Last week's Times featured the obituary of one Commander James Bond. Like many people called James Bond, the Australian naval officer frequently had to deal with jokes and bemused reactions when giving his name, but it seems he was happy to go along with them. Indeed, his name brought him invitations to film premières, offers of martinis shaken, not stirred, and requests for autographs.
Commander Bond's experience mirrors that of the original James Bond, the ornithologist whose name Ian Fleming borrowed for his fictional secret agent. In her book, How 007 Got His Name (Collins, 1966), Mary Wickham Bond, wife of James Bond, wrote how airport customs officials would playfully ask James Bond (the ornithologist) whether he was carrying any firearms, or would fast-track him through customs – the sort of 'red carpet' treatment the fictional Bond enjoys at the start of the novel of Live and Let Die.
Anyone called James Bond no doubt has similar stories (a topic explored in Mattt Bowyer's documentary, The Other Fellow). To what extent Commander Bond's experiences differed from those of other James Bonds because of his rank, which is as much part of the fictional spy's identity as his name, is an interesting question and worth exploring.
What also interests me about Commander Bond's obituary is that the headline is so familiar. It is, after all, the fourth time we've seen it in print and on the screen.
The fictional Bond's obituary in the book of You Only Live Twice (published, of course, in the Times) reads 'Commander James Bond', as it does in the films Tomorrow Never Dies and Skyfall. In the film of You Only Live Twice, the 'death' of James Bond is presented as a newspaper story, rather than an obituary, but in common with the obituary of the real Commander James Bond, the fictional Bond is wearing his naval uniform.
An obituary in the Times caught my eye recently. It marked the death, aged 95, of Lieutenant-Commander Stevenson (Steven) Moir Mackenzie, who served as a naval officer of the Secret Flotillas during the Second World War and subsequently as an officer in MI6. We learnt something else about him too: he was a James Bond fan.
Steven Mackenzie's clandestine wartime role, smuggling agents across the English Channel, brought him into contact with Ian Fleming, who no doubt was enthralled by reports of Steven Mackenzie's exciting and dangerous exploits. These were the sort of stories that might have inspired Fleming's writing, although there is no evidence that Fleming used any of Mackenzie's experiences, both during and after the war, in his James Bond adventures. However, elements of the novels match Mackenzie's background so closely that it is unsurprising that Mackenzie, as the Times revealed, enjoyed reading the books.
As a child, Steven Mackenzie attended Eton, where he excelled at sports, particularly the Wall Game, rowing, rugby and boxing. As Fleming tells us in Bond's 'obituary' in You Only Live Twice, James Bond also attended Eton and later, when he had been transferred to Fettes in Edinburgh, enjoyed considerable sporting success too, though in individual sports, notably athletics, rather than the team sports favoured by Mackenzie. Boxing, however, was a sport common to both; Bond was a strong enough boxer to have fought for the school twice.
The choice of Fettes is interesting. Bond's obituary reveals that Fettes was his father's old school, but what made Fleming pick that one? After all, while much of Bond's schooling reflects that of his creator (including attendance at Eton and sporting success), there had been no obvious connection with Fettes; Fleming's father, Valentine, had attended Eton. Fleming's Scottish heritage may have played a large part in the choice, but the obituary of Steven Mackenzie mentions a detail that suggests another intriguing possibility: Fleming took the idea from Mackenzie, whose father, Moir, went to Fettes.
The possibility that Fleming 'inherited' the meme of sending Bond to 'his father's old school' from Mackenzie seems a remote one, but Fleming and Mackenzie were well acquainted; they met during the war for operational reasons, and continued to meet after the war socially for lunch at Boodle's. It is not too unreasonable to suggest that Steven Mackenzie mentioned Fettes and his father to Fleming during their inevitable conversations about their school days at Eton. That Fleming drew inspiration from Mackenzie is of course highly speculative and I wouldn't want to claim it as fact, but the coincidence of Bond's schooling and Mackenzie's background is interesting nevertheless.
After the war, Steven Mackenzie, like Bond, was recruited into MI6, but unlike Bond followed a more conventional career path involving a series of foreign postings, among them Germany, Hong Kong, and Brazil, becoming director of the Far East and the Americas, and then Head of Station in Buenos Aires. His career path was not too dissimilar from another Bond-like figure, Peter Lunn, an Old Etonian and MI6 agent during and after the war, who served as station head in Berlin, Bonn and Beirut.
