The Rum Diary (Volume II)

I’m sitting down to write this in the house I’ve lived in for nearly 30 years — pretty much half of my life — on an island in the West Indies measuring only three miles by half a mile. The house is a white stucco villa sitting in a good-sized garden with more than 200 tall coconut trees, many of which I’ve grown from baby coconuts — a real point of pride. 

The room has wide planked floors and a fireplace for burning casuarina and driftwood in the winter. It is partly lined with books that I covered in Manila paper years ago, as a way of passing the time and to take my mind off a passing hurricane. The windows are open and the ocean is raging by the beach. Even though there is a stiff breeze and an overhead fan, the air is humid. There is a hurricane to the south of here, off the eastern tip of Cuba, and we are watchful. 

I don’t expect this weather report to earn me much sympathy — in fact, it’s surprising to me that I am even able to write for The Rake. When I was intro-duced to Tom Chamberlin, the Editor-in-Chief, in London in the summer, he said to me, “Your name came up in the magazine a couple of years ago, in an article about your wife. In an editorial meeting we had, someone suggested that living on a coconut island with India Hicks meant you deserved to be punched in the face.” 

Less surprising is that I have my preferred drink next to me. My glass condenses irresponsibly onto a stack of books, and it’s no coincidence that the book at the top is Hunter S. Thompson’s The Rum Diary. The book is much better than the movie, and for my money it is as good as, or even better than, anything Hemingway wrote about the islands. I say that, though I watched the film again the other day, and Bruce Robinson gives Kemp, the flawed hero of the film, the immortal line (again, oddly in an editorial meeting). When his new boss asks him how much he drinks, Kemp replies: “I suppose at the upper end of social... ” 

The important part of this story is that I make the rum... and rum leads to storytelling, so bear with me. 

I was sitting in the corner, nursing a cup of coffee, when a girl came in and asked if I was working there. 

In 1995 I left England, throwing in a good job in advertising. I rented out my flat between the King’s Road and the river, and came to live on the speck of pink sand that is Harbour Island, one of the Family Islands of the Bahamas. 

I took up a job in an eight-room hotel, learned to mix drinks, and did the books once a month with a pencil and a calculator on huge green sheets of ledger paper. I had already spent some months here a few years earlier — failing to write a film script. 

Fridays were spent mostly at Government Dock, meeting the mail boat from Nassau and trying to save cases of fruit and veg from either falling in the bay or going on the ‘wrong’ truck. At nights, after I’d closed the restaurant, I would stop off on the way home at a couple of bars to polish my pool game with the locals and watch the girls dancing. A few tried to teach me to dance, but I think it was mostly just to give the others something to laugh about. 

I lived in the middle of the tiny settlement of Dunmore Town, which takes up the centre of the island and runs from the harbour to the commissioner’s residence, a verandah house of colonial scale that today stands ruined on the top of a hill. My digs a couple of houses down the hill were more modest, but I loved them: they suited the movie of my life that I was setting myself in. I had a two-bedroom apartment above a tearoom in an aquamarine-painted stucco house from the mid 1800s. At the back it overlooked a courtyard set out with tables and chairs for the tearoom, umbrellaed by bougainvillea trees. The front had a slim verandah that was shaded until the late afternoon and caught a little of the breeze off the bay — it was a good place to set up a chair and read with a drink and a cigarette before work, although I never got very far with a book, as everyone passing by would stop to hail me and ask how things were, whether I would be out that night, or to try to sell me grouper or lobster for the hotel. 

I may have lived over a tearoom, but the truth is I was drinking a lot more rum than tea, and more importantly I began to appreciate the difference between good and bad rum. 

I have a friend who likes to say, “All the best stories are love stories”, and later in the spring, life changed in a ‘Casablanca moment’. I was sitting in the corner of the restaurant, nursing a cup of coffee and working on the books, when a girl came in from the street, walked through the room and up to the bar, and asked if I was working there. She was wearing a Ralph Lauren short floral dress and had half-heartedly dyed blue streaks in her hair, like a girl in an Elaine Dundy novel. When the man polishing glasses pointed and said, “He’s sitting right there”, she wheeled round and I recognised her. I had not seen her in 10 years, after we had had the mildest of flirtations when I walked her back to Government House — where she was staying with her mother — after a fancy charity dinner in Nassau.

