Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica (15 page)

By now, however, the United States offered little succour to Jamaican nationalists. For one thing, much of its anti-colonial rhetoric had been more about business interests than concern for oppressed people. During the 1930s, Europeans had attempted to re-establish mercantilism across their empires, shutting out US investment and access to markets and resources. But as these restrictions were swept away, American anti-colonialism lost a lot of its impetus. As early as 1942, the US airline Pan Am received a promise that it could develop a route to Jamaica on a level commercial playing field. The following year, the State Department successfully lent its active support to the US-based Reynolds Metals Company to acquire concessions to exploit bauxite resources in Jamaica. (Thus Fleming would regretfully write in 1952, as the bauxite market took off: ‘Jamaica has the largest bauxite deposits in the world, being exploited by Americans, of course.’)

The other new factor was the Cold War, which began in earnest with the formation of NATO and the Warsaw Pact in 1949. United States foreign policy was now dominated by the idea of ‘containment’ – influencing and policing the perimeters of the non-communist world. This made the British Empire and Commonwealth, whose mandate spread across scattered swathes of this space, a pillar of American security. Unrest in the colonies, it was thought, would only benefit the Soviet Union. Reform was still needed, then, to prevent this, but only if those empowered showed no risk of going over to the ‘other side’, as a number of Jamaican nationalists would soon discover.
With or without the Americans, Jamaica was changing, and colonial culture was about to change as well.

Fleming in his 1947
Horizon
article identified two great worries about ‘social ambience’ that an emigrant from Britain to the Empire might have, You fear the moral “dégringolade” of the tropics, the slow disintegration … In your imagination you hear the hypnotic whisper of the palm trees stooping too gracefully over that blue lagoon. You feel the scruffy stubble sprouting on your chin. The cracked mirror behind Red’s Bar reflects the bloodhound gloom of those ruined features…’ (Bond, with his weakness for the sensual, erotic and intoxicating, is constantly tempted by this ‘tropical sloth’.)

‘On the other hand,’ Fleming continues, ‘you are appalled by the tea-and-tennis set atmosphere in many of the most blessed corners of our Empire. You smell boiled shirts, cucumber sandwiches and the L-shaped life of expatriate Kensingtonia.’ Bond himself, in Dr
No,
‘wanted to get the hell away from King’s House, and the tennis, and the kings and queens’. But what Jamaica offered, Fleming wrote in 1947, was a balance of the two: ‘A middle way between the lethe of the tropics and a life of fork-lunches with the District Commissioner’s wife can be achieved and I believe you will achieve it in Jamaica.’

But the world of Molly Huggins, tennis and grateful ‘natives’ was coming to an end. In September 1947, King’s House had played host to Arthur Creech Jones, Labour Secretary of State for the Colonies. Molly wrote that she liked Jones, ‘though our political views differed’. She also liked his wife, Vi, ‘though I don’t think she really approved of me. Perhaps she thought I was too gay … I think she felt it was democratic to go about in rather an old cotton dress and no stockings and flat shoes. I tried to explain to her that the people of Jamaica really expected one to dress up for them, as otherwise they felt they were being insulted. I think I got the message over to her, at last.’

In fact, the Joneses were much more interested in meeting Jamaican
nationalists Norman and Edna Manley than in any of the King’s House flummery Jones was in Jamaica for a conference at Montego Bay to discuss the British West Indies being formed at some point in the future into a federation, a political union of the English-speaking islands. This new entity then could be granted dominion status in a body that, with the large and small islands together, would absolve the British of responsibility for what were in most cases uneconomic entities. It turned out to be a half-baked plan, but it did signal a more rapid journey towards self-government than had previously been thought possible.

