Blades to Kingsdown, tracing the Moonraker chase

As the headquarters of the Secret Service, London is a setting in most of the Bond novels and none as much as in Moonraker.  The book mentions a number of locations and describes Bond’s journeys around the capital in detail.

In the second half of the book, Bond has arranged to meet Gala at Scott’s restaurant on the corner of Coventry Street and Great Windmill Street.  When she doesn’t appear, he calls Ronnie Vallance who is at an event at Mansion House and concludes that he should seek out Drax at his club.  What follows is an exciting chase between London and the South Coast.

Blades of course is a fictional club but is a based on a mixture of other clubs in the area of St James.  The exterior appears to be similar to the nearby Boodle's club but the location is that of Pratt’s club on Park Place (which Fleming renamed Park Street). Bond parks outside Boodle’s where he can keep an eye on Drax’s car around the corner.

When Drax leaves Blades, he turns into St James’s Street, then a quick left/right into Pall Mall and Marlborough Road.  The chase then goes through the Mall, around the roundabout outside Buckingham Palace and towards Drax’s house on Ebury Street.

I was tracing the route of the chase and was initially struggling to place the location of Drax’s house.  Drax passes through the traffic lights at Lower Grosvenor Place and then quickly turns into Ebury Street which doesn’t add up on an modern map.  I did some digging and found that the upper end of Ebury Street was renamed Beeston Place in 1966.   This means that Bond waits for Drax at the corner of what is now Beeston Place and Lower Grosvenor Place and that Drax’s house is probably located at today’s number 3, 3a, 5 or 7 Beeston Place.  Followers of Fleming will note that he lived at two different addresses in the area, in Victoria Square and further down Ebury Street itself.

After Drax leaves his house, the chase continues down Ebury Street, across Chelsea Bridge and through Clapham Common.  As they continue out of London, the cars take the South Circular road and then join the A20 at Eltham.  Various parts of the A20 have been changed over the years since the book was written but the basic route remains the same.

Just after Wrotham Hill, they pass the turning for Mereworth and the nearby woods that are mentioned earlier in chapter 18.  Just before Maidstone there is the Thomas Wyatt Hotel which is a real location and in the town itself there is the Royal Star hotel, now the Royal Star Shopping Centre.

At Leeds Castle, Attaboy II joins the chase and is unceremoniously run off the road by Drax just before Charing Fork.  Heading up Charing Hill, Drax comes up behind a newsprint lorry from Bowaters, at the time the world’s largest producer of newsprint.  Krebs releases a number of rolls from the truck which run down the hill and causes Bond to crash his car into some iron railings.

The rest of the trip to the launch site at Kingsdown is not described in detail but we can assume it follows the same route as Bond’s drive in chapter 10.  After Chilham Castle it was a right turn at Canturbury into the Old Dover Road.

Bond keeps left through Dover and passes Dover Castle and the Swingate radar station.

The "wonderful cardboard castle"

"...he motored slowly along the coast-road, the ruby-spangled masts of the Swingate radar station rising like petrified Roman candles on his right." Moonraker, chapter 10

At the right turn towards Kingsdown there was the fictional World Without Want inn.  In reality, this is the location of the Five Bell’s pub which is still there today.

The launch site itself is located on the Walmer & Kingsdown golf course and we shall explore the area in more detail in a later post.

BEA flight 130 to Rome

Last week's blog post was my attempt to log Bond's flying map using a great little website called Flight Memory.  Flying in Bond's time was a often a luxury experience, quite different to what the majority of travellers experience today.

On a recent British Airways flight I was browsing through the media on the In Flight Entertainment and found a number of information films produced by BA's predecessors BEA and BOAC in the 1950s & 1960s.

It was interesting to watch one film called "Flight Plan".  This surrounds BEA flight 130 from London to Rome.  So what is the link to Bond?  Well in the novel From Russia With Love, Bond takes the same flight BEA flight 130 from London to Istanbul with stops at Rome and Athens.  This film looks like it was filmed in the late 1950s so gives you a feel for what flying was like at the time.

