For those of you who don’t know, Desmond Llewelyn died in a car crash last December. He was Q in pretty much evey James Bond movie. My question: I’ve heard more than one comment about the accident being caused by him pushing a button on his stick shift. Is this just a joke, or was there really some button that lead to his demise? I have never driven a stick shift, BTW, so for all I know there really could be stick shift buttons that deploy ejector seats :D.
On a related matter, why was DL’s most famous character called “Q”? Why is James Bond’s boss called “M”? What are these letters supposed to stand for?
I don’t know about Llwellan’s death, but the name “M” parallels actual British Intelligence practice, which calls their leader by a single letter (I believe it was “C.”). I suppose the idea was to make it harder for the enemy to identify the leader.
“Q” comes from Q-boats, which were British radio listening posts disguised as merchant boats during WWII. The letter got attached to the British special equipment branch, and Fleming attached the name to the character.
“Q” is the standard slang abbreviation (among officers,at least), of “QM,” which is quartermaster: the individual responsible for giving out boots, beans and bullets.
There is strong belief that the character of Q is loosely based on a rather eccentric Englishman named Clayton Hutton, who, during the Second World War, was part of MI9, the section of British Military Intelligence dealing with sending fiendishly clever escape devices to British POWs in Germany.
Hutton, in his 1960(ish) book “Official Secret,” credits himself with developing the mini compasses which were hidden inside brass buttons, shirt collar studs, etc. He also lays claim to inventing the “escape kit,” a plastic box with concentrated food (mostly malted milk tablets), a rubber water bottle (with a supply of purification tablets), waterproof matches, fishing line, etc., and of course a package of benzedrine tablets. The idea was that your best chance of escape after being shot down was to go on the run asap, and try to get into a resistance-run escape line. There was (it is claimed), enough calories and bennies to keep you going for three days without sleep.
He had a lot of other gizmos as well, including German money and false papers hidden inside phonograph records, mini-telescopes inside the handles of cricket bats, etc. You can see where Ian Fleming got some of his ideas!
In the supplementary material on On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, during an interview with Mr. Llewelyn, the narrator and Llewelyn say that Q is based on a real person named Jeffrey Boothroyd (unsure of the spelling of the first name), a gun expert who (apparently IRL, from the way they talk about him) suggested that Bond use the Walther PPK instead of a Beretta.
This site http://www.netspace.net.au/~heliosz/jamesbond.html has some photos of Bond’s watches in action (mostly Rolex Submariners). There’s one where the dial turns into a mini-circular saw, and a Seiko liguid quartz that prints out a secret message.
As to the OP, until I bought my current vehicle I’d never owned an automatic transmission car. None of the manual transmission cars (“stick shifts”) had any buttons on the lever. These cars were (in no particular order) a 1966 MGB, two 1977 MGBs, a 1977 1/2 Porsche 924, a 1974 Toyota pickup, a 1972 Ford Courier, a 1948 Willy’s CJ-2A, three Chevy Sprints, a 1979 Porsche 911SC, a Honda motorcycle, and three Yamaha motorcycles. A fairly eclectic mix. Not a button on a one of them. My automatic Jeep Cherokee has a button to release the selector lever.
In short, it sounds like the “button on the shift lever” was a joke (in poor taste).
On the other hand, I once new an aircraft technician who installed a fighter’s joystick on his shift lever of his VW Thing. All of the buttons worked. (The “coolie hat” worked the turn signals, the trigger worked the horn, etc.) He also installed aircraft instruments in place of the automotive ones on the dash.
Well, my car has a button on the stickshift. It’s a 1987 Volvo 740. The button puts it into 5th gear but doesn’t eject anything (actually it’s an overdrive) Other than that button, I like my car.
The “stick shift” line was definitely a joke. Most cars on British roads don’t have buttons. Desmond Llewellyn was killed, IIRC, in a collision with another vehicle or by swerving off the road.
Confusion, here. Let’s talk Ian Fleming. He did NOT write about a person called Q. Fleming did, in a very few of the books, mention Q-branch which provided James Bond with equipment – straight stuff, like guns, 'twasn’t fancy cars with ejector seats. Thus, the interpretation of Q-branch as Quartermaster seems reasonable. (Ben’s interpretation from Q-boats seems dubious, especially in light of his incorrect statement that Fleming attached the letter to the character.)
In one of Fleming’s books, a Major Boothroyd is mentioned as head of Q-branch. Max, I don’t know if Boothroyd was a “real” person or not, but there is a conversation (IIRC, in the book DR NO) between M, Bond, and Major Boothroyd about the Walther PPK instead of Bond’s favorite Baretta. Since Bond is fictional and M is fictional, this is a fictional encounter, written by Fleming. Whether there was a real Major Boothroyd who preferred the one gun over the other, I don’t know.
