Inevitably there were delays and disappointments, but Fleming, a friend reported, was ‘infinitely practical and direct, prompt and lucid’. He was also decisive about the name he wanted for his new abode. The spot had previously been known as ‘Rock Edge’ or ‘Rotten Egg Bay’; clearly neither would do. Friends had suggested ‘Shame Lady’, after the green weed that covered the site (Mimosa pudica, which has a habit of folding up and shrinking at the slightest touch), and also ‘Rum Cove’. But Fleming called his new house Goldeneye, after a wartime operation he had planned for the defence of Gibraltar, should Spain enter the war, and because of the happy coincidence that Oracabessa meant ‘Golden Head’ in Spanish. The name also contained a nod to the strange and dark 1941 Carson McCullers novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye.
During this trip of about two months, Fleming stayed most of the time at the house of his friend Sir William Stephenson. ‘Little Bill’, as he was known, was a millionaire Canadian who had headed British Secret Service operations in North America during the war. Fleming had met him in June 1941 on a trip to the US, and they had become firm friends. The Canadian and his wife Mary had recently bought Hillowtown, a Great House (the residence of the plantation owner) near Montego Bay. It had cost £7,000, and Stephenson considered it ‘the finest house in the island’.
It was Stephenson who introduced Fleming to Jamaica’s elite expatriate society. Also near to Montego Bay was Cromarty, the Jamaican mansion of the newspaper proprietor and wartime production and supply minister Lord Beaverbrook. Yet their first meeting was not a success. Fleming criticised as tasteless a recent article in Beaverbrook’s Daily Express, then the largest-circulation newspaper in the world. ‘That young whippersnapper!’ Beaverbrook said of Fleming to Stephenson later. He strongly objected to being told at his own table how to run his newspapers. But at a subsequent dinner at Hillowtown, Fleming turned on the charm and peace was restored. The Daily Express owner would prove a very useful friend.
As had been the case since the days of the sugar barons, Jamaica provided a home for British eccentrics, second and third sons of the aristocracy and rich misfits. Lord Ronald Graham, the second son of the sixth Duke of Montrose, had left England in 1940 after his prewar pro-Nazi views became an embarrassment. He set up a property agency in Jamaica and handled Fleming’s purchase of the Goldeneye land from Christie Cousins (it was essential to get ‘proper title’ for land, Fleming would later warn). Lord Peregrine ‘Perry’ Brownlow, who had been lord-in-waiting to Edward VIII, and therefore at the pinnacle of the court, had also washed up on Jamaica’s north shore. He had famously driven Mrs Simpson across France pursued by the press a week before the final abdication announcement. With his social standing thereafter much reduced, he was among those referred to as ‘Gone with the Windsors’. Like most rich incomers, he had bought an old plantation Great House. His was at Roaring River, St Ann’s Bay, just along the coast from Oracabessa past Ocho Rios.
Men like this, in their refurbished and lavishly staffed Great Houses, saw themselves as inheritors of the old plantocracy. On his walls at Hillowtown, Stephenson displayed a series of valuable J. B. Kidd prints, the famous ‘Views in the Island of Jamaica’. They are classically imperialist in tone, depicting a tamed natural world and blacks, if at all, as tiny, inconsequential figures similar in status to draft animals. Nobel-prize-winning West Indian poet Derek Walcott recently described them and their like as drawn ‘as if the sky were a glass ceiling under which a colonized vegetation is arranged for quiet walks and carriage rides’. Displaying such pictures was a statement of celebration of Jamaica’s plantation past.
Millionaire businessman Sir Harold Mitchell, perhaps the north shore’s most locally noted expatriate resident, created a plantation-style set-up pretty much from scratch. Having been a Conservative MP for fourteen years, as well as deputy chairman of the party, he had lost his seat in the Labour landslide of 1945. Thereafter he spent at least six months of the year in Jamaica, along with his family and half a dozen or so of his most important staff. As a child he had been told by an uncle who lived on the island ‘stories of pirates and desperadoes … Elizabethan sea-rovers, of earthquakes and hummingbirds’. This had led him to buy, sight unseen, 1,200 acres on the high ground on the Oracabessa side of Ocho Rios.
