Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica (5 page)

‘I suppose I fell in love with Jamaica and its people almost as soon as I arrived,’ Molly wrote in her memoir, backing up the sentiment always expressed in the many articles she wrote about herself. ‘I gave a great deal of my heart, my mind and my energies to working for
them. Their splendid response of love and gratitude has been one of the highlights of my life.’

Shortly after the war,
Life
magazine ran a profile of the Governor’s wife, which begins: ‘Nothing like Lady Molly Huggins ever happened before to Jamaica – or possibly to any other British colony.’ Lady Molly, it reports alongside a picture of adoring black children holding a welcoming banner, ‘steams about the island engaging in good works’ and ‘visits village markets, climbs onto tables and harangues her audiences on the importance of learning how to take better care of their children and homes’. We learn, however, that she still finds time for tennis – winning the Jamaica women’s doubles championship – ‘shoots golf in the low 80s’ and had just organised her daughter’s wedding, ‘the social event of Jamaica’s spring season’.

Unlike her husband, Lady Molly was extremely sociable. She unashamedly loved parties. ‘The handsome young men simply swarm around her,’ noted one local magazine journalist. She was often out on her own, as her husband had decided that to avoid charges of favouritism he should not attend dinners in private houses. A popular destination was the Craighton Estate Great House, high above Kingston beyond Irish Town. Here Bobby and Sybil Kirkwood gave lavish black-tie dinners for twelve or more, waited on by liveried servants.

Robert Kirkwood, an Englishman, was another pillar of elite Jamaican society and the most powerful businessman on the island. He had attended Harrow School and then taken a job at Tate & Lyle, thanks to his mother, who was a Lyle. At that time the company was involved with processing the sugar of Britain’s heavily subsidised domestic beet crop. When they looked to expand in 1936, they sent Kirkwood, now a company director, to the West Indies. He recommended investing in cane sugar estates in Trinidad and in Jamaica’s Westmoreland and Clarendon parishes. His suggestion that he take on the task of putting the largely derelict estates back into production was accepted.

The
company bought cheap and then invested heavily in centralised factories: at an estate called Monymusk in Vere, Clarendon (previously owned by the Lindo family); and at Frome, Westmoreland. The latter was served by the port of Savanna-la-Mar on Jamaica’s south-west coast, visited by Bond in
The Man with the Golden Gun,
where he comments on the ‘drably respectable’ villas built for the ‘senior staff of the Frome sugar estates’.

Tate & Lyle formed a new subsidiary, the West Indies Sugar Company, known as WISCO, whose estates, run by expatriate British and white Jamaicans, accounted by the end of the war for about a third of the island’s entire production.

In 1948, the irascible Kirkwood would fall out with his bosses and resign, to be replaced by Alan Walker, another Englishman. Kirkwood became chairman of the Sugar Manufacturers Association, a body representing all sugar producers, large and small, in their dealings with the government, suppliers and labour unions. This was a key position, as sugar remained Jamaica’s biggest business and the largest employer – albeit seasonal – by a huge margin.

In spite of this relative importance, the sugar industry was a shadow of its former self, as the landscape of Jamaica at the time of Fleming’s first visits amply testified. From almost the beginning of the eighteenth century, for a hundred years, Jamaica had been by far the richest and most important colony in the British Empire, thanks to its sugar crop. By 1774, average per capita wealth for a white man in Jamaica was £1,000, while in England it was around £42. This wealth built a large proportion of Britain’s stately homes and contributed substantially to the capitalisation of the Industrial Revolution. So important was Jamaica to the Empire that its defence was prioritised over the suppression of the revolution in North America’s Thirteen Colonies.

For 150 years after 1700, all the flat land around the future site of Goldeneye would have been planted in cane. The largest estate was Trinity, worked by over 1,000 slaves and consisting of about 5,000
acres around Port Maria. The area’s reliable rainfall and proximity to the port made this ‘one of the island’s most desirable properties’. Adjacent to this estate was Frontier, with about 300 slaves working nearly 1,500 acres. To the west of Port Maria lay the plantation of Agualta Vale, owned by the eccentric Hibbert family. At its prime it consisted of 3,000 acres and nearly 1,000 slaves. In the late nineteenth century it would be sold to the Scottish physician Sir John Pringle.

On the high ground in the interior of Fleming’s parish, near the border with St Catherine, Sir Charles Price, scion of one of Jamaica’s richest sugar families, had built his retreat, Decoy. Price, who could trace his family back to one of Cromwell’s invasion force, owned numerous properties, including jamaica’s most famous Great House, Rose Hall, as well as about 26,000 acres and some 1,300 slaves. Decoy, 2,000 feet up in the hills, provided an escape into cooler air. Here he entertained visitors from England, who could enjoy the surrounding park, grazed by imported fallow deer, in a fantastical imitation of the aristocracy at home. In front of the house was ‘a very fine piece of water, which in winter is commonly stocked with wild-duck and teal’, a visitor reported. Behind was an elegant garden, with numerous richly ornamented buildings and a triumphal arch.

In fact Price was already heavily in debt by the 1770s, and the family’s fortune was gone by the next generation. The abolition of slavery, combined with natural disasters, endemic war and the planters’ greed, corruption and decadence, saw the industry rapidly decline during the nineteenth century. As the sugar price fell, production in Jamaica slumped from 100,000 tons in 1805 to a low of 5,000 tons just over a hundred years later. In the last half of the century, the number of sugar plantations shrank from more than 500 to just 77. In common with the rest of the island, sugar production in Fleming’s St Mary Parish collapsed after Emancipation. Trinity’s output halved in the ten years after 1838.

This left the cane fields derelict and the countryside littered with decaying, squatted or abandoned Great Houses and sugar works, quickly reclaimed by vines and bush. Vandalism, hurricanes and fires contributed to the ruin, and almost every old house acquired its own ghost story. And each ruin acted as a visible, melancholy reminder that Jamaica’s heyday was a hundred years in the past.

This romantic mood was memorably evoked at the beginning of Richard Hughes’s 1929
A High Wind in Jamaica:
‘ruined slaves’ quarters, ruined sugar-grinding houses, ruined boiling houses’, where ‘two old Miss Parkers’ had taken to their beds as their plantation house crumbled about them into ‘half-vegetable gloom’. Of course, many other authors writing about Jamaica similarly employed this image of romanticised decay, Fleming included. The melodramatic melancholy suited his temperament to a T. It was also linked to his respect for Jamaica’s ‘aristocracy’, the old families like the Havelocks, who are murdered for their property at the beginning of the short story ‘For Your Eyes Only’. For Fleming, the Havelocks are exemplary white Anglo-Jamaicans: they are tolerant of the clumsiness of their servants, appreciative of nature and snooty about Americans. Their own lands – 20,000 acres given to ‘an early Havelock’ by Oliver Cromwell – are in good shape, having been maintained ‘through three centuries, through earthquakes and hurricanes and through the boom and bust of cocoa, sugar, citrus and copra’. But a neighbouring estate, Belair, is in ruins, ‘a thousand acres of cattle-tick and a house the red ants’ll have down by Christmas!’

‘Belair used to be a fine property. It could have been brought back if anyone in the family had cared,’ complains Colonel Havelock.

‘It was ten thousand acres in Bill’s grandfather’s day. It used to take the busher three days to ride the boundary,’ adds his wife.

‘That’s one more of the old families gone,’ continues the Colonel. ‘Soon won’t be anyone left of that lot but us.’

By Fleming’s time, however, another crop had come to the rescue. Now planted all around the site of Goldeneye were bananas. This
was the essential local business. Thanks to an American entrepreneur, what became known as the ‘Green Gold Era’ had started in Jamaica in the 1870s, and Oracabessa, just beyond Goldeneye’s eastern border, had grown into an important hub from which the fruit was exported. By the 1930s, banana production had become a mainstay of the entire Jamaican economy.

In 1937, the island exported twenty-seven million stems, twice that of any other country. More than 70 per cent of the crop went to Britain. The business was particularly important for St Mary, where the landowning families – the Whites, McGregors, Marshes, Silveras, and in particular Blanche Blackwell’s family, the Lindos – had grown rich from the crop. Leonora Rickets, local resident and granddaughter of a St Mary banana pioneer, remembers the plantation owners as ‘vibrant, colourful characters’, ‘a happy-go-lucky lot, who drank a lot and had a lot of women’.

‘Banana day’, when the crop was loaded on to ships for export, ‘was the highlight of the week. Everything revolved around green gold day.’
At the shallow port of Oracabessa, this involved the bananas being stacked on to red-painted barges, then rowed out to stocky white ships standing out in the bay. A writer on the
Gleaner
remembered the ‘attractive sea-weedy-cum-banana-trash smell – a smell that holds all of the lush and potent Tropics’. Paddy Marsh, a local labourer, had a less romantic memory of having to walk a long way to the port, and then ‘work night and day to make any money and the money was so small. We had to carry that banana on our head, sometimes we carry one, sometimes two, to the wharf’ At this point the ‘tallyman’ would tally the bunch as a ‘six-hand, seven-hand, eight-hand’ and so on. ‘We had to sleep on the wharf, we take our bed. People cook down there,’ recalled Marsh.

‘You got a lot of exploitation,’ conceded Rickets, ‘but money was going round, people were employed.’ The Second World War, however, hit the industry hard. No shipping could be spared or risked to take the fruit to its market in Britain. Nevertheless, some transports still called at St Mary’s ports. Blanche Blackwell remembers that part of the local banana production was purchased by the British government, even though there was never any plan to ship the crop to England. Instead, the bananas were loaded on to the ships at Oracabessa and elsewhere on the island, everyone was paid, and then the fruit was carried out to sea and simply tipped over the side. Under this scheme, twelve million stems were purchased during the conflict at the pre-war price, but the rising cost of living and wages, as well as hurricanes and leaf-spot disease, saw many plantations abandoned nonetheless.

In 1946, production in Jamaica was at less than a fifth of the prewar level. Although the end was still some years away, and tourists and expatriates, including Fleming and his friends, would enjoy viewing from the comfort of their verandas the picturesque spectacle of the banana-loading, the days of Oracabessa’s prosperity were numbered, and the port – now overlooked by the rising outline of the new Goldeneye house – was in slow but melancholy decline.

1947 The Bachelor Party

He knew, deep down, that love from Mary Goodnight, or from any other woman, was not enough for him. It would be like taking a room with ‘a view’. For James Bond the same view would always pall.

The Man with the Golden Gun

Early in 1947, Ramsay Dacosta, later Fleming’s gardener, was among a group of small black boys who had swum round from Oracabessa to fish on the reef about twenty yards off the beach at Goldeneye. The beach, accessible only by sea, had been a favourite secret place for local children. Blanche Blackwell’s brothers Frederick and Roy Lindo remembered using the small cave in the cliff as an arena for illegal cockfighting. But today Ramsay Dacosta and his friends could see steps leading down from the cliff above and a tall white man standing on the sand. It was now Fleming’s beach. Dacosta remembers him waving to the boys in a friendly way.