The name’s Fleming
He shared so much of 007’s glamorous lifestyle, but the creator of James Bond kept one thing top secret... his humble Scots roots
WITH his impeccable background and cutcrystal accent, he embodied the perfect English gentleman – an Old Etonian who favoured his martinis dry and smoked cigarettes hand-rolled from Macedonian tobacco in a slender ivory holder.
Ian Fleming shared the jet-setting lifestyle with his fictional James Bond creation, gourmandising and womanising, while both held the rank of commander in the Royal Navy and worked in secret to defend the realm against its enemies.
Yet while Bond’s imaginary roots were solid Highland landed gentry, Fleming’s family history had its roots in a two-room Victorian tenement flat in Dundee, where his forebears had lived in abject poverty.
And despite his lifelong gratitude for the privileges he enjoyed, thanks to an enterprising great-grandfather, energetic grandfather and brilliant father, he kept his origins top secret.
According to an old f ri end: ‘ He might never have lost sight of his humble beginnings – but he rarely let on about them or spoke of a world which for him was so far, yet so near.’
Dundee was a world away from Fleming’s childhood and youth spent in the family home in London’s Mayfair or their Scottish retreat in Inverness-shire.
Educated at England’s finest school, he went on to Sandhurst to train as an officer before embarking on a career in journalism and his shadowy war work.
Biographies of Fleming rarely touch on the writer’s roots, inevitably concentrating on his creation of the MI6 agent with a licence to kill – or his own top secret but desk-bound work with British naval intelligence during the Second World War.
A new four-part TV drama, beginning this evening, will focus on those days when he was tasked with devising often bizarre plans for behind-the-lines raids – many of which he would later introduce into the adventures of 007.
THE series will no doubt depict Fleming as we recall the novelist who died from a heart attack in 1964 at the age of 56 – as a man with exquisite taste whose love life was as convoluted as the military manoeuvres he dreamed up.
But step back three generations and there is a life not found in Whitehall’s inner sanctum, the casinos of Monte Carlo or the languid lifestyle of Jamaica where Fleming lived out his last days.
The story begins with Fleming’s great-grandfather John, born in 1806 in Perthshire’s Kirkmichael parish but gravitating to the industrial grime of Dundee where there were jobs aplenty in the jute mills.
He took with him his wife Girsal or Grizel – the old Scots word for Grace – and Fleming’s great-grandfather was soon working his way up from the shop floor to factory overseer. Not content to spend his life in a jute mill, he then saved enough to open a little grocer’s shop – but lost his wife soon afterwards and then employed a housekeeper.
The census reveals the family was living in a two-room ‘ apartment’, sharing the address with 11 other families, but John Fleming prospered and eventually returned to Kirkmichael, farming 35 acres until his death in 1858 at the age of 86.
By then his efforts had laid the foundation for the family’s later considerable wealth. His son Robert, Fleming’s grandfather, was a gifted accountant who would found the Scottish American Investment Company, later the merchant bank of Robert Fleming & Company.
‘Bob’ may have been given a head start by his enterprising father but he, too, worked hard. He remained in Dundee when his father left for Perthshire, launching his career as a clerk in the yarn and cloth industry before founding his company.
By the time he married in 1881, at the age of 36, he was apparently being described as the ‘secretary’ of an investment company.
He was upwardly mobile enough now to consider a move across the silvery Tay to the more salubrious Tayport. In the 19th century, it mushroomed from a rural village to a fashionable small town for those who made their money in the city but preferred to put some distance between them and the industrial grime of the City of Discovery.
The family took up residence in a comfortable middle- class villa in the western part of the town which they christened Tighnavon.
In keeping with his new status, Robert began suggesting that his father, John, had been better than he was, describing him as a ‘tea merchant’. The ‘old man’ had no doubt been a tea merchant – serving packets of the stuff to his customers in the grocer’s shop.
But Robert went from strength to strength in the world of finance and by the time Ian Fleming’s father, Valentine, was born in Newport-on-Tay in 1882, ‘Bob’ was a very wealthy man. Yet Valentine would perhaps be the greatest of them all after following his father into the banking profession, consolidating the family business as a world leader, and then becoming a Conservative MP for the London seat of Henley in 1910.
MEANWHILE, several years previously, he had moved with his family from Scotland to a home in Mayfair – where Ian Fleming was born into a life of privilege in 1908. Yet the link with Scotland remained. His wealthy father had bought an estate at Arnisdale near Loch Hourn in Inverness-shire, where he built a house in 1914 just before the outbreak of the First World War.
Fleming would recall with fondness Highland holidays with his father and mother who, like the mother of his creation, was a Swiss woman. But while he might have loved being with his father, he had no great love for huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’, saying: ‘I preferred listening to records than being out of doors killing something.’
But his happy childhood at London and Scotland was about to end tragically. When the Great War started, Valentine became a major in the Queen’s Own Oxford Hussars.
On 20 May, 1917, he was killed in action at Picardy in France. Winston Churchill, no less, wrote an obituary for The Times.
‘It was the moment my childhood ended,’ Fleming recalled later, adding: ‘Until then, my father was a link to the great-grandfather and grandfather who had taken us to a place from which we could dream of great things.’
Fleming, Sky Atlantic, tonight at 9pm.