Grandad the spy!
Kit Harington discovers his grandfather was a wartime intelligence officer with a James Bond connection…
MY GRANDPARENTS’ WAR Thursday, 9pm, C4 Factual
As Jon Snow in Game of
Thrones, Kit Harington was used to intrigue and heroics, and he finds both feature in his family history as he explores his grandparents’ experiences in World War Two.
He discovers that his paternal grandfather, John Harington, was recruited by Naval Intelligence in 1941 and sent to Jamaica, where one of his colleagues would have been James Bond creator Ian Fleming.
‘This was before Fleming wrote the Bond novels and he’d have met all sorts of people in the service,’ says Kit. ‘Fleming most likely would have met my grandfather, so, in a really roundabout way, John Harington might have inspired Bond!’
John was tasked with keeping an eye on the former King Edward VIII, who had been appointed Governor of the Bahamas but whose Nazi sympathies worried the security services.
In the Caribbean, John married Kit’s grandmother, Lavender, mere days after meeting her. She had been posted to Barbados also to do vital wartime intelligence work. Meanwhile, Kit’s maternal grandfather, Mick Catesby, fought in Italy in one of the bloodiest campaigns of the war – the Battle of Monte Cassino in the first half of 1944 – which earned him the Military Cross. ‘He lost some of his closest friends at that time,’ says Kit. ‘He didn’t want to talk about what happened. He didn’t even want to acknowledge that he’d won a medal. He just wanted to move on.’