Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica

by Matthew Parker

But according to his friend John Pearson, Fleming’s all-time favourite author was the now-forgotten 1930s novelist Hugh Edwards. In 1963, Fleming tried to persuade his publisher Jonathan Cape to reissue Edwards’ All Night at Mr Staneyhursts, a story set in the eighteenth century involving treasure, shipwreck and castaways. Cape only agreed on the condition that Fleming, by then at the height of his fame, write an introduction. In this, he outlined the appeal of Edwards’ novels: their ‘romantic sexuality and the background of high life’. Edwards had served in the West India Regiment before the First World War, and Fleming suggested that his inspiration came from ‘seeing the West Indies in their last rip-roaring days, and his memories of the barbaric splendour – a compound of blood, champagne and pretty quadroons’.

  Fleming’s other favourite Edwards novel was Sangoree, set in Barbados during the time of slavery, published in 1932 and never reprinted. A garish take on West Indies history, it is full of cruelty and melancholy. Edwards depicts planters feasting for breakfast on black-crab pepper-pot washed down with claret, hock and rum; there is widespread gambling on faro, hazard and macao; slave girls dance naked and much else for the men; nature is ‘edenic’ and society characterised by ‘luxury and licence’.

  When he wrote about Jamaica’s ‘literary associations’, Fleming championed the dark and violent gothic novelists ‘Monk’ Lewis and William Beckford, author of Vathek, a fantastical novel full of exotic locations, rapid action and exaggerated passions. Fleming would later conclude from his own plotting and characters, particularly the villains, that he enjoyed ‘exaggeration and things larger than life’, key elements of local Jamaican writing and storytelling and of European West Indian travelogues, as well as this gothic tradition.

  Most highly recommended by Fleming in his Horizon article on Jamaica was Herbert de Lisser’s White Witch of Rosehall, a story of ‘hot-blooded sadism and slaves set in the 1850s’. This is the account (actually set during slavery) of a newcomer from England being at first appalled by the slave society, and then becoming corrupted by it. He works for a woman at Rosehall called Annee Palmer, who had dabbled in witchcraft, murdered four husbands and had countless lovers. She is finally hacked to pieces by the slaves she had terrorised.

  Fleming was later famously accused of writing ‘Sex, Snobbery and Sadism’. Certainly de Lisser’s story has sex and sadism, but it is above all about the appalling cruelty of the plantation system. Jamaica was the most brutal of all the British slave colonies, and this left a legacy of violence and resentment that Fleming could not have missed. The vicious tyranny of slavery was met by continual resistance, and Fleming’s parish was the epicentre of the island’s biggest slave rebellion of the eighteenth century. On Easter Sunday in 1760, fifty slaves on the Frontier plantation near Port Maria, then owned by Ballard Beckford, a scion of one of Jamaica’s most famous and notorious families, rose up under the leadership of an enslaved African called Tacky. They marched on Port Maria and captured the fort that guarded the harbour. Other slaves at the neighbouring plantation, Trinity, also rebelled, and soon much of the island was in uproar, with enslaved men and women burning cane fields and sugar works and destroying the hated Great Houses. Their aim was the ‘entire extirpation of the white inhabitants.’ Although outnumbered and ill equipped, Tacky’s followers held Port Maria and kept the British at bay for more than a month before the rebellion could be subdued, with help from the Maroons at nearby Scott’s Hall. Sixty whites and about three hundred blacks were killed. Fifty further slaves were subsequently executed in the main by being slowly burnt alive.

  Modern Jamaica had a dark side for Fleming. In many of his stories the Caribbean functions as a lawless space, somewhere to hide for criminals, misfits and ex-Nazis. And in Jamaica itself, there is danger among the beauty, just as there is on the reef. In a newspaper article, he recommends avoiding ‘the stews of Kingston’ – ‘a tough town – tough and dirty’; in a later piece, he mentions wild stories about ‘naked black men, their bodies glistening with coconut oil, who roam abroad at night to thieve and rape’. When Fleming first arrived in Jamaica, Ivanhoe ‘Rhyging’ Martin, an outlaw and folk hero who inspired the film The Harder They Come, was still at large. He was finally tracked down and killed in a shootout at Lime Key in 1948.

