Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica (29 page)

In the autumn, Ann and Gaitskell started an affair that would last until his death in 1963, meeting for trysts at the house of Anthony Crosland. Trade unionist figures disapproved of the way in which Ann Fleming ‘showed him the pleasures of upper class frivolity’, but for her this was part of the challenge and the fun. In November, she wrote to Evelyn Waugh: ‘Mr Gaitskell came to lunch … He had never seen cocktails with mint in them or seen a magnum of champagne, he was very happy. I lied and told him that all the upper classes were beautiful and intelligent and he must not allow his vermin to destroy them.’

In the meantime, Ian had been conducting an affair with Lord Beaverbrook’s granddaughter Lady Jeanne Campbell, then in her twenties. It seems that he was the first to stray since his and Ann’s marriage, but, as Blanche Blackwell remembers, he was furious about Ann’s infidelity.

Before Ian’s next visit to Jamaica, Goldeneye, through an extraordinary and somewhat ironic set of circumstances, was to become famous.

In July that year, President of Egypt Gamal Abdel Nasser had nationalised the Suez Canal. Britain’s government led by Sir Anthony Eden responded by planning a joint attack with Israel and France to regain control of the waterway and remove Nasser from power, at the same time, it was hoped, dealing a blow to the region’s Arab nationalism and Soviet influence.

The whole operation was dressed up as a peacemaking intervention by Britain and France to separate Israeli and Egyptian forces, though this was quickly seen as a sham. It was, as Eisenhower would comment, going to war ‘in the mid-Victorian style’, a throwback to the days of high imperialism.

A bad-tempered television debate on 31 October, featuring the popular historian A. J. P. Taylor, Lord Boothby and Michael Foot, demonstrated how divided the country was. On the same day, as British bombers hit Cairo, Hugh Gaitskell told the House of Commons that it was ‘an act of disastrous folly whose tragic consequences we shall regret for years. Yes, all of us will regret it, because it will have done irreparable harm to the prestige and reputation of our country.’

Lord Beaverbrook’s
Daily Express
was supportive, declaring that Eden was acting ‘to safeguard the life of the British Empire’. The Prime Minister himself believed that unless they met the challenge of Nasser, ‘Britain would become another Netherlands’. But because Eden suspected that the United States was out ‘to replace the British Empire’, he made the fatal mistake of not ‘consulting the Americans’, and now President Eisenhower led the widespread condemnation of the attack, even voting with the Soviets and against Britain and France in the UN. He also blocked Britain’s access to the International Monetary Fund until she withdrew her troops, and refused to provide the oil to replace supplies interrupted from the Middle East; ministers feared a disastrous run on the pound.

With most of the Commonwealth refusing to provide support, Eden broke, calling a ceasefire on 6 November, even as troops were still landing. It was a stunning humiliation, a demonstration to the world that the British Empire was now ‘toothless, immoral and anachronistic’. The Deputy Cabinet Secretary judged the crisis ‘the psychological watershed, the moment when it became apparent that Britain was no longer capable of being a great imperial power’. Sir Anthony Nutting, who resigned from his position as Foreign Minister over the attack, called it the ‘dying convulsion of British Imperialism’. Conservative opinion also saw it as ending the hopes of the Commonwealth as a ‘military or economic bloc’ and a huge boost for anti-colonial movements all around the British Empire.

After Suez, there could be no more doubts about the way the Empire was going. Colonialism was more than ever a dirty word. ‘Empire Day’ became ‘Commonwealth Day’ in Britain, and four years later, the UN passed resolution 1514, which recognised that ‘the peoples of the world ardently desire the end of colonialism in all its manifestations’.

Noël Coward, who had now sold his homes in England and was dividing his time between Jamaica, Bermuda and Switzerland, saw Suez as the end of ‘good old imperialism’ and the ‘British Empire, a great and wonderful social, economic and even spiritual experiment’. The decision to ‘knock Nasser for six was a good one’, he wrote to a friend at the end of November. The real mistake, he believed, was withdrawing troops from the Canal Zone in the first place. This had been due, he wrote, to ‘our usual misguided passion to prove to the Americans and the rest of the world what wonderful guys we were. We just let go our hold as we have done, with disastrous results, in so many other parts of the world.’

