In the thick of it again
Mark Amory
Diaries of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart Vol 2 ed. Kenneth Young (Macmillan pp. 800, £30) 4 Well, Mr Lockhart, here you are in the thick of it again,' said Jan Smuts in the Hyde Park Hotel in 1942 and he was right. Bruce Lockhart was by then the Director General of the Political Warfare Executive (PWE) which meant dealing with the Minister of Economic Warfare, Hugh Dalton, the Minister of Information, Brendan Bracken, and the Foreign Secretary, who was by great good fortune his friend Anthony Eden. Another friend Max Beaverbrook, had for some time been giving him hot information as to how things were going: 'At midnight Max summoned to PM. Went at once, came back an hour later. Grave news from France,' while his intimacy with Jan Masaryk and President Eduard Benes made him a natural choice for British representative to the Czech government in exile. Lockhart, a compulsive writer, scribbled away at his diary (three million words in all). History was being made and it is from this sort of document that it is written.
This is Volume Two. Volume One presumably (I failed to get hold of a copy, even from the London Library) told the romantic story of his early life. A Scot, born in 1887 the son of a schoolmaster, he started badly by failing to transfer from Fettes to Cambridge. In 1908 he caused a scandal in Malaya by having an open affair with a local princess, in 1911 he passed top into the Foreign Office. 'He thought nothingin his middle years,' writes Kenneth Young, the editor of both volumes, 'of visiting three night clubs in one night or of hiring gypsy bands to regale himself and his friends or of dancing on the top of empty champagne bottles. He was usually in debt...' Lockhart had not yet settled down to such sobriety when he was posted to prerevolutionary Moscow, which offered an irresistible round of parties, women and intellectual ferment — also an occasional game of soccer for a factory team.
In 1917 Lloyd George sent him back to establish unofficial relations with the Bolsheviks, carrying a letter from Litvinov to Trotsky, with whom he talked daily. Lockhart advised strongly against military intervention, but was overruled and found himself in a Russian gaol for a month. His latest attachment, Moura Budberg, who was to crop up again living with H. G. Wells, brought him food. After his release he served the Foreign Office in Czechoslovakia, became a travelling banker and then edited Londoner's Diary on the Evening Standard. He wrote about 400,000 words a year, which is as much as a decentsized book a month. More conventionally he played golf with the Prince of Wales, dined with Lady Cunard and was still broke. Leslie Howard enacted him in a film of his Russian adventures, which gives him an edge over Paddy Leigh-Fermor who was impersonated by Dirk Bogarde in Ill Met By Moonlight.
All this glamour gives rise to hopes that the book does not fulfil. 'The war diaries, however,' his editor warns us immediately, 'certainly contain far less tittle-tattle about his night club exploits, his amorous pursuits and the general raffishness of his life.' All too true, alas, indeed an understatement. This volume is about work and the war, and it does not even tell you what you want to know about his work. The exploits of PWE are gripping, though in the nature of things it is somewhere between difficult and impossible to assess how important they were. Lockhart thought, not very. Accurate news had to be sent to occupied Europe for those who were still, or potentially, our friends. Falsehoods, or a subtle blend of fact and fiction, were also sent to confuse the enemy. This had to be co-ordinated by SOE (Special Operations Executive) which carried out guerrilla and subversive warfare. When the Americans came in they too had to be worked with and kept abreast of plans.
The BBC understandably resented intruders ordering them, in their view, to tell lies. There were squabbles, PWE grew and grew until it employed 8,000 people. In March 1944 alone 265 million leaflets were manufactured and dropped, and 'leaflets' were sometimes handbooks or complete forged newspapers. In 1942 the Americans sold us Aspidistra, a transmitter so powerful it could blast anything else in Europe off the air or tune in to any wavelength. If a German station went dead, our version of the facts could be smoothly inserted — as long as everything had already been minutely prepared and a man was standing by. Lockhart writes of the administration behind these exploits not of the exploits themselves. There are battles between departments, rows as to whether something should have been seen by someone else first, rumours as to whom the minister favours. I struggled conscientiously but never really understood the endless complications, nor wanted to. More rewarding are conversations between Top People. Lockhart is an unasser tive diarist, willing to record in detail the views of others and then perhaps append his agreement or lack of it. There is talk of British politics: will Chamberlain go, and then, almost the theme song, will Winston stay? Because they do not know the answers, the progress of the war becomes vividly exciting. The frustrating delays in opening the Second Front and the increas ing suspicions of the Russians are described with a mixture of impressive vision and uncertainty.
The result of the 1945 election does not surprise Lockhart who agreed with an MP as early as June 1943 that if Winston went on into the peace he would lose. Informed opinion was 'inclined to think that the Tories will win by a small majority of 50 or so,' and Stalin was confident that 'Mr Churchill will be able to settle Mr Attlee all right.' Wrong again. Famous names abound. There are many Churchill stories and a view of Beaverbrook from his best side. Eden emerges as frustrated but loyal, his divorce examined in greater detail than Lockhart's own marriage. Brendan Bracken and Richard Crossman make vigorous appearances and young sprigs like Harold Wilson (whom Eden thought arrogant and conceited) and Michael Foot (who would go far, Beaverbrook considered, but for his bad health and open atheism) pop in. Noel Coward did not think much of Margaret Rutherford in Blithe Spirit; but even he was, surprisingly to me, connected with work.
After the war Lockhart made a disastrous decision to leave the Foreign Office who would have found him a job, an embassy and a pension. Instead he was determined to write and became poor and lonely. The same discussions hold diminishing interest as they become yesterday's men on yesterdays topics. The suicide (or murder?) of Masaryk thrusts Lockhart back to the centre of gossip once more and he does finally lunch with Eden at Number Ten but these are exceptions. Mostly he is in the Beefsteak and The East India and Sporting Club and becoming of little account. There are few mentions of him in the books by or about those he mentions so frequently: nothing in Eden's memoirs, little in A. J. P. Taylor's Beaverbrook or Harold Nicolson's diaries but quite a bit in Andrew Boyle's Brendan Bracken. George Lyttelton fled from him at the Literary. Society, reporting, 'Lockhart looks a bore before he opens his mouth'. No wonder he took to quoting, 'The days of our youth are the days of our glory.' The editor, for whose knowledge, clarity and industry no praise is too high, recognises the decline and the last 15 years take under 40 pages, while 1945 spreads itself over 131. The publisher's claim that this handsome volume is of interest to historians is just. They suggest also that it will entertain the general reader but they have priced it out of his range and I fea their secret thoughts were right again.
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