When Your Name's in the Frame

‘What do you know about a man called Scaramanga, 007?’ M asks James Bond. We know perhaps a little more, courtesy of Sunningdale School

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WE all peer at our old school photos from time to time, wondering whatever happened to the girl who looked just like Twiggy or whether the grinning imp who revelled in the title of ‘The Naughtiest Boy’ ended up as a vicar or in prison.

But at Sunningdale School the names along the bottom of some football team photographs provide a fascinating link with literary and film history, taking us into the world of James Bond. For there in a 1951 grainy line-up of stony-faced boys with their arms folded is Nichol Fleming, nephew of author Ian, a brother of Nichol’s father, Peter. And among the older boys attending the prep school at that time, also recorded in photos, were Peter Scaramanga and John Blofeld, whose surnames would later be used by the author for now infamous Bond villains.

Tom Dawson, Sunningdale’s headmaster, says: “The story is that Ian Fleming used the names in the books because Scaramanga and Blofeld were not very kind to his nephew, Nichol.”