Black Jamaican journalist Evon Blake wrote that tourism had turned Jamaican youth into touts, beggars and parasites. ‘The labourers will not work for economical wages; life is more exciting for men who lounge and hang round trippers and tourists with pockets filled with pound and dollar notes, and from whom they can get fat tips rather than spend their days in tilling the soil.’ Other critics contended that it would make Jamaica ‘a nation of waiters. We will become more servile and be further away from self-government.’ While the economic benefits of tourism were meant to mitigate the problems of Jamaica’s colonial past, it was argued that the industry actually shored up many core features of that original condition and trapped the island in the grip of neocolonialism. For some, it was a trade-off between dignity and much-needed dollars.
Although a forceful campaigner for self-government and racial equality, like many Jamaicans Evon Blake remained a passionate monarchist.
Perhaps most serious was the concern that tourism, with its segregationist structure of closed enclaves and private beaches, was ‘sharpening colour prejudice’. Leigh Fermor noted of Jamaica that ‘a colour bar that is non-existent in law [is] in social practice violently alive’. This was most apparent at the smart hotels. Morris Cargill, a white Jamaican, tells of how he was offered a season ticket by the manager of Myrtle Bank hotel. But why was it necessary? he asked. ‘That’s how we keep out the niggers,’ came the reply. Black Jamaican journalists reported how in the grandest hotels, particularly those catering for American tourists, they were made to feel unwelcome and ‘in some barred by means of adroit subterfuges’.
Evon Blake had lived in Panama in the US Canal Zone, so knew all about racial segregation. In the summer of 1948, as tourists and local whites lounged by the side of Kingston’s Myrtle Bank hotel pool, Blake suddenly burst on the scene, stripped to his swimming trunks and plunged into the pool. The white swimmers immediately clambered out. The staff quickly gathered at the edges, shouting threats at the intruder. From the middle of the pool, Blake defiantly challenged: ‘Call the police. Call the army. Call the owner. Call God. And let’s have one helluva big story.’ Although the Gleaner declined to report the incident, news of the protest quickly spread all over the island. The hotel’s owner, Abe Issa, made loud noises about how everyone was welcome, but in photos of the hotel from the late forties and fifties, the only black faces are the staff. After Blake’s plunge, the pool was drained and refilled.
There was, of course, another side to the story. Although ownership of the hotels was largely in the hands of foreigners or a tiny elite of brown or white Jamaicans, the development provided work for thousands, as well as stimulating construction and infrastructure improvements. Douglas Waite, who worked his entire life as a policeman in Oracabessa, remembered the huge boon that the new hotels brought to his town, suffering so badly with the decline of sugar and the banana business. ‘Tourists were people with money. Everybody rushed to get a job in the hotel,’ he says. ‘The salaries were very low, but in those days they get good tips. Out of what they get from the hotel a lot of people were able to buy bicycle, buy motor car, build lovely houses and send their children to school.’ The alternative was ‘work on the plantation: banana, coconut and chop the field all day’.
For Ramsay Dacosta, who would go on to work for Fleming as a gardener, the arrival of the jet-set opened up another world. ‘We saw water, electricity, motor cars and wanted these things and were stirred to work towards them,’ he says. ‘People gathered good knowledge of things from that time. Jamaica start to get up. Come up.’
Furthermore, many felt that the arrival of famous tourists, as well as expatriate residents, had put Jamaica on the map. In 1949, the Gleaner gave a warm welcome to Jamaica’s established regular visitors ‘with homes of their own’ who ‘make an impressive contribution. Noël Coward, Ian Fleming, Ivor Novello, Lord Beaverbrook, Sir William Stephenson – people like these are the focusing points for a number of little eddies of social and cultural activity, and confer upon this island a lasting benefit.’
Late in February, Ann, Ian, Noël and Graham decided to motor along the coast to Montego Bay for a stay at Carmen Pringle’s Sunset Lodge, now filled with American millionaires and British aristocrats. Ian made a point of being photographed with Babe Paley, the glamorous wife of CBS chief Bill Paley, and the young and curvaceous Diana Huggins, daughter of the Governor. Ann stayed out of the picture. But the effect was somewhat ruined by Ian and Ann breakfasting together the next morning in full view on the balcony of their room. Coward stormed round to give them a stern lecture on discretion. ‘I must say they are very sweet,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘but I have grave fears for the avenir.’
