Peter Fleming: The Adventurer, Spy, and Writer Who Inspired James Bond
- Daniel Holland
- 22 hours ago
- 9 min read
If Ian Fleming gave the world James Bond, his older brother Peter lived him. Adventurer, soldier, spy, and writer, Peter Fleming’s life read like one of his sibling’s novels, except that his were all true. Described by Vita Sackville-West as “an Elizabethan spirit allied to a modern mind,” Fleming embodied a curious mix of Oxford charm, reckless courage, and sharp literary wit. He was the sort of man who could discuss Milton over breakfast, cross a jungle by lunch, and be home in time to shoot a brace of pheasants before sunset.
Peter Fleming’s adventures, and the quiet brilliance behind them, make for one of the most remarkable lives of the twentieth century. His journey from Eton editor to Brazilian explorer to covert intelligence officer shows how one man could combine the pen and the pistol, the desk and the danger, the mind and the map.
A Childhood Shaped by Duty and Loss
Robert Peter Fleming was born on 31 May 1907 into privilege and tragedy. His father, Valentine Fleming, was a Conservative MP and close friend of Winston Churchill, killed in action in 1917 during the First World War. Peter, just ten at the time, vividly recalled the moment the family received the telegram announcing his father’s death. His mother, Evelyn, turned to him and said: “You must be very good and brave, Peter, and always help your mother: because now you must take your father’s place.”
That single sentence became a kind of moral compass. While Ian was more impulsive and restless, Peter carried a sense of quiet responsibility that would define his choices. It was Peter who became the family’s steady centre, clever, loyal, and dependable, while his younger brother, who adored him, struggled to step out of his shadow.
Eton, Oxford, and the Making of a Gentleman Adventurer
Peter’s education was the epitome of the British upper class: Durnford School, then Eton College, where he edited The Eton College Chronicle. His wit and intellect were clear even then, and the school still awards the “Peter Fleming Owl” to its best student journalist each year.
At Oxford’s Christ Church, he read English and graduated with first class honours. He joined both the Oxford University Dramatic Society and the infamous Bullingdon Club, a dining society known for aristocratic rowdiness and excess. But while many of his peers would later turn toward politics or law, Peter’s path bent toward adventure.
As literary editor of The Spectator, he seemed destined for a stable, intellectual life. Yet, as he later confessed, he was “a restless being.” He craved something more, a test of nerve and stamina, a narrative of his own making.
The Call of the Wild: Brazilian Adventure
In 1932, while scanning The Times’ Agony Column, Fleming stumbled upon an advertisement that changed everything. It read:
“Exploring and sporting expedition, under experienced guidance, leaving England June, to explore rivers Central Brazil, if possible ascertain fate Colonel Fawcett; abundance game, big and small; exceptional fishing; ROOM TWO MORE GUNS; highest references expected and given.”
He couldn’t resist. Though he mocked himself for even considering “a wild-goose chase,” curiosity won. He replied simply: “Peter Fleming, 24, Eton. Christ Church, Oxford.”
Thus began one of the most famous literary adventures of the 1930s, the doomed attempt to uncover the fate of British explorer Colonel Percy Fawcett, who had vanished in the Amazon.
The expedition, led by a man Fleming later dubbed “Major Pingle,” quickly descended into farce and disagreement. Fleming, along with a few disillusioned companions, including his Oxford friend Roger Pettiward, broke away to continue independently through dense, perilous jungle.
They endured fevers, foot rot, hostile insects, and unreliable guides before finally admitting defeat. But Fleming returned with something more valuable than gold, material for Brazilian Adventure (1933), a witty, self-deprecating, and thrilling account that became an instant classic. It has never been out of print.
“São Paulo is like Reading,” he famously wrote, “only much farther away.”
The book’s mix of irony and heroism captured readers’ imaginations. It also revealed Fleming’s gift for turning hardship into literature, comedy into survival.
Journeys Through Asia: Tartary and Beyond
Fleming’s appetite for exploration didn’t stop in South America. As a correspondent for The Times, he travelled from Moscow to Peking, chronicling his observations in One’s Company (1934). He journeyed through the Caucasus, across the Caspian Sea, through Samarkand, Tashkent, and the Trans-Siberian Railway, a route that most men of his class would have found far too uncomfortable.
In 1935, he teamed up with the Swiss adventurer Ella Maillart for an audacious overland trip from China through the remote lands of Tunganistan and into India. This journey became News from Tartary (1936), which, along with One’s Company, established him as one of Britain’s finest travel writers.
