Ann’s short visit ended acrimoniously. In mid February, she wrote to Ian from New York alluding to the pain of leaving him ‘and the lobsters’ but also to a furious row – ‘Do you know that when you said that to me if I’d had a revolver I should have shot you? Damn you … You’re a selfish thoughtless bastard, but we love each other.’
Ian had promised that he would accompany her to New York to spend a few days together there, but when the time came, he suddenly decided that he’d rather stay in Jamaica than go to what he would call the ‘stressed-concrete jungle’ of the American city.
Britain’s uneasy and changing relationship with the new imperial power of the United States is of central concern to Fleming and his Bond stories. In fact, his takes on the Anglo-American relationship are some of the most sparky and deeply felt sections of the novels.
Fleming knew that for policymakers in Whitehall, the greatest threat to the British Empire lay in American support for the rising nationalist movements among colonised people. After all, self-determination was one of the founding principles of the United States. Following the signing of the Atlantic Charter, Roosevelt had kept constant pressure on Churchill to address the issue of Indian independence.
At the same time, Britain could not afford a breakdown of relations with the US, who after the war had lent London money and put its troops on the ground to help prop up British interests in the Middle East, the Mediterranean and elsewhere. This dependence of the Empire on the upstart Yankees, who drove a hard bargain with Britain before, during and after the war, was not to the liking of those, such as Fleming, who looked back fondly on the days of British supremacy.
Both Fleming and Bond made frequent visits to the United States. Certainly Fleming loved the country’s speed, its scale, its service and its food. He had huge admiration for its technical know-how and muscle. In From Russia, with Love, for instance, we learn that the Americans, in ‘such matters as radio and weapons and equipment, are the best’. Even the Russians use American knives of ‘excellent’ manufacture and American Zippo lighters. But at the same time, Fleming despaired of what he called, in a letter to Ann in 1947, ‘their total unpreparedness to rule the world that is now theirs’.
Scottish novelist Candia McWilliam identifies as part of the appeal of the Bond books their ‘continual homeopathic doses of Anti-Americanism’. It is striking how, with the exception of Felix Leiter, almost all the Americans Bond meets are surly, uncooperative and jealous of his success and panache. In From Russia, with Love, praise of American technical skill is countered by the criticism that ‘they have no understanding of the [espionage] work … they try to do everything with money’. And quickly acquired wealth has poisoned the country. In Diamonds are Forever, the Chief of Staff briefs an incredulous Bond on America’s appalling murder rate and ‘ten million’ drug addicts, and how gambling, controlled by the Mafia, is the biggest business, ‘bigger than steel. Bigger than motor cars.’ In his travelogue Thrilling Cities, having beaten the ‘syndicates’ of Las Vegas, Fleming goes to bed ‘after washing the filth of the United States currency off my hands’.
Elsewhere, we learn that Las Vegas is ‘ghastly’, New York is obsessed with ‘the hysterical pursuit of money’, and Chicago has ‘one of the grimmest suburbs in the world’. In all, the country is crime-ridden and in crisis, thanks to consumerism and the breakdown of the traditional family in a ‘society that fails to establish a clear moral definition of right and wrong’.
Fleming’s attitudes to the United States were shaped not only by his own experiences there, but also by the situation in Jamaica. One of the reasons Bond loves the country on his earlier trips is that it is British space, where, for once, he is not dependent on American resources or approval. In Live and Let Die, the FBI’s surly Captain Dexter tells him that Jamaica is ‘your territory’. In Dr No, M is given the Jamaica case after nagging from the Americans ‘because the place is British territory’. When Bond comes to Jamaica from the United States in Live and Let Die, it is a blessed relief for him, an escape to a space uncontaminated by American materialism: ‘Bond was glad to be on his way to the soft green flanks of Jamaica and to be leaving behind the great hard continent of Eldollarado.’
