A scene from Kingston’s Kings Street in 1961.
But at the same time, the huge promise of the PNP’s victory in 1955 had not been met. Expectations had risen faster than tangible wealth, and the population had grown even more than the economy. Land reform had failed and industrial development had degenerated into going cap-in-hand to foreign investors with ever-increasing inducements. Manley was forced to admit that the rich had got richer, but the poor poorer.
Against this backdrop, on 3 January 1958, two days before Fleming’s flight touched down at Montego Bay, the West Indies Federation came into being. Its capital was in Trinidad and its first prime minister was Barbadian Grantley Adams. As part of the post-Suez rush to decolonise and disengage with those parts of the Empire that were unprofitable, it was planned in Britain that the Federation should achieve independence as a dominion within four or five years. The American consul in Trinidad made an accurate assessment: he reported to Washington that British support for the Federation had two aims: ‘(1) To impress the United Nations with its eagerness to grant self-government and independence to its colonial dependencies; and more important, (2) to rid itself of the continuing financial drain of supporting an area which is dependent upon grants and development aid.’
The Americans were watching closely. As colonial ties with Britain are loosened,’ one United States newspaper opined, ‘the possibilities for lucrative trade will increase with the development of the islands … American influence, too could help the new-born federation towards the stable democratic government now lacking among some of its Caribbean neighbors.’
As early as the 1947 Montego Bay conference, federation had seemed inevitable. But in the intervening years, enthusiasm for the project had ebbed away as scepticism grew in all quarters about the viability of the plan. It was a blow when Belize (then British Honduras) and Guyana (British Guiana) refused to join: it was hoped that these largely empty territories would have provided scope for immigration from the disastrously overpopulated islands. At the same time, distrust had worsened between the British and the local Caribbean governments. By the time it was launched, both sides had shown their reluctance to confer significant authority on the federal government. Instead, national governments and the British Governor-General would pull the strings.
Colonial Secretary Lennox-Boyd had virtually promised the position of Governor-General of the new Federation to Sir Hugh Foot, who remained hugely popular in Jamaica. But instead it was decided by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan that the new man was to be Patrick Buchan-Hepburn, 1st Baron Hailes, a former personal secretary to Winston Churchill and chief whip for the Conservative Party, recently appointed Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire. No one was consulted in the West Indies, where Hailes was almost unknown. The American embassy in London reported the prevailing opinion across the political spectrum that ‘his lack of distinction … was not particularly complimentary to the new Federation’. Instead, ‘it gave the appearance of a political deal’, a sinecure. Morris Cargill described Hailes as ‘a bird-brain. His attention span was about ten seconds.’
At Hailes’s inauguration, Manley complained about Britain’s ‘parsimonious attitude towards this new Federation’. Frequent requests for loans had been turned down, causing an editorial in the Jamaica Times to lament: ‘In the Commonwealth and Empire, in the way of loyalty and belief in a straight British future, few other territories can today equal the West Indies in sincerity. Yet we are the people that Britain, it appears, has chosen to leave to swim if we can, or sink if we can’t.’
Fleming was certainly among those who, like Sir Hugh Foot, believed that Britain should support its former overseas possessions even after independence. So when, in April, he travelled to the Seychelles to write a series of articles for the Sunday Times, he first contacted Lennox-Boyd at the Colonial Office, offering to help promote tourism there in return for letters of introduction and travel advice. ‘Having visited Jamaica for twelve years for my holidays,’ he wrote, ‘it is very much a bee in my bonnet that English people should become empire-minded for their holidays, and I shall encourage this idea in all my articles.’
The purpose of Fleming’s trip was to report on a treasure-hunting project that was searching for a supposed hoard worth around £120,000 hidden by Olivier Levasseur, an eighteenth-century French pirate. But this proved to be a dead end, and Fleming found the place full of retired colonels, the ‘flotsam and jetsam of our receding empire’. In a letter back to England, he crossed out ‘Government House, Seychelles’ on the headed paper and wrote in ‘State of Decay’.
