In a strange case of truth following fiction, Godfrey would eventually ask Fleming to write his biography (Fleming declined), yet it seems the inspiration for M was not entirely pleased to be immortalised as the boss of a cold-blooded killer, who was prepared to employ Bond to kill the crooks who had murdered his friends (in ‘For Your Eyes Only’). ‘He turned me into that unsavoury character, M,’ Godfrey complained after Fleming’s death. ‘Ian wanted people to take M seriously and questioned me closely about his notional age and career. The end result did not convince or thrill.’
The use of the single initial was a convention dating back to Mansfield Cumming-Smith, the first head of SIS (MI6), who became known as ‘C’ after his habit of initialling papers he had read with a C written in green ink. In Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden stories, another source of inspiration for Fleming, the same post is occupied by ‘R’, the grim, amoral spy chief who is prepared to expend his agents ruthlessly without ever dirtying his own hands. Alongside the fictional R and the real C, there are three more Ms and one Z, all real, all known to Fleming, and all parts of the composite character that emerged as M.
‘Colonel Z’, Lieutenant Colonel Sir Claude Dansey, was Deputy Chief of SIS and head of the shadowy Z network of which Conrad O’Brien-Ffrench was a part. The bespectacled Dansey was witty, spiteful, charming and slightly mad. As a boy of sixteen, Dansey, who was not homosexual, was seduced by Oscar Wilde. His father threatened to prosecute, and then packed the young Claude off to Africa. He was first recruited as a spy during the Boer War, lost his money in the Wall Street Crash, performed various duties for British intelligence before the Second World War, and then abruptly quit, allowing rumours to circulate that he had been sacked for stealing. Meanwhile, believing SIS to be ill-organised and inefficient, he set about building a parallel organisation behind the cover of a respectable import–export business in Bush House, recruiting part-time, usually unpaid agents, including journalists, businessmen, gamblers and playboys. Dansey’s agents used the codename Z, and avoided using the wireless for messages. In 1939, the Z network was absorbed into SIS, and as assistant to the new ‘C’, Stewart Menzies, Dansey helped to coordinate active espionage until the end of the war. Fleming gives him a namecheck in From Russia with Love, when Darko Kerim, Bond’s friend who is murdered on the Orient Express, refers to ‘Major Dansey’, his predecessor as Head of Section T. Two famous men who worked in wartime intelligence with the real Dansey gave very different assessments of Colonel Z: Malcolm Muggeridge called him ‘the only professional in MI6’; the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre, however, considered him ‘an utter shit, corrupt, incompetent, but with a certain low cunning’.
Major-General Sir Colin McVean Gubbins was director of operations and training with SOE, and the creator of the auxiliary units on which Peter Fleming worked, intended to operate behind the lines in Britain in the event of a German invasion. An expert in guerrilla warfare, he was described by the cryptographer Leo Marks as ‘a real Highland toughie, bloody brilliant . . . with a moustache which was as clipped as his delivery and eyes which didn’t mirror his soul or any other such trivia. The general’s eyes reflected the crossed swords on his shoulders, warning all comers not to cross them with him.’ Since the initial C was already taken, and G is an initial commonly used as an army abbreviation, Gubbins signed himself by his middle initial: M.
Another contender is the equally strange MI5 spymaster Maxwell Knight, who ran a subsection of the security service responsible for rooting out potential extremist subversives in Britain, both fascist and communist. Knight broke up some of the most important spy rings in Britain, and was one of the first to warn that the secret services were being infiltrated by communist moles, but his warnings were fatally ignored. Knight was a man of many parts, most of them very odd and quite incompatible: in addition to running a huge and elaborate spy ring, he was a novelist, a jazz saxophonist who had been taught by the great Sidney Bechet, and an occultist who befriended and recruited the bizarre black magician Aleister Crowley. He was also an obsessive and inspired naturalist who kept snakes in the bath and wrote such definitive works as How to Keep a Gorilla. Ostensibly, Knight was a ladies’ man: he was married three times (and briefly suspected of murdering one of his wives), filled his office with beautiful young women, ran two of the most successful female agents in British wartime history, and wrote a peculiar guide to running women agents, which includes a section on using sex as bait, in so-called honey traps. ‘It is difficult to imagine anything more terrifying than for an officer to become landed with a woman-agent who suffers from an overdose of Sex,’ he wrote. This slightly odd statement may perhaps be explained by the fact that Knight never consummated any of his marriages, and was probably homosexual. Maxwell Knight signed all his memos ‘M’, and was certainly well known to Fleming, although they never worked together. After the war, Knight would move effortlessly from a career in spying to a new career as a naturalist, ending his life as a much-loved BBC presenter of nature programmes.