He observed the absurdities of the colonial world with dry humour. Beijing, he declared, was “lacking in charm,” while Harbin had “no easily definable character.” Yet amid the mockery, he offered sharp insights into politics and power in a region riven by Japanese expansion and Communist unrest.
Owen Lattimore, reviewing the book, called Fleming “an inspired amateur whose quick appreciation, especially of people, and original turn of phrase… have created a unique kind of travel book.”
By the late 1930s, Fleming had become both a celebrity and a national curiosity, a well-bred intellectual who preferred tents to tea rooms.
The War Years: From Commando to Deception Master
When war broke out in 1939, Peter was already serving as a reserve officer in the Grenadier Guards. His experience abroad made him an obvious recruit for Britain’s intelligence services. In fact, he was brought into secret research work before war was even officially declared.
His first task was to develop methods of irregular warfare, essentially guerrilla tactics to support allies like China against the Japanese. He later served in Norway and helped conceive early versions of what would become the Home Guard, the civilian defence force made famous by Dad’s Army. In Norway, he was not merely an observer. During the hurried withdrawal he carried out small demolition jobs that gave him an early, practical feel for irregular warfare.
At the height of invasion fears in 1940, Peter was asked to prepare plans for secret resistance networks in case of a Nazi occupation of Britain. He helped stand up the Kent XII Corps Observation Unit, the seed of the GHQ Auxiliary Units. These were handpicked civilian patrols who trained in absolute secrecy, maintained underground hides and were told, bluntly, that once activated behind enemy lines their life expectancy might be a fortnight. To keep curiosity at bay they were filed under the harmless label “Observation Units.”
The Auxiliary Units trained at night, worked by day, and told nobody, not even their families. Fleming personally chose many of the hideouts and lobbied for them to be properly stocked with weapons, food, and radio sets so that the men involved would at least have “a sporting chance” to remain, as he put it, “a thorn in the enemy’s flesh.” Invasion planning filled the headlines, while these Observation Units stayed off the page.
From Home Defence, he moved into the deception world shaped by the London Controlling Section, the discreet clearing house for strategic trickery, before taking charge of deception work in Southeast Asia from New Delhi.
From 1942 onward, he ran “D Division,” the Allied deception command in Southeast Asia. Operating out of New Delhi, he masterminded strategies of misinformation to confuse Japanese intelligence. Among the gambits credited to him in India was a planted briefcase stuffed with carefully forged papers, part of a broader diet of decoys and whispers designed to inflate the strength of India’s defences in Japanese eyes.
He even penned a speculative novel during this time, The Flying Visit (1940), which imagined Adolf Hitler flying to Britain to propose peace, a story that proved eerily prophetic when Rudolf Hess made his bizarre flight to Scotland the following year.
For his wartime service, Peter Fleming was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1945 and later received the Order of the Cloud and Banner from the Republic of China. His cool assessment of those months appeared later as Invasion 1940 (retitled Operation Sea Lion in the United States), a book that mapped the invasion scare with characteristic restraint and almost no mention of his own part in it.
A Life in Parallel: Ian and Peter Fleming
The Fleming brothers’ relationship has fascinated biographers. Ian, born just a year later in 1908, idolised Peter’s intellect and confidence yet resented always being compared to him.
Mark Amory, in The Letters of Ann Fleming, wrote that Ian “was not as classically handsome as his elder brother Peter; nor was he as clever, popular, rich, serious, or virtuous.”
Peter’s achievements came naturally. Ian’s required invention. It’s no coincidence that both men gravitated toward espionage, exotic locations, and the art of storytelling. Ian joined Naval Intelligence in 1939, five months after Peter, and would later weave that world into the Bond novels.
As Ian lobbied for No. 30 Assault Unit to snatch enemy science on the European coast, Peter sketched the home-soil corollary: small, covert teams with local knowledge, trained to sabotage and vanish.
Peter himself dabbled in fiction, publishing The Sixth Column (1952), a satirical novel about bureaucracy in the secret services, which he dedicated to Ian. One year later, Ian released Casino Royale. The echoes are unmistakable.
Though they “fought like cat and dog,” Peter remained deeply supportive of his brother. He proofread Ian’s manuscripts, suggested character names including Miss Moneypenny, and helped him secure Jonathan Cape as a publisher. When Ian first struggled to convince Jonathan Cape to publish Casino Royale, Peter stepped in as one of the house’s best-selling authors to persuade them to take a chance on it. Ian relied on Peter’s meticulous eye, and began to call him “Dr. Nitpick” for the margin notes that kept Bond’s world precise.
