THIS FIRST BOOK OF MY father’s climbed almost immediately to the top of the bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic, and Putnam, the original publisher, was kept busy with reprint after reprint. The critics hailed it everywhere: ‘Holds our attention to the last page,’ said the Sunday Times. ‘A far more real personality than Lawrence of Arabia,’ wrote the New York Times. ‘No better picture of the summer of 1918 in Moscow has been or is ever likely to be painted,’ thought Arthur Ransome, while Harold Nicolson’s view was: ‘A book in a thousand … exhilarating and unforgettable.’ Published in many languages and in numerous editions, British Agent was turned into a film in 1934: with Leslie Howard, Kay Francis and a cast of over five thousand, it was the most expensive movie Warner Brothers had ever produced. They described the book as ‘The Greatest Human Document of the Century’. The film itself was praised as ‘The Most Important Dramatic Event of the Year’.
My father, the late Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, KCMG, was born in Scotland in 1887, without a drop of English blood in his veins. It is said that King Robert the Bruce, when dying at the Battle of Bannockburn, asked his friend Sir James Douglas to cut out his heart, lock it carefully in a casket and take it to Palestine for burial. Sir James set off but only got as far as Spain where he became involved in fighting the Moors, in the course of which he threw the casket at them. One legend is that the casket was brought back to Scotland almost immediately, while another is that it was buried in Madrid and returned to Scotland’s Melrose Abbey early last century. In 1996, an old casket was unearthed at Melrose Abbey, and many believe it to be that of Robert the Bruce, but it has never been opened. Whatever the truth of the matter, the descendants of Sir James Douglas changed their name to Lockhart and later added in the name Bruce.
My father’s mother was also very much a Highlander – a Macgregor and a member of Rob Roy’s clan. Her grandfather, in 1824, had been one of the first two men in Scotland to obtain a licence to distil whisky – although the Macgregors had been doing so without a licence for several hundred years. They made a lot of money from malt whisky before selling out to Distillers Limited in 1925. My father spent much of his youth on Speyside with his Macgregor relations, having whisky for breakfast, lunch and dinner like his elders. Yet, despite that, the nearby graveyard where many Macgregors are buried reveals that they all lived into their eighties and nineties. My father, although he spent much of his adult life in England, also died in his eighties in 1970. I scattered his ashes in the River Spey opposite the Balmenach (former Macgregor) Distillery, as requested in his will.
After preparatory school where he learnt Greek and Latin, my father obtained a scholarship to Fettes College in Edinburgh, where, in his own words, he ‘spent five years in the worship of athleticism’. From Fettes he travelled to Berlin to study German, and then on to Paris to learn French from a Sorbonne professor. The comments of his educators are worth noting. The headmaster of Fettes described him as: ‘A boy of exceptional vigour and ability, very quick and alert in mind combining marked literary and historical tastes.’ In France, he scored forty-nine out of fifty marks in his six exams. His professor remarked: ‘I had many occasions to talk with M. Lockhart and follow his studies. I know that he knows French very well indeed and speaks it fluently and correctly.’ The German professor wrote of him: ‘His knowledge of German is accurate and fluent and he has an exceptionally pure accent.’
My father returned to Great Britain in the summer of 1908. His father’s plans for him to sit an exam for the Civil Service went down the drain when his favourite Macgregor uncle, who owned a number of rubber plantations in Malaya, suggested my father go out there to manage one of them, and in October off he went to Negeri Sembilan, via Canada, Japan and Singapore. He fell in love with the country immediately and learnt yet another language – Malay. But he also fell in love with a Malayan princess, ward of the Sultan of Negeri Sembilan, who went to live with my father in his bungalow. This created an enormous scandal: not because a white man was living with a Malay girl – which was quite common in those days – but because a Malayan princess had stooped so low as to live with a white rubber planter. Fate, however, intervened, and in 1910 he was forced to return to England having contracted a particularly virulent form of malaria. It is interesting to note that my father began his literary career in a small way in Malaya, writing short stories that were subsequently published in the Sphere magazine under a pseudonym. He also wrote some poems there, which I find very beautiful but which have never been published.
On his return to England he stayed with his parents, by then living in Berkshire, and decided to take the advice given to him to sit the Foreign Office exams for the Consular Service. Over sixty candidates registered that year for only four vacancies. My father came top. After a short period in the Foreign Office he was off to Moscow as Vice-Consul in January 1912.
Before he left England, his parents gave two or three parties for him. At one of these he fell head over heels in love with ‘a beautiful Australian girl’ called Jean Haslewood Turner from Brisbane. Her grandfather had been the richest man in Queensland. Ten days after their first meeting, they became engaged – a matter of days before my father had to leave for Russia. They were married in 1913, as soon as he had his first leave.
