Rogue Agent E-Book

James Crossland

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 526

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'It is impossible not to keep the pages turning' Scotland on Sunday 'It's a brilliant book everyone, go and get it!' Dan Snow 'Compelling and meticulously researched, the riveting life of a maverick Scottish spy.' Charles Cumming THE THRILLING BIOGRAPHY OF ROBERT BRUCE LOCKHART, BRITAIN'S 'AGENT' IN MOSCOW Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart (1887–1970) was an impressive figure: a diplomat, intelligence agent, conspirator, journalist and propagandist who played a key role in both world wars. He was a man who charmed his way into the confidences of everyone from Leon Trotsky to Anthony Eden. A man whom the influential press baron Lord Beaverbook claimed 'could well have been prime minister'. And yet Lockhart died almost forgotten and near destitute, a Scottish footnote in the pages of history. Rogue Agent is the first biography of this gifted yet habitually flawed maverick. It chronicles his many exploits, from his time as Britain's 'Agent' in Moscow, and his role in a plot to bring down the communist regime, to leading the Political Warfare Executive, a secret body responsible for disinformation and propaganda in the Second World War. Exploring Lockhart's unorthodox thinking and contributions to the development of psychological warfare as well as his hedonistic lifestyle, late nights and many affairs that left him in a state of perpetual debt, Rogue Agent tells the thrilling story of this unconventional war hero. 'In this rigorously researched yet lively and highly readable account, James Crossland cuts through the myth and legend to tell a compelling story.' Professor Rory Cormac, author of How to Stage a Coup 'This riveting account of Lockhart's adventures in revolutionary Russia, his penchant for exotic women and extravagant nightlife, reads like a thriller.' Julia Boyd, author of A Village in the Third Reich 'A mesmerising tale of espionage and journalism . . . when an elite Scot with "no drop of English blood in my veins" might believe he could almost single-handedly change world history.' James Hawes, author of The Shortest History of Germany

Leseprobe

For Durey

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction: A Plot Undone

Chapter 1 No Drop of English Blood

Chapter 2 Our Man in Moscow

Chapter 3 Implosion

Chapter 4 Agent of Britain

Chapter 5 Crossroads

Chapter 6 Double Game

Chapter 7 Enter ST1

Chapter 8 The Great Gamble

Chapter 9 Mission’s End

Chapter 10 A Night Without Dawn

Chapter 11 Hell on Fleet Street

Chapter 12 Whither Europe?

Chapter 13 Fighting ‘Phoney’

Chapter 14 Cancel the Revolution

Chapter 15 Wordy Warfare

Chapter 16 Be All Sins Misremembered

Picture Section

Acknowledgements

Notes

Bibliography

Index

PREFACE

Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart was a man of many seemingly irreconcilable parts. He was a diplomat, journalist, intelligence gatherer and propagandist, who charmed his way into the confidences of everyone from Leon Trotsky to Anthony Eden. In the First World War, Prime Minister Lloyd George made Lockhart his personal representative – British Agent – in Bolshevik Russia. Years later, Winston Churchill approved his appointment as director-general of the Political Warfare Executive, a secret department tasked with waging psychological warfare against the Third Reich. Lockhart was also Britain’s wartime liaison to the government-in-exile of occupied Czechoslovakia and a deputy under-secretary at the Foreign Office. When not playing the part of Whitehall insider and being tasked with important missions by prime ministers, Lockhart was a bestselling author and right hand of one of the world’s most powerful men, the press magnate and occasional cabinet minister Lord Beaverbrook.

Throughout this extraordinary career, Lockhart filled his address book with the details of diplomats, spies, generals, admirals, literary titans, unscrupulous journalists and notorious revolutionaries, many of whom praised him as ‘a delightful companion’, who was ‘circumspect to a fault’ and possessed of ‘dynamic qualities’. In a rapidly changing age of war, revolution and extremist ideology, Lockhart knew everyone and did everything.1

This is one version of the man. The other is of an inveterate womaniser, drinker, plotter and adventurer, who squandered his enormous potential by getting into a state of perpetual debt and succumbing to crippling bouts of self-doubt and depression. This Lockhart made enemies who were immune to his charms – people like the Bolshevik spymaster Felix Dzerzhinsky, the British military attaché Alfred Knox and even some of the ministers and propagandists with whom he worked during the Second World War. These and other detractors wrote him off as a feckless and unreliable ‘prima donna’ who was ‘weak and unable or unwilling to take over effective control’ of situations. This Lockhart got involved in a doomed plot to usurp the Bolsheviks from power in 1918 and spent the next decade trying to forget his failure at the bottom of a bottle. By his own admission, this version of Lockhart ‘behaved like a cad’ towards his wife Jean, who suffered watching him openly philander his way across Europe for years.2 It is this Lockhart that has captured the imagination of historians, who have focused almost exclusively on his machinations in Russia in 1918 without paying sufficient mind to the other eighty-one years of his eventful, multifaceted life. This biography does not reject the opinions of those who have dubbed Lockhart a ‘wild’ and ‘unbridled’ miscreant who was ‘adventurous beyond common sense’. Rather, it acknowledges that Lockhart was not so one-dimensional and that the life he led was defined by exceptional peaks and wretched valleys, the contours of which need to be explored fully to understand the man who shaped them.3

I have been helped in this task by the fact that whatever turmoil Lockhart faced there remained one constant throughout his life – a compulsion to write. He authored sixteen books and hundreds of radio scripts, newspaper articles and essays. He composed poetry from a young age and, from 1915 until the late 1960s, kept as many as three daily diaries of varying length and detail. He also filled numerous notebooks with observations and character sketches of the many famous people he encountered on his travels from Malaysia to Russia, across Europe and North America. These published pieces and private notes have left behind a comprehensive picture of what Lockhart thought, who he met and how he carried out his work.

That said, following and interpreting Lockhart’s paper trail has not been without its challenges. His memoirs are rich in anecdotes and often quite beautiful prose, yet they suffer like most self-authored histories from obfuscation and distortion of fact. For this reason, I have mostly used them to convey Lockhart’s perception of events and to fill the gaps in his archival record. Although such lacunas exist – primarily in the years before 1914 and in the early 1920s – the documents covering the rest of Lockhart’s life are as voluminous as they are scattered. The largest collections of private material are held at the University of Indiana’s Lilly Library in Bloomington and at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution in Palo Alto. The bulk of his professional correspondence can be found in the Lockhart Collection at the National Archives of the United Kingdom, the basement library of the Bank of England in London and among the Papers of Lord Milner at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. These archival materials, and a report from Bolshevik Russia in the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King’s College London, have proved invaluable in tracing the often-blurred lines between Lockhart’s private and professional life.

