Bond creator's Truly Scrumptious sideline

Ian Fleming's gloriously eccentric flying car, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which inspired the 1968 film starring Dick Van Dyke, first appeared in the pages of the Daily Express 60 years ago this month. A National Trust exhibition picks up the story

- By Jon King

AN Fleming’s spy novels have thrilled generations, with 007 battling to save the world from the evil villains Ernst Blofeld, Auric Goldfinger and Francisco Scaramanga. But while Fleming remains best known today for creating James Bond, he also entertained millions of children with another world-famous work, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a lighter piece of fiction that was adapted by Roald Dahl into the evergreen 1968 film.

The book was written by Fleming for his son, Caspar, and was first serialised in the pages of the Daily Express in 1965. It was illustrated by the late John Burningham, whose original artwork features in a new exhibition at Mottisfont house near Romsey, Hampshire, to mark the 60th anniversary of the drawings being created.

Fleming has long been linked with Mottisfont, now run by the National Trust, thanks to his intimate friendship with former owner Maud Russell, a wealthy socialite and major modern art collector with whom he was romantically entwined.

So it’s fitting that his only children’s book, featuring the eccentric inventor Caractacus Potts and the delectable Truly Scrumptious, portrayed in the film adaptation by Dick Van Dyke and Sally Ann Howes, should be celebrated here.

The aptly named Helen Potts, Mottisfont’s Experience Manager, is the brains behind the upcoming Chitty Chitty Bang Bang illustrations exhibition which features 80 original works by Burningham — who died in 2019 aged 82 — alongside new illustrations by Steve Antony, who updated the classic tale in 2020.

“Not a lot of people know Ian Fleming wrote Chitty or that it was first serialised in the Daily Express,” she says. “We're showing the original illustrations and telling the story how Fleming told it, which is very different to the film.

“The film is darker, but the novel has all the hallmarks of a spy story — adventures, heroes, villains, gadgets. It’s an absolutely delightful read.”