BA's synopsis of the film is "At the viewing balcony on the roof of the Queens Building at Heathrow Airport two debonair jetsetters (played by the same actor) feel they must have met before. In the style of an Ealing comedy, this film reveals the behind the scenes activities of staff at BEA."

Anyway, if you are desperate to watch this and you have no BA flights planned in the near future, the film is apparently included on this DVD.

BEA takes you there..?

Being a bit of a map geek and also someone who travels a lot for work, I like to log my trips so I can look back on all the different places I have visited over the years.

There are a number of websites that can be used for logging flights and my favourite is Flight Memory.  This site combines ease of use together with some fun maps and statistics on your personal travel history.

During the 1950s and early 1960s when the Bond novels were written, flying was not something that most people would experience and the books often describe the luxury of plane journeys during this "golden age" of travel.

Using the information from Fleming's books, John Griswold's excellent chronology, this brilliant forum post plus some of my own research, I have built Bond's own Flight Memory page.

The example below is Bond's journey from London to Istanbul in From Russia With Love and shows the detail that can be inputted.  Timings were calculated using historical timetables.

We can see some nice maps of Bond's trips.  Note that Weathership Charlie, Piz Gloria and the Strasbourg Chateau all have their own "airports".  Bond's trip from London to Tokyo on JAL was a 4-legged affair via Orly, Copenhagen and Anchorage.

 

Flight Memory also shows some statistics on Bond's flights:

Have a look at some more statistics on Bond's flights.  Unfortunately, the flight data can only be accessed by the individual user so I have provided a screenshot of the data below.  Let me know if you have any information to fill in any gaps.

See my Google map to track 007's flights plus over 850 other locations from Ian Fleming's Bond novels.

Phantoms & Meteors

Trains play a significant part in a number of Fleming's books and the novels Live & Let Die and Goldfinger both feature railroad trips between New York and Florida.

The Seaboard Air Line Railroad introduced the Silver Meteor, a diesel powered service between New York and Florida, in 1939.  The train used to split at Wildwood with the front half of the train heading southwest towards the Gulf Coast and the rear to Miami.

In Live and Let Die, Bond and Solitaire take The Silver Phantom from Pennsylvania station through Newark, Trenton, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington.  The Silver Phantom was a fictional name conjured up by Fleming, the trains operated by the Seaboard Air Line Railroad at the time were named the Silver Meteor and Silver Star.

Fortuitously they slip off the train at Jacksonville and take the Silver Meteor (this time a real train name), to Tampa and avoid an attack on the Phantom.

"'There's a long stretch of straight track between Waldo and Ocala,' continued Leiter, 'running through forest and swamp land. State highway right alongside the track. About twenty minutes outside Waldo, Wham! goes a dynamite emergency signal under the leading Diesel. Driver comes down to forty. Wham! And another Wham! Three in line! Emergency! Halt at once!" 

Three of Mr Big's agents walk down the outside of the stopped train:

"Twenty yards and they stop outside Car 245. Men with the rippers give a double squirt at your window. Open it up for the pineapple. Centre man tosses in the pineapple and all three run back to the car. Two seconds fuse. As they reach the car, BOOM! Fricassee of Compartment H. Fricassee, presumably, of Mr. and Mrs. Bryce."

A timetable from the early 1950s says it is 42 minutes from Waldo to Ocala on the Silver Meteor.  As the attack happened around 20 minutes after leaving Waldo we can place it just south of the town of Hawthorne where there is a long straight stretch of the line next to the Sid Martin Highway.

Bond & Solitaire leave the train at Clearwater station which is the last station before St Petersburg before heading to the (presumably fictional) Everglades.  On the way they get spotted by Poxy, an associate of the Robber, at the junction of Park Street and Central Avenue.

In Goldfinger, Bond also takes the Silver Meteor from Miami to New York accompanied by his "hostage" Jill Masterton. 

No travel details are given of the journey, presumably as Bond had other things to occupy his mind:

"It had been a wonderful trip up in the train. They had eaten the sandwiches and drunk the champagne and then, to the rhythm of the giant diesels pounding out the miles, they had made long, slow love in the narrow berth."

See my Google map to track 007's train journeys on the Seaboard Air Line Railroad, plus over 850 other locations from Ian Fleming's Bond novels.