  In her writings, American artist Marion Simmons – a friend of Coward’s – is almost always upbeat about Jamaica and complimentary – if patronising – about ‘the natives’, as she calls them. But, as Fleming also experienced, a more hostile aspect sometimes asserted itself ‘Some things have happened recently that make me wonder what possessed me to settle in this barbaric place,’ she wrote in 1951. She was driving her car when someone threw a stone, hitting and damaging the windscreen. Then ‘a black man’ yelled ‘White Bitch!’ at her. On top of this some (to me) fairly large sums of money have been taken from my purse … we have started locking up the house at night and suddenly everything is horrid.’

  A friend, Val, tells her she must get a pistol, and a second-hand one is found for her – ‘an evil looking thing which I have no idea how to shoot, and indeed am loath to touch’. She got a licence from the police, then took the gun home and shut it in a drawer, ‘where it will no doubt rust and rot – but Val says everyone knows when you have one, whether you shoot it or not, and that it’s a sound idea’.

  Fleming’s mother Eve, who moved to the Bahamas in 1950, also kept a gun – writing to Ian, ‘The thing is to let the blacks know I have a pistol’ – as did Fleming himself in Jamaica. In all, he owned three guns: a twelve-bore shotgun kept permanently at Holland & Holland gunsmiths; a Colt .38 given him by General Donovan of the US secret services; and a Browning .25 issued to him during the war, which he took with him each year ‘for defence against the Blackamoors’. (In his Jamaican short story ‘For Your Eyes Only’, it is no surprise that Havelock has a gun in his desk drawer.)

  Writing about Jamaica, Fleming also conceded that ‘there will always be racial simmering and occasional clashes between coloured and white vanities’, and explained that Friday and Saturday nights saw ‘plenty of heavy drinking’ and ‘ganja’ smoking. But on the whole he reported that he had found Jamaicans ‘most law abiding and God-fearing’, with ‘a strictness of behavior and manners which will surprise you and charm you’. ‘Bad or indecent language’ was ‘almost absent’, and ‘law and the church are a great counterweight to the human extravagance which the hot sun breeds. I think you will appreciate the fairly solid civic framework which contains this tropic luxury.’ In fact, Jamaica seemed to Fleming the perfect mix of British old-fashioned imperial influence and law and the dangerous and sensual, of reassuring conservatism and the exciting exotic: in effect, the same curious combination that would make the Bond novels so appealing and successful. Candia McWilliam admires this dichotomy in the novels’ ‘luscious clash of ostentation and restraint’ (a succinct summary, too, of Fleming’s character). When late in his life Fleming was asked the secret of his best-selling formula, he too was clear on this contrast: What I endeavour to aim at is a certain disciplined exoticism.’

  Fleming later described how during the six years between building Goldeneye and the start of his first book, he had had ‘plenty to do exploring Jamaica, coping with staff and getting to know the locals, and minutely examining the underwater terrain within my reef’. But by the sixth year, he had done all this and was looking for a new challenge.

  Now he was acclimatised. And each year, Jamaica had soaked into him, with its creative spirit and cocktail of luxury, melancholy, imperialism, fantasy, sensuality, danger and violence. Now, at last, it seemed he was ready to fulfil his Jamaican home’s original purpose as pronounced to Ivar Bryce on the aeroplane in 1943 – to write that book.

  1952 Casino Royale

  Then he slept, and with the warmth and humour of his eyes extinguished, his features relapsed into a taciturn mask, ironical, brutal, and cold.

  Bond, described in Casino Royale

  Fleming’s trip to Jamaica at th
e beginning of 1952 was the pivotal moment of his life. By the time he left in late March, he was both an author and a married man.

  Much had changed since the previous visit in October 1951. Esmond Rothermere and Ann had agreed to a divorce, and by January Ann knew she was pregnant again.

  Although many of his friends advised against it, Ian had decided this time to ‘do the right thing’ and marry her. The wedding was to be in Jamaica – ‘the easiest way’, according to Ann – just as soon as the divorce papers came through. Ann’s brother Hugo, although he disliked Ian, sent him a letter of support, to which Fleming replied: ‘We are of course totally unsuited … I’m a non-communicator, a symmetrist, of a bilious and melancholic temperament … Ann is a sanguine anarchist/traditionalist. So china will fly and there will be rage and tears. But I think we will survive as there is no bitterness in either of us and we are both optimists – and I shall never hurt her except with slipper.’

