I’m curious what a spy would have earned IRL during Fleming’s time and what the incentives of a job well done would have been and how far was Bond’s lifestyle from reality?
This assumes that Bond’s sole source of income was his agent’s salary.
We know that Bond comes from a history of family wealth at least, as he has a family coat of arms and a motto (“the world is not enough”).
He also has a country house, although I’m not sure when it was first mentioned in the Bond canon, so it may not have been part of Flemming’s initial thinking.
What is more, the British civil service at that time was heavily class-based, and still is to a relatively lesser degree.
In the 1950s, there was no open recruitment for agents/spies. Instead, students at elite universities or officers were “spotted” and recruited clandestinely (some still are). Given the class prejudices and hiring practices at the time, it was extremely unlikely that working class Jimmy Bond would have been recruited by MI6.
In the films, Bond attended Cambridge, achieving a first in Oriental languages. In the books, he also went to University of Geneva, before leaving to ski at the tony Austrian ski town of Kitzbühel. That is not something that a student who was not well off could easily have done.
To be a working class student at Cambridge at all at that time would put Bond in the minority. Just 34% of all students in 1951, the last year for which there I found data, began their elementary/primary school careers at any type of state school. That doesn’t mean that they didn’t go to private (what the UK calls public) schools later on- just that they had any experience with state education at all.
It’s more likely that Flemming imagined Bond to have family money.
Still, Bond has some help. He sometimes uses a cover story of being a businessman from a company “Universal Exports.” Under that cover, his fancy living costs would be paid as a government expense. His missile-equipped Aston Martins are also government equipment, supplied by Q.
As for his actual salary, im the 1955 book Moonraker, Fleming wrote, “He earned £1,500 a year, the salary of a Principal Officer in the Civil Service, and he had a thousand a year free of tax of his own.”
This last bit suggests that he has other income sources from which to be tax exempt, and that they yielded at least £1000 per year. Doing a very rough and lazy assumption that this is based on a 5% return, Bond has income-generating assets of at least £20,000, or 200 times the average monthly income of a manual laborer. At least.
That’s not too bad, but is it enough to live like Bond?
I don’t think so. Just the watch alone would be too expensive. A basic Rolex Submariner was $230 in 1951. A one-way flight from NY to London was $290 in 1955. His ground floor - I.e. with garden access - flat in Wellington Square, London would have cost a pretty penny as well. I couldn’t find the exact historical price, but there is some more about Bond’s housing in the update below, and it looks like it was expensive. These things add up.
A personally rich Bond makes sense in other ways as well. For a long time, senior civil service was expected to be just that - service - with the salary more of a courtesy than the recipient’s sole source of income. This would have been the case for many of Bond’s colleagues. A high-trust position such a Bond’s, recruited clandestinely from someone viewed as reliable, aka “one of us,” might have even required it, assuming of course that it had really existed as written.
TL:DR Bond gets free gear and has a nice expense account, but he probably lives rich because he is personally rich. Still, we don’t see much of what he does in his off time. In this magical world created by Flemming, perhaps he does get by on a big government budget supporting a famous and high-living agent pursuing high-profile arch villians.
UPDATE: a dedicated fan tracked down what he thinks is the exact apartment Flemming gave Bond, at number 25, Wellington Square. I still haven’t found 1950s purchase or lease costs, but you can see for yourself, it’s a nice building in a nice area.
https://www.zoopla.co.uk/property/25-wellington-square/london/sw3-4nr/23136399
You can see pictures of an apartment in the building here. Alas, the exterior photo is just a street view and not the “plane-treed square” that Flemming described as well.
When Flemming visited, the flat was occupied by the editor and book critic Sir Charles MacCarthy and his wife, the writer Lady Mary MacCarthy, who were themselves upper class and well off.
Neighbors of the MacCarthys included Lord John and Lady Agnes Clydesmuir (1st Baron Clydesmuir, Secretary of State for Scotland, Governor of Burma, Governor of the BBC), actor Peter Bull, and an actual special agent with his own money - Maurice Buckmaster (head of the French Section of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during World War II).
Such residents suggest that it was an expensive place at the time.
Update 2: I initially wrote that Bond was a member of the Blades Club, but as u/HarknessJack correctly stated, he was a frequent guest, but not a formal member. His boss, M, is a member.
To be a member, one must be able to show, that is have in cash or government bonds, £100,000 in 1950s money. There is no way that M could have amassed that much on his own government salary. Like so many others in the civil service, M is upper class with outside income sources.
Sources:
House of Commons, BRIEFING PAPER Number 0616, 31 July 2019, “Oxbridge 'elitism'”
https://blog.crownandcaliber.com/rolex-submariner-watch-prices/amp/
Southern, James, “Class and the British Foreign Service,” Foreign & Commonwealth Office.
https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/air-travel-today-is-a-damn-bargain-951705216
A follow-up question I'm curious about is: did the James Bond books and movies create this picture of ultimate masculinity that so many people have strived towards since then, or was this image of masculinity already present from the 1950's onward and was James Bond just a materialisation of this already present image?
One main thing a lot people forget is that his family were the equivalent of millionaires back then and he inherited their estate when they died..
A majority of his watches, clothes & travel expenses are covered by MI6.
In current times he would be making roughly $45K - $65K I’d say Casino Royale to Spectre.
So at the end of the day he saves a lot of money by not spending his salary and enjoying the free perks that come with the job.