In addition to these collections, it has been both frustrating and rewarding to make use of Lockhart’s diaries, which have a story as winding and confusing as that of their author. After Lockhart’s death in 1970, the Beaverbrook Press was bequeathed his journals and notebooks and a political advisor at the press named Kenneth Young was employed to edit them into a publishable form. This task was arduous. Aside from Lockhart’s often impenetrably small handwriting, some of the material was missing at the time of delivery to the Beaverbrook offices. Most of these journals were later found in uncleared cupboards and, in one instance, in a safe that had been locked and forgotten for decades. This scavenger hunt disrupted Young’s timetable, leaving a gap between the publication of the first volume of diaries in 1973 and the second volume’s completion in 1980.

The diary project also came under scrutiny from the Foreign Office. Fearing instances of libel – Lockhart was candid in describing his interactions with and the personal habits of important political figures – and the disclosure of national secrets, the government insisted on vetting Young’s transcriptions. Particular attention was paid to diary entries covering Lockhart’s propaganda work, which continued beyond the fight against Nazism and into the Cold War via anti-communist articles penned under pseudonyms and his radio broadcasts into communist Czechoslovakia. Despite these obstacles, Young managed to produce a mostly accurate reflection of the original diaries that currently reside in the Beaverbrook collection at the Parliamentary Archives at Westminster. Where omissions exist in Young’s published versions, I have used a combination of these unvarnished originals and private papers.4

Though he left behind millions of words describing his life and times, Lockhart is still a man of mystery. The declassification of files has lifted most of the veil from his secret work in 1918, but a question mark still hangs over whether these labours continued into the 1920s. There are traces, albeit fleeting, in the archival record that suggest he was still working with the anti-Bolshevik insurgent Boris Savinkov and the fantastically reckless spy Sidney Reilly up until the point they were executed by the Bolsheviks in 1925. Certainly, he maintained a connection to the intelligence services for the rest of his life, if only through his preferred means of doing business and acquiring information – lunches at the Carlton Club or the St James’s. Most of the files pertaining to Lockhart’s government work were declassified in 1993; however, a few documents in this series remain under lock and key. Lockhart’s son Robin, who worked for Naval Intelligence and had an awareness of his father’s secret activities, claimed that these documents will never see the light of day. If this is true, I can’t help but reflect on the decade I have spent researching Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, raise a glass of Scotch in toast to his enduring mystery and smile at a remark he made to his dear friend Harold Nicolson in 1932 – ‘my whole life is a lie. In fact, it is the best definition of it.’5

INTRODUCTION

A PLOT UNDONE

Moscow was a city on edge. It was 30 August 1918 – the day, it seemed, that Vladimir Ilyich Lenin would die. That afternoon, the father of the Bolshevik revolution had delivered a rousing speech at a weapons factory outside the Russian capital, lauding the vital role its workers were playing in arming the revolutionary motherland against its reactionary enemies. Cheers and applause followed, to which Lenin doffed his hat and gave an appreciative wave, before walking towards a waiting car at the factory’s gates. At that moment, a furious jeer stabbed out at Lenin from the crowd’s friendly hum. Irritated, he turned to address the unseen critic. He barely had the chance to open his mouth before three pistol shots tore through his body, leaving a wound in his neck and punctures in his lungs. Commotion consumed the scene as Lenin’s guards grabbed the shooter, batting away the hands of the workers who called for bloody vengeance. This swift apprehension of Lenin’s assailant did little, however, to calm the nerves of the other Bolshevik leaders. As news of the attack spread through Russia’s corridors of power, fears arose that a counter-revolutionary coup was imminent. The angst was compounded by Lenin’s dire state. Not trusting the security at Moscow’s hospitals, he had insisted on being taken to the Kremlin for treatment. Behind the gilded doors of one of the palace’s master bedrooms, Lenin writhed and screamed through the night as doctors struggled to extract the bullets from his broken body. By the time the clock struck midnight, an eerie pall had fallen over Moscow, where many a mind was consumed by a single thought: the ‘Bolshevik leader was not dead, but his chances of living were at a discount’.1

These words were scrawled into Robert Bruce Lockhart’s notebook shortly before he collapsed into slumber at 1 a.m. on 31 August, exhausted from pondering the day’s events. Not that he minded being in Moscow at this moment of terror and uncertainty. Lockhart lived for such drama. Two days shy of his thirty-first birthday, he was the coming man of Britain’s diplomatic corps, possessed of a head for foreign languages, a keen intellect and a way with words. These talents, combined with his limitless reserves of self-confidence, made Lockhart just the man to serve as Britain’s Agent in Bolshevik Russia. This ambiguous title had been bestowed on Lockhart by no less a figure than Prime Minister Lloyd George who, shortly after the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917, tried to forge a diplomatic link with Russia’s new masters. Lockhart had the youth, the creativity and, having previously served as a consul-general in Moscow, the experience of Russia’s mysteries to meet Lloyd George’s requirements. He had been selected, as he later put it, ‘from among God knows what weird choice of candidates for a difficult and exciting mission’.2

This mission’s primary objective was to liaise with Lenin’s regime on behalf of the British government. Simple enough, except that while shaking hands with the Bolsheviks, Lockhart was also plotting their downfall. In the summer of 1918, he became the linchpin of a network of spies, journalists, diplomats and adventurers from Britain, France and the USA, which had taken root across Russia and formed alliances with local counterrevolutionary groups. The network’s aim was to get Russia back into the First World War, from which it had been extracted by the Bolsheviks, and, if possible, bring Lenin’s great ideological experiment to a permanent end. It was a dangerously ambitious plan that by August 1918 had evolved into a conspiracy that has become known to history as the ‘Lockhart Plot’.3

Curled up on an ottoman in his apartment in Moscow, this plot’s namesake drifted off to sleep in the early hours of 31 August, his mind racing with questions over what Lenin’s death would mean for him and his network. Lockhart enjoyed barely an hour’s rest before receiving an emphatic answer. His lover, Moura Budberg, was the first to hear the crack of boots on polished wood rattling up the hall. The sound cut so sharply through the building’s dead silence that Lockhart’s deputy, Captain William Hicks, was roused from his bed, joining Moura at the apartment door just as the approaching footsteps ceased. Then came an urgent knock and a barked demand that the door be opened. Moura and Hicks begrudgingly obeyed, flooding the apartment with armed officers from Lenin’s secret police, the Cheka. Having instantly identified his quarry, the leader of the Chekist raiders made a beeline for Lockhart. Pointing his pistol at the British Agent’s head, the Chekist demanded that he wake up and get dressed. As he complied in wearied indignation, Lockhart made a show of confused outrage. Beneath the façade, his stomach turned in fear. Somehow the Cheka knew of his plot and, in the paranoid spasm that followed the attack on Lenin, had decided to bring it to an end. Now dressed, Lockhart, Hicks and Moura were herded into a corner of the apartment, where they watched on helplessly as the Chekists tore up cushions and wrenched drawers from sideboards and desks, confiscating letters and notes, along with pistols, ammunition and stacks of roubles. Having seized these compromising items, the raiders then took their prisoners down the stairs to waiting police cars, which ferried them to the Cheka’s headquarters, the Lubyanka.

