Where has Bond travelled to?

I feel I have neglected this blog recently so I thought I would reboot it by mapping the countries that Fleming’s Bond travelled to.

Bond lives in London and spent part of his childhood in Scotland so the United Kingdom is first on the list.  Bond is a regular visitor to Jamaica, the United States, West Germany, Switzerland, Italy and France as these are all featured in multiple stories.

From Russia With Love is a great travel story with Bond following the Orient Express route through Turkey, Greece and Yugoslavia.  Thunderball is based in the Bahamas whilst nearly all the activity in You Only Live Twice takes place in Japan.  The short story For Your Eyes Only takes Bond on a trip to Canada and in the first part of The Man With The Golden Gun Bond recalls his stay in the Soviet Union.

James Bond replica passport from indyprops.com

Bond travels to Africa at the end of Diamonds Are Forever, visiting Sierra Leone & Liberia and we have visits to the Seychelles and to the Kenyan port of Mombasa in the Hildebrand Rarity.

There are other mentions of Bond’s previous travels in the books.  We know he has visited Sweden as he shot a Norwegian double agent in Stockholm and Thunderball hints at a visit to Lisbon in Portugal during the war as well as a trip to Hungary in 1953.  Bond learnt to ski in Austria and the country is referenced in Octopussy, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and From A View To A Kill.  

Bond recalls visits to Mexico & Venezuela in the first chapter of Goldfinger which also describes the service’s waterfront office in Hong Kong.  Other quick mentions include a trip to Trinidad in The Man With The Golden Gun, Monaco in Casino Royale and in Goldfinger Bond recalls watching a motor race in the Libyan capital of Tripoli.  The final mention goes to Denmark, not specifically named but Bond’s JAL flight to Tokyo in You Only Live Twice would have stopped at Copenhagen on the way there.

I am sure I have missed a few places that Bond visited in Fleming’s novels so please let me know!

Map produced using historicalmapchart.net

Tracing the timeline of Thunderball

Of all Fleming's Bond novels, Thunderball is perhaps one of the harder ones to follow as the first half of the book is not told in a strict chronological order.

Inspired by a similar (but far superior) work on the movie Pulp Fiction, I have produced this infographic showing the timeline of the novel, where the action takes place and the interactions of the key characters.

Let me know your thoughts (plus any errors and omissions).

If anyone would like this as a PDF to print at home, drop me a message and I will send it to you.

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.