In January 1948, Burma followed India and Pakistan to independence, with Sri Lanka joining them a month later. At a conference on African affairs the same year, Jones issued a memorandum on local government in the colonies, which confirmed the intention to bring in responsible government. It was not all about high ideals. There were problems in the Gold Coast, Kenya, Malaya, Iran, Egypt and elsewhere in the Empire that the British government could simply not afford to cope with. In September 1949, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was forced to announce a humiliating devaluation of the pound.

In Jamaica, the election of 1949 saw a return to power of Bustamante’s JLP, once again garnering the funding of the wealthy elite and the support of the illiterate peasantry. Still, it wasn’t quite business as usual. Bustamante was coming round to the idea of self-government, and Manley’s fiercely pro-independence PNP had gained much ground, actually polling more votes than the JLP and reducing Bustamante’s majority in the House of Representatives to just four. A much larger turnout than before signified greater involvement of the ordinary Jamaican in politics.

In January 1950, Governor Huggins was booed at the opening of the Legislature, something that had never happened before, and the following month he was jeered by a crowd, causing Molly to exclaim tersely,
‘I’ll be damned.’ It was clearly time for a new governor; Huggins was retired, and the family left Jamaica in September that year. (The story of the Huggins has a surprising coda: back in England Molly continued her ‘continental’ approach to her marriage, then in early 1958 her dry old stick of a husband Sir John suddenly ran off to Italy with a married woman. The story was covered in the
Express.
At the time Molly was trying to get selected as a prospective Tory MP in a constituency thought to favour a female candidate. According to Molly, the scandal ruined her chances; instead the party in Finchley chose Margaret Thatcher.)

The new Governor was very different from the staid and uninspiring Huggins. Hugh Foot was the son of a Liberal Party MP, Isaac Foot. His brothers included Sir Dingle Foot, a Liberal MP who later switched to Labour and served in Wilson’s cabinet; Lord John Foot, who became a Liberal peer and fierce defender of colonial peoples; and Michael, who would become leader of the Labour Party. ‘We were proud to be nonconformists and Roundheads,’ Hugh once wrote of his family. Oliver Cromwell was our hero and John Milton our poet.’ By 1950, he and his wife Sylvia had three children. The eldest, fourteen-year-old Paul, would become a campaigning journalist.

Foot had done his national service in Jamaica in the 1920s and had returned in 1945 as Colonial Secretary. Locals found him ‘dapper’ and ‘well-bred’, but also ‘conscientious’. Standing in for the absent Governor in 1946, he had dealt skilfully with an outbreak of political violence, then ‘travelled the island extensively, learned conditions and displayed a genuineness’ that showed ‘his desire to play ball with Jamaicans without seeming to work wholly for the Colonial Office’. Edna Manley found him a ‘charming, likable, infinitely clever person’.

In 1947, he had been posted to Nigeria, where he had narrowly survived assassination, and was delighted now to be returning to Jamaica as Governor. He loved the island – ‘nowhere I know in the world is there such a variety of people in such a small compass or such
a mixture’ – was a great fan of West Indian cricket and was excited by the changes taking place.

Both Coward’s novel
Pomp and Circumstance
and the earlier play
South Sea Bubble
feature Samolo’s governor, Sir George Shotter, ‘a cheerful man of about fifty’, who closely resembles Sir Hugh Foot. The previous incumbent is described in
South Sea Bubble
as ‘Quite nice, really, but a bit sticky’. In
Pomp and Circumstance,
he is ‘true-blue conservative’ and ‘aloof’. Shotter is entirely different, having been ‘an ardent socialist in his earlier years’.

In
South Sea Bubble,
Shotter’s support for the more left-wing and independence-leaning of the two local parties in Samolo (Manley’s PNP in Jamaica) causes distress for the island’s white ‘die-hards’, and also confusion for the supposedly ‘empire-minded’ majority of Samolans. Certainly Foot arrived with a new attitude to empire, determined to act on behalf of the island. As he later wrote, When I
was governor of Jamaica I did not regard myself as the agent of London, but as the advocate of Jamaica.’ For him, it was a ‘critical time’, ‘refreshing and absorbing’: Jamaica was ‘advancing at an accelerating rate towards her coming of age in independence’.