Lockhart and his companions were not the Cheka’s only midnight targets. Hours before arriving at the Moscow apartment, Lenin’s men fanned out across Petrograd arresting other members of the network. One team of raiders stormed the residence of Henri de Verthamon, France’s chief saboteur in Russia. Thinking quickly as the Chekists bounded up his stairs, Verthamon opened a top floor window and leapt onto the adjoining rooftop, over which he scrambled to escape while leaving behind explosives, money and maps. This contraband, combined with the money found in Lockhart’s apartment, was used to justify the proclamation made in the Bolsheviks’ official newspaper, Izvestia, that ‘a conspiracy organised by Anglo-French diplomats’ was trying to ‘organise the capture of the Council of People’s Commissars and the proclamation of a military dictatorship in Moscow. This was to be done by bribing Soviet troops.’4

The ‘liquidation’, as Izvestia ominously put it, of this conspiracy continued apace the next day. At eight o’clock on the morning of 31 August, a team of heavily armed Chekists arrived at the British embassy in Petrograd. The military attaché, Captain Francis Cromie, was not as willing as Moura or Hicks to open the door to surrender. After ordering the staff to barricade the first-floor offices and take cover, Cromie drew his pistol and stalked out onto the balcony overhanging the embassy’s foyer, which was filling up with Chekists who had broken down the front door. This incursion was both a breach of international law and, to Cromie’s enraged mind, a mortal threat to all within the embassy. He unloaded his pistol while cursing the invaders for swine, killing two of them before return fire ended his one-man stand. As the gun-smoke cleared into eerie silence, the Chekists advanced up the stairs, stepping over Cromie’s dying body and into the first-floor offices he had tried in vain to defend. There they seized documents, pistols and the embassy’s terrified staff, who were promptly hauled off to prison. As reports in an outraged British press revealed, these clerks and secretaries were crammed into cells so small they had to take turns lying down to sleep, while being deprived of food and fresh air.5

As many as twenty British and French diplomats and their staff were detained in these dire conditions as Verthamon went to ground and Cromie’s bullet-ridden body grew cold. Sitting on a bench under the brutal white lights of a Lubyanka interrogation room, the author of this fiasco – the cocksure wunderkind hand-picked by a prime minister to alter the course of Russia’s history – was now in a state of shipwreck. Lockhart exhaled for what felt like the first time since the raid. His head fell defeated into trembling hands. Wincing at his thoughts, he reached deep into his considerable brain for answers. How had the Cheka known? Who else would they arrest? What would become of him, Hicks and Moura, the woman who had captured his heart and was carrying his child? Amid this pall of unanswerable questions, a single thought above all others cut through Lockhart’s mind to taunt him – ‘how did you get yourself into this mess?’

CHAPTER 1

NO DROP OF ENGLISH BLOOD

‘I must be rising, and I must be going,

On the roads of magic that stretch afar,

By the random rivers so finely flowing,

And under the restless star’

– Neil Munro

Robert Bruce Lockhart was born in 1887 in Anstruther at the mouth of the Firth of Forth – Scotland’s gateway to the seas. Though this birthplace portended his globetrotting career, Lockhart carried no memories through his life of this small fishing village. Instead, his first impressions of the world were formed in Beith, a town south-west of Glasgow to which his family relocated in 1888 so that his father, Robert senior, could fill the vacant post of headmaster at the newly founded Spier’s School. The position suited the elder Lockhart, whom his son characterised as an archetypal Victorian patriarch and educator. ‘Frugal in his wants and Spartan in his self-denial’, Lockhart’s father was hard-working, religiously devout, taciturn, intellectually curious and a sports enthusiast. He believed that physical pursuits were vital for the health of one’s body and soul. Lockhart’s mother, Florence Stewart Macgregor, was a less traditional creature. Eschewing the reserve expected of a headmaster’s wife, Florence was impulsive and outgoing. Beyond making sure Lockhart and his siblings – John, Norman, Freda, Rupert and Rob (yet another of the many Roberts in the family) – were cared for, she took little interest in mundane matters of the home. With reason, Lockhart believed that his father instilled in him studiousness and the capacity for hard work, while his mother gifted him restless energy and a proclivity for self-indulgence – a dichotomy of character that shaped the tumultuous course of Lockhart’s professional and personal life.

Not yet torn by this tension between the hedonistic Macgregor and the disciplined Lockhart within, young ‘Bertie’ – as he was known to the family – enjoyed a carefree and privileged upbringing. Florence was descended from the founders of Balmenach distillery, one of the oldest whisky producers in Scotland. Robert senior commanded respect from Beith’s community and, having been head-hunted by its wealthy benefactor to get Spier’s School off the ground, took home a good salary. Aside from money and his family’s standing, Lockhart’s upbringing was cushioned by love. Florence doted on her children and eight-year-old Bertie reciprocated, penning a letter signed with seventy-four cross-kisses to his mother, expressing his love and despair at her absence during one of her many forays to the Highlands. Lockhart and his siblings also received affection from their activity-mad father, who organised wholesome fishing holidays and supported his sons in whatever sport they chose. This led to Lockhart’s youngest brother, John, becoming a renowned sportsman who represented Scotland internationally in both cricket and rugby.

