For Your Eyes Only (5 page)

Where did James Bond – the name – come from? As with all aspects of the Bond stories, there are several theories and a number of speculations. The most popular (and one that he publicly affirmed) is that Fleming, sitting down to work at his desk in Goldeneye, simply lifted the name from his bookshelves, his eye having alighted upon
Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies
by James Bond, the standard reference book published by Macmillan in 1947. Fleming was fascinated by wildlife, and birds in particular: ‘For Your Eyes Only' opens with a detailed description of the streamertail or doctor hummingbird, which again may be derived from the other James Bond. In 1964, long after his name had become a global brand, the American ornithologist paid
a surprise visit to Fleming in Jamaica. A Canadian film crew happened to be conducting an interview with Fleming at the time, and with a happy flourish, the author introduced his unexpected guest as ‘the real James Bond'. In the film
Die Another Day
, starring Pierce Brosnan, Bond picks up a copy of
Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies
and disguises himself as an ornithologist, in elaborate homage to the origin of the name.

Though James Bond may have been christened after an expert bird-spotter plucked at random from a book spine, it is possible that the name was already stored somewhere in Fleming's mind when he began to write
Casino Royale
. During the war, C. H. Forster, a friend who was then working in the Ministry of Aircraft Production, recalled a casual conversation in which Fleming described how he planned to come up with fictional names if he wrote a book. ‘That's easy,' he said. ‘I think of the first couple of names in my house at school and change their Christian names.' Forster told him that the first names in
his
school register had been James Aitken and Harry Bond. ‘So you could have Harry Aitken and James Bond'. Fleming had allegedly remarked that ‘James Bond' sounded better. There are other possibilities. Peter Fleming knew an SIS officer named Rodney Bond, who had saved his life during a clandestine operation in Greece. According to the British diplomat Harold Caccia (who had been rescued by Rodney Bond in the same operation), when Ian Fleming was looking
for a name for his fictional hero, it was his brother Peter who suggested he be named in honour of his wartime colleague. There is also a character named James Bond in the Agatha Christie short story ‘The Rajah's Emerald', published in 1934: Fleming may have read the story, leaving the name lodged somewhere in his subconscious. Bondologists have also noted that there is a church in Toronto called St James Bond, which Fleming might conceivably have seen on his visit to Canada during the war – although his Bond, of course, is no kind of saint.

Any, all or none of these factors may have contributed to the naming of Bond. What is certain is that once he had alighted on the name, Fleming knew it fitted his spy like a Savile Row suit. ‘I wanted the simplest, dullest, plainest-sounding name I could find,' he said, something ‘brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon and yet very masculine.' A name like ‘Peregrine Maltravers', he reflected, would be too exotic for a man intended to be a ‘neutral figure – an anonymous blunt instrument wielded by a Government Department'. What Fleming did not say is that ‘Peregrine Maltravers' is also an avowedly
upper-class
English name. Scottish-born Bond, for all his clubbable ways and public school education, is intended to be classless (or as classless as an upper-class man like Fleming could make him). The bi-syllabic James Bond has a double-barrelled simplicity to it. ‘Bond' sounds oddly British and reassuring: a bond is what an Englishman's word is made of, the financial security one may reliably
invest in, the adhesive that holds things together. With no offence to Peregrines worldwide, this is not a name women tend to go to bed with on first acquaintance, and the phrase ‘The name's Maltravers, Peregrine Maltravers' hardly trips off the tongue. In
The Man with the Golden Gun
, Bond, refusing a knighthood, reflects on his own name: ‘No middle name. No hyphen. A quiet, dull, anonymous name.'

The codename 007 may have a simpler origin. One of the greatest triumphs of British naval intelligence in the First World War had been the breaking of the code in the fabled Zimmermann Telegram of 1917, which helped bring the United States into the war and effectively sealed Germany's defeat. The telegram, sent by German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann, instructed the German ambassador in Mexico to approach the Mexican government with a view to forming an alliance against the US. The message was intercepted and decoded by three naval intelligence code-breakers, working out of Room 40 in the Admiralty; two months later, an outraged US Congress declared war on Germany. The German diplomatic code used in the top-secret telegram was identified by the number 0075; thereafter the double-zero code was attached to all highly classified documents. To anyone versed in intelligence history, 007 signified the highest achievement of British military espionage. ‘When I was in the Admiralty during the war,' Fleming told a later interviewer, ‘all the top-secret signals had the double-O prefix. Although this was later changed for security reasons,
it stuck in my mind and I decided to borrow it for Bond to make his job more interesting and provide him with a licence to kill.' The sixteenth-century English mathematician, occultist and secret agent, Dr John Dee, used a similar code in messages sent to Queen Elizabeth I. In Dee's code the double-O prefix, symbolising two eyes, was shorthand for ‘For Your Eyes Only'.

