Read Online Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica by Matthew Parker - Free Book Online Page B

bananas, there is the sea, ‘breaking in silver on the reef’ – a description that Fleming would reuse in Live and Let Die, when Bond and Quarrel are driving across the island.
    Other Jamaican attractions outlined in the 1947 article are the Great Houses, including ‘Prospect, belonging to Sir Harold Mitchell’ and ‘Bellevue Plantation, belongs to the Bryces’, and the hot springs at Bath and Milk River, the latter boasting ‘the highest radio-activity of any mineral bath in the world’, useful for ‘curing your rheumatism or sciatica (or just having an aphrodisiac binge)’.
    The food was plentiful and exciting. Fleming details a mouthwatering menu that includes black crab, roast stuffed suckling pig, and guavas (as Quarrel would make for Bond and Solitaire in Live and Let Die). Here in Jamaica you could gorge yourself on treats unavailable at home, just as Bond would do. There were ‘Unbounded drinks of all sorts’. He also recommends the local weather, the Daily Gleaner - ‘my favourite newspaper above all others in the world’ – the ‘electric rhythms’ of the music, and swimming in a bay after dark, shining ‘like an Oscar, because of the phosphorus’. He was a man clearly passionate about his Jamaica.
    The only real shortcomings of the island for Fleming were ‘the mosquitoes, sandflies, grass-ticks and politics. None of these arevirulent hazards.’ Having dismissed it as a mere irritation, however, he then goes on to describe his views of the politics of the island in some detail.
    Like other incomers, Fleming initially knew little about the political undercurrents on the island, although he does refer in his article to ‘recent disturbances’. Jamaica had been a Crown colony, ruled directly from London, since the 1860s, although twenty years later a very limited form of representative government was introduced. Nevertheless, by the 1930s, only a twelfth of the population was entitled to vote, and real power was still in the hands of the British Governor and the Colonial Office. One Caribbean historian has recently described the politics of this period as a ‘dictatorship of white supremacy’.
    The first real challenge to this came from New York. Then, as now, the city played host to a large Jamaican community. New York, with its ‘Harlem Renaissance’, gave West Indians an opportunity that they did not enjoy at home to engage in political activity, and a context in which to assert themselves. In 1936, W Adolphe Roberts, Wilfred Domingo and the Reverend Ethelred Brown launched the Jamaica Progressive League, committed to ‘work for the attainment of self-government for Jamaica’. Soon the organisation was sending activists from New York to Jamaica.
    What they found there was atrocious poverty, squalor and governmental neglect. Where tourists and visiting expatriates saw picturesque scenes of time stood still or romantic decline, they saw urgent social and economic problems. Disease and malnourishment were everywhere, and few places off the beaten track had electricity or piped water. A book about Jamaica published in 1938 described the hill dwellers as a ‘lost people’: ‘the children have yaws on their legs, or are blown with midget elephantiasis … there is no doctor here but the Obeah man’. Roads, hospitals and poorhouses were in a disgraceful condition. Education provision was amongst the worst in the Empire,with most children only attending school three times a week, and then in classes of seventy or more. Only 3 per cent of the population was educated beyond the age of ten, and as much as half the black population was illiterate.
    Unemployment was rife and the global depression had pushed down wages in the key sugar business to levels not much higher than in 1830. There was growing protest about poor pay and working conditions, including, in 1935, strikes and riots among the banana workers at Oracabessa. This came to a climax in May 1938, when Kirkwood’s new Tate & Lyle