Lockhart was similarly keen on rugby, for which the squat and well-muscled adolescent seemed built. At Seafield House – a school south of Dundee to which the family moved when a new headmaster’s position opened in 1895 – Lockhart was given the nickname ‘letterbox’ on account of being a ‘small boy with a wide, half-open mouth and a head too large for his body’. This unpolished exterior was further abraded by his habit of scrapping with schoolyard bullies, probably because they called him a letterbox. As punishment for one such fight at Seafield, Lockhart was made to stand with his back to a teacher as the latter repeatedly kicked a rugby ball into the young man’s head. Whatever bruising came of this violent reprimand was nothing, however, compared to the scarring he received when during a family game of cricket he fumbled a catch that led to the ball cracking the bridge of his nose. This break was exacerbated on the rugby field and in the boxing ring, leaving him with a permanently out-of-joint nose.1

For all his physicality, the adolescent Bertie was no thoughtless bruiser. In his teens he came to love poetry, particularly the Scottish Romantics who evoked the bleakly beautiful Highlands and the timeless steel shimmer of the lochs. These panegyrics to Scotland’s majesty, combined with his mother’s tales of Rob Roy, the Jacobite Rising of 1745 and the mist-hewn family history of the Highland Macgregors instilled in Lockhart a sense of pride at being the product of two great Scottish families. He liked to boast that there was ‘no drop of English blood in my veins’. This claim referred as much to spirit as to biology. A repeated motif in Lockhart’s writings was his belief that Scots are inherently bold and curious, unafraid to embrace the unknown and tame its mysteries through hard work and perseverance. Conversely, ‘the Englishman’, he concluded after years working alongside Whitehall policymakers and Eton boys turned journalists, ‘who rules the greatest empire the world has ever known, is amazingly ignorant of geography’. Stilted by hubris, to be English was to seek easy comfort at the expense of gaining wisdom through adversity. True Scots like Lockhart were ‘experimentalists in adventure’ and could never tolerate a closeted existence. This self-conceptualisation was fed both by a copy of James Mackenzie’s History of Scotland his father gave him as a child and Peter Parley’s Universal History on the Basis of Geography, which drove young Bertie’s yearning to blossom into a windswept and well-travelled adult. Turning the latter book’s pages on many a rain-grey afternoon at Seafield, Lockhart was entranced by stories of Alexander the Great’s military adventures, the Samurai warriors of Japan and the Prophet Muhammed’s conquest of Arabia. Rugby, fishing and schoolyard scraps were well and good but, fundamentally, they were easy. They were safe. They were the sorts of things that an Englishman might content himself with.2

By the time he reached the cusp of adulthood, Lockhart’s discomfort with comfort had grown into a fear that he was destined for the proverbial Englishman’s existence. This fear became acute in 1905, when the seventeen-year-old commenced his final year at the prestigious Fettes College in Edinburgh. As this first chapter of his life ended Lockhart stewed on the story to come, believing its narrative would involve him getting an honest job, a steady wage and a family he would take on fishing holidays and bracing Highland hikes. The push and pull within between the Macgregor dreamer and the Lockhart pragmatist left him at an impasse. He could not abide the thought of gliding out of Fettes into a normal life yet had no idea what alternative path he could take. It was left to Lockhart’s father to square this circle for his son by sending him on an adventure abroad, albeit to continue his education with the aim of securing gainful employment. The destination chosen was the Tilley Institute in Berlin, where Lockhart was to undertake an intensive course in German, enrich his mind at museums and art galleries, consume a diet free from alcohol and meat and, most perversely of all to his rugby-mad mind, complete this education without once taking to a playing field. Despite deep reservations, Lockhart took heart that he was at least getting the chance to travel and so begrudgingly accepted his father’s proposal.

If the elder Robert’s aim was to transform his son’s listlessness into motivation, then the Berlin plan worked perfectly. The challenge of studying in a foreign land and in a foreign tongue lit a fire under Lockhart, stirring an intellectual curiosity he had let wither amid the rugby scrums at Fettes. He threw himself into his studies, earning plaudits from his professors and discovering his passion for working hard on difficult problems. Lockhart’s time at the Tilley Institute also revealed a God-given gift that would serve him well in his career to come – the ability to quickly comprehend and converse in foreign tongues. Within weeks of arriving in Berlin, his teachers concluded that he could transcribe German accurately and speak the language with fluidity. Continuing his studies in Paris in July 1906, Lockhart picked up French in short order, which he came to speak with a near-flawless accent. These experiences of talking, eating and thinking differently on the continent affirmed Lockhart’s belief in a connection between his outgoing inner Highlander and the wider world he yearned to embrace. Arriving back in Scotland in 1908, he was buoyed to the point of smugness at the fact that he had been to Europe before venturing south of the border into dull, inward-looking England.3

It was at this point that Robert senior’s plan to channel his son’s adventurous spirit into a conventional existence came undone. Lockhart’s wanderlust had been unleashed. He was now certain that his future lay beyond the horizon of Britain’s leaden skies. As fate would have it, so did his uncle, Ian Macgregor, the owner of a rubber plantation in the Malaysian state of Negeri Sembilan. Ian paid a visit to the Lockhart family home in the summer of 1908, just as his twenty-one-year-old nephew was preparing for a government entrance exam, success in which would land him a job in the civil service. Mired in tedious preparation for a career he didn’t want, it took only a few tales from Ian of swaying palm trees, foreign peoples and easily amassed fortunes to push the pendulum in Bertie’s soul. His parents were irritated but Lockhart was determined. He abruptly ceased preparing for his exam and accepted his uncle’s offer to travel with him to the distant paradise of Negeri Sembilan.

Like many a colonial adventurer before him, Lockhart believed that ‘going native’ was essential to his Asian odyssey. As he boarded the ship bound for Singapore at Southampton in October 1908, he did so with a determination to ignore fellow British passengers and spend the journey studying the Malays’ language and customs. By imposing this unbending intellectual schedule on himself, Lockhart would arrive at Negeri Sembilan with all the knowledge required to conquer a land of jungle and mystery. This pretension did not last long. After a week at sea, Lockhart took a shine to the daughters of a London shipping magnate and embarked on a romance that scuttled his abstentious plans. His thoughts of exotic adventure were also stamped out when after arriving in Singapore on 1 December 1908 he was ordered by his uncle to head for Port Dickson, a coastal settlement established by the British in the early 1800s as a base from which to trade out of Negeri Sembilan. The port was everything Lockhart hoped to avoid on his great adventure. Existing solely for the purposes of filling white men’s pockets, Port Dickson was an underwhelming and distinctly non-paradisical place of warehouses and jetties, whose small population of shopkeepers, fishermen, clerks and porters left Lockhart feeling disenchanted. He was similarly dissatisfied with his position as the Macgregor company accountant, through which he learned a sobering lesson about his new life in Malaysia – the rubber trade was serious business and his uncle expected him to work rather than play.4

Ian Macgregor had suffered difficult days at the turn of the century, when Negeri Sembilan’s rubber industry was in its infancy and its plantations produced only a fraction of the world’s rubber, most of which was still being drawn from the jungles of Brazil. It was not until the rubber boom of 1908 that his plantations started to prosper and Lockhart’s wealthy Macgregor grandmother – a key shareholder in the venture – transcended the whisky business on which she had built her fortune and earned the epithet of ‘Rubber Queen of Edinburgh’. The amount of family money tied up in Negeri Sembilan meant that Bertie had little time for larks. Instead, having been shoved behind a desk at Port Dickson, he spent long days mired in paperwork that kept him away from the tantalising jungle that lay beyond his sweltering office. Worse still, this unremarkable existence led Lockhart to assume the guise of the comfortable Englishman he claimed to abhor. Like most of the rubber men in Port Dickson, he spent his evenings drinking whisky and sodas and talking export taxes in the clubs that dotted the Strait of Malacca. Even his interactions with the locals were made through well-trodden avenues. On weekends, the sports-loving Fettes graduate schooled Port Dickson’s Malay and Chinese dock workers in the art of rugby, captaining a team that managed to defeat the neighbouring state of Selangor’s side, despite the latter’s profusion of European players.

