Free Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica by Matthew Parker

sugar factory at Frome advertised for workers. Thousands turned up, and when there was not nearly enough work to go round, riots broke out that claimed the lives of eight men and led to a declaration of martial law. Strikes and rioting spread across the island.
    The disturbances saw the emergence of new unions under the leadership of the flamboyant and energetic Alexander Bustamante, and, more widely, a new Jamaican nationalism spearheaded by Norman Manley, a Rhodes scholar and the island’s leading barrister. Manley had fought for the Empire during the First World War as an artilleryman, experiencing violent racial prejudice from his comrades. (His brother Roy was killed near Ypres in 1917, aged twenty-one). His sculptress wife Edna Manley had already started a movement of anti-colonial Jamaican art.
    In the same year as these disturbances, Manley launched the socialist People’s National Party (PNP), pledging to ‘raise the standard of living and security of the masses of the people’ and to ‘develop national spirit’. While empire nostalgists like Fleming looked back fondly on the old Jamaica of the Great House, Manley saw the island’s ‘ugly’ past as a ruinous curse that had created a ‘culture of dependency’, making people ‘turgid and lethargic’. ‘We are still a colonial people. The values of the plantation still prevail,’ he lamented. Manley was fond of quoting a British colonial official who had admitted:‘The Empire and British rule rest on a carefully nurtured sense of inferiority in the governed.’
    Norman Manley addressing a crowd during the 1962 election campaign. Intellectually brilliant, hardworking and both tough and sensitive when required, Manley should have led Jamaica to independence. Although he was a fine public speaker, critics say he was too erudite for the ‘ordinary’ Jamaican.
    Public Opinion newspaper, founded in 1937 to take on the establishment views of the Daily Gleaner, saw neglect of education in Jamaica as the result of a ‘social oligarchy’ deliberately aiming to ‘nurture a sense of inferiority in the masses’, who as a result ‘are embittered with a feeling of frustration’. ‘Each Jamaican is a smoldering little volcano of resentment,’ warned one magazine writer. Another predicted a ‘revolution because of class resentment’, which ‘would be suppressed by British bayonets and boycotted by Yankee capital’.
    During the Second World War, the British Governor of the time, Sir Arthur Richards, used the cover of imperial security to enhance his own powers and harass and arrest his opponents, earning himself the nickname ‘the Repressor’.
    But the authorities in London conceded that change had to come. At the Foreign Office, Anthony Eden, who would later, famously, stay at Goldeneye, urged that due to their proximity to the UnitedStates, it was essential to ‘make our Colonies in the Caribbean good examples of our Imperial work’. Richards was replaced by Huggins, and in February 1943 a new constitution was proposed that allowed for a House of Representatives on the island, elected by universal adult suffrage. In July 1943, Bustamante, who had been imprisoned for seventeen months for sedition, formed his own political party, the Jamaican Labour Party (JLP), to rival his cousin Norman Manley’s PNP. The election was to be held in December of the following year.
    Bustamante, for now, was unsure about self-government, not just because he thought it unaffordable, but because he saw the inevitable outcome as the control of the black masses by the ‘brown’ middle class; what he called ‘a new slavery’. Bustamante was inherently conservative but also a shrewd and opportunistic populist and a stunning orator. To one cheering crowd he declared: ‘We want bread! B-R-E-D bread!’ When the election came, he managed to secure far greater funding than the PNP and to garner the votes of both the elite whites and the poorest blacks, winning twenty-two of