On the land was a Great House of sorts, called Prospect. In fact it was a simple single-storey eighteenth-century stone fort, complete with firing slits to keep the French or the vengeful slaves at bay. Mitchell had ordered that another storey be built, in the plantation-house style. Inside, weathered cedar panelling was put up, and ‘fine old mahogany furniture was installed in the principal rooms’. On the walls were hung portraits of Admirals Rodney and Vernon, both of whom made their names in the West Indies, and also such powerful sugar barons from the period of slavery as Rose Fuller and Peter Beckford. Along with more J. B. Kidd prints, there were also a number of prints originated from drawings by George Robertson, who specialised in depicting idealised Jamaican estates, far removed from the brutal reality of the sugar plantation. These can still be seen at Prospect, along with Mitchell’s cricket bat, a ‘Gradidge Imperial Driver’.
Mitchell grew coconuts, limes and pimento, kept a large herd of cattle and at one point dabbled in sugar. But he never made any money out of his ‘modern-day plantation’. It was more a social experiment, an exercise in imperial nostalgia.
Of course, much of the attraction of Jamaica was as an escape from the cold of a London winter. In Dr No, Bond is delighted to leave behind ‘hail and icy sleet’, where ‘people streamed miserably to work, their legs whipped by the wet hems of their macintoshes and their faces blotching with cold’, and revels in the ‘velvet heat’ of Jamaica. In a much later short story, ‘Octopussy’, Bond takes a back seat while Fleming describes the appeal of Jamaica right after the war to his central character, Dexter Smythe, who has just emigrated: ‘Prince’s Club, in the foothills above Kingston, was indeed a paradise.’ (This would become ‘Queen’s Club’ in Dr No, and is based on a real establishment still in business, the Liguanea Club.) ‘Pleasant enough members, wonderful servants, unlimited food and cheap drink, and all in the wonderful setting of the tropics.’ Dexter Smythe and his wife enjoy ‘one endless round of parties … yes it was paradise all right, while, in their homeland, people munched their spam, fiddled in the black market, cursed the government and suffered the worst winter weather for thirty years’.
But Jamaica offered more than sunshine, rum and cheap servants. In his memoir, Mitchell remembered fondly an earlier time when ‘those generously red-splashed maps which symbolized the power and influence of one small island’ were ‘a fact of life’. Others, including Fleming, shared this nostalgia for the ‘years of greatness of the British Empire’, which now seemed under threat. As Bond complains in You Only Live Twice, Britain had been ‘bled pretty thin by a couple of World Wars’. In 1946, the country was bankrupt, rationing was getting even stricter and class relations seemed in worrying flux after the social upheaval of the war and the election of a Labour government in July 1945. This had led, Bond continues, to ‘Welfare State politics [that] have made us expect too much for free’. Furthermore, in 1941, Britain had signed up to the Atlantic Charter, committing herself in theory to decolonisation. The Labour administration looked as if it would follow through on this promise. In many parts of the Empire, most notably India, there were vociferous and growing movements for independence.
But Jamaica seemed, on the face of it, different, stuck in a comfortable time warp where imperial and social structures remained virtually unchanged from a hundred years previously. In Dr No, Bond drives with Quarrel across the island from Kingston to the north shore. On the way they see ‘an occasional man going off to his precipitous smallholding on the flank of a hill, his three-foot steel cutlass dangling from his right hand, chewing at his breakfast, a foot of raw sugar cane’. Further along, they pass ‘a woman sauntering up the road with a covered basket of fruit or vegetables for Stony Hill m
arket, her shoes on her head, to be donned when she got near the village’. Bond reflects, with pleasure, that it ‘was a savage, peaceful scene that had hardly changed, except for the surface of the road, for two hundred years or more’. Indeed, it could have been a scene from the slavery era.