For all that he slipped into familiar behaviours, Lockhart’s linguistic competence set him apart from other European planters, many of whom had set up shop in Negeri Sembilan in the 1890s but had yet to learn the native language. His knowledge of Malay was timely and necessary. In July 1909, Ian gave Lockhart a plantation to run in the inland region of Pantai, where few white settlers lived. In penetrating the jungle, Lockhart felt he could finally claim success in his quest for adventure. The unglamorous and repetitive practice of running a plantation, however, soon brought him down to earth. He had trees and vines cleared, he organised shipments to Port Dickson, he managed the occasional malaria outbreak and he refined his skill with a revolver on the many rats and snakes that plagued his bungalow. In the evenings, Lockhart sat on his porch and read French literature while sipping a gin and tonic. The most excitement he eked out of his time at Pantai was the occasional midnight bicycle ride along jungle paths that bandits were known to roam – not that he ever encountered any. His odyssey into the unknown had become a typical European’s colonial existence.5 This was why when offered the chance to turn his life upside down, Lockhart grasped it with both hands.

With the aim of impressing the locals and keeping things friendly between him and his neighbour, a former sultan who had been deposed by the British, Lockhart convened a rong geng at Pantai. This was a traditional Malay dance recital which, though engaging to his workers, left Lockhart feeling rather bored. That was until he caught sight of a young woman who appeared through the whirling colours and heat-haze as a ‘radiant vision of brown loveliness in a batek skirt and a red silk coat’. In addition to his dalliance on the ship to Singapore, Lockhart had engaged in romances while in France and Germany. These encounters, however, had been fleeting and meaningless. Now, at the age of twenty-three, he was ready for the full assault on his senses that only love at first sight could bring. Ignoring the former sultan, the dance and all else besides at the event he was hosting, Lockhart spent the remainder of the rong geng gawking ‘at the frail beauty of this Malayan girl who had disturbed the monotony of my life’.

When he asked his workers about the mysterious woman, the besotted planter was informed that her name was Amai and that she was a princess who was in the process of divorcing her husband. As a member of the former sultan’s household, she would soon be betrothed to her benefactor’s cousin. She was completely off limits to Lockhart. This only made her more alluring. The advice of his Malay workers and British officials from Port Dickson to let his passions subside went unheeded. Within days of first laying his eyes on Amai, Lockhart arranged a midnight liaison, the essence of which he captured in a poem – ‘in the deep silence of an Eastern Night, bathed in the mountain’s misty dew, feeling my way with bated breath, where the crack of a broken twig brings death, dear heart, I come to you’. Who knows if it was these pithy lines of devotion that won Amai’s heart but, at the conclusion of this daring moonlit meeting, she abandoned the ex-sultan’s palace for Lockhart’s humble, rat-infested bungalow.6

This courtship of Amai was the product of Lockhart’s romanticised thoughts of Malaysia meeting the crushing normality of life there. That night at the rong geng, the uninterested planter saw in Amai’s diminutive beauty a chance to offend local conventions and outrage the sensibilities of the Europeans with whom he had spent too many balmy evenings downing cocktails and discussing rubber prices. Amai was the adventure Lockhart had yearned for since leaving Britain. She was an adventure he embraced wholeheartedly. To keep his lover by his side in the face of local outrage, Lockhart pledged to both Pantai’s elders and the colonial officials who feared unrest over the affair that he would convert to Islam. Further evidence of how hard he fell for Amai can be gleaned from the poems he penned during their time together, featuring lines like ‘we drink of life and scorn dull care’ and ‘life without love is death’.

For all that this reads as schoolboy fantasy, Lockhart’s romance with Amai was more than a fling. When he returned to Malaysia in 1935, he refused to believe the rumours that his first love was dead and sought her out for a reunion, albeit not for the purpose of rekindling a long-extinguished flame. Reflecting through the seasoned prism of middle age, Lockhart concluded that ‘the focus point of my sentimental attachment to Malaya was Amai’. She may have entered his life as a novelty, but the Malaysian princess became the first of many women to leave a profound and lasting impact on Lockhart.7

This impact went beyond the emotional. News of the scandalous romance ran through Negeri Sembilan’s clubs. Lockhart’s beloved rugby team disbanded – his half-back Akbar simply walked into the jungle, never to be seen again, and his plantation’s Chinese cook abandoned his post for fear of getting caught up in the retaliation that all assumed would be unleashed on Pantai by the enraged ex-sultan. Such was Lockhart’s belief in this threat that he started carrying a pistol on his person at all hours of day and night. And then, in the summer of 1910, this exciting idyll of danger and forbidden love was ended by a fresh drama when Lockhart suddenly and violently fell ill. The couple suspected that the ex-sultan’s men had paid off the servants to poison the food, in response to which Amai insisted on preparing all his meals herself from then onwards. As Lockhart shivered and sweated his way into autumn without improvement, it became clear that he had succumbed to a malady less acute though no less dangerous than that inflicted by arsenic or strychnine – malaria. In vain, Amai deployed a swathe of home treatments while a doctor summoned from Port Dickson administered quinine. When neither approach bore fruit, the doctor returned to the port and sought out Ian, to whom he gave a stark prognosis. Lockhart had to be invalided away from Pantai immediately or else face a slow and painful death far from home.

