Was Jasper Maskelyne the real Q?

One of Jasper Maskelyne’s wartime pupils would become a Bond villain. Another has been suggested as a model for 007. Jasper himself was a stage magician who taught escape skills and helped supply concealed equipment to men going behind enemy lines. Some of those who knew his work also knew Ian Fleming. It is an inviting thought: could Jasper have been the real Q, the man behind James Bond’s gadgets?

A signed photo of Major Jasper Maskelyne, Royal Engineers

(Source: Author's collection)

Before the war, Jasper made his living convincing audiences that they had seen the impossible. His grandfather, John Nevil Maskelyne, and his father, Nevil, had both been professional magicians. Jasper followed them onto the stage, performing at London’s St George’s Hall and in variety theatres. You can still watch him at work in a 1937 Pathé film. He appears to swallow razor blades, then draws them from his mouth threaded along a length of string.[1]

Jasper Maskelyne performing the razor blade trick

(Source: British Pathe, 1937) 

During the war, Jasper found other uses for his skills. Between 1940 and 1943, British and Commonwealth forces fought Italian and German armies across North Africa, defending Egypt and the Suez Canal. Intelligence organisations worked to get agents into occupied countries and stranded servicemen out. A pilot shot down far from Allied lines might need a map, money and a compass before he could begin his journey home.[2]

Jasper worked with MI9, the British military intelligence department responsible for helping service personnel evade capture and escape imprisonment. In the Middle East and Mediterranean, he taught men at risk of capture and helped supply the equipment they might need. Fabric maps could be folded into clothing; a compass could be concealed in a button. The equipment had to survive rough handling and, if possible, a search. Jasper knew a good deal about hiding objects and anticipating where people would look for them.[3]

A miniature compass issued for escape and evasion

(Source: Australian War Memorial)

Jasper’s work also extended to supplying the Special Operations Executive, or SOE, which sent agents into occupied countries to work with resistance groups and organise sabotage. In SOE: The Scientific Secrets, Fredric Boyce and former SOE scientist Douglas Everett describe him heading a Cairo depot linked to Station XV, SOE’s camouflage establishment in Britain. Through the depot, Jasper helped supply disguised equipment for men going behind enemy lines.[4]

Fleming served in Naval Intelligence as personal assistant to its director, Admiral John Godfrey. He became aware of the world of gadgets from that role. SOE agents, MI9’s escapers and other secret operatives needed some of the same things: equipment they could carry undetected, and ordinary possessions with a second, hidden use. Years later, Bond would collect his own equipment from Q Branch.

Ian Fleming, c1958

(Source: Wiki commons)

One of Jasper’s pupils was David Smiley. Before going to Albania with SOE in 1943, Smiley received escape instruction from the man he remembered as “Captain Jasper Maskelyne, a peace-time conjuror”. Clive Jones’s biography describes Jasper teaching him about concealed compasses, silk maps and other escape equipment. After his lecture, trainees searched the magician. They missed more than twenty hidden items.[5]

David Smiley (left) and another British officer with partisans in Albania

(Source: Unattributed)

Smiley went on to a career of irregular warfare and clandestine operations. His Daily Telegraph obituary named him among the possible models for James Bond. Jones also records that Smiley knew Ian’s elder brother, Peter Fleming, from his time in the Far East.[5]

Peter Fleming

(Source: Wiki commons)

Peter’s work took him to General Headquarters (GHQ) India in New Delhi, where he directed deception against the Japanese through the organisation that became D Division. Jasper later served in India supplying escape equipment. Their work lay in related branches of the GHQ intelligence organisation, concerned with misleading the enemy and helping men survive behind enemy lines.[6]

Christopher Lee also remembered Jasper’s lessons. While serving as an RAF intelligence officer, he had watched the magician demonstrate how to escape from handcuffs. Speaking years later to magician David Berglas, Lee said he had fortunately never needed to try it himself. But “he showed us extraordinary things”.[7]

 

Christopher Lee talking about Jasper Maskelyne with David Berglas

(Source: ‘In the Mind of David Berglas’ (series 1) (1986) (Channel 4)

Lee was Fleming’s step-cousin, through his mother’s marriage to Fleming’s uncle. His sister, Xandra, worked with Ultra, the intelligence obtained from deciphered enemy communications, according to Lee. He also recalled that Fleming had wanted him to play Dr No, but Joseph Wiseman had already been cast by the time the suggestion reached the producers. In 1974, Lee played Francisco Scaramanga opposite Roger Moore in The Man with the Golden Gun. The man with the golden gun had once taken an escape lesson from Jasper.[7]

Christopher Lee as Francisco Scaramanga

(Source: The Man with the Golden Gun, Eon Productions)

Berglas himself knew Jasper and visited him in Kenya. He also worked as a technical adviser on Casino Royale (1967), the comic adaptation starring David Niven, Peter Sellers and Orson Welles.[7]

