James Bond - The Last Englishman

Speaking from the Ian Fleming exhibition at the Imperial War Museum entitled 'For Your Eyes Only', Professor David Cannadine attempts to put the Bond novels into their historical perspective and speculates about the real-life characters Fleming might have drawn upon to assist in the creation of James Bond.

This programme has been edited for copyright reasons.

Historian David Cannadine mentions two candidates who could have provided the inspiration for Fleming's Bond: Wilfred 'Biffy' Dunderdale and Patrick Dalzel-Job. Both were responsible for astonishing feats of derring-do during their wartime intelligence careers. In 1939, Dunderdale, who was nicknamed 'Biffy' because of his prowess in the boxing ring, managed to smuggle a model of the German Enigma encoding machine from Poland to Paris and then onwards to London. Dalzel-Job evacuated 4,500 inhabitants of the Norwegian coastal town of Narvik prior to a German bombing raid in 1940 using a fleet of fishing boats, an act that earned him the Knight's Cross of the Royal Norwegian Order of St Olaf.