Where next for Horowitz’s Bond?

Following on from the success of his first Bond novel Trigger Mortis, Ian Fleming Publications has announced that Anthony Horowitz will write a second 007 book to be published in spring 2018.

Trigger Mortis is a period Bond novel and is set immediately following the events of Thunderball.  It was generally well received by both critics and Bond fans due to a combination of a strong story and the writing remaining faithful to the original Fleming.  The book features locations including London, the Nurburgring racetrack in Germany plus Florida and New York in the United States.  It included material from a story called Murder on Wheels, part of an intended Bond television series written by Fleming.

It seems that the new novel will again be a period piece and Horowitz has hinted that he is has been thinking about placing it around the time of Casino Royale.  This got me thinking where it would be good to see Bond visit next.

Winning the 00 number
In Casino Royale, Bond tells how he was awarded the 00 number after killing a Japanese cypher expert in New York and a Norwegian double agent in Stockholm.  Again linking one of these stories, perhaps as a prologue to the novel, would be a nice nod to Fleming’s original books.  Mentioned in Thunderball,  The Spy Who Loved Me and From Russia With Love (and also being a city that I visit regularly), Stockholm is surely ripe for inclusion.

Hong Kong
A colony (later dependent territory) from 1841 to 1997, Hong Kong was a major strategic location of the British Empire/Commonwealth.  The territory has been used in various Bond continuation novels set in more modern times but a 1950’s Hong Kong, possibly featuring Dickson from Goldfinger would be an interesting stamp in Bond’s passport from the mid 1950s.

An African Adventure
Despite the historical ties between many African countries and Britain, Fleming only sent Bond to Africa on two occasions.  At the end of Diamonds Are Forever he closes the diamond smuggling pipleline in Sierra Leone and the short story The Hildebrand Rarity is located in the Seychelles.

We can rule out Bond being involved in the Suez crisis (“one of the most pitiful bungles in the history of the world”) as this was at the same time as the Hungarian uprising where he was on an operation at the time.  However there are many exotic locations in Africa that Bond could visit such as Algiers or Dar es Salaam.

You can just imagine Bond being sent by M to some remote colonial outpost where unbeknown to the outside world, there is a megalomaniac villain up to his nefarious tricks…


Behind the Iron Curtain?
Despite all of Bond’s many trips, Fleming never sent him to one of the old Warsaw Pact counties.  In Moonraker he mentions previously being attached to the British Embassy in Moscow and in Thunderball Bond recalls a trip on the Arlberg Express which mainly ran from Budapest to Paris.  Weaving one of these two events into the new book would interesting and add something more to Bond's backstory.

Alternatively an undercover trip to Warsaw, Prague or East Berlin could be another adventure for 007 which would presumably include an exciting escape over the frontier (Fleming always seems to use this word rather than “border”).  Personally, I would love to see Bond operating undercover in Eastern Europe.

Of course all of this is pure speculation, I guess we will have to wait until 2018 before we find out what Anthony Horowitz has up his sleeve.

A trip to Harlem and where was Mr Big's HQ?

Fleming's second book, Live And Let Die, contains far more real life locations than in Casino Royale and it is evident that the author did a considerable amount of research to provide the intricate detail that would become one of the hallmarks of his work.


Bus Ride

Leiter and Bond venture uptown from the St Regis hotel to explore Harlem or "Mr Big's back-yard". They take the bus, probably the most un-Bond like transport in all the novels, which would most likely be route no. 2 of the Fifth Avenue Coach Company (route would have been Fifth Avenue, West 110th Street (Cathedral Parkway), 7th Avenue)

Bar Crawl

After a scotch-and-soda at Sugar Ray's, Bond and Leiter eat "Little Neck Clams and Fried Chicken Maryland with bacon and sweet corn" at Ma Frazier's.  This long closed restaurant was owned by Lula (Ma) Frazier and also known as Ma Frazier's Dining Room and Frazier's Restaurant.  Accounts vary as to the exact location although most accounts place it at 124th and 7th.  This is however, slightly contradicted by Fleming who implies it is further up the street from Sugar Ray's.  Other sources put it on the same block as Sugar Ray's, or opposite Sugar Ray's and also down the street from the Hotel Theresa (between 124th & 125th Streets),

After a another scotch at the Savoy Ballroom, Bond and Leiter skip Smalls Paradise and visit Yeah Man on West 136th Street before moving on to the fictional Boneyard on Lenox Avenue (since 1987 also known as Malcolm X Boulevard).

