Fleming family shaken after vandals target writer’s grave

His most famous creation was James Bond, but even 007’s global fame has proved unable to protect ian Fleming’s grave from vandalism.

the grave, at st James’ Church, sevenhampton, in Wiltshire, is the final resting place not just of Fleming, who died from a heart attack in 1964 aged 56, but also of his wife, Ann, and of the only child they had together, Caspar.

Lying just a few yards from Warneford House, which Fleming rebuilt in his final years, it is marked by a stone obelisk bearing slate plaques memorialising all three.

But the plaque to Fleming, inscribed ‘ Omnia perfunctus vitae praemia marces’ — ‘ having enjoyed life’s prizes, you now decay’ — has now been torn out.

‘ i t’s an outrage,’ Fleming’s biographer, Andrew Lycett, tells me, while Fleming’s stepdaughter, Fionn morgan, fears that the attack was perpetrated by someone gripped by the erroneous belief that the Flemings owed their fortune to slavery.

‘it could be the work of an extreme Bond fan who wants to keep it,’ reflects Fionn, whose father, Lord o’Neill, was killed in action in 1944. Her mother married Fleming eight years later.

‘or, less likely, it could have been stolen by someone thinking it would sell for a large sum.’

But she believes it ‘very likely’ that the grave was desecrated by someone who concluded that Fleming and his family were beneficiaries of the slave trade, simply ‘because of ian’s home in Jamaica, Goldeneye’. in fact, Fleming’s grandfather, Robert Fleming, left school aged 13 but founded the bank which bore his name, making an immense fortune, much of which he bequeathed to his native Dundee.

ian Fleming was revered in Jamaica, particularly at Goldeneye, where staff referred to him as ‘the Commander’.

Recalling Prime minister Anthony Eden’s convalescence there, Fionn tells me: ‘ian’s housekeeper, Violet, refused to obey any but her dear Commander’s wishes. she described the Prime minister as “just the next man”, but the Commander as “the best man i ever met — better than all the men in Jamaica and the rest of the world, too”.’ ‘Outrage’: Obelisk with writer’s plaque missing