THE MAN WHO SAVED BRITAIN
by Simon Winder
Picador, £14.99; 300pp
JAMES BOND HAS ABOUT AS much to do with the intelligence profession as Billy Bunter has with public schools. Bond is no spy, he is a mere licensed killer, who after a brief meeting with M, a visit to Q to pick up the gadgets, sets off with no more mission than to destroy.
“Good juicy violence . . . the girls as wild and luscious as ever,” to quote from The Times review, on the back of my 1962 edition of For Your Eyes Only. Next year, with its magic 007 number, may see us inundated with Bond reminiscences, but I doubt whether any will make such exaggerated claims for their hero as Simon Winder’s The Man Who Saved Britain.
From his boyhood obsession with Bond, Winder develops the thesis that in the gloom after the Second World War, “as a large part of the planet slipped from Britain’s grasp, one man silently maintained the country’s reputation and morale . . . secretly, in a luxury hotel somewhere in the world, one man was slipping a .25 Beretta into his chamois leather shoulder holster . . . putting on his dinner jacket and going out into the night to save their world”.
In fact, poor Bond is little more than a prop to Winder’s obsession with the evils of Empire — “the entire Raj was built on one long bloodbath of . . . cheap victories cheered on merrily at home” — and his desire to denigrate Britain’s intelligence services.
The first modern spies were indeed identified with Empire. They were those who played the “Great Game” for imperial stakes on the North West Frontier of India. But they were real people, some of them coming to ends that even Largo, Rosa Klebb and the cat-eating Oddjob might have hesitated to inflict. It was the spies of the Indian Political Service, in direct descent from Sleeman and Malcolm, the infiltrators and destroyers of the Thuggi gangs who infested the north Indian roads, who gave rise to the first great modern spy story — Kipling’s Kim, published in the last gasp of the Victorian era.
When I was an archivist in the India Office Library I read some of the reports of the real agents who provided that mass of “information received” on which the India Office acted. It was them and Kim, not the cardboard cutout, two-dimensional James Bond that I had in mind when in the late 1960s, in the grounds of the British High Commission in New Delhi, I received the tap on the shoulder that was the form of recruitment that MI5 practised in those days. No wonder Simon Winder regarded the possibility of an approach from MI6 as “risible” if Bond were his model of a British intelligence officer.
But neither Kim nor that other great pre-First World War spy story, Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands, can be regarded as precursors to Bond. They are too entirely real. Bond’s true ancestor is their contemporary, Duckworth Drew of the Secret Service — the creation of the British novelist William le Queux. Duckworth Drew, unlike Bond, is a spy. “One of the most remarkable of men, possessing shrewdness, tact, cunning and daring that are utterly amazing . . . he is held in fear by the diplomatic circle in Europe and is heartily hated by all the secret Chancelleries . . . Upon him rests the onerous and most perilous task of obtaining the well-guarded secrets of other nations and combating the machinations of England’s enemies.”
“Of perfect manner and a born gentleman,” Duckworth Drew smoked Russian cigarettes, carried drugged cigars and other gadgets so that he could knock out his enemy long enough to read the contents of the secret treaty lying on the desk, and answered in the Foreign Office to the Marquis of Macclesfield, whom he called MM. He had, it is true, no truck with women, being too occupied in escaping the clutches of his deadly enemy Otto Krempelstein of the German Secret Service, also a dab hand with cigars, although his were explosive ones — a man to make Krebs stop saying “Wundershon” and stand to his laurels.
The direct resemblance, though, is not only between Duckworth Drew and Bond but also between their two authors, Le Queux and Fleming. Fleming, a member of the political and artistic elite from youth, newspaper man, wartime naval intelligence officer, omnipresent in influential circles, became finally a Jamaica-based offshore cynic. Le Queux, a newspaper editor, aviation pioneer and diplomat, collaborated with Field Marshal Roberts in alerting Britain to the danger of war and did much to fill his fellow countrymen with the (by no means unjustified) spy mania that led to the formation in 1909 of what became MI5 and MI6.
Those two agencies, far from being “dangerous and depressing farces”, as Winder would have it, have over the years prevented a great many potentially disastrous events and continue to do so, principally through careful and professional analysis of large masses of information frequently gained at considerable risk, of whose accuracy it is rarely possible to be completely certain.
Le Queux it was who brought the gadget into spying, to be much exploited by such writers as Edgar Wallace and finally crowned in a frenzy of airborne boats and flying cars by Bond. It is true that for Duckworth Drew, motor cars went along in a more or less normal fashion and Krempelstein preferred horses. But when it came to dodgy cigars or chairs in which British citizens could be strapped upside-down while foreign villains skilfully slipped powerful explosives into adjacent gas lamps, Le Queux was masterly.
It was with John Buchan that the marvellous machines arrived, from the monoplane under the direction of a German who “lisped in his speech . . . and could hood his eyes like a hawk” to the six-cylinder Daimler in which Richard Hannay nearly crosses the Alps in pursuit of a “great open car” in which the Graf von Shwabing has imprisoned his future wife. Buchan too gives us the ladies — Hilda von Einem — certainly no Octopussy, more akin perhaps to Elinor Glyn, with whom to sin on a tiger skin. Fleming has nothing to match these splendid accoutrements to adventure on the grand scale and his villains are for the most part gross businessmen with vulgar tastes and his women at best little more than luscious. It was Buchan who brought the glamour into the professional trade of international spying, and Fleming who converted it into mere celebrity.
My own favourite spy? A woman, of course, and a real one. Spy and author Aphra Behn. Employed by Charles II as a secret agent in Antwerp, in 1667 she smuggled out the news that the Dutch Admiral de Ruyter was preparing an attack on the Thames and the Medway.
In the absence of a Joint Intelligence Committee and of gentlemen in shirtsleeves in permanent session on Downing Street sofas, the news failed to reach the highest quarters. The Dutch fleet arrived in force, leaving Sir William Batten, at dinner with Samuel Pepys, to utter the memorable words “By God, I think the Devil shits Dutchmen!” A remark Winder would no doubt see as a sign of “the arrogance and insularity that have been our stock in trade for centuries”.
