Scotland, Fleming's other secret agent

Much like an extra character, Scotland has had a starring role in many Bond films – but was 007 a Scot?

- DANIEL PEMBREY

When Ian Fleming sat down at his Jamaican retreat in early 1963 to finish You Only Live Twice, he was 54 and entering the final 18 months of his life. The novel’s title comes from the notion that we die upon looking death in the face. Hauntingly, this 12th instalment of the Bond book series contained an obituary, written by M after Bond is believed killed. Two passages of the obituary are especially telling. One is that Bond is ‘of a Scottish father, Andrew Bond of Glencoe, and a Swiss mother, Monique Delacroix, from the Canton de Vaud’ (both of whom died in a climbing accident during Bond’s youth). The other concerns ‘his transfer [from Eton] to Fettes, his father’s old school’.

Many real-world figures have been claimed as the inspiration for Bond but by far the most persuasive is Fleming himself or, rather, an idealised version of him: the adventurous life that an older Fleming might have imagined for his younger self. That younger self was shaped by Scotland.

“Never forget you’re a Scot,” his mother, Evelyn Beatrice Sainte Croix Fleming, would tell him growing up. Born in 1908 in Mayfair, Fleming was thoroughly anglicised but his family hailed from Dundee, with the original patriarch, Robert, making his fortune in investment trusts during the late 19th century. By the turn of the 20th century, the family was spending summers at Scottish estates, notably Black Mount, near Glencoe, a glorious 90,000-acre deer forest. Robert rented the estate in 1924, later acquiring it outright, and a central strand of the Bond story began spinning.