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

by Matthew Parker

  Pringle imported two French chefs from the George V hotel in Paris, and Round Hill fast became the destination of choice for the biggest celebrities of the day, including Bing Crosby, Clark Gable, Paul Newman, Alfred Hitchcock, Leonard Bernstein, Cole Porter and John and Jackie Kennedy. Its model was widely copied around the world.

  John Pringle would also later go on to become a successful minister for tourism, but there is something slightly ironic about him having such a key role in the Jamaica tourist business. In 1938, his father Kenneth had published a book called Waters of the West. In this he describes the effects of tourism in Jamaica as ‘positively evil’, believing that visitors, ‘with their mimic high life and imbecile deportment … have sown habits of discontent in the fertile imaginations of the natives of the shores which they have honoured’. Montego Bay, where his son and his estranged wife Carmen Pringle now ran their hotels, was ‘a hundred yards of sand on which several hundred rich and roseate wrecks are lying like strange fish’. At night the moon had never shone ‘on a more fantastic assembly of ghosts’.

  In 1946, there had been 229 hotel rooms in Montego Bay. By 1956, there were 1,350. With so many hotels, the north coast now saw polo matches, balls and bonfire beach parties every night.

  Ian was not an enthusiast of Montego Bay. According to Ivar Bryce, he ‘regarded it as a tourist trap’. Coward, who had paid £40,000 for his Round Hill cottage, sold it two years later for a substantial profit. ‘Montego was horrible as usual,’ he wrote in his diary soon after. ‘Roundhill is full, packed with all the soi-disant gratín of New York … there is no doubt about it, the idle rich are, always have been, and always will be, boring … I would rather live in a shack on a deserted sandbank than be stuck in Roundhill with all those shrill dullards.’

  For the austere Scot part of Fleming’s make-up, it was all a bit too much, and in his Atticus column for the Sunday Times in March 1954 he expressed his regret at Jamaica’s ‘crazily inflated tourist boom’ and castigated Jamaican hoteliers (‘most of them “plantocrats” who have gravitated to the hotel business since the war’) for their high prices. Even the Gleaner, usually a cheerleader for tourist development in the country, reflected that it was ‘Rather odd that in Jamaica, we pay our own people, the labourers, less than anywhere else in the world, and charge the visitor more!’Jet-set characters in Fleming’s books – Count Lippe, Count Vicenzo – tend to be worthless sorts. In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Bond’s father-in-law Marc-Ange speaks disparagingly of the ‘fast international set’, and in Moonraker, M voices his suspicion of ‘sunburned men in England’. ‘Either they’ve not got a job of work to do or they put it on with a sun-lamp.’

  By now, the new Jamaica Tourist Board, under the leadership of the hugely energetic Abe Issa, was also targeting the less wealthy in the United States as potential tourists. The aim was to encourage visitors during the summer months, when up until now almost all the hotels shut down. (It was also hoped that less wealthy visitors would be more ‘interested in Jamaica and Jamaicans’ than the ‘playboy’ variety of winter visitor, who spent the time in ‘sybaritic’ torpor.) The campaign was a great success, with obliging American journalists praising Jamaica’s sunshine, music and ‘British atmosphere’. The Charleston Gazette also helpfully noted that ‘There are no “America. Go Home!” signs on this island. The Jamaican knows which side his tourist bread is buttered on, and he is prone to kill Americans with kindness.’ In August 1955, Pan Am flew 2,400 travel agents and their wives to stay in Jamaica, which they claimed as the ‘biggest peacetime human airlift ever attempted’.

  The following month, the Gleaner reported that the ‘success stories in the tourist industry of Jamaica’ were not just the big hotel owners and travel agents, but also the ‘barefoot boys from country villages in Jamaica who today are respected, well paid, well-shod members of the industry [which] has brought a new life and a new standard of living to the thousands of Jamaican waiters, bartenders, cooks, laundresses’. As well as providing new prosperity, tourism was believed to have ‘widened the horizons’ of the ‘village boys’.