The trip did, however, provide the setting for one of Bond’s adventures in the book of short stories Fleming would write the following winter at Goldeneye. In ‘The Hildebrand Rarity’, Bond is sent to the Seychelles to give an independent view on the notion of situating a naval base there, as there was trouble in the Maldives, ‘Communists creeping in from Ceylon. Strikes, sabotage – the usual picture.’
His mission completed, Bond is at a loose end. Then, as an ‘underwater ace’ (the story opens with Bond hunting a deadly stingray with his ‘Champion harpoon-gun’), he is invited to go along on a specimen hunt with an American hotel-owning millionaire, Milton Krest, who has the ‘finest damned yacht in the Indian Ocean’. Krest is gathering fish samples for the Smithsonian, but only as a tax dodge. Drawing on his experience of specimen hunting in Pedro Cays with Blanche the previous year, Fleming shows Bond appalled and disgusted when Krest tips poison on to the lovingly described reef in order to collect his target, a fish known as the Hildebrand Rarity.
Krest, who although American is of German ancestry, is an obnoxious drunk who uses a dried stingray tail to beat his beautiful English wife. He delights in patronising his guests. To Bond he declares, ‘there were only three great powers – America, Russia and China. That was the big poker game, and no other country had either the chips or the cards to come into it. Occasionally some pleasant little country … like England would be lent some money so that they could take a hand with the grown-ups. But that was just being polite like one sometimes had to be – to a chum in one’s club who’d gone broke.’
The fictional ‘Hildebrand Rarity’, according to Milton Krest, was from the squirrel-fish family (right) but ‘bright pink with black transverse stripes.’ Squirrel fish spines are often venomous as well as sharp.
Krest gets his comeuppance, of course, but his view of Britain as third rate, in decline and imperial retreat, is an ever more pressing concern of Fleming. The following year, he undertook a world tour for a series of articles for the Sunday Times under the heading ‘Thrilling Cities’, which would be collected and published in 1963. ‘A trip around the world, however hasty,’ he wrote, ‘brings home all too vividly the fantastically rapid contraction of our influence, commercial and cultural, over half the globe … it was a source of constant depression to observe how little of our own influence was left … our trading posts are everywhere in retreat.’ Instead, in the ‘Orient’, ‘where we did so much of the pioneering’, ‘Americans, and American culture, communications and trade have almost a monopoly’.
‘Can this contraction be halted or even reversed?’ Fleming asks. Only if, perhaps emulating Bond, ‘the spirit of adventure which opened the Orient to us can be rekindled and our youth can heave itself off its featherbed and stream out and off across the world again’.
In the West Indian stories in the For Your Eyes Only collection, there is also a palpable sense of decline and retreat. In ‘Quantum of Solace’, the Bahamas are tired and dull: ‘the winter visitors and the residents who had houses on the island talked of nothing but their money, their diseases and their servant problems,’ Bond complains. The Governor had ‘filled the minor posts for thirty years while the Empire crumbled around him’. In the title story, the estate of Fleming’s exemplary Jamaicans, the Havelocks, is portrayed as a rare island of efficiency amid general rack and ruin.
The story opens with an introduction
full of fondness for the flowers and birds of Jamaica. Then Colonel Havelock looks up from his copy of the Gleaner to comment on the situation in nearby Cuba: ‘It looks to me as if [President] Batista will be on the run soon. Castro’s keeping up the pressure pretty well.’ Later in the story, we discover that the man behind the Havelocks’ killers, von Hammerstein, is an ex-Nazi who worked as Batista’s head of counterintelligence. We also learn from M that Bond’s investigations won’t get anywhere with ‘the Batista people, but we’ve got a good man with the other side – with this chap Castro’. This was a time when Fidel Castro seemed very much the lesser of two dictatorial evils. After the US withdrew support and even recognition for Batista’s regime in December 1958, he fled on 1 January 1959; US-Castro relations did not begin to sour until the spring of 1960.
