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

the thirty-two seats in the House of Representatives. A disappointed Edna Manley wrote in her diary that ‘I shall never forget the rich people rolling in in their hundreds to vote Labour’ soas ‘to keep Manley out’. This victory made Bustamante the unofficial government leader, under the title of Minister of Communication. But real power and responsibility resided with the Executive Council, made up of five elected members, or ministers, and five men appointed by the Governor, who himself sat in the chair and therefore kept control.
    Alexander Bustamante, with St. William Grant, being freed from prison after arrest for inciting unlawful assembly during the unrest of May 1938. Along with other Jamaican nationalists and trade unionists, he would be arrested again during the first year of World War Two.
    Nonetheless, the chance to vote for the first time had given ordinary Jamaicans new confidence that their interests and opinions mattered. As a consequence, support for self-government and involvement in politics grew. From 1945 onwards, this sometimes manifested itself in political violence, with the victims more often innocent bystanders, rival trade-union or party groups rather than the colonial authorities.
    Even the wife of the Governor was no longer immune from criticism. Molly’s mass marriages ‘had caused more harm than good. A number of happy homes have come to grief,’ Adolphe Roberts would complain. ‘Lady Huggins,’ wrote Public Opinion, ‘must have been sent out by the Colonial Office to sell British Imperialism. The salesmanship was good but the article for sale was shoddy.’ According to leaders of the PNP, her Women’s Federation constituted ‘political activities’. The Governor, they argued, should ‘put a restraining hand upon her’. There were also hints that her personal conduct was bringing the Governor’s office into disrepute; that he should not ‘let his attractive wife roam at large and, from all appearances, do very much as she liked’.
    Molly’s lover, Kirkwood, was furious, and at a party given at King’s House defended her from attacks by the PNP leaders. Edna Manley, who was at the party, noted in her diary that night that ‘Kirkwood had “too many” and went all over the crowd saying “the PNP” is a pack of crooks, bastards and anti-British. He and Lady Huggins are pretty matey. It’s funny because when she came to see me she said she didn’t like him, he was all “I – I – I.” So is she, poor darling.’
    In his 1947 Horizon article, Fleming summed up local politics as ‘the usual picture – education bringing a desire for self-government,for riches, for blacker coats and whiter collars, for a greater share (or all) of the prizes which England gets from the colony’. He saw the independence movement as materialistic – an urge to own ‘all the desirable claptrap of the whites’ such as cars and racehorses. ‘Two men are fighting each other to take over the chaperonage of Jamaica,’ he reported, before describing Bustamante as ‘a gorgeous flamboyant rabble-rouser’ and Manley as ‘the local Cripps and white hope of the Harlem communists’. The latter, he declared, has ‘the right wife to help him’. Of the two leaders, Fleming wrote, ‘you would like both of these citizens although they would both say that they want to kick you out’. Fortunately, he concluded, ‘holding wise and successful sway is the Governor, Sir John Huggins’, assisted by Hugh Foot as Colonial Secretary and Lady Molly Huggins, ‘a blonde and muchloved bombshell’. ‘Heaven knows what the island would do without her,’ he added.
    Local politics for Fleming, reporting in 1947, was picturesque, populated by ‘zany’ characters, reassuringly old-fashioned rather than a ‘grave danger’. He was confident that the ‘edge’ would be kept off the rising political ‘passions’ by ‘the liberality and wisdom of our present policy’. Pax Britannica, it seemed, still