Children of Theodora and Thomas Herbert Minshall

Upon graduation Minshall trained as an architect at London University, before embarking on his boat the Hawke (now known as Sperwer and on display in the Netherlands in the indoor museum of the Zuiderzee Museum in Enkhuizen) on his quest to be the first Englishman to sail across Europe to the Black Sea. 

MARRIAGE OF MR. MERLIN MINSHALL.

The wedding took place at Bampton-in-the-Bush, Oxfordshire, on Saturday, of Mr. Merlin T. Minshall, only son of Colonel and Mrs. T.H. Minshall, of Friars, Matfield, and 9, Melbury-road, Kensington, and Miss Elizabeth Loveday, eldest daughter of the late Colonel Francis W. Loveday, R.A., and Mrs Loveday, of Manor Cottage, Bampton, Oxfordshire. Prebendary F.W. Gegg conducted the ceremony.

The bride, who was given away by her brother, Mr. J. Loveday, R.N., wore a Mediaeval gown of gold tissue with train embroidered in gold and silver, and a wreath of gold bay leaves in her hair. She carried a sheaf of delphiniums.

Miss Penelope Loveday (sister of the bride) was the train-bearer, and there were two other grown-up bridesmaids, Miss Diana Minshall (sister of the bridegroom) and Miss Mary Macfayden (cousin of the bride). They wore dresses of the same pattern as the bride's, in parchment-tinted silk with blue twisted girdles. They had head-bands of blue, and cabuchon crystal necklaces, and carried Victorian posies. Mr. Arthur Mann was best man.

About 200 guests attended the reception, afterwards held by Mrs. Loveday at St Stephen's, Bampton (lent by Miss Cobb), and on the wedding cake was an exact model of the sailing vessel, "The Hawk," in which the bride and bridegroom intend making a tour of the waterways of Europe to the Danube.

Mr. and Mrs. Minshall later left for their honeymoon, the bride wearing a dress of grey georgette trimmed with blue, and black hat. They were the recipients of a large number of beautiful presents.

The marriage of Mr. Merlin T. Minshall, son of Col. T.H. Minshall and the late Mrs. Minshall, of Friars, Matfield, to Miss Isyllt Winn Llewellyn, of Chesham Place, S.W.1, daughter of the late Dr. and the Hon. Mrs. R.L.J. Llewellyn, of Warley Lodge, took place at St. Mark's, North Audley Street. The Rev. E. Goodchild and Preb. W.G. Pennyman officiated. The bride, who was given away by her cousin, the Rev. W.N. Manning, wore a gown of white angel-skin cloqué patterned with gold, the train decorated with lovers' knots. A headdress of orange blossom and gold leaves surmounted her tulle veil, and she carried a sheaf of white flowers.

. . . leading a joint NID/SOE team, Minshall ran Operation Shamrock, where a commandeered fishing smack was used as an observation platform for monitoring German U-boat traffic in the Gironde estuary. Minshall received a "Mentioned in Despatches" for his part in this operation

. . . ran a section at HMS Flowerdown, using direction finding and transmitter analysis ("Z machines") to identify the positions of individual ships. As such, during May 1941 he played a part in the hunt for the Bismarck. Posted to Fiji, he managed to get his posting changed to New Zealand, where he worked on various intelligence projects, including establishing a Z machine intercept station at Rapuara near Blenheim.

Recalled to the UK, he was landed in occupied Yugoslavia as officer in charge of the Allied Naval Mission to Tito in Yugoslavia.

TRAVEL PLANNING LIMITED (10, Blacklands Terrace, London, S.W.3), whose small intimate parties are accompanied personally by the managing director, Merlin Minshall.

He was certainly regarded as a bit of a character by the kids; "Is he living in his camper van?" [ . . . ] He definitely stood out from the rest of the staff & had something of an air about him, no doubt helped by his semi aristocratic background, although we ignorant louts probably weren't able to recognise it as such.

