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

by Matthew Parker

  For 150 years after 1700, all the flat land around the future site of Goldeneye would have been planted in cane. The largest estate was Trinity, worked by over 1,000 slaves and consisting of about 5,000 acres around Port Maria. The area’s reliable rainfall and proximity to the port made this ‘one of the island’s most desirable properties’. Adjacent to this estate was Frontier, with about 300 slaves working nearly 1,500 acres. To the west of Port Maria lay the plantation of Agualta Vale, owned by the eccentric Hibbert family. At its prime it consisted of 3,000 acres and nearly 1,000 slaves. In the late nineteenth century it would be sold to the Scottish physician Sir John Pringle.

  On the high ground in the interior of Fleming’s parish, near the border with St Catherine, Sir Charles Price, scion of one of Jamaica’s richest sugar families, had built his retreat, Decoy. Price, who could trace his family back to one of Cromwell’s invasion force, owned numerous properties, including jamaica’s most famous Great House, Rose Hall, as well as about 26,000 acres and some 1,300 slaves. Decoy, 2,000 feet up in the hills, provided an escape into cooler air. Here he entertained visitors from England, who could enjoy the surrounding park, grazed by imported fallow deer, in a fantastical imitation of the aristocracy at home. In front of the house was ‘a very fine piece of water, which in winter is commonly stocked with wild-duck and teal’, a visitor reported. Behind was an elegant garden, with numerous richly ornamented buildings and a triumphal arch.

  In fact Price was already heavily in debt by the 1770s, and the family’s fortune was gone by the next generation. The abolition of slavery, combined with natural disasters, endemic war and the planters’ greed, corruption and decadence, saw the industry rapidly decline during the nineteenth century. As the sugar price fell, production in Jamaica slumped from 100,000 tons in 1805 to a low of 5,000 tons just over a hundred years later. In the last half of the century, the number of sugar plantations shrank from more than 500 to just 77. In common with the rest of the island, sugar production in Fleming’s St Mary Parish collapsed after Emancipation. Trinity’s output halved in the ten years after 1838.

  This left the cane fields derelict and the countryside littered with decaying, squatted or abandoned Great Houses and sugar works, quickly reclaimed by vines and bush. Vandalism, hurricanes and fires contributed to the ruin, and almost every old house acquired its own ghost story. And each ruin acted as a visible, melancholy reminder that Jamaica’s heyday was a hundred years in the past.

  This romantic mood was memorably evoked at the beginning of Richard Hughes’s 1929 A High Wind in Jamaica: ‘ruined slaves’ quarters, ruined sugar-grinding houses, ruined boiling houses’, where ‘two old Miss Parkers’ had taken to their beds as their plantation house crumbled about them into ‘half-vegetable gloom’. Of course, many other authors writing about Jamaica similarly employed this image of romanticised decay, Fleming included. The melodramatic melancholy suited his temperament to a T. It was also linked to his respect for Jamaica’s ‘aristocracy’, the old families like the Havelocks, who are murdered for their property at the beginning of the short story ‘For Your Eyes Only’. For Fleming, the Havelocks are exemplary white Anglo-Jamaicans: they are tolerant of the clumsiness of their servants, appreciative of nature and snooty about Americans. Their own lands – 20,000 acres given to ‘an early Havelock’ by Oliver Cromwell – are in good shape, having been maintained ‘through three centuries, through earthquakes and hurricanes and through the boom and bust of cocoa, sugar, citrus and copra’. But a neighbouring estate, Belair, is in ruins, ‘a thousand acres of cattle-tick and a house the red ants’ll have down by Christmas!’

  ‘Belair used to be a fine property. It could have been brought back if anyone in the family had cared,’ complains Colonel Havelock.

  ‘It was ten thousand acres in Bill’s grandfather’s day. It used to take the busher three days to ride the boundary,’ adds his wife.

  ‘That’s one more of the old families gone,’ continues the Colonel. ‘Soon won’t be anyone left of that lot but us.’

  By Fleming’s time, however, another crop had come to the rescue. Now planted all around the site of Goldeneye were bananas. This was the essential local business. Thanks to an American entrepreneur, what became known as the ‘Green Gold Era’ had started in Jamaica in the 1870s, and Oracabessa, just beyond Goldeneye’s eastern border, had grown into an important hub from which the fruit was exported. By the 1930s, banana production had become a mainstay of the entire Jamaican economy.

