Ian Fleming, David Chipp and Who Did and Who Didn’t Work for Reuters in Peking

Peter Fleming (he of News from Tartary and One’s Company as well as a history of the Boxer Rebellion) has been a regular guest on this blog (use the search engine if interested). His, nowadays better known, brother Ian, less so. Still there are a few interesting references in the very readable (in fact to use an overused phrase) “unputdownable” The Man with the Golden Typewriter: Ian Fleming’s James Bond Letters (edited by Fergus Fleming). Ian Fleming was about to be offered the post of Shanghai correspondent for Reuters in 1939 after he resigned from the Berlin post. He didn’t take the job. He is famously supposed to have given his reason for refusing the job: “the salary wouldn’t have even covered my opium bill.” In 1957 Fleming received a letter from David Chipp, then the Reuters Representative in Peking (the first after 1949 and serving from 1956-1958), asking why Fleming appeared to have killed off Bond in From Russian With Love? Fleming fudged on the issue, wanting Chipp (and a couple of million other people) to buy the next Bond outing Dr No – Bond aficionados will know whether I’ve got the books right – I haven’t read them since I was supposed to be revising for O Levels!. He did however recall his own Reuters days noting:

‘…I only resigned when I was offered an appointment as Chief Representative in the Far East on a salary, with expenses, of £800 a year – barely enough to cover my opium consumption.’

Chipp (who had been Reuters correspondent in Rangoon in the late 1940s) remained in Peking for a while longer and wrote a wry memoir, The Day I Stepped on Mao’s Toes (which he apparently once did). It was printed in a private edition and is quite tricky to get nowadays (though a good place to start tracking it down is here).

David Chipp with Zhou En-lai