Niven, who played Sir James Bond in that film, had served in the Commandos. Dudley Clarke had proposed the force in 1940, helped bring it into being and recuited Niven; he later employed Jasper in his Cairo deception organisation, A Force.[8]

David Niven

(Source: Wiki commons)

Jasper also appeared alongside future Bond actors. In the 1958 television series African Patrol, Jasper played Carl in “No Place to Hide”, an episode that also featured Zena Marshall. Four years later, she was Miss Taro in Dr No. Margaret Lacey, who had worked as Jasper’s stage assistant in the 1930s, later played Mrs Whistler, the diamond smuggler posing as a schoolteacher in Diamonds Are Forever (1971).[9]

Zena Marshall in Dr No

(Source: Dr No, Eon Productions)

Margaret Lacey in Diamonds Are Forever

(Source: Dr. No, Eon Productions)

Back in wartime Cairo, Patrick Leigh Fermor had known Jasper’s work. The SOE officer, who helped abduct the German General Kreipe on occupied Crete, remembered the equipment available there. In his afterword to Ill Met by Moonlight, he recalled concealed compasses and maps, and explosives disguised as animal droppings, which he said were supplied by Jasper Maskelyne.[10]

Patrick Leigh Fermor

(Source: Wiki commons)

After the war, Leigh Fermor became Fleming’s friend and a guest at Goldeneye, his Jamaican home. He stayed there in 1948 while working on The Traveller’s Tree, a book Fleming later drew on in Live and Let Die. He knew Jasper’s wartime work and could have told Fleming about it, although we have no account of such a conversation.[10]

Jasper’s wartime acquaintances offer possible routes by which Fleming might have heard about him. For Q himself, the clearest trail begins with a letter. In May 1956, Geoffrey Boothroyd, a firearms enthusiast living in Glasgow, wrote to Fleming criticising Bond’s choice of pistol. Fleming took his advice. Bond got a new pistol and an armourer named after the man who had prompted the change. Major Boothroyd appeared in Dr. No in 1958. Fleming later told the story in “The Guns of James Bond”, published in Sports Illustrated on 19 March 1962.[11]

'The Guns of James Bond', article by Ian Fleming

(Source: Sports Illustrated, 1962)

On screen, the armourer became a rather different character. Peter Burton played Major Boothroyd in Dr. No in 1962; Desmond Llewelyn took over in From Russia with Love the following year. The films gave us the familiar Q, dispensing gadgets while Bond tried his patience and damaged government property. Boothroyd supplied the armourer’s name and firearms expertise; the workshop full of improbable devices had wartime counterparts, including Jasper’s Cairo depot.[12]

Desmond Llewelyn, actor famed for playing Q

(Source: Wiki commons)

Jasper shared that practical world with several other men associated with Q. Christopher Clayton Hutton, known as “Clutty”, helped put escape maps, concealed compasses and other aids into the hands of service personnel through MI9. Charles Fraser-Smith, working under Ministry of Supply cover, organised the provision of disguised equipment for clandestine use. He is frequently described as an inspiration for Q; historian and former SOE officer M. R. D. Foot called him “one of the models”. Their equipment was made to be taken into the field, where a failed mechanism or an unconvincing disguise could have fatal consequences.[13]

Christopher Clayton Hutton

(Source: Wiki commons)

Then there was James Elder Wills, a film art director and director who ran SOE’s Station XV camouflage establishment near Elstree. He recruited film-industry expertise to disguise equipment as ordinary objects. His establishment supplied the disguised equipment held at Jasper’s Cairo depot. A device might be cleverly engineered and still need a convincing exterior before an agent could carry it safely. Making that disguise was work for which film craftsmen and magicians were well suited.[4]

Jasper belongs in this company. There is no evidence that Fleming based Q on him, or that the two men met. Boothroyd has the direct connection with the fictional armourer. Jasper, alongside Hutton, Fraser-Smith, Wills and others, was part of the wartime world behind the gadgets. He brought a magician’s experience to the job. Long before Bond collected his equipment on screen, Jasper had been a wartime Q-man.

Jasper Maskelyne, 'The War Magician', in Abbassia, Egypt c1941

(Source: Unattributed, colourised by ChatGPT)

There was one final irony. Desmond Llewelyn, the actor who brought Q to life, had himself spent nearly five years as a German prisoner of war. He participated in an unsuccessful tunnel escape attempt and later devised a scheme to smuggle escape equipment into the camp concealed in Welsh-language books. Long before he was supplying James Bond with ingenious gadgets, Llewelyn had been seeking precisely the sort of hidden escape aids that Jasper Maskelyne and his MI9 colleagues had worked to provide. In an extraordinary reversal of fiction and reality, Q had once been a would-be escaper himself.