In the same way, the people of Jamaica seemed to show the white English elite a deference that had been lost at home and elsewhere in the Empire. Ramsay Dacosta, who worked as a young man as a gardener for Fleming, says: ‘We were scared, kind of shy of going near white people. If they say something to you harsh and so forth.’ Schools taught British history and literature. Blanche Blackwell, who grew up in the Jamaica of the 1920s, remembers that they imbued people ‘with the idea that England was the only place on earth’. Only a handful of non-whites attended secondary school, where, one later complained, ‘We absorbed the doctrine that white was virtue, power, wisdom and that black was vice, weakness, stupidity.’ For empire nostalgists, then, Jamaica seemed a delicious slice of the old imperial certainties, where their comparative wealth, Englishness and fair complexion gave them extra-special status.
As a writer on Jamaica’s longest-established newspaper, the Gleaner, noted, the epicentre of ‘the social life of the upper classes who either came from England, or liked to give the impression that they did’ was King’s House, the residence of the Governor and his family. In 1946 this was Sir John Huggins, a career colonial officer, viewed by Jamaicans as ‘very reserved and even unfriendly’; ‘an unimaginative man with no special intellectual tastes, no enthusiasms’. Huggins made little impact in Jamaica, but for his wife, Molly, it was a very different story.
Chris Blackwell, Blanche’s son, who now owns Goldeneye, remembers Molly Huggins as ‘very vivacious, a larger-than-life character. A big woman, tall, five foot ten or eleven. Nice-looking. Strong personality.’ He doesn’t recall meeting the Governor, but confirms that ‘she was the one that really registered’. It was Molly who set the tone for the behaviour of the white society Fleming now engaged with, as well as its attitude to Jamaica and Jamaicans: in part well-meaning and affectionate, but hampered by ignorance, arrogance and double standards.
A child of the Empire, Molly was born in Singapore in 1907, so was just a year older than Fleming. While her father worked as a colonial resident in Malaya, she attended boarding school in England. After having had ‘great fun’ helping to break the General Strike and conducting a string of affairs, she was married in 1929 in Kuala Lumpur to John Huggins, then a colonial administrator in Malaya, who at thirty-seven was sixteen years her senior.
The couple, acquiring three daughters along the way, were posted to Trinidad, then Washington, then Jamaica in 1943, where Huggins became Governor. Here Molly’s first task was to take King’s House in hand. Apart from the central dining room, the residence had been destroyed in the 1907 earthquake, and rebuilt as what Molly called ‘an ugly, squat, grey cement building’. Inside, ‘immediate redecoration’ was required, ‘war or no war’. Her daughters were happy, however. They had a swimming pool, and 150 acres of grounds in which to ride their horses.
Amid a general refit, Molly had the silver from the West India Regiment polished up and displayed and the Joshua Reynolds portraits of George III and Queen Charlotte sent to England for restoration. Antique mahogany furniture was acquired locally, ‘much of it brought out from England in the old days of the great sugar barons’. Soon everything was ready for the stream of visitors and functions. In this, Molly was determined to make a decisive change: ‘We rather startled Jamaica in the early days by having coloured Jamaicans to play tennis, as this really had not been done very much in the past. But we had decided from the beginning that we would have no colour prejudices of any kind.’
‘Lady Molly’, as she was soon known across Jamaica, found the West Indies ‘sadly neglected’ and noted that ‘there seemed to be a great deal of poverty, especially after the wealth of Malaya’. Although ‘the Jamaican plantocracy (mostly of white background) had done a good deal in the field of social services’, she writes, ‘the sugar workers were very badly paid and, except on the very good estates, they lived under very poor conditions’. The demands from every parish, for better water and electricity supplies, housing and roads, were ‘endless’. On arrival, she was immediately swamped with letters asking her to be chairman or president of organisations, ‘and there were a great many pathetic ones asking for money, clothes, jobs, and in fact, help of any kind’. She immediately promised to be president of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (a particular bugbear of hers, and a concern she shared with Fleming) ‘and of all the societies dealing with women and children … I intended to do a lot of work’. ‘After I had seen much of the poverty and need for help,’ she writes, ‘I realized very quickly that what Jamaican women needed was leadership.’ So in 1944, Lady Huggins formed the Jamaican Federation of Women, with the motto: ‘For our Homes and our Country’. The executive committee was dominated by the great and the good – Blanche Blackwell’s sister-in-law, Pamela Lindo, as well as the wife of the editor of the Gleaner – but membership was open to all and was soon 25,000 strong, drawn from all parts of the population even if the middle classes dominated. Each member paid a penny a month, which was spent on school uniforms, books, girls’ clubs and sewing, cooking and knitting lessons.
