The Scottish diplomat and journalist Robert Bruce Lockhart might well be regarded as a “bounder”, a term his early-20th-century contemporaries would have used if asked. He flagrantly and publicly advertised his faithlessness to his long-suffering wife, and regularly drank himself into debt with all-night binges; on the face of it, he was a poor example to his generation. Yet, as James Crossland reminds us in this first full biography, Lockhart was a gregarious charmer who wrote well, mixed easily with the good and the great, and ended up directing Britain’s political – Crossland prefers “psychological” – warfare effort in the Second World War.
Lockhart was a paradox. On the one hand, he was capable of hard work and intelligent observation of the world’s trouble-spots; on the other, he was unable to resist a fascinating woman or a night of revelry whatever the cost to those around him or his own health. Crossland suggests that these two sides reflected his parents’ personalities – a schoolmaster father with Presbyterian ideals and a mother who sought excitement and self-indulgence. For much of his career, it seems that the maternal inheritance predominated over the paternal. Lockhart found routine work boring and unfulfilling, and gladly welcomed any opportunity to challenge convention and live more dangerously.
In writing Rogue Agent, Crossland has made good use of the copious records that Lockhart left to reconstruct his subject’s long and perilous career. Trouble started early on, before the First World War, when he was sent to work for the family rubber plantations in Malaya, and fell madly in love with a Malay princess, defying the disapproval of both sides until finally being forced to return to Scotland without his lover. He made it into the Foreign Office, and at the same time met and married an Australian woman after a typically brief and energetic courtship. Jean was to have much cause to regret accepting the impulsive invitation for matrimony, albeit Lockhart’s magnetic attraction for the opposite sex deserved a little more explanation here.
Lockhart ended up as vice-consul in Moscow, where he quickly learned fluent Russian – his gift for languages was a redeeming feature – and began to file significant analysis to the Foreign Office on the parlous condition of the Russian war effort. He once again found office work tedious, and sought solace both in affairs that soon became public knowledge, and in long nights in bars listening to gypsy music (a lifelong passion). He was recalled to London in 1917, but in what seems an extraordinary decision, was chosen by prime minister David Lloyd George to return to Russia as the “British Agent” to report on the new Bolshevik regime and see what hope there was that Russia might rejoin the war against Germany.
What followed was the most famous of Lockhart’s adventures in a turbulent and violent political environment. Crossland provides a blow-by-blow account of Lockhart’s tumultuous year in revolutionary Russia and, where possible, dispels the myths and half-truths of the British Agent’s activities, many of them the product of Lockhart’s own version of events. Here he once again fell for a beautiful woman, the Estonian countess Moura Benckendorff, with whom he had another flamboyant affair; this ended when he was arrested by the secret police for attempted subversion of the regime and she was thrown into jail as an accomplice.
In the interim, Lockhart changed his tune from promoting support for the Bolsheviks to trying to overturn the revolution by encouraging armed intervention, even the murder of Lenin and Trotsky by disaffected socialists. Crossland attributes this turnaround to Lockhart’s realisation that the regime was a murderous and terroristic innovation that had to be eradicated to save Russia. He might have placed Lockhart’s secretive and risky game into a broader context of Allied plans for intervention: it isn’t clear here whether Lockhart really mattered, though the public enjoyed the cloak-and-dagger aspects of his life, which he turned into a popular memoir, minus the more insalubrious details.
The year as British Agent was in many ways the high point of Lockhart’s troubled life. He drank heavily after the war, was persistently in debt, and failed to repair the damage to his marriage. He was rescued from a bleak decade by Lord Beaverbrook, who liked Lockhart’s charming side and respected his intelligence; the latter wrote for the Beaverbrook press until deciding later in the 1930s to embrace full-time writing. He and Jean divorced in 1937, and he kept up a series of affairs, interspersed with efforts to cope with his drink-induced debts. It’s all the more surprising that when war broke out, he was invited back to the Foreign Office to help with political propaganda to Germany and German-occupied Europe.
He returned to journalism and writing after the war, with diminishing success. Nonetheless, for a man who had so abused his body for years, and perpetually battled ill-health, he lived to the remarkable age of 82. This biography, detailed and engagingly written, gives us the man, warts and all: a restless spirit who might well have achieved more with fewer women and less wine.
Richard Overy’s latest book is Why War? Rogue Agent by James Crossland is published by Elliott & Thompson at £25. To order your copy for £19.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
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