At the heart of Coward’s Samolo novel Pomp and Circumstance is a very thinly fictionalised account of Ian and Ann in Jamaica in early 1949. The novel is narrated by a friend of the Governor’s wife called Grizel, married to an English banana planter. A smart, beautiful and aristocratic woman – Eloise – is coming out to the island to conduct an affair, and Grizel has to weave a web of lies to pretend to the public and extremely interested press that Eloise is staying with her rather than with her lover, Bunny, who lives part of the year in a house nearby.
Like the Duchess Eloise in the novel, Ann, Lady Rothermere, had arrived ‘in a blaze of Jamaican publicity and announced she was going to stay with me’, as Coward wrote in his diary. But when a photographer from Life magazine arrived unexpectedly, the houseboy had to be dispatched ‘hot foot’ to Goldeneye to fetch her. Coward later remembered: ‘There then began a very natty high comedy scene in which she kept forgetting she was a house guest and asking what we had been doing all the morning, etc.’
In the character of Bunny, Eloise’s lover, we have a remarkably unflinching portrait of Ian Fleming’s time on the island in 1949–51, the years immediately preceding his marriage to Ann and the simultaneous launch of James Bond.
Bunny, after a war spent in ‘cloak-and-dagger activities’, comes out to Samolo/Jamaica for two or three months a year and ‘spends all his time doing underwater fishing with an Aqua Lung and a spear gun and green rubber flippers on his feet’. He has a succession of different lovers to stay with him, sometimes chaperoned, sometimes not. If these women are interested in ‘barracuda, lettuce coral, blowfish, and other wonders of the deep, so much the better for them’. If not, they get foisted off on Grizel, the narrator. As well as these ‘ill-starred romances’, Bunny also ‘managed to have a few local flings’.
It’s astonishing how little Coward bothered to make up. If Fleming ‘reveled in discomfort’, Bunny is ‘allergic to all forms of physical comfort’. The teasing about Goldeneye continues. Bunny’s ‘beach villa’ is a ‘bleak, overmasculine barrack’ with nasty pictures of horses on the wall and grubby shells everywhere. Even Fleming’s precious Violet appears, in the form of Cynthia, Bunny’s housekeeper, characterised by ‘amiable nonchalance’. There is a row about Eloise not eating the maid’s simple local food: she is ‘far too luxury-loving and thoroughly spoilt’.
Like Fleming, Bunny is ‘a partner, not a very active one’, in a publishing firm. In London he too lives in ‘the all-pervading atmosphere of solid, sleek bachelorhood’.
And here was the rub for Coward, whose female narrator describes Bunny as an ‘irrepressible dilettante’. ‘It seemed inconceivable that he should seriously contemplate giving all that up and settling down with an ex-duchess whose spiritual home was the Oliver Messel suite at the Dorchester,’ she concludes of the doomed Eloise-Bunny affair. If Coward had ‘grave fears’ for Ian and Ann’s future, it was because, like Grizel’s fears for Bunny, Ian would ‘find himself caught up in an over-social marriage for which he was temperamentally unsuited and probably be utterly miserable’.
Ann left Jamaica before Ian that year, and under a cloud. On 20 February, Fleming wrote to her at her stopover in New York: ‘I’ve funked everything these last few days and almost purposely tried to squabble with you and vex you so that the melanc
holy should keep away.’ In fact both Ann and Ian were contemplating taking serious decisions about their relationship. ‘We will be brave one way or another before the end of the year,’ Ann wrote back. ‘I would like to look after you forever … and you should know this when talking to Esmond,’ replied Ian, although he was worried that his ‘difficulties’ might be too irritating for her, and there was also the question of how Ann was ‘accustomed to money’. ‘If we have enough money for gin and cigarettes I think I might be very happy,’ she replied.
When she reached Southampton, she was met by an emissary of her husband, who handed her a sealed envelope. Inside were curt orders that she should desist from seeing Fleming or face divorce.
