Ian Fleming, creator of the 007 figure famous worldwide through the very successful film series based (mostly) on his books, lived and wrote for part of his life in Kent. He was inspired to write another of his creations, about the Chitty-chitty Bang-bang car, by a resident of an estate near Canterbury. He died in Kent, while attending a function at the Sandwich Royal St Georges Golf Club. Parts of his work were based in Kent, and refer to it (in particular in `Goldfinger’ and `Moonraker’). He owned at least two houses in the county, and while based in London was a frequent weekend visitor. Despite this, there are only the faintest vestiges of his life here. One small memorial, on the beach front at Dover, has a silhouette of the figure of 007 wielding a gun. But it is tucked away, and not easily accessible. The Duck Inn at Pett Bottom carries a small plaque saying that he wrote `You Only Live Twice’ here in the early 1960s. The 007 numbered bus from London to Dover is reportedly the inspiration for his eponymous hero. But for such a hugely successful writer, with such an international reach, Kent makes very little of the Fleming link.
A part of this might be that the majority of his novels were set in more exotic parts of the world – the Caribbean, where he had a home and often stayed, or Japan, Hong Kong, or elsewhere in Europe. Fleming’s mythical hero seems more at home in the casinos of Monte Carlo or the ski slopes of the Swiss Alps, rather than the homely landscape of provincial England. Even so, there is an odd synergy between what the underlying message of his novels often proved to be – celebration of British prowess despite a fading influence in the world, with all the complexity around that – and the memory traces from the Second World War and life afterwards that are still evident to this day in Kent.
Fleming himself was born in London. His father, Valentine, had been killed on active service in the war. His brother, Peter Fleming, became a highly successful writer in his own right, largely of travel books. Indeed, as John Pearson in his biography of Fleming issued soon after the writer’s death made clear, one of the issues in his early life was that Ian was the underachiever in the family. This was despite attending Eton, and a brief stint in the late 1920s at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. He pursued careers in journalism, banking, and finally, during the Second World War, naval intelligence. All of these were to inform his novels, commenced in 1952 with `Casino Royale’ and continuing to his death, in 1964.
Fleming’s interest in Kent, according to Pearson (who had known him) had started at least in the 1930s, when he went to stay at the Guildford Hotel in Sandwich (demolished in 1974 -www.dover-kent.com/Guilford-Hotel-Sandwich.html) in order to play golf at the nearby Royal St Georges. This was to famously figure as the location of 007’s initial battle with Goldfinger in the novel of that name (written in 1958 and published a year later) (John Pearson, `The Life of Ian Fleming’, Bloomsbury, 1966, republished 2013, 98). After his adventures in the war, and now married to Anne Charteris (with whom he had been engaged in a long term affair during her previous two marriages) while based in London as a journalist, Fleming bought one of the houses immediately beside the sea front at St Margaret’s Bay near Dover from Noel Coward. He would escape here for the weekend. Despite initial arguments with Coward about the state the house had been left in (sorted out amicably) St Margaret’s was to prove a good choice. Fleming,’ Pearson states `was delighted with his house by the cliffs near Dover, with its views across the Channel (he erected a telescope on the terrace to watch the shipping) and its blessed proximity to “the best seaside golf course in the world” at Sandwich’ (Pearson, 289).
The other house that Fleming lived in, though for much shorter, was the Old Palace in Bekesbourne, a village near Canterbury, which he purchased in 1960 but was to sell two years later before his death. The Old Palace was also, fittingly, later owned by a deputy head of M15.
The work which has the strongest associations with Kent by Fleming was the 1955 `Moonraker’ – the tale of a scientist, Sir Hugh Drax, producing a massive rocket programme which is located at Kingsdown, along the eastern coast from Deal. Kent places figure throughout the work, much of it talking of the roads through the county from London which Bond has to drive in order to work at the Moonraker base. `Bond did a racing change, and swung the big car left at the Charing fork, preferring the clear road by Chilham and Canterbury to the bottlenecks of Ashford and Folkestone.’ (`Moonraker’, Jonathan Cape, 1955, 123) Later on waking up at the location of his assignment Bond looks out at the landscape around the base. `It was a wonderful afternoon of blue and green and gold….[they] stood gazing over the whole corner of England where Caesar had first landed two thousand years before.’ (187). This was, according to Pearson, `Fleming’s favourite corner of England.’ (Pearson, 334). This even extended to the Café Royal at Dover, now long gone, where Fleming’s favourite of scrambled eggs, bacon and coffee were a meal Bond ploughed his way through, while suspicions of the seemingly impeccable and patriotic Drax and his intentions were dawning on him.
Traffic and roads through Kent recur in `Moonraker’. The `congested traffic’ of Maidstone, which impeded Bond as he speeds after Drax following him back to his base in Kent from London. The Thomas Wyatt hotel and pub just outside Maidstone (and still there) figures as the place where Bond’s love interest and fellow ally against Drax’s schemes, Gala, asks to powder her nose in an attempt to free herself of the villain. (225-226). Needless to say, it goes wrong – initially. Farningham by-pass, Wrotham Hill, and Swanley Junction, along with the race up Charing Hill, in which Bond’s car is finally smashed off the road, all figure – memorials of a world before motorways made this into mere side routes, and places one can bypass.
`Moonraker’ is a good novel to dwell on the meaning of Fleming’s novels – at least as they speak to English identity. The undercurrent of the plot is explicit enough – a group of Germans masquerading as patriots of England, scheming to finally even things with the country that had been so central to their defeat only a decade before. This reinforcement of a sense of battered national pride in the post-war era in which Britain existed in a world where its colonies were largely fading into history, and the shadow of the US and other larger powers fell across it, is something the historian David Canadine has written forcefully on. `Fleming’, he states, `was the champion and successor of the clubland heroes in a degenerate age who, like M, was opposed to the domestic decline, and to the softening of the national backbone.’ (David Cannadine, `In Churchill’s Shadow’, Allan Lane, London, 2002, 299). The landscape of coastal Eastern Kent was rich in references both to the most recent history of defiance to threats coming from the continent, but also of more ancient traces- the Roman invasion being the one Fleming explicitly referred to. But the location of the two forays by Caesar into Britain is disputed – no archaeological evidence has ever been found either for the mission, or where it may have started from. The earliest remnant of Roman activity is a ditch network at Richborough Castel, close to Sandwich, from the Claudian invasion, almost a century later. Even so, as Joseph Conrad was to so powerfully write, in the opening of the `Heart of Darkness’, the Roman invasions figure with ambiguity in British history – either as moments of oppression or of enlightenment over the `dark places of the world’ which pre-Roman and therefore pre-civilised (at least in this context) Britain was.
Fleming was to die, poignantly, at the hospital in Canterbury after a heart attack ( he had been a heavy smoker, and drinker, through most of his adult life) while accepting an honorary position at his beloved Royal St Georges in Sandwich bay. In his later years, he had written the three Chitty Chitty Bang Bang books for his son, Caspar. These too were based on the racing driver and motor engineer Louis Zoborowski (1895-1924) who had lived near Bridge, Canterbury. Reflecting the low key way that the memory of Fleming’s work in Kent figures now, of the many films made from the books since the 1960s, only one scene has been filmed here – in the Port of Dover ferry terminal for the 1971 `Diamonds are Forever’.