The Ian Fleming Miscellany (2 page)

Her second son's interests, other than dining, drinking, girls and fast cars, were writing and travelling. She scanned her address book with a frown, flipped past Beaverbrook, ignored Rothermere and found the head of Reuters. Surely Sir Roderick Jones could do something? Indeed, he could. In October 1931, Ian joined the news agency as subeditor and journalist.

Reuters' intermittent link to the Secret Service dated back many years, but in 1916, after the death of Baron Hubert de Reuter, the company received a guaranteed subsidy from Secret Service funds to enable Sir Roderick Jones to buy it. Jones had been the Reuters South Africa correspondent during the Boer War, and when the Ministry of Information was created he became its Director of Propaganda.

Reuters was perfect for Fleming. Boring, repetitious tasks were cut to a minimum. Deadlines, witty company, drinks at El Vino's, endless novelty and the creative challenge of grabbing public attention and keeping it were just what he needed. He became, by trial and error, a newsman. He learned to write vividly, with economy and impact. He loved it, and he got paid. He left the western edge of Chelsea for a flat of his own at the eastern edge, where Belgravia began, in Ebury Street. He had a Buick, and he reported on the Alpine Motor Trials from Munich in 1932. He actually took part, with an experienced co-driver, and loved every minute of it.

The young Ian Fleming, Reuter's correspondent, as pictured in his Visa application to the Soviet authorities, 1939.
GARF

March 1933 was tense. This was the month in which Hitler slithered from coalition leader to outright dictatorship in Germany. But it was news from Moscow that electrified Parliament. Six British, and many more Russian, Metro-Vickers engineers had been arrested on charges of espionage or treason. There was an immediate call for a trade embargo.

The government's consternation arose from complacency about the assistance Britain was affording to Stalin's Five Year Plan. In the 1800s, British engineers had built railways the world over, and now, in the new century, our expertise in power generation would propel Russia's vast downtrodden populace into the twentieth century. Mr Stalin, we assumed, must be grateful.

Apparently not. The Ambassador was recalled. The men would soon be tried and sentenced. All the news agencies wanted reporters in the courtroom and every one of them would be vying to get his piece back first. Ian Fleming's editor picked him to represent Reuters alongside their resident reporter in Moscow. The least experienced foreign journalist there, he rose to the occasion. He arrived well ahead of time and began sending despatches back, building up the tension. Alone among the press pack, he travelled out of Moscow to the Vickers compound and interviewed the five engineers who were being held on bail.

When the case came to court, just one of the British men pleaded guilty. (Even he claimed later to have done so only because his Russian lady housekeeper, whom he loved, would otherwise be shot.) All the rest pleaded innocent. The outcome of their trial was impossible to guess.

‘Everything depends on getting in first!' Fleming had been warned. Every other journalist knew that too, so they tried bribing the girls in the telegraph office down the road from the courthouse. Fleming decided this would never work. Instead, since every cable had to be read and passed before despatch, he made a special friend of a censor. What if, he asked his friend, he were to draft two stories with alternative outcomes, and when judgement was passed, he telephoned the cable office and the censor filled in the gaps in the right one and sent it first ..?
Niet
. So Fleming came up with another plan. He found a boy. He found running shoes that fitted the boy. He stationed the boy beneath a window outside the courtroom and disabled all the courthouse phones except one, where a
Central News
correspondent had to await a call from head office. And he sat in the courtroom, noted down the lenient sentences, added them to his prepared article, dropped the text out of the window to the running boy – and waited as the kid sprinted madly towards the telegraph office.

It should have worked. But luck was against him. The
Central News
correspondent, chewing his nails near the phone in a corridor, heard the Judge's verdict through a nearby loudspeaker, and by some fluke he got through to
Central News
in London almost immediately. They therefore obtained the result twenty minutes before Reuters did.

Moscow wasn't altogether a wasted journey. Fleming had also tried to get an interview from Stalin. He received a polite Excuse and No, personally signed, which he treasured to the end of his days. And after the trial, the foreign press contingent sent a telegram to Sir Roderick Jones, praising their new colleague Ian Fleming. ‘He gave us all a run for our money' was the cheery message.

Ian had found his métier. He was offered a job in Shanghai, the most exotic town in the world and notoriously, then, the former home of Mrs Simpson. It was a dream job. He was very much tempted. But everything was about to change.

That summer old Robert Fleming died aged 88. His will left the huge house in Oxfordshire, No. 27 Grosvenor Square, the Scottish estate and the bulk of his fortune to his second son, Philip. Granny Kathleen could remain in residence at all the homes for life. Eve would get nothing and her sons were effectively disinherited.

They had enough, thanks to their father, to set themselves up and would not receive enough to ruin themselves; maybe their grandfather's will would prove the making of all of them. But Ian knew that he would never have the life he wanted on a journalist's salary. Not long before, over dinner in Paris, he had told Ivar Bryce:

He had always thought of writing as a wonderful way of life, and again explained the advantages and pleasures of writing thrillers while travelling about the world. He was excited at the thought of all the adventures and characters for plots that could be met with in, say, Vienna, and utilised as a short-cut to fame and fortune, with no more capital required than a pen and a writing-pad.