Coward had recently become Britain’s first high-profile tax exile, prompting a backlash, but for him, London had become as grey as Moscow, and the British beyond saving: We’ve lost our will to work, lost our sense of industry, lost our sense of pride in our heritage and above all lost our inherent conviction that we are a great race.’ Fleming was similarly appalled by the disaster. In a letter to his Jamaica friend Sir William Stephenson, he wrote: ‘In the whole of modern history I can’t think of a comparable shambles created by any single country.’

Eden himself now became erratic and apocalyptic, and his health, which had been very poor for a number of years, deteriorated rapidly. On 21 November, Downing Street announced that he was ‘suffering from the effects of severe overstrain. On the advice of his doctors he has cancelled his immediate public engagements.’ The following day, the news came out: with exquisite irony, Eden had chosen to recover at Goldeneye, the birthplace of the imperial hero Bond, the ‘one-man Suez task force’.

Predictably, there were digs about the ‘Sunshine Trip’ and accusations that the captain was deserting a sinking ship. Randolph Churchill waded in, drawing a parallel between Suez and the Battle of Stalingrad, saying that not even Hitler had wintered in Jamaica. The
Daily Mirror
ran a competition on how best to solve the Suez crisis, with the first prize being a three-week holiday for two in Jamaica.

Ian was delighted; Ann less so. She had told her friend Clarissa Eden about Goldeneye, which was how the idea for the trip had formed, but now she was worried that the Edens would find the house horribly uncomfortable and primitive. As she was not officially supposed to know about the Edens’ plans, it was only when Clarissa confided in her forty-eight hours before departure that she was able to warn her of Goldeneye’s drawbacks. ‘She seemed disconcerted,’ Ann wrote to Waugh, ‘to hear that if one wished a bath one had to give two days’ notice, and that I did not know if there was a dentist on the island and that all the doctors were black. I warned her that shoes must be worn while bathing, and that the reef abounded with scorpion fish, barracuda and urchins … The plumbing is not good at the moment, after plugs are pulled noises of hunting horns are heard for at least twenty minutes … I think Torquay and a sun-ray lamp would have been more peaceful and more patriotic.’

Ian, on the other hand, was thrilled at the publicity he would get for his rental property, and enjoyed the cloak-and-dagger nature of the arrangement. The Colonial Secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd, had originally phoned Ann to ask if the house was free for himself, although he swore her to secrecy. A few days later, Lennox-Boyd summoned Fleming to the Foreign Office to tell him in person that it was to be for the Prime Minister. There was even a cover for the meeting – talking about a book project. Still not allowed to tell anyone, Fleming sent a telegram to Anthony Lahoud in Jamaica saying that ‘three important friends’ were coming to stay for three weeks. Violet should get extra staff, he instructed, and the house be prepared. When he received back
a rather relaxed-sounding ‘Everything is ok Lahoud’, he telegraphed again asking that uniforms be found for the staff and that Lahoud should be ‘prepared for considerable publicity’.

Once the news was out, Fleming sent another telegram to Violet. ‘The Commander told me someone is coming,’ she recalled, and that ‘I would be surprised. I would see a lot of excitement. But I must be calm. Because although he is Prime Minster, he is just the next man. I must not let them get me off my nerve.’

The press were intrigued by Goldeneye and its dashing owner. On 22 November, the
Daily Express
led its front page with two pictures, one of Ann and Ian, the other of Goldeneye. Ann, letting the side down a bit, was quoted in the accompanying article: ‘It’s a small house with a nice garden leading on to the sea … It’s no luxury place. The Edens will have to rough it.’ She then went on, rather spitefully, ‘We lent the house to Noël Coward seven years ago after he had a colossal
flop in New York.’ The next day, she wrote to Waugh: ‘yesterday’s
Daily Express
will mean a permanent breach with Noël Coward’.

