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

by Matthew Parker

  Princess Margaret, representing the Queen at the celebrations of August 1962. Between 1960 and 1964, sixteen other British colonies also gained independence.

  At a string of public events, the Princess was cheered by huge crowds. Pathé News reported: ‘They rejoiced, not that they were parting from Britain – they are firm adherents of the crown – but because Jamaica stood on the threshold of independence.’

  Lady Fiona Aird, who was the Princess’s lady-in-waiting, remembers ‘the most amazing, tremendous reception’. Margaret, she says, loved Jamaica for its ‘sun, sea, and the joyfulness of their spirit’, but adds that the royal party was largely protected from any dealings with ordinary Jamaicans. There was a certain amount of sadness within the royal party that Jamaica was becoming independent – it felt like ‘the end of an era’ – but the Princess was ‘very pragmatic about what had to happen’. Apart from the heat, the only irritating factor was the US Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who as the representative of the US President thought himself the most important person there. In addition, there were several occasions when his motorcade passed along the streets about half a mile ahead of that of the Princess. According to Lady Aird, to the royal party’s annoyance he was announcing through a loudspeaker: ‘Now you’re going to be free at last! The colonial oppressor is vanquished!’

  Meanwhile, celebrations were occurring all over the island, including folk singing, dramatic presentations, regattas, bonfire parties, beauty pageants and donkey races. In Oracabessa, it was ‘Boat Races, Swimming Races, Dress Parade, Quadrille Dances, Grease Pole, Eating Race, Domino Tournament’. According to local resident Pearl Flynn, the ‘Eating Race’ involved watermelons and flour dumplings. She remembers ‘Street dancing, dancing all over, parties. Church bells were ringing.’ In the national stadium on 5 August, there were speeches, march-pasts, songs and fireworks. Strangways actor Timothy Moxon, in his Cessna crop-sprayer, was part of a fly-past in pouring rain. The climax came at midnight, when 20,000 people saw the Union flag lowered and the black, green and gold of independent Jamaica raised. For Pearl Flynn, watching on television, this was a great moment. ‘I felt good, elated,’ she says. ‘I always loved Jamaica, I was always fighting for my rights. So many promises were made, we all felt elated.’

  On 7 August came the opening of the first session of the new Jamaica parliament, attended by dignitaries including Lyndon Johnson, a papal envoy and a number of leaders of the newly independent African nations. First came a message from the Queen, read by Princess Margaret, in which warm mention was made of Britain’s ‘bonds of friendship’ and ‘more than three hundred years of close association with the island and her people’. Some found the portrayal of British rule as benevolent somewhat extraordinary, and the failure of the speech to make any mention of Jamaica’s role in achieving its own independence was criticised. Leader of the Opposition Norman Manley, when he spoke, did acknowledge that Jamaicans had had a hand in their own freedom: the ‘men who in the past and through all our history strove to keep alight the torch of freedom in this country. No one will name them today but this House is in very deed their memorial.’

  Timothy Moxon’s daughter, Judi Moxon Zakka, remembers that ‘at the time of Jamaican independence people were very excited and filled with anticipation. It was a huge step into the future, the shackles of colonialism would be finally thrown off. Jamaica would be free of its European oppressors.’ Before the end of the year, there was a new Governor-General – a black Jamaican, Sir Clifford Campbell – and Jamaica had become the 109th member of the United Nations.

  Veteran journalist Morris Cargill, Fleming’s close friend, wrote two years later: ‘A people who have managed so successfully the transition to self-government from beginnings which were so corrupting and destructive to human decency are, it seems to me, capable of almost anything if given even the smallest chance.’ At the same time, he noted that per capita income in Jamaica in 1963 was £140, more than most African and Asian countries, and higher even than Portugal. The greatest challenge, in his opinion, was population growth. Already at 370 people per square mile, density was among the highest in the western hemisphere.

  Norman Manley had declared before independence that Jamaica would stay aligned to the West and look for even closer ties with the United States. Bustamante went further, announcing as he arrived at La Guardia airport in New York: ‘Jamaica stands between Castro and the Panama Canal.’ We are pro-American,’ he said later, ‘we are anti-communist. We have nothing to do with Cuba or any communist country. We belong to the West.’

