Peter Smithers, 92; WWII Spy and Diplomat May Have Been the Model for James Bond

Sir Peter Smithers, a British politician, diplomat and award-winning gardener who worked as a British spy during World War II and was said to have inspired the fictional character of James Bond, the suave Agent 007 in Ian Fleming’s novels, died June 8. He was 92.

Smithers died at his home in Vico Morcote, a village in Switzerland, where he had retired in 1970. The Council of Europe political organization announced his death on its website; Smithers had been a delegate to the organization in the 1960s.

His years in military intelligence work began soon after he joined the British naval reserve in 1940. He came down with measles, which got him assigned to shore duty, and was asked to interview with Naval Intelligence Commander Fleming.

He worked for Fleming in Paris and later in Bordeaux, France, where they helped arrange the evacuation of British citizens after Germany invaded Paris. Fleming later named several characters in his novels “Smithers,” including a villain in Fleming’s “Goldfinger,” but never confirmed that his former colleague was the model for James Bond.

Smithers went on to work in England and Washington, D.C., before he was stationed in Mexico in 1943, monitoring possible submarine-to-shore communications. In Mexico he met Dojean Sayman, a native of St. Louis.

The couple married a few weeks later. Smithers once named a flower after his wife, a white tree peony with a maroon center that he bred and cultivated. She died in early 2006.

At the end of the war, Smithers went into politics and won a Conservative seat in the British Parliament, which he held from 1950 until 1964. He traveled extensively with delegations to Africa, India, Pakistan, Burma and Indonesia, collecting plant species along the way.

He was appointed the United Kingdom’s delegate to the United Nations General Assembly for two years starting in 1960 and then became a delegate to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France, serving as its secretary general from 1964 to 1969. He was knighted the year after he retired.

Although he made a career of politics and diplomacy, his 1995 autobiography, “Adventures of a Gardener,” suggests that flowers were at least as important to him.

“I regard gardening and planting as the other half of life, a counterpoint to the rough and tumble of politics,” he wrote.

Born Peter Henry Berry Otway Smithers in Yorkshire, England, on Dec. 9, 1913, he spent much of his time as a boy with his nanny, “a keen naturalist,” he wrote in his autobiography. She got him interested in the garden.

He graduated from Oxford University in 1934 and became a lawyer before he was commissioned in the naval reserves.

Smithers was in his 50s when he retired from government work and turned full time to horticulture and botany. “The garden is planted so as to reduce labor to an absolute minimum as the owner grows older,” he said in a 1989 interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He cultivated rhododendrons, magnolias, tree peonies, lilies and wisteria, developing an ecosystem that required not more than two days of garden work each week.

Later in his life he held a number of gallery exhibitions of his flower photographs. He won eight gold medals for photography from the Royal Horticultural Society.

Smithers is survived by two daughters and a stepson.