(In ‘Quantum of Solace’, Bond is in the Bahamas to stop a shipment of arms to the Cuban rebels: ‘He hadn’t wanted to do the job. If anything, his sympathies were with the rebels, but the Government had a big export programme with Cuba in exchange for taking more Cuban sugar than they wanted, a minor condition of the deal was that Britain should not give aid or comfort to the Cuban rebels.’)
However, the result of the revolutionary turmoil was that a lot of Batista cronies – ‘crooks and gangsters’ – were trying to get their ‘funk money’ out of Cuba. In ‘For Your Eyes Only’, von Hammerstein has taken a liking to the Havelocks’ Jamaica estate, and in a scene that is amongst Fleming’s most powerful and affecting, they are killed when they refuse to sell.
Fleming writes in an interesting subtext. It was, of course, widely known that the Batista regime had for a long time been propped up by the United States government and corporate interests, as well as cooperating closely with the American Mafia. So although the hitmen in the story are Cuban, and their boss German, they carry Pan American holdalls stuffed with ‘solid wads of American money’. Havelock tells them, ‘I do not share the popular thirst for American dollars.’ When they make their escape from Jamaica, Fleming makes a point of informing us that their boat flies the Stars and Stripes. Once again, he implies that the threat to Jamaica comes in a roundabout way from the United States, a society, he declares in Thrilling Cities, riddled with ‘criminality’.
The Havelocks had been friends of M – he was best man at their wedding – and Bond agrees to take on this mission of private revenge, recasting it as ‘protecting the security of the British empire’: ‘If foreign gangsters find they can get away with this kind of thing, they’ll decide the English are as soft as some other people seem to think we are … They had declared and waged war against British people on British soil.’
In the course of tracking down and killing von Hammerstein, Bond encounters the Havelocks’ daughter, Judy. She is one of Bond’s favourites, another very un-Ann-like and even Blanche-like Creole: ‘wild and rather animal … good hard English stock spiced with the hot peppers of a tropical childhood … Bond thought she was wonderful.’
There is one very unusual short story in the collection. ‘Quantum of Solace’ only features Bond as a framing device for a tale narrated by the Governor of the Bahamas about marital infidelity that gives a chilling glimpse into Ian and Ann’s relationship around this time. It is based on a story that Blanche told Ian about a Jamaican couple (as ‘payment’, he gave her a Cartier watch). ‘She was a very lovely woman,’ says Blanche. ‘He was a very unattractive little man. And she was having a terrific love affair.’
In real life, the man was a police inspector, but here Fleming makes him a colonial civil servant, Philip Masters. After Fettes and Oxford, Masters is sent by the government to Nigeria, where ‘he was lenient and humane towards the Nigerians, which came as quite a surprise to them’. Although ‘shy and rather uncouth’, Masters meets and marries an air hostess, Rhoda. When he is posted to Bermuda, Rhoda starts an affair and, rather like Molly Huggins with Robert Kirkwood, ‘didn’t make the smallest attempt to soften the blow or hide the affair in any way … poor Masters was wearing the biggest pair of horns that had ever been seen in the Colony.’
Masters is then posted to Washington for five months, and Rhoda, ditched by her lover, prepares to be reconciled with her husband. But when he comes back, he tells her that they will divorce in a year, and in the meantime, he has split the house into two sections. He will never speak to her in private, although they will continue to appear as a couple in public. A year later, Masters returns to England, leaving his wife penniless and with debts, an act of cruelty that he would have been incapable of a few years before.
‘When all kindness has gone, when one person obviously and sincerely doesn’t care if the other is alive or dead, then it’s just no good,’ explains the Governor. This was when the Quantum of Solace stood at zero. ‘It’s extraordinary how much people can hurt each other,’ says Bond.
Fleming travelled to Jamaica alone again at the beginning of 1959, but then pushed hard for Ann to come and join him, adding that he was impressed with Blanche’s improvements to Goldeneye. Ann was not quite ready to cede to her rival proprietary rights in Jamaica and flew out a few weeks later. The trip was not a success, with Ian failing to hide his great affection for Blanche (in the summer of the previous year he had tried to persuade her to join him in New York to ‘snatch what we can’, although she had declined).
