Exports and extinguishers

September 29, 2021 Comments Off

With Literary Footprints 2021 nearly upon us, David Charnick tells us about a London building with a remarkable heritage in both the factual and fictional London spy scene. You can hear more on Dave’s tour Secret Writing which he is running as part of our October literary festival, as a walking tour on Saturday 2nd October and the virtual version on Monday 11th October (both start at 11.00 am). Full details are on Dave’s tours page.

You can find the full Literary Footprints 2021 tours schedule here.

Casino Royale, the first James Bond novel, opens with Bond leaving the eponymous Casino in the early hours. He is there as a result of a meeting with M, his superior officer, in his office “on the top floor of the gloomy building overlooking Regent’s Park“.

This is the headquarters of the Secret Service, as conjured up by Bond’s creator Ian Fleming and while it may be fictional, it is based on a real building.

The real one is also tall, and it also overlooks a park, although not Regent’s Park.

Broadway Buildings, sited on a street called Broadway, overlooks St James’s Park. Facing the north side of St James’s Park underground station, Broadway Buildings was from 1926 to 1964 the headquarters of SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, known at the time as MI1(c). Since World War Two it’s been known more familiarly as MI6.

Broadway Buildings opened in 1924 as an office block. At that time the SIS was based in Holland Park to save money in the wake of WW1 budgetary cuts. (Holland Park has come up in the world since then!) But Rear Admiral Hugh Sinclair, who became head of SIS in 1923, decided that his people needed to be closer to the centre of operations.

It’s a tall building, overlooking a park, and had a chief designated by a single letter – although the head of MI6 is known not as M, but as C. But was it a gloomy building? To answer this, let’s turn to the words of arch-traitor Kim Philby, one of the notorious Cambridge Spies.

Philby had no love for Broadway Buildings. In his autobiography My Silent War, he describes it as ‘a dingy building, a warren of wooden partitions and frosted-glass windows’. However, he acknowledges the benefits of being there, at the nerve-centre of intelligence.

When SIS moved into Broadway Buildings it did so under the cover name of ‘Minimax Fire Extinguishers’. This use of a fictional company to provide cover began with the original C, Mansfield Smith-Cumming, who started operations in 1909 under the cover ‘Messrs Rasen, Falcon Ltd, Shippers and Exporters’. As a result, he is credited as the originator of the classic ‘import and export’ cover. Similarly, the cover for Fleming’s Secret Service is ‘Universal Exports’.

There is one other connection between Broadway Buildings and James Bond. MI6 moved out of Broadway Buildings in 1964, to go south of the river to Century House. It was in 1964 that Ian Fleming died.

John le Carré, the other twentieth-century giant of espionage fiction, created The Circus, a fictional version of MI6 located off of Cambridge Circus near Leicester Square. But Mick Herron, creator of the Slough House spy novels, follows Fleming by locating a Secret Service HQ at Regent’s Park. Ironically – or deliberately – it isn’t that of MI6: it’s the headquarters of the Security Service, also known as MI5!