But in subtle ways Jamaica is also shown to be under threat of American colonisation. In Live and Let Die, the Harlem gangster Mr Big has taken control of Surprise Island, just off the coast. Strangways, station commander in Jamaica, explains to Bond that this involves complications: ‘You see, it belongs to an American now … with pretty good protection in Washington.’ Dr No, who has colonised another Jamaican island, has ‘a trace of an American accent’, and his men call Bond a ‘Limey’ in the American manner. More obviously, both Fleming and Coward saw the preponderance of Americans among Jamaica’s hotel owners and tourists – ‘millionaires in beach clothes’ – as cause for regret and a threat to Jamaica’s integrity.
The Spanish-American war at the end of the nineteenth century had left the United States as the dominant power in the Caribbean, further enhanced by the completion of the Panama Canal in 1914. In 1911, The Times newspaper had predicted that the ‘islands of the West Indies … will gravitate in due course to amalgamation with the Great Republic of the North’. But while the US intervened freely in Central America and what had been the Spanish Antilles, the British islands remained part of the Empire, albeit a neglected one.
This had all changed with an agreement signed in March 1941: in return for much-needed destroyers, Britain gave the US long leases on eleven military bases in the area. For London, the deal represented the abdication of exclusive authority over the British Caribbean and, at the same time, the very beginning of the ‘Special Relationship’. The Caribbean and the deals done there, such as at the naval conference attended by Fleming in 1943, formed a bridge between Britain and the United States.
The Lend-Lease agreement of March 1941 saw the ‘American invasion’ – the deployment of US military power across the British West Indies.
The American aim was threefold: to secure the islands, should Britain surrender in Europe; to counter the serious submarine threat; and to maintain order in the region lest it cause trouble for their national interest. In 1942, as anti-colonial winds blew in from Asia, US troops were used to suppress revolt in St Lucia and the Bahamas, in the latter case after a personal request from the Duke of Windsor, the recently abdicated Edward VIII.
On the islands, it was called ‘the American invasion’. In Jamaica, there were two large bases: an airfield at Vernamfield, Clarendon, and a naval station at Goat Island in Old Harbour Bay. For almost all Jamaicans, this was their first contact with North Americans. Lower classes largely welcomed the free-spending incomers. Sweets were handed out to children. Operators of popular nightclubs like downtown Kingston’s famous Glass Bucket prospered. In Trinidad, a new calypso swept all before it: ‘Working for the Yankee Dollar’.
But employers saw their control of wages and the labour market challenged, and political activists found themselves in a dilemma. Although historically Americans had seemed pro-self-government, the lack of local consultation on the destroyers-for-bases agreement pointed in the opposite direction. Jamaican nationalists were uneasy that the deal might be the sharp point of a wedge that would presently see the ownership of the colonies simply shift from Britain to the United States. For them, then, the much-expanded American influence in the region offered both threat and promise. The fear of being subsumed within a new US colonial system was weighed against the opportunity to exploit American anti-colonial rhetoric to reinforce opposition to British rule.
The issue of race was similarly complicated. During the wartime rule of Governor Richards, black trade unionists and nationalists, including Bustamante, were rounded up and imprisoned. But when in 1941 Wilfred Domingo, founding member in New York of the Jamaica Progressive Party, was arrested on his arrival on the island, there were vigorous protests from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), based
in New York. Worried that New York blacks were going to cause trouble, the US government complained about the arrest. In 1942, Domingo was released, and Richards replaced. The conceding of the universal franchise soon afterwards was also hastened by American pressure.
