Mallorca has a long, fascinating and intriguing history with spies and espionage. Certain characters on the island played crucial roles in various global conflicts, including the Second World War. And since the first James Bond novel was published in 1953, countless pages have been written about the spy and his creator, Ian Fleming. However, it was not until a few months ago that his definitive biography was published. And a certain Mallorcan featured. Among the more than 700 pages of Nicholas Shakespeare’s Ian Fleming The Complete Man, there is a surprising mention of a more than familiar name: Juan March, or “the most unscrupulous man in Spain”, as Nicholas, who is passionate about Mallorca having spent his summer holidays on the island as a child, highlights.
Q.— What sparked your interest to write Ian Fleming: The Complete Man?
A. — I was approached by the Fleming family, who wondered if I would consider writing what would be the first authorised biography of Ian Fleming since 1966. I admit I was hesitant. Excited. Intrigued. Flattered to be asked – who wouldn’t be? But also, to start with, a bit wary, given Fleming’s fame and reputation and the amount of chaff that hedges his name. Was there anything more to say about him? And if there was, was I the person to say it? Plus, did I wish to spend four or more years in the company of a cad – which was his public caricature? I’d grown up on Bond, yet about his creator I knew little other than tidbits picked up when making films or writing about some of his contemporaries. The idea I had of Fleming was of a “squalid, unillumined” figure, as Malcolm Muggeridge called him.
New material
Before committing myself, I conducted a background check. I sought out Fleming’s two previous biographers, John Pearson – who had shared a desk 66 years before with my father (I reintroduced them) – and Andrew Lycett. I spoke to Fleming’s surviving family and friends. I was given and came across new material. And what I found as I did my due diligence was not what I had expected. The image I previously had of Ian Fleming from sideways glances was in surprising respects inaccurate and unfair. Only very recently has it struck me that a moral of Ian Fleming’s story is this: don’t run off with the wife of the proprietor of the Daily Mail – still the only paper that hasn’t reviewed my biography – if you want to avoid being forever after rendered into tabloid fat.
Significant war work
People tend to have already made up their minds about IF like I had – as a sardonic, moody, wife-beating bounder who strutted about pretending to be more important than he was. What decided me to write the book was to discover that his war work was indeed significant. As well, how much kinder he was in life than his posthumous caricature suggested. It was a line in an unpublished diary that clinched it, penned seven years after his death by Maud Russell, Fleming’s wartime lover who had bought him Goldeneye, the clifftop bungalow in Jamaica where he wrote all his Bond novels: Sometimes I think of Ian – mostly of his personality, his character and his innate kindliness. Kindliness is a prize quality to uncover. I was relieved to find it in spades, both towards men and women.
Q.— In conclusion, who really was Ian Fleming as a person?
A. — He was a son of privilege – or over-privilege – but in his bones a melancholy and sensitive character who for a long time was overshadowed by his brilliant elder brother Peter and dominating, snobbish mother Eve. He only escaped their reach after writing his Bond novels.
Q.— Did your father’s career as a senior diplomat arouse your interest in the workings of the foreign office?
A. — I felt reasonably familiar with Fleming’s world after discovering a number of unexpected but intriguing connections. It turned out that in 1915 my grandfather had breathed in the very same cloud of chlorine gas at Ypres as Fleming’s war hero father Val – who then helped my grandfather transport 359 wounded soldiers on stretchers. That was not all. My son was in the same schoolhouse as Fleming and, like him, won the athletics prize. In 1953, my father shared a desk at the Times with Fleming’s first biographer. He went on to work for Fleming’s successor as Foreign Manager of the Sunday Times. Only after that did my father enter the Foreign Office as personal assistant to our ambassador in Paris, Gladwyn Jebb (who in 1940 had started SOE). Spookier still, my wife’s Icelandic-Canadian relatives in Winnipeg, the Stefánssons, had fostered the Icelandic orphan whom Fleming claimed as the model for Bond, William Stephenson – who adopted and anglicised their name, under which he ran British Intelligence operations in the US, the Caribbean and Latin America.
Q.— What has been the most surprising thing you have learnt or discovered about Fleming?
A. — He was kinder and more significant than his tabloid caricature had suggested. Most of the women who loved him – “there were enough to fill the Albert Hall,” wrote Rebecca West – went on loving him. No “chocolate sailor” with his feet behind an Admiralty desk, he was in the words of his boss, Admiral Godfrey, head of Naval Intelligence, “a real war-winner’, with fingers in practically every intelligence pie. As well, Fleming was one of only a handful of trusted officers who assisted the Americans in setting up their first foreign intelligence agency in 1941, with Churchill’s object of bringing America, then neutral, into the war. In 1947, this became the CIA.
