Malaya At 21, Lockhart went out to
Malaya to join two uncles who were rubber
planters there. According to his own account, he was sent to open up a new rubber estate near
Pantai in
Negeri Sembilan, in a district in which "there were no other white men". He then "caused a minor sensation by carrying off Amai, the beautiful ward of the Dato' Klana, the local Malay prince... my first romance". However, three years in Malaya, and one with Amai, came to an end when "doctors pronounced Malaria, but there were many people who said that I had been poisoned". One of his uncles and one of his cousins "bundled my emaciated body into a motor car and... packed me off home via Japan and America". The Dato' Klana in question was the
chief of
Sungei Ujong, the most important of the Nine States of Negeri Sembilan, whose palace was at
Ampangan.
First Moscow posting In September 1911, Lockhart passed the examination for the British
Consular Service and in January 1912 was posted to
Moscow as vice-consul. He was acting British Consul-General in Moscow for much of the First World War, from 1914 to 1917. He was present when the
February Revolution broke out in early 1917 but left shortly before the
Bolshevik Revolution later that year. Lockhart states, "I left St. Petersburg just as the
Kerensky-Korniloff duel was starting. I arrived in London six weeks before the Bolshevik revolution." At the time of his arrival in
Russia in 1912, people had heard that a great footballer named Lockhart from Cambridge was arriving, and he was invited to turn out for Morozov, a cotton mill soccer team that played its games some thirty miles east of Moscow. The manager of the team was from
Lancashire, England. Lockhart played for most of the 1912 season, and his team won the Moscow league championship that year. The gold medal that he won is in the collection of the
National Library of Scotland. The great player, however, was Lockhart's brother, John, who had played rugby union for Scotland, and by his own admission Lockhart barely deserved his place in the team and played simply for the love of the sport. Lockhart also helped
Trotsky's secretary, Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina, with whom Ransome had fallen in love, to leave Russia in 1919; she married Ransome in 1924. He was accused of leading the "Lockhart Plot" against the Bolshevik regime and, for a time during 1918, was confined in the
Kremlin as a prisoner and feared being condemned to death. However, he escaped trial via an exchange for his counterpart,
Maksim Maksimovich Litvinov, the Bolshevik government's representative in London, who had been arrested for engaging in propaganda activities. Lockhart was tried
in absentia before the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal in a proceeding, which opened 25 November 1918. Some 20 defendants faced charges in the trial, most of whom had worked for the Americans or the British in Moscow, in the case levied by procurator
Nikolai Krylenko. Lockhart and Reilly were both sentenced to death in absentia, with the sentence to be executed if they were ever found in
Soviet Russia again. Some research suggests that the "Lockhart Plot" was a
sting operation orchestrated by
Felix Dzerzhinsky with the goal of discrediting the British and French governments.
Between the wars On 17 November 1919, Lockhart was appointed commercial secretary of the British legation in
Prague. In late 1922, with the personal debts he ran up exceeding his official salary and feeling the need for change, he resigned from the Foreign Service to accept a position in Prague with the Anglo-Czechoslovak Bank, on whose creation he had worked. In 1925, Lockhart moved to a job with the Anglo-International Bank, based in London but specializing in central European affairs. By 1928, again in debt and bored, Lockhart sought a new career in journalism. He served as the editor of the paper's
Londoner's Diary column and became known for his hard-drinking and semi-debauched lifestyle. It enhanced his reputation that, despite having been caught by the Russians and exchanged for a Soviet agent, he remained on unusually cordial terms with the Soviet Embassy in London, from whom he received an annual gift of
caviar. He also helped to organise Beaverbrook's
Empire Free Trade Crusade campaign. Throughout his life, Lockhart wrote detailed diaries for his own use. In the 1930s, he began to turn these into books for publication, which were successful enough to allow him to take up writing as a full-time career in 1937. In his autobiography
Memoirs of a British Agent (1932), which became a best-seller, and whose chapters on the Russian Revolution
Warner Brothers turned into the 1934 film
British Agent, he wrote about his experiences in Malaya and Russia. In his second volume of autobiography,
Retreat from Glory (1934), he turned his attention to his experiences in central Europe. Many other books followed, and eventually large extracts from his diaries between 1915 and 1965 were published in two volumes.
Later life During the
Second World War, Lockhart returned to government service. He became director-general of the
Political Warfare Executive, co-ordinating all British propaganda against the
Axis powers. He was also for a time the British liaison officer to the
Czechoslovak government-in-exile under President
Edvard Beneš. Lockhart recounted his activities from the Munich Crisis to VJ-Day in another volume of autobiography,
Comes the Reckoning (1947). After the war, he resumed writing, lecturing and broadcasting and made a weekly
BBC Radio broadcast to
Czechoslovakia for over ten years. ==Personal life==