Robert Fleming was a British adventurer, soldier and travel writer. He also was an Investment company executive.
Background
Peter Fleming was the product of a well-to-do English family. Born on 31 May 1907, he was the first of four children of Valentine Fleming, a member of Parliament and a captain in a regiment called the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars. One of Fleming’s brothers, Ian, would also become an author and creator of the James Bond novels.
Raised in London, Fleming was a sickly child who suffered from chronic nausea. The difficulties of his childhood multiplied with the outbreak of World War I when he was seven; his father was sent to France and was killed three years later.
Education
Fleming spent his childhood at boarding school, and then attended the famed Eton College, a preparatory academy, as a teenager; upon graduation, he entered Oxford, where he earned a degree in English from Christ Church College in 1929.
Career
For a time as a young man, Fleming worked in New York City as a stockbroker, a job he greatly disliked. He did, however, take some time to travel to Central America, and when he returned to London he took a job as an assistant literary editor at the Spectator around 1931.
That same year, however, he also decided to make a trip to China, journeying from Moscow to Shanghai along the famous Trans-Siberian Express. When he came back to London several months later, he returned to his job at the magazine. But he soon answered an unusual classified notice in the Times of London that was looking for potential candidates for a hunting expedition to Brazil. The ad also mentioned that the trip would investigate the fate of a missing British man, Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, who had vanished in the jungles of central Brazil a half-dozen years earlier.
Fleming signed on for the trip and obtained an assignment to write about it for the estimable Times. “Colonel Fawcett’s Fate” was published in the London daily on January 10, 1933, an article in which its author revealed his disappointment that the original premise of investigating the Fawcett disappearance had been merely a lure. Fleming had also interested a publisher in a fuller account of the trip before his departure, and when he came back he wrote his first book, Brazilian Adventure, in just three months. The work was a bestseller the year it was published, 1933, and remained a perennially popular title for several more years, with over two dozen subsequent printings.
Brazilian Adventure recounted Fleming’s Amazon River journey in a matter-of-fact narrative voice, provided great descriptive detail regarding the strange places and fascinating characters encountered and did not hesitate to relate the various tensions in the group. At one point, the men even divided into two parties, since Fleming wanted to search for Fawcett. Prior to his book, nearly all true-life adventure travel stories strove for a valiant tone, but Fleming’s style was infused with an observant, typically dry British wit. He did not regale readers with accounts of the hardships and tests of endurance he faced, but rather the interminable boredom and the ways in which the party’s plans and itinerary were maddeningly thwarted by uncontrollable circumstances and unexpected obstacles.
Fleming had already embarked upon his next grand adventure, another journey to China. He convinced the Times of the timeliness of a series of articles about the tensions between Japan and China, the former having taken over the coveted northern Chinese province of Manchuria in 1931. From this, as well as his previous trip - specifically the Trans-Siberian Express leg - came his second book, One’s Company: A Journey to China, published in 1934.
One’s Company also sold phenomenally well, and once more Fleming departed the comfort of England for another ordeal. He journeyed to the Caucasus region in late 1934, and his diary from this time would be published much later as A Forgotten Journey in 1952. He continued on from there, returning to China, and met up with another well-regarded travel writer, Ella Maillait; both had hoped to walk from China to India, and so decided to make the trip together. They began in Beijing in 1935 and walked thirty-five hundred miles, some of it upon the ancient Silk Road; they crossed into Chinese Turkestan, also known as Tartary and later Xinjiang, which was in the 1930s a place few Westerners had ever entered. Fleming’s trek became the subject of his third acclaimed travel book, News from Tartary: A Journey from Peking to Kashmir. This 1936 volume won rave reviews and was again a lucrative effort in the end for Fleming and his London publisher, Cape.
In 1938, the Times sent Fleming back to China - a trip he took with his wife - as its war correspondent, for now, a full-scale armed conflict had broken out with Japan. The following year, the Flemings settled in Oxfordshire, and the birth of their first child would forever restrict any further adventures for the pair. He did, however, continue to write and publish.
As World War II loomed, Fleming re-enlisted in his former regiment, the Grenadier Guards, and worked mostly in British military intelligence operations during the war. He was a member of the British Expeditionary Force, and as such was the subject of a false report that he had been killed in Norway; his former employer, the venerable Times, even ran his obituary. Infiltrated into Europe at other sites, Fleming helped organize resistance efforts and was injured when a vessel he was on was bombed in the Mediterranean; he also survived a glider crash in the Burmese jungle. After the war, Fleming returned to his career as an author.
In the 1950s, Fleming delved into works that concerned memorable events in the history of the British Empire. Fleming had begun writing his memoirs, but died in 1971, before they were completed.
Fleming bluntly opposed the British government’s policy of appeasement toward the growing Fascist threats in Germany, Italy, and Spain.
Views
Quotations:
"In history, true 'adventure' is nonexistent, and often any truly unusual feats are obscured by their origins as mere publicity stunts."
"It requires far less courage to be an explorer than to be a chartered accountant."
Membership
Fleming was a member of the Bullingdon Club.
Personality
As an observer of foreign cultures, Fleming was a witty yet thoughtful writer, and his tone differed remarkably from the usual travelogue authors of grand colonial adventures, who nearly always trumpeted their explorations in bombastic or overly heroic terms.
Quotes from others about the person
“Fleming’s reputation as a travel writer has neither much changed nor diminished since the spectacular success of his first book in 1933.” - Chris Hopkins
“One does not, of course, read Mr. Fleming primarily for information. One reads him for literary delight and for the pleasure of meeting an Elizabethan spirit allied to a modem mind.” - Vita Sackville-West
"Fleming’s main contribution to the travel-writing tradition is the invention of a modest response to strangeness, acknowledging that he and his readers inhabit a world they assume to be normal but may not be.” - Chris Hopkins
Interests
hunting, fishing, music
Connections
In December of 1935, Fleming married an actress, Celia Johnson, and settled in London. They had three children, Nicholas Fleming, (Roberta) Katherine Fleming and Lucy Fleming.