<Archive Obituaries> Charles Fraser-Smith (November 9th 1992)
Bill Schenley
(deceased; one son, one daughter), secondly Selina (Lin) Richardson,
died Bratton Fleming Devon 9 November 1992.
Photo: http://www.archivo007.com/Images/frasersmith.jpg
The Independent (November 20th 1992) ~
By M.R.D. Foot
Charles Fraser-Smith, Christian evangelical, farmer and wartime
secret-gadget deviser - one of the models from whom Ian Fleming drew
his ''Q'' - was brought up at Croxley Green in Hertfordshire, one of
the two sons of a solicitor who died when he was a boy. His father had
also owned a grocery business, so he was not raised in penury. He was
partly Scots by descent, and proud of belonging to the Clan Fraser. He
went from Watford Grammar School to Brighton College, which he left
aged 17 to become a preparatory-school master near Portsmouth. He was
undistinguished academically, but an ardent rugger player, noted for a
strong practical bent.
After a year's teaching he insisted on having three years' training as
a farmer. He was already an active evangelical in the Crusader
movement, and wanted to follow his missionary aunts' example, and
preach the Gospel abroad. After a year in France learning the language
and playing rugby he went to Morocco in 1926.
There his abilities soon raised him to manage one of the royal
estates; and he settled eventually inland of Marrakesh at a farm which
he irrigated and made to prosper. Both his aunts died of typhoid in
Tangier. He founded orphanages there and in Marrakesh in memory of
them. His Yorkshire-born wife, who shared his missionary zeal, helped
him with the orphans, with the farm and with reading the Bible with
their Arab neighbours.
He was able to bring her and their eight-year-old son to England in a
Norwegian steamer in the autumn of 1940 and cast round for a role in
the world war. By mere chance, he happened to preach at a meeting in
Leeds at which two senior personages in the Ministry of Supply were
present. They realised he had gifts for which they were looking. He
joined a branch of the ministry called CT6 - ostensibly the sixth
section of the Clothing and Textiles Division - located in Portland
House in Tothill Street, Westminster. It was in fact next- door to the
then headquarters of the Secret Service, and Fraser Smith's job was to
provide various secret and special services with tools for secret
work.
His role was not unique; Churchill's protege Major Millis Jefferis,
who specialised in explosive devices, and MI9's Clayton Hutton, who
devised silk maps, had both been at work for months, and remained busy
all through the war; while SOE had teams at work on parallel tasks in
the basement of the Natural History Museum. Fraser-Smith worked
alongside them in spirit, though not in body. He worked out
hiding-places for such objects as compasses - I went into action
myself carrying three of his compasses, cleverly enough hidden, two of
which other people used in successful escapes; the third survived two
searches of my clothes when I was only wearing a blanket. The RAF
Museum at Hendon shows numerous specimens of his and Clayton Hutton's
creations; so does a museum at Bratton Fleming in Devon, on the Exmoor
steam railway not far from his final home. The Minox cameras
Fraser-Smith provided were invaluable to secret agents seeking to take
clandestine photographs under enemy noses; and SAS as well as SOE and
the commanders benefited from the long hours he spent cutting red tape
and applying his enormous ingenuity.
Those who wanted goods from him normally applied by scrambler
telephone; he had little work on paper. Once one of his secret-
service contacts arranged an evening for him at Madam Butterfly; shook
his hand; but hardly spoke to him. Years later he discovered that his
host had been the formidable Sir Claude Dansey, giving him an
inspection under the cover of a colleague's identity. They did not
meet again but Fraser-Smith supposed he had passed muster.
Two years of peacetime life in the ministry doing more normal work on
textiles held no appeal. He retired to Devon to farm at Aylescott
Farm, at Burrington near Barnstaple, and to continue to preach the
Gospel and to do good works. His first wife died of leukaemia in the
Sixties, his second survives him.
