Ian Fleming

Robert Fleming started life in a poor district of Dundee - one of only two surviving children of John and Annie Fleming. Five of his siblings died of diphtheria before reaching adulthood. Robert Fleming won a scholarship to the Academy of Dundee High School, and started work as a book- keeper. He spotted the investment opportunities offered in America and founded the Scottish American Investment Trust in Dundee in 1873, when he was twenty eight years old and went on to establish a financial dynasty. Robert Fleming had two sons - Valentine and Philip. Ian Fleming, was born on 28 May 1908 at 7 Green Street, London W1. He was the second son of Valentine and Eve Fleming. Their first child, Peter, was born a year earlier and two younger brothers, Richard and Michael, soon followed. Valentine Fleming was elected as Member of Parliament for South Oxfordshire in 1910 and the family moved to Pitt House on Hampstead Heath. Ian Fleming's first boarding school, Durnford School, was based near Swanage in the Isle of Purbeck. It was here that he first read Sapper's Bulldog Drummond books, as well as the adventure novels of John Buchan, Sax Rohmer, Poe and Robert Louis Stevenson. Valentine Fleming joined the Oxfordshire Yeomanry in August 1914, and was soon promoted to major. He was killed in action on 20 May 1917. Winston Churchill wrote a lengthy appreciation of his friend for The Times, and Major Fleming was posthumously awarded the DSO. Ian Fleming would always keep this obituary framed and by his side for the rest of his life. Along with his brothers, Ian Fleming attended Eton. He was not an industrious pupil but excelled at athletics. He was Victor Ludorum (champion of the games) two years in a row. After leaving Eton, Ian Fleming spent some time in the Austrian Tyrol at Kitzbühel and went on to study in Munich and Geneva. He had briefly attended the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst (which he did not enjoy) and was later disappointed not to succeed in the tough Foreign Office entrance examinations. Instead, he started at Reuters. This was a very enjoyable and successful period and he particularly relished covering a notorious espionage trial in Russia. But he then went back to London and started a new career as a stockbroker; until the outbreak of war changed his life completely.