The original M may, in fact, have been Z. “Colonel Z”, Lieutenant Colonel Sir
Claude Dansey, was Deputy Chief of SIS and head of the shadowy Z network.
The bespectacled Dansey was witty, spiteful, charming and slightly mad. He
was first recruited as a spy during the Boer War, and ended up a pivotal
figure in the British secret service. Two famous men who worked in wartime
intelligence gave very different assessments of Colonel Z: Malcolm
Muggeridge called Dansey “the only professional in MI6”; the historian Hugh
Trevor-Roper, however, considered him “an utter shit, corrupt, incompetent,
but with a certain low cunning”.
Another contender as the original M was the strange MI5 spymaster Maxwell
Knight, who ran a subsection of the security service responsible for rooting
out potential subversives in Britain. Knight was one of the first to warn
that the secret services were being infiltrated by communist moles. He was a
man of many parts, most of them odd and quite incompatible: in addition to
running a huge spy ring, he was a novelist, a jazz saxophonist who had been
taught by Sidney Bechet, and an occultist who befriended and recruited the
bizarre black magician Aleister Crowley. He was also an obsessive naturalist
who kept snakes in the bath and wrote such definitive works as How to
Keep a Gorilla. Maxwell Knight signed all his memos “M”, and was
certainly well known to Fleming. After the war, Knight would move
effortlessly from a career in spying to a new career as a naturalist, ending
his life as “Uncle Max”, a much-loved BBC presenter of nature programmes for
children.
There is one final intriguing hypothesis, advanced by John Pearson, Fleming’s
first biographer, to the effect that M might conceivably be modelled on
Fleming’s mother. Certainly, “M” was Fleming’s nickname for his mother from
early childhood. She, like M, was by turns strict and indulgent, loved and
feared.
The principal model for the much-loved Moneypenny character appears to have
been a Miss Kathleen Pettigrew, who was the personal assistant to Stewart
Menzies, director general of MI6, or “C”. In the first draft of Casino
Royale, M’s secretary was “Miss Pettavel” or “Petty”, but Fleming
clearly realised that was too close to reality, and changed it. Miss
Pettigrew was something of a legend in espionage circles: anyone attempting
to gain access to C had first to pass through his terrifying secretary, who
was brisk, efficient and not remotely seductive. One former colleague
described her as a “formidable, grey-haired lady with the square jaw of the
battleship type”.
Vera Atkins, executive officer with “F” (French) Section of the Special
Operations Executive (SOE), the espionage and sabotage organisation
organised by Churchill to “set Europe ablaze”, was described in her New
York Times obituary in 2000 as “widely believed to have inspired the
character of Miss Moneypenny”. Another strong possibility is Victoire
“Paddy” Bennett, who worked as a secretary in Room 39 and knew Fleming well.
Paddy Bennett once described her former colleague, somewhat tartly, as
“definitely James Bond, in his mind”. She went on to marry Sir Julian
Ridsdale, the long-serving MP for Harwich, and was made a Dame of the
British Empire for her work with the Parliamentary Wives Club – a role that
has a distinctly Moneypennyish ring to it.
Fleming’s villains, like his heroes, are patchworks of different people, names
and traits. Le Chiffre, the Benzedrine-sniffing villain of Casino Royale,
is believed to be based on Aleister Crowley, who gained notoriety in
inter-war Britain as “the Wickedest Man in the World”. Crowley was a
bisexual, sado-masochistic drug addict. A master of Thelemic mysticism (“Do
what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law”), he specialised in
mountaineering, interpreting the Ouija board, orgies and thrashing his
lovers. The press simultaneously adored and hated him. Crowley made Le
Chiffre seem positively sane.
Fleming plundered his school register ruthlessly in the quest for names. Hugo
Drax, the villain in Moonraker, was named after the magnificently
festooned Admiral Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, an
old friend of Fleming’s. Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the super-villain without
earlobes, was probably named after another Old Etonian, Tom Blofeld, whose
son Henry Blofeld is the much-loved BBC cricket commentator. Francisco
“Pistols” Scaramanga, the triple-nippled gunman in The Man
with the Golden Gun, was named after yet another school contemporary,
George Scaramanga.