India Hicks, who is the reason some people think I should now be punched in the face, had come to scuba dive from an island 50 miles away. She was thinking of moving down for the summer to the neighbouring island, where her family had built a holiday house in the seventies. She was beginning to feel as though she needed a break from New York and fashion modelling. I told her I had a spare room, and that if she wanted to stay overnight we could have dinner and she could go diving again the next day, on the Sunday. 

She accepted the invitation and has never left. 

There is a theme developing: a childhood in England reading too much Conrad, Maugham and Hemingway. 

We ‘fell pregnant’ in the summer, and she thought that if we were going to have a family, we’d better have a house — that’s how we came to Hibiscus Hill, where I’m sitting now. I left my job and we started to make a home — in fact, we did a good enough job that Vogue came to photograph India and the house, and another chapter began. 

We came to realise quite soon that when you have a house on a tropical island, you get rediscovered by friends and family — some of whom you never knew you had. When they come out from England or Europe they don’t just stay for a long weekend, they can settle in for weeks. After a while a friend pointed out that a couple of places on the property leant themselves to
building guest cottages, where people could stay and even rent. Otherwise, as he put it, “You can’t have a fuck or a fight without an audience”. 

We built the cottages just in time for Hurricane Floyd to pass over the roof, one of the most destructive storms in decades here. I had never built anything in my life, but with the help of young Bahamians, led by a 25-year-old Scottie Lewis, they stood up well. 

Down on Bay Street, the Landing Hotel, a magical but already rundown house, built in 1800 and owned by friends, did not do so well and was almost wiped out as the roof came off and the house flooded. We put in some money and completely redesigned and decorated the place with Scottie and the same crew from our new houses. We stayed partners in the hotel for five years before selling our share, but in that time The Landing became one of the most celebrated little inns and bars in the region. 

Designing the bar room at The Landing is still one of my great sources of pride. The place desperately needed to reopen for the season, and in two days and nights — fuelled by a case of rum, a bucket of ice and random mixers — we created what still looks today like a film set. A dark-stained-wood bar, a wall of framed photographs of the owner’s Bahamian family in black and white, ceiling fans and planters chairs. 

There is a theme developing in all of this: a childhood in England reading too much Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham, Hemingway and Graham Greene, with an uncle who would appear from time to time with stories of adventures and oddly explained business attempts in the Azores, Ceylon and in far eastern archipelagos. 

Our years have included, as well as children, travel all around the world and journeys through the Caribbean to other islands — Cuba, Jamaica, the Grenadines and other Leeward Islands — and to South America. But we still come back to this tiny barrier island about 60 miles east of Nassau, and after half a lifetime, despite its becoming more built up and chi-chi, we still sense the adventure, intensity, drama, danger and hilarity of island life. 

Does anyone remember life during the Covid pandemic? Life on a small island under almost draconian regulations, with very limited travel options, was especially close to a siege mentality. However, all in all, we had a ‘good’ pandemic — close-knit as a family and as an island community. The bars and liquor stores were occasionally closed in arbitrary ‘emergency law’ moments... these then involved making arrangements with people to meet at random times in the back of hotel bars or shut-up stores, where one would often 

meet a policeman sitting at a table or shuttered bar having a cold beer and completely ignoring the comings and goings — only to hear of the same officer patrolling after curfew and fining people (often for cash spot fines). It was very old school. 

Just before the world shrank for those years, I had a drink with a man called Rodger Nisbet in my study at home. Rodger is a usually sane and sensible Scotsman. He had been visiting the island for years and staying in one of our guesthouses. After training as an architect he became one of those very discreetly successful money managers that Edinburgh excels at producing. He sat in my chaotic study stacked with books, unhung paintings and the ephemera of projects-in-progress and asked me, out of the blue, whether I had ever considered developing a rum. 

His belief was that rum was gaining more interest after gin and tequila had monopolised shelves in the recent past. Premium rum, unlike gin or vodka, could not be made on Wednesday and drunk on Friday, and that was its appeal to some extent — it had a craft and age and the drama of the tropics to it, whereas Scotch whisky has a wet, wild and windy mystique. 

It’s smooth and intriguing without burning, and the aroma is sensational. In many ways it’s like a good first date. 

Rodger said my life here over the past quarter of a century provided a backstory that wouldn’t mean we needed to glue on an artificial DNA to create a ‘brand’ if we wanted to tell a story. It took a quarter of an hour for us to come up with a company name: the Spirits of Dunmore Town, Harbour Island in the Bahamas — a celebration of what I felt the island meant to me. The rum would prove more elusive to create. Here, and not for the last time, we had some strange and good luck. We had been disappointed by a few potential suppliers and blenders, and as much as it can be hard to do business in the Caribbean at the best of times, we had to contend with a shutdown in the hospitality business and travel restrictions. And remember, there is no sugar industry in the Bahamas, either. 

When travel restrictions were lifted, and after six months without leaving the island, I was in England in the summer of 2021 and went to stay in the country with an old friend. He was a big polo player in his day, and has a presence in that world, something I know almost nothing about. On a Sunday morning in June he told me we were going to watch some new clients practising what they call ‘stick and balling’. 

As I was wondering why I wasn’t lying in a bath with the newspaper, we were approached by a group of attractive South Americans, none more so than a woman holding out a box to my friend and saying, “I wanted to offer you this. It’s a rum that my family makes and we are particularly proud of — we have been blending rum for three generations in Colombia”. I asked whether the woman’s family blended rum for others. She said they did, and shortly after that I met her brother in a restaurant in Portobello, and the Riascos family began to prepare samples. You would be hard pressed to meet more considerate and collaborative partners. 

I had always preferred Latin American rums, and this was an extraordinary chance to develop a rum literally to one’s own taste. Remarkably, in the process of getting to a premium aged rum, the stage of blending the liquid was possibly the easiest, despite the distances and logistical nightmares involved in shipping samples to Edinburgh and Harbour Island. 

We arrived at a rum that appeals to aficionados and newcomers alike. Fortnum & Mason even made it their ‘spirit of the month’ last summer. It’s smooth and intriguing without burning, and the aroma is sensational. In many ways it’s like a good first date. 

For many years at Customs House on Harbour Island there was a sign nailed to the wall with a list of rules and regulations. The seventh rule was that there should be ‘NO LOAFING OR IDLE ASSEMBLY’. I went to the police station and asked them for the definition of ‘idle assembly’, and was told it was an ordinance to prevent people from gathering for no purpose. After all this time on the island, I thought that was harsh — a glass of rum and a group of people not doing very much seemed to sum up not only a particular appeal to life here but a frame of mind that might export itself. 

I gave my son Felix a mood board, a collection of images I felt summed up the character of what we were trying to articulate — something of that Ralph Lauren-Errol Flynn-Cary Grant-on-the- deck-of-a-schooner theme. 

It struck me that most rum packaging seemed to fall into a few schools: a festival of tropical colours depicting fauna and flora (banana leaves and parrots, mostly); treasure maps and piracy (Yo ho ho!); and an assertion of a group’s ‘premium-ness’ via heavy and large decanter-style bottles with ornate gold lettering and glass stoppers. Others still had gone for a sort of contemporary ‘bath and beauty’, short, stubby bottle with chunky sans serif faces printed vertically with delineated boxes with batch numbers and seals and signatures in them. These are all valid and sensible ideas, but it seemed crowded territory to us, so we settled on my boy’s two-colour label: mostly 

a black engraving on very good paper stock with an illustration of a seaplane banking over a line of palms as it prepares to land between the reef and the beach. It’s adapted from the endplate of a book with stories of the islands, which was privately published between the wars by an American in Paris, and which we found in the house when we bought it. 

We use the most widely available single malt Scotch bottle, as a tip of the hat to a time when people would have put their rum in the most commonly available vessel to hand. 

Idle Assembly is made from five- to 20-year-old rums aged in American white oak, ex-bourbon barrels and is made for sipping. In London you’ll find it at Wiltons, Maison François, The Arlington, 5 Hertford Street and Oswald’s, and if you’re by Berkeley Square you can source it at Hedonism Wines. Rum this good is made for sipping, but I’ve also learned that even the most elaborate cocktails taste better with good rum. I make it a policy to have a simple lime daiquiri on a daily basis. 

We made 6,500 bottles of our rum in the first batch. We stood in the bonded warehouse in Scotland where we bottled it by hand during Thanksgiving of 2022. We sold that batch in the U.K., the Bahamas and the U.S., and now we have a second batch, of 10,000 bottles. As my friend says, “All the best stories are love stories”. Our rum is made with 30 years of island life and a lot more stories. 

Enjoy your idle moments. 

Read the full story in Issue 97, available now.