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Readers next discovered
Bond in Kent in Fleming’s seventh novel, GOLDFINGER (1959). James Bond is
travelling down to Sandwich on the A2 to make contact with Auric
Goldfinger at The Royal St. Marks Golf Club (a thinly disguised Royal St.
Georges, even to point of using the club’s professional, Alfred Whiting as
Bond’s caddy Alfred Blacking). During his journey down to Kent, Bond spies
out Goldfinger’s factory, ‘Thanet Alloys’, in Reculver (on the north Kent
coast), where Goldfinger also owns a house. The famous golf match between
Bond and Goldfinger is described in great detail by Fleming (hole-for-hole
he was describing the Royal St. Georges course). The Guildford Hotel once
stood overlooking the Royal St. Georges course, where Fleming frequently
stayed. Bond’s Kentish base in GOLDFINGER is The Channel Packet in
Ramsgate (possibly based on a pub/hotel in Pegwell Bay). |
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 Bond, in a battleship
grey Aston Martin DBIII, seconded from the car pool of the Secret Service,
then follows Auric Goldfinger in his Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost to Lydd
Airport on the Romney Marsh. While Bond waits for the next flight (a
Bristol freighter, the old car-carrying aircraft) he drives a few miles to
a pub he knows in the next county in Rye, East Sussex, for lunch (most
likely The Mermaid Inn). Fleming would often travel for golfing weekends
and trips to Europe from Lydd Airport. Like Noël Coward, Fleming loved
Kent and particularly Romney Marsh. Coward had a particular fondness of Dymchurch and Dungeness, for the peace of the little village of St.
Mary-in-the-Marsh, where he wrote his early plays, and later, when his
earnings substantially increased, he purchased Goldenhurst Farm at
Aldington near Ashford, on the rising land just above the marsh.
Goldenhurst and White Cliffs at St. Margaret’s at Cliffe were not too far
apart, and due to the unique friendship between the two writers there was
much toing and froing between the two houses. Coward was delighted to find
he could happily visit White Cliffs unclouded by nostalgia, while Ian and
Ann Fleming often took their guests to Goldenhurst for rather rowdy meals
on Sunday evenings, when on occasion guests would include notable
glitterati of the day: Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, and
Cecil Beaton. |
