Rainham’s Goldfinger Route
‘Goldfinger’ - the most iconic 007 movie, certainly of the Sean Connery era. The mere mention of the name unleashes that spine-tingling, Shirley Bassey ear-worm – “He only loves gold …” (in the studio, Bassey held the final note so long, she nearly passed out). The sixtieth anniversary was celebrated last year with a gold-ceilinged pop-up bar in Piccadilly’s Burlington Arcade named The 007. There you could live out your Bond fantasies, ordering a vodka martini, ‘shaken not stirred’ and see movie props like henchman Oddjob’s infamous razor brimmed hat.
Have you seen the National Express 007 coach pulling into Hempstead Valley on its way from Dover to London? A pub quiz fact: Fleming lived at St Margaret’s Bay in Kent and assigned James Bond the codename 007 after the bus route (I have written professionally about espionage: the double-o programme was a figment of Fleming’s imagination, no doubt based on the secret wartime training given to Special Operations Executive agents).
In the original ‘Goldfinger’ novel (1959), you can read how James Bond drives through Rainham on his way to play the villain Auric Goldfinger in a round of golf at the Royal St Mark’s Golf Club (a thinly disguised Royal St George’s, at Sandwich). Fleming describes Bond taking the A2 from London on his way to stakeout Goldfinger’s property at Reculver, near Herne Bay. Fans of the movie will picture Bond in his iconic, Aston Martin DB5 (with ejector seat and machine gun attachments) speeding along the A2, but in the novel, Bond drove a battleship grey, Aston Martin DB Mark III (the iconic DB V did not begin production until 1963), the only modifications for spycraft being a ram, a secret pistol compartment and various hiding places for smuggling.
Fleming describes the route down the short hill in Strood into ‘the inevitable traffic crawl through Rochester’ and the fifteen minutes it took him to negotiate the ‘sprawl’ of Chatham. Continuing through the towns, Bond overtook a slow-moving family saloon whose driver began angrily hooting at Bond. The spy raised a clenched fist out of the open window to silence the noisy local (road rage on Chatham Hill?). As Bond reached the outskirts of Gillingham (Rainham), the traffic began to thin, and Bond picked up pace on his way towards Faversham and his encounter with Goldfinger and his lethal henchman, Oddjob.
This was a route Fleming clearly knew in detail.
Author Terry Crowdy lives in Rainham and specialises in military and espionage history.
