character, M,â Godfrey complained after Flemingâs death. âIan wanted people to take M seriously and questioned me closely about his notional age and career. The end result did not convince or thrill.â
The use of the single initial was a convention dating back to Mansfield Cumming-Smith, the first head of SIS (MI6), who became known as âCâ after his habit of initialling papers he had read with a C written in green ink. In Somerset Maughamâs
Ashenden
stories, another source of inspiration for Fleming, the same post is occupied by âRâ, the grim, amoral spy chief who is prepared to expend his agents ruthlessly without ever dirtying his own hands. Alongside the fictional R and the real C, there are three more Ms and one Z, all real, all known to Fleming, and all parts of the composite character that emerged as M.
âColonel Zâ, Lieutenant Colonel Sir Claude Dansey, was Deputy Chief of SIS and head of the shadowy Z network of which Conrad OâBrien-Ffrench was a part. The bespectacled Dansey was witty, spiteful, charming and slightly mad. As a boy of sixteen, Dansey, who was not homosexual, was seduced by Oscar Wilde. His father threatened to prosecute, and then packed the young Claude off to Africa. He was first recruited as a spy during the Boer War, lost his money in the Wall Street Crash, performed various duties for Britishintelligence before the Second World War, and then abruptly quit, allowing rumours to circulate that he had been sacked for stealing. Meanwhile, believing SIS to be ill-organised and inefficient, he set about building a parallel organisation behind the cover of a respectable importâexport business in Bush House, recruiting part-time, usually unpaid agents, including journalists, businessmen, gamblers and playboys. Danseyâs agents used the codename Z, and avoided using the wireless for messages. In 1939, the Z network was absorbed into SIS, and as assistant to the new âCâ, Stewart Menzies, Dansey helped to coordinate active espionage until the end of the war. Fleming gives him a namecheck in
From Russia with Love
, when Darko Kerim, Bondâs friend who is murdered on the
Orient Express
, refers to âMajor Danseyâ, his predecessor as Head of Section T. Two famous men who worked in wartime intelligence with the real Dansey gave very different assessments of Colonel Z: Malcolm Muggeridge called him âthe only professional in MI6â; the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre, however, considered him âan utter shit, corrupt, incompetent, but with a certain low cunningâ.
Major-General Sir Colin McVean Gubbins was director of operations and training with SOE, and the creator of the auxiliary units on which Peter Fleming worked, intended to operate behind the lines in Britain in the event of a German invasion. An expert in guerrilla warfare, he was described by the cryptographer Leo Marks as âa real Highlandtoughie, bloody brilliant . . . with a moustache which was as clipped as his delivery and eyes which didnât mirror his soul or any other such trivia. The generalâs eyes reflected the crossed swords on his shoulders, warning all comers not to cross them with him.â Since the initial C was already taken, and G is an initial commonly used as an army abbreviation, Gubbins signed himself by his middle initial: M.
Another contender is the equally strange MI5 spymaster Maxwell Knight, who ran a subsection of the security service responsible for rooting out potential extremist subversives in Britain, both fascist and communist. Knight broke up some of the most important spy rings in Britain, and was one of the first to warn that the secret services were being infiltrated by communist moles, but his warnings were fatally ignored. Knight was a man of many parts, most of them very odd and quite incompatible: in addition to running a huge and elaborate spy ring, he was a novelist, a jazz saxophonist
The use of the single initial was a convention dating back to Mansfield Cumming-Smith, the first head of SIS (MI6), who became known as âCâ after his habit of initialling papers he had read with a C written in green ink. In Somerset Maughamâs
Ashenden
stories, another source of inspiration for Fleming, the same post is occupied by âRâ, the grim, amoral spy chief who is prepared to expend his agents ruthlessly without ever dirtying his own hands. Alongside the fictional R and the real C, there are three more Ms and one Z, all real, all known to Fleming, and all parts of the composite character that emerged as M.
âColonel Zâ, Lieutenant Colonel Sir Claude Dansey, was Deputy Chief of SIS and head of the shadowy Z network of which Conrad OâBrien-Ffrench was a part. The bespectacled Dansey was witty, spiteful, charming and slightly mad. As a boy of sixteen, Dansey, who was not homosexual, was seduced by Oscar Wilde. His father threatened to prosecute, and then packed the young Claude off to Africa. He was first recruited as a spy during the Boer War, lost his money in the Wall Street Crash, performed various duties for Britishintelligence before the Second World War, and then abruptly quit, allowing rumours to circulate that he had been sacked for stealing. Meanwhile, believing SIS to be ill-organised and inefficient, he set about building a parallel organisation behind the cover of a respectable importâexport business in Bush House, recruiting part-time, usually unpaid agents, including journalists, businessmen, gamblers and playboys. Danseyâs agents used the codename Z, and avoided using the wireless for messages. In 1939, the Z network was absorbed into SIS, and as assistant to the new âCâ, Stewart Menzies, Dansey helped to coordinate active espionage until the end of the war. Fleming gives him a namecheck in
From Russia with Love
, when Darko Kerim, Bondâs friend who is murdered on the
Orient Express
, refers to âMajor Danseyâ, his predecessor as Head of Section T. Two famous men who worked in wartime intelligence with the real Dansey gave very different assessments of Colonel Z: Malcolm Muggeridge called him âthe only professional in MI6â; the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre, however, considered him âan utter shit, corrupt, incompetent, but with a certain low cunningâ.
Major-General Sir Colin McVean Gubbins was director of operations and training with SOE, and the creator of the auxiliary units on which Peter Fleming worked, intended to operate behind the lines in Britain in the event of a German invasion. An expert in guerrilla warfare, he was described by the cryptographer Leo Marks as âa real Highlandtoughie, bloody brilliant . . . with a moustache which was as clipped as his delivery and eyes which didnât mirror his soul or any other such trivia. The generalâs eyes reflected the crossed swords on his shoulders, warning all comers not to cross them with him.â Since the initial C was already taken, and G is an initial commonly used as an army abbreviation, Gubbins signed himself by his middle initial: M.
Another contender is the equally strange MI5 spymaster Maxwell Knight, who ran a subsection of the security service responsible for rooting out potential extremist subversives in Britain, both fascist and communist. Knight broke up some of the most important spy rings in Britain, and was one of the first to warn that the secret services were being infiltrated by communist moles, but his warnings were fatally ignored. Knight was a man of many parts, most of them very odd and quite incompatible: in addition to running a huge and elaborate spy ring, he was a novelist, a jazz saxophonist
Similar Books
