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Promoting Kent through James Bond

On this day: 20 July 2003

When the British Open came to Kent back in 2003, Maxim was asked to help make the most of Kent’s connections to the iconic James Bond.  

Coinciding with Royal St George’s Golf Club in Sandwich hosting the championship, Maxim highlighted its literary links to James Bond, who may have travelled the world in the process of saving it, but whose heart always belonged to England, and nowhere in the UK is that connection stronger than in Kent. 

Kent Tourism, part of Kent County Council’s Economic Development Unit, had developed its ‘James Bond Country’ guide to the county – and asked Maxim to promote it.  

Here’s some great trivia for the pub quiz night: 

  • Author Ian Fleming spent his weekends and holidays at nearby St Margaret’s Bay, and played golf at Royal St George’s throughout his life. In later years, he would drive down from London on a Friday for nine or 18 holes before tea in the clubhouse, followed at six o’clock by dry martinis – ‘shaken, not stirred’. 

  • Royal St George’s – thinly disguised as Royal St Mark’s in the novel Goldfinger – was also the setting for the infamous golf game between James Bond and the villainous Auric Goldfinger; a shot-by-shot duel which lasts two whole chapters of the 1959 book.  
     
  • Fleming was elected Captain of Royal St George’s for 1964/5 and had just attended a meeting there on 11 August 1964, when he suffered a heart attack. He died the following day and the club’s flags were flown at half-mast.                                                                                   

Kent Tourism’s brochure highlighted two car journeys through the county – one in the 4.5 litre supercharged Bentley in ‘Moonraker’; the other, taken in the classic Aston Martin DB III, from ‘Goldfinger’ – which, together formed a circular tour converging on St Margaret’s Bay. 

The two routes took in such fictional sites as Bond’s childhood home at Pett Bottom, near Canterbury, the site of Sir Hugo Drax’s rocket research establishment at Kingsdown and Goldfinger’s base of operations at Reculver, as well as Fleming’s house, White Cliffs, St Margaret’s Bay and Highham Park, near Canterbury, where the real Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was based – Fleming’s other famous literary creation. 

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