11th November 1920

Scottish spy James Bond is born

“James Bond was born of a Scottish father, Andrew Bond of Glencoe, and a Swiss mother, Monique Delacroix, from the Canton de Vaud,” according to his obituary, as written by M and included in You Only Live Twice, the last novel Fleming completed before his own death.

His exact date of birth isn’t given in any of Ian Fleming’s novels, but it has been calculated by two other authors. John Pearson, who wrote an authorised biography of the character, published in 1973, put it at 11 November 1920 based on ages mentioned in the Fleming novels.

James Bond’s birthday calculated

However, while John Griswold agrees with 11 November, he believes that 1921 is a more accurate date of birth for the fictional spy. In Ian Fleming’s James Bond: Annotations And Chronologies for Ian Fleming’s Bond Stories, he writes that 1920 “does not take into account the ‘1938’ date mentioned earlier in From Russia with Love. In the obituary in You Only Live Twice, Fleming wrote that Bond was seventeen years old [when he joined the service], and it was by claiming an age of nineteen… that Bond was able to get his professional start (in July 1939) at the Admiralty. Using spring of 1939 as the beginning of Bond’s career and knowing he was seventeen at the time, his birth date would have been November 11, 1921”.

You Only Live Twice revealed some more of Bond’s background, including his Scottish heritage, which had been influenced by Sean Connery’s portrayal of the character on screen. Although the Bond of Fleming’s books spends much of his youth studying abroad, in Kent, and at Eton, the film Skyfall also introduced a Scottish mansion, from which the film takes its name, and in which Bond had apparently been raised. This was said to be located in Glencoe but the action was filmed on a set in Surrey.