  In 1937, the island exported twenty-seven million stems, twice that of any other country. More than 70 per cent of the crop went to Britain. The business was particularly important for St Mary, where the landowning families – the Whites, McGregors, Marshes, Silveras, and in particular Blanche Blackwell’s family, the Lindos – had grown rich from the crop. Leonora Rickets, local resident and granddaughter of a St Mary banana pioneer, remembers the plantation owners as ‘vibrant, colourful characters’, ‘a happy-go-lucky lot, who drank a lot and had a lot of women’.

  ‘Banana day’, when the crop was loaded on to ships for export, ‘was the highlight of the week. Everything revolved around green gold day.’ At the shallow port of Oracabessa, this involved the bananas being stacked on to red-painted barges, then rowed out to stocky white ships standing out in the bay. A writer on the Gleaner remembered the ‘attractive sea-weedy-cum-banana-trash smell – a smell that holds all of the lush and potent Tropics’. Paddy Marsh, a local labourer, had a less romantic memory of having to walk a long way to the port, and then ‘work night and day to make any money and the money was so small. We had to carry that banana on our head, sometimes we carry one, sometimes two, to the wharf’ At this point the ‘tallyman’ would tally the bunch as a ‘six-hand, seven-hand, eight-hand’ and so on. ‘We had to sleep on the wharf, we take our bed. People cook down there,’ recalled Marsh.

  Whites Wharf, Oracabessa. A visitor to Fleming’s house wandered down one banana-loading night to find ‘sleazy, brilliantly lit wharves… Women lay asleep among the dried leaves. There was a smell of rum, a tinny whine of music.’

  ‘You got a lot of exploitation,’ conceded Rickets, ‘but money was going round, people were employed.’ The Second World War, however, hit the industry hard. No shipping could be spared or risked to take the fruit to its market in Britain. Nevertheless, some transports still called at St Mary’s ports. Blanche Blackwell remembers that part of the local banana production was purchased by the British government, even though there was never any plan to ship the crop to England. Instead, the bananas were loaded on to the ships at Oracabessa and elsewhere on the island, everyone was paid, and then the fruit was carried out to sea and simply tipped over the side. Under this scheme, twelve million stems were purchased during the conflict at the pre-war price, but the rising cost of living and wages, as well as hurricanes and leaf-spot disease, saw many plantations abandoned nonetheless.

  In 1946, production in Jamaica was at less than a fifth of the prewar level. Although the end was still some years away, and tourists and expatriates, including Fleming and his friends, would enjoy viewing from the comfort of their verandas the picturesque spectacle of the banana-loading, the days of Oracabessa’s prosperity were numbered, and the port – now overlooked by the rising outline of the new Goldeneye house – was in slow but melancholy decline.

  1947 The Bachelor Party

  He knew, deep down, that love from Mary Goodnight, or from any other woman, was not enough for him. It would be like taking a room with ‘a view’. For James Bond the same view would always pall.

  The Man with the Golden Gun

  Early in 1947, Ramsay Dacosta, later Fleming’s gardener, was among a group of small black boys who had swum round from Oracabessa to fish on the reef about twenty yards off the beach at Goldeneye. The beach, accessible only by sea, had been a favourite secret place for local children. Blanche Blackwell’s brothers Frederick and Roy Lindo remembered using the small cave in the cliff as an arena for illegal cock
fighting. But today Ramsay Dacosta and his friends could see steps leading down from the cliff above and a tall white man standing on the sand. It was now Fleming’s beach. Dacosta remembers him waving to the boys in a friendly way.

  Back in London, Fleming had secured a job at the Sunday Times as foreign news manager. The newspaper’s proprietor, Lord Kemsley, was a bridge-playing friend of Ian’s and had generously agreed to his new employee’s stipulation that he have two months’ paid leave every year to spend in Jamaica.

  Goldeneye was completed in December 1946, a gently sloping roof now rising above Fleming’s design of a ‘squat, elongated box’ with its large main room with huge open windows looking out over the sea. The following month Fleming was back in Jamaica to live in his new house for the first time. With him to stay for a few weeks were Ivar Bryce and another louche ex-Etonian friend, John Fox-Strangways. With the exception of a large Barringtonia tree that pre-dated the construction and still stands just outside the west-facing door, the new house was not yet softened by surrounding vegetation. Bryce found it ‘a cubist arrangement of concrete surfaces … a masterpiece of striking ugliness’.