From an empire family, Molly Huggins was raised by maiden aunts in Tunbridge Wells, seeing her parents ‘every three or four years.’ At Roedean boarding school she was captain of tennis, cricket and lacrosse.
‘I suppose I fell in love with Jamaica and its people almost as soon as I arrived,’ Molly wrote in her memoir, backing up the sentiment always expressed in the many articles she wrote about herself. ‘I gave a great deal of my heart, my mind and my energies to working for them. Their splendid response of love and gratitude has been one of the highlights of my life.’
Shortly after the war, Life magazine ran a profile of the Governor’s wife, which begins: ‘Nothing like Lady Molly Huggins ever happened before to Jamaica – or possibly to any other British colony.’ Lady Molly, it reports alongside a picture of adoring black children holding a welcoming banner, ‘steams about the island engaging in good works’ and ‘visits village markets, climbs onto tables and harangues her audiences on the importance of learning how to take better care of their children and homes’. We learn, however, that she still finds time for tennis – winning the Jamaica women’s doubles championship – ‘shoots golf in the low 80s’ and had just organised her daughter’s wedding, ‘the social event of Jamaica’s spring season’.
Unlike her husband, Lady Molly was extremely sociable. She unashamedly loved parties. ‘The handsome young men simply swarm around her,’ noted one local magazine journalist. She was often out on her own, as her husband had decided that to avoid charges of favouritism he should not attend dinners in private houses. A popular destination was the Craighton Estate Great House, high above Kingston beyond Irish Town. Here Bobby and Sybil Kirkwood gave lavish black-tie dinners for twelve or more, waited on by liveried servants.
Robert Kirkwood, an Englishman, was another pillar of elite Jamaican society and the most powerful businessman on the island. He had attended Harrow School and then taken a job at Tate & Lyle, thanks to his mother, who was a Lyle. At that time the company was involved with processing the sugar of Britain’s heavily subsidised domestic beet crop. When they looked to expand in 1936, they sent Kirkwood, now a company director, to the West Indies. He recommended investing in cane sugar estates in Trinidad and in Jamaica’s Westmoreland and Clarendon parishes. His suggestion that he take on the task of putting the largely derelict estates back into production was accepted.
The company bought cheap and then invested heavily in centralised factories: at an estate called Monymusk in Vere, Clarendon (previously owned by the Lindo family); and at Frome, Westmoreland. The latter was served by the port of Savanna-la-Mar on Jamaica’s south-west coast, visited by Bond in The Man with the Golden
Gun, where he comments on the ‘drably respectable’ villas built for the ‘senior staff of the Frome sugar estates’.
Tate & Lyle formed a new subsidiary, the West Indies Sugar Company, known as WISCO, whose estates, run by expatriate British and white Jamaicans, accounted by the end of the war for about a third of the island’s entire production.
In 1948, the irascible Kirkwood would fall out with his bosses and resign, to be replaced by Alan Walker, another Englishman. Kirkwood became chairman of the Sugar Manufacturers Association, a body representing all sugar producers, large and small, in their dealings with the government, suppliers and labour unions. This was a key position, as sugar remained Jamaica’s biggest business and the largest employer – albeit seasonal – by a huge margin.
In spite of this relative importance, the sugar industry was a shadow of its former self, as the landscape of Jamaica at the time of Fleming’s first visits amply testified. From almost the beginning of the eighteenth century, for a hundred years, Jamaica had been by far the richest and most important colony in the British Empire, thanks to its sugar crop. By 1774, average per capita wealth for a white man in Jamaica was £1,000, while in England it was around £42. This wealth built a large proportion of Britain’s stately homes and contributed substantially to the capitalisation of the Industrial Revolution. So important was Jamaica to the Empire that its defence was prioritised over the suppression of the revolution in North America’s Thirteen Colonies.
Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica Page 3