Some people objected to seeing their names in a Bond novel, most notably Ernö
Goldfinger, the distinguished modernist architect. Fleming is said to have
disapproved of Goldfinger’s love of concrete and the destruction of
Victorian houses to make way for tower blocks, and so used his name for one
of his most memorable evil-doers:
Auric Goldfinger, the gold-obsessed treasurer of Smersh. When Ernö obtained a
proof copy of Goldfinger, he was enraged: Ernö was a visionary 6ft
architect and Auric is a murderous 5ft megalomaniac. There is also a whiff
of anti-Semitism in Fleming’s depiction of a Jewish billionaire with a gold
fixation. The real Goldfinger threatened to halt publication. Equally angry,
Fleming thought his publisher should insert an erratum slip, changing
Goldfinger to “Goldprick” throughout the book. Fleming’s publishers
eventually agreed that, in advertising the book, the name Goldfinger would
be coupled with the name Auric wherever possible. Even so, for the rest of
his life Ernö Goldfinger was plagued by people calling him on the telephone
and saying, in the voice of Sean Connery, “Goldfinger? This is 007.”
Bond’s women were echoes of Fleming’s women, and perhaps one woman above all.
Muriel Wright was 26 and a fresh-faced English rose when Fleming met her in
1935. “Mu”, as he called her, was an expert rider, skied beautifully and was
one of Britain’s foremost polo players. She came from the finest landed
British bloodstock. With an explosion of blonde hair that earned her the
nickname “Honeytop”, she was also exceptionally beautiful and refreshingly
unconventional. She was rich enough not to have to work, but nonetheless
made a good deal of money modelling sportswear and, almost scandalously,
swimsuits on the beach at Monte Carlo. Muriel loved horses, dogs, parties,
gossip and fun; but most of all she loved Ian Fleming, to the point of
self-abasement. She would caddy for him on the golf links, and rush to
collect his custom-made cigarettes when he ran out. One of his friends
called her Fleming’s “slave”.
Fleming enjoyed showing Mu off to his friends, and annoying his family by
introducing this slightly scatty beauty into weekend house parties. But he
undoubtedly treated her very badly. Fleming was consistently unfaithful,
and, unlike some of his lovers, she minded. It is said that her lack of
intellect stood in the way of his commitment, but then there is no evidence
Fleming considered brains to be an attractive quality in a woman, and quite
a lot to suggest otherwise.
Then suddenly, like some character in a Bond movie, she was dead. On March 14,
1944, Muriel Wright returned to her flat in Eaton Mews (having just
delivered Fleming his weekly package of cigarettes) and went to bed. That
night, there was an air raid: a chunk of masonry hurtled through her window,
striking Mu in the temple and killing her at once. Fleming was called from
the card table to identify the body. He was distraught, and wracked with
remorse at the way he had treated her. Mu, he reflected sadly, had been “too
good to be true”.
The quality of being “too good to be true” is, of course, what distinguishes
the Bond Girls. Muriel Wright has a claim to be the fons et origo of the
species: pliant and undemanding, beautiful but innocent, outdoorsy,
physically tough, implicitly vulnerable and uncomplaining, and then
tragically dead, before or soon after marriage.
Fleming’s plots, like his characters, are rooted in reality, emerging in many
instances directly from the Second World War and the Cold War. Fleming was
quick to point out that the reality of the espionage game was stranger than
any fiction he could invent: “My plots are fantastic, while often being
based on truth. They go wildly beyond the probable, but not, I think, beyond
the possible.”
The most pleasing irony is that MI6 itself is happy to blur the question of
where James Bond ends and real life begins. The official MI6 website cannot
bring itself to deny its greatest asset, pointing out that recruits will
enjoy “a stimulating and rewarding career which, like Bond’s, will be in the
service of their country”. James Bond is an MI6 recruiter. A real spy
agency, harnessing fiction, based on fact, to recruit real spies: no one
would have been more flattered than Ian Fleming.
For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond by Ben Macintyre is
published by Bloomsbury on April 7 to coincide with an exhibition of the
same name at the Imperial War Museum from April 17 to March 1, 2009, and is
available from BooksFirst priced £18 (RRP £20), free p&p on
0870 1608080; www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
