For Your Eyes Only by Ben Macintyre Page B

who had been taught by the great Sidney Bechet, and an occultist who befriended and recruited the bizarre black magician Aleister Crowley. He was also an obsessive and inspired naturalist who kept snakes in the bath and wrote such definitive works as
How to Keep a Gorilla
. Ostensibly, Knight was a ladies’ man: he was married three times (and briefly suspected of murdering one of his wives), filled his office with beautiful young women, ran two of the most successful female agents in British wartime history, and wrote a peculiar guide to running women agents, whichincludes a section on using sex as bait, in so-called honey traps. ‘It is difficult to imagine anything more terrifying than for an officer to become landed with a woman-agent who suffers from an overdose of Sex,’ he wrote. This slightly odd statement may perhaps be explained by the fact that Knight never consummated any of his marriages, and was probably homosexual. Maxwell Knight signed all his memos ‘M’, and was certainly well known to Fleming, although they never worked together. After the war, Knight would move effortlessly from a career in spying to a new career as a naturalist, ending his life as a much-loved BBC presenter of nature programmes.
    There is one last real-life ‘M’, who may have helped to form the fictional M. William Melville, an Irish-born policeman who died in the last year of the First World War, has a good claim to be Britain’s first secret service chief. Born in Kerry, Melville made his name foiling Fenian and anarchist bomb plots in Britain, and inspired the character of the detective in Joseph Conrad’s
The Secret Agent
. Melville recruited Sidney Reilly, the so-called ‘Ace of Spies’, learned the art of lock-picking from Harry Houdini, and foiled the 1887 Golden Jubilee Plot to assassinate Queen Victoria. On his ‘retirement’ from the police in 1903, Melville founded a secret service, the forerunner of MI5, and adopted the codename ‘M’. Using the pseudonym William Morgan, he gathered intelligence for the War Office, and when the Secret Service Bureau was established in 1909 to coordinate both home and foreignintelligence (later MI5 and MI6), Melville was recruited as chief detective. Fleming would certainly have been aware of the exploits of this other ‘M’, which had become a part of intelligence legend by the time he arrived at NID.
    There is one final intriguing hypothesis, advanced by John Pearson, Fleming’s biographer, to the effect that M might conceivably be modelled on Eve Fleming. Certainly, ‘M’ was Ian’s nickname for his mother from early childhood. She, like M, was by turns strict and indulgent, loved and feared. As Pearson writes, ‘While Fleming was young, his mother was certainly one of the few people he was frightened of, and her sternness toward him, her unexplained demands, and her remorseless insistence on success find a curious and constant echo in the way M handles that hard-ridden, hard-killing agent, 007.’
Who was Miss Moneypenny?
    M’s comely, love-struck secretary, the loyal keeper of secrets, has almost as many potential real lives as she has had appearances on screen. Miss Moneypenny’s role in the books is comparatively small and, apart from her being a non-smoking, milk-drinking poodle-owner, we know little of her life. She ‘would have been desirable but for eyes which were cool and direct and quizzical’. In
Thunderball
we learn that she ‘often dreamed hopelessly about Bond’. Miss Moneypenny’s yearning is made much more explicit in the films, and becamea staple of the genre, the longest flirtation in film history, a central element in the badinage that precedes every Bond mission. Her amorous life is unfulfilled, but her career prospers, at least in the popular culture, as ‘Britain’s last line of defence’. By the time
You Only Live Twice
was filmed, she had