One of the lines of inquiry that a family history researcher aims to achieve is to find out where an ancestor lived at particular stages of their lives. There are many records that we can use in this pursuit, including censuses, vital record certificates and so on. In this piece I have sought to use some of those easily available records online to collect several of the addresses for the famous creator of James Bond over time.

Ian Lancaster Fleming was born on 28 May 1908 and at the time of his birth his parents, Valentine and Evelyn, were living in London. This fact we can confirm by carrying out a search of TheGenealogist’s birth and baptism records. The civil registration birth records tells us that the author’s birth was registered in the St George Hanover Square district in the second quarter of 1908 in volume 1a, page 420. This provides the details needed in order to purchase a copy birth certificate from the General Register Office that will give the exact address at which he came into the world. While waiting for that to arrive we could look for other records that provide an address by doing a search of TheGenealogist’s Trade, Residential and Telephone records to see if the Fleming’s residence at the time was listed. This trawl reveals a Valentine Fleming, Ian’s father, living at 27 Green Street in the wealthy London district of Grosvenor Square, Mayfair.

Valentine Fleming was the member of parliament for Henley-on-Thames from 1910 to 1917 and this Mayfair home would have been close to the House of Commons for the working parliamentarian. Consulting a directory for Oxfordshire reveals to us that Major Fleming was at one time the president of the Salisbury Conservative Club in Henley’s Queen Street, thus disclosing to us his political affiliation as well as where the club was situated.

Had we not located the MP’s address in the residential directory then there is another useful record set courtesy of TheGenealogist that we could have used. That is the Polls & Electoral Rolls, in which we find Valentine Fleming’s right to vote in the district of St George, City of Westminster along with an address at 27 Green Street.

Childhood home before the First World War
At the time that the Fleming family lived there, just before the outbreak of WW1, the house was surveyed as a result of the Lloyd George-led Liberal government’s inspection and valuing of all the property in the country. The Valuation Office survey 1910-1915, also known as the Lloyd George Domesday survey, was for a property tax aimed at raising funds for the Inland Revenue and was created following the 1910 Finance Act. The field books describe the house and land and are linked to very detailed maps that show the exact plot. These records are being digitised and put online by TheGenealogist and so by entering V Fleming into the search field for the records we can discover more about the childhood home of our famous author.

The Flemings’ house was leasehold from the Duke of Westminster’s estate at a ground rent of £80 per annum and occupied a position on the north side of the road, facing south and close to the Park. Switching to look at the georeferenced map on TheGenealogist’s Map Explorer we can see the exact plot for the house, noting how close it is to Marble Arch with Hyde Park just over Park Lane from the Flemings’ road, presumably ideal for giving the young Ian some fresh air.

Valentine Fleming also had a house in the country for a short while, as we can tell from another entry in the Trade, Residential and Telephone directories, this time in the earlier 1911 Oxfordshire Kelly’s. It had been in 1906 and two years before the birth of his son Ian, when Valentine was the MP for South Oxfordshire, that the politician had bought Brazier’s Park in Checkendon. They did not live there for long, however, as in 1911 Braziers was sold again to Sir Ernest Moon, remaining the property of his widow until 1950. Fascinatingly the entry for Valentine Fleming in the directory that we can find on TheGenealogist gives us the address for his London home as 7 Chesterfield Gardens, Mayfair. This house, according to the Lloyd George Domesday Survey records, was a substantial building on a furnished lease to a Robert Fleming for five years from 1907. This gentleman would have been Valentine’s father, the Scottish philanthropist and financier Robert Fleming, who was the founder of the merchant banking business Robert Fleming & Co. The residence at Chesterfield Gardens was likely to be just a temporary home for Valentine and his young family after leaving Green Street.

In 1910 Ian Fleming’s father had then purchased a house on the edge of Hampstead Heath which had once been the home of William Pitt the Elder. Re-naming this Pitt House, the Flemings moved in and a search of the 1921 census substitute records on TheGenealogist reveals it still in Mrs Fleming’s occupancy in that year.

