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M (James Bond)
M is a codename held by a number of fictional characters in Ian Fleming's James Bond book and film series; the characters are the current or past Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, the agency known as MI6. Fleming based the character on a number of people he knew who commanded sections of British intelligence. M has appeared in the novels by Fleming and seven continuation authors, as well as appearing in twenty-four films. In the Eon Productions series of films, M has been portrayed by four actors: Bernard Lee, Robert Brown, Judi Dench and Ralph Fiennes, the incumbent; in the two independent productions, M was played by John Huston, David Niven and Edward Fox (actor), Edward Fox. Background Fleming based much of M's character on Rear Admiral John Henry Godfrey, John Godfrey, who was Fleming's superior at the Naval Intelligence Division (United Kingdom), Naval Intelligence Division during the Second World War. After Fleming's death, Godfrey complained "He turned me in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James Bond
The ''James Bond'' series focuses on a fictional British Secret Service agent created in 1953 by writer Ian Fleming, who featured him in twelve novels and two short-story collections. Since Fleming's death in 1964, eight other authors have written authorised Bond novels or novelisations: Kingsley Amis, Christopher Wood, John Gardner, Raymond Benson, Sebastian Faulks, Jeffery Deaver, William Boyd, and Anthony Horowitz. The latest novel is ''With a Mind to Kill'' by Anthony Horowitz, published in May 2022. Additionally Charlie Higson wrote a series on a young James Bond, and Kate Westbrook wrote three novels based on the diaries of a recurring series character, Moneypenny. The character—also known by the code number 007 (pronounced "double-oh-seven")—has also been adapted for television, radio, comic strip, video games and film. The films are one of the longest continually running film series and have grossed over US$7.04 billion in total at the box office ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Henry Godfrey
Admiral John Henry Godfrey CB (10 July 1888 – 29 August 1970) was an officer of the Royal Navy and Royal Indian Navy, specialising in navigation. Ian Fleming is said to have based James Bond's boss, " M", on Godfrey. Life and career Godfrey was born in Handsworth, Staffordshire, in 1888. He was the son of Godfrey Henry Godfrey, he was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham; Bradfield College; and HMS Britannia. In 1921 he married Bertha Margaret Hope, (1901–1995), who had studied at Girton College, Cambridge and was the daughter of Donald Hope, managing director of Henry Hope & Sons Ltd, window-frame manufacturers, of Birmingham. The couple had three daughters, the eldest, Kathleen Margaret Godfrey (1922–2015) (married names Kinmonth, then Warren) became a Women’s Auxiliary Air Force officer and a Bletchley Park code breaker. Mrs Margaret Godfrey Hope was very active and supportive of her husband's career, assisting the establishment of the Bletchley Park set u ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Golden Jubilee Of Queen Victoria
The Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria was celebrated on 20 and 21 June 1887 to mark the 50th anniversary of Queen Victoria's accession on 20 June 1837. It was celebrated with a Thanksgiving Service at Westminster Abbey, and a banquet to which 50 European kings and princes were invited. Background As the fiftieth anniversary of Victoria's accession approached, public anticipation of national celebrations began to grow, encouraged by the Liberal politician, Lord Granville. At the previous royal jubilee, the Golden Jubilee of George III, the king had been ill at Windsor Castle, so there was little precedent to follow. In 1872, the recovery of Edward, Prince of Wales from a bout of typhoid fever was marked by Victoria processing through London to a thanksgiving service at St Paul's Cathedral; despite the queen's reluctance, this had proved to be a resounding success which had silenced the many critics of the monarchy. For the Golden Jubilee, Victoria had informed the Conserva ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Queen Victoria
Victoria (Alexandrina Victoria; 24 May 1819 – 22 January 1901) was Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 20 June 1837 until Death and state funeral of Queen Victoria, her death in 1901. Her reign of 63 years and 216 days was longer than that of List of monarchs in Britain by length of reign, any previous British monarch and is known as the Victorian era. It was a period of industrial, political, scientific, and military change within the United Kingdom, and was marked by a great expansion of the British Empire. In 1876, the British Parliament voted to grant her the additional title of Empress of India. Victoria was the daughter of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn (the fourth son of King George III), and Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. After the deaths of her father and grandfather in 1820, she was Kensington System, raised under close supervision by her mother and her comptroller, John Conroy. She inherited the throne aged 18 af ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sidney Reilly
Sidney George Reilly (; – 5 November 1925)—known as "Ace of Spies"—was a Russian-born adventurer and secret agent employed by Scotland Yard's Special Branch and later by the Foreign Section of the British Secret Service Bureau, the precursor to the modern British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6/SIS). He is alleged to have spied for at least four different great powers, and documentary evidence indicates that he was involved in espionage activities in 1890s London among Russian émigré circles, in Manchuria on the eve of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05), and in an abortive 1918 ''coup d'état'' against Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik government in Moscow. Reilly disappeared in Soviet Russia in the mid-1920s, lured by Cheka's Operation Trust. British diplomat and journalist R. H. Bruce Lockhart publicised his and Reilly's 1918 exploits to overthrow the Bolshevik regime in Lockhart's 1932 book ''Memoirs of a British Agent.'' This became an international best-seller and garn ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Melville
