Thirteen years before the war, Marion Morrison travelled to the Falklands for the Observer Magazine (‘The little bit of Empire at the end of the world’, 31 August 1969), and reported back from ‘this windswept extremity’.
Could they stay British ‘in the face of territorial claims by Argentina and an economy that may have to depend on sheep and seaweed’? Well, yes, but only after much loss of life in what Borges famously called ‘a fight between two bald men over a comb’.
Morrison relayed just how remote it was. ‘Virtually the only way of getting to the islands is on the monthly RMS Darwin from Montevideo’ – which was a four-day trip.
Shipwrecks cluttered the harbour at Stanley, including the hulk of Brunel’s SS Great Britain, which Morrison later wrote about for the Observer in 1970 when it returned to Bristol.
The BBC news for 10 minutes a day was the main source of outside current affairs and as there were no papers – ‘any story spreads and gets misconstrued largely by gossip’.
Apart from the tough terrain – ‘You can drive from Stanley to Darwin, but the 45 miles will take you a day or more’ – Morrison said the islanders ‘live as well as people in many parts of Britain, and in some ways better – washing machines, cameras and radios are tax free… and in Stanley a peat officer allocates each household a section of bog’.
‘A great many of the people have no concept of Argentina and are open to be led whichever way the wind may change,’ she wrote, controversially, ‘particularly if Buenos Aires can offer a cheaper and more convenient source of entertainment and supplies than London can.’
Even less prophetically: ‘The islanders feel that if they are forced to ask for British aid they will make themselves more vulnerable to a sellout to the Argentines. Perhaps it is already too late.’
