 Bond failed to gain admittance to Oxford University, so on leaving school he spent his gap year in the US, as an English-Speaking Union scholarship student at Cate School, near Santa Barbara, California, before being given passage on a ship from Long Beach to Hong Kong as a deck hand.Bond is married to Elizabeth, Lady Bond, with whom he has two daughters and a son.His elder daughter Annabelle Bond is the fourth British woman to have climbed Mt Everest and the woman to have scaled the Seven Summits in the briefest period of time.