Things You Won't Get From Wikipedia

Responding to a comment from a reader in an earlier article about the latest Bond mis-adventure, caused me once again to just shake my head at today's sad condition of the media and the misleading and often subtly deceptive information resources we all have and regularly turn to - I suppose, particularly, Wikipedia.

I understand that a fundamental protocol of what allows certain things to make it to a Wiki page and certain other things to 'not,' is this academia, campus-based 'peer review' and fact-checking volunteer scheme they have. Granted the Wiki began with a huge global co-operation of librarians and especially campus-based librarians, then no doubt they desire to preserve some kind of intellectual territoriality but so much of what they allow up onto the main pages is just so much nonsense really.

Lord Nicholas Windsor - his dad is the head of UK freemasonry (I think).
He went to Oxford, not Cambridge, unlike Charteris.

Nobody these days seems to have the common sense capacity to think through ideas logically and adjust things that appear through constant repetition but simply cannot be true realistically-speaking.

I mean, my own uncle went to school with Charles Yin (Leslie Charteris) and my father was just a year younger than Yin - and they not only thus lived in the same eras, but either in the same physical locations in the world and certainly in the exact same social circles.

If you go by Wiki, Charles Yin was footloose, moved around a lot, appearing to struggle from one job to another... ...and what I think you're meant to draw from this is that by travelling as much as he did at a young age, and experiencing so many jobs he gained a lot of experience for his eventual career as a writer.

Dr Peter Duncan, Cambridge expert on Russia -
the individual most singly responsible for current MI6 Russian policy. 

Wiki very casually explains that Charles Yin went to King's College Cambridge and Rossall School. I don't even want to go into what that means to knowledgeable people but if you look up even the silly Wiki entries and read through them at some point you are going to trip over certain er, 'associations' and 'clubs' let's say, that will give you cause to stop and think.

On Charteris himself (Bowyer-Yin), the Wikipedia entry again very casually says firstly that his father was 'a physician,' and that (and I find the phrasing quite rude, frankly) he - ' claimed to be able to trace his lineage back to the emperors of the Shang Dynasty.'

Well okay, let me tell you something about his father - he was the A-Number One Chinese physician across the whole of South East Asia, having surgeries all over the place from Siam (as it was then) to Ceylon (as it was also known then). He had a partner who was a compounding chemist as well as a medical GP - Doctor Lim - and in 1954, Doctor Suat Yin was the first and only person in South East Asia to own and drive a 'gull-wing' Mercedes 300 SL. And that was because he had the monopoly rights to manufacture medicinal morphine from the US Military (because it was a militarily controlled substance) into South East Asia. His partner Doctor Lim was highly versed in the chemistry and entire process of manufacturing medical morphine including the so-called Indian latex method of extraction and had been since long before WWII - and the US Army recognized this doubly so because Lim was an industrial chemist of sorts who also consulted to the wartime rubber (rubber latex, not poppy latex) plantations and first stage process works in Ceylon and India and Malaysia.

Wiki absurdly tells that Charteris worked on a rubber plantation. Doing what, exactly, did he 'work' on a rubber plantation - as a Tamil cutting rubber, or maybe a Chinese rubber tapper...? Rubber plantations were owned by literally the most wealthy people more or less in the world, due to the exorbitant prices on rubber caused by the wars.

Leslie Charteris - I hate to tell you all this - was a writer by no accident; he is related to the Mitford Sisters through his mother's family and their link to the Redesdale and Denham Baronetcy. Yeah he 'drove a bus' as Wiki rightly says - he tested out vehicles for my father's aunt and her then husband, who started the Green Line Busing Company of Thailand and Singapore. Probably worth - the bus company - today's equivalent of thirty to fifty million dollars or more.

Sometimes, I give up, honestly. 

Original Mercedes 300 SL

So, the comment pointed out that Charteris had never worked as a writer on a Bond movie. And that is certainly a conclusion one can draw from the Wiki entry on his work. He was contracted to Paramount, in any case, not Columbia. A little point about 'movies' generally... In the old days, movies were made by photographing on special film stock made by petrochemical companies exclusively. Shell made most of the film stock. It cost HUGE sums to even buy the unexposed canisters of film stock, never mind the movie cameras. Bell and Howell, Hughes Tool Corporation, and MGM either made the main parts or owned all the actual fully-made cameras - and the first two of these were deeply linked to the petroleum exploration and drilling industry. Now there are things that I can tell you about the movie 'Thunderball' that very few others alive today can - for one thing it was not all filmed in the Bahamas, although the story is set there and the movie intends you to believe it is all Bahamian scenery. 

John Hopkins has the screen credit as co-screenplay writer on 'Thunderball' - a story which was devised by Kevin McClory and produced by him. McClory was first cousin to the then Managing Director of Shell Far East, who provided the film stock at the expense of Shell.

Hopkins was also from Cambridge University - and hit his head and drowned in his pool in California in 1998, and, according to Wikipedia, that was 'following an accident in which he slipped.' 

Whatever.


Any-hew... Thanks to the Singapore government decently retaining some real history about itself, here is the official entry in its own records about Dr Yin Suat Chuan:

http://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/photographs/record-details/b0701eba-1162-11e3-83d5-0050568939ad