Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, our fine four-fendered friend, turns 60 on October 22nd. Mary Miers relives the adventures of the magical flying car and reveals the little-known story of its creation by Ian Fleming, as the writer turned his attention from the world of 007 to a children's tale.
It begins with a soft humming noise. Then the mudguards swing out and click into wing position as the radiator grille parts to allow the fan-belt propeller and petrol-pump fly-wheel to slide out from the bonnet. A green light on the dashboard blinks PULL DOWN. As Commander Caractacus Pott RN (Rtd) gingerly pulls the lever down and presses the accelerator pedal, the car tilts up her shining green-and-silver nose and takes off. ‘Don’t worry! She’ll look after us!’ he shouts to spell-bound Mimsie and the twins as they soar over the weekend traffic jam. After circling Canterbury Cathedral, they take a short cut over Dover Castle and fly up the Kent coast looking for a place to land for a picnic.
In the hands of ‘James Bond’ author Ian Fleming, the crime-busting exploits of Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang cannot fail to thrill. ‘Never say no to adventures… Otherwise you’ll lead a very dull life,’ says Cmdr Pott, the eccentric inventor who saves the 12-cylinder, eight-litre, supercharged Paragon Panther from wreckage. ‘You never get real adventures without a bit of risk somewhere.’ And so the Potts set off in their splendidly restored car, which does 100mph in top gear and has a mind of its own.
When they get marooned on a sandbank, stumble upon a cache of weapons in a French cave, encounter a band of gangsters who kidnap the twins and get embroiled in a heist on a Parisian sweet shop, Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang transmogrifies into an aerocar or a speed-boat and gets them out of trouble. Named after the sneezes and explosions that erupt from her exhaust pipes and with a cryptic GEN II on her numberplates, the magical car was inspired by the 1920s aero-engined racing models built by Count Zborowski on his Kent estate, Higham Park.
The gangsters from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Artwork by John Burningham. Credit: The Ian Fleming Estate 1961. Artwork reproduced with the permission of Ian Fleming Publications Ltd and The Ian Fleming Estate
Fleming had nine Bond novels under his belt and was convalescing after a heart attack in April 1961, when, forbidden a typewriter for fear of straining himself, he reimagined bedtime stories he’d told his son Caspar and penned Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang by hand. Enthralled by the first two instalments, Michael Howard, his editor at Jonathan Cape, expressed hope that he would ‘reel off at least 10 more episodes’. The adventures were to be serialised, as several ‘Bond’ books had been, but Fleming soon tired of the project, confessing in June that ‘I really can hardly bear to look at these stories again and anyway I am knee deep in The Spy’.
By November 1962, he was ‘tidying up Adventure Number 3, but heaven knows if and when I shall produce an adventure Number 4 [he didn’t]. So would your machine now please take the whole problem over and cope with it as best they may?’ he implored Howard. ‘Sorry to put all this firmly on your plate, but such free mind as I have is now engaged in trying to devise another James Bond.’ He did, however, promise to find a more delectable recipe for the top-secret Bon-Bon ‘Fooj’.
English writer Ian Fleming (1908 – 1964) pictured in his study at Goldeneye, a few months before hi death. (Photo by Harry Benson/Express/Getty Images)
He also remained involved in the protracted efforts to secure a suitable artist, having stressed early on that ‘much will depend on the illustrator’ and that the original drawing of the car ‘must, I think, not look too funny’. Among candidates trialled was the Daily Mail’s cartoonist Trog (Wally Fawkes), but the newspaper refused to allow him to collaborate with an author whose work was serialised in its rival, the Daily Express. (There was also the small matter of Fleming’s past affair with the proprietor’s then wife, Ann Rothermere. Although she’d been married to Fleming since 1952, a long-standing froideur lingered.)