This message did not end the affair, but some further effort was made at discretion. Noël Coward had purchased a line of small cottages at St Margaret’s Bay in Kent, right beside the iconic white cliffs. One, previously rented by spy-thriller writer Eric Ambler, was made available as a ‘nest’ to Ian and Ann. Coward himself was frequently next door, and in an echo of their Jamaican sojourns, they shared many evenings of canasta and high-spirited charades. But in spite of the bonhomie, and Coward’s abetting of the relationship, he wrote in his diary on 10 July 1949: ‘I have doubts about their happiness if she and Ian were to be married. I think they would both miss many things they enjoy now.’
1950 Doctor Jamaica
‘Up to forty, girls cost nothing. After that you have to pay money, or tell a story. Of the two it’s the story that hurts most.’ He smiled into her eyes. ‘Anyway, I’m not forty yet!’
Bond to Tiffany Chase, Diamonds are Forever
Just before Christmas 1949, Fleming flew out to Jamaica on his own. By this time there were two London to Kingston routes: one via New York and Miami with Pan Am; the other with BOAC via Lisbon, the Azores, Bermuda and Nassau. Fleming used the former route more. They cost the same, £235 return, about a half of his gross monthly salary. Both airlines used Boeing’s Stratocruiser, a direct descendant of the wartime B-29 Superfortress bomber. The four-engined plane had two decks, a bar and sleeping berths, and typically carried only sixty or seventy passengers, with half fewer on long-haul, where most would have berths.
Fleming, now forty years old, felt in need of Jamaica, where, he later wrote, he enjoyed ‘the most healthy life I could wish to live’. Three years previously, unbeknownst to Ann or anyone else, he had visited a New York cardiac specialist while passing through the city. He had been suffering from a ‘constricting pain in the heart’. The doctor reported: ‘The patient admits to smoking seventy cigarettes a day and drinking at least a quarter of a bottle of gin’. But he found no evidence of heart weakness, and Fleming came away reassured, though firmly instructed to stop smoking and reduce his alcohol intake, advice he entirely ignored.
In late 1949, he suffered painful kidney stones; then the tightness in his chest returned. He went to see his bridge-playing friend Dr Beal; Beal referred him to Sir John Parkinson, a leading Harley Street heart specialist, who repeated the urgings of the New York doctor. This time Fleming took some notice, for a while cutting down the huge gin martinis he usually enjoyed before dinner, and avoiding the brandy, port and liqueurs afterwards. But he still kept up his weekly 300-cigarette order from Morlands in Grosvenor Street, a supply often further replenished. Soon afterwards, the kidney trouble returned with a vengeance, bringing on a painful attack while he was eating dinner with a young lady at the Etoile restaurant in Soho. He had to be helped back to his flat in excruciating agony. Dr Beal arrived and straightaway gave the patient a strong dose of morphine.
For Fleming, Jamaica would always provide a place of recovery. So too for Bond: in Live and Let Die, he undertakes a fitness regime there combined with abstemious living; in both Dr No and The Man with the Golden Gun, he is sent by M to Jamaica in part to recover from a previous physical and mental trauma – in the former after near-death by poisoning at the end of From Russia, with Love; in the latter after he has been brainwashed by the KGB following a harrowing battle with Blofeld in You Only Live Twice.
Fleming found Jamaica immensely soothing, both physically and mentally. American artist Marion Simmons – whose clifftop house Glory Be was now completed just down the coast from Goldeneye – was the same, enjoying scuba diving in particular for its therapeutic benefits. In Simmons’ friend Noël Coward’s Pomp and Circumstance, the Bunny/Fleming character when miserable and tense is advised: ‘On with your Aqua Lung and go and have a look at a few nice barracuda … You know it always cheers you up.’ Coward himself called the island ‘Dr Jamaica’. One friend, when asked if Coward had an analyst replied, ‘If Noël has a problem, he flies to Jamaica.’
Coward had come out on 15 December to find that ‘Everything is unbelievably lovely.’ The garden at Blue Harbour had grown quickly, and the sea and air were both warm. ‘I have fallen in love with the place all over again,’ he wrote. On Christmas Eve, he dined with Fleming and a few other friends, including society photographer Cecil Beaton and actor Alec Guinness. After dinner they all played canasta.