  But Fleming, the ‘sleek’ bachelor of forty-four years of age, was worried by the marriage, or ‘this dangerous transmogrification’, as he put it. Would his ‘difficulties’, he wrote to Ann, still be tolerated when she was no longer in love with him but instead settled into ‘the usual married friendship’? You might get too irritated, I don’t know,’ he wondered.

  For her part, Ann was aware that Ian liked his own company and that the change would be ‘quite a step for him after 43 years of solitude’. ‘I fear Ian’s martyrdom is imminent,’ she wrote to her brother and his wife, ‘with intrusion of talking parrot, saxophone, R. [Raymond], F. [Fionn], and self to his perfectly run bachelor establishment … the immediate future looks rather chaotic’.

  Because of the difficulties of her first pregnancy, Ann took it easy after their arrival at Goldeneye at the end of January, passing the time sitting under a large straw hat in the sunken garden, painting birds, fish and flowers. Although most of her friends considered her entirely ‘London’, she had inherited from her naturalist father a love of wildlife, and like Coward found Jamaica conducive to creativity. Not that the north-coast social scene was entirely ignored. Soon after her arrival on 29 January, the Gleaner reported that Ann had been seen with local aristocrat Lady Brownlow on the Montego Bay cocktail party circuit. The north coast from Port Antonio to Montego Bay was christened by the paper ‘Jamaica’s Gold Coast’. In the sky above, they reported, the British Overseas Airways Corporation, ‘BOAC, with its Stratocruiser is bringing down the tourists in luxurious comfort from way above the clouds’. By this time, more than 80 per cent of tourists arrived by air, the majority still to the Kingston Palisadoes airport (later named after Norman Manley), rather than the north coast. Pan Am, however, were planning a direct route from New York to Montego Bay, described the same year by an American newspaper as ‘the best resort in the British Empire’.

  The Sunken Garden. Ian’s step-son Raymond remembered, ‘Humming birds buzzing all around you – it was absolute paradise.’

  For Ann and Ian, there was also a trip across the Blue Mountains to the south coast. ‘I watched the banks for new flowers,’ wrote Ann in her diary. ‘Ian stopped whenever I shrieked for it was marvelous new territory. Two day lilies with stems inches thick.’ With a machete brought for the purpose, Ann dug these out to replant at Goldeneye. After a picnic of ‘iced limeade, bottle of gin, hard boiled eggs, marmalade, sandwiches and fruit’, followed by a siesta, there were more flowers to be found – ‘amaryllis lilies, smaller and far more appealing than the hothouse variety … a very delicate pale salmon colour, or else salmon and white stripes. Presently green valleys of lemon orchards in flower, then baked fields with vast watermelons ripening upon them.’

  Their destination was a spa hotel on the Milk River. When they reached it, they found a small eighteenth-century sugar planter’s house, its paint flaking and a ‘closed’ sign on the door. Nearby lay a dead alligator. It was just the sort of ramshackle Jamaican scene that Ian loved. Eventually he managed to rouse the proprietress and charmed her into letting them stay and even provide them with a dinner of lobsters straight out of the sea.

  The spa itself, consisting of a large rocky excavation just below the hotel, seems to have been something of a disappointment, and the beach nearby was punishingly hot. But retreating from the scorching sand, they came across a deep pool of ice-cold fresh water. Ian dived in and speared three mackerel-like fish, which they enjoyed for supper. The planned crocodile hunt, though, was rained off.

  On 7 February, Ann’s divorce was finalised, and she and Ian could start planning their wedding, now set for the end of March. On the 16th, Noël Coward arrived in Jamaica and once again rushed round to Goldeneye the same evening. ‘Dine with Ian and Annie,’ he wrote in his diary that night. (Previously they had always been referred to as Annie and Ian). ‘I sensed that Annie was not entirely happy.’

  Ann reported of the visit in an undated diary fragment that Noël had ‘told all our favourite jokes’, but she was beginning to tire of ‘The Master’. A fortnight later, she complained in a letter to Cecil Beaton that Noël ‘should be used as a cabaret and not as a guest, he does not understand the give and take of talk and the deserts of pomposity between the oases of wit are too vast’. This new mood put a strain on the usual Goldeneye dynamic.

