|
Ian Lancaster Fleming (May 28, 1908 – August 12, 1964) was a British author,
journalist and Second World War Navy Commander. Fleming is best remembered for
creating the character of James Bond and chronicling his adventures in twelve
novels and nine short stories. Additionally, Fleming wrote the children's story
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and two non-fiction books.
Ian Fleming was born in Mayfair, London, to Valentine Fleming, a Member of
Parliament, and his wife Evelyn Ste Croix Fleming (née Rose). Ian was the younger
brother of travel writer Peter Fleming and the older brother of Michael and Richard
Fleming (1910–77). He also had an illegitimate half-sister, the cellist Amaryllis
Fleming. He was the grandson of Scottish financier Robert Fleming, who founded the
Scottish American Investment Trust and merchant bank Robert Fleming & Co.
(since 2000 part of JP Morgan Chase). He was cousin to actor Christopher Lee and
actress Dame Celia Johnson was his sister-in-law (wife of his brother Peter).
Fleming was educated at Durnford School in Dorset, Eton College, and the Royal
Military Academy Sandhurst. He was Victor Ludorum at Eton two years running,
something that had been achieved only once before him. He found Sandhurst to be
uncongenial, and after an early departure from there, his mother sent him to study
languages on the continent. He first went to a small private establishment in
Kitzbühel, Austria, run by the Adlerian disciples Ernan Forbes Dennis and his
American wife, the novelist Phyllis Bottome, to improve his German and prepare him
for the Foreign Office exams, then to Munich University, and, finally, to the
University of Geneva to improve his French. He was unsuccessful in his application
to join the Foreign Office, and subsequently worked as a sub-editor and journalist
for the Reuters news service, including time in 1933 in Moscow, and then as a
stockbroker with Rowe and Pitman, in Bishopsgate. He was a member of Boodle's, the
gentleman's club in St. James's Street, from 1944 until his death in 1964.
His marriage in Jamaica in 1952 to Anne Charteris, daughter of Lord Wemyss and
former wife of Viscount Rothermere, was witnessed by his friend, playwright Noel
Coward.
 World War
II
In 1939, on the eve of World War II, Rear Admiral John Godfrey,
Director of Naval Intelligence of the Royal Navy, recruited Fleming (then a
reserve subaltern in the Black Watch) as his personal assistant. He was
commissioned first as a Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve lieutenant, and
subsequently promoted to Lieutenant Commander, then Commander. His known
codename was 17F.
In 1940 Fleming and Godfrey contacted Kenneth Mason, Professor of Geography at
Oxford University, about preparing reports devoted to the geography of countries
engaged in military operations. These reports were the precursors of the Naval
Intelligence Division Geographical Handbook Series produced between 1941 and
1946.
He also conceived of a plan to use British occultist Aleister Crowley to trick
Rudolf Hess into attempting to contact a faux cell of anti-Churchill Englishmen in
Britain, but this plan was not used because Rudolf Hess had flown to Scotland in an
attempt to broker peace behind Hitler's back. Anthony Masters's book The Man Who
Was M: The Life of Charles Henry Maxwell Knight asserts Fleming conceived the plan
that lured Hess into flying to Scotland, in May 1941, to negotiate Anglo–German
peace with Churchill, and resulted in Hess's capture: this claim has no other
source.
Fleming also formulated Operation Goldeneye, a plan to maintain communication with
Gibraltar as well as a plan of defence in the unlikely event that Spain joined the
Axis Powers and, together with Germany, invaded the Mediterranean colony.
In 1942, Fleming formed an Auxiliary Unit known as 30AU or 30 Assault Unit that he
nicknamed his own "Red Indians"; it was specifically trained in lock-picking,
safe-cracking, forms of unarmed combat, and other techniques and skills for
collecting intelligence. He meticulously planned all their raids, alongside Patrick
Dalzel-Job (one of the Inspirations for James Bond), going so far as to memorize
aerial photographs so that their missions could be planned in detail; because of
their successes in Sicily and Italy, 30AU was greatly enlarged and Fleming's direct
control was increased before D-Day.
Fleming even visited 30AU in the field during and after Operation Overlord,
especially after the Cherbourg attack, in which he felt that the unit had been
incorrectly used as a frontline force rather than as an intelligence gathering
unit, and from then on tactics were revised.
Writing
career
As the DNI's personal assistant, Fleming's intelligence work provided the
background for his spy novels. In 1953, he published his first novel, Casino
Royale. In it he introduced secret agent James Bond, also famously known by his
code number, 007. The double "00" indicating that he has a licence to kill. Bond
appears with the beautiful heroine Vesper Lynd, who was modelled on SOE agent
Christine Granville. Ideas for his characters and settings for Bond came from his
time at Boodle's. Blade's, M's club (at which Bond is an occasional guest), is
partially modelled on Boodle's and the name of Bond's arch enemy, Ernst Stavro
Blofeld, was based on a fellow member's name. Bond's name came from famed
ornithologist James Bond, the son of the Bond family who allowed Fleming the use of
their estate in Jamaica to write. The Bonds were wealthy manufacturers whose estate
outside of Philadelphia, Pa. eventually became the grounds of Gwynedd Mercy
College. Fleming used the name after seeing Bond's Birds of the West Indies
(1936).
