BRITISH GUIANA
SIR,—In last week's issue, your paragraph on British Guiana seems to throw some doubt on conditions there and accordingly I think I cannot do better than send you extracts of a letter I have just received from a senior official there who is a very old perional friend of mine and I can assure you a most ,level-headed man. He writes:- " As you have heard and read, the balloon went up here and what with Army and Navy the place looked busy. Now 1 see a lot of the armchair critics are questioning the neces- sity. In fact we went so far as to say that the opinions of the Government here were not backed up by the opinions of independent observers, meaning no doubt the newspaper correspondents of such papers as the Express and the Mirror, who came in after the troops arrived. I wish some of them had tried to live here.
" These Communists were playing a very clever game and 1 am afraid they were allowed to carry on. The intimidation was widespread, it was -getting such that decent people didn't like going out at night and it was as' much as anyone's life was worth to hold an independent meeting. They had a gang of unemployed toughs to do the stone throwing, knifing, etc., and the police had orders not to interfere. And these so-called Ministers of the Crown used to stand up and revile the Governor and all the heads of departments openly and, incidentally, me too. My Minister had reported me to the Governor for discourtesy, sabotage and non-co-opera- tion. But we did have a flap, what with people being evacuated to police barracks to ensure their safety (including the Arch- bishop, etc.) and troops marching with weapons at the ready.
" The main trouble was the incitement to riot and the fear of incendiarism, which in this town is just plain murder (Georgetown is almost a hundred per cent. wood buildings including the Cathedral which is 'the biggest wooden building in the world). The Ministers had stated openly that they were not voting money for the police next year, quite a lot of whom were infected with Communism, and had ordered us not to spend any money on police buildings and had said that they were going to organise their own 'Peoples' Police.' In addition, there were ' party' committees organised in each district which would control everything. All works or proposals would have to be approved by these commit- tees before the Ministers would consider them. Luckily, it hadn't got into full swing and this has nipped it, if not exactly in the bud, before it has had time to bloom fully. It was absolutely necessary to bring in the troops to back up the police. I am quite sure if the riots and strikes had started, they would cleverly have worn the police down by timing events to give them no time to recover." —Yours faithfully,
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