Ian feared for his nephew’s life, but he also saw this medical emergency as an opportunity to end Bertie’s troublesome romance and bring profitability back to the Pantai rubber operation, which had been suffering from its owner’s lack of financial prudence even before Amai consumed his attentions. To save his nephew and restore his business, a day after being informed of Lockhart’s dire state Ian arrived at Pantai to take him away. This evacuation was executed at such speed that Amai had no chance to say goodbye to the man she had forsaken her old life to be with. Lockhart, for his part, was too insensible with fever to fully comprehend the abruptness of his parting from the woman who had given meaning to his time in Malaysia. As Ian’s driver spun the car around in the clearing outside the bungalow and accelerated in the direction of Port Dickson, Lockhart caught a fleeting glimpse of ‘her little silver slippers, which were lying neatly on the bottom step of my bungalow entrance. They were the last I saw of her.’ For over two decades, they were.8

As Ian intended, his nephew’s journey from the drama and disease of Pantai was absolute. Instead of simply being invalided to Singapore, Lockhart was placed on a ship to Japan on the premise that distance would defeat both the infection and the infatuation that afflicted him. A friend of Ian’s took this plan a step further, insisting that Lockhart accompany him across the Pacific to where he had business in Canada. Even while fighting off malaria, the travel-mad Lockhart was excited by this unexpected journey, making favourable notes and observations about Japan’s alien culture and Canada’s breathtaking wilderness.

When hot springs and clear Canadian air did little to improve Lockhart’s condition, it was decided that he had to return to Britain for specialist treatment. During this odyssey of convalescence, Lockhart tried to reconcile himself to the situation and find a silver lining, noting in his diary that ‘I have seen so much now that I am almost surfeited with beautiful things’. These rich experiences could not, however, obscure the reality that Ian had effectively banished Lockhart from both Malaysia and its rubber trade as penance for his personal and professional missteps. True to the mindset that had guided him to Negeri Sembilan in the first place, Lockhart processed this parlous situation with romantic lament. Writing from his sickbed on board the Empress of Yokohama in July 1910, he bid a bitter ‘farewell to the land of the soft-scented valley’, ‘where the dreams of my youth lie broken and shattered’. In Canada, he wrote a poem for Amai, in which he dubbed himself a ‘coward’ for leaving his ‘poor eastern maid’, who ‘knew no other sin, save that you gave me your heart to break’.

Lockhart’s self-pity deepened after he arrived in Liverpool in March 1911 and journeyed north to Tomintoul, a village in the Highlands where his Macgregor ancestors had first distilled whisky and which was now all but ruled over by his domineering grandmother. There, the family gathered to receive him in a flood of mixed emotions. His visible weight loss and alarming lethargy evoked sympathy from Florence and Robert senior, who were relieved that their Bertie was safely back on Scottish soil. What should have been a homecoming of thanks, however, was complicated by the fact that stories of Lockhart’s scandalous behaviour had preceded his arrival. The Rubber Queen upbraided her grandson for the damage he had done to the family’s reputation, lecturing him on his lack of maturity and decency, and dragging him to church to seek penance. More so than the Amai affair, what irked the Macgregor matriarch most was that Lockhart had somehow managed in the midst of the rubber boom to return home without riches. This forced her to conclude that despite his father’s pains to educate him and his uncle setting him up at Pantai, her once-promising grandson had grown into an unreliable, self-indulgent fool.

Showered with criticism, devoid of prospects and beset by fragile health, Lockhart was forced – for the first but by no means the last time in his life – to take stock of who he was and where he was going. In May 1911 he escaped the Rubber Queen’s wrath and travelled south to visit his father at Sandhurst in Berkshire, where he had taken on yet another headmaster role. There, Lockhart pledged to the elder Robert that he would get his life in order and cast off the shameful pall of Amai and Pantai. He would stow his wanderlust. He would sit his civil service entrance exam. He would become the man his father had always wanted him to be.9

CHAPTER 2

OUR MAN IN MOSCOW

‘From the wisdom of your reports, I expected to see an elderly gentleman with a grey beard’

– David Lloyd George

On his twenty-fourth birthday, Lockhart – now recovered from his year-long struggle with malaria – was playing golf when a hollering from across the green stopped him in mid-swing. The source of the noise was his younger brother Norman, who was waving a piece of paper and excitedly calling out to his sibling, ‘You’re in!’

Norman was referring to the Foreign Office, the entrance exam for which Lockhart had sat a few months earlier in July 1911. Rediscovering the capacity for hard work he had found in Berlin but lost in Pantai, Lockhart had prepared thoroughly for the exam, brushing up on his German and French and employing a law and politics tutor. He also masked his despondency at taking a mundane career path by drawing on his deep reserves of charm and whimsy to sway the selection panel at the interview. This effort to impress was furthered by Lockhart’s brother John reaching the height of his fame as a fast bowler at the time, which delighted the cricket-loving panel of mandarins whose job was to decide if the young man before them was fit to serve in Britain’s diplomatic corps.

The panel said nothing of Lockhart’s dalliance with Amai, noting on his file only that he had been a rubber planter who had quit the business because of poor health. This half-version of events was backed by personal referees who didn’t mention his romantic escapades, asserted that the malaria was no indictment of Lockhart’s overall health and claimed that he left Malaysia voluntarily despite his success as a planter. This burying of Lockhart’s past and the sporting achievements of his brother alone didn’t get him the job. As the exam results Norman waved in his face revealed, Lockhart had scored higher than the other candidates in French and law and narrowly missed out on topping German. It was mostly in arithmetic and, oddly for someone possessed of an interest in far-off places, geography that he had stumbled. Lockhart’s total score was enough, however, to top the list of would-be consular officials. With his letter of acceptance in hand, Lockhart went before his disapproving grandmother, who recognised that he had now ‘passed from the ranks of the ne’er-do-wells into the Valhalla of heroes’. The Rubber Queen forgave her grandson’s past indiscretions and embraced him, pushing a £100 cheque into his hand and despatching him to London to begin the next chapter of his life.1

Wanting to make the most of this fresh start, Lockhart arrived at the Foreign Office building in September 1911, clad in the regulation pinstriped trousers and eager to attack his new vocation of minuting letters and responding to queries from British subjects across the globe. As in Port Dickson, however, Lockhart’s enthusiasm was soon consumed by the drudgery of office life. The highlight of his working day was catching a glimpse of diplomatic heavyweights like Sir Edward Grey and Sir Eyre Crowe, who would occasionally walk by his desk without acknowledging his existence. Aside from the tedium, Lockhart felt that something was amiss about Whitehall and his place in its creaking bureaucratic machine. Reforms aimed at modernising the Foreign Office’s practices, increasing pay and recruiting young bucks with fresh ideas had been rolled out in the decade prior to Lockhart’s arrival. The installation of telephones and the introduction of a registry system for keeping track of important documents had done little, however, to inject modern efficiency into the culture of the Foreign Office, where ‘the long weekend was still normal, and vacations were of a length which suited gentlemen’. This was one of the many practices that led to public accusations that the institution was elitist, aloof and its staff ill-equipped to solve the complex international problems of the new century.