The 30-years rule does not apply to secret-service papers; but under
the Callaghan ruling Fraser-Smith felt entitled to publish in 1981,
with help from Gerald McKnight and Sandie Lesberg, The Secret War of
Charles Fraser- Smith. It includes photographs of dominoes,
hairbrushes, shaving brushes, as he modified them to hold maps or
escape-files. He also wrote, with Kevin Logan, Secret Warriors (1984),
an account of parts of the secret war known to him, and by himself Men
of Faith in the Second World War (1986). In this book he discussed the
godliness of 10 Allied heroic figures, which he believed enabled them
to hold out until victory against the evils of Nazidom was achieved.
There is a life of him by David Porter - The Man Who Was Q (1989). He
and Porter wrote jointly in the previous year Four-Thousand Year War,
a book about God's role in the struggle of free men to remain free.
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Photo:
http://www.ursispaltenstein.ch/cgi-bin/EE/images/uploads/james_bond_art.jpg
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Charles Fraser-Smith, Mr. Gadget For James Bond Tales, Dies At 88
FROM: The New York Times (November 13th 1992) ~
By James Barron
Charles Fraser-Smith, the gadget-designing genius on whom the
character "Q" in the James Bond novels and movies was modeled, died on
Monday at his home in Bratton Fleming, in southwest England. He was 88
years old.
His family announced his death yesterday. The cause was not disclosed.
In Ian Fleming's novels, Mr. Fraser-Smith became "Q," the shadowy man
who provided the weapons. But Mr. Fraser-Smith's inventions were
somewhat lower tech than the amphibious sports car that James Bond
drove across the beach and into the surf, or the life-saving cigarette
lighters that seemed to provide Bond with every weapon but an atomic
bomb.
Working quietly out of the Ministry of Supply, Mr. Fraser-Smith
stashed compasses inside golf balls, a trick that turned up in
"Diamonds Are Forever." But Mr. Fraser-Smith's real-life golf balls
were designed to help prisoners of war find their way home through
enemy-occupied territory.
He was a master of disguising tools in ordinary objects. He made tiny
metal saws and sewed them into standard-issue military shoelaces. He
had flight crews carry pipes lined with flame-resistant asbestos that
let him hide detailed maps inside -- maps that could be burned like
tobacco if the airmen were shot down.
His job, in a building next to M.I.6 in Minimax House, was so secret
that neither his secretary nor his boss knew what he was doing. To
make himself seem important, "I always spoke as if I were Churchill
himself," he said.
Mr. Fraser-Smith, the son of a solicitor who owned a wholesale grocery
business, was orphaned at the age of 7 and brought up by a missionary
family in Hertfordshire. At Brighton College, where he studied, he was
deemed "scholastically useless except for woodwork and science and
making things."
His early career was one detour after another. He was a prep-school
teacher in Portsmouth, a motorcycle messenger rider and an aircraft
factory worker. Then, one Sunday in 1939, he gave a sermon at the Open
Brethren Evangelical Church in Leeds.
'A Funny Job in London'
In the congregation were two Ministry of Supply officials, who were
impressed by his adventures when he bought a farm in Morocco and ran
for the Moroccan royal family. The two officials offered him what he
called "a funny job in London."
At first he designed clothing and props for agents working behind the
lines, but gradually the gadgetry took over: cameras camouflaged in
cigarette lighters, shaving brushes with space inside for film. The
idea was to get back ground-level pictures of damage by German
warplanes and to pinpoint V-1 rocket launch sites.
Another of his assignments was to design a trunk in which a body could
be preserved in dry ice. The trunk body was later dropped into the
ocean off Sicily, with false papers inside to confuse the German
military -- something Fleming wove into "The Man Who Never Was."
After the war, Mr. Fraser-Smith bought a rundown dairy farm and made
it profitable. But once a year, he would spend a week explaining his
gadgets at the Exmoor Steam Railway, a tourist attraction in Bratton
Fleming that had an exhibit of his wartime works. "He was always
delighted to explain to visitors the workings of the gadgets," June
Stirling, the proprietor, told The Times of London.
Mr. Fraser-Smith is survived by his wife, Selina, and two children by
his marriage to Blanche Ellis, Brian and Christine.
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Photo: http://www.archivo007.com/Images/llewelyn.jpg