Sean Connery was a Scottish National Party separatist and a bit of an eccentric; and also, most everyone avers, a good guy. He lived in gated, ultra-posh Lyford Cay in New Providence, fifty miles from us on Eleuthera. He was intensely private—hard on visitors, who were always trying to see him. Appropriately, he chose to live where he filmed so many escapades—romancing lovelies while fighting sharks, frogmen, tarantulas, barracuda, octopi, gorgeous spies and implacable masterminds.

Nassau

He used to go to this little bistro outside of Lyford Cay. The restaurant belonged to the sister of a good friend. We would go there whenever we were in Nassau. One night my friend I and had just returned from a northern fishing trip. We brought back salmon, some of which was featured on the menu. Seated a couple of tables over were Sean Connery and his wife Micheline, feasting on our fish.

The waitress, my friend’s niece, gestured toward us, telling Sean we were the ones who had actually caught the salmon. As he was leaving he stopped at our table to thank us.

Another friend who was at the table, but not on the fishing trip, shook hands with Mr. Connery and said, “You’re welcome.” We of course gave our friend action for having taken credit for something he had no part of. He said he didn’t care what we thought—it was one of the highlights of his life. He tells the story of shaking Sean Connery’s hand quite often.

London threesome

Here is another snippet that would otherwise be lost to memory. My friend Garry Clark, our manager on a dozen Churchill tours, runs a fleet of limousines and private cars in London. In 1989 he drove for the cast of the third Indiana Jones movie. He drove Sean Connery, Harrison Ford and screenwriter George Lucas for a stag night on the town. Behind the wheel, Garry was in stitches the entire ride. “Each of them was taking turns, telling the other two how far past it they were.”

Bond girls? Sure, but what about Bond cars?

Every car nut growing up in that era was struck by the great cars in Ian Fleming‘s thrillers. Sean Connery drove them with verve and assurance. Each of us conjured up the sensation of being pressed against the seatback under the urge of the car’s terrific power.

Early on there was Bond’s supercharged 1930 Bentley 4 1/2-liter coupe. Arch-villain Sir Hugo Drax ambushed and totaled it on the Dover Road in Moonraker (1955). Drax himself drove a Mercedes-Benz 300S cabriolet. “Bond had once dabbled on the fringe of the racing world,” Ian Fleming writes. “Lost in memories, he heard again the harsh scream of Caracciola‘s great white beast of a car as it howled past the grandstands at Le Mans.” Or the huge silver grand prix Mercs of Lang, Seaman and von Brauchitsch, “drifting the fast sweeping bends of Tripoli at 190, or screaming along the tree-lined straight at Bern with the Auto Unions on their tails.”

“He disagreed with something that ate him”

Bond’s friend, CIA agent Felix Leiter, drove a Cadillac-powered Studillac in Diamonds are Forever (1955). Leiter let it out on the Taconic State Parkway, doing 80 in second. Then his “hook” slammed the column shift into high on the way to 100. (Leiter’s “hook” had replaced his right hand, eaten by a shark in Live and Let Die, 1954, Fleming wrote: “He disagreed with something that ate him.”) The Studillac didn’t impress Bond. “This sort of hotrod job’s all right for kids who can’t afford a real car,” he told Leiter.

Most memorable of all was Bond’s Aston Martin DB5 (DB3 in the original text of Goldfinger (1957). Hollywood immortalized it with trick machine guns, rotating number plates, ejection seat, water- and oil-sprayers, a bullet-proof deck shield, and knock-off hubs which extended to rip the guts out of opposition vehicles.

“The Locomotive” (Bentley S2)

Never seen in the films was Bond’s Bentley Continental S2, which he called “The Locomotive.” It appeared in the novel Thunderball (1961). Fleming called it “the most selfish car in England….. Some rich idiot had married [it] to a telegraph pole on the Great West Road. Bond bought the wreck, straightened the chassis and fitted a new engine.”

Next he had Mulliners fit a custom body: “A trim, rather square convertible with only two armed bucket seats in black leather. The rest was all knife-edged, rather ugly, trunk.” [Not “boot”?] The Bentley was battleship grey, “painted in rough, not gloss…. She went like a bird and a bomb and Bond loved her more than all the women at present in his life rolled, if that were feasible, together.”

Fleming’s readers….

…were struck by The Locomotive, envisioning this incongruous Bentley heading to “work.” That took place in the mysterious, unmarked building on Regent’s Park, “Universal Exports,” cover for Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Ian Fleming continues:

The twin exhausts—Bond had demanded two-inch pipes—he hadn’t liked the old soft flutter of the marque—growled softly as the long grey nose, topped by a big octagonal silver bolt instead of the winged B, swerved out of the little Chelsea square and into King’s Road.

