James Bond - The Secret History. Sean Egan

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       A CONVOLUTED CREATOR

      When in the mid-1960s the James Bond motion-picture franchise began taking the world by storm, a curious aspect of the craze was that it was perceived as part of a modernistic and classless zeitgeist. The swaggering, rule-bucking, increasingly gadget-wielding secret agent of the Bond films was felt to be implicitly in tune with the same reformist trend as the Beatles, Swinging London, the contraceptive pill and civil-rights demonstrations. As the News of the World put it in 1964, Bond was ‘as typical of the age as Beatlemania, juvenile delinquency or teenagers in boots’.

      It was curious because Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, was a man who simply could not have been more Establishment. In fact, Fleming’s biographer and onetime colleague John Pearson agrees that he would probably have even hated the term ‘franchise’. Pearson states of Fleming, ‘He was very much what you’d expect from his background.’ That background was quintessentially upper-class.

      Ian Lancaster Fleming was born on 28 May 1908. He had an older brother, two younger brothers and a younger half-sister. His father Valentine was a Member of Parliament at a time when that was largely a gentleman’s profession. When his father was killed in action during World War I, his Times obituary was written by no less a figure than Winston Churchill. Ian Fleming attended Eton College, the quintessential English ‘public school’ (by which is meant, private boarding school steeped in arcane tradition) and Sandhurst, the nation’s premium military academy. He also attended Munich University and the University of Geneva. Fleming excelled in languages, being proficient in German, French and Russian. His career in banking thereafter is also part of an archetypal ‘toff’ trajectory of the period, underlined by the fact that his grandfather founded the bank Robert Fleming and Company.

      Yet at the same time Fleming was not a clichéd product of his privileged upbringing. His mother pulled him out of both Eton and Sandhurst for his ‘fast’ ways. His stint as a stockbroker was not a success. ‘I must do something that entertains me,’ he told the BBC of the fact that ‘I didn’t get on very well there.’ He was hedonistic in the manner one would expect of someone with far fewer prospects in life, indulging his vices to such a degree that he was cut down shockingly young. Moreover, when, in August 1963, he appeared on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs radio programme, his choice of favourite pieces of music contained no classical works but instead was comprised exclusively of offerings by Édith Piaf, The Ink Spots, Rosemary Clooney and other examples of what most of his class would have dismissed as low culture.

      Prior to his stint in banking, Fleming worked for Reuters. He didn’t stay with the famous international news agency longer than three years, but his dissatisfaction was with the money, not the job. He said, ‘I had a wonderful time in Reuters, was a correspondent in Moscow and Berlin and all over the place. And of course I learnt there the straightforward writing style that everybody wants to have if they’re going to write books.’ Fleming eventually returned to journalism, beginning in 1945 a long-term relationship with The Sunday Times. In the half-decade preceding that, he – like so many men of his generation – had found his life and career taking a detour into the service of King and Country.

      There have been a hilarious number of docudramas positing Fleming as a man of action during World War II, among them Goldeneye and Spymaker, both subtitled The Secret Life of Ian Fleming. In point of fact, Fleming’s war was axiomatically unheroic and sedentary. He was assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence, John Godfrey. He worked his way up the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve from lieutenant to commander, but never stepped off dry land in that capacity. He would later give James Bond the same rank and background, his creation conceding in the book Thunderball that he had been ‘supercargo’ and ‘a chocolate sailor’. It’s quite true that in his work in Room 39 of the Admiralty – the fabled nerve centre of the Naval Intelligence Division – Fleming was involved in numerous important operations and schemes involving intrigue and cunning. One was a plan that was an accidental precursor to Operation Mincemeat, the famous Allied plot to mislead the enemy with bogus documents planted on a corpse. In 1941, he even wrote the original charter of the Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. However, he was almost never allowed to participate in the field, not least because it ran the risk of capture and valuable information being extracted from him by torture.

      Nonetheless, Fleming adored his work in Room 39. Pearson says of the Navy, ‘That was one thing he really did worship. That was the only organisation he belonged to which he really enjoyed and respected.’

      After the war, Fleming became foreign manager of the Kemsley newspaper group, owned by The Sunday Times. It was a job for which he was qualified on more than one level. Pearson explains, ‘He ran this press agency, a foreign news service called Mercury which he built up in the war as part of the British secret service effort within America with a lot of old secret service friends and so on.’ Some might observe that this sounds as though Fleming was playing a dual role as newspaper employee and intelligence operative. Pearson: ‘There was certainly an element of that.’

      Pearson also says, ‘Ultimately it didn’t work because the competition with Reuters was all too tough and Mercury faded. That’s when, to keep him happy, he was given a job at [the gossip column] “Atticus”.’ Fleming would also be given other tasks by the paper, including foreign assignments. In fact, for six years after his first published Bond novel, Fleming continued to work full-time for The Sunday Times.

      Not that that day job was particularly onerous. Pearson says Fleming ‘had a very cushy time at The Sunday Times’ because proprietor Lord Kemsley and his wife ‘were extremely fond of him’. Moreover, the fact that Fleming married the ex-wife of Lord Rothermere, proprietor of the Daily Mail, served, says Pearson, to grant Fleming ‘a sort of ex-facie role as almost a member of the newspaper aristocracy within The Sunday Times. He was treated much better than most journalists were. He had longer holidays and so forth.’ Indeed. Fleming negotiated a contract that allowed him to avoid the bitter English winters. He spent his annual two-month leave in Jamaica. He had fallen in love with the Caribbean island – then still a British colony – when he had occasion to visit it during the war. He bought a patch of land with its own private cove and there built a three-bedroom house, which he named Goldeneye, either after one of his wartime operations from 1940 or Carson McCullers’s novel Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), depending on which story he felt like telling.

      Little has been written about Fleming’s journalism down the years, and his newspaper writing has not been the subject of any mainstream anthology. (An omnibus volume titled Talk of the Devil appeared in 2008 but only as part of a deluxe centenary box set of his corpus retailing at a wallet-straining minimum of £2,000.) His travelogue Thrilling Cities (1963) was enjoyable enough, if hardly substantial, while The Diamond Smugglers