We all were familiar with his "roads of history drawings" on the blackboard & he obviously had drawing skills. We had no idea he had been an Architect. I don't think he was particularly engaged with teaching us but he could command a classroom, which in a school with some less than well behaved kids, was more than other teachers could manage.

By John Shaw

THE day was cold, grey and overcast. We met for lunch at the Reform Club; game pie, claret and a rather good Stilton.

It was easy, amid the murmur of urbane conversation, to imagine it like the beginning of one of the better class spy thrillers.

He wore an inconspicuous suit, blue shirt and affected a monocle which swung on a red ribbon as he handed me his card: "Merlin Minshall, the original 007."

Merlin Theodore Minshall, alias James Bond, comes from a family of spies — even his mother was an agent — and has come in from the cold to publicise his memoirs, Guilt Edged, out today. He met Bond author Ian Fleming in Naval Intelligence in 1940.

"Bond was really an extension of Ian Fleming," he said. "It was really what he would have liked to have been, but I was really the model for Bond. Some of my exploits are in the Bond books.

Amused

But his exploits are regarded with some amusement by former colleagues, some now holding senior jobs in Whitehall.

They refer to him as an adventurer and "a buccaneer."

Vice-Admiral Sir Norman Denning, former deputy director of Naval Intelligence described Minshall today as "A ruddy pirate."

Up to now Bond has been thought of as a composite character drawn from several people including the British agent Bill Dunderdale and the sophisticated Yugoslav counterspy Dusko Popov, who lives in the South of France.

Mr Minshall, who lives at Stoke Ferry, King's Lynn, has a ginger beard, wears a red plastic carnation in his buttonhole and is half brother of Lord Poole, former chairman of the Conservative Party. Mr Minshall says his grandfather built the liner Mauretania.

Author, architect, racing driver and cordon bleu cook, he also claims to be the first Englishman to cross the Sahara by motorcycle in 1937.

Mr Minshall's first exploit was a daring attempt to block the Danube, one of the main industrial arteries for Nazi Germany.

Before the operation got underway a German agent tried to kill him on the Orient Express. But Mr Minshall put poison in his wine and pushed the dead agent's body out of the lavatory window. Bond did a similar thing in From Russia with Love.

The main plan failed, and Mr Minshall escaped to ram a launch packed with explosives against a crucial railway embankment used to tow oil barges through the rapids. That was used as a scene in To Live and Let Die.

Naturally there was sex. A beautiful German spy spent two pre-war months on his boat sailing up the river. "And she wasn't there to do the cooking," said Mr Minshall.

• Guilt Edged by Merlin Minshall. Poulter Books 75p.

Guilt-Edged is a wild and woolly tale which the author, Merlin Minshall, says—and I believe him now—is 95 per cent true. He sailed up and down the Danube on his honeymoon in the 1930s and, mistaken for a spy, became one. He discovered the one place where the Danube could be blocked but no one back in London would listen to him. He was a car racing champion, a marksman, a karate ace, an ace stud and the dupe of a "lovely but lethal German agent" who seduced him, lucky chap. The problem people have with this book lies in the style. It does not read true. I think that this is in the telling and not in the tale. Mr Minshall may or may not have been "the inspiration for James Bond", as is claimed on the back of the book, but he is most certainly a most odd bod.

MR MERLIN MINSHALL

Merlin Minshall, a rumbustious adventurer was born three or four years centuries too late, died on September 3. He was 81.

Merlin Theodore Minshall, son of a newspaper proprietor and nephew of a baronet, had a conventional education—prep school, public school, Oxford, architectural school—and loathed it. He gave up his architectural training to spend over two years sailing across Europe in a small boat, thus coming into contact with the Nazi regime, which had just come to power.

He next turned to car-racing, found himself being presented with a prize by Mussolini and went off to cross the Sahara north-to-south in a three-wheeled light truck coming into further contact with fascism.

He tried to get authorities in Whitehall interested in what he had found out; without, in the floodtide of appeasement, much success. He did secure a sub-lieutenant's commission in the RNVR, but his was not in any sense a subordinate temperament.

