Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica (20 page)

After a heavy Christmas, Ian was longing for Jamaica, telling his friend Cyril Connolly that ‘the Doctor Birds are waiting in the Crown of Thorns bushes and the Butterfly fish on the reef’. Having parked Caspar with his nanny in London, Ann and Ian flew out to New York, staying for one night before heading on to Florida, where Ian wanted to do some research on his next book. Most of the action, though, he planned to take place in his beloved Jamaica.

1953 The First Jamaica Novel – Live and Let Die

Carribean reality resembles the wildest imagination.

Gabriel García Márquez

At the end of 1952, it was learnt that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was shortly to visit Jamaica for a two-week holiday. He’d be arriving after a trip to the United States to meet President Truman and President-Elect Eisenhower as part of his strenuous efforts to stoke more life into the ‘Special Relationship’. The
Gleaner
was in ecstasy at the news. ‘This island is no stranger to distinguished visitors – To royalty, statesmen, film stars, literati, millionaires … Jamaica takes most such visitors in its stride,’ the paper opined. But Churchill deserved extra ‘reverent affection’. The announcement of his visit had, the paper reported, ‘stirred the patriot emotion of all the people of Jamaica’.

The Governor, Sir Hugh Foot, in a white suit, was standing at the bottom of the steps on 9 January as Churchill climbed out of the US presidential jet, lent to take him on his holiday. With Foot at Montego
Bay airport was Sir Harold Mitchell, at whose Prospect Great House Churchill was to stay. Churchill inspected his guard of honour lined up in white pith helmets and was then introduced to Bustamante, who presented him with Jamaican cigars.

At Prospect, the road to the main gates had been resurfaced by the government and telephones installed in every room, with a special exchange on the first floor. The Mitchells had already moved out of the main house into one of their cottages to make room for Churchill’s wife, daughter and son-in-law, who arrived on separate flights, as well as two secretaries, two detectives, a maid and a valet. The secretaries were to deal with mail and cables from London and to ‘work on his memoirs’. A police camp of forty men was established in a citrus grove near the house.

Churchill spent much of his time on the veranda, which had been converted into a studio for his painting. Mitchell’s staff kept the whisky and sodas flowing. ‘The doctors have advised me not to swim,’ Churchill declared when he arrived; ‘I intend to swim every day.’ ‘And
indeed he did,’ Mitchell remembered, ‘even when it was quite rough.’ Where the Prospect land met the sea was Frankfort beach. Here, while the Prime Minister swam, a mounted policeman kept a lookout at the gate and two plain-clothes detectives concealed themselves in the bushes at either end of the tiny strip of sand.

To commemorate the visit, Mitchell asked his guest to plant a mahogany tree in front of the house. Churchill ‘selected the exact spot and went to work with a spade in a business-like manner’. ‘When the ceremony was over he called for champagne, his favourite Pol Roger’ and he and Mitchell ‘toasted the tree’. The mahogany is still there, now grown to a huge size.

Although he was on holiday, there were still some official duties for the Prime Minister to perform. On 17 January, there was a tour through Kingston followed by a reception for a thousand guests at King’s House. Churchill’s speech at the occasion tellingly celebrated the unity and importance of the ‘Great British Empire’. The following day he visited the new University College of the West Indies and then Spanish Town, where he admired the lavish memorial to Admiral Rodney.

The Pathé News footage of the visit is extraordinary. It was created by the Jamaican Film Unit, which had recently been established with a policy to ‘produce films for Jamaicans, by Jamaicans, with Jamaicans, designed to assist in the solution of Jamaica’s problems – educational, social, cultural, and economical’. But in the reel, the elderly British imperialist politician is filmed at the centre of every scene, surrounded by adoring, cheering homogenous black crowds. In spite of the current moves towards self-representation and autonomy within Jamaica, as evidenced in ongoing political and artistic agitation, the film shows a very traditional image of Jamaica and its relationship to Britain, as if all Jamaicans were unified in support of the Empire.

Enthusiasm for Churchill was also surprising in the context of his well-known objection to Jamaican emigration to Britain. The
Empire
Windrush
had docked at Tilbury in June 1948 with 492 passengers from the West Indies; it was the birth of multicultural life in Britain. As Evon Blake wrote in 1950: ‘Britons made them feel like the uninvited they were … Nipped and gnawed by starvation, many begged to be (and were) repatriated … Bitter stories by sadder and wiser returnees did not deter more travelling to the Land of Unwelcome.’ In 1952, some 2,000 Jamaicans migrated to Britain. It was still a trickle rather than a flood – in 1955, the figure would reach 17,000 – but it was still too many for Churchill’s liking. He told Sir Hugh Foot that he feared Jamaican migration would produce a ‘magpie society and that would never do’, and tried to get his cabinet to legislate to stop it. He would also suggest that for the 1955 election campaign the Conservatives stand on the slogan ‘Keep Britain White’.

But it does seem that Churchill’s ‘star quality’ won over some doubters. Every time his car left Prospect – for instance to visit Beaverbrook at Cromarty – crowds would line the streets to catch a glimpse of the old man, who gamely gave his famous V sign. Foot himself was overwhelmed by the enthusiasm of Kingstonians as he accompanied the Prime Minister through the city. He had been slightly anxious that Churchill would be suspicious of his family’s politics, particularly those of his brother Michael. But for the whole visit, Churchill ‘made no reference whatever to any of my political relatives’ until they were both standing surveying the cheering throng in Kingston, when the Prime Minister turned to Foot, and only just audibly above the ‘din of acclamation’ asked: ‘I wonder what Michael would say about all this?’