The reason for the house in Hampstead being recorded in Mrs Fleming’s name is that Evelyn Fleming had been widowed in May 1917. The war had cruelly deprived her of her husband and the young Ian of his father just eight days before Ian reached his ninth birthday. A search of TheGenealogist’s Military records confirms this with Major V. Fleming appearing in the casualty lists published in The Times for 30 May 1917.

Even though these do not help with the current line of investigation into the addresses of our subject, it is interesting to note that there are several other military records pertaining to Ian Fleming’s father, who was a major in the Oxford Yeomanry and these could be useful for more study later. They are returned from a search of the holdings on TheGenealogist and include his campaign medal card, several records for Mentions in Dispatches, an article in The Great War newspaper, his entry in a war memorial book and his listing in the official GRO War Deaths, Army Officers for 1917.

Stockbroker’s home
By the time that the country was experiencing the clouds of war rolling in yet again in 1939, and the government had embarked on a mission to register all its citizens, Ian Fleming’s address was by then 22b Ebury Street in London. By consulting the 1939 Register for England and Wales, as provided on TheGenealogist, we are able to see that the only other person recorded in his household with our 31-year-old stockbroker had been a housekeeper.

To find out which stockbroker business Ian Fleming worked for is comparatively easy as we need only turn to the Trade, Residential and Telephone directory records on TheGenealogist.

Here, in a section of the 1940 Kelly’s Post Office Directory for London, we see that a search for Ian Lancaster Fleming identifies him as being with the once mighty firm of Rowe & Pitman. Back in the mid-20th century R&P, as it was often known, had been one of the largest City of London brokers. The asterisk next to Fleming’s name indicates to us that he was a broker with the firm.

Fleming’s previous abode had been at 118 Cheyne Walk London SW3, as we can tell from his inclusion on a passenger list for a ship sailing to New York in October 1937 and which gives this as his address in the UK. It turns out that 118 Cheyne Walk had actually been his mother’s address as entries in various directories from the 1930s returned on TheGenealogist reveal.

As an aside, one of the 29-year-old Fleming’s fellow passengers on the S.S. Europa lived in the same road as him at number 16 Cheyne Walk. This man’s name was Frederick Pitman and he too was listed as a stockbroker on the manifest for the voyage to New York. Frederick Archibald Hugo Pitman, the 45-year-old son of one of the founders of Rowe & Pitman, is said to have been Fleming’s mentor at R&P so it is not a surprise to find them travelling together to America.

Rowe & Pitman would also send Ian Fleming on business to Nazi Germany and it is claimed that while there he would also carry out some freelance snooping for British intelligence well before he would officially join the intelligence community.

Second World War
As the Second World War began, however, Fleming was then recruited by Admiral John Godfrey to be his personal assistant working for the British Admiralty in the Naval Intelligence Division (NID). Fleming had been headhunted to work in Room 39, named after the room in the Admiralty building that NID occupied, precisely because he was an old Etonian and a stockbroker. Intelligence work required certain skills that were different from normal naval operations and the Admiral’s predecessor from the First World War, Admiral Hall, had found an old Etonian stockbroker called Claude Serocold to be just the sort of unorthodox mind needed in this role. Now, in World War Two, Ian Fleming was suggested to Admiral Godfrey as being the ideal candidate and soon he was commissioned as an officer in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve.

After the war Fleming changed career to become a journalist. In fact he had previously had a stint at Reuters before he had worked for the stockbrokers and so it was a return to journalism in the post-war years – he is listed under this occupation in various passenger lists on TheGenealogist. His employer was now Kenisley Newspapers and it is their address that he most often provides the shipping company with. So while this helps with identifying his employment it doesn’t help us tie down his home address like some of the earlier trips had done. As another interesting digression from our aim to find our famous author’s residences, there is one voyage from Southampton to New York where a fellow passenger is the 23-year-old actor Richard Burton and his first wife, Sybil. We may wonder if they realised at the time just how famous each was destined to become?

When we set out to try and locate a person in the past we should be mindful that there are a whole host of records that we can use which may reveal an ancestor’s address. Here I have sought to use the creator of James Bond to show that residential directories, poll and electoral records, land and property records such as the IR58 Lloyd George Domesday Survey and the 1939 Register as well as the 1921 census substitute and passenger lists can all be used to identify a person’s address.