The Ian Fleming Miscellany

For Alia

Ian Fleming's birth and upbringing nurtured the talent, urbanity and focus that made him successful, but also the arrogance and self-doubt that caught up with him in the end.

He was born into a family of great wealth and extraordinary talent. Only two generations back, his paternal great-grandfather had been a humble Dundee bookkeeper. His grandfather had begun work at 13, learned how to invest other people's money and founded his eponymous merchant bank Robert Fleming and Co. before he was 30. Having left Scotland for New York, he made influential friends, among them the international banking magnates John Pierpoint Morgan and Jacob Schiff. In the early twentieth century his bank changed its base from Dundee to the City of London, and Robert and his wife, Kathleen, moved the family to a mansion in Grosvenor Square.

The older of Robert Fleming's two sons was Valentine, known as Val. On Val's marriage to Eve Ste Croix Rose, Robert gave the couple £250,000 – tens of millions today. Val became a barrister, and MP for Henley, and had four sons of his own: Peter, Ian, Richard and Michael, in that order. Their mother, Eve, was a pretty and sociable woman of distinguished heritage and with a strong sense of entitlement.

Perhaps it was all too perfect to last. Valentine Fleming served in the First World War as a major in the Queen's Own Oxfordshire Hussars and was killed in Picardy in 1917. His closest friend, who appreciated him as a kind and honourable man and wrote a sad and loving obituary in
The Times
, was Winston Churchill. Valentine left money in trust for his sons and their education. For Eve, there was an extremely generous allowance for life unless she remarried, in which case her stipend would be considerably reduced.

All the boys boarded at a prep school – which Ian hated – before taking up places at Eton. They were close, especially Ian and his older brother Peter, who remembered their father well and understood the terrible finality of his death when it happened. At Eton, Peter took the academic prizes while Ian concentrated on establishing his physical prowess. ‘Victor Ludorum twice,' he said proudly to Roy Plomley, when asked about Eton decades later in a BBC radio interview. He also edited a school magazine, wrote poetry and made dozens of friends for life. There were escapades with Ivar Bryce, a rich, young fellow pupil. Together they discovered motorbikes, fast cars and the thrill of escape from authority.

Eve Fleming, meanwhile, indulged a penchant for Upper Bohemia. Ian had been born in Green Street, Mayfair, but for most of his childhood the family had occupied Pitt House at North End, Hampstead. This was the home Eve had shared with her husband and where she entertained a large circle of friends. In 1923, she sold it and moved to the unfashionable, least accessible part of Chelsea: a row of unassuming cottages at the west end of Cheyne Walk. One of them was distinguished by having been home to J.M.W. Turner. She bought it, and the two others either side of it, and got the builders in; she ended up with a twelve-bedroomed mansion with a lot of space for grand gatherings of well-off and slightly louche musicians, artists and writers. She was a pretty widow; Augustus John, who, at 45, was seven years older, lived with the mother of some of his many children. He was a notorious philanderer. His studio was nearby, across the King's Road in Mallord Street. The inevitable happened – or, quite possibly, it had already happened, for a move from sturdy, family friendly Hampstead to what was then arty, edgy Chelsea seems otherwise unlikely.

Quite how much Eve's oldest sons knew of her affair with Augustus John is uncertain. In 1925, at 17, he wrote a story in
Wyvern
, an Eton College magazine, and the thread that ran through it was the infidelity of women. Was he secretly hurt and censorious about his mother's ‘betrayal' of his deceased father? We cannot know. Like most teenagers, Ian was probably self-obsessed and not much interested. He would soon follow his brother into adult life, which meant making his mark, somehow. Eton encouraged its pupils to think of themselves as leaders of men.

Peter, the eldest of the four, was tough-minded. He refused to countenance a career in the family bank and devoted himself to becoming a writer. His mother encouraged him, and his success at Eton led to Christ Church, Oxford, and a First in English.