There is one last real-life ‘M’, who may have helped to form the fictional M. William Melville, an Irish-born policeman who died in the last year of the First World War, has a good claim to be Britain’s first secret service chief. Born in Kerry, Melville made his name foiling Fenian and anarchist bomb plots in Britain, and inspired the character of the detective in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Melville recruited Sidney Reilly, the so-called ‘Ace of Spies’, learned the art of lock-picking from Harry Houdini, and foiled the 1887 Golden Jubilee Plot to assassinate Queen Victoria. On his ‘retirement’ from the police in 1903, Melville founded a secret service, the forerunner of MI5, and adopted the codename ‘M’. Using the pseudonym William Morgan, he gathered intelligence for the War Office, and when the Secret Service Bureau was established in 1909 to coordinate both home and foreign intelligence (later MI5 and MI6), Melville was recruited as chief detective. Fleming would certainly have been aware of the exploits of this other ‘M’, which had become a part of intelligence legend by the time he arrived at NID.
There is one final intriguing hypothesis, advanced by John Pearson, Fleming’s biographer, to the effect that M might conceivably be modelled on Eve Fleming. Certainly, ‘M’ was Ian’s nickname for his mother from early childhood. She, like M, was by turns strict and indulgent, loved and feared. As Pearson writes, ‘While Fleming was young, his mother was certainly one of the few people he was frightened of, and her sternness toward him, her unexplained demands, and her remorseless insistence on success find a curious and constant echo in the way M handles that hard-ridden, hard-killing agent, 007.’
Who was Miss Moneypenny?
M’s comely, love-struck secretary, the loyal keeper of secrets, has almost as many potential real lives as she has had appearances on screen. Miss Moneypenny’s role in the books is comparatively small and, apart from her being a non-smoking, milk-drinking poodle-owner, we know little of her life. She ‘would have been desirable but for eyes which were cool and direct and quizzical’. In Thunderball we learn that she ‘often dreamed hopelessly about Bond’. Miss Moneypenny’s yearning is made much more explicit in the films, and became a staple of the genre, the longest flirtation in film history, a central element in the badinage that precedes every Bond mission. Her amorous life is unfulfilled, but her career prospers, at least in the popular culture, as ‘Britain’s last line of defence’. By the time You Only Live Twice was filmed, she had been promoted to the rank of second officer in the Wrens, the Women’s Royal Naval Service.
In the books Bond has his own secretary, Loelia Ponsonby, shared with 008 and 0011. The real Loelia Ponsonby was a friend of the Flemings who would become the Duchess of Westminster. When her marriage broke down, ‘Lil’ Ponsonby is said to have fallen for Ian himself, describing him as ‘the most attractive man I’ve ever met’. For his part, Fleming described the fictional Loelia Ponsonby as ‘tall and dark, with a reserved unbroken beauty’, but added, ‘unless she married soon, Bond thought fo
r the hundredth time, or had a lover, her cool air of authority might easily become spinsterish’ – which probably did not please the real ‘Lil’ one bit. It is possible that the duchess objected to seeing her real name hijacked for the purposes of popular literature. This may explain why, in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Ponsonby abruptly retires after marrying a member of the Baltic Exchange ship-broking company, and is replaced as Bond’s secretary by Mary Goodnight – a name with echoes of Fleming’s own secretary at the Sunday Times, Una Trueblood (a name he would appropriate for the secretary murdered in Dr No). Both of Bond’s secretaries are slight characters compared to Moneypenny, whose film persona is now almost as famous as Bond himself.
The name Moneypenny is derived from a character in an unfinished novel written by Peter Fleming after the war, entitled The Sett. The novel came to a halt after about thirty thousand words, but Miss Moneypenny survived in Ian’s memory. The principal model for the Moneypenny character appears to have been a Miss Kathleen Pettigrew, who was the personal assistant to Stewart Menzies, Director General of MI6. In the first draft of Casino Royale, M’s secretary was ‘Miss Pettavel’, or ‘Petty’, but Fleming clearly felt that was too close to reality and changed it. Miss Pettigrew was something of a legend in espionage circles: anyone attempting to gain access to ‘C’, as Fleming must have done, had first to pass through his terrifying secretary, who was brisk, intensely efficient and not remotely seductive. One former colleague described her as a ‘formidable, grey-haired lady with the square jaw of the battleship type’.
Another strong possibility is Victoire ‘Paddy’ Bennett, who worked as a secretary in Room 39 and knew Fleming well. Bennett worked on ‘Operation Mincemeat’, the successful deception plan which involved planting a corpse with fake papers on the coast of Spain to persuade the Nazis that the Allies would attack Greece and Sardinia rather than Sicily. Ewen Montagu of NID was an architect of this ruse, and Fleming would probably have been at least tangentially involved. Paddy Bennett once described her former colleague, somewhat tartly, as ‘definitely James Bond, in his mind’. She went on to marry Sir Julian Ridsdale, the long-serving MP for Harwich, and was made a Dame of the British Empire for her work with the Parliamentary Wives Club – a role that has a distinctly Moneypennyish ring to it.
Vera Atkins, executive officer with ‘F’ (French) Section, SOE, was described in her New York Times obituary in 2000 as ‘widely believed to have inspired the character of Miss Moneypenny’. The unmarried Atkins was discreet, handsome and probably known to Fleming through his liaison duties. Though recruited as a secretary, Atkins swiftly emerged as a remarkable intelligence officer in her own right, briefing and dispatching more than five hundred SOE agents to occupied France; after the war she spent years trying to ascertain their fates.
