Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica by Matthew Parker
Authors: Matthew Parker
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seminal moment: the birth of what would become the ‘North Coast Jet Set’.
Fleming urged visitors to ‘embrace’ all aspects of Jamaica, including dangerous-looking food.
The hotel’s creator was Carmen Pringle, a charismatic and well-connected local figure. She was originally a de Lisser, a long-established white Jamaican family, but had married Kenneth Pringle, one of thesons of the Sir John Pringle who had bought the Hibbert estate in St Mary and subsequently became the island’s biggest landowner, with 100,000 acres of sugar, banana, citrus and cattle lands throughout the parishes of St Ann, St Mary and Portland. The marriage had produced a son, John Pringle, born in 1925, but had ended in separation. According to Molly Huggins, Carmen ‘really preferred women to men’.
The new hotel boasted offering ‘the last word in comfort and luxury without for one moment losing the charm and simplicity which is Jamaica’. A key selling point was ‘the only private beach in Montego Bay’. Sports on offer included golf, tennis, croquet and badminton; ‘Alligator shooting and polo can be easily arranged.’
Carmen Pringle had the idea of inviting the great and good of Britain and America to come to the beachfront hotel free of charge – with the exception of their bar bill – in return for telling their friends about the place. Fleming reported back to Ann that there was a ‘huge bonfire on the beach, and a lot of expensive people and two superb local bands playing the sort of Rum and Cococola tunes you like’.
The experiment was a great success. According to Blanche Blackwell, it was the moment when Jamaica was discovered by the international rich who had previously holidayed in the South of France. ‘When they found Jamaica, they found it so beautiful it wasn’t true,’ she says. ‘People arrived in Jamaica and just fell in love with it. Never wanted to leave it. It’s what made Jamaica come alive.’
Tourism in Jamaica dated back to the late 1870s, when Lorenzo Dow Baker, the boss of Boston Fruit, began ferrying Americans to the island in his banana boats. To cater for them, a small number of high-class hotels, including Myrtle Bank in Kingston, were constructed in the late 1880s, and in the 1900s Baker himself built the lavish 400-room Titchfield Hotel near Port Antonio. During the winter months, wealthy East Coast Americans would arrive on the banana boats from the US and stay for a few weeks enjoying balls and bridge evenings.In 1918, Baker purchased Myrtle Bank as well, reconstructed after suffering in the earthquake of 1907. The 1920s and 1930s saw development starting around Montego Bay, centred on Doctor’s Cave Beach, where a natural spring offered health benefits. In 1931, the world-famous American aviator Charles Lindbergh, in a four-engined Sikorsky S40, landed smoothly in Kingston Harbour, to the delight of many spectators; thereafter a regular Pan Am service was established from Miami to Kingston and, soon after, Montego Bay, where the graceful seaplanes landed off Doctor’s Cave Beach, an event that become a popular focus of Sunday outings for local Jamaicans. By 1938, visitor numbers had grown in a decade from 14,000 to more than 62,000.
By the time of the opening of Sunset Lodge, runways on the Palisadoes opposite Kingston and at Montego Bay, both built during the war for military purposes, were now in action, ferrying far more passengers than the seaplanes had coped with. At the beginning of 1948 the Gleaner would report, under the title ‘Here they come’: ‘Now the pace has become so fast and furious that it needs a strong man-about-town to survive it.’ Noting ‘dukes, duchesses, lords and ladies … wanting change from austerity and winter cold’, the reporter applauded the ‘variety that brings welcome colour and change to the monotony of our lives’. A new world of extreme luxury, a world that James Bond would make his own, was now being born in Jamaica.
One of the great
Fleming urged visitors to ‘embrace’ all aspects of Jamaica, including dangerous-looking food.
The hotel’s creator was Carmen Pringle, a charismatic and well-connected local figure. She was originally a de Lisser, a long-established white Jamaican family, but had married Kenneth Pringle, one of thesons of the Sir John Pringle who had bought the Hibbert estate in St Mary and subsequently became the island’s biggest landowner, with 100,000 acres of sugar, banana, citrus and cattle lands throughout the parishes of St Ann, St Mary and Portland. The marriage had produced a son, John Pringle, born in 1925, but had ended in separation. According to Molly Huggins, Carmen ‘really preferred women to men’.
The new hotel boasted offering ‘the last word in comfort and luxury without for one moment losing the charm and simplicity which is Jamaica’. A key selling point was ‘the only private beach in Montego Bay’. Sports on offer included golf, tennis, croquet and badminton; ‘Alligator shooting and polo can be easily arranged.’
Carmen Pringle had the idea of inviting the great and good of Britain and America to come to the beachfront hotel free of charge – with the exception of their bar bill – in return for telling their friends about the place. Fleming reported back to Ann that there was a ‘huge bonfire on the beach, and a lot of expensive people and two superb local bands playing the sort of Rum and Cococola tunes you like’.
The experiment was a great success. According to Blanche Blackwell, it was the moment when Jamaica was discovered by the international rich who had previously holidayed in the South of France. ‘When they found Jamaica, they found it so beautiful it wasn’t true,’ she says. ‘People arrived in Jamaica and just fell in love with it. Never wanted to leave it. It’s what made Jamaica come alive.’
Tourism in Jamaica dated back to the late 1870s, when Lorenzo Dow Baker, the boss of Boston Fruit, began ferrying Americans to the island in his banana boats. To cater for them, a small number of high-class hotels, including Myrtle Bank in Kingston, were constructed in the late 1880s, and in the 1900s Baker himself built the lavish 400-room Titchfield Hotel near Port Antonio. During the winter months, wealthy East Coast Americans would arrive on the banana boats from the US and stay for a few weeks enjoying balls and bridge evenings.In 1918, Baker purchased Myrtle Bank as well, reconstructed after suffering in the earthquake of 1907. The 1920s and 1930s saw development starting around Montego Bay, centred on Doctor’s Cave Beach, where a natural spring offered health benefits. In 1931, the world-famous American aviator Charles Lindbergh, in a four-engined Sikorsky S40, landed smoothly in Kingston Harbour, to the delight of many spectators; thereafter a regular Pan Am service was established from Miami to Kingston and, soon after, Montego Bay, where the graceful seaplanes landed off Doctor’s Cave Beach, an event that become a popular focus of Sunday outings for local Jamaicans. By 1938, visitor numbers had grown in a decade from 14,000 to more than 62,000.
By the time of the opening of Sunset Lodge, runways on the Palisadoes opposite Kingston and at Montego Bay, both built during the war for military purposes, were now in action, ferrying far more passengers than the seaplanes had coped with. At the beginning of 1948 the Gleaner would report, under the title ‘Here they come’: ‘Now the pace has become so fast and furious that it needs a strong man-about-town to survive it.’ Noting ‘dukes, duchesses, lords and ladies … wanting change from austerity and winter cold’, the reporter applauded the ‘variety that brings welcome colour and change to the monotony of our lives’. A new world of extreme luxury, a world that James Bond would make his own, was now being born in Jamaica.
One of the great
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