For more background to Bond's visit to Harlem, this is an excellent bit of research on Bruce Allen's site, Fleming's Bond.


So where is Mr Big's HQ?  

From Bond's escape, the HQ must be located between 7th Avenue and Lenox Avenue "He came to some red traffic lights and jumped them (Lenox Avenue). Several more dark blocks (5th Avenue, Madison Avenue) and then there was a lighted avenue (Park Avenue). There was traffic and he paused until the lights went green. He turned left (actually right) and was rewarded by a succession of green lights, each one sweeping him on and further away from the enemy."

As Bond turns right into Park Avenue, he can be no further North than 132nd Street (any higher than or no further South than 124th Street as Marcus Garvey Park is in the way.

Unfortunately the book gives no more clues as to the location of Mr Big's HQ but maybe there is something in Bruce Allen's suggestion that the Boneyard could well have been based on the real life Lenox Lounge at 288 Lenox Avenue.  If correct, this would place Mr Big's warehouse (which is about a block away) on either 124th Street or 125th Street (Dr Martin Luther King Boulevard).

I have placed Mr Big's Headquarters on 125th Street.  See my Google map to track Bond's routes to and from Harlem, plus over 850 other locations from Ian Fleming's Bond novels.

A few real life places from Casino Royale

Generally considered one of Fleming's best Bond novels, Casino Royale is interestingly one of the least lacking in location detail.  As we have already discussed, Royale-les-Eaux is a fictional town and on the whole, Fleming appears to have written the book based on his own experiences without any of the detailed research that he would do for his later work.


I have tried searching for other locations that appear to be in the area around Royale such as the Dubernes, Les Noctambules and L'Auberge du Fuit Defendu without success.  Similarly, 450 Charing Cross Place in London does not exist and Chaffery's is a fictional Jamaican company. 

However, in an attempt to give his novel some additional authenticity, Fleming does mention a few real life places:


RCA Building at Rockefeller Center, New York City, United States

"Well, in the last few years I've killed two villains. The first was in New York - a Japanese cipher expert cracking our codes on the thirty-sixth floor of the RCA building in the Rockefeller centre, where the Japs had their consulate. I took a room on the fortieth floor of the next-door skyscraper and I could look across the street into his room and see him working. Then I got a colleague from our organization in New York and a couple of Remington thirty-thirty's with telescopic sights and silencers. We smuggled them up to my room and sat for days waiting for our chance. He shot at the man a second before me. His job was only to blast a hole through the windows so that I could shoot the Jap through it. They have tough windows at the Rockefeller centre to keep the noise out. It worked very well. As I expected, his bullet got deflected by the glass and went God knows where. But I shot immediately after him, through the hole he had made. I got the Jap in the mouth as he turned to gape at the broken window." Casino Royale, chapter 20

Dachau Displaced Persons Camp, Munich, Germany

Concentration Camp located near Munich in Germany where Le Chiffre was encountered as a displaced person in June 1945. 



Casino, Monte Carlo, Monaco

World famous casino in Monaco.  Mentioned as the place where Bond "sat in the Casino in Monte Carlo for two months before the war watching that Roumanian team work their stuff with the invisible ink and the dark glasses. He and the Deuxiéme bowled them out in the end and 007 turned in a million francs he had won at shemmy". 


Used as a location in the films Never Say Never Again and Goldeneye.



Château de Fontainebleau, near Paris, France

Château located near Paris and from 1945-1966, the headquarters of NATO's Allied Forces Central Europe. Felix Leiter is based here.



Daily Gleaner, Kingston, Jamaica 

Jamaica's newspaper of record, at the time based at 148–156 Harbour Street, Kingston.  Fawcett, the Picture Editor, is a representative of the Secret Service.