It was 9 o’clock, too early for the bad traffic, and Bond pushed the car fast up Sloan Street and into the park. It would also be too early for the traffic police, so he did some fancy driving that brought him to Marble Arch in three minutes flat. Then there came the slow round-the-houses into Baker Street and so into Regent’s Park. Within ten minutes of getting the Hurry call, he was going up in the lift of the big square building to the eighth and top floor….

The Locomotive Lives! (Update, 2021)

We recently heard from professional car designer and Bond fan Tony Hunter, who has brought Bond’s coachbuilt S2 Bentley back to life. The design, writes Tony

Naturally we asked, what about the big silver bolt radiator mascot? (In his drawings above, artist Tom Rivel interpreted this literally.) But Tony Hunter doubts this is what Fleming imagined:

Whatever you think was in Fleming’s mind, Tony’s recreation is truly magnificent. (I’m glad he painted it in gloss, not rough!) It’s authentic down even to the vintage telephone, Bond’s connection to “Universal Exports.”

Further reading

Exuma, Jewels in the Sea: Diving the Thunderball Grotto, 2013.

Garfield’s gripping novel: fictional biography?

The late, prolific Brian Garfield wrote this book four decades ago, yet I am still asked about it—and whether it could be true.

The story Mr. Garfield tells seems impossible—fantastic. An eleven-year-old boy named Christopher Creighton leaps a garden wall in Kent one day. He finds himself face to face with the Right Honorable Winston Churchill, Member of Parliament. He will later know the great man by the code-name “Tigger.” It is 1935.

Christopher, who continues to invade Chartwell, impresses Churchill with his audacity and pluck. Four years later, aged fifteen, he is recruited into the British Secret Service by a pair of spy-masters known as “Owl” and “Winnie-the-Pooh.”

Christopher’s climacterics

Garfield’s young warrior then accomplishes a succession of what Churchill might call “climacterics.” He warns that Belgium plans to surrender to Hitler. (One book reviewer said “without a fight.”) Advance knowledge of the Belgian collapse enables the British to pull off a fighting retreat, saving 338,000 French and English soldiers at Dunkirk.

But Christopher is just getting warmed up. Next, he finds secret U-boat pens in Ireland and blows the Germans’ most strategic cover for Atlantic warfare. Then he sabotages a friendly Dutch submarine and sends its crew to the bottom after it reports the Japanese battle fleet en route to Pearl Harbor. Churchill has concluded the Americans must not be warned—lest it enable them to avoid war. Back in London, Christopher finishes the job by murdering the only cipher clerk who has read the Dutch sub’s message. And she turns out to be one of his lady friends.

He engineers the assassination of Vichy’s treacherous Admiral Darlan, and tips off the Nazis to the Dieppe raid so they will meet it in force, convincing the Americans that it is too soon for a cross-channel invasion. Finally, when the D-Day invasion really is on, he steers the Germans into defending Calais and not Normandy. By which time Christopher Creighton is a good deal older, wiser, sadder and bloodier. But war is a dirty business!

Counter-factuals

The Belgian scenario is quite contrary to history. The Belgians fought bravely against overwhelming odds for several weeks in May 1940. Also, King Leopold issued warnings of his impending surrender in advance. The Germans never had secret U-boat pens in Ireland. (See for example Warren Kimball’s article, “That Neutral Island.” Dieppe was a disaster, but not by plan: Terry Reardon has carefully catalogued the many errors in its planning and execution. (All three of these articles are published by the Hillsdale College Churchill Project.)

Numerous conspiracy theories attend Pearl Harbor. One says Roosevelt knew and let it happen to get Congress to declare war. Another says Churchill knew, and kept the news from Roosevelt, so the Americans would be dragged in. This is simply silly. No American president, especially a lover of the Navy, would allow his country’s military to be so badly damaged. No British prime minister would withhold advance warning. Surely, an alerted American fleet and aircraft would have engaged the Japanese, and war would have happened anyway.

Read for entertainment, however….

But Brian Garfield spun a great yarn. Although the imagination strains over many conspiracies engineered by a boy, The Paladin is gripping, well-written and plausible. The Churchill Garfield describes tallies closely with the best accounts of his contemporaries. The vivid scenes at the “hole in the ground” (Cabinet War Rooms) are painted with authority. Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Belgians and French, the British and German agents, are entirely believable. Brian Garfield is as plausible than Len Deighton, as exciting as Ian Fleming. His novel is splendid entertainment, and you should definitely add a copy to your library of tall tales.

Garfield set tongues wagging back in 1980, when promoting his new book. “The hero is a real person,” he wrote. “He is now in his fifties. His name is not Christopher Creighton.”

I’ve often thought that the Churchill novels of Michael Dobbs are so well scripted, so faithful to the real-life characters in them—and that we would not be surprised to see Dobbs’s scenes described as truth  by some careless future writer. Well, Brian Garfield had a twenty-year head start on Dobbs, and did him one better. In the 1990s, someone named “Christopher Creighton” surfaced, with a book about a secret raid on Berlin. We report, you decide.