  From New York, Bustamante flew to London for meetings with British officials, and to ask for loans; not ‘as beggars’, but as the Gleaner’s correspondent reported: ‘In asking for economic aid Sir Alexander will back his case with moral and political reasons. He says that the Colonial Office has ruled Jamaica as a colony for 300 years and left a legacy of unemployment they have the duty to help clear up.’ In the event, Jamaica got a lot less from Britain than it asked for and felt entitled to.

  The Jamaican coat of arms from imperial days was retained, but with a new motto: ‘Out of Many, One People’. As Norman Manley had declared in February 1962, ‘The right road will have us all walk together – black, white, and brown – in peace and harmony, united because we are citizens of one land.’ When British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had toured the Caribbean in March the previous year, he had praised the West Indies as an example to the rest of the Commonwealth as a place where multiracial society worked.

  Nonetheless, soon after independence, some of the richer whites started moving themselves and their money out of the country. Among them, somewhat surprisingly, was Chris Blackwell, who relocated his still-fledgling Island Records business to England. ‘I thought in 1962, in view of my complexion, ‘I’d be better off in England than in Jamaica,’ he says. ‘Jamaica had just become independent and every problem was considered to be associated with white folk and previous colonial oppression. It’s a changed situation. People who had no money, no influence, they say they were oppressed by the British … they want to get theirs now. Finally it’s their time.’

  Just before independence, Ann and Ian had been invited by Terence Young to a private room at the Travellers’ Club for their first viewing of the new film. Other guests included the Duke and Duchess of Bedford, Lord and Lady Bessborough and Peter Quennell. The Flemings took along their staff – Mr and Mrs Crickmere – as well as ‘Nanny, old Caspar and all the Miss Lambtons’. ‘It was an abominable occasion,’ Ann reported to Evelyn Waugh. The children ‘were very restive, and I feared Mrs Crickmere might give notice and no more coconut soup; luckily she found the film “quite gripping”. I wish I had, for our fortune depends on it. There were howls of laughter when the tarantula walks up James Bond’s body: it was a close-up of a spider on a piece of anatomy too small to be an arm.’

  The general public, however, was much less sniffy. Three days later, just two weeks before the Cuban missile crisis, the film went on general release in 110 cinemas across the UK. In all but seven, it broke box office records. It would go on to be one of the biggest hits of the 1962–3 season and gross £60 million worldwide.

  Book sales went through the roof. Dr No sold 1.5 million copies within seven months of the release of the film. In 1961, the Bond books had sold a highly respectable 670,000 copies in paperback in Britain; by the end of 1963, the figure was 4,468,000. The same year saw the release of From Russia, with Love, with twice Dr No’s budget; the third film, Goldfinger, was also in production, with a £3 million budget. Bond seemed unstoppable.

  1963–4 You Only Live Twice; The Man with the Golden Gun

  I don’t want yachts, race-horses or a Rolls-Royce. I want my family and friends and good health and to have a small treadmill with a temperature of 80 degrees in the shade and in the sea to come to every year for two months. And to be able to work there and look at the flowers and fish, and somehow to give pleasure, whether innocent or illicit, to people in th
eir millions.

  Fleming on Goldeneye, 1964

  A few weeks before the preview screening of Dr No, Ann and Ian had experienced one of their worst ever rows. On the surface it was about nine-year-old Caspar. Ian complained: ‘Watching his character deteriorate under your laissez-faire depresses me beyond words, because I see him not being casually spoiled now but spoilt when it comes to facing the world …’ Beneath this was Ian’s fury at Ann’s relationship with Hugh Gaitskell, who had suddenly fallen ill – Ann made little effort to hide her deep concern for him. Ian complained that he was ‘jealous and lonely’ and, in case she had forgotten, he was ill too.

  Getting nowhere with the ‘stale’ arguments, Ian suddenly decided he needed to go to Jamaica. On the BOAC flight to New York, he scribbled a note to Ann: ‘In the present twilight we are hurting each other to an extent that makes life hardly bearable.’ All his efforts to make her happy, he said, were answered by ‘a string of complaints. When I want to do the things I enjoy, as this sudden trip to Jamaica, that is also a cause for complaint. You have had to get another man for a dinner-party! … can you wonder that I’m fed up to the teeth? But for my love for you and Caspar I would welcome the freedom which you threaten me with.’ He was exhausted, he said, and needed to ‘regain some spirit, which, though you haven’t noticed it, is slipping out of me through my boots’. From New York, he cabled Blanche to meet him at Goldeneye for a ‘honeymoon’. He told her he was leaving his wife.