As well as finding a trip to Jamaica hugely restorative, Coward also found it creatively invigorating. After one visit he wrote in his diary that ‘It has been a lovely holiday – I feel well and full of ideas and, as usual, I am grateful to dear Jamaica.’ On another occasion, he noted: ‘this place has a strange and very potent magic for me. I also seem to be able to do more work here in less time than anywhere else.’ Ann, too, recommended Jamaica to her aspiring novelist brother Hugo as ‘healing, beneficial and inspiring’. Fleming agreed. ‘Here there is peace and that wonderful vacuum of days that makes one work,’ he noted while writing Goldfinger. Not only Coward, but ‘other still more famous writers, let alone painters, have been stimulated by Jamaica’, he later wrote. ‘I suppose it is the peace and silence and cut-offness from the madding world that urges people to create here.’
It all contributed to making Fleming a different person in Jamaica from how he was in Britain. Peter Quennell, who knew him well in both places, wrote that he ‘Always took life strangely hard, except in Jamaica.’ The island smoothed Fleming’s rough edges; instead of coming across as tense and aloof, he was unassuming, diffident, relaxed. His friend Robert Harling, a frequent visitor, wrote that in Jamaica ‘Fleming is at his mellow best.’Jamaican friends from all walks of life remember him as a ‘very charming, attractive character, warm even’.
A life-giving plant, the Traveller’s Tree is so named because its leaves have large sheathes at their base in which water collects in such quantity as to provide a welcome draught to thirsty by-passers.
Fleming was determined to throw himself into exploring his reef, and before his late 1949 trip had bought a naturalist’s notebook and had it bound in black leather by Sangorski and Sutcliffe of London. Picked out in gold on the cover was ‘Sea Fauna or the Finny Tribe of Goldeneye’.
One of his earliest notes was the spotting of two ‘Hunt class barracudas’, which he christened Bicester and Beaufort. On Christmas Eve, he ‘declared war on them’ because they were ‘getting too big and frighten the customers’, the other fish. That afternoon, he descended the stone steps with a Champion spear gun and went after Beaufort. ‘As usual he examines me with wary curiosity and a pronounced but possibly forced sneer,’ Fleming noted. ‘He allows me, moving very slowly and softly, to come within six feet, at which range I shoot and miss, probably low. Beaufort travels twelve feet like a bullet then stops dead, broadside on.’ Fleming moved closer, but the fish ‘merged silently away into the grey mists of deeper water’. He made up for it by taking it ‘out on a half pound lobster, shot through the head’. The day after Christmas at Blue Harbour, Fleming was back on the Goldeneye reef, where he encountered Beaufort again. This time he managed to gash him behind the head with his trident, concluding that ‘the parasites will have him within a day or two’.
Like the shark-hunting episode with Aubyn Cousins the previous year, this watery peril would be poured into
the novels. In Thunderball, Bond is on a dive at night when a barracuda approaches: ‘The gold and black tiger’s eye was on him, watchfully incurious, and the long mouth was half open an inch so that the moonlight glittered on the sharpest row of teeth in the ocean – teeth that don’t bite at the flesh, teeth that tear out and chunk then hit and scythe again.’ Bond’s insider knowledge of Caribbean waters meant that ‘his stomach crawled with the ants of fear and his skin tightened at his groin’.
For Fleming the danger was the grit in the oyster, the spicy seasoning to the mellow sensuality of the reef All of Jamaica should be ‘embraced’, he would shortly write. ‘It is easy to enjoy the orchids and the hummingbirds, but here is much that is very strange.’ Visitors should also be able to marvel at the ‘fruits that are sometimes deadly poison … the hideous vultures, the ants’ nests like brown goiters on the trees, the blood thirst of shark and barracuda …’
Ann joined Ian for a couple of weeks halfway through January. She would encounter the dangers of the reef at first hand when she stood on a spiny puffer fish. Other smart visitors suffered exotic injuries. When Laurence Olivier was staying with Coward, he was ‘lightly stroked across the shoulders by a stingray tail’ and had to lie on his front for two days. ‘I am still grateful for the gentle ministrations of Noël’s black maids, who periodically laid cool slices of melon, papaya and mango all over my back,’ he later wrote. David Niven, friend of Errol Flynn as well as Coward, who visited in 1955, was nearly attacked by a scorpion and then, he reports, suffered an infestation of grass ticks in his crotch.
Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica Page 9