During a restoration project at Elizabeth Castle, a 16th-century fortress off the coast of Jersey in the Channel Islands, workers unblocked a long-sealed fireplace on the first floor of the Officers’ Quarters. Buried in concrete inside was a glass bottle. And inside the bottle was a note.
It read: “007 JAMES BOND. 26th Feb 1966. P.S. SECRET AGENT. DON’T TELL ANYBODY.”
On the back was a single clue: the signature “E. A. Blampied.” Tucked in alongside the note were several pages of the weekly Reveille newspaper, dated February 23, 1966.
Jersey Heritage shared the find on <a href="https://
Harvey Doolan, Jersey Heritage’s historic buildings officer and the archaeologist on-site, called it “quite an eclectic mix to find,” according to the BBC. The writer, he said, was “clearly a very big James Bond fan.” His first guess was that the signature might belong to Edmund Blampied, one of Jersey’s most famous artists. But the math didn’t work. “He was 79 years old at that point in time, and he passed away in the August of that year, so we thought it was possibly unlikely that he was shoving bottles into fireplaces at Elizabeth Castle,” Doolan said.
Doolan also worked out roughly when the bottle was hidden. That particular fireplace appeared to be the last one sealed during a mid-century restoration. “All the others had been blocked between probably 1923 and 1946 as we found cigarette packets from the period and German ammunition,” he noted, a reference to Jersey’s occupation by German forces during World War II.
What Doolan loved about the find was that it was a window into an ordinary person’s life. “It’s trying to get down to the lives of normal everyday people that history has generally not captured,” he said.
And here’s the part the original mystery didn’t include, because it hadn’t happened yet: they found their guy.
After the appeal went out, two sisters named Annelis Michel and Debbie Blampied heard the name “E. A. Blampied” mentioned on the local radio station, Channel 103. They immediately thought of their late father, Edward Arnold Blampied.
“I was listening to Channel 103 when I heard the name E. A. Blampied and I thought, hold on a minute!” one of them recalled. “I messaged my sister and said, ‘Are you listening to the radio?’”
Edward, it turned out, was a carpenter who worked at Elizabeth Castle in 1966 and built the stairways in the Officers’ Quarters. He was a devoted James Bond fan whose favorite film was “Thunderball.” And crucially, he had a well-documented habit of hiding messages in bottles.
His daughters remembered him tucking notes and mementos into the walls of the family home as he built it. He also encouraged them to throw messages in bottles into the sea, hoping a stranger somewhere would find one and write back.
“When my sister first heard it on Channel 103, we were both excited and immediately thought of our dad,” Debbie said. “It was something we knew he did and always used to sign his name as ‘E. A. Blampied.’” The family spent a day going through old photos and letters, sharing memories, before confirming it was him.
Jersey Heritage said it’s now “very confident” the note was Edward’s work. And his daughters suspect it won’t be the last one found. “We wouldn’t be surprised if other notes are discovered in other locations in future,” Debbie said.
So the secret agent was a Jersey carpenter with a flair for the dramatic and a love of 007. He sealed a joke into a fireplace in 1966, almost certainly never expecting anyone to read it. Nearly 60 years later, somebody did, and against pretty long odds, they figured out exactly who he was.
Not bad for a note that explicitly instructed everyone not to tell anybody.
