Andrew Cook

Who's the real James Bond?

Well, despite what anyone says, Ian Fleming is the real James Bond.

James Bond was just a fictitious alter ego that he created himself because he was bored to tears being stuck behind a desk in Whitehall during World War II working for Naval Intelligence.

He wanted to write a novel, or more than one novel, and ideally see that novel become a film.

What he wanted to do was to create a spy superhero like the one he saw in The Evening Standard.

And that strip cartoon that he saw on a regular basis was called Master Spy.

And it was the Sidney Riley strip cartoon.

And that was portraying Riley almost as like a Bond figure.

If it wasn't for Riley, and more importantly, his fictitious alter ego, the master spy series in Beaverbrook Papers, Fleming might not have twigged on trying to create his own Sidney Riley.

And that's all James Bond was.

Life for folk in those days wasn't great, and it was even worse if you were Jewish.

An awful lot of Jews left the Russian Empire in the late 19th century and went to Germany to escape pogroms, basically when mobs of Russians descend on a Jewish village and literally kill everybody.

When he comes to the UK, he's Sigmund Rosenblum.

He sets himself up as a company director.

He's a trained chemist.

Whether or not he completed his degree is open to question.

Probably not is the answer.

But he came over to this country, and he got into what we call these days, or back in the day, patent medicines.

He could talk the hind leg of a donkey.

And it wasn't just that he was extremely articulate.