William Melville (25 April 1850 – 1 February 1918) was an Irish law enforcement officer and the first chief of the British Secret Service Bureau. Birth William Melville was born into a Roman Catholic family in Direenaclaurig Cross, Sneem, County Kerry, the son of a baker and publican. He moved to London in the 1860s and followed his father's footsteps as a baker before he joined the Metropolitan Police in 1872. Scotland Yard In 1882 he was chosen to be one of the founding members of the Special Irish Branch that was founded to work against Fenians and anarchists. Melville was posted to the Le Havre port, during which posting his children, James Benjamin (1885) (later Sir James Melville KC) and Cecile Victorinne (1886; died in London in 1891), were born. In December 1888 Melville returned to London and was assigned to protect the Shah of Persia in his state visit. His duties later expanded to the protection of British Royal Family and he foiled the Jubilee Plot against Que ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mansfield Smith-Cumming
Captain Sir Mansfield George Smith-Cumming (1 April 1859 – 14 June 1923) was a British naval officer who served as the first chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). Origins He was a great-great grandson of the prominent merchant John Smith, a director of both the South Sea Company and the East India Company, the second son of Abel Smith (d. 1756), the Nottingham banker who founded a banking dynasty and whose business much later became National Westminster Bank, now one of the largest banks in the UK.J. Leighton Boyce, ''Smith's the Bankers 1658–1958'' (1958). Early naval career Smith joined the Royal Navy and underwent training at Dartmouth from the age of twelve and was appointed acting sub-lieutenant in 1878. He was posted to HMS ''Bellerophon'' in 1877, and for the next seven years served in operations against Malay pirates (during 1875–6) and in Egypt in 1883. However, he increasingly suffered from seasickness, and in 1885 was placed on the retired list ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Maxwell Knight
Charles Henry Maxwell Knight OBE, known as Maxwell Knight, (9 July 1900 – 27 January 1968) was a British spymaster, naturalist and broadcaster, reputedly a model for the James Bond character "M". He played major roles in surveillance of an early British Fascist party as well as the main Communist Party. Background Knight was the son of Hugh Coleraine Knight, a solicitor, and his wife, Ada Phyllis (née Hancock). He was christened in Holy Innocents Church, South Norwood on 3 August 1900. Career Military He saw service during the First World War. Having been a naval cadet, he was appointed to the temporary rank of Midshipman in the Royal Naval Reserve on 2 May 1918.The National Archives, reference ADM 240/49/4. In July 1918 he attended a hydrophone officers' course, and in August served for a short time as First Class Hydrophone Officer aboard the trawler, ''Ninus''. On 1 September 1918 he was appointed to the armed merchant cruiser, HMS ''Andes''. In December 1918 Captai ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hugh Trevor-Roper
Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton (15 January 1914 – 26 January 2003) was an English historian. He was Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford. Trevor-Roper was a polemicist and essayist on a range of historical topics, but particularly England in the 16th and 17th centuries and Nazi Germany. In the view of John Kenyon, "some of revor-Roper'sshort essays have affected the way we think about the past more than other men's books". This is echoed by Richard Davenport-Hines and Adam Sisman in the introduction to ''One Hundred Letters from Hugh Trevor-Roper'' (2014): "The bulk of his publications is formidable... Some of his essays are of Victorian length. All of them reduce large subjects to their essence. Many of them... have lastingly transformed their fields." On the other hand, his biographer Adam Sisman also writes that "the mark of a great historian is that he writes great books, on the subject which he has made his own. By this exact ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Malcolm Muggeridge
Thomas Malcolm Muggeridge (24 March 1903 – 14 November 1990) was an English journalist and satirist. His father, H. T. Muggeridge, was a socialist politician and one of the early Labour Party (UK), Labour Party Members of Parliament (for Romford, in Essex). In his twenties, Muggeridge was attracted to communism and went to live in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, and the experience turned him into an anti-communist. During World War II, he worked for the British government as a soldier and a spy, first in East Africa for two years and then in Paris. In the aftermath of the war, he converted to Christianity under the influence of Hugh Kingsmill and helped to bring Mother Teresa to popular attention in the West. He was also a critic of the sexual revolution and of drug use. Muggeridge kept detailed diaries for much of his life, which were published in 1981 under the title ''Like It Was: The Diaries of Malcolm Muggeridge'', and he developed them into two volumes of an uncompleted a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Secret Intelligence Service
The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), commonly known as MI6 ( Military Intelligence, Section 6), is the foreign intelligence service of the United Kingdom, tasked mainly with the covert overseas collection and analysis of human intelligence in support of the UK's national security. SIS is one of the British intelligence agencies and the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service ("C") is directly accountable to the Foreign Secretary. Formed in 1909 as the foreign section of the Secret Service Bureau, the section grew greatly during the First World War officially adopting its current name around 1920. The name "MI6" (meaning Military Intelligence, Section 6) originated as a convenient label during the Second World War, when SIS was known by many names. It is still commonly used today. The existence of SIS was not officially acknowledged until 1994. That year the Intelligence Services Act 1994 (ISA) was introduced to Parliament, to place the organisation on a statutory footin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Claude Dansey
Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Claude Edward Marjoribanks Dansey, KCMG (10 September 1876 – 11 June 1947), also known as Colonel Z, Haywood, Uncle Claude, and codenamed Z, was the assistant chief of the Secret Intelligence Service known as ACSS, of the British intelligence agency commonly known as MI6, and a member of the London Controlling Section. He began his career in intelligence in 1900, and remained active until his death. Early life Dansey was born in 1876 at 14 Cromwell Place, Kensington, the second of nine children and eldest son of Captain (later Lieutenant-Colonel) Edward Mashiter Dansey, an officer in the 1st Life Guards, and his wife, the Hon. Eleanor Dansey, daughter of Robert Gifford, 2nd Baron Gifford.M. R. D. Foot"Dansey, Sir Claude Edward Marjoribanks" ''The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'' (online ed., Oxford University Press, 2008). Retrieved 24 July 2021. He attended Wellington College until 1891, and then a private school in Bruges. At the age of 17 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
