The woman who captured Ian Fleming’s heart

By Emily Russell, Maud’s granddaughter and editor of her diaries

Born to wealthy German parents, Maud Russell and her younger sister Kate (Kitty) grew up in a six-storey town house in Knightsbridge. At a dinner party during the First World War she met Gilbert Russell, a captain in the Intelligence Corps; they were engaged within a month. They went on to have two sons. From their Hampshire estate, Mottisfont Abbey, and their house in Cavendish Square, London, they threw parties for politicians, society figures, writers, musicians and artists.

One of their regular visitors was a handsome Reuters journalist, Ian Fleming, who was to play a crucial role in the Naval Intelligence Division at the Admiralty, before writing his 007 novels in the 1950s. As my grandmother later recalled, Fleming had the ‘handsome looks of a fallen angel’.

The two almost certainly became lovers in the 1930s, and their relationship continued intermittently over the next decade, long after Gilbert’s death from asthma in 1942.

Among her papers I found a small envelope with a lock of black hair inside. On the envelope, in pencil, she has written ‘I.’s’. Meanwhile, the strength of Fleming’s attraction to her is perhaps best displayed by one of the letters he sent her from Colombo in 1945, in which he told her, ‘You’re the one reason I want to see London again.’

Maud (left) with her mother and sister, Kitty