  As the wedding loomed, and without the distraction of guests, Ann noted that it was ‘rather a tense period in our lives’. She had become enthused by her painting, but Ian seemed at a loose end. According to Ann, she suggested that he should write something just to amuse himself And so, in the same undated diary fragment that tells of the Milk River trip, we find the following from Ann: ‘This morning Ian started to type a book. Very good thing. He says he cannot be idle while I screw up my face trying to draw fish.’

  Perhaps Ann takes too much credit. Ian had packed his twenty-year-old ‘Imperial portable’ typewriter, and on passing through New York ten days earlier had purchased a ream of best-quality folio writing paper from a shop on Madison Avenue. The intention to write was already there.

  On around 17 February, he sat down at his desk in Goldeneye’s main room, plucked a name from the author of Birds of the West Indies, whose book sat on his shelf, lined up his ream of smart paper and started to write. So began Bond, with the claustrophobic first line of Casino Royale: ‘The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.’

  When later asked what inspired him to create James Bond, Fleming’s stock answer – much to the annoyance of Ann – was that he started writing to take his mind off the ‘hideous spectre of matrimony’. It fact, that was only part of a wider crisis for Ian that included concerns about money, his health, and the state of his country and empire.

  The Conservatives, led by Winston Churchill, had returned to power at the end of 1951 on a platform that included a more assertive and independent foreign policy and a ‘strengthening of the resources of the Empire in order to close the dollar gap’. But their mandate was small – a majority of sixteen seats, with less of the vote than Labour – and there was no promise to roll back the Welfare State so disliked by Fleming. Churchill was a much-diminished figure from the wartime colossus, and some felt he should have given way to the next generation of Eden, Macmillan and Butler.

  In the meantime, a series of blows had fallen on the Empire. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, owner of the world’s biggest oil refinery, at Abadan, was taken over by the Iranian government; in Egypt, nationalists were attacking British troops in the Canal Zone; Cyprus made a bid for independence; nationalists were victorious in elections in the Gold Coast; in recognition of Britain’s declining reach, Australia and New Zealand made a security pact with the United States.

  Worst for Fleming, though, was the seismic shock delivered to the British intelligence services and the country as a whole by the disappearance in the summer of 1951 of two British spies, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, who had been tipped off by a mysterious ‘Third Man’ (correctly identified by the Americans as Kim Philby, Briti
sh intelligence’s liaison man in Washington). There were strong suspicions – later proven correct – that Burgess and Maclean were traitors and had fled to Moscow. British intelligence was in crisis.

  On a more personal level, Fleming’s impending change from bachelor to husband and father threw up a number of challenges. Ann had secured a £100,000 divorce settlement from Rothermere, but nonetheless, Fleming was presented with the need to provide for a wife with expensive tastes, and, of course, a child. His salary from the Sunday Times was generous, but so had been his bachelor expenditure. For his lifestyle to be maintained, along with these new drains on money, a fresh source of income was required.

  Over the previous two years, Ian had made strenuous efforts to rent out Goldeneye during the ten months he was not there. In this he had had some success, but barely enough to cover the costs of the place, as ‘the house runs away with money all through the year’. So as well as everything else, he needed Bond to pay for Goldeneye.

  Also under threat was his personal space, the aloof loneliness he had wallowed in for so long. From the very first, Fleming established a routine for his writing at Goldeneye. Retreating inside, he closed the large wooden jalousies, shutting out the noisy colour of the garden, the views of sea and sky, the calls of birds and the crash of the surf on the reef He didn’t discuss what he was writing with Ann, nor did she ask to see any of it. Thereby he managed to maintain a private, self-regarding space, even when his bachelor pad in Jamaica was being thoroughly invaded by the looming proximity of marriage and fatherhood.

  The maleness of that space he created at Goldeneye is, of course, in black and white on the pages of the books, starting with Casino Royale. ‘These blithering women, who thought they could do man’s work,’ Bond exclaims at one point. In Casino Royale, we learn too from Bond about the nature of relationships for men like him: ‘the lengthy approaches to a seduction bored him almost as much as the subsequent mess of disentanglement’. Women are for ‘entertainment’ only, although preferably with a violent twist – ‘brutally ravaged’. In fact, in his detachment Bond is outdone by his lover Vesper, who is given the line: ‘People are islands. They don’t really touch. However close they are, they’re really quite separate. Even if they’ve been married for fifty years.’