As readers will note, much of my father’s early years in Moscow were spent in meeting all the people who mattered in politics, from Tsarist politicians down to men of the Left who were destined to change the world; at the same time he lived a hectic social life with the aristocracy. His wife, who spent some time in Moscow with him, gave a major social party once a week. Champagne and caviar and pretty girls abounded everywhere, and my father, it is fair to say, did not always resist temptation. Apart from upsetting his wife, one of his attachments was so strongly disapproved of by the authorities that in 1917 he was sent home. While he was away, the Bolshevik revolution broke out and peace negotiations between the Russians and the Germans began in Brest-Litovsk.
When back in England he met the leading politicians; with the British Ambassador and staff en route home, the British Government had no means of contact with the Bolsheviks. My father, in view of his extensive knowledge of Russia and Russians, and despite his extramarital relationship, was returned to Russia by Prime Minster Lloyd George with the mission of keeping the Russians at war against Germany. The British Government, ignoring my father’s opposite views, felt sure the Bolshevik revolution would collapse. The story of how it didn’t, and my father’s involvement with that story, you will shortly discover.
On 19 October 1918, the thirty-one-year-old British agent who had been assigned the extraordinary tasks of keeping a revolutionised Russia in the war against Germany and of preventing Bolshevism from spreading worldwide returned to Great Britain. I doubt whether any British agent has ever been assigned such an immense responsibility, before or since. He had been released from the Kremlin in exchange for Litvinov, whom the British had arrested in reprisal for my father’s imprisonment – the first ‘spy swap’! Four days later, bevies of cameramen were assembled to photograph my father before he went off to meet Lloyd George and then on to a forty-minute audience with King George V. After he had attended various sessions with the chiefs of staff and other government officials, the Foreign Office gave him nearly a year’s leave before sending him to Prague in October 1919, as Secretary to the British Legation in the newly created Republic of Czechoslovakia.
After nearly three years at the Legation he was transferred, at the request of the Bank of England, to join the Anglo-Austrian Bank to help it and similar Bank of England-fostered European banks establish stability and increase Great Britain’s influence in the middle of Europe. Hence my father travelled much to Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia – thus increasing still further his stock of foreign languages.
In 1925, my father returned to England, and Lord Beaverbrook, with whom he had made friends in 1918–19, engaged him to run the ‘Londoner’s Diary’ for the Evening Standard. His assistants at various times included Malcolm Muggeridge, Harold Nicolson and Randolph Churchill. It was during this period that he wrote Memoirs of a British Agent. While remaining a great friend of Lord Beaverbrook’s for the rest of the latter’s life, he eventually left his employ and went on to write a further thirteen books – all big sellers, one or two of which I myself have updated. In the 1930s he established himself as a pillar of high society who was invited everywhere, becoming a friend of the Prince of Wales, Lord Mountbatten, King Carol of Romania, Anthony Rothschild, Anthony Eden, the Duke of Sutherland and Lady Emerald Cunard among others.
With the approach of the Second World War, he was warned in early 1939 to be ready, at a week’s notice, to proceed to the Foreign Office’s Political Intelligence HQ in the countryside outside London, which, with the outbreak of war in September 1939, he did; he simultaneously became part-time British Representative to the exiled Czechoslovak Government.
Later, having turned down the offer to be head of MI6 – the British secret service – he was appointed head of a new department named the ‘Political Warfare Executive’. In this position he supervised the UK Press and radio, technically under the Minister of Information, and all propaganda – overt and covert – against Germany, under the Foreign Secretary; he also liaised with MI6 and the Chiefs of Staff, and dealt with some matters direct with the Prime Minister.
My father and the-then head of MI6 were both knighted in January 1943, and at the end of the war Anthony Eden offered my father an ambassadorship, but he turned this down, stating: ‘I have had enough of politicians and the Government.’ However, he received a tax-free pension and did the occasional piece of work for the Foreign Office’s Political Intelligence Department. This would consist of writing articles that might influence the relations with Great Britain of specific countries. They were not published under my father’s name. On the contrary, the Political Intelligence Department obtained (paid?) people well known in the countries concerned to pretend they had written the articles. My father also made weekly broadcasts to Czechoslovakia.
On my father’s death, I was officially advised that most of his covert work would remain ‘Secret’ for at least a hundred years. I had found many files and documents of his which were clearly very Secret, and some which were at the least Confidential. All the really Secret material I gave to the Foreign Office, together with what I and they considered Confidential; they promised to return the latter to me after thirty years. When the thirty years were up, I asked for the Confidential material back, but despite manifest complaints by me I was told it had ‘disappeared’.
Nevertheless, my father’s legacy endures. Now, dear reader, turn the page and start reading ‘The Greatest Human Document of the Century’, or, as the Daily Express described it: ‘A first-class book sensational enough to satisfy the cravings of the most rabid of spy fans.’
Robin Bruce Lockhart