At Goldeneye itself, there was a rush of activity. Blanche Blackwell had been told about the mysterious telegrams by Lahoud, and as she happened to be back in Kingston later the same day, she asked at King’s House. Here she was given the recently received news that the Prime Minister was coming to Goldeneye. Together with Foot’s private secretary and his wife, and her Lindo sister-in-law, Blanche rushed back to Oracabessa to attempt to get the place in shape. Six extra men were quickly gathered to help gardener Felix Barriffe tidy up the outside, where, the
Gleaner
reported the day before Eden’s arrival, ‘the hibiscus was in full bloom and the poinsettias were adding their scarlet quota’. Blanche remembers doing what she could inside. Fleming later teased her that he had conjured up a picture of her ‘punching up my faded cushions and putting cut glass vases of flowers beside the detectives’ beds’.

Harry George, the Bahamas-born chef from King’s House, was driven over to draw up menus and organise supplies, while two telephone lines were installed in the living room and the new gazebo was commandeered as a communication centre and office, with typewriters and emergency telephones. New maids and a valet were taken on and dispatch riders lined up to buzz over the island between Kingston and Oracabessa several times a day.

Lady Foot suggested that Violet might make way for staff from King’s House, but she was having none of it, replying, ‘No, Lady, I obey my Commander.’ When Lady Foot tried to convince her that the Queen herself would want this arrangement, Violet remained adamant: ‘I respect the Queen but I obey the Commander.’

Noël, who had played and sung at the Edens’ house during the war, rushed off to Kingston to buy a huge basket of Earl Grey tea, caviar, cutlets, champagne and foie gras paté – ‘Anything I could see in fact that might mitigate the horrors I knew the poor dears were in for.’

The Edens landed on Saturday 24 November to be greeted at Kingston airport by a calypso band singing ‘Jamaica the Garden of Eden welcomes Britain’s Sir Anthony Eden’. Sir Hugh Foot and his wife Sylvia accompanied them to Goldeneye. The next day, Blanche received a telephone call from Violet: there had been some confusion over who was doing what and there was no lunch for the Edens. Blanche was eating with Coward and had to pack the food up quickly and send it over to Goldeneye. Thereafter she was the first call to sort out any small problems, to the chagrin of the agent Lahoud.

Over the next few days, Coward, Brownlow and Bryce all offered hospitality, but it was declined. The extent of the Edens’ sociability was hosting a lunch for the Foots and Blanche. ‘A complete inertia has overcome us,’ Clarissa Eden wrote to Ann after a week. ‘We are blissfully happy and it is everything we had hoped for but far more beautiful. We haven’t been outside the gates so far.’ There was a trip to Antonio’s emporium in Falmouth, where Eden bought a pair of willow-pattern shorts, but for almost all of their three-week stay, the large white Cadillac, lent by Prime Minister Norman Manley, remained unused as they kept to the house and beach. Eden did not take to the snorkelling. As Clarissa reported to Ann, After one claustrophobic splash, Anthony had absolutely refused to put his head under water, so he swims up and down in the deep bit, occasionally crashing himself into a reef of coral. I am obsessed by the fishes, and now swim about with a wet towel tied to my back on account of bad sunburn.’

One reason for the seclusion was that the property was soon surrounded by journalists and photographers from the English press. They even rented boats to capture shots of the Edens on the beach. The tiniest rumours were published, including the news that a doctor had visited during the night. (In fact, the local doctor Lenworth Jacobs was only giving some aspirin to Clarissa.) The finger of blame for this leak was pointed at Anthony Lahoud, who then had his police
pass rescinded. When Ian heard about this, he immediately contacted Downing Street and King’s House to have his man’s honour restored.

Coward had his ear to the ground for information about the ailing Prime Minister. For his part, he thought it very curious that Eden was at Goldeneye while ‘the Egyptians and the Arabs and the Israelis and the Iranians and the Syrians and the Russians are frigging away in the Middle East’. In a letter to a friend, he reported ‘fairly well authenticated rumours that [Eden] has wakened in the night screaming several times and sent for the guard. This of course might be accounted for by the acute discomfort of Ian’s bed and the coloured prints of snakes and octopuses that festoon the peeling walls.’