  Ian with Ivar Bryce, who introduced him to Jamaica. Bond author Raymond Benson remembered Ivar as ‘cool as hell and quite the playboy. I think there’s a lot of him in Bond.’

  The visit was something of a bachelor party. The three friends swam naked in the sea before breakfast every day and started drinking at 11 a.m. In letters to his lover Ann, Ian assured her that there was no female company, but one visitor remembered a ‘beautiful married blonde from Bermuda’ being part of the group at Goldeneye. By the rail at the end of the sunken garden there were now outdoor chairs and lilos, as well as a table pierced by a big sunshade. When the mood took them, the three men moved earth around to create a garden, and two paths were cut through the bush from the house to each frontier limit along the cliffs. Inside, they hung shelves and a set of French horse portraits. Ivar gave Ian a dog called Fox, the first of many mongrels that lazed around in the sun at Goldeneye. Another was Himmler, which acted as a guard for the property.

  There was much exploring, from the mountains that rose behind the property to Negril at the farthest west of the island. In Falmouth, on the north coast west of Oracabessa, they admired the surviving Georgian buildings from the high point of empire and discovered a shop called Antonio’s. Antonio was a ‘Syrian’ – Jamaican for anyone from the Levant. He was a merchant and shopkeeper who, Bryce later wrote, stocked ‘a million fragments of damaged cotton goods from Manchester, printed in strange designs and bright and jarring tints for the West African markets. These prints are unobtainable in Manchester, but when stitched together into shirts, give great pleasure to the connoisseur of early Jamaican touristiana.’ Bryce purchased one in mauve and puce, depicting Winston Churchill holding up his fingers in the V sign. ‘Ian had many trouvailles from Antonio,’ he reported, ‘which all lent colour and character to the Goldeneye scene.’

  On one occasion, travelling along the north coast road on his own, Fleming noticed a substantial building on the crest of the hills near Duncans, a village perched above the road just east of Falmouth. He assumed it was a Great House and was intrigued. Turning up the hill, he drove up a narrow winding drive until he reached the gates. He rang the bell pull, which was answered by a picturesque old butler with crinkly silver hair and a majestic smile. ‘The Colonel will be delighted to receive you, sir,’ he intoned. Fleming was shown into a large, dimly lit room containing an old couple who, from appearances, seldom left the house. The butler soon reappeared bearing a silver salver with three full glasses. ‘Vespers are served,’ he announced. The drink turned out to be a curious mix of frozen rum, fruit and herbs, which his hosts were accustomed to imbibe most ceremoniously at six o’clock. ‘Ian was delighted by the scene,’ remembered Bryce, ‘and left the great house in great good humour … he never returned, but this gracious visit acquired a romantic aura of unreality which pleased him greatly.’ Back at Goldeneye, with Bryce’s help, he did his best to recreate the cocktail.

  Fleming with assorted mongrels at the door of the back bedroom of Goldeneye, where later Bond stories would be written.

  Fleming’s favourite thing of all, though, was the reef, where he would spend hours floating, observing or hunting, enjoying the coolness of the water, his body’s natural buoyancy and the exciting other-worldliness of it all. He had been introduced to underwater swimming by his wartime boss, Admiral Godfrey, and Goldeneye soon acquired a rubber dinghy, flippers, snorkels and masks, as well as spear guns and steel tridents. The target was lobsters, or anything else that could be eaten. The hazards included sharp coral, barracudas and sharks.

  For Fleming, being out in the bay was the perfect combination of action and sensuality that would become James Bond. The reef would also provide a milieu for Bond’s most vivid and exciting challenges, and fuel for Fleming’s best writing. Kingsley Amis, looking back on the Bond books, would comment: ‘All writers possessed of any energy annex some corner of the world to themselves, and the pelagic jungle roamed by ray and barracuda is Mr Fleming’s.’

