Caught by the Googlies, you silly Herberts!
What was James Bond’s middle name? I had been compiling a Christmas quiz, and hit upon the idea of writing a question or two about the first names of famous characters in fiction. What, for instance, was Jeeves’ Christian name? and what was Captain hook’s?
It was at this point that I found myself wondering about whether James Bond had a middle name.
Like Captain hook, Bond was an Old Etonian (coincidentally, both were expelled). Etonians tend to have grand middle names. For instance, the middle name of Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming, was Lancaster. this made it seem likely that he had come up with something similarly fancy for Bond.
So I did what all researchers do these days: I typed ‘James Bond middle name’ into Google.
this gave me 2,020,000 results. the first link directed me to a site called Quora, which confidently told me ‘James Bond’s middle name is herbert. he is James herbert Bond’.
a martyr to the truth, I thought I had better doublecheck, so I clicked on the next site, which was Yahoo answers. here, to the question ‘What is James Bond’s Middle Name?’, the answer came: ‘Bond’s middle name was herbert (her Majesty’s Secret Service)’.
By now, I felt pretty confident that I could offer ‘herbert’ as the answer to my general knowledge question. But just to make absolutely sure, I clicked on another site, theory of Names, which boasted of being set up with the laudable aim of ‘giving parents inspiration and options when making the most important (and happiest) decisions of their adult lives’.
‘We asked ourselves: does the most famous name in British Spy history have a middle name?’ they announced, then confirmed the seemingly universal opinion that, yes, Bond’s middle name was herbert. Readers were then directed to the original source.
I clicked on the link, just to be certain. to my surprise, the source for the information was named as ‘Craig Brown’. It all sprang from an article I had written ten years ago.
I have a terrible memory, not least for my own jokes, so I couldn’t remember ever having said that herbert was James Bond’s middle name. But here it was, reprinted in full: a characteristically flippant piece in which I had made up thirteen things You Didn’t Know about James Bond.
Number one was: ‘James Bond’s middle name is revealed only once in the entire canon. In On her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963), Bond is being held in a raffia-work cage suspended over a pool of piranha fish while the villain, Dr Peevish, taunts him by saying ‘herbert, herbert, herbert’ over and over again.
‘Finally, Bond can bear it no longer. “Go on — kill me, kill me, PLEASE!” he screams.
‘But at that very moment he spots Dr Peevish’s Christian name on the laundry-mark attached to the raffia-work cage and shouts: “Do your worst — Dibdin!” While Peevish is blocking his ears in anguish, Bond makes good his escape.’
I then double-checked all the other sites, and, sure enough, the trail of their original source always led back to me. Somewhere along the way, a joke had been transformed into fact, and now, like the comedian who balances a bucket of water on the top of a door and then forgets it is there, I had fallen into my own trap.
Ever since Donald trump won the Presidential election, borne aloft by a stream of websites carrying bogus information, commentators have been announcing our entry into a world of ‘Post truth’.
Snowed under by an avalanche of information on the internet, we have lost the means of sifting the true from the false, the reality from the joke. I still find it hard to believe that anyone who read my original article could have taken it seriously, particularly as other claims I made were equally daft. For instance, one of them read: ‘For the past 40 years, James Bond’s older brother, Basildon, has been a leading figure in the stationery business.’
AND another was: ‘James Bond’s sister, Jennie, was the BBC Royal Correspondent from 1989-2003, and later proved her family mettle on I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out of here! (2005).
‘the first full-length Jennie Bond movie, scheduled for release in early 2007, is said to be less aggressively masculine than the usual Bond films, and features the all-action heroine grappling with the Earl and Countess of Wessex in a 6in deep pool of ornamental goldfish.’
It now strikes me as perfectly possible that Jennie Bond is the sister of James and Basildon. Why not?
But is Donald trump really going to be the next President of the USA? Is Boris Johnson really Foreign Secretary? Did Ed Balls really re-launch himself by performing on Strictly Come Dancing? all these things seem far less likely.