28 May: Ian Fleming

Ian Fleming, English author, journalist and naval intelligence officer best known for his James Bond series of spy novels, was born on this date in 1908.

1. He came from a wealthy family connected to the merchant bank Robert Fleming & Co. He was born in Mayfair, was educated at Eton, Sandhurst and the universities of Munich and Geneva. His father was the Member of Parliament for Henley from 1910 until his death on the Western Front in 1917. His father's obituary was penned by none other than Winston Churchill himself.
2. Although best known for the James Bond novels, Fleming also wrote three non-fiction books, two of which were published. The first, The Diamond Smugglers, was published in 1957 and was partly based on background research for Diamonds Are Forever. In 1960 Fleming was commissioned by the Kuwait Oil Company to write a book on the country and its oil industry, but they didn't like what he wrote so it was never published. Fleming's second non-fiction book was published in 1963. It was called Thrilling Cities, and was a reprint of a series of Sunday Times articles based trips taken during 1959 and 1960.
3. Fleming also wrote the children's story, Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, which was based on the bedtime stories he told his son. It was written while Fleming was recovering from a heart attack in 1961. It was published in October 1964, two months after his death.
4. He wrote his first Bond novel, Casino Royale, in 1952. He later claimed he wrote it to take his mind of his forthcoming marriage to his pregnant mistress, and called it his "dreadful oafish opus". One of the people who helped type up the manuscript for him was his secretary at The Times on whom Miss Moneypenny was based.
5. He based several of his characters on real people, including Bond himself (Bond "was a compound of all the secret agents and commando types I met during the war", Fleming said. These included his brother, Peter, Conrad O'Brien-ffrench, a spy whom Fleming had met while skiing in Kitzbühel in the 1930s, Patrick Dalzel-Job, who served with distinction in 30AU during the war, and Bill "Biffy" Dunderdale, station head of MI6 in Paris) and some of his villains were named after people he didn't like - Scaramanga was a boy he fought with in school and Goldfinger was named after British architect Ernő Goldfinger, whose work Fleming disliked.
6. Also, to some extent, he based Bond on himself. He had the same golf handicap, his taste for scrambled Eggs, his love of gambling, and used the same brand of toiletries. Fleming, like Bond, was a bit of a womaniser. It got him into trouble even at school, which is why he left early for a crammer course to gain entry to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. While there, he contracted gonorrhea. The woman he eventually married, Ann Charteris, was his mistress during her two marriages to other men. Her second husband divorced her because of her relationship with him (she'd been carrying on with Fleming in Jamaica, having told her husband she was visiting Noel Coward). They married presumably because Ann was pregnant and both of them had affairs after marriage.
7. Fleming's day jobs gave him plenty of experience to draw upon in his writing. In May 1939 Fleming was recruited by Rear Admiral John Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence of the Royal Navy, as his personal assistant. This involved coming up with plans, outlined in memos, to dump a fresh corpse dressed as an airman behind enemy lines with a failed parachute and false papers to mislead the enemy. He also outlined a scheme to "obtain" a German bomber, man it with a German-speaking crew in Luftwaffe uniforms, and crash it into the English Channel. When the Germans rescued them, they'd attack them, and bring their boat and the Enigma machine back to England. Alan Turing and Peter Twinn at Bletchley Park would have liked this to have happened, but it never did. Admiral Godfrey put Fleming in charge of Operation Goldeneye, a plan to maintain an intelligence framework in Spain in the event of a German takeover between 1941 and 1942; Fleming's plan involved maintaining communication with Gibraltar and launching sabotage operations against the Nazis. In 1942 Fleming formed a unit of commandos. Even though he didn't fight with them in the field he gave them orders. They didn't like him because he called them his "Red Indians".
8. He also worked as a journalist for a while. After he failed entrance exams to the foreign office, his mother got him a job with Reuters News Agency. During this time he covered the Stalinist show trial of six engineers from the British company Metropolitan-Vickers. While in Moscow, he wrote to Stalin requesting an interview. He was turned down but by means of a hand written note from Stalin himself, apologising for not being able to meet him.
9. During an Anglo-American intelligence summit in Jamaica in 1942, Fleming fell in love with the country and decided to buy a house there. The house was named Goldeneye and it was where he wrote his novels.
10. In 2011 Fleming became the first English-language writer to have an international airport named after him: Ian Fleming International Airport, near Oracabessa, Jamaica.