TINKER, TAILOR, ACTOR, SPIES…
While his father, grandfather and a great uncle were all secret agents, Dugald Bruce Lockhart was deemed ‘unsuitable’ for MI6. Instead, after forging a successful career on stage and screen, he’s used their real-life stories as inspiration for his gripping thrillers
DUGALD Bruce Lockhart was 14 when his father James took him and his younger brother, Andrew, 13, into their garden in Vienna for a quiet chat. “I was thinking we were a bit old for the birds and the bees,” Dugald, now 55, admits today – four decades after the conversation.
In fact, the rites of passage James Bruce Lockhart wanted to discuss had nothing to do with the normal teenage curiosities. Having hitherto claimed he worked for the Foreign Office, he had now decided it was time to reveal what he really did for a living.
“Dad said, ‘You’re getting to the age where you might hear friends talking about spooks. Well boys, I’m in the Secret Intelligence Service, but you can’t go talking about it’,” recalls Dugald. “Of course, we were very excited and immediately thought he was James Bond.”
James Bruce Lockhart’s career with the Foreign Office was in fact a cover for his real work with MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence service, about which – despite his admission to his sons – he always remained tight-lipped. He would only say that he had followed a similar path to that of novelist John Le Carré, who worked undercover for the agency in Bonn and Hamburg during the ColdWar.
Dugald continues: “We knew Dad had several passports, and he liked to tease us when we asked, ‘What exactly did you do?’
“He gave nothing away, really, apart from the time he told us about taking our dog for a walk and pretending to be an American tourist in Greenwich Park to scope out some agents who wanted to meet with him ‘alone’.
“It turned out they weren’t alone at all. Good job he had the Hawaiian shirt and our Welsh terrier with him as a disguise…”
Soon after discovering his father’s raison d’etre, Dugald also discovered espionage ran in the family; his paternal grandfather John Bruce Lockhart had also been a diplomat and a spy, rising to number two at MI6 during the Second World War and taking charge of the post-war Secret Intelligence Service in Germany.
“I didn’t know about Grandpoppa, as we called him, being in MI6 until after Dad told us he was in it,” says Dugald. “But everything added up after that. In 1983, we watched [1983 TV series] Reilly, Ace of Spies starring actor Sam Neill in Grandpoppa’s drawing room in Rye and there was my dad, granddad, and then my great-uncle Bertie’s portrayed on TV. I remember thinking I’m in espionage heaven here. And me, a lowly actor wannabe…”
DUGALD’S great uncle, Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, known as Bertie, also served with the British Secret Service during the Russian Revolution and had an affair with a Russian agent, later known as Moura Budberg. After working undercover in Moscow in 1918, he was accused of having led a failed plot to assassinate Vladimir Lenin, a charge he always denied. It was later found that it was in fact a Russian sting operation, orchestrated with the goal of discrediting the British and French governments.
Sir Robert’s 1932 book, Memoirs of a British Agent, became an international bestseller and was turned into the 1934 spy thriller, British Agent, starring Leslie Howard.The book also garnered global fame for Sidney Reilly, the Russian agent employed by British intelligence, whose own memoirs inspired the TV series, and featured Bertie as a key character.
As scion of the family, it would have been a natural step for Dugald to follow in his forebears’ footsteps. Instead, rather than taking the Foreign Office entrance examination, he became an actor and trained at RADA after studying German at St Andrews University. Dugald then followed his great uncle into the world of espionage literature, with his 2021 fictional debut, The Lizard. He’s just published his second espionage thriller, Second Skin, and has already been described as a “Graham Greene for today”.
“Reading Uncle Bertie’s escapades in the Malay an jungle, where he described whisk CONFIRMATION
ing the tribal chief’s daughter away on the back of a bicycle, definitely made me want to write. I thought ‘I AM Uncle Bertie.’
“Writing is for me a way of keeping that spirit and sense of adventure alive. The adventure that can happen between two people actually talking, rather than sharing emoticons.”
And with a healthy dose of sex and violence thrown in for good measure.
So, no tap on the shoulder for Dugald at university, then?
“Well, in fact, there was in a way, although I was never approached directly,” he laughs. “My parents came up to St Andrews to see a play I had written about a mermaid who persuades a male student to swim to his death and on the way back to my digs in the car – when I asked if I might also have a career in MI6 – they told me that I’d been checked out and ‘deemed unsuitable’.
“It was one of the university’s international relations tutors who, I understand, was the scout. Possibly I was too flamboyant, although my father was very flamboyant in his own way.
“When posted in Nigeria to his cover role in the British embassy, he’d be wearing flipflops or trusty Dunlop Green Flash trainers and wielding his old wooden Cambridge tennis racket with a cigarette in one hand, shirtless in his shorts.
“He was very old school, very spirited, and with a wicked sense of humour. But he was always discreet.
“You do these incredible things on behalf of your country, and you can’t talk about it to anyone. Everyone likes to share what they’ve done at work, so you are in a quite extraordinary position.”
It’s quite possible to see why the immensely jovial and fun-loving Dugald would have found this a bit of a trial.
“When I was at St Andrews, Grandpoppa was invited to come up in 1988 to give a lecture about how we should worry less about looking at the KGB and be more concerned about the rise of Chinese power. He said we should all be learning Chinese, which was all very far-sighted of him,” he says.
“I also remember playing golf with him in Rye and him saying I reminded him of greatuncle Bertie who was very much in with the Moscow Arts Society and used to go fly fishing with Trotsky.
“He had his finger on the pulse of the Bolsheviks but got it wrong and ended up being framed. My grandfather told me that if I wasn’t careful I might become a bit of a drifter. Like Bertie, he felt it might be hard for me to settle down.
“Grandpoppa was still alive when I started acting, but my first tour with the Royal Shakespeare Company happened after he died, so he never got to see me not being a drifter. But I found being compared to greatuncle Bertie very encouraging.”
Dugald appeared as the Swedish Dad in the long-running West End version of Mamma Mia!, on television in The Crown and most recently starred in Private Lives with Patricia Hodge and Nigel Havers. As well as the RSC, he has worked with the National Theatre and the Old Vic.
“I remember telling Dad while we were playing croquet that I was thinking of going to drama school. He encouraged me to send off the 20 quid application fee and have a chat with him if I didn’t get in.”
But he did and in time Dugald settled down with his Anglo-American wife Penelope Rawlins, an actress and voice-over artist with whom he has two children, Mackenzie, eight, and Cassidy, five.
HIS debut novel, The Lizard, has been optioned for a six-part TV series. It turns out he’s terribly good at imagining the world of his ancestors, winning rave reviews and creating the sort of ripping yarns that would make his grandfather proud.
“My first two books are set in Greece, which was where we were posted when I was a young child,” he says.
“I went back to Paros while I was at university and went slightly feral, losing myself while trying to find myself. I wanted to write these books for about 30 years. I like to get my protagonist up against a brick wall and work out how to get him out of it.
“In the second book, the main character starts to work in Greek intelligence. There is a whole knowledge needed to write in detail about that world, but although I’ve seen it at first hand, I try to steer away from making it a very technical procedural.
“Instead, I wanted to go with the possibility of what might happen and draw on personal experience to keep my family alive. It’s a strange fusion, with autobiographical elements being drawn in.”
And he’s resolutely old school in his approach to derring-do.
“To get into MI6 these days you pretty much need a university degree first. In the old days, you might apply, not get in, and then get a tap on your shoulder because you were excellent at languages. All that is less relevant now, but I want to keep that spirit alive. I like my characters to rely on their animal instincts.”