By the end of the war, however, the power of Harlem and the NAACP had faded, and American influence started to be viewed rather differently by black nationalists in Jamaica. The precedent of racial segregation in the Panama Canal Zone was worrying, as were the examples of how tourism was developing in the British colonies of Bermuda and the Bahamas, where US dominance in hotel ownership and in visitors was even greater than in Jamaica. The American-owned British Colonial Hotel in Nassau refused entry to a number of distinguished Jamaicans, even Bustamante, for fear of upsetting its white patrons. Evon Blake, in his Spotlight magazine, highlighted these cases to show the possible effect of expanded American influence in Jamaica, writing that the attitudes in Nassau towards negroes ‘were equalled only in the most sociologically retarded of Dixie backwaters’. In late 1952, Blake urged the Colonial Secretary, Oliver Lyttelton, to outlaw such ‘Jim Crow’ practices. But in the House of Commons, Lyttelton announced that he was ‘advised that [the maintenance of the colour bar in Bermuda] is essential to the tourist trade on which people of the colony as a whole depend for their livelihood’. In Blake’s estimation, Lyttelton was presented with a choice between ‘US dollars and democracy’, and ‘by excusing racial discrimination as a modus operandi of tourism, had unapologetically chosen the former’. It was a decision, according to Blake, that ‘threatened the undoing of the British Empire’.
Nonetheless, for Blake, the Empire, however indifferent, remained preferable to the active racism of the Americans. Writing in Spotlight in August 1950, he urged locals to buy bonds to help ‘the present and future welfare of this great little island of ours’, and added the warning: ‘The Yanks would love to own it, you know.’
But Jamaica still needed American dollars. In 1950, the Jamaican government lifted restrictions on foreign capital investment and on taking the profits of such investment out of the country. It was very much the dollar, rather than the pound, that was being targeted. A delegation from the Chambers of Commerce of Kingston and Montego Bay toured the US the same year looking for investors. According to a US official report, ‘the delegation made it plain that the position of these Islands places them fully within the sphere of North American influence. There was no question of less than complete allegiance to Britain, but Britain’s “many problems” made that country unable to offer immediate major economic assistance.’
Jamaicans also hoped to play on British fears of an American takeover to get what they could from the mother country. ‘I was in New York. It’s only good to make money,’ Bustamante told the British press while on a visit to London in late 1948. ‘Jamaica stays with Britain,’ he announced, thereby highlighting the alternative. By 1951, frustrated by trade restrictions that forced Jamaicans to buy expensive British imports, he was threatening to switch allegiance away from Britain and towards the US.
By now, however, the United States offered little succour to Jamaican nationalists. For one thing, much of its anti-colonial rhetoric had been more about business interests than concern for oppressed people. During the 1930s, Europeans had attempted to re-establish mercantilism across their empires, shutting out US investment and access to markets and resources. But as these restrictions were swept away, American anti-colonialism lost a lot of its impetus. As early as 1942, the US airline Pan Am received a promise that it could develop a route to Jamaica on a level commercial playing field. The following year, the State Department successfully lent its active support to the US-based Reynolds Metals Company to acquire concessions to exploit bauxite resources in Jamaica. (Thus Fleming would regretfully write in 1952, as the bauxite market took off: ‘Jamaica has the largest bauxite deposits in the world, being exploited by Americans, of course.’)
The other new factor was the Cold War, which began in earnest with the formation of NATO and the Warsaw Pact in 1949. United States foreign policy was now dominated by the idea of ‘containment’ – influencing and policing the perimeters of the non-communist world. This made the British Empire and Commonwealth, whose mandate spread across scattered swathes of this space, a pillar of American security. Unrest in the colonies, it was thought, would only benefit the Soviet Union. Reform was still needed, then, to prevent this, but only if those empowered showed no risk of going over to the ‘other side’, as a number of Jamaican nationalists would soon discover. With or without the Americans, Jamaica was changing, and colonial culture was about to change as well.
Fleming in his 1947 Horizon article identified two great worries about ‘social ambience’ that an emigrant from Britain to the Empire might have, You fear the moral “dégringolade” of the tropics, the slow disintegration … In your imagination you hear the hypnotic whisper of the palm trees stooping too gracefully over that blue lagoon. You feel the scruffy stubble sprouting on your chin. The cracked mirror behind Red’s Bar reflects the bloodhound gloom of those ruined features…’ (Bond, with his weakness for the sensual, erotic and intoxicating, is constantly tempted by this ‘tropical sloth’.)