Reading about Steven Mackenzie reminded me that James Bond's background and post-war recruitment into MI6 follow that of real agents and are utterly authentic in the context of early Cold War intelligence services. Where Bond's trajectory diverges from convention is his career path. Rather than serve in a succession of foreign postings, perhaps with promotion to section head after ten or fifteen years, Bond is essentially London-based in the double-0 section, although according to John Griswold's chronology, Bond has one foreign posting in to Jamaica in 1947-9, and before is on special duties involving smuggling operations.
Steven Mackenzie's obituary, like others discussed in a previous post, illustrates how significant a figure James Bond has become in the cultural environment. Favourite books are not normally a matter for obituaries, but the success of James Bond, allied with Mackenzie's connection with Ian Fleming (the importance of which is itself elevated by the success of Bond) and Mackenzie's clandestine roles, make it a point of interest. Incidentally, the obituary of Mackenzie in the Daily Telegraph makes less reference to Fleming, a difference possibly explained by Ian Fleming's connection with Times newspapers, which has created a more receptive environment for the perpetuation of James Bond as a cultural phenomenon.
Reference:
Griswold, J, 2006 Ian Fleming's James Bond: Annotations and chronologies for Ian Fleming's Bond stories, Author House
One can learn about some pretty remarkable people through the obituary columns, and it's here that I often read about some of the less well-known individuals connected with the world of James Bond. In recent months, I have read about Marcel van Clemmput, who designed Goldfinger's Aston Martin DB5 and the submersible Lotus Esprit from The Spy Who Love Me for Corgi, and Kiki Byrne, who designed the golden bikini worn in the titles sequence of Goldfinger. But what also catching my eye are the occasional obituaries that mention James Bond or Ian Fleming while describing people who seemingly had no or little connection with either. These obituaries are no less interesting, as they reflect the extent to which Bond has become deeply embedded in cultural space.
Take John Quine, who died in May. His obituary in the Times reveals that he joined MI6 after the Second World War and was posted to Tokyo, before returning to Europe in 1954 to recruit a network of agents. In 1961, he unmasked the KGB double agent, George Blake. We learn that Quine was 'an avid reader of James Bond books' and, in the 1960s, bought the The Old Palace in Bekesbourne, near Canterbury, an 18th-century house briefly occupied by Ian Fleming. Quine's reading seems an especially minor point, but its importance is lifted by the Fleming connection and, of course, Quine's MI6 career.
Yaakov Meidad, who died in June 2012, was a Mossad agent who, as his Times obituary states, “masterminded the daring operation to seize the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann from the streets of Argentina.” Remarking on Meidad's appearance – he was bald and bespectacled – the obituary writer noted that Meidad was more George Smiley than James Bond, but that his life was as exciting as the events of any thriller. With no other link, it is simply the intelligence connection that prompts a comparison with James Bond and another famous fictional spy.
Then there is Sir John Morgan, who died in June 2012. He was a diplomat who served in Moscow, Mongolia, the Foreign Office in the Far Eastern Department, Poland, then Mexico. He married (later divorcing) Fionn O'Neill, the daughter of Ann Fleming from Ann's first marriage, and we learn in the Times obituary that this loose connection with Ian Fleming, along with Morgan's self-confident, buccaneering spirit, prompted family members to suggest that Morgan served as a model for James Bond. The suggestion is fanciful – Morgan married in 1961 – but as the allusion to Bond conveys something of Morgan's character, it gains weight and becomes a point of interest in the obituary.
James Bond is used again as a shorthand for character in the obituary of Anthony Cavendish, who died in January 2013. Cavendish served as an MI6 officer in the late 1940s and early '50s, and, being fluent in German and French, leaping from one secret adventure to another, and mixing with beautiful women, the obituary writer suggests that Cavendish “cut a James Bond-like figure.”
One other individual should be mentioned here. In the 'Lives Remembered' section of the Times, a reader recalled that Sir Nicholas 'Nicko' Henderson, a diplomat who died in March 2009, tried to out-trump Sir Eddie Rayne, shoemaker to the Queen Mother, when they argued about how well they both knew Ian Fleming. In his winning bid, Henderson claimed that Fleming left him all his suits. It's true that Henderson and Fleming had been friends – according to Andrew Lycett, Henderson gave Fleming the title, On Her Majesty's Secret Service – but that the anecdote is offered at all is testament to Fleming's continued cultural significance.
James Bond's obituary appears in Fleming's penultimate full-length novel, You Only Live Twice, but he has appeared in many more obituaries since then as shorthand for a certain type of person, and inevitably as a point of comparison with the real lives of wartime and intelligence officers.
Acknowledgement:
Thank you, Radley, for trawling through the archive for remarkable people.