  Blanche as ever was on hand with undemanding adoration and kindness. ‘He was sick and so miserable in his marriage,’ she says. ‘I looked after him. Jamaica and me: we could have kept him alive.’ But after only a week, a cable arrived from Ann saying she was dangerously ill. Fleming delayed, but Blanche persuaded him he had to return to her bedside. Ann recovered from what turned out to be a minor operation, but the marriage remained exhausting and trying for them both.

  During the time he did manage to spend in Jamaica, however, Fleming wrote what Blanche calls his most autobiographical story. ‘Octopussy’, like ‘Quantum of Solace’, is not really about Bond. Instead the focus is on Dexter Smythe, a golf-loving retired special operative who after the war, seeking to escape bad weather, austerity and the Labour government back home, moves with his wife Mary to Jamaica.

  Many years later, Bond arrives at Wavelets, Smythe’s north-shore house (with stairs to a beach and reef), to investigate an old crime. The body of a ski instructor and mountain guide has been found in the Alps. It turns out that Major Smythe, in the course of tracking down Nazi records and hideouts at the end of the war, had stumbled on a cache of gold. He had killed the guide who helped him reach it, and then smuggled the bullion to Jamaica, where he’d done a deal with Chinese traders in Kingston to sell it off gradually. Bond skilfully gets Smythe to confess, then hints that it might be better all round if the Major dies before being taken back to Britain for trial. In the event, Smythe goes out on the reef, where he is killed by a combination of a scorpion fish – ‘far more dangerous than barracuda or shark’ – and his reef pet, Octopussy.

  But this is really a story about alcoholism. For their first years in Jamaica, the Smythes enjoy an ‘endless round of parties’, ‘cheap drinks’ and ‘lazy, sunshiny days’. They both put on weight. Then he has a heart attack and is told to cut down on his cigarettes and alcohol. ‘At first Mary Smythe tried to be firm with him; then, when he took to secret drinking and to a life of petty lies and evasions, she tried to back-pedal on her attempts to control his self-indulgence. But she was too late. She had already become the symbol of the janitor to Major Smythe and he took to avoiding her. She berated him with not loving her any more and, when the resultant bickering became too much for her simple nature, she became a sleeping-pill addict.’ After a flaming row, Mary takes an overdose ‘just to show him’, but it kills her.

  The story opens two years later. Smythe, like Fleming, is in his early fifties. He is slightly bald and his belly sags; he is now just ‘the remains of a once brave and resourceful officer and of a handsome man who had made easy sexual conquests all his military life’. Although with the help of ‘a discreet support belt behind an immaculate cumberbund, he was still a fine figure of a man at a cocktail party or dinner on the North Shore’, he ‘had nothing but contempt for the international riff-raff with whom he consorted’.

  He has now suffered a second heart attack and ‘it was a mystery to his friends and neighbours why, in defiance of the two ounces of whisky and ten cigarettes a day to which his doctor had rationed him, he persisted in smoking like a chimney and going to bed drunk, if amiably drunk, every night’. He takes pills to go to sleep and more pills in the morning to deal with his hangover. On the day Bond arrives, Smythe has started drinking at 10.30 a.m.: brandy and ginger ale – what Fleming calls ‘the drunkard’s drink’. (This is also Bond’s choice in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and Fleming’s, too, when he was interviewed by a magazine the following year.) By half past eleven, Smythe is lighting his twentieth cigarette of the day.

  ‘Dexter Smythe had arrived at the frontier of the death-wish,’ Fleming explains. ‘General disgust with himself had eroded his once hard core into dust.’ Only one thing in his life keeps him from swallowing ‘the bottle of barbiturates he had easily acquired from a local doctor’. ‘The lifeline that kept him clinging to the edge of the cliff’ was ‘the birds and insects and fish that inhabited the five acres of Wavelets, its beach and coral reef beyond. The fish were his particular favourites.’ With his snorkel and Pirelli mask, he spends all his time ‘stirring up the sand and rocks for the bottom feeders’, ‘breaking up sea eggs and urchins for the small carnivores’, and bringing out ‘scraps of offal for the larger ones’. ‘He knew them all intimately, “loved” them and believed that they loved him in return.’