Q.— How did Fleming’s background in British intelligence inform his fiction? Did he base Bond on himself?
A. — He couldn’t have written his Bond books without his six years in Naval Intelligence. The thrillers were grounded in a reality and a truth that he could not reveal but had intensely experienced. As for how much he drew on himself for Bond, there are, aside from Fleming, as many candidates for that role as there are authors supposed to have written Shakespeare. Fleming never made any secret that Bond was a fictional compound of the agents and commando types he had met during WW2, a medley of himself and what he had asked others to do or heard they had done. I haven’t found any reason to disbelieve him.
Q.— How did Juan March get involved and what kind of character was he? People tend to very rarely talk about him in Mallorca.
A. — Juan March was the richest and allegedly “most unscrupulous man in Spain”: in one week in September 1936 he deposited in his own name 121 metric tons of gold in the Bank of Italy, greater than most national gold reserves. His obsession with gold planted a lifelong fascination for that precious metal in . Originally a tobacco smuggler, March, the son of a Mallorcan pig-farmer and in one legend illiterate till he was 40, bankrolled General Franco and paid for a British plane to pilot Franco from the Canary Islands to Spanish Morocco to ignite the counter revolution. “Franco can refuse me nothing,” he boasted.
Q.— Did he play the British or did the British play him, how important was he?
A. — It is hard to judge March’s importance. “I don’t keep books,” he claimed. The details of his dealings were informal, orally made, and never written down in the Treasury books.
One scheme he proposed to Churchill that involved Fleming was to buy up 59 German ships tied up in Spanish ports because of the British blockade, which the British could then use. Fleming organised for March to receive a gold deposit today worth 305 million pounds, although most of the shipping remained in German hands.
Spain refused to help Germany
A more successful operation, pursued again at the behest of Churchill, was to bribe a handful of Spanish generals (including Luis Orgaz Yoldi and Antonio Aranda Mata) to restrain Franco from siding with Axis powers. An estimated $300 million was spent on this. Fleming’s fingerprints are all over these transactions. One of Fleming’s assistants said, “It was fantastic how the situation changed for the better and how well our plans worked out. So much so that Spain refused to help Germany and would have resisted by force if the Germans had tried to enter Spain.”
Q.— It is somewhat ironic that a Mallorcan should have popped up in the Fleming story considering you used to holiday on the island as a child. Have you been back to the island and what memories do you have of Mallorca?
A. — Mallorca has a special place in my affections. My great-aunt Winifred went to live in Peguera after the war: the climate was recommended to restore her tubercular husband’s battered lungs. My earliest summer holidays were spent in her villa in the 1960s, on a terrace wreathed in bougainvillea with a view to the Mediterranean. If I think of a warm clear sea, it’s the beach at Cala Fornells, where I learned to snorkel. If I conjure a platonic fishing village, it’s Andratx before it became developed.
If I think of an idyllic landscape, it’s the drive through the mountains to Soller. I have not been back. Otherwise, I might well have learned about Guy Hamilton and the Thomas Harris affair ...
Q.— Of all the actors who have played Bond, which do you think Fleming would have approved of most?
A. — Fleming only lived to see Sean Connery in the first two Bond films. Initially, he’d been put off.
“He’s not my idea of Bond at all. I just want an elegant man, not this roughneck.” But that changed when he saw him on screen. Connery was “not quite the idea I had of Bond, but he would be if I wrote the books over again”. Just as Alec Guinness reshaped the character of George Smiley for John le Carré, Fleming responded to Connery’s cinematic Bond by putting him into his next novel, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. I frankly can’t see him doing that in response to, say, Roger Moore.
Q.— Having travelled so much, where do you feel more at home in the word?
A. — The son of a diplomat, I was brought up in France, the Far East and South America. I was 42 when I visited the Australian state of Tasmania. Nothing prepared me for the arrestingly beauty of the island or the humour and independent spirit of its people. I felt at home at once and have felt so ever since buying a beach shack there on the east coast, where I have written part of six books, including Ian Fleming.
Q.— Had you not become a hugely successful writer, what do you think your career path would have been?
A. — I’m not sure about hugely successful. I count myself fortunate merely to have survived to this point as an author. I began as a documentary-maker in the BBC and then went into newspapers (The Times, Daily Telegraph). I now realise I’d have been made redundant long ago if I’d stayed.
In low moments, I yield to supremely unrealistic fantasies that perhaps I should have been an estate agent or an academic or a barrister, but these are short-lived. Writing allows me to engage all six cylinders, as it were. This is especially the case with fiction, which I continue to regard as “the only game in town”. After five years on the trail of Ian Fleming, I’m more than excited to return to the novel which he interrupted.