Lockhart was frustrated by this institutional inertia. It seemed mad to him that the diplomatic nerve centre of the world’s largest empire was presided over by old men whose chief preoccupations were the quality of their quill pens and the straightness of their subordinates’ ties. Such rigidity was anathema to the seducer of forbidden Malay princesses, who felt with each passing week that he was treading water in a stagnant pond. He fell into a malaise of self-reflection over whether the respectability he was gaining in Whitehall was worth the sacrifice of his true desires.

Thankfully for Lockhart, these bouts of troubled introspection were as common throughout his life as the opportunities that arose to end them. In this instance, he was thrown a lifeline a few days before Christmas 1911 when he received his first overseas posting – vice-consul in Moscow. Beyond a cursory knowledge of the histories of Ivan the Terrible and Catherine the Great, Lockhart knew nothing of Russia. The spirit of adventure within and the restlessness he felt without ensured, however, that he gleefully accepted the assignment. Thereafter, Lockhart counted the days until he could put the stifling oak and marble of the Foreign Office building behind him.

To remedy his ignorance of the land of the tsars, Lockhart spent his final weeks in London bending the ears of Foreign Office colleagues and Russian émigrés, from whom he prised knowledge of their homeland’s politics, culture and history. Owing to the class of Russian he quizzed – petty nobility and cashed-up businessmen – Lockhart concluded that Russia was a country unfettered by stuffy British norms, in which marathons of excess were commonplace. It sounded tailor-made for his indulgent Macgregor sensibilities. Wisely, Lockhart kept this revelation to himself and instead basked in the pride his parents felt in their now seemingly reformed son’s career finally taking off. He further pleased Florence and Robert senior when, during a going-away party they threw for him just before Christmas, he took another significant step towards responsible adulthood by getting his private life on the straight and narrow.

With Amai confined to a past best forgotten, Lockhart’s attentions were grabbed at the party by a young Australian woman named Jean Haslewood Turner, who was the daughter of a prosperous businessman from Brisbane. Neither Lockhart’s memoirs nor his diaries give much away as to why he felt so infatuated with Jean as to propose marriage a mere ten days after first asking her to dance. What is clear is that this impulsive act created porous foundations for a fractious relationship which, blighted by acrimony and affairs, ended in a bitter divorce in 1937. That bleak future, however, seemed inconceivable in the heady final days of 1911 when Lockhart composed yet another of his romantic odes. Simply titled ‘Jean’, the poem pledged that its author’s ‘life is yours. You hold it in your hand, to make or mar or bend it at your will, yours, yours all alone, for all time good or ill . . . I live for you, dear heart, and you for me’.

The poem reads as heartfelt, yet it is telling that ‘Jean’ is one of the few examples within Lockhart’s voluminous writings where he fondly spilled ink in his wife’s name. Moreover, the other poem of note, which was penned after they parted in January 1912 (Jean returned to Australia to get her affairs in order while Lockhart headed to Moscow to set up their new life together), strikes a sobering and reflective tone. In it, Lockhart refers to him and Jean ‘standing on the brink of life’s abyss’ when they met, drawn together by the need to ‘tear from life what pleasure we could’. Dismissing any notion of agency on their part, he wonders whether their pairing happened simply ‘because His boundless mercy knew that you had need of me and I of you?’ As he put it ruefully on the brink of divorce decades later, his abrupt marriage proposal was part of ‘a serious effort to conform to the conventionalities of my new state’. Jean may have been his spouse but to judge by Lockhart’s poems, letters and memoirs, it was the other women in his life who stirred his passions.2

Lockhart’s relationship with Jean was not helped by the fact that shortly after she accepted his proposal he fell in love once more – this time with Russia. Much like his marriage, the fraught nature of the union was not apparent to Lockhart when he first arrived in Moscow just after New Year’s Day 1912. Instead, as he glided through snow-misted streets on a horse-drawn sleigh he felt the joy of life that Whitehall had drained from him return. When the driver reached his destination, Lockhart gleefully tossed him a few roubles and strode out of the ice-clear night air into the fug of the Hotel Metropole’s packed foyer. There, he relished the assault on his senses from the gleaming chandeliers of gold and diamond, and the cacophony of unknown words erupting from the human sea of ‘steaming furs, fat women and big sleek men’, all of whom exuded ‘great wealth and crude coarseness’. These were the Russians the well-heeled émigrés in London had promised Lockhart and, before his first week in Moscow was over, he would meet plenty more of them.

Moscow’s new vice-consul had arrived at an opportune moment. With the aim of strengthening diplomatic relations following the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 – an agreement that settled long-standing grievances over the two empires’ shared borders in Central Asia – a delegation of British politicians, clergy and military men had arrived in Moscow just after Christmas on a goodwill tour of the city. In joining this delegation, Lockhart ensured that his supposedly respectable career in Moscow commenced with a three-day binge of orchestras, ballets and multi-course banquets, all washed down with copious amounts of vodka and champagne. During this prolonged party, Lockhart peeled off from the main group of Britons to explore a late-night bar of ill-repute. As he downed glass after glass of vodka in the smoke-wreathed basement room, he watched a troupe of musicians use the sound of deep violas to guide tortured fiddles and haunting vocals, creating the unmistakable cacophony of gypsy folk. So began an infatuation with this evocative genre of music that would last the rest of Lockhart’s life.

Fully intoxicated by the wonders of Moscow, the wide-eyed vice-consul continued exploring the city alone after the British delegation returned home head-sore and exhausted. In the coffee shops and art galleries, the gregarious Scot befriended scores of writers, artists and actors. These were Lockhart’s types of contrarians – culturally sophisticated and politically cynical, yet bookishly middle-class enough to not be dangerous. Through winding discussions that ran into the dawn, Lockhart’s new comrades espoused to him their distaste for the worship of tsar, God and country, and their concerns for the arrested development of Russia’s political and societal progress.

