Oliver Locker-Lampson

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Oliver Stillingfleet Locker-Lampson was born on the 25th of September 1880 into a family of poets, diplomats, and naval heroes, and he spent the next seven decades doing his best to outrun every expectation that inheritance placed on him. His name appears in the history books for an astonishing range of reasons: he commanded armoured cars in Belgium and Russia during the First World War, built a paramilitary organisation that sent gifts to Mussolini, and then turned around to shelter Albert Einstein from assassination threats on a Norfolk heath. He was a Conservative MP for thirty-five years, a journalist, a barrister who never practised, and a co-editor of a Cambridge student magazine. How does a man who once praised Adolf Hitler as a legendary hero end up sponsoring Jewish refugees out of Nazi Germany? And what drove him, alone among most Conservative MPs in the 1930s, to keep backing Winston Churchill when almost no one else would? These are the questions that animate the life of Oliver Locker-Lampson.

• 2. Roots and Beginnings

  ›

  Oliver's father was the poet Frederick Locker, who added the surname Lampson as a condition of his father-in-law's will. The father-in-law was Sir Curtis Lampson, a baronet, and Oliver's mother Hannah Jane was Sir Curtis's daughter. It was a family already threaded through British public life. Oliver's ancestors included Captain William Locker, Edward Hawke Locker, Benjamin Stillingfleet, and Jonathan Boucher. His brother Godfrey also became a Member of Parliament, and his cousin Miles Lampson pursued a career as a diplomat.

  Oliver was educated at Cheam School, then Eton, and then Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took an Honours Tripos in History and Modern Languages. His Cambridge years were socially busy. He co-edited the student magazine Granta alongside Edwin Montagu, and served as President of the Amateur Dramatic Club. After graduating he read law at the Inner Temple and was called to the Bar in 1907, but never went near a courtroom professionally. Journalism absorbed him instead, and he also became a founding director of a Norwich-based motorcar company called Duff, Morgan and Vermont. The word Vermont in that name was his own invention: as an MP he did not want his name on the company, so he substituted the home state of his maternal grandfather. The grandfather was American, which made Vermont a family joke hiding in plain sight.

  In 1911 a prankster friend named Horace de Vere Cole demonstrated the limits of Oliver's street awareness. Cole challenged him to a footrace on a London street, let Oliver surge ahead, then shouted that Oliver had stolen his watch. Cole had quietly slipped the gold watch into Oliver's pocket before the race began.

• 3. Parliament and Pre-War Politics

  ›

  At the January 1910 general election, Locker-Lampson won the Ramsey Division in Huntingdonshire from the Liberal incumbent, standing as a Conservative Unionist on a Tariff Reform platform. He won again in December 1910, and when the Ramsey Division was abolished ahead of the 1918 election, he stood for the new all-Huntingdonshire seat and kept his seat there too. In 1922 he moved to Birmingham Handsworth and held that constituency until 1945, when the local party removed him from the candidate list.

  Before the First World War his parliamentary energy went into several specific battles. The Conservative and Unionist Party appointed him to raise money for the Unionist Working Men's Candidates Fund. He was also drawn into a covert Conservative plan to seize control of the Daily Express, but the man who would become Lord Beaverbrook outmanoeuvred him. His main preoccupation, though, was hounding Asquith's Liberal government over the sale of honours and the Marconi scandal. He also opposed Irish Home Rule and channelled funds to Edward Carson's Pro-Unionist Ulster Volunteer Force.

  From 1919 to 1921 he served as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Austen Chamberlain, and travelled with Chamberlain to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. The posting gave him a front-row seat at the post-war settlement that would shape European politics for the next two decades.

• 4. Armoured Cars and Russia

  ›

  In December 1914, Locker-Lampson obtained a commission in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve at the rank of Lieutenant Commander. The commission came with an arrangement: he would personally fund the creation of an armoured car squadron for the Royal Naval Air Service's Armoured Car Division. His unit trained at Whale Island in Hampshire and in north Norfolk near his family home, Newhaven Court in Cromer, before his No. 15 Squadron was deployed to France and then operated in unoccupied Belgium alongside the Belgian Army for much of 1915.

  When trench warfare made armoured cars useless on the Western Front, most of the Naval armoured car squadrons were disbanded. Three squadrons, however, were assembled into the Armoured Car Expeditionary Force, also called the Russian Armoured Car Division, and sent by ship to Archangel to support Britain's Russian ally. Sea ice blocked the approach to Archangel, and the force landed instead at the small town of Alexandrovsk. Locker-Lampson commanded the force as it operated with the Russian Army in Galicia, Romania, and the Caucasus.