‘On the other hand,’ Fleming continues, ‘you are appalled by the tea-and-tennis set atmosphere in many of the most blessed corners of our Empire. You smell boiled shirts, cucumber sandwiches and the L-shaped life of expatriate Kensingtonia.’ Bond himself, in Dr No, ‘wanted to get the hell away from King’s House, and the tennis, and the kings and queens’. But what Jamaica offered, Fleming wrote in 1947, was a balance of the two: ‘A middle way between the lethe of the tropics and a life of fork-lunches with the District Commissioner’s wife can be achieved and I believe you will achieve it in Jamaica.’
But the world of Molly Huggins, tennis and grateful ‘natives’ was coming to an end. In September 1947, King’s House had played host to Arthur Creech Jones, Labour Secretary of State for the Colonies. Molly wrote that she liked Jones, ‘though our political views differed’. She also liked his wife, Vi, ‘though I don’t think she really approved of me. Perhaps she thought I was too gay … I think she felt it was democratic to go about in rather an old cotton dress and no stockings and flat shoes. I tried to explain to her that the people of Jamaica really expected one to dress up for them, as otherwise they felt they were being insulted. I think I got the message over to her, at last.’
In fact, the Joneses were much more interested in meeting Jamaican nationalists Norman and Edna Manley than in any of the King’s House flummery Jones was in Jamaica for a conference at Montego Bay to discuss the British West Indies being formed at some point in the future into a federation, a political union of the English-speaking islands. This new entity then could be granted dominion status in a body that, with the large and small islands together, would absolve the British of responsibility for what were in most cases uneconomic entities. It turned out to be a half-baked plan, but it did signal a more rapid journey towards self-government than had previously been thought possible.
In January 1948, Burma followed India and Pakistan to independence, with Sri Lanka joining them a month later. At a conference on African affairs the same year, Jones issued a memorandum on local government in the colonies, which confirmed the intention to bring in responsible government. It was not all about high ideals. There were problems in the Gold Coast, Kenya, Malaya, Iran, Egypt and elsewhere in the Empire that the British government could simply not afford to cope with. In September 1949, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was forced to announce a humiliating devaluation of the pound.
In Jamaica, the election of 1949 saw a return to power of Bustamante’s JLP, once again garnering the funding of the wealthy elite and the support of the illiterate peasantry. Still, it wasn’t quite business as usual. Bustamante was coming round to the idea of self-government, and Manley’s fiercely pro-independence PNP had gained much ground, actually polling more votes than the JLP and reducing Bus
tamante’s majority in the House of Representatives to just four. A much larger turnout than before signified greater involvement of the ordinary Jamaican in politics.
In January 1950, Governor Huggins was booed at the opening of the Legislature, something that had never happened before, and the following month he was jeered by a crowd, causing Molly to exclaim tersely, ‘I’ll be damned.’ It was clearly time for a new governor; Huggins was retired, and the family left Jamaica in September that year. (The story of the Huggins has a surprising coda: back in England Molly continued her ‘continental’ approach to her marriage, then in early 1958 her dry old stick of a husband Sir John suddenly ran off to Italy with a married woman. The story was covered in the Express. At the time Molly was trying to get selected as a prospective Tory MP in a constituency thought to favour a female candidate. According to Molly, the scandal ruined her chances; instead the party in Finchley chose Margaret Thatcher.)
The new Governor was very different from the staid and uninspiring Huggins. Hugh Foot was the son of a Liberal Party MP, Isaac Foot. His brothers included Sir Dingle Foot, a Liberal MP who later switched to Labour and served in Wilson’s cabinet; Lord John Foot, who became a Liberal peer and fierce defender of colonial peoples; and Michael, who would become leader of the Labour Party. ‘We were proud to be nonconformists and Roundheads,’ Hugh once wrote of his family. Oliver Cromwell was our hero and John Milton our poet.’ By 1950, he and his wife Sylvia had three children. The eldest, fourteen-year-old Paul, would become a campaigning journalist.
Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica Page 10