These exchanges prompted Lockhart to reflect on his own politics. Though his background was conservative and embedded in the Presbyterian tradition, from the moment he countenanced becoming a Muslim to pursue a romance that offended all norms of polite society Lockhart realised he was a political and spiritual agnostic. Although he had little time for ideologues, Lockhart’s relentless curiosity drove him to tolerate their sermons. In the politically fissile Russia of the early 1900s, this made him a social chameleon. Lockhart was as capable of clinking champagne glasses with beribboned generals and tsarist courtiers as he was of absorbing the ire of those who despised such pomp and privilege. As a witness to the vice-consul’s carousing in Moscow attested, his ‘cheerful’ manner when dealing with Russians of whatever conviction, combined with his ‘taste for gypsies, wine and dancing’ made him ‘a very good mixer’. This skill helped Lockhart achieve much in his renewed quest to ‘go native’, this time in the log-fired clubs of Russia rather than in the sweating jungles of South-East Asia. In addition to quickly making friends in places high and low, during an evening out in the spring of 1912 Lockhart was bestowed with a Russian epithet by the gypsy singer Maria Nikolaevna Lebedev. As her mother tongue had no equivalent to ‘Robert’, Maria dubbed him ‘Roman Romanovich’. The pride Lockhart felt at being made an honorary Russian was one of the many reasons why, six decades later, he maintained that ‘my first two years in Russia were the happiest of my life’.3

Lockhart’s cultural immersion intensified after he became a lodger in the home of one of his artistic friends, Madame Ertel, the widow of the novelist Alexander Ertel. At Lockhart’s insistence, his new landlady gave him lessons in Russian (which he perfected within a year) and deeper insight into an aspect of his new home that was easy to overlook amid the obscene banquets and tantalising musical entertainment – the revolutionary grievances of the country’s oppressed. Though the autocracy of the tsars had been challenged in the early 1800s by dissident army officers, it was not until the 1860s that a sustained campaign to change Russia by whatever means necessary began. This was in response to Tsar Alexander II’s introduction of reforms in 1861, which were designed to emancipate the peasants and liberalise education. When neither objective was met, groups of nihilists and revolutionary socialists took drastic measures to force the pace of history. This involved attempts to radicalise peasants with propaganda and the shooting and stabbing of police chiefs and court officials. Even the Holy Tsar wasn’t safe. In March 1881, a nihilist suicide bomber rushed at Alexander II on the streets of St Petersburg, detonating a dynamite device that ended both men’s lives in a storm of fire and smoke.

In February 1905, Russia’s new autocrat Nicholas II faced a threat more existential than a terrorist desiring martyrdom when thousands of his subjects took to the streets to demand a revolutionary shake-up of Russia’s politics and society. As his predecessor had done in the 1860s, Nicholas responded with proposals for democratic reforms that fell short of his people’s demands. This engendered a fresh wave of violence in which thousands of government officials, nobles and ordinary Russians were shot, stabbed and blown apart by bombs. Only a few months before Lockhart arrived in Moscow, the Russian prime minister Peter Stolypin was shot dead at a theatre in Kiev. At firelit evenings spent with Madame Ertel and friends in the rug-smothered front room of her apartment, Lockhart was regaled with these stories of violence amid lamentations on the need for political change. Britain’s vice-consul was dossing with dissidents. Lockhart, however, saw no problem with this. Although revolutionary sentiment in Russia had long been simmering, in 1912 it seemed far from the point of boiling over. This was exemplified by the fact that on a day supposedly earmarked for an anti-tsarist uprising, Madame Ertel and her friends chose to stay in bed rather than take to the streets.4

Lockhart’s subversive dinner companions may have been talkers rather than doers, but Moscow’s consul-general was not impressed. A veteran diplomat with a measured temperament, Montgomery Grove wanted a quiet and trouble-free life. In his consulate, beyond issuing passports and handling the petty complaints of Moscow’s British diaspora, there would be no time for ‘poking one’s nose into other matters’. Grove warned Lockhart to be mindful of the company he kept, not just because it was unbecoming of a vice-consul but also because he might attract the unwelcome attention of the tsar’s secret police, the Okhrana. Grove’s concerns were not unjustified. As one of Lockhart’s contemporaries at the St Petersburg embassy noted of this time, ‘the Tsarist predecessors of the Bolshevik OGPU [secret police] were exceedingly ingenious’ in their monitoring of British diplomats, who were suspected of providing money and support to the kind of subversives with whom Lockhart was supping. In St Petersburg, this paranoia over the Okhrana led to the implementation of new security measures by the British embassy’s staff, including an excess of locks being fitted to office doors and nightly inspections of the premises which, in one instance, led to shots being fired at the ambassador by his own staff, who mistook him for an Okhrana snooper.5

Far from giving him pause for thought, these warnings were welcomed by the adventure-starved Lockhart, who was once more succumbing to the dispiriting reality of his job. When the hangover from his first days in Moscow cleared and Lockhart first clapped eyes on his workplace, memories of Whitehall’s stilted inefficiency and his tauntingly bland accounts book at Port Dickson must have come flooding back. Britain’s diplomatic outpost in Moscow was a single room attached to Grove’s personal flat, which was located in a faceless apartment building off a side street. There was no messenger to run telegrams and the office was habitually cash-strapped, to the point that Grove relied on a typewriter of Victorian vintage to compose missives. This destitution was reflected in Lockhart’s wages, which amounted to £300 a year plus an initial £100 one-off payment to purchase attire becoming of a British official. This was far from the £1,000 per year most senior consular officials in St Petersburg took home. It was the need to eke the most out of this meagre wage that led Lockhart to abandon the swanky Hotel Metropole for Madame Ertel’s spare room.6

To improve his financial situation and provide an outlet for his stifled creative energies, Lockhart wrote stories inspired by his time in Malaysia and sketches on Russian life for British magazines. With no shortage of guile, he got around the Foreign Office’s prohibition on earning independently by writing under the pseudonym of Jean D’Auvergne. Unconstrained by this anonymity, Lockhart let loose on other Britons who refused to embrace Russian life as he had. This mockery was best exemplified in ‘The Way of the English’, in which Lockhart profiled an Englishman who dines out in Moscow on 24 December to celebrate Christmas Eve, arrogantly indifferent to the fact that the Russian Christmas falls in January. Informed by his late-night experiences, Jean D’Auvergne also titillated readers with stories of the hedonistic delights of vodka and song that could be enjoyed in Moscow. Lockhart balanced this inclination to the louche with cultural observations of Russian writers and their morbid, nihilistic views of their country’s rotten political system. Aloof Britons, appalling excess and stewing discontent – these were Lockhart’s candid observations of tsarist Russia in its denouement. Though pithy and lacking a political purpose, these early works from behind the veil of an alias show Lockhart’s eye for the sensational and his understanding of how to use provocation to engage a reader. They reveal the mind of a man who understood the art of propaganda long before the British government employed him as a propagandist.7

The use of the name ‘Jean’ was owing to Lockhart no longer being alone in Moscow. In January 1913 he travelled back to Britain to marry Jean, who then accompanied him back to Russia. Madame Ertel’s no longer being fit for purpose, Lockhart acquired an apartment on Khlebnyi Pereulok (Bread Lane) and pledged to curtail his nightlife in favour of devoting attention to his new bride. To this end, he gave Jean lessons in Russian and tours of the city he had grown so enamoured of. Unfortunately, she was neither as adept at picking up languages nor as instantly besotted by all things Russian as