His bristly personality soon put him at odds with Admiral Godfrey, the director of naval intelligence. Luckily for Minshall, Godfrey's assistant, Ian Fleming, gave him a helping hand (Minshall is supposed to have been one of the characters from whom Fleming later drew James Bond).

As he had intimate knowledge of the middle-Danube, he was sent to take part in ineffective British attempts to stop the flow of Romanian grain and oil to Germany. He returned to England after various hair's breath's escapes, and was snapped up by SOE on its formation in the summer of 1940.

Late that November he ran operation 'Shamrock'. He took a small party of Frenchmen to the Gironde Estuary. They travelled by submarine and seized a fishing smack from which they studied the movements of U-boats going in and out of the estuary. They then sailed the smack back to England to report.

Minshall then spent a spell in New Zealand, organizing special naval intelligence. From this comparative rest he was recalled in the autumn of 1943, promoted Commander, and sent to establish naval liaison with Tito's partisans on the coast of Yugoslavia.

This provided him with a further string of adventures, recounted in his entertaining war autobiography, Guilt-edged, published in 1975 with a foreword by his friend, Len Deighton.

When the war was over, uniformed service held no attractions for Minshall. Once he tried his hand at politics. His half-brother, Lord Poole, had been chairman of the Conservative party; his own inclinations, though strongly anti-Socialist, were more Liberal.

He settled in Norfolk, with his third wife and their four sons.

Merlin Minshall

MERLIN MINSHALL, who has died aged 81, was one of the well-connected group of adventurers recruited by naval intelligence at the beginning of the 1939–45 War. One of his colleagues was Ian Fleming, and it is thought he was a model for Fleming's character of James Bond.

A burley, monocled man in a fur coat—he has been described by Len Deighton as "an amiable bear"—when Minshall first met Commander Fleming and Admiral Godfrey (who then comprised the Admiralty's intelligence team) he nearly ended his intelligence career with the observation that the Navy's Balkan Department was "up the creek".

But Fleming smoothed the ruffled feathers, and thenceforth they became figures in a daring plan to block the Danube to German shipping.

Minshall knew the Danube intimately. Before the war he had sailed his 100-year-old Dutch sailing barge, Sperwer, across the waterways of Europe to the Black Sea.

His mission to jam the famous Iron Gate—perilous narrows between Rumania and Yugoslavia—was aborted because his boats ran out of fuel, but this did not blight his 007-like future.

Occupied France

Put in charge of an anti U-boat intelligence operation known as "Z Intelligence" he found himself at a shore establishment, HMS Flowerdown, of which he later noted, "My staff consisted of 28 gorgeous Wrens. I was the only male in the establishment. James Bond would have discovered immediately how to cope with this, but it took me slightly longer."

But attempting to counter Biscay-based U-boats from Flowerdown was far too tame for Minshall, so he got himself landed in occupied France by submarine to take a look for himself.

Another of his more exciting exploits took place in Yugoslavia where he helped Tito's partisans, at one point capturing a small German warship while armed only with a cutlass.

After his Yugoslav adventures Minshall was summoned to Downing Street by Winston Churchill, who said: "Commander, you are the first person who has told me the truth about Tito's armed forces."

Merlin Minshall was born in 1906. He was a half brother of Lord Poole (a redoubtable chairman of the Conservative party) and a nephew of the Baronet MP Sir Philip Wigham-Richardson. More to the point, his mother had worked for the Secret Service in the 1914–18 War.

Restless man

He was educated at Oxford and later qualified as an architect. Even then his reputation was somewhat larger than life: he worked as a photographer for newspapers and magazines (one of his sitters being Hermann Goering) and made a name for himself in motor racing, being presented by Mussolini with the Foreign Challenge Trophy for the world's longest car race.

After the war this energetic, restless man, labelled affectionately and despairingly by at least one admiral as a "ruddy pirate", was associated with various ventures—from starting a travel firm to launching a wine and food club—the British Epicure Society.

Minshall was also adopted as a Liberal candidate for Parliament against Lord Lambton at Berwick, and took up practice as an architect.

He is survived by his wife, Christina, and four sons.