Ian, as the second son, lived in Peter's shadow. As a student, he was careless. As an athlete, he excelled. He was not a great team player, but he liked challenging games such as golf and even bridge, and he was by no means stupid. At 18 he seemed to be imaginative and outgoing but lazy. What to do about Ian? His housemaster, Edward Vere Slater, MA Oxon, co-author of a popular Latin Grammar, judged grimly that Fleming Minor ‘could do better' and, regarding the boy's academic failure as inevitable, recommended a term in a crammer as preparation for officer training at Sandhurst.

Later in life Ian said he'd wanted, at the time, to go into the Black Watch. He took his Scottish ancestry seriously. But he was unsuited to regimentation, and he faded away from Sandhurst after a year – with gonorrhoea, according to a biographer, contracted after a brief encounter with a girl at the 43, Mrs Meyrick's notorious nightclub in Gerrard Street. Nearly twenty years would pass before antibiotics became generally available and until then there was no reliable treatment for venereal disease.

Plan B, in 1927, was more successful. ‘I had a go at the Diplomatic,' drawled Ian on the radio in 1963. This meant the Diplomatic Service of the Foreign Office, which required fluency in languages – an excuse to go abroad.

As his exasperated mother knew, not only had he caught the clap but he had done so when in keen pursuit of another girl for whom he was still pining. Abroad was definitely a good idea.

She made enquiries and pulled strings, something she would do again and again until Ian found his niche. She despatched him to Kitzbühel in Austria, where an interesting couple called Forbes Dennis ran a school. Ian found an enchanting Tyrolean town with winding mediaeval streets and snowy mountains where he could learn to ski well. A.E. Forbes Dennis had been the British Passport Control Officer at the Vienna Embassy – that is, in charge of British intelligence for Austria and the lands around it. Nigel West traces Fleming's aspiration to improve his German and French, join the Foreign Office and get into intelligence, to Forbes Dennis. Mrs Forbes Dennis, better known as Phyllis Bottome, was a novelist and biographer.

He enjoyed himself. Not only did he make friends of both sexes, drive fast and expertly, and feel freer than he had in England, but he may have received a grounding in popular writing from Phyllis Bottome, who respected his talents. He was already an avid reader of adventure stories, but from her he could learn how to plunge right in, set a scene and introduce characters and the relationship between them in the first few pages. She was not aiming at literary fiction and deployed predictable techniques. In her stories, which can be over-reliant on expository dialogue, key characters make a memorable entrance and one colourful location follows another as in the scenes of a play. There's conflict, unresolved sexual tension, identifiable motive, desirable outcome and generally everything that makes people want to turn the pages.

After Kitzbühel there were courses at Munich University and the University of Geneva. Four years after leaving Sandhurst, Ian could read and speak French and German well and Russian passably. He was back in England ready to be considered, by examination and interview, for a job in the Foreign Office, and he had a serious girlfriend, Monique Panchaud de Bottomes. They became engaged in 1931. He was 23 and still living at home when he was in England. Monique came to spend a few days at Cheyne Walk, which was a disaster since his mother made it clear to him that this Swiss girl of the haute bourgeoisie was in no respect haute enough to become a Fleming (she had caught her creeping towards Ian's bedroom at night). Monique left.

Ian did not get one of the few vacancies at the Foreign Office. Until the day he died, he said he had come seventh and there were only five places. Later research has revealed that he did not get anywhere near the top of the list, and he must have been bitterly disappointed.

Nil desperandum. Eve was not lacking in grit and nor were the Fleming grandparents. Old Robert, now in his late 80s, and his eccentric wife, Kathleen, lived, as they had done since long before the First World War, between Grosvenor Square and a vast mock-Tudor house called Joyce Grove outside Nettlebed in Oxfordshire. Perhaps Granny Fleming's dour assessment of the prospects for a young man without a job stung Eve into action, or maybe she was already aware that London in the twenties and early thirties was over-supplied with unemployed young men qualified in the arts and classics, with oodles of charm and bags of background but no understanding of science or business. Anyhow, she set about finding work for Ian.