  With visitor numbers growing rapidly – doubling between 1951 and 1959 to nearly 200,000, spending an estimated £11 million during the year – tourism was an increasingly vital part of Jamaica’s economy, now second only to sugar in terms of foreign currency. But how the island was marketed – what Kenneth Pringle back in 1938 called ‘fantastic absurdity and make-believe’ – caused concern for some. Evon Blake had for a long time argued that advertising showing beaches empty of local people (except as waiters) or postcards portraying blacks as ‘picturesque’ peasants – barefoot boys climbing palm trees, donkeys and women with loads on their heads – fostered American racist perceptions of the black population of Jamaica. ‘The American who comes here for the first time,’ he wrote, ‘is surprised when he walks out of a hotel and sees … we are a civilized people and not savages.’

  Fleming, whose version of Jamaica in Live and Let Die also stressed its ‘pre-lapsarian’ side, considered himself different from the run-of-the-mill tourists. In The Diamond Smugglers, he speaks favourably of his interviewee in Sierra Leone who has ‘invested in local property’ and as such ‘had a genuine stake in the country’. But he and Coward were also tiring of the winter-sun expatriate set, and their interminable cocktail parties, ‘usually three or four a week and frequently more and the same groups of people foregather, wearing more or less the same clothes and discussing more or less the same things. The same drinks and same canapés are served.’ Now they both preferred to meet and play canasta in the evenings or just spent the time with their guests from England.

  In February, Peter Quennell arrived to stay for three weeks at Goldeneye. His passage had been paid for by Ann, who wanted company while Ian wrote. Originally a poet, Quennell had become a literary historian and essayist as well as a founder editor of History Today and editor of the conservative Cornhill Magazine from 1951. He was the first of Ann’s literary friends. He adored her and became known as ‘Lady Rothermere’s Fan’. He was also a great favourite of her daughter.

  Quennell was unusual among Ann’s circle in that he got on with Ian too. He put this down to the fact that he was ‘neither a wild bohemian nor a rampant homosexual’. ‘I must admit,’ he later wrote, ‘I could not take to James Bond. But Ian himself I liked.’ The difference between them, he thought, was that Fleming altogether lacked Bond’s ‘self-esteem and unquestioning self-assurance’. He saw Ian as ‘a natural melancholic, subject to bouts of gloom … puritan, too, at heart perhaps an ingrained Calvinist’. (In Moonraker, Fleming approvingly comments on part of M’s character: ‘The Puritan and the Jesuit who live in all leaders of men’.)

  The author or editor of sixty-two books, Quennell was sometimes accused of over-flowery language. Nonetheless, his is the most lyrical account we have of the charms of Goldeneye and its surrounds. As with other visitors, there is little in his descriptions about the politics of Jamaica or its people – a sight of some road sweepers evokes for him scenes from a French novel – but plenty about the wildlife and the beauties of the reef

  In his book, The Sign of the Fish, published in 1960 and dedicated to ‘my friends at Goldeneye’, Quennell described how arriving late at Montego Bay airport, he reached the house just as dawn was breaking: ‘dew was glittering on my friends’ garden; and the immense arch of a nearly perfect rainbow spanned the Caribbean Sea. Against a backdrop of big expansive flowers, a humming bird perched by the kitchen-door; and at the end of the garden, below a rocky cliff, tufted with palms and festooned with pendulous tree-roots, the transparent wind-ruffled lagoon thrust up gentle glassy waves, which lapped into the rosy mouth of a conch lying half-buried at the edge of the water.’

  In the ‘romantic half-tamed garden’ he found the tropical flowers not to his liking: ‘huge papery, obtrusive blossoms that often suggest the showy merchandise of some prodigious bargain-basement’. But he enjoyed the birds, including the kling-klings an
d the doctor birds, which would drop down towards him ‘in a celestial spark of metallic brilliance’.

  Fleming with his gardener, Felix Barriffe. The garage and staff quarters can be seen on the right.