That was all very well, but Ian Fleming liked dinners in Paris, and cars, and taking girls out. He needed money. His brother Peter was travelling the world and had just published
Brazilian Adventure
to loud acclaim. Peter was prepared to rough it, a condition Ian viewed with distaste. Richard and Michael, his younger brothers, had both joined Flemings and commuted happily enough into the City every day. Theirs, not Peter's, was the route to the security you needed in order – someday – to live the dreams that would – someday – come to life in best-sellers.

Ian had, by then, a lover: a sophisticated and wise older woman called Maud, who was married to Gilbert Russell, a director of Cull & Co., bankers. Gilbert was preparing to retire in a couple of years and offered Ian a job in the City. He found it congenial enough. He took people out to lunch and discussed their investments; that was about it. Socially, he spent a lot more time shooting in Scotland than he ever had before. There were games of cricket, bridge and so on. Cull & Co. paid him generously, the hours were undemanding and the seat on the board soon to be vacated would be his, so he could do pretty much as he pleased. He lived well, made friends with a knowledgeable antiquarian bookseller and began to collect rare books. And then one day in 1935 the world woke up to read in the newspapers that Cull & Co. – having made some extremely unwise investments – had lost a huge amount of money.

Gilbert Russell was asked to stay on. Ian might as well go. However, if he wished to live in the style to which he had become accustomed, he must first pass by the Labour Exchange located within the Fleming network. Through this he found a job at Rowe and Pitman, stockbrokers. It seems that some intelligence officers worked for Rowe and Pitman. Most important and well connected of all the directors was Lance Hugh Smith, whose friends included Oppenheimers, Bowes Lyons, directors of De Beers and John Pierpoint Morgan. Andrew Lycett, Fleming's biographer, read the firm's unpublished official history, and it identifies Lance Hugh Smith as a likely talent-spotter for Intelligence before, and probably during, the Second World War.

Hugh Pitman, the senior partner for whom Ian would work, was from a spectacularly well connected family himself – Hambros, a director of the National Provincial Bank, the deputy director of Naval Intelligence and many others were among them. Socially, Hugh Pitman almost certainly knew Ian's mother. He and his wife lived near Eve, and their portraits had been painted by Augustus John.

Pitman, like everyone else, could see that Ian was in the City because he knew how to spend a positively tumbling cascade of cash. Sadly, he couldn't spot a good investment if you wrapped it in red satin and pinned it to his desk. But Ian seems already to have had another agenda. When Hugh Pitman took him to New York in the autumn of 1937, Fleming seized his chance to visit Washington and talk to Alaric Jacob, his closest friend at Reuters. Jacob got the impression that Ian was unusually interested in Roosevelt's foreign policy – probably in some capacity other than stockbroking.

Certainly the business bored him. When, one night, he pleaded illness and excused himself half way through dinner with Hugh Pitman and a client, Pitman later found him in bed with a blonde at the St Regis.

Staff at Rowe and Pitman resented Ian's dismissive remarks about their business, which was making money. He might find their preoccupations mundane, but they had a gift he desperately wished to possess. He had all the advantages that a silver spoon can bestow at birth, but he wanted to prove something. He wanted to make money out of writing – and the kind of writing he wanted to do required the kind of experience he didn't yet have.

Boys of 8 cannot stand girls. Alarmingly, by the time Ian Fleming was a 20-something with a long trail of girlfriends, his love-hate relationship with women was still apparent. This was in part a feature of the Zeitgeist. In any man's working life women were people of no account and powerless. The glass ceiling before the Second World War rested at the level of schoolteacher, secretary or, exceptionally, headmistress or hospital matron.
The Evening Standard
employed Stella Gibbons, author of
Cold Comfort Farm
, to write its fashion page, not its book reviews.

Socially, women – ‘girls' – of his own age were prey and, by definition, foolish enough to be caught; once caught and played with, they were best despatched quickly and cleanly, with no further involvement. If they argued, they were nags. If they argued with devastating logic, they had male minds and were very probably lesbians. He was convinced of all this.

So with hindsight, Ian Fleming was a boor in this way, but his attitude was almost normal among men of his class, at least until they were over 30. Sexually attractive women were assumed to be thick as a plank.

As they aged though, women – in Ian's eyes – thought and behaved more like regular human beings (i.e. men). Circumstances such as the death of a husband, as in his mother's case, or enormous riches and great age, as in his grandmother's, could leave them in a position of power for which, in his opinion, they were likely to be unfit. Only a long life shared with intelligent men could bestow perception and empathy, and he was attracted to these qualities in older women.

In his youth, he was close to only one ‘intellectual' woman, not a type he would ever have met in England. Phyllis Bottome was someone he could respect, although of course she was married, more than twice his age when he knew her and he was rather in awe of her husband. She was not prey. Nor was she authoritarian, although their relationship was that of teacher and pupil. She was liberal-minded, politically sophisticated and a prolific biographer as well as a popular novelist. Bottome had studied under Adler and was therefore aware of the latest theories about family position and its effect on one's outlook. Ian, as the second son in a family of four boys, was probably assessed as a young man with a sub-conscious drive to compensate for his relative lack of success, in order to impress his mother.