  Russia pulled him into intrigue as much as combat. He later said he had been invited to take part in the 1916 assassination of Rasputin, and that he had a secret plan to extract Tsar Nicholas II from the country after the Tsar's abdication in March 1917. In September 1917 he was reportedly involved in Kornilov's attempted coup against the provisional government of Kerensky. After the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917, the force was pulled out. Selected vehicles and personnel were transferred to the Machine Gun Corps and served as 'Duncars' within Dunsterforce in Persia and Turkey, though Locker-Lampson himself did not go with them. In 1918 he became the Ministry of Information's Russian Representative instead.

• 5. From Blue Shirts to Refugee Sponsor

  ›

  Russia left a mark. Locker-Lampson came home fiercely anti-Communist, persuaded that Bolshevik influence was quietly corrupting British life. In the 1920s he organised mass rallies under the banner 'Rout the Reds', events stewarded by members of Rotha Lintorn-Orman's British Fascisti. He expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler in the Daily Mirror, calling the future Nazi leader "a legendary hero" and "the most masterly expounder and contriver in the length and breadth of the Reich".

  In 1931 he founded a quasi-paramilitary group he called the Sentinels of Empire, known also as the Blue Shirts, whose stated purpose was to peacefully fight Bolshevism and clear out the Reds. Their motto was his own family's motto: "Fear God! Fear Naught!" Their anthem, "March On", carried words written by Locker-Lampson himself, set to music taken from the film High Treason. It was sold as sheet music and as a 78-rpm record. The organisation sent a phonograph record of the anthem to Mussolini, packaged with silver and blue-enamelled cufflinks and a badge as a gift.

  Also in 1931, the Nazi philosopher Alfred Rosenberg had lunch with Locker-Lampson at the Savoy during a London visit. The meeting was arranged by the MI6 spy F. W. Winterbotham, who was investigating the Nazis while posing as a sympathiser. Rosenberg was reportedly delighted by the Blue Shirts, and particularly pleased that their target was Communist propaganda. He later sent Locker-Lampson a gold cigarette case as a token of esteem. Locker-Lampson returned it, with embarrassment.

  By 1933 the trajectory reversed. In July of that year he introduced a Private Member's Bill to extend British citizenship to Jewish refugees from Nazi persecution. The bill did not become law, but the effort was real. In September 1933 he gave Albert Einstein shelter at a camp on Roughton Heath near Cromer, after Einstein had received death threats while living in Belgium. He went on to assist Haile Selassie and Sigmund Freud, and sponsored numerous ordinary Jewish individuals to help them escape persecution in Germany and Austria. Some observers have described his efforts as exceptional in how he saved Jews from Germany.

• 6. Refusing Appeasement

  ›

  In 1934, Locker-Lampson introduced a Ten Minute Rule Bill to ban the wearing of political uniforms, a measure aimed squarely at Oswald Mosley's Black Shirts, the British Union of Fascists. The bill itself did not pass, but a government-sponsored version of the same idea became law in 1936. That same year he was instrumental in the successful prosecution of the British fascist Arnold Leese for publishing anti-Semitic literature.

  In 1935 he became a founding member of Focus, a cross-party group formed to oppose the prevailing policy of appeasing German and Italian aggression. Throughout the second half of the 1930s he was one of the very few Conservative MPs who maintained vocal public support for Winston Churchill during Churchill's long wilderness years of political isolation. When age and ill-health limited his activity during the Second World War, he joined the Home Guard and continued to back Churchill loudly from the backbenches. The local Conservative Party deselected him before the 1945 general election, ending a parliamentary career that had run from January 1910.

• 7. Private Life and Legacy

  ›

  The Locker-Lampson family's main home was Rowfant in West Sussex. When Oliver's mother died in 1915, his older brother Godfrey inherited Rowfant, while Oliver received the family's summer house, Newhaven Court, in Cromer. Cromer in north Norfolk thus became his base, which is why Einstein's camp on Roughton Heath was conveniently close.

  Oliver married twice. His first wife, Bianca Jacqueline Paget, died in 1929, six years after their 1923 marriage. He married Barbara Goodall in 1935. They had two sons, Jonathan and Stephen. Oliver Locker-Lampson died on the 8th of October 1954 and is buried in Worth churchyard near Crawley in Sussex.

  A Netflix TV drama-documentary released on the 17th of February 2024 included recreated scenes from Einstein's stay at the Roughton Camp, with actor Andrew Havill playing Locker-Lampson, giving the episode at Cromer a visibility it had not held for decades.