Sir Peter Smithers: Sir Peter Smithers, a British politician, diplomat and award- winning gardener who worked as a British spy during the second World War and was said to have inspired the fictional character of James Bond, the suave agent 007 in Ian Fleming's novels, died on June 8th. He was 92.
Smithers died at his home in Vico Morcote, Switzerland, where he retired in 1970. The Council of Europe political organisation announced his death on its website, noting that Smithers had been a member.
His years in military intelligence work began soon after he joined the British naval reserve in 1940. A case of measles got him assigned to shore duty and he was asked to interview with Naval Intelligence Cmdr Ian Fleming.
He worked for Fleming in Paris and later in Bordeaux, France, where they helped arrange the evacuation of British citizens after Germany invaded Paris. Fleming later named several characters in his novels Smithers, including a villain in Goldfinger, but never confirmed that his former colleague was the model for James Bond.
Smithers went on to work in England and Washington before he was stationed in Mexico in 1943, monitoring possible submarine-to-shore communications. There he met Dojean Sayman, from St Louis. The couple married a few weeks later.
At the end of the war, Smithers won a Conservative seat in the British parliament, which he held from 1950 until 1964. He travelled with delegations to Africa, India, Pakistan, Burma and Indonesia, collecting plant species along the way.
He was appointed UK delegate to the UN General Assembly for two years starting in 1960 and was made secretary general of the Council of Europe which took him to Strasbourg, France, from 1964 to 1969. He was knighted the year after he retired.
While Smithers made a career of politics and diplomacy, his 1995 autobiography, Adventures of a Gardener, suggests that flowers were at least as important to him.
"I regard gardening and planting as the other half of life, a counterpoint to the rough and tumble of politics," he wrote.
Born Peter Henry Berry Otway Smithers in Yorkshire, England, on December 9th, 1913, he spent much of his time as a boy with his nanny, "a keen naturalist", he wrote in his autobiography. He graduated from Oxford University in 1934 and became a lawyer before he was commissioned into the naval reserves.
Smithers was in his 50s when he retired from government work and turned full time to horticulture and botany. "The garden is planted so as to reduce labour to an absolute minimum as the owner grows older," he said in a 1989 interview with the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
He cultivated rhododendrons, magnolias, tree peonies, lilies and wisteria, forming an ecosystem that required not more than two days of garden work each week.
Later in his life he held a number of gallery exhibitions of his flower photographs. He won eight gold medals for photography from the Royal Horticultural Society.
Smithers once named a flower after his wife, a white tree peony with a maroon centre that he bred and cultivated. She remained with him until her death in early 2006.
Smithers is survived by their two daughters and a stepson from Sayman's previous marriage.
Sir Peter Smithers: born December 9th, 1913; died June 8th, 2006