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Sources

1. British Pathé, Jasper Maskelyne (1937).
2. National Army Museum, “The struggle for North Africa, 1940–43”, for the campaign and the strategic importance of Egypt and Suez; “Special Operations Executive”, for its work with resistance movements and its specialist equipment. 
3. M. R. D. Foot and J. M. Langley, MI9: The British Secret Service That Fostered Escape and Evasion 1939–1945, and Its American Counterpart (London: Bodley Head, 1979). Jasper’s lecture work is discussed and quoted in “Jasper Maskelyne: How to escape and evade”, Magic at War, 1 March 2022.
4. Fredric Boyce and Douglas Everett, SOE: The Scientific Secrets (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2003), Elstree & Borehamwood Museum, “The ‘Most Missed’ Buildings in Elstree & Borehamwood, Part 3”, independently describes Station XV, its use of film-industry expertise and its command by J. Elder Wills.
5. Smiley and Jasper: David Smiley, Albanian Assignment (London: Chatto & Windus, 1984), recollection quoted in the Magic at War article above. Clive Jones, The Clandestine Lives of Colonel David Smiley: Code Name ‘Grin’ (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), p. 72, describes Maskelyne’s instruction and the concealment demonstration; chapter 4, note 24, cites Roderick Bailey, The Wildest Province: SOE in the Land of the Eagle (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008), p. 52, and Smiley, Albanian Assignment, p. 15.Smiley and 007: “Colonel David Smiley”, The Daily Telegraph, 9 January 2009, reproduced on the Patrick Leigh Fermor website. The obituary explicitly says his exploits prompted suggestions that he was among the models for James Bond. This establishes a published basis for describing him as a possible model. Jones also examines the suggestion, pp. 332–333, but finds no evidence that Smiley’s activities informed Fleming’s creation. On p. 332 Jones also records that Smiley knew Peter Fleming from his time in the Far East. This is evidence of their acquaintance, not of Ian Fleming’s borrowing from Smiley.
6. Alan Ogden, Master of Deception: The Wartime Adventures of Peter Fleming (2019; Bloomsbury Academic paperback, 2022), organisational charts, pp. xiii–xv; Peter’s letter of 13 June 1943 identifying his GHQ India intelligence appointment, pp. 266–267; and chapter 19, note 3, p. 310, on the transfer of escape-and-evasion work from GSI(d) to GSI(e) in March 1942. Escape and evasion had originally belonged to GSI(d), the deception section, before becoming the separate GSI(e) in March 1942. E Group later handled escape-and-evasion work under Lieutenant-Colonel R. C. Jackman. 
7. Christopher Lee’s interview with David Berglas, identified as In the Mind of David Berglas, series 1 (Channel 4, 1986), and quoted in the Magic at War article in note 3. Lee’s recollections about Fleming’s wish to cast him as Dr No and his sister’s Ultra work are reproduced in “Sir Christopher Lee, Dr. No, Scaramanga and Spying”, Artistic Licence Renewed, 26 July 2013. For Berglas’s film work, the Patrick Page family website, “Pat Facts”, records Page’s work with Berglas and Ali Bongo on Casino Royale (1967); Berglas is credited as technical adviser. 
8. Sandhurst Trust, “David Niven”, 1 May 2023, on his transfer to the Commandos and subsequent service with Phantom. Robert Hutton, The Illusionist: The True Story of the Man Who Fooled Hitler (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2024), extract “The Birth of Britain’s ‘Commando’ Units”, CrimeReads, 5 September 2024, on Clarke’s proposal and Niven’s recruitment. 
9. African Patrol, “No Place to Hide” (1958): the episode’s closing credits list Zena Marshall as Stella Stevens and Jasper Maskelyne as Carl. For Margaret Lacey’s work as Jasper’s assistant and her later Bond role, see “Student of the Week, No. 7 – Margaret Lacey”, History at The Hammond, 29 October 2016. Mary Harvey also recalls Lacey’s work as a magician’s assistant, tentatively identifying Jasper, in her interview with Teddy Darvas, 6 November 1996, BECTU History Project interview 390, transcript, p. 53. 
10. Patrick Leigh Fermor, afterword to W. Stanley Moss, Ill Met by Moonlight (London: Folio Society, 2001), pp. 193 and 205–206, as cited and discussed by Jeremy Duns, “Commando Bond”, especially notes 5–6. Duns also documents Leigh Fermor’s 1948 Goldeneye stay and Fleming’s use of The Traveller’s Tree. 
11. Ian Fleming, “The Guns of James Bond”, Sports Illustrated, 19 March 1962, reproduced in “Now Pay Attention, 007”; Ian Fleming Publications, “Major Boothroyd (Q)”.
12. Dr. No (Eon Productions, 1962), Peter Burton as Major Boothroyd; From Russia with Love (Eon Productions, 1963), Desmond Llewelyn as Boothroyd. 
13. Christopher Clayton Hutton, Official Secret (London: Max Parrish, 1960), his first-hand account of MI9 equipment work; National Museums Scotland, article in note 3. M. R. D. Foot, obituary of Charles Fraser-Smith, The Independent, 20 November 1992, reproduced here, describes Fraser-Smith as “one of the models” for Q.