On her return to London, Ann received a letter from Peter Quennell that gives some indication of the anguish she had suffered whilst away. Blanche was not a ‘formidable rival’, he wrote. ‘It’s tragic, nevertheless, that she should have cast a shadow over your visit and dimmed the goldenness of Goldeneye! How tiresome of the Commander to let her bother you.’ He went on to explain that Ian’s ‘gallant escapades’ were only his way of shoring up his ‘often badly-battered ego’, more affected by her and her friends’ disdain for his novels ‘than you have ever quite suspected’. Thus he was in need of ‘the classical “little woman”, whose big eyes reflect only trust and love and admiration’.
Blanche and Ann on the Goldeneye window ledge, with lan between them. Much later, Ann told a friend, ‘Men suffer from not knowing what or whom they want.’
For Ian’s winter trip the following year, Ann, pumped full of tranquillisers for the flight, came along with reinforcements: Caspar, on only his second trip to his father’s Jamaica house, Caspar’s governess, Mona Potterton, and later in the month, Ann’s own lover Hugh Gaitskell made an appearance. The result was a mixture of farce and tragedy.
Caspar, now aged seven, was clearly a precociously intelligent little boy, interested in everything. Ann’s daughter Fionn, who remembers him with immense affection, describes how he was always treated as an adult, and seemed as a result far older than his years. In Coward’s play Volcano, the Ann character Melissa calls her son a ‘little monster’, but blames herself: ‘I’m not the mother type. I say the wrong things.’ Her son is like his father ‘inside and out’, she says: ‘He’s got Nanny and me and my sister exactly where he wants us. He’s started young, taking women for granted.’
Violet, now the leader of a house staff of five at Goldeneye – an extra cook, Miss Elfreda Ricketts, a maid, Luna Smith, a laundress, Rena Oliphant, and an errand boy, Leaford Williams – remained a huge fan of Caspar. But most others depict him as highly difficult, with Evelyn Waugh describing him as ‘a very obstreperous child, grossly pampered’. Fleming himself complained to Ann: ‘I am nauseated by his bad manners which you seem to tolerate so indulgently.’
On her arrival at Goldeneye, Ann discovered that Blanche had been working hard on the garden, and promptly ripped out all the new plants and threw them over the cliff into the sea. John Gielgud, who was staying with Noël Coward, came over for lunch. He found Ann ‘wizened, and gossipy … I felt they were on the verge of a frightful row.’ Gielgud also met Blanche shortly afterwards, describing her as ‘Noel’s new cicerone and apparently Ian’s mistress, a very rich widow with a toothy smile and Joyce Grenfell voice.’ By now, Ann was referring to Blanche as
‘Thunderbird’s Jamaican wife’.
The weather was again terrible. We have endured six days of rain and gales,’ Ann wrote to Evelyn Waugh on 26 January. ‘The sofa and sheets are all sopping, sticky damp and the ill-fitting shutters drip all day: the rivers belch yellow water and coconut husks into the sea in widening circles of bile and filth, the dainty beach is piled high with refuse, and landslides block all the roads.’
In the meantime, the highly efficient and prim governess was getting on Fleming’s nerves. She had arrived in a ‘pleated bonnet’, causing Ian to give Ann a pound and say, ‘Take her to buy a straw hat, and forbid any raffia decorations.’ When she took too long in the one rather primitive bathroom, he banged on the door, shouting, ‘Lights out, Miss Potterton!’
Hugh Gaitskell had become very adept at ‘coincidentally’ being in the same place as Ann (just as Ian had done when Ann was married to Rothermere). A couple of weeks into the trip, he turned up for a few days’ ‘fact-finding mission’ in Jamaica, much to the displeasure of his political party, who warned that the ‘Eden Goldeneye legend’ would make their leader the butt of silly jokes. Ann took him rafting on the Rio Grande, but the river was in spate, causing him to be thrown into the water: ‘He disappeared for several minutes, and we were about to form a human chain when he rolled onto the shore like an amiable hippo.’
Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica Page 24
