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The real M
The MI6 fan website (yes, they do have fans!) has an interesting article about Ian Fleming (who was also a British spy in real life) and his relationships with the Secret Service. Most interesting is the section dealing with Maxwell Knight, former MI5 boss and allegedly also member of Crowley’s magical Order A.A.
Another contender as the original M was the strange MI5 spymaster Maxwell Knight, who ran a subsection of the security service responsible for rooting out potential subversives in Britain. Knight was one of the first to warn that the secret services were being infiltrated by communist moles. He was a man of many parts, most of them odd and quite incompatible: in addition to running a huge spy ring, he was a novelist, a jazz saxophonist who had been taught by Sidney Bechet, and an occultist who befriended and recruited the bizarre black magician Aleister Crowley. He was also an obsessive naturalist who kept snakes in the bath and wrote such definitive works as How to Keep a Gorilla. Maxwell Knight signed all his memos “M”, and was certainly well known to Fleming. After the war, Knight would move effortlessly from a career in spying to a new career as a naturalist, ending his life as “Uncle Max”, a much-loved BBC presenter of nature programmes for children.
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