It was Cape’s new director, Tom Maschler, who spotted the talent of the author-illustrator John Burningham (1936–2019), pioneer of a new style of picture book that exploited developments in colour printing. Cape had published Burningham’s first book, Borka: The Adventures of a Goose with no Feathers, in 1963 and, on the back of that award-winning success, commissioned him to illustrate Chitty.
‘John adored cars,’ says his wife, the children’s illustrator Helen Oxenbury, recalling his 1934 Austin Seven convertible (inspiration for Mr Gumpy’s Motor Car), his ‘shellfish’ Citroëns and the Jeep you had to double-declutch to brake.
She remembers helping to make the cardboard model of Chitty in his basement flat in Soho, London W1, where he suspended it on a fishing line and photographed it from different angles. She still has what survives of it — a small and fragile remnant like a tattered moth that has lost its wings. Burningham’s illustrations have fared better and Fleming rightly acknowledged their brilliance.
At their sole, brief meeting, he requested only one small change: could a Tabac sign be added to a drawing of Paris. As a fellow enthusiast of both France and smoking, Burningham happily obliged.
The drawing of the Paris street with the Tabac sign, and the Eiffel Tower in background, from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Artwork by John Burningham. Credit: The Ian Fleming Estate 1961. Artwork reproduced with the permission of Ian Fleming Publications Ltd and The Ian Fleming Estate
The illustrations are notable for their diversity of scale, style and media and the way they convey so dynamically the mix of humour and suspense. Looking at the double-spread of the great green aerocar with her resplendent coachwork trimmed with polished chromium, one can almost hear the ‘delicious rumble’ emanating from the fish-tail exhausts as she speeds along the motorway, firing terrific blasts from her boa-constrictor klaxon. Later, when pursued by gangsters, Burningham depicts her as a swooping black dragon.
Fleming did not live to see publication of Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang: The Magical Car. On August 12, 1964, two months before Cape released the first of the three volumes, he had another heart attack and died. It was Caspar’s 12th birthday and his father was only 56. Burningham, who always took his readers’ viewpoint, thought it rotten to prolong their suspense by staggering publication over several months. The cliff-hanger adventures were first released as a single volume in 1968 and there have been many subsequent editions and reinventions, three sequels by Frank Cottrell Boyce (in 2011–13) and new artwork by Barney Tobey, Joe Berger, Steve Antony and Thomas Gilbert. The original editions are now much sought-after; Jonkers Rare Books in Henley sold a set of first editions recently, while, Peter Harrington currently lists a trio of first editions of the original volumes at £1,500.
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When Fleming took Caspar to see Walt Disney’s newly released The Absent-minded Professor in June 1961, he found to his horror that it featured ‘a flying motor car which circles a church spire! Moreover [the professor] builds it in his back yard. This really is the limit,’ he wrote to Howard. ‘Would you send one of your intelligence spies to have a look at the film and suggest what amendments we ought to make?’ The similarities were no more than coincidental, but Fleming took the precaution of omitting mention of Canterbury’s spire.
He might have been more perturbed by Bond producer ‘Cubby’ Broccoli’s 1968 film, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Adapted from a screenplay by Roald Dahl and Ken Hughes, it starred Dick Van Dyke (who allegedly declined Broccoli’s suggestion that he replace Sean Connery as James Bond) and featured many invented characters, plots and creations, notably Truly Scrumptious, stunts in Alpine Vulgaria and Rowland Emett’s fantastical automata. Even the hero didn’t make it through unscathed: Caractacus Pott picked up an extra ‘s’ en route tothe silver screen, being renamed Caractacus Potts.
Burningham considered it ‘ungracious’ that he wasn’t involved and declined to see it. Whatever Fleming might have made of it, the film turned his creation into an international classic. Yet his authorship remains little known, with few people aware of the connection between 007 and the magical flying car.
Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang’s original film poster. Note the appearance of Gert Frobe in the credits, providing another James Bond link: Frobe is the German actor who played the title role in the third 007 movie, 1964’s Goldfinger.
