More on James Bond's Golden K

A day after posting my thoughts on the origins of James Bond's 'golden K', which he won as a teenager at the Hannes Schneider ski school (OHMSS, Chapter 12), I came across Arnold Lunn's book, The Story of Ski-ing (Eyre and Spottiswood, 1952). In it, I found this:

'Miss B E M Carroll was a consistently successful performer and, though she never won the A-K [Arlberg-Kandahar Challenge Cup], she is one of the three British racers who hold the Gold A-K badge, awarded to those who have won the silver A-K three times.' (p. 97)

So that confirms it. James Bond was a good enough skier to come second in the Arlberg-Kandahar Challenge Cup three times, and as a reward, gained his gold K badge, or rather his A-K badge.

How to ski like James Bond

In an earlier post, I speculated on the link between Ian Fleming (and in particularly From Russia, With Love) and Peter Lunn, the late Old Etonian, war-hero and cold-war spy chief. We can connect Fleming, Bond and Lunn in another way – through their shared interest in skiing.

Snowy settings have become an essential Bondian landscape (a Bondscape, if you like), thanks to Fleming's Swiss-set On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1963) and its film adaptation (1969). The book sees Bond put on a pair of skis for the first time since the war as he escapes Blofeld's henchmen in pursuit. Fleming's descriptions of Bond's skiing accord well with the techniques being taught in the 1930s when Bond learned to ski, as a read-through of Peter Lunn's skiing manual, A Ski-ing Primer (published by Methuen in 1948), reveals.

In Chapter 12 of OHMSS, we find out that Bond learnt to ski before the war as a teenager at the Hannes Schneider School at St Anton in the Arlberg, Austria. There Bond used steel-edged hickory skis, which by the time of his mission in the Swiss alps, were out of date, having been replaced by metal skis. Interestingly, Peter Lunn states that there had been earlier experiments with metal skis, but none had been successful, and when his book was published there was still no substitute for hickory, ash or birch.

Seeing the skiers on the Gloria run, Bond admires the art of Wedeln, with its use of the hips to effect turns. In his youth, there was much more shoulder work. Bond is referring to the style of turn called the downhill Christiana, which allows the skier to turn while keeping the skis parallel. Lunn explains exactly how to do it. As you face downslope in the travserse position, straighten up and start to rotate your intended inside shoulder. At the moment you feel like you are about to topple over, rotate both shoulders forcibly into the slope, while at the same time bending the knees. Bring your outside hand round with the knees and bring the inside ski forwards slightly. Press your knees into the slope, and resume the traverse position as you come out of the turn.

In terms of equipment, Lunn recommends the skis with the Marius Ericksen steel edges. In Blofeld's ski room, Bond chooses Master's with the Attenhofer Flex forward release. But then again, skis had moved on since 1948.

If you want to ski like James Bond, then, Peter Lunn's primer is an excellent place to start. And if you ever wondered what Bond's mysterious 'golden K' refers to (Bond won it while at the Schneider school), the primer may have the answer.

Arnold Lunn, Peter's father, founded the Kandahar Ski Club in 1924. In 1928, Arnold Lunn visited Hannes Schneider and the two of them set up the Arlberg-Kandahar Challenge Cup, which was awarded to the best skier in a combined slalom and downhill contest. The cup was held alternately at St Anton and Mürren (where the Kandahar club was based). Did Bond win the cup one year during the 1930s? And was he admitted to the Kandahar Ski Club? After all, the club's badge is a simple golden K.

Click here for more on Bond's golden K.

A real-life James Bond

He was an Old Etonian who spent his war years with the Secret Intelligence Service in Malta and Italy. After 1945 he was posted to Vienna where he was appointed SIS station head. In a long career, he served successively as station head at Berlin, Bonn and Beirut. Throughout his life he was a devoted skier. He learnt to ski in 1916 aged 2, and he captained the British skiing team in the 1936 Winter Olympics. During his retirement, he returned each year to Mürren in Switzerland.

War-hero, skier, spy. Peter Lunn, who died in November aged 97, could have been the model for James Bond. I don’t know whether Ian Fleming knew him, but I wonder whether Peter Lunn made his mark on the world of 007 in another way.

One of Peter Lunn’s achievements while working for SIS was to pioneer the excavation and use of tunnels to allow the intelligence service to eavesdrop on the KGB. In Vienna, he arranged for tunnels to be dug which would intercept communication cables between the Soviet embassy and the city’s airport. The operation lasted from 1948 to 1951. In Berlin in 1955, a tunnel was excavated deep into East Germany and enabled Soviet communications to be tapped. The ruse was exposed in 1956, but not before years’ worth of useful material had been gained.

Given the success of the tunnelling operations, what must SIS chiefs have thought when they turned to chapter 16 of From Russia, with Love (1957) and read a description of a tunnel extending from SIS Station T in Istanbul to the Soviet embassy? The details do not match entirely – Fleming’s tunnel allows Kerim Bey to physically spy on the Russians with the use of a periscope, rather than to tap their communication cables – but the general idea is the same.

At this time, Ian Fleming still had connections in the intelligence community, and it is possible that he heard of Peter Lunn’s tunnels and thought it worth adapting for his latest novel. If so, then, to paraphrase M in his obituary of James Bond in You Only Live Twice, if the degree of the description's veracity had been any higher, Fleming would certainly have been prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act.