If you’re a fan of James Bond and spy stories and looking to book a hotel in London, then St Ermin’s in Victoria could be a good choice.
It’s a rather lovely looking hotel built in 1887 in the red brick Queen Anne style in a horse shoe design around a charming courtyard.
But it’s genteel demeaner hides an interesting past. In the run up to the Second World War, Britain realised it would need a secret service to carry out clandestine missions against the enemy. They didn’t exactly want to advertise the fact that an organisation like this existed so the simple solution was to find a nearby hotel that could hand over some of its rooms. St Ermin’s was chosen as it was centrally located near Government and had apartments with their own entrance off the courtyard.
So, it was here in 1940 that the SOE (Special Operations Executive.) was first set up. Their brief was to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in German occupied Europe and to offer aid to local resistance movements. Operating under the cover name ‘Statistical Research Department’ from their offices in St Ermin’s, they directly employed or controlled more than 13,000 people, including many secret agents operating under cover. There were even guerilla warfare classes run here.
In addition, the hotel was used by other secret organisations including SIS, Mi5 and the Naval Intelligence Division. A member of the Naval Intelligence Division at the time was a certain Ian Fleming, who, after the war wrote the James Bond series of novels. Fleming later said that the character James Bond was based on a number of commandos he met while serving here.
Keeping with the spy theme, after the war, the Caxton Bar in the hotel became a regular meeting place for the infamous Cambridge Five – the ring of university educated MI5 agents who secretly passed sensitive information to the Soviet Union.
Image by Tim Fordham-Moss – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17297707