Initially Fleming's Bond novels were not bestsellers in America, but when President
John F. Kennedy included From Russia With Love on a list of his favourite books,
sales quickly jumped. Fleming wrote 14 Bond books in all: Casino Royale (1953),
Live and Let Die (1954), Moonraker (1955), Diamonds Are Forever (1956), From Russia
With Love (1957), Dr. No (1958),Goldfinger (1959), For Your Eyes Only
(1960),Thunderball (1961), The Spy Who Loved Me (1962), On Her Majesty's Secret
Service (1963), You Only Live Twice (1964), The Man With The Golden Gun (1965), and
Octopussy/The Living Daylights (1966).
In the late 1950s, the financial success of Fleming's James Bond series allowed him
to retire to Goldeneye, his estate in Saint Mary Parish, Jamaica. The name of the
house and estate where he wrote his novels has many sources. Notably, Ian Fleming
himself cited Operation Goldeneye, a plan to bedevil the Nazis should the Germans
enter Spain during World War II. He also cited the 1941 novel, Reflections in a
Golden Eye by Carson McCullers. The location of the property may also have been a
factor — Oracabessa, or "Golden head". There is also a Spanish tomb on the property
with a bit of carving that looks like an eye on one side. It is likely that most or
all of these factors played a part in Fleming's naming his Jamaican home. In Ian
Fleming's interview published in Playboy in December 1964, he states, "I had
happened to be reading Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers, and I'd
been involved in an operation called Goldeneye during the war: the defense of
Gibraltar, supposing that the Spaniards had decided to attack it; and I was deeply
involved in the planning of countermeasures which would have been taken in that
event. Anyway, I called my place Goldeneye." The estate, next door to that of
Fleming's friend and rival Noel Coward, is now the centerpiece of an exclusive
resort by the same name.
The Spy Who Loved Me (1962) stylistically departs from other books in the Bond
series as it is written in the first person perspective of the (fictional)
protagonist, Vivienne Michel, whom Fleming credits as co-author. It is the story of
her life, up until when James Bond serendipitously rescues her from the wrong
circumstance at the wrong place and time.
Besides writing twelve novels and nine short stories featuring James Bond, Fleming
also wrote the children's novel Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. He also wrote a guide to
some of the worlds most famous cities in "Thrilling Cities" and a novel on diamond
smuggling entitled "The Diamond Smugglers".
In 1961, he sold the film rights to his already published as well as future James
Bond novels and short stories to Harry Saltzman, who, with Albert R. "Cubby"
Broccoli, co-produced the film version of Dr. No (1962). For the cast, Fleming
suggested friend and neighbour Noël Coward as the villain Dr. Julius No, and David
Niven or, later, Roger Moore as James Bond. Both were rejected in favour of Sean
Connery, who was both Broccoli and Saltzman's choice. Fleming also suggested his
cousin, Christopher Lee, either as Dr. No or even as James Bond. Although Lee was
selected for neither role, in 1974 he portrayed assassin Francisco Scaramanga, the
eponymous villain of The Man with the Golden Gun.
Neither Saltzman nor Broccoli expected Dr. No to be much of a success, but it was
an instant sensation and sparked a spy craze through the rest of the 1960s.
The successful Dr. No was followed by From Russia with Love (1963), the second and
last James Bond movie Ian Fleming saw.
During the Istanbul Pogroms, which many Greek and some Turkish scholars attributed
to secret orchestrations by Britain, Fleming wrote an account of the events, "The
Great Riot of Istanbul", which was published in the The Sunday Times on 11
September 1955.
Later
life
Fleming was a bibliophile who collected a library of books
that had, in his opinion, "started something", and therefore were significant
in the history of western civilization. He concentrated on science and
technology, e.g. On the Origin of Species, but also included other significant
works ranging from Mein Kampf to Scouting for Boys. He was a major lender to
the 1963 exhibition Printing and the Mind of Man. Some six hundred books from
Fleming's collection are held in the Lilly Library at Indiana University,
Bloomington, Indiana, U.S.A.
In March 1960, Fleming met John F. Kennedy through Marion Oates Leiter who was a
mutual friend and invited to dinner. Leiter had introduced Kennedy to Fleming's
books during his recovery from an operation in 1955. After dinner Fleming related
his ideas on discrediting Fidel Castro; these were reported to Central Intelligence
Agency chief Allen Welsh Dulles, who gave the ideas serious consideration.
Fifty-six-year-old Ian Fleming died of a heart attack on the morning of August 12,
1964, in Canterbury, Kent, England, and was later buried in the churchyard of
Sevenhampton village, near Swindon. Upon their own deaths, Fleming's widow, Ann
Geraldine Mary Fleming (1913–1981), and son Caspar Robert Fleming (1952–1975), were
buried next to him. Caspar committed suicide with a drug overdose.
Source : Some of the information on this page came
from a Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU Documentation
License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
|
.png "UK")
Ian
Fleming - Generator - Biography