  Fleming’s companions were enthusiastic collaborators. ‘Every exploration and every dive results in some fresh incident worth the telling,’ remembered Bryce. ‘And even when you don’t come back with any booty for the kitchen, you have a fascinating story to recount. There are as many stories of the reef as there are fish in the sea. At Goldeneye, the doings on the reef filled the whole day with interest and pleasure.’ Soon the shelves in the house were cluttered with collected shells.

  Fleming was enchanted. On 26 January he wrote to Ann that she would love it too. ‘There are so many things which would make you giggle here … The weather is beautiful and you would feel a different person and you would get small freckles under your eyes which would annoy you but which I would like. And you wouldn’t be able to dance about like a dragon-fly because there is no point in it here.’ The butterflies were wonderful, he wrote, ‘and when you bathe in the dark there are fireflies which drift about and disappear. We never wear any clothes when we bathe and it is just a question of walking out of bed and down the steps into the warm sea.’

  In his accounts of the early days of Goldeneye, Fleming reported ‘small blackamore troubles which arise the whole time’, and later wrote that he spent much effort in the early years ‘coping with staff’. ‘They require exact instructions, constant reminders, exhortation and a sense of humour, which the majority appreciate,’ he noted later that year. Nonetheless, in The Man with the Golden Gun we are told that ‘Jamaican servants, for all their charm and willingness’, are not of very high ‘calibre’.

  On this visit, however, Fleming made one tremendously successful appointment in the form of Violet Cummings. Introduced by Reggie Aquart, she was a local thirty-one-year-old woman, who had never travelled far from her home near Oracabessa. She would work for Fleming as Goldeneye’s housekeeper for the rest of his life. Frequent visitor Ivar Bryce called her ‘One of those superlative human beings who distribute comfort and well-being continuously among ordinary and lesser mortals. The whole establishment runs like clockwork with Violet as the mainspring.’ Her great-niece, Olivia Grange-Walker (a Jamaican Member of Parliament and until recently a government minister) remembers her as ‘calm, confident and self-assured … a strict no-nonsense person’. She cleaned, washed, shopped and cooked, cared for Fleming’s and his guests’ clothes, performed errands, and kept the spear-fishing equipment in trim. She could also, Bryce wrote, ‘conjure up any number from one to five of slim and jungly assistants within the hour, if needed’.

  To visitors, Violet became an intrinsic part of Goldeneye, though she never read a Bond book. She and Fleming clearly had a very good relationship. After his death, Violet spoke about him in an interview with the Gleaner: ‘The Commander was the best man I ever met, better than all the men in Jamaica, and in the rest of the world, too.’ She adored him. According to Blanche Blackwell, Ian for his par
t was ‘devoted’ to Violet and fiercely protective, worried all the time that she would be poached by someone else. To Violet’s delight, he was also a fan of her Jamaican cooking, which most other English visitors considered ‘a culinary disaster’. Saltfish and ackee was her speciality, but Ian also enjoyed her shrimp, oxtail, black crab soup and liver. ‘He also like real Jamaican goat fish and not many English people like that,’ Violet told John Pearson in 1965. Very special guests were given conch gumbo and fried octopus tentacles with tartare sauce.

  In his relations with Violet, Fleming made a point of never arguing or raising his voice. (In his travelogue, Thrilling Cities, Fleming would complain that: ‘Too many of the English and American wives had no idea how to treat good servants. They would clap their hands and shout “Boy!” to cover their lack of confidence. This sort of behaviour was out of fashion and brought the Westerner into disrepute.’) She, in turn, gave ‘the Commander’, as Fleming is still known to everybody around Goldeneye, a good reputation locally and helped with further recruitment. By the end of his first stay, he had lined up Daisy the cook, Holmes the gardener, Hall the houseboy, Stewart the fisherman, and an old lady, Ann, a cleaner. He paid them between three and four shillings a day.

  Pearl Flynn, a veteran resident of Oracabessa who can remember the arrival of Fleming in the locality, admits that there was suspicion at first: ‘Some of them didn’t like him, you understand, white man come dis.’ But, she continues, ‘when they employ them and give them work, it made a difference’.

  In Dr No, Bond’s assistant Quarrel was useful as ‘a passport into the lower strata of coloured life which would otherwise be closed to Bond’. It seems Violet did the same for Fleming. After this visit, he wrote of Goldeneye: ‘My neighbours, both coloured and white, are charming and varied.’