The Goldeneye estate where Ian Fleming wrote his James Bond novels. — Photos: dpa
The serpentine roads between the Blue Mountains and Jamaica’s north coast are narrow and dotted with potholes. Many a car driver speeds through the bends and beeps at any approaching traffic.
It doesn’t feel surprising that Ian Fleming dreamed up the breakneck chases of his novel hero James Bond in this area.
There is one such chase in the very first Bond book, Casino Royale, which was published 70 years ago. Like the other novels about 007, Fleming wrote the work on his Goldeneye estate in the Jamaican town of Oracabessa, which was little more than a port for the banana trade at the time.
As an intelligence officer in the British Navy, Fleming had spent four days in Jamaica in July 1943, writing in Horizon magazine in 1947.
“July is the beginning of the hot season and it rained in rods everyday at noon, yet I swore that if I survived the contest I would go back to Jamaica, buy a piece of land, build a house and live in it as much as my job would allow.”
The name Goldeneye came from a World War II mission Fleming helped plan. Before it became his, the property was called “Providence”, said Penny Dyer. It belonged to her grandfather, says the 81-year-old woman who grew up on the neighbouring property and now spends winters there, otherwise living in Canada.
People in the family say that the grandfather owed his sister money. When he and Fleming were drinking together, her grandfather offered to give Fleming the property if he paid the sister the money. So Fleming did.
Before it became a resort, Goldeneye hosted celebrities like Sting and Steve Jobs, who were friends of Blackwell’s.
He built a modest three-bedroom house, as the British music producer Chris Blackwell – founder of Island Records – who grew up partly in Jamaica, writes in his memoirs The Islander published last year. Together with the English writer Noel Coward, Fleming led a small community of rich Britons who wintered in Jamaica.
“Goldeneye, and Jamaica itself, offered the illusion that Britain remained an imperial power rather than a fast-contracting empire.”
Fleming wrote a Bond book every winter within six weeks until his death in 1964, according to Blackwell.
Dyer says she remembers often passing a cottage by the water where Fleming wrote when she was a child, and being told not to make any noise. “Mr Fleming is there.”
Fleming said Blackwell’s mother Blanche was the model for “Bond girls” Honey Rider – played by Ursula Andress in the first Bond film, Dr No in 1962 – and Pussy Galore.
Obituaries of Blanche Blackwell, such as the Guardian’s for example, said when she died in 2017 at the age of 104 that she had also been in a relationship with Fleming.
When Fleming’s son died in 1964, Blanche Blackwell asked her son Chris to buy Goldeneye in 1976. Blackwell received well-known friends at Goldeneye, and Sting is said to have written the song Every Breath You Take there, while Apple founder Steve Jobs celebrated his 29th birthday at Goldeneye.
Blackwell writes that he wanted to open a Bond hotel there on “07/07/2007” in tribute to Bond’s agent number. The plan was to open a bar called Shaken, Not Stirred with would-be Bond girls serving drinks.
But then he decided to build something of his own. Today, the property is a luxury resort with several cabins and villas, and prices start at US$578 (RM2,578). Beyoncé and businessman Elon Musk have stayed there, along with other celebrities.
From a neighbouring property of the resort, part of the coast of the northern Jamaican town can be seen.
Oracabessa is no longer a banana port, but a larger hub for the 4,000 residents and local workers. There are at least five churches there, and a few chicken restaurants on the main street. Perhaps the most modern establishment is a smoothie shop.
An idyllic little stretch of beach next to Goldeneye – not 30km east of Laughing Waters Beach, where the iconic scene from Dr. No was filmed, with Andress emerging from the sea in a bikini – is now called James Bond Beach.
It is currently closed for renovation, along with the nearby Moonraker bar, but can still be visited if you “tip” the guard. The beach next to it at a fishing boat landing is also commonly called James Bond Beach. Signs indicate the place as private property.
On one recent Sunday, three young construction workers are sitting there on a wall, smoking and drinking rum with the energy drink Boom, while behind them a small group of American tourists swam in the sea.
Like many other people here, they don’t know why James Bond Beach is called that, nor who Ian Fleming was – 25-year-old Junior Panton only knows that a nearby airport is named after him.
He knows more about Blackwell, the guy who owns the beach and allows everyone to swim there. “Blackwell is a good man, he takes care of the poor people,” he says.
A few hundred metres away, 52-year-old fisherman Milton Cole sits in front of a hut – sheltered from the merciless sun – and watches as two colleagues play a game called Draw with plastic bottle tops on a chessboard.
He used to watch Bond films as a child, he says. The fact that the hero is an agent of the former colonial power does not bother him. Bond fame is positive for Oracabessa, he says: “We are known for something good.” – dpa
