‘My name is Bond.......and I'm 50!’

The 50^th Anniversary of the Bond movies takes me back to the Liguanea Club in Kingston, Jamaica, where I lived for two happy years. The opening sequence in Dr No is the facade of the club.

 

Guests staying at the club would often ask to be given the room where Sean Connery or Ursula Andress slept. The manager would reply ‘ You are very lucky; it just happens to be vacant’, and give them whichever key was handy.

 

Of course, neither of them actually stayed there.

 

The inspiration for the gorgeous blonde emerging from the Caribbean in a wet tee-shirt was neither blonde nor Scandinavian. She was Jamaican.  Ian Fleming obviously said ‘I’ll have a bit of that’, and took her home to ’Goldeneye’, his house near Ochos Rios where she became the chatelaine for many years.

 

‘Goldeneye’ is now  preserved much as Fleming left it, and is a very up-market holiday home.

 

There are two stories about how ‘007’ came about.

 

One is that when he was creating Naval Intelligence in the Caribbean during WW2, he was dispatched to New York to bump-off a certain Oriental gentleman in a down-town hotel. There was no such person; it was a test to see if Fleming was the Right Stuff. The room number was 1007, but the 1 had fallen off!

 

The other is that it was the number of the bus route taking his kids to school in Kent, where he lived with Lady Anne and his legitimate family when he wasn’t having fun in Jamaica.

 

I prefer the first but believe the second.

 

‘James Bond’ was the name of a famous Caribbean ornithologist.

 

Fleming seems to have got the plot for the sunken bomber in ’Goldfinger’ from a true incident. German U-boats in the Caribbean were pretty safe before the US entered the war, and crews were accustomed to sneaking ashore to get fresh fruit and veg in isolated villages. There is a very deep trench in Kingston harbour. The Germans were confident of their invulnerability because we had little in the way of sub countermeasures, so they would sit on the bottom taking a peek  at any juicy targets. Fleming sent his dirty-tricks lads down to take it out. Local folklore says it is still down there.

 

The smart set were pretty thick on the ground between Ochos Rios and Port Antonio in the early post-war days, including Noel Coward and Errol Flynn. Flynn owned his own island just off Port Antonio, which he lost in a poker game. The lounge in the Trident Hotel in Port Antonio has photographs of just about every Hollywood star you can think of.

 

So whatever mythology has grown up around Fleming, you can be certain of one thing.

 

He held some awesome parties!