  Although a timid and inexperienced swimmer, Quennell found the lagoon off the Goldeneye beach ‘a country in itself’. ‘As one lies face down on the warm resilient water and turns one’s glass-fronted helmet from side to side, the surface, viewed from below, becomes a sheet of wrinkled quicksilver, shedding a silvery-soft light that ripples and trembles across the sandy floor. Large fish move like planets; shoals hang like constellations, suspended in the blue-grey distance.’ Among the forests of coral and weed, he admires the angelfish, ‘orange and heliotrope: youthful Parrot Fish, blue and grass-green, with wavering rosy touches around their scales: Butterfly Fish striped black and yellow; and a fish that, having a large peacock’s eye near the tail-fin, seems perpetually to be swimming backwards. There are other, more menacing presences – a miniature Barracuda, pencil-thin and torpedo-straight, which hovers alongside the swimmer and fixes him with its flat malevolent gaze, and, now and then, the speckled ribbon of a fierce Moray Eel, nosing and undulating through a bed of sea-grass.’ He soon became an ‘intrepid swimmer’, unruffled as a ‘shark sailed by’. At the end of the day, he wrote, ‘The Caribbean night falls with a weight and density from which it is difficult to believe that day will ever recover.’

  For three ‘calm and unusually happy weeks’, Quennell corrected the proofs of his new book while Ann ‘painted flowers and fishes and shells, and Ian hammered out his latest story’.

  Like others, Quennell noticed that Fleming ‘worked and played according to a prearranged schedule that nobody might interrupt’. Ian was furious when Quennell, on his way for a morning swim, crossed his view as he lay in bed observing ‘the morning freshness of his garden’. ‘Ann was therefore instructed to suggest that I should change my irritating habit and, so as to remain invisible from Ian’s bedroom, take a longer path behind the house.’

  ‘Another peculiarity of the place,’ Quennell explained, ‘was that it was always rather hard to get a drink when you wanted it. The Commander tended to drink in the American way. Vodka martinis or very brown whisky sodas would appear late in the day, and he would drink rather heavily then. But at dinner itself there was seldom anything to drink; and I had usually to ask Ian if I could have some beer; at which Ian would order “A bottle of beer for Mr Quennell, Violet!” in sepulchral and reproving tones, and Violet would throw up her hands and eyes, muttering “Lordie, Lordie!”, and you would feel that you were upsetting the routine of the entire place.’

  Fleming strikes a meditative pose looking out of the large main window.

  Fleming biographer John Pearson makes the point that readers of the Bond novels might have imagined Goldeneye as some sort of tropical Shangri-La, with luxurious decadence everywhere, but as Ian’s friend Robert Harling, who visited on at least two occasions, commented, Fleming was more like a ‘genial Caribbean squire’. His routine, Pearson wrote, was ‘far closer to the life of some self-absorbed eighteenth-century original than to the glamour of the international millionaire smart-set who build their summer houses along this coast’.

  By now the familiar routine – Violet and the shaving water, the instructions for his breakfast, the swimming, writing, drinking – was set in stone, and ‘traditions’ established for Goldeneye that could not be broken. Although Ian was far less defensive and prickly with other people in Jamaica than he was in England, if his routine was disturbed, it ‘awoke the authoritarian’ in him, as Ann recounted. Violet remembered that ‘Everybody understood that his work came first. They respected his schedule.’ Ian himself said on Desert Island Discs in 1963 that unless he stuck to a routine, ‘if I just wait for genius to arrive from the sky, it just doesn’t arrive’.

  Quennell remembered that during his visit in 1954, Fleming ‘evidently enjoyed his work’, writing every day from an early breakfast until nearly one o’clock, ‘shut into his bedroom and protected from the outer world by wooden blinds, through which the rattle of his typewriter, like a burst of machine-gun fire, regularly swept across the terrace’. He worked at Goldeneye ‘with a fierce intensity’.

  By 24 February, he had written 30,000 words of his third novel, Moonraker. Moonraker is unique in the Bond adventures in that it is set entirely in England. The threat that Bond has to deal with is to Britain alone, rather than, in the two previous books, France and the United States.

  The villain, Sir Hugo Drax, ‘a raving paranoiac’, is named after the old sugar estate just down the coast from Goldeneye. Drax Hall was once owned by William Beckford, the gothic novelist recommended by Fleming in his Horizon article on the island. In the novel, Drax is one of Britain’s leading businessmen, having made a fortune cornering the market in ‘columbite’, essential for missile technology. Although a bit ‘loud-mouthed and ostentatious’, he is now a national hero, having offered to produce a missile, the Moonraker, designed to give Britain ‘an independent say in world affairs’.