  Six months later, in January 1963, Ian was back in Jamaica, and after the filming of Dr No found himself something of a local celebrity. The Gleaner sent a reporter to Goldeneye to interview him. When you see “Doctor No” you will be proud of the Jamaican actors,’ Fleming pronounced, claiming that he had urged the directors to use as many locals as possible. When asked if he would write another book with a Jamaican setting, ‘he said with a chuckle, “I can’t go on plugging Jamaica like this or my public will think I have shares in the Jamaican Travel business.”‘ (He did, however, manage a plug for Jamaican cigars in his current book, You Only Live Twice.) He was then asked to comment on one of the ever-present issues in Jamaica – race and colour. ‘That is rather getting into the realms of politics,’ he replied, ‘but I am very happy the way things are going, the way we are becoming what we basically are – brothers. As far as I am concerned, the colour problem does not exist.’

  The interviewer found the main room of Goldeneye ‘loaded with spear fishing and underwater diving equipment’. But according to Ann, Ian, although ‘far better here’, was ‘alas, unable to prowl the reef’.

  Ann herself had suffered a series of blows. Ian had continued to take every opportunity to see Blanche – on one occasion in New York, another in Austria and several times in England. More seriously, Ann’s brother Hugo was very ill, and her sister Mary Rose had lost her long-running battle with alcoholism. Two days before Christmas, she was found by one of her children dead in her bed, having drunk, on an empty stomach, the best part of a bottle of brandy. Ann wrote to Evelyn Waugh that Mary Rose had had ‘no contact with the present and death was a merciful relief’. Then ‘Heavenly’ Hugh Gaitskell was taken into hospital, having suffered a collapse. Ann was desperate to visit him, but also did not want to upset his wife, Dora. In the meantime, Ian’s latest visit to his own doctor had produced the information that he had at most five years to live. After agonising over the decision, Ann elected to go with Ian to Jamaica. Gaitskell died on 18 January. Soon afterwards, Ann wrote from Goldeneye to Clarissa Eden: ‘I mind very much more than I could have imagined.’

  Somewhat unsurprisingly, given the circumstances, the 1963 visit s
aw the production of one of Fleming’s darkest and strangest books.

  In mid November 1962, Fleming had travelled to Japan to research You Only Live Twice. As ever, he was curious about everything. Visiting Mikimoto’s Island, he had alarmed one of the young girls diving for pearls by gently rubbing her shoulder. ‘You must touch to get the precise texture of wet feminine skin,’ he explained.

  Since the murder of his wife at the end of the previous novel, Bond has gone into a severe decline. Even a month off in Jamaica after Tracy’s death hasn’t helped. ‘He’s going slowly to pieces,’ M tells Sir James Malony, the Secret Service’s nerve specialist. ‘Late at the office. Skimps his work. Makes mistakes. He’s drinking too much …’ (‘It was three thirty,’ Bond tells himself at the beginning of the book. ‘Only two more hours to go before his next drink!’) Bond has bungled his last two missions and is facing the sack. Malony replies that Bond has admitted to him that ‘all the zest had gone. That he wasn’t interested in his job any more, or even in his life.’ He then suggests that as Bond is a ‘patriotic sort of chap’, an especially difficult and important mission might help him ‘forget his personal troubles’.

  So Bond is sent to Japan on a diplomatic mission to persuade Tiger Tanaka, the head of the Japanese secret service, to reinstate an arrangement to share intelligence. To save money, the British had been closing down operations in the Pacific, relying instead on the CIA. But high-profile defections and arrests for treason had made the Americans wary of passing on secrets. (While Fleming was still writing the book, the news broke of the defection of Kim Philby.) Britain is ‘a now more or less valueless ally – an ally now openly regarded in Washington as of little more account than Belgium or Italy’. M comments about Tiger Tanaka, ‘He probably doesn’t think much of us. People don’t these days.’