In the end, Moneypenny was surely more fantasy than reality, not least because of the way Bond speaks to her. In Thunderball, when Moneypenny teases him about having to go to a health farm, he warns her: ‘Any more ticking off from you and when I get out of this place I’ll give you such a spanking you’ll have to do your typing off a block of Dunlopillo.’ Miss Moneypenny has an instant comeback: ‘I don’t think you’ll be able to do much spanking after living on nuts and lemon juice for two weeks, James.’ It is hard to imagine Fleming having such a conversation with any of the no-nonsense women he knew from wartime intelligence, let alone carrying out his spanking threat.
Villains, allies and others
‘It is so difficult to make these villains frightening,’ Fleming observed. ‘But one is ashamed to overwrite them though that is probably what the public would like.’ No one ever accused Fleming of underwriting his villains, who are as lurid and sensational as Bond himself is deliberately understated. They are all extraordinary – ugly, deformed, brilliant, sadistic, rich, power-mad and unrepentantly insane. ‘So was Frederick the Great,’ crows Ernst Stavro Blofeld. ‘So was Nietzsche, so was Van Gogh. We are in good, illustrious company . . .’ Many have specific physical characteristics that mark them out as evil, or psychologically damaged, and usually both: an absence of earlobes, a gap between the front teeth, even red hair. Most are foreign, and a large proportion are German or Russian. Many are overweight, some astonishingly so – Blofeld tips the scales at thirty stone; several are wildly camp (Le Chiffre in Casino Royale addresses Bond as ‘dear boy’, Noël Coward’s favourite form of address); Rosa Klebb is a lesbian; several villains are homosexual; and one is apparently an extreme opera fan – we meet Blofeld in You Only Live Twice dressed as a Valkyrie, complete with chainmail. These were not qualities, to put it mildly, that Fleming admired. Although some of Fleming’s close friends were homosexual, he shared the prejudices of his time and class, and so does Bond. Fleming’s villains do nothing by halves. Blofeld’s criminal enterprises are ‘on a scale of a Caligula, of a Nero, of a Hitler, of any of the greatest enemies of mankind’. Fleming’s villains emerged out of a postwar world that had just witnessed, and defeated, wickedness on an unimaginable scale; yet some of the perpetrators of that evil – Mengele, Bormann and others – were still believed to be at large, and assumed to be living a life of criminal luxury. The criminal inventiveness of Bond’s enemies seemed horribly believable in a world that had experienced the death camps, Japanese torture and Gestapo interrogation methods. Bond refers to friends who have been tortured during the war, and Fleming’s personal knowledge of what could happen to captured agents again underpins the fiction. ‘You only have to read about the many tortures used in the war by the Germans which were practised on several of our agents to realise that mine is mild stuff compared with that,’ he once said.
Most of Bond’s enemies are older, male, super-rich and sophisticated, a pattern that has prompted some to see Fleming’s villains as caricatures of patriarchal figures. And it is certainly true that Bond is repeatedly brought to the villain’s lair, told he is a young fool, and then prepared for punishment. This was a scene only too familiar to Fleming from many unpleasant encounters with his cane-wielding housemaster at Eton, and to any number of ex-public-schoolboys familiar with corporal punishment. ‘My dear boy,’ Le Chiffre spoke, like a father, ‘the game of Red Indians is over, quite over. You have stumbled by mischance into a game for grown-ups.’ Bond’s ability to trip up the patronising crooks and bullies had an instant appeal to every grown-up schoolboy who still dreamed of kicking the headmaster in the groin.
Once more, Fleming’s villains, like his heroes, are patchworks of different people, names and traits. Le Chiffre, the sweaty, Benzedrine-sniffing villain of Casino Royale, is believed to be based on Aleister Crowley, who gained huge notoriety in inter-war Britain as ‘The Wickedest Man in the World’. Crowley was a bisexual, sado-masochistic drug addict with the ears of a leprechaun and the eyes of a dissipated stoat. A master of Thelemic mysticism (‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law’), he specialised in mountaineering, interpreting the Ouija board, orgies and thrashing his lovers. The press simultaneously adored and hated him. Crowley made Le Chiffre seem positively sane.
Oddly enough, Crowley is also claimed to have been a British spy. The International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence recorded that, while living in America during the First World War, Crowley used the cover of a German propagandist to gather information for the British secret service on the German intelligence network in the United States, and on Irish Republican activity. During the Second World War, Crowley personally offered to make contact with Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, who was thought to be fascinated by the occult. After Hess landed in Scotland, Crowley offered to intercede as a sort of mystical go-between: ‘If it is true that Herr Hess is much influenced by Astrology and magick, my services might be of use,’ he wrote. Fleming was clearly intrigued, and suggested using Crowley to supply Hess with fake horoscopes, or as an interrogator. After all, Crowley and Hess spoke the same language, namely gobbledegook. Neither idea came to fruition, but Crowley had plainly made a strong impression.
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