Remembered in the landscape: Oliver Locker-Lampson

 Oliver Locker-Lampson

The younger son of the poet Frederick Locker, and his second wife, Hannah Jane Lampson,who had  taken the name Locker-Lampson as a condition of his father-in-law's will, he was educated at Cheam School, Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge where he gained an Honours Tripos Degree in History and Modern Languages. While at Cambridge, he was co-editor of Granta with Edwin Montagu and President of the Amateur Dramatic Club.

After Cambridge he studied law at the Inner Temple and was called to the Bar in 1907 but never practised. Locker-Lampson worked as a journalist and was a founding director of a Norwich-based motorcar vendor, Duff, Morgan and Vermont. 

Locker-Lampson was elected to the House of Commons at the January 1910 general election as the member for the Ramsey Division in Huntingdonshire, defeating the Liberal incumbent. He stood as a Conservative Unionist on a Tariff Reform ticket and was re-elected in the December 1910 general election. 

The Locker-Lampson family's principal home was Rowfant in West Sussex. Following his mother's death in 1915 Oliver's older brother Godfrey inherited Rowfant, Oliver received the family’s summer home, Newhaven Court, Cromer.

Newhaven Court had been built by the Locker-Lampsons in 1883/4. It would remain in the family until financial problems led the family to give up the house, which burnt down in 1963.

With the outbreak of the Great War Locker-Lampson received a commission in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve with the rank of Lieutenant Commander. This was largely on the basis of an understanding with the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, that he would personally fund the establishment of an armoured car squadron for the Royal Naval Air Service's Armoured Car Division. After training at Whale Island, Hampshire and in north Norfolk near his family home.

IWM (HU 124255)

 No. 15 Squadron was sent to France, then operated in the unoccupied portion of Belgium on attachment to the Belgian Army during much of 1915.  By the end of the year, trench warfare meant there was no scope for armoured cars on the Western Front and most of the RNAS's armoured car squadrons were disbanded by the Admiralty. 

Three squadrons of RNAS armoured cars were assembled and sent by ship to Archangel as the Armoured Car Expeditionary Force (ACEF), also known as the Russian Armoured Car Division, with Locker-Lampson in command in order to show support for Britain's Russian ally. Sea ice prevented the Division from reaching Archangel and men and armoured cars were landed at Alexandrovsk.The ACEF operated with the Russian Army in several areas, including Galicia, Romania, and the Caucasus.

Locker-Lampson involved himself in Russian politics at this time. He claimed  that he had been asked to participate in the 1916 assassination of Rasputin and further suggested he had a secret plan to get Tsar Nicholas II out of Russia after his abdication in March 1917. It is also alleged that in September 1917 he was involved in Kornilov's attempted coup against the provisional government of Kerensky.

After the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, the ACEF was withdrawn from Russia.  Commander Locker-Lampson was not with them as in 1918 became the Ministry of Information's Russian Representative.

Locker-Lampson's early political career was taken up with a number of causes. He was appointed by the Conservative and Unionist Party to raise money for the Unionist Working Men's Candidates Fund. He was also involved in a secret plan by Arthur Steel-Maitland and Conservative Central Office to gain control of the Daily Express, but was outmanoeuvred by the future Lord Beaverbrook.

Before the 1918 general election, constituencies were redrawn and the Ramsey Division was abolished. A new all Huntingdonshire seat was created, and Locker-Lampson stood for this instead, and was elected.

In 1923 Locker-Lampson married Bianca Jacqueline Paget,  She died in 1929. He married his second wife, Barbara Goodall, in 1935. They had two sons, Jonathan and Stephen.

Locker-Lampson became Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer Austen Chamberlain from 1919 to 1921, and accompanied Chamberlain to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. In the 1922 election he moved to Birmingham Handsworth and was elected there. He held Birmingham Handsworth from 1922 until the 1945 general election, when he was de-selected by the constituency party.

Locker-Lampson became fiercely anti-Communist and a vocal part of the Red Scares of the 1920s. He organised several mass rallies under the banner 'Rout the Reds', many of which were stewarded by members of Rotha Lintorn-Orman's British Fascisti. He also expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler in the Daily Mirror, touting the future leader of Nazi Germany as "a legendary hero" and "the most masterly expounder and contriver in the length and breadth of the Reich".] In 1931, he founded the "Sentinels of Empire", also known as the Blue Shirts, a quasi-paramilitary organisation "to peacefully fight Bolshevism and clear out the Reds!" Their motto was his family motto "