IAN FLEMING

007

The London-to-Dover coach is reputed to have had the number 007. For years, he lived a couple of hundred yards away from Victoria Coach Station. He was also partial to playing golf at Royal St George's in Kent.

A Bachelor's Final Distraction

Ian Fleming was overawed by the abilities and success of his older brother Peter: whereas Peter studied at the University of Oxford, Ian only became an officer cadet at Sandhurst; Peter became a famous travel writer, Ian became just a stockbroker; Peter married Celia Johnson, who was a star of stage and screen, Ian was wary of marriage.

In 1935 Ian visited Le Touquet in France in order to gamble at its casino and to partake of the town's nightlife. There, he met Anne Lady O Neill. Following the outbreak of the Second World War, he joined Naval Intelligence. It soon became apparent that at last he had discovered his m tier. While still serving, he made remarks that indicated he was planning to write a novel that would be informed by what he had been experiencing during his service.¹

Lord O Neill was killed fighting in the conflict. His widow indicated to Fleming that she would be amenable to marrying him. He held back from making the commitment. Therefore, she wed the newspaper proprietor Viscount Rothermere instead.

With the coming of peace, Fleming accepted a job from Viscount Kemsley as The Sunday Times newspaper's foreign manager. This involved him running a network of foreign correspondents. Lady Rothermere became pregnant by Fleming. The child died soon after birth. Lord Rothermere became aware of the affair and tried to have Lord Kemsley quash it. Her ladyship became pregnant by Fleming a second time. Her husband divorced her. In January 1952 she joined Fleming in Jamaica. Two months later, the couple married.

Having long been a bachelor, Fleming had found the prospect of marriage to be somewhat daunting. He had had to go through a process of re-adjustment. In the weeks before the wedding, to provide himself with a distraction, he had turned to writing the novel that he long thought about composing. In part, Fleming may have been seeking to ingratiate himself with his prospective bride's literary friends.² His sibling rivalry with his brother Peter may also have been a factor. The latter had written The Sixth Column (1952), a spy story that had satirised security service bureaucracy.

Within four weeks Ian had finished the manuscript of Casino Royale. Its lively depiction of sex and violence was informed by his taste for American pulp thrillers and movies. The material differed from pre-1939 spy novels. The latter had featured gentlemen amateurs as their heroes; in the former Bond was a professional.

In 1953 Casino Royale was published. Anne's friends indicated to Fleming that they had enjoyed the book. They were not always so polite about his output. Upon one subsequent occasion, he returned home unnoticed to discover that one of his wife's soir es was still in progress. He realised that extracts from his latest novel were being read out aloud. These prompted outbursts of laughter that it had not been the author's intention to prompt. Undetected, he went quietly to bed.

Fleming appears not to have enjoyed his success. His wife termed his books pornography and horror comics . By Moonraker, which was his third novel, he believed that he was running short of inspiration. He does not appear to have gained any pleasure from the fact that the novels were going to be made into films. If the books are read sequentially, it appears that Bond is having a protracted mental breakdown. It was one that could be regarded as paralleling that of the British Establishment.

The movie Dr No (1962) was released shortly after Jamaican independence. The film does not make a single reference to the event. Black people were largely portrayed as servants. In part, Sean Connery had been cast in the role because he could portray a certain classlessness. In many of the Jamaican scenes he looks ill at ease.

John Campbell was the chairman of the food company Booker McConnell, a business that had considerable interests in the West Indies. He knew Fleming socially. In 1964 Booker paid Fleming 100,000 for a 51% holding in Glidrose Productions, the company that held the copyright to the James Bond novels.

Fleming was unhappy about how little progress his agent was making in selling the overseas rights to the Bond books. At a dinner party he mentioned this to the thriller writer Eric Ambler, who suggested that he should consider using the services of the literary agent Peter Janson-Smith (1922-2016). Following Fleming's death Janson-Smith continued to be involved in the management of the writer's literary estate. He oversaw the commissioning of the post-Fleming Bond novels. Kingsley Amis wrote Colonel Sun (1969), using the pseudonym, Robert Markham. In 1969 Booker established the Booker Prize for literature. This became one of the English language s foremost literary prizes.

In 1981 Licence Renewed, the first John Gardner-written Bond novel was published. It was followed by thirteen more, of which COLD (1996) was the last. Of these, the writer regarded The Man From Barbarossa (1991) as being his best. He also wrote novelisations of Licence To Kill (1989) and Golden Eye (1995). Mr Gardner was a former Anglican priest who had become a Marine and then an alcoholic. At rock bottom, he had worked as a drama critic.

Ian Fleming Publications runs the Ian Fleming literary estate. The company took to commissioning well-established novelists to write Bond books. Sebastian Faulks's Devil May Care (2008) was the 24^th authorised novel to have been published since Fleming's death.

Location: Carlyle Mansions, Chelsea Embankment, SW3 5LS (purple, pink)

22a Ebury Street, SW1W 0LU. Fleming moved into the flat in 1936. (red, blue)

Royal Avenue, SW3 4QF. Bond was described as living in Chelsea in an (unnamed) square off the Kings Road Fleming was probably referring to Royal Avenue. (red, pink)

See Also: M.I.6, The Hothouse

Website: www.ianflemingcentre.com www.themanbookerprize.com

¹. Fleming's first published work was The Black Daffodil, a collection of romantic poems. He became embarrassed by it and is believed to have destroyed every copy of the book.