  But M’s suspicions about Drax are aroused by his cheating at cards, and after Drax is bested by Bond in a game of bridge, M sends in his operative to investigate Drax’s establishment on the white cliffs of the south coast of England.

  Bond eventually discovers that Drax is an ‘enemy within’, a Nazi set on achieving revenge for Britain’s victory in the war by destroying London, with the help of a Soviet-supplied nuclear warhead.

  With only days to save millions of lives and ‘British civilization’, the plot is exciting and fast-moving, but the doomsday scenario, so inflated compared to the previous books, strains believability. The home setting doesn’t help. In the exotic badlands of the Caribbean, anything seemed possible, but the familiar ground here adds to the reader’s incredulity. The setting also contributes to a feeling of imperial contraction. The British, or at least the part of the population that included Fleming, had believed they were a great people because they had an empire. Now, in Moonraker, that empire seems to be on the wane. Drax tells Bond that the British are ‘Useless, idle, decadent fools, hiding behind your bloody white cliffs while other people fight your battles. Too weak to defend your colonies, toadying to America with your hat in your hands.’ The details of defence establishments in Kent, both modern and ancient, are a reminder of threats very close to home. At Manston, previously the forward aerodrome of the Battle of Britain, it is American jets writing ‘white scribbles in the sky’.

  In the place of empire, Moonraker is a hymn to England. Even Krebs, Drax’s Nazi sidekick, is moved by the sight of the Kentish countryside, and Bond and his heroine Gala Brand are brought together by a shared appreciation of the view from the iconic white cliffs: ‘where Caesar had first landed two thousand years before … a panorama full of colour and excitement and romance’. Bond even calls English cooking ‘the best in the world’. Under threat from the Moonraker rocket is ‘the Palace. The nursemaids in the park … the softly beating heart of London.’ In an essay for the Spectator, Fleming later wrote that ‘of course I have the affectionate reverence for Sir Winston Churchill that most of us share’. The icon of Britain’s moment of glory in 1940 is similarly idolised by Gala Brand as the voice of every important moment in her life, even though – at the time of writing – Prime Minister Churchill, after several strokes, was doing his best to hide the collapse in his health and vitality.

  Much later, Fleming would describe Bond as having only two virtues, patriotism and courage. In Moonraker, this patriotism has a distinctly naval feel: nowhere else are we reminded so many times of Bond’s preference for navy blue clothes. When Bond contemplates a suicide effort to stop the atomic bomb hitting London, he declares, ‘The boy stood on the burning deck. I’ve wanted to copy him since I was five.’ But it is clear from the story that the power of the Royal Navy, the bedrock of British imperial glory, is a thing of the past, and not just because of wartime losses and budget cuts. Missiles such
as the Moonraker have made ships obsolete. What’s more, the atomic age has produced a new threat against which no destroyer can operate: ‘the most deadly saboteur in the history of the world – the little man with the heavy suitcase’. It is a melancholy picture for Fleming’s England.

  Moonraker is also unique in that, for once, Bond doesn’t get the girl. Before he meets Gala Brand, he knows her ‘vital statistics’: ‘Height: 5ft 7. Weight: 9 Stone. Hips 38. Waist: 26. Bust: 38. Distinguishing marks: Mole on upper curvature of right breast. Hm! Thought Bond.’ Ian had asked Ann for the ‘perfect measurements’ for Gala Brand, but apparently she got it wrong. ‘Fortunately,’ Ann wrote to her brother from Jamaica, ‘Noël brought a Mainbocher [couture] saleswoman for a cocktail and all is well.’ Even in this least Caribbean of the books, Bond and his heroine come closest to union while swimming: ‘At once nothing else mattered but the velvet ice of the sea and the beauty of the patches of sand between the waving hair of the seaweed.’ Bond even catches a lobster on the English coastline. But there is a new sourness to his relations with women: we learn that he spends his evenings ‘making love, with a rather cold passion, to one of three similarly disposed married women’, and that ‘Marriage and children and a home were out of the question if [he was] to be of any use “in the field”.’ In fact, while attempting to make Bond a less ‘cardboard character’ than in the previous books, what emerges is a distinct portrait of the ‘sleek bachelor’ of Fleming’s pre-wedding days.