When Ian died in 1964, Peter served on the board of Glidrose, the company managing Bond’s literary estate, ensuring his brother’s creation lived on. After Peter, his daughters Kate and Lucy continued the family’s careful stewardship of their uncle’s work.
When Malcolm Muggeridge derided the Bond books soon after Ian’s death, Peter replied with quiet steel, reminding him he had slighted a man who had shown him nothing but kindness.
Home, Family, and the Quiet Country Life
Despite his global escapades, Peter was at heart a man of the English countryside. After the war, he settled at Nettlebed, a family estate in Oxfordshire, where he became the quintessential country squire. In 1935, he had married the actress Celia Johnson, star of Brief Encounter, and together they had three children, including the actress Lucy Fleming.
Peter wrote prolifically in his later years, producing 19 books in total, including histories, essays, and memoirs. He was witty, disciplined, and deeply loyal, a man equally at ease editing proofs by the fire or trekking across Himalayan passes.
Duff Hart-Davis, his biographer and godson, noted that Peter had “a physical endurance equal to anybody’s, and a tolerance of discomfort astonishing.” Yet he also valued civility and understatement, traits that made him quintessentially British.
Death and a Poet’s Farewell
Peter Fleming died as he lived, outdoors, in motion, and on his own terms. On 18 August 1971, while shooting near Glen Coe in Scotland, he suffered a heart attack and collapsed. He was 64.
Typically, he had prepared for this eventuality years earlier. His funeral instructions requested that his dog attend, that his coffin be made from wood cut on his estate, and that estate workers be given “a good, strong drink when it is over.” Most importantly, he insisted there be “no mourning.”
He was buried in the churchyard of St Bartholomew’s in Nettlebed, Oxfordshire. A stained glass window by artist John Piper was later installed in his honour, depicting the Tree of Life surrounded by birds.
On his gravestone appear his own words, an epitaph written years earlier, reflecting both humility and self-awareness:
He travelled widely in far places;
Wrote, and was widely read.
Soldiered, saw some of danger’s faces,
Came home to Nettlebed.
The squire lies here, his journeys ended –
Dust, and a name on a stone –
Content, amid the lands he tended,
To keep this rendezvous alone.
R.P.F
Legacy of a Gentleman Explorer
Peter Fleming’s life combined contradictions: elite yet adventurous, modest yet heroic, humorous yet serious. He was that rare Englishman who could quote Shakespeare at dinner and then tramp across Mongolia without complaint.
His influence stretched across literature, journalism, and espionage. His blend of curiosity, courage, and irony shaped both travel writing and the mythology of the British spy. The Royal Geographical Society continues to honour his name through the Peter Fleming Award, supporting modern research expeditions that “advance geographical science.”
In 1971, shortly before his death, Peter amused readers of The Sunday Times by recounting a peculiar encounter: a retired banker claimed to have received a new James Bond story dictated by Ian from beyond the grave. The manuscript, Take Over: A James Bond Thriller, was full of unlikely phrases. Peter recognised immediately that it was not his brother’s work and sold his witty write-up of the incident to the newspaper for £100.
And perhaps most enduringly, his spirit lingers in the pages of Casino Royale and every Bond novel that followed. When Ian Fleming imagined 007’s cool detachment, love of risk, and stoic patriotism, he wasn’t merely inventing fiction. He was, in many ways, writing about Peter.
Sources:
Brazilian Adventure by Peter Fleming (Jonathan Cape, 1933)
One’s Company and News from Tartary by Peter Fleming (Jonathan Cape, 1934–1936)
Invasion 1940 by Peter Fleming (Jonathan Cape, 1957)
Duff Hart-Davis, Peter Fleming: A Biography (Jonathan Cape, 1974)
Andrew Lycett, Ian Fleming: The Man Behind James Bond (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995)
Mark Amory (ed.), The Letters of Ann Fleming (Collins Harvill, 1985)
The Sunday Times, “Take Over: A James Bond Thriller” feature, October 1971
The Royal Geographical Society, “Peter Fleming Award” – www.rgs.org
Oxfordshire County Archives – Nettlebed Church and Estate Records
The Spectator Archives – Peter Fleming as Literary Editor