As ever, check out the Google map for these and over 850 other locations featured in the Bond novels.

Where is that moonlight trail that leads to your side?

I was playing around with Google Earth and for a bit of fun, I thought I would try and simulate the path of the rocket launch featured in Moonraker.

We know the launch time was 12:05pm but we can also pin the date down to 22 May 1953.  Bond historians John Griswold and Henry Chancellor both place the book in 1953 and the launch was in a week when Tuesday was "towards the end of May" (chapter 10).  As Monday 25th was a bank holiday in the UK in that year (and appears to be a normal working day in the book), the events must take place during the 3rd week of May 1954.

The arc appears really steep as the rocket flies 1,000 miles high (chapters 10, 12, 20, 24) but only travels 80 miles north east of the launch site near Kingsdown in Kent.

Apologies for the cryptic blog title, I guess the hardcore Bond fans will recognise the line from the Shirley Bassey song.

Where is the location of Royale-les-Eaux?

Royale is featured in the books Casino Royale and On Her Majesty's Secret Service but has slightly differing accounts of it's location.

In Casino Royale, the town is a fishing village North of Dieppe, it is near the mouth of the Somme and has a beach. Le Tréport is the best fit as any further south there is no beach and further north there is no fishing port. Le Tréport was also in the Seine-Inférieure département (now called Seine-Maritime).

It is harder to pin the location in OHMSS down - the book clearly points to the location being Le Touquet but Le Touquet is separately mentioned in the book. There is no nearby coastal town north of Le Touquet so I have chosen Stella Plage. However, if Bond and Tracey were both driving to a location south of Le Touquet, why did they drive through Montreuil?

Good supporting info here and as always you can see all the Bond locations on the Google Map.

London Calling

London features in most of the Bond stories, particularly in Moonraker and The Spy Who Loved Me.

For a bit of fun I have produced the below map in the style of the London Underground which attempts to show all of the locations mentioned in the 007 novels.  As per Harry Beck's original tube map, this is not strictly geographically accurate although my "stations" are approximately in the correct places.

In Goldfinger, Bond actually takes the tube from Bank station when returning back to headquarters after visiting Colonel Smithers at the Bank of England.  Even M seems to use it in Dr No after telling his driver to finish early "I'll use the tube this evening. No weather for driving a car."

Wellington Square is the joker in the pack as this is not actually mentioned in Fleming's novels, however this is the location of Bond's flat in Chelsea given by John Pearson in his book "James Bond: The Authorised Biography".

Strict rules of golf?

Follow the Bond v Goldfinger golf game which took place at the Royal St Marks golf links at Sandwich by using my Google Map. A close game which Fleming placed on the real life Royal St Georges golf course in Kent.

I have attempted to recreate the shots that Bond (red) and Goldfinger (orange) played at each hole.  Unfortunately Fleming does not go into detail about the shots played at the 8th, 9th, 12th, 13th and 16th holes.

"The ball soared a hundred feet, paused elegantly, dropped eighty feet on to the thatched roof of the starter's hut and bounced down." Goldfinger, chapter 8

A trip to Shrublands

In the novel Thunderball and following an unsatisfactory medical, Bond is sent to a health clinic in Sussex.  He travels from London via train but takes a taxi from the station to the town of Washington. 

Fleming doesnt mention the railway station but we can deduce it is Burgess Hill Station which is "'bout half an hour" away.  From the text it is clear Bond is not collected from Brighton and the small station at Hassocks does not appear to have had any traffic islands (roundabouts) close by for the cab driver to negotiate at the time.

The route takes Bond to Shrublands through Sussex Downs towns of Poynings and Fulking.

During the taxi ride, Bond and the Cab driver discuss the Bucket of Blood, the nickname of the Astor Club which was the location of a notorious police corruption case in 1954.  Also in close proximity to each other are Brighton Racecourse where the cab driver sees as the source of his future fortunes and Brighton Central Hosptial (actually Brighton General Hospital) where Count Lippe recovers from his burns.

Bond's mode of transport was an Austin taxi which was 20 years old.  With Thunderball taking place in 1958 then the most likely model was the Austin Low Loading Taxi Cab which was introduced in 1934.