The movies introduced Q as a character (IIRC, in DR NO, the first movie, where Desmond Llewelyn’s Q has just such a conversation (Walther PPK vs Baretta) with Sean Connery’s 007. They kept the character (and actor) through the movies (at least, the REAL movies, ignoring the side-stuff like CASINO ROYALE), and they started developing more and more fantastic equipment. Fleming didn’t write any thing about special equipment, except fairly mundane stuff – like a briefcase with a hidden knife in the handle.
If you are interested in Bond, there’s a James Bond chat on AOL on Monday Nights at 9 PM Eastern. Raymond Benson, who is writing the current set of Bond books with the approval of Fleming’s estate, sometimes drops by.
On some manual cars you have to press and hold a button to change into reverse. This seems most common on cars where reverse is up and to the left of first (rather than down and to the right of fourth). My wife’s Daewoo has a ring under the main knob which you need to lift and hold to get into reverse.
The wreck that killed Desmond Llewelyn was a head-on collision with another car. Somehow I doubt it was caused by him looking for a button to push on the shift knob. I smell an urban legend (and a very stupid one at that).
Yes, there was such a conversation in Dr. No. It’s very very hard to tell, from the interview, whether it was merely the character of Boothroyd or the real Boothroyd who made the suggestion; when I get home tonight, I’ll type an exact transcript of that portion of the interview and let y’all judge.
One correction, though: in Dr. No, the first Bond movie, the character is credited not as “Q” but as “Major Boothroyd” and was played not by Desmond Llewelyn but by Peter Burton. The PPK vs. Beretta conversation was between Connery and Burton as Bond and Boothroyd (they show a snippet of it during the interview).
There are Europeon cars that have push button manual transmissions. An American hearing that someone pushed the wrong button on his manual transmission might make the mistake of assuming the button was on the stick shift when there was no stick shift. The car Desmond was driving was a Renault Megane. I could not find out on the web whether or not the Megane has a push button manual. (The information is probably out there, but I gave up.) The 1988 Megane concept car did have a button to switch from manual to automatic transmission. I’m not sure exactly how that worked or if it could be done while driving.
I’m not sure how pushing the wrong button on your push button manual, or accidently changing from automatic to manual transmission, could lead to a head on collision. Maybe someone who has driven a Megane can help me out.
I can’t find much information about the real Boothroyd on the Net; all I’ve come up with are two books on British guns written by a “Geoffrey Boothroyd” (consarn it, I picked the wrong spelling last time around); probably the same person, although you can never be sure. Still, there seems net-wide agreement that Q is based on the real-life Boothroyd, though no one seems to know much about him.
Anyway, here’s that transcript I promised:
Since Fleming was a bit of a runner in shadowy circles himself, I feel that the above could mean one of two things: either Fleming knew or spoke with the real Boothroyd, who suggested a different gun for Bond from that which Fleming originally intended, causing Fleming to write the scene, or Fleming just came up with the scene on his own. Which it was, I don’t know.
Great work, guys. It’s beginning to sound like the button thing was just a tasteless joke. About the Q/Boothroyd discussion: IIRC, in the movie about the shipping tycoon who steals nuclear submarines, the Soviet spy babe greets Q as “Major Boothroyd.”
As far as the name M, RealityChuck’s explanation is close to the information I have.
I’ve read that the first of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), which eventually became MI6, was Sir Mansfield-Cumming, also known as “C”. So when Ian Fleming decided to name Bond’s supervisor, he choose M, the other initial, as an inside joke.
I don’t know that every leader of MI6 was known only by an initial, or if this only applied to Mansfield-Cumming.
<< Since Fleming was a bit of a runner in shadowy circles himself, I feel that the above could mean one of two things: either Fleming knew or spoke with the real Boothroyd, who suggested a different gun for Bond from that which Fleming originally intended, causing Fleming to write the scene, or Fleming just came up with the scene on his own. Which it was, I don’t know. >>
Either is plausible. Although DR NO was the first Bond movie (to speak of), it was about mid-series in the books; hence, the real Boothroyd may well have read the books and had that conversation with Fleming, who incorporated it into DR NO as an in-joke. I’ll see if I can find out more.
On the “M”… As the original “C” stood for Cunningham, so “M” stood for Admiral Sir Miles Messervy, the name of Fleming’s fictional head of the Secret Service. (This is not revealed until MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN, last of the Bond books, right before Fleming’s death around 1967, IIRC.)
It’s interesting that the movie folks are changing the name of Q-branch (when the Q probably stood for Quartermaster) with the new character, but didn’t change the name of M (when the M stood for the character’s name), if you follow me.
He might have been Sir Mansfield Cumming (if Mansfield was his Christian name) or Sir [John] Mansfield-Cumming, but I don’t think he can have been Sir Mansfield Cumming.
Tom is correct, I didn’t want to comment on it, but a guy named Johh Smith who becomes a knight is Sir John Smith, and familiarly as Sir John. He would NEVER be Sir Smith.