Robert Harling - Ian Fleming: A Personal Memoir

W ho was Robert Harling? The author of this wonderfully candid memoir of his great friend Ian Fleming was well known in his day as a typographer and type designer, architectural critic, advertising executive and a notably long-serving editor of House & Garden back in the great era of the glossy magazines. Harling, a handsome and rather raffish character, who stalked around Mayfair in a black fedora, was a key figure in mid-twentieth-century graphic design. He makes an appearance in The Spy Who Loved Me as the expert compositor on the Chelsea Clarion. There are elements of Harling that are clearly recognisable in Flemings creation of the character of Bond. Through two decades of close male camaraderie, which started in wartime naval intelligence, Harling and Fleming shared a multitude of esoteric interests, including an intrepid fascination with sex.

Harling was a master of obfuscation. No one knew where he had come from. He romanticised his past. So much so that even I a friend of his for forty years, veteran of countless intimate lunches at the Causerie in Claridges (Roberts favourite place for entertaining female friends) swallowed the tale he told about his parents dying young and Robert, as a boy, being brought up in Brighton by a family friend, whose husband was a dairyman. This was the account he gave in his semi-autobiographical novel Amateur Sailor, published (typically) under a pseudonym, Nicholas Drew.

It only emerged later, after Roberts death in 2008 at the age of ninety-eight, when I came to write his entry for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, that both his parents had survived until well into their seventies. His father had been a taxi driver living in north London. This was where the young Robbie was brought up and went to school. He had also drawn a veil over the fact of his first marriage to a young drapery saleswoman named Mary Adelaide. Harling later became an accomplished thriller writer, but his towering achievement was to fictionalise himself.

When Harling first met Fleming in late summer 1939, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, he was already well established both as a designer and a typographic entrepreneur. With his friend James Shand, Harling conceived and published an innovative specialist graphics magazine. Instead of simply covering conventional fine printing, Typography included lettering on every level. The first issues, for instance, featured Kardomah tea labels; the second contained an analysis of train ticket typography. Harlings eclectic tastes in typographical ephemera anticipated 1960s pop culture in a fascinating way.

Typography formed an immediate bond between the two men, when it emerged that Ian Fleming had subscribed to the magazine right from the beginning. Fleming was, by then, already working surreptitiously in naval intelligence. He had been impressed by Harlings News-Reel Maps for the News Chronicle, a series of data maps and captions containing information for the general public on likely German invasion points in the coming war. Fleming recruited Robert to redesign the admiraltys then lamentably dowdy Weekly Intelligence Report over the first of what developed into a long series of convivial and confidential male-to-male lunch meetings, first at Scotts and later on at the Etoile.

What I love about this memoir is the vivid sense it gives us of the burgeoning friendship between two witty, clever, sophisticated men, very different in background: Fleming, with his establishment values derived from Eton, Sandhurst, the City and the admiralty; Harling, working-class in origin, a self-invented man of charm, ambition and professional finesse. The two men shared a certain inner loneliness. War suited both of them. They both had a taste for action, an almost boyish longing for adventure and escapade.

Harling, always a keen sailor, had volunteered for the navy in the early days of war. In May 1940, in charge of a whaler, he took part in the evacuation of Dunkirk. Promoted to a sub-lieutenant, he then became the navigator of a Corvette, on convoy duty in the Western Approaches. In 1941, conscious of his special talents, Fleming extracted Robert from the navy, recruiting him to work in the Inter-Services Topographical Division (ISTD). This department interacted closely with intelligence in collecting information on ports, beaches and other potential enemy targets. It was something of a cloak-and-dagger operation.

Harlings far-flung foreign forays, travelling under cover, often to exotic places, gave scope for unlimited sexual liaisons. One of these was with Andre, Parisienne mistress of a Turkish bigwig, encountered, Harling tells us, through eye-to-eye contact in an Istanbul caf. Harlings ISTD travels and diversions, reported back to Fleming in such novelistic detail, have obvious parallels in Flemings fictional James Bond. Remember, it was Harling to whom Fleming first confided, over a wartime picnic of Calvados and rations in 1944, his intention to write the spy novel to end all spy novels. James Bond bears a distinct resemblance to Robert in his sardonic elegance of manner and his cool sexual expertise.

Robert talked of Fleming often, with affection and admiration. But, more than I had realised, Fleming played an increasingly influential role in Harlings professional career. After ISTD, Fleming summoned him to join 30 Assault Unit (30AU), the outfit referred to by Robert as Flemings Secret Navy, formed to operate on the front line at the end of the war to capture German codebooks, wireless equipment and security documents before these could be destroyed by the retreating enemy. Harling became the units expert on mines and minefields.