20 Things You Didn’t Know About On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)
18. “Yes, If He Is Our Man, I’d Like To Get Him Away From Switzerland.”
During his meeting with Sir Hilary Bray, Double-0 Seven was to discover Sir Hilary’s assistant and SPECTRE agent, Phidian (Brian Grellis) eavesdropping on them. Pursued by Bond across the roof of the College of Arms and into London’s subterranean Post Office Railway, Phidian would have been killed by a passing mail train.
Q (Desmond Llewelyn) then sourced corpses from local morgues to join Phidian’s body aboard a train leaving St. Pancras Station, before engineering a crash to explain Phidian’s death without arousing suspicion.
Work on the sequence started on location at the College of Arms, but was delayed when George Lazenby broke his arm whilst scaling a building. The next scenes shot were of Bond entering Blofeld's laboratory for the first time, wearing a coat to conceal a plaster cast on Lazenby’s arm.
Phidian’s death and the subsequent cover-up were later discarded altogether for time and pacing reasons. However, MI6 agent, Shaun Campbell (Bernard Horsfall) is reading about the rail accident, which apparently killed 19 people, in The Daily Express upon Bond’s arrival in Mürren, Switzerland.