Like most fictional characters, James Bond is not one individual. ‘He was a compound of all the secret agents and commando types I met during the war,' Fleming once declared. ‘It was all the things that I heard and learned about secret operations that finally led me to write about them in a disguised way and with James Bond as the central character.' Fleming never denied that Bond was a combination of real people; he did not, however, identify exactly
which
people, leaving the door open to an entire raft of claimants. Fleming compounded the issue by flattering more than one person with the suggestion that he was the model for the superspy; inevitably, as Bond's fame spread, this was an increasingly coveted accolade.

Chief among the contenders is, of course, Fleming himself. The physical descriptions of 007 recall his creator, with his ‘longish nose' and slightly ‘cruel mouth'. They even share the same colour (blue) eyes and black hair. In
From Russia with Love
, Fleming provides the most detailed picture of Bond, complete with elements of self-portraiture: ‘The eyes wide and level under straight, rather long black
eyebrows . . . the line of the jaws rather straight but firm.' In
Casino Royale
, Bond's looks remind the doomed beauty Vesper Lynd of Hoagy Carmichael, the American songwriter, singer and actor. The comparison is made again in
Moonraker
, in which Bond is described as ‘certainly good-looking . . . Rather like Hoagy Carmichael in a way. That black hair falling down over the right eyebrow. Much the same bones. But there was something a bit cruel in the mouth, and the eyes were cold.' An image of Bond, approved by Fleming as part of the
Daily Express
strip cartoon that started in 1958, makes 007 appear faintly vampiric, but again bears more than a passing resemblance to Fleming himself. Fleming sometimes played up the autobiographical aspects of Bond, and sometimes downplayed them: ‘I couldn't possibly be James Bond,' he told his friend, William Plomer. ‘He's got more guts than I have. He's also considerably more handsome.'

Val Fleming, the courageous father killed in the trenches of the First World War, must have a primary claim to be the inspiration for James Bond. The father, dead when Ian Fleming was just eight years old, naturally left a permanent hole in Fleming's world, which Bond may partly have filled by representing his ideal man of action. It is possible, though simplistic, to see Bond as an expression of father/hero-worship played out in fiction, though Val was far too fastidious, gentle and conventional to be confused with the hard-eyed Bond.

Peter Fleming, Ian's much-admired elder brother, may have come a little closer to that model, being handsome, tough and, most importantly, a secret warrior. Having forged one career in peacetime as a highly successful travel writer, Peter had enjoyed an adventurous war. Drafted early into the world of military intelligence and irregular warfare, he was sent to Norway on a reconnaissance mission to plot a counter-attack following the Nazi invasion, and was erroneously reported killed. Mirroring Ian's role in naval intelligence, Peter had become assistant to the chief of military intelligence, and thus privy to some of the most delicate and fascinating secrets of wartime spying. He again narrowly escaped death while on an SOE mission to Greece, and was then transferred to Delhi, where he spent three years organising deception plans quite as elaborate as anything dreamed up by his brother. One such plot involved planting a briefcase full of forged papers in a crashed jeep in the jungle, to try to convince the advancing Japanese that they were facing an unexpectedly strong British force. After the war, Peter returned to writing and produced a novel,
The Sixth Column
, which had as its main character a thriller writer who creates a protagonist with marked similarities to Bond. In at least three ways, then, Peter helped to create Bond: by a successful writing career that may initially have put off his younger brother but later spurred him on to try his hand at fiction; by a wartime intelligence career with some enviably Bond-like aspects; and by writing a book that uncannily prefigured
Ian's own literary career. Just six months after Peter published
The Sixth Column
, Ian set to work on
Casino Royale
.

