meet the Kleebs. They put on their usual star performance. Robert Kleeb has a great way with words from his isolated villa with the volcano spewing ash behind him. He refuses to believe the prophets of doom.

He says the scientists at the Volcano Observatory are “academic whores”. He dismisses the credentials of the earnest vulcanologist and Head Scientist at the Montserrat Volcano Obervatory.

The Kleebs are amongst the rather more recent of immigrants. In 1493, Columbus sighted this lush, tropical island and called it Montserrat because it reminded him of the landscape surrounding the monastery of Montserrat in his native land of Spain. Today, they call this the Emerald Isle of the Caribbean after the settlers who came later.

In 1632, the English governor, Sir Thomas Warner, ordered the tiresome dissident Irish living on nearby St Kitts to colonise Montserrat for England and the island soon became renowned as a refuge for persecuted Irish Catholics from other English colonies.

The evidence of this Irish diaspora is everywhere. Irish shamrocks adorn Government House and the cannons on the foreshore of the now abandoned capital of Plymouth. The flag and crest bear a lady - Erin - with a cross and a harp.

St Patrick's Day is celebrated with an open air fete.

The names of the estates, villages and heights are pure Irish: St Patrick's, Fergus Mountain, Kinsale, Galway's, Cork Hill, Sweeney's, O'Garro's and Galloway.

Montserrat enjoys an extraordinary and unique Afro-Irish culture; a curiously integrated mixture of the cultures of the Caribbean slave and the Irish settler. It is intriguing to hear a black Monserratian ending a sentence, “at all, at all”.  

The original settlers chose to take their chances on Montserrat, even though the Soufriere Mountain - literally ‘sulphur pot’ - had erupted less than a hundred years previously.  But the volcano had brought dividends to the settlers. The sugar cane industry was nourished by the rich and fertile volcanic soil in the 17th and 18th centuries. Things worked out well.

Then, in July 1995, the volcano, generally thought to be extinct, awoke after almost four centuries of inactivity.

Apparently, the geologists term this a ‘sub-duction zone’.  It is here that the North and South American tectonic plates meet, pushing against each other beneath the weaker Caribbean plate. In pre-history, this threw up the islands of the Lesser Antilles, of which Montserrat is just one, 39 square-mile product. Where the plates meet, the rock melts into magma and is expelled to the surface. As it rises, it forms a dome against which the magma continues its relentless pressure.

What happens then seems to be anyone's guess. Already, two thirds of this island had been abandoned, including the capital, Plymouth, the airport, and the best of the agricultural land.

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