In Britain, the Labour Party had fought and narrowly won the February 1950 election on a platform that included the pledge: ‘In the Colonial territories our purpose is to help in creating the economic and social basis for democratic self-government.’ Clearly Foot’s brief from his superiors was to make democratically elected Jamaicans responsible for the island’s domestic government. The days of the colonial backwater, much loved by Coward and Fleming, were numbered.

In
Pomp and Circumstance,
Coward’s English colonials react to the changes fast approaching them with a sort of inward-looking exhausted languor. Fleming’s reaction to the end of empire in Jamaica and in the wider world as-evidenced in James Bond would be very different.

1951 ‘Disciplined Exoticism’

What I endeavour to aim at is a certain disciplined exoticism.

Ian Fleming, ‘How to Write a Thriller’

Ann and Ian continued their correspondence during the spring and summer of 1950, although their meetings were, for discretion’s sake, few and snatched. Ian professed his love for her ‘more than any other woman’, but also his misgivings about her divorcing and their marrying. He was a solitary man, but she was at the centre of family, home and friends. He felt bad about Esmond – ‘there is no evil in him and neither of us wishes him harm’ – and the children, Fionn and Raymond, who had got used to their Rothermere stepfather and ‘shouldn’t be shaken up again’. ‘I know all the other side,’ he wrote in February 1950, ‘our basic love and faith in each other and in our stars. They would be enough to sail our ship if it weren’t for the harm we would do.’

Ann found herself in what she described to her brother Hugo as a ‘static emotional state’. She loved Ian – Rothermere was very much ‘second-best’ – but lacked the ‘courage to leap from the merry-go-round’. This was partly because she liked the excitement of her social
life at Warwick House, and her ever more frequent meddling in the running of the
Daily Mail.
Ian, Ann reported to her brother, ‘rightly says he cannot offer the public life and in fact hates social gatherings, and so I hesitate to take the step’. For his part, Esmond had by now ‘deserted – for an American blonde – but I don’t think it’s serious’.

In November, she wrote to her brother again: ‘Christmas without Ian seems a bleak affair, he was always there at Christmas, long before Esmond, and he gave the children presents about which he had taken trouble.’ (This included jazz records bought in New York for Raymond.) But Ian was no longer welcome at Warwick House, and then there was the whole issue of Jamaica. The arrival of winter also made Ann think of ‘the last two years when I was able to anticipate sunshine and an Eden shared with an Adam, who though he may not be the solution to all things at least [watched] me colour fish and lizards with sympathetic enthusiasm’.

Somehow, by pretending once more to be staying with Noël Coward, Ann managed to snatch two weeks in February with Ian at Goldeneye. Tactfully, her letters to friends were addressed from ‘Blue Harbour, Port Maria’. In one, she gleefully recounted teaching snorkelling to Coward’s guests Cecil Beaton and Oliver Messel, the theatrical designer: ‘Cecil was tremendously brave and seeing a sneering dangerous barracuda chased it “because it looked like a disagreeable dowager”. Oliver appeared unable to swim a stroke and constantly sank in bubbling ecstasies. . .’

To Ann’s displeasure, Ivar Bryce was also in attendance. Ivar, who admitted to being ‘indolent and forgetful’, was considered by Ann to be a gold-digger and a bad influence on Ian. Ann’s daughter Fionn remembers ‘something reptilian about him’. Bryce had separated from his wife Sheila and married for the third time, to a hugely rich American, Marie-Josephine Hartford, granddaughter of George Huntingdon Hartford, founder of the A&P supermarket chain. The newly-weds were honeymooning on a luxury yacht with their
American friends the Leiters, as well as the new Mrs Bryce’s daughter and son-in-law. Their only firm plan was to dock at Oracabessa and visit Goldeneye.