Behind the Flemings follow a parade of swashbuckling types, each with a claim to a little of the Bond myth. One of the earliest is Conrad O'Brien-Ffrench, the skiing spy Fleming had first met in Kitzbühel back in the 1930s, when the older man was gathering information on German troop deployments as part of the Z Organisation, an amateur spy network made up of journalists and businessmen. While Fleming certainly met and admired this extraordinary character, he is unlikely to have known about his espionage activities in enough detail to use them as material in the Bond series.

A more likely candidate is Patrick Dalzel-Job, who served in the 30 AU unit during the latter part of the war. Dalzel-Job displayed many of Bond's characteristics: he was a superb marksman who had learned how to ski backwards, parachute behind enemy lines, dive, and pilot a miniature submarine. When on assignment, he wore an airman's jacket with a compass hidden inside one of the buttons and carried a pipe with a hidden chamber containing maps. Jan Aylen, technical officer with 30 AU, declared Dalzel-Job to be ‘one of the most enterprising, plucky and resourceful' warriors he had ever met. Like Fleming, Dalzel-Job had lost his father in the trenches, and spent much of his youth navigating around the Norwegian coast with his mother, gaining a specialist knowledge that proved invaluable when war was declared
and he signed up with British Naval Intelligence. Serving with the North Western Expeditionary Force in Norway in 1940, Dalzel-Job revealed a Bond-like streak of rebellion when he disobeyed a direct order and insisted on evacuating five thousand Norwegian civilians from the town of Narvik who were facing imminent Nazi retaliation. He escaped a court martial after King Haakon of Norway awarded him the Knight's Cross of St Olav in recognition of his gallantry, ‘making it difficult for me to be disciplined', in his own words.

By the time Fleming met him in 1944, Dalzel-Job had already won a reputation for bravery just this side of lunacy, which continued to expand in the closing months of the war. Striking out from Utah Beach after the D-Day landings with a handful of Royal Marines, he filleted vital intelligence from an abandoned flying-bomb site, disabled a German destroyer and personally accepted the surrender of the German city of Bremen. He then immediately set off on a quixotic quest to find the Norwegian woman who had once served as crew on his boat, and married her three weeks later.

Throughout his long life, Dalzel-Job, who died in 2003 at the age of ninety, was credited with being the model for James Bond. He never denied the association, and claimed that Fleming had told him, long after the war, that he was indeed an inspiration for Bond. But disarmingly, this diminutive figure with large ears who lived in retirement
in the Scottish Highlands pointed out that in certain respects he was no Bond: ‘I have never read a Bond book or seen a Bond movie. They are not my style . . . And I only ever loved one woman, and I'm not a drinking man.' Yet he also implied that he knew what was in the books and films, and recognised himself. ‘When you have lived such an exciting life you don't need to see a fictional account of it,' he said, adding, perhaps unnecessarily, since he was approaching the age of eighty-seven: ‘I prefer the quiet life now.' It is possible that the villain Oddjob in
Goldfinger
may be a sly joke on the name Dalzel-Job.

Dalzel-Job may have the strongest claim to be Bond, but he was not the only prototype among the ranks of hard men in naval special operations. Another was Michael Mason, the scion of a landed Oxfordshire family who ran away to become a fur-trapper in rural Canada and then enjoyed a second career as a successful amateur boxer. At the outbreak of war, the rugged Mason was operating as an agent in Romania when two Nazi agents were sent to assassinate him; he killed them both. Another with a claim to a bit of Bond was the extraordinary Merlin Minshall, an amateur racing driver who took part in Fleming's abortive attempt to disrupt traffic on the Danube by scuttling six cement barges at the river's narrowest point, the Iron Gates. Minshall, who had spent much of his life sailing the waterways of Europe, simply walked into Room 39 in 1939 and suggested the idea off his own bat. Minshall was sent to Bucharest in 1940 with
orders to help Mason carry out the scheme. The cement barges were duly chartered and headed up the Danube to the Iron Gates, with Minshall following behind in a highspeed launch. Everything went wrong: the launch ran out of fuel, the plan was betrayed and the local Nazis appeared. In true Bond tradition, Minshall then set off in the launch and escaped, it is said, after a two-hour high-speed chase. Minshall, who spent the latter part of the war tracking U-boats and worked as naval liaison to Tito's partisans in Yugoslavia, was one of the first to claim consanguinity with Bond.