London - Halle Berry's bikini, Daniel's Craig's "blood-splattered" shirt and prototypes of Rosa Klebb's flick knife shoes are on display in an exhibition in London to mark the centenary of the birth of Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond. Queen Elizabeth II, rarely known to lend personal items for an exhibition, has revealed her admiration for the agent of Her Majesty's Secret Service by donating the toy model of one of her
son's Aston Martin DB5 cars.
For Your Eyes Only - Ian Fleming and James Bond - features a fascinating array of Bond gadgets in an attempt to "look at the author and his fictional character in their historical context," according to curators at London's Imperial War Museum.
It seeks to establish "how much of the Bond novels were imaginary and how far they were based on real people and events" encountered by Fleming during his wartime service in naval intelligence and his career as a journalist and author.
To mark Fleming's 100th birthday on May 28, the exhibition traces the author's early life and examines how his wartime experience, as well as the "Cold War" that followed, informed the Bond plots and inspired their iconic heroes and villains.
To illustrate the link between Fleming and 007 the exhibition features such items as the jacket worn by Fleming during the Dieppe Raid in northern France in 1942, and a Magnum revolver Fleming was given by the Colt company in 1964.
On display are Fleming's desk and chair, complete with the typewriter on which the James Bond manuscripts were written, at the author's Goldeneye home on Jamaica, where he would stay two months every year.
Among the photographs and books on the desk is a copy of The Sea Fauna of Golden Eye by an American ornithologist called James Bond - in what is one of the many clues as to how the fictional 007 was created.
Fleming, the son of a Conservative member of parliament and descendant of the famous banking family, was educated at Eton public school in Britain, where he was "unremarkable academically, but excelled at sport" and got into trouble over girls, according to the documents displayed.
He did not shine either at Sandhurst Military Academy which he "left under a cloud," it is revealed.
Fleming's childhood, however, was overshadowed by his father's death in World War I when Fleming was just 8 years old. His mother, Eve Fleming, entertaining hopes that her son would become a diplomat, sent him to Austria in the 1930s to perfect his German.
At the outbreak of World War II in 1939 Fleming joined the Naval Intelligence Division (NID) led by Admiral John Godfrey, generally acknowledged to have been the prototype for M.
While in military service, Fleming suggested an lively plan ("Operation Ruthless," he called it) to capture a code machine from an "enemy vessel" in the English Channel.
"Once aboard, shoot the German crew, dump them overboard, bring rescue boat to a British port," he was to have said. The plan, which was never carried out, was ideally to be carried out by a "tough bachelor, able to swim."
Also in the exhibit are plenty of reminders that postwar Britain, and London in particular, became a centre of Cold War espionage - a fact highlighted by exhibits ranging from lipstick guns, secret cameras hidden in cigarette packets and "dead" letter boxes.
There is even a message left for British agents in London by a Soviet agent who had discovered one of the disguised message devices. It read: "Thank you and good bye for now 007. Ivan."
