Spy story
MY SAINTED predecessor, Nicholas Dav- enport, was caught up in a City tragedy, now retold as a spy story. One summer morning in 1930, the broker Sidney Russell Cooke was found dead with his gun by his side: 'I had lost my best friend', so Nicholas wrote, 'and Rowe & Pitman their most intelligent partner.' In the firm's new histo- ry, From Diamond Sculls to Golden Hand- cuffs, Andrew Lycett suggests that he was murdered by Russian agents: 'Like several people associated with Rowe & Pitman, he was a spy.' Nicholas says that the two of them wrote a book on oil, which the Soviet government chose to republish in Moscow. A connection followed. Leo Kamenev, Trotsky's brother-in-law (later shot), came to London on a trade mission and went to stay with Cooke. Rowe & Pitman's senior partner, the lordly Lancelot Hugh Smith, had, so Mr Lycett tells us, his own links with espionage and probably encouraged his protégé. After Cooke's death, rumours of Soviet involvement persisted: 'Hugo Pit- man told a colleague specifically that Cooke has been shot by the Russians.' As the biographer of Colonel Gaddafi and of Ian Fleming — who worked for Rowe & Pitman, writing circulars and chasing blon- des — Mr Lycett is in his element.
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