It all strikes a rather unreal note. Ironically, the day before Churchill’s arrival, the Governor had announced through the
Gleaner
that he was acceding to demands for greater democratic reform in Jamaica. What was agreed was the establishment of proper ministries, headed by elected officials, who now also achieved a majority on the Executive Council. By the approval of the House of Representatives,
Bustamante became Jamaica’s first Chief Minister. Defence, foreign affairs, justice and finance to a large measure remained under the control of the Colonial Service officials on the spot, but it was nonetheless an undoubted diminution of the power of the British Governor and a significant lurch towards Jamaican self-government.

Although Foot differed politically from Churchill, and certainly had very much more liberal views on race, somewhat surprisingly he did share the Prime Minister’s strident anti-communism. In August that year, he made a speech alleging that ‘the Communist movement in Jamaica’ was being financed by a ‘supply of foreign Communist money’. Suspected communists had their whereabouts tracked and post opened. Foot’s particular bugbear was the Chinese community on the island, which he saw as a Maoist vanguard. He ordered that all Chinese incomers be fingerprinted and photographed, and even suggested that previously naturalised citizens have their Jamaican nationality revoked.

A lot of it now looks like overreaction, but Foot’s fear of communist infiltration was shared by many, particularly in the United States, then in the throes of McCarthyism. By now, the spread of American influence and the start of the Cold War had made the ‘red menace’ an international issue.

In February 1952, Bustamante, on Jamaican government business, was detained in the US colony of Puerto Rico, on suspicion of being a communist. He demanded an apology, which was hardly surprising as in fact, according to Foot, he was a ‘fanatical opponent of communism’. In November the same year, Bustamante called for it to be banned by law in Jamaica, and for many years he had been using anti-communist rhetoric to attack the PNP, in which ‘red communism’, he said, was ‘rampant’. On several occasions Norman Manley’s party had been forced to declare publicly that it was not communist.

Despite these denials, American anti-communist interest was also focused on the PNP As early as 1948, an American from the consulate met Manley to discuss ‘communist accusations’. As the Cold War stepped up, so American security policy towards Latin America and the Caribbean was increasingly directed against the spread of communism. It became ever clearer that the United States would simply not tolerate ‘communist’ regimes popping up in their backyard. For example, in 1953, elections in Guyana saw victory for the People’s Progressive Party, which the American State Department considered too supportive of communism. The colonial authorities in London were unconcerned, but American pressure saw the constitution suspended, a state of emergency declared and the colony occupied by British troops. The following year, following arm-twisting, a majority of the Organisation of American States foreign ministers supported a US resolution declaring communism incompatible with the inter-American system.

In January 1952, Governor Foot launched an attack on Kenneth Hill, who was a founder member of the PNP, the mayor of Kingston and
the most popular leader of the PNP’s left wing. Foot described him as ‘an extremist who cares nothing for the disruption which he causes to industrial development in Jamaica and if he is eliminated from the trade union field Jamaica will certainly be better for it’. Later the same year, the party was forced to set up a committee to investigate charges that the left had been engaged in communist teaching. The result was the expulsion from the party of the ‘Four H’s’: Hill, his brother Frank, Richard Hart and Arthur Henry. The event, which sent shock waves across the Caribbean, was accompanied, according to
Public Opinion,
by ‘shouts, screams and threats, followed by bottles and chairs hurled by Communist observers’. In June, Edna Manley wrote in her diary, ‘The political world seethes and boils and it’s too, too much.’

In
Live and Let Die,
written at Goldeneye in February and March 1953, the action takes place in the context of this fear of communist infiltration in the Caribbean. If the fantastical elements of the story are stripped away, effectively Bond’s mission is to defeat a communist agent established in Jamaica. But, interestingly, Fleming seems rather half-hearted about this fear. In the novel, we are told that Bond had been on a ‘long assignment’ in Jamaica just after the war, ‘when the Communist headquarters in Cuba was trying to infiltrate the Jamaican labour unions’. We are given no more details except a very curious comment from Bond that ‘It had been an untidy and inconclusive job.’ This is immediately followed by the reader learning that he was very pleased to be back in Jamaica. Earlier, we hear from the heroine Solitaire that Cuban and communist agents are actually controlled out of US territory – Florida and Harlem. As will emerge in the later novels, sometimes Fleming’s anti-Americanism even trumps his anticommunism. The greatest threat to his Jamaica was not the Soviet Union, but Uncle Sam.

Ann and Ian arrived in Jamaica the day Churchill left, 22 January 1953. On the way, they had taken the train from New York to Florida,
the same journey that Solitaire and Bond (under the name of Bryce) would travel in
Live and Let Die.
It was all research for this next book. In Florida, Fleming visited a live worm warehouse at St Petersburg, which would soon inspire the Ourobourus Worm and Bait Company, the setting of Bond’s discovery of fish tanks containing gold, and his fight with Robber, the villain’s local agent.

Goldeneye was looking fine, its harsh outlines now slightly softened by ‘a cloak of verdure’. To sort out the paying of bills, repairs and other problems, as well as to help Violet ready the house if it was to be rented, Fleming had employed a local ‘attorney’, Anthony Lahoud.