The man with the golden gun

Lance Neita, Contributor

THE CONTROVERSY surrounding the renaming of the Boscobel Airport should have been expected. After all, Ian Fleming was not a local, and the christening would have had deeper national impact if the airport had been named after a Jamaican.

We could have much easier justified it 50 years ago when the James Bond films were heading the box office hits around the globe.

The theme music with its distinctive guitar sounds, the code name 007, the bestselling books, and the dashing Sean Connery, were the rage back then, and there was everything Jamaican about Bond.

Fleming is not as well known as his mythical secret agent, hence the difficulty in accepting his name. Still, he is no alien. The man spent his winter months in Jamaica over a 20-year period, and wrote the world famous series from his desk at his Goldeneye villa in St Mary which he purchased in the 1950's.

The earlier novels, Dr No, Octopussy, Live and Let Die, The Man with the Golden Gun, were partly filmed in Jamaica and generated millions of dollars worth of publicity for our tourism industry. He also wrote numerous articles on Jamaica in some of the world's leading travel magazines, and got married right here, in the Port Maria church hall, to Lady Rothermere.

Numerous endorsements

During the 1950s and '60s Goldeneye was the hub for an international circle of celebrities and aristocrats who made Jamaica their vacation playground. Fancy such names as Elizabeth Taylor, Errol Flynn, Lord Beaverbrook, British Prime Minister Anthony Eden, Noel Coward, David Niven, Katherine Hepburn, James Mason, Sir Lawrence Olivier, Alec Guinness, all endorsing Jamaica as a high holiday resort.

Stories abound about the parties, jaunts and mischief that Europe's and Hollywood's best got up to along St Mary's lush sea coast.

Jamaican journalist, the late Morris Cargill relates the hilarious story in his book Jamaica Farewell of Britain's Opposition Leader Hugh Gaitskell trying to avoid the British press while on a visit to Goldeneye in the late 1950s.

Gaitskell, in the act of innocently driving Ian's wife to the post office, took off in panic when he spotted the paparazzi camped out at Goldeneye's gate. According to Cargill, the man who nearly became England's prime minister ended up in a Mr Johnson's hardware store in Port Maria, hiding behind a keg of nails, demanding that his friends Cargill and Fleming come to rescue him.

The Jamaican inte-rest in our airports should not be taken for granted. Traveling to Sangster or Manley is always an occasion. Palisadoes (now Norman Manley) used to be a 'must stop' for school tours from the country. And in the 1950s it was the scene of high drama as truckloads of country folk would descend in droves on the airport to see off family and friends migrating to England.

More thought needed

The entire village would board the trucks and at the airport, the crowds would gather by the tarmac fencing to wave goodbye to the BOAC flight, with the girlfriends competing to see who could put up the most vigorous and sustained bawling as proof of the strongest romantic attachment.

So don't take our fixation or fascination lightly. Our airports are our gateways and remind us of family gatherings, farewells and joyful reunions. The waving gallery upstairs the Manley airport used to be the last post where we mixed sad partings with the cocktails available from the Horizon bar, and on many occasions happily waved off the wrong plane irregardless of flight number or destination.

It's too late now to turn back the clock. There is good reason from a strictly tourism point of view to go ahead with our friend Mr Fleming. But with a little more imagination and with all due respect to the Fleming family, who we may have unfortunately and needlessly embarrassed, we could have considered a Tacky, a Bob Marley, a Louise Bennett, or a Horace Clarke.

Or the enormous potential of a James Bond or 007 Airport as a name catcher. Come man, think.

Comments to columns@gleanerjm.com or lanceneita@hotmail.com.