The Real James Bond
With the third delay (until October 2021) of the latest James Bond film, No Time To Die, Bond fans were left waiting if they might in fact have time to die before seeing it.
With that wait in mind, you might find it interesting to know where author, Ian Fleming, actually got the name for his character and that it was in fact a real life person. That is: in name, not in actions.
There have been many who attribute the actions and exploits of Fleming’s fictional character to Dusko Popov — codename: TRICYCLE — a Serbian who worked as a double agent for the British, passing on disinformation to the Germans during World War 2. According to Popov’s biography, he attempted to gamble with $50,000 of Her Majesty’s Government’s money at Casino Estoril in Lisbon. An event that it is thought Fleming watched unfold as he was stationed in the Portugese capital during the war. A scene many of you will recognise as a key scene in Fleming’s first novel and later movie, Casino Royale.
But what of the name of Bond, James Bond? That was borrowed by Fleming from a very different source altogether — Birdwatching. The real James Bond was an American ornithologist (a bird expert) with a particular focus on birds of the Caribbean. His field guide, Birds of the West Indies, was sitting on a desk at Goldeneye — Fleming’s beach house in Jamaica where he wrote all his novels — and was used by the author, mentioning that: “It struck me that this brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon and yet very masculine name was just what I needed, and so a second James Bond was born."
In turns out, Fleming was a keen birdwatcher himself, but it’s also interesting to note that at the time ‘birdwatcher’ was used amongst intelligence agencies as slang for spy. So perhaps Fleming was channeling a tongue-in-cheek, inside joke to former intelligence agency colleagues.
I’m sure birdwatching has been used by real life intelligence agents in the field, it’s a reasonable excuse if you’re caught on the side of a mountain with a long range camera. Although I’m not sure if it would be believed as the case of two birdwatchers from the US found out when they were kidnapped in Colombia in 1998. They were released a month later.
The protagonist, Oliver Jardine, in my novel Magical Disinformation uses the cover of bird watching while he investigates a matter up in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia. Colombia is an up-and-coming bird watching destination with a lot of increasing interest especially as many areas which were previously not accessible due to conflict become more open to birdwatchers from around the world. However, I chose this cover as my own tongue-in-cheek reference to James Bond, the ornithologist.
If you’re interested to know more about the REAL James Bond, I came across this interesting book by Jim Wright The Real James Bond: A True Story of Identity Theft, Avian Intrigue, and Ian Fleming which tells the story of James Bond the birdwatcher — not the spying kind ;) — and it even includes his encounter with Ian Fleming in Jamaica. It seems he wasn’t overly pleased with the use of his name, but took it in his stride and mentions that it even helped him to get through customs and immigration on his travels!
James Bond and Ian Fleming meet in 1964 at Fleming’s Goldeneye beach house in Jamaica. Source: Photo by Mary Wickham Bond, Free Library of Philadelphia.
So that’s a short story of James Bond, the ornithologist, not the spy. Something to think about and read about while we wait for the next instalment of James Bond in the cinema.