². The likes of Cyril Connolly, Peter Quennell, and Evelyn Waugh.

Character Bases

Goldfinger

In Goldfinger (1959) the character Auric Goldfinger is a gold smuggler who seeks to detonate a nuclear bomb inside Fort Knox in order to render the United States's gold reserves unusable and thereby increase the value of his own bullion. There is a theory that Fleming based his creation on Gustav Steinhauer, a German spy who ran agents in Britain before the First World War. William Melville, the head of the British Secret Service Bureau concluded that his counterpart had devised a plan to blow up the Bank of England in order that the United Kingdom should be unable to utilise its gold reserves and thus bankrupt the country at a critical juncture.

Charles Engelhard

The eponymous villain of Goldfinger (1959) was based upon Charles Engelhard, who owned Engelhard Minerals & Chemicals Corporation. The businessman made his fortune by importing precious metals, in some instances he may have been a bit vague in his observation of export restrictions. He spent freely on art and racehorses. His steeds included the Derby winner Nijinsky. Socially, he mixed with the likes of the Kennedys. In London, he banked with Robert Fleming & Company.

Auric Goldfinger

Fleming named the character after the architect Ern Goldfinger, who had been a pupil of Le Corbusier. To what extent this was a response to his indirect knowledge of the man or to the man's architecture is not clear. Goldfinger had married a member of the (Crosse &) Blackwell family, whose cousin was a frequent golfing companion of the writer. The architect decided to sue. Fleming responded by threatening to change the character's name to Goldprick. The matter did not reach the courts. Fleming's publisher paid Goldfinger's costs and gave him six copies of the book.

Location: 2 Willow Road, Hampstead, NW3 1^th. Goldfinger's Hampstead home. It is now owned by the National Trust.

See Also: THE BANK OF ENGLAND; M.I.5

Website: www.nationaltrust.org.uk/2-willow-road

Vesper Lynd and Tatiana Romanova

There is a theory that Fleming partly based the characters Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale and Tatiana Romanova in From Russia With Love on the enigmatic Polish-born Special Operations Executive spy Krystyna Skarbek. She was stabbed to death in 1953. Her corpse was discovered in a hotel in South Kensington.

Location: The Shellbourne Hotel, 1 Lexham Gardens, W8 5JL (blue, turquoise)

M

M was based upon Admiral John Godfrey, the head of Naval Intelligence. During the Second World War he was in favour of employing beautiful girls within N.I.. This was because he felt that that they would not feel a need to boast of what they were doing to their boyfriends.

Miss Moneypenny

Through working in Naval Intelligence (Victoire) Paddy Bennett (later Dame Paddy Ridsdale) (1921-2009) came to know Fleming. He is reputed to have used her as the model for Miss Moneypenny

Q

Ian Fleming used Charles Fraser-Smith as the basis for the character of the technology expert Q. The fellow was orphaned as a child. He was raised by a family who had been missionaries. As a young man, he worked as one himself in a remote part of Morocco. The lack of material resources there meant that, upon occasion, he had to improvise solutions to problems from unlikely items. In 1939 he returned to England. He was invited to give a sermon at a church in Leeds. During this, he had cause to recount some of his adventures.

In the congregation were two men who were officials in the Ministry of Supply. They appreciated that Fraser-Smith was a man of exceptional practical ingenuity and spoke to him subsequently. He was hired by the Ministry ostensibly to be part of its Clothing & Textile Department (Dept. C.T.6). His activities for it were so highly classified that neither his secretary nor his manager knew what he did. At the direction of M.I.6, he fabricated equipment both for British prisoners of war to help them to escape and for members of the Special Operations Executive who were to be parachuted into Occupied Europe. For the latter he devised ways of secreting miniaturised cameras within everyday objects.

For the most part Fraser-Smith produced items to order, however, a small proportion were of his own independent creation. These, he dubbed Q gadgets in reference to the Q ships that had been deployed during the First World War. They had been merchant vessels that had carried concealed heavy armaments. They had appeared to be lightly-armed as freighters so that German submarine commanders would mistake them for easy prey. His own inventions included: a hollow jacket button for concealing documents (this had a front with a left-hand screw, he believed that the failure of it to yield would not prompt anyone examining to try to turn it in the other direction); garlic-flavoured chocolate so that agents who were dropped into France or Spain could seem to have been eating the local diet;¹ and maps that were printed upon silk handkerchiefs that could only be read following the application of a particular chemical solution.²

Following the war Fraser-Smith became a dairy farmer in Devon.

Location: Queen Anne's Chambers, 45 Tothill Street, SW1H 9LQ (red, orange)

¹. Garlic might have been a simpler means.

². Urine.

Dust Jackets

From 1957 onwards the Bond dust-jackets were designed by Richard Chopping (1917-2008). He received the contract after his friend Francis Bacon had recommended him to Anne Fleming.

Scrambled Eggs

Fleming had a great liking for scrambled eggs. It was one of his traits that he bestowed upon Bond. There are only three of the original novels in which they do not make an appearance. A proofreader is supposed to have commented that it would be easy to find the spy in a foreign country. All a person would need was to go restaurants and asked had anyone ordered scrambled eggs.

See Also: FOOD Eggs

David Backhouse 2024