Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica Read Online Free PDF Page A

court, had also washed up on Jamaica’s north shore. He had famously driven Mrs Simpson across France pursued by the press a week before the final abdication announcement. With his social standing thereafter much reduced, he was among those referred to as ‘Gone with the Windsors’. Like most rich incomers, he had bought an old plantation Great House. His was at Roaring River, St Ann’s Bay, just along the coast from Oracabessa past Ocho Rios.
    Men like this, in their refurbished and lavishly staffed Great Houses, saw themselves as inheritors of the old plantocracy. On his walls at Hillowtown, Stephenson displayed a series of valuable J. B. Kidd prints, the famous ‘Views in the Island of Jamaica’. They areclassically imperialist in tone, depicting a tamed natural world and blacks, if at all, as tiny, inconsequential figures similar in status to draft animals. Nobel-prize-winning West Indian poet Derek Walcott recently described them and their like as drawn ‘as if the sky were a glass ceiling under which a colonized vegetation is arranged for quiet walks and carriage rides’. Displaying such pictures was a statement of celebration of Jamaica’s plantation past.
    Millionaire businessman Sir Harold Mitchell, perhaps the north shore’s most locally noted expatriate resident, created a plantation-style set-up pretty much from scratch. Having been a Conservative MP for fourteen years, as well as deputy chairman of the party, he had lost his seat in the Labour landslide of 1945. Thereafter he spent at least six months of the year in Jamaica, along with his family and half a dozen or so of his most important staff. As a child he had been told by an uncle who lived on the island ‘stories of pirates and desperadoes … Elizabethan sea-rovers, of earthquakes and hummingbirds’. This had led him to buy, sight unseen, 1,200 acres on the high ground on the Oracabessa side of Ocho Rios.
    On the land was a Great House of sorts, called Prospect. In fact it was a simple single-storey eighteenth-century stone fort, complete with firing slits to keep the French or the vengeful slaves at bay. Mitchell had ordered that another storey be built, in the plantation-house style. Inside, weathered cedar panelling was put up, and ‘fine old mahogany furniture was installed in the principal rooms’. On the walls were hung portraits of Admirals Rodney and Vernon, both of whom made their names in the West Indies, and also such powerful sugar barons from the period of slavery as Rose Fuller and Peter Beckford. Along with more J. B. Kidd prints, there were also a number of prints originated from drawings by George Robertson, who specialised in depicting idealised Jamaican estates, far removed from the brutal reality of the sugar plantation. These can still be seen at Prospect, along with Mitchell’s cricket bat, a ‘Gradidge Imperial Driver’.
    Mitchell grew coconuts, limes and pimento, kept a large herd of cattle and at one point dabbled in sugar. But he never made any money out of his ‘modern-day plantation’. It was more a social experiment, an exercise in imperial nostalgia.
    Of course, much of the attraction of Jamaica was as an escape from the cold of a London winter. In Dr No, Bond is delighted to leave behind ‘hail and icy sleet’, where ‘people streamed miserably to work, their legs whipped by the wet hems of their macintoshes and their faces blotching with cold’, and revels in the ‘velvet heat’ of Jamaica. In a much later short story, ‘Octopussy’, Bond takes a back seat while Fleming describes the appeal of Jamaica right after the war to his central character, Dexter Smythe, who has just emigrated: ‘Prince’s Club, in the foothills above Kingston, was indeed a paradise.’ (This would become ‘Queen’s Club’ in Dr No, and is based on a real establishment still in business, the Liguanea Club.) ‘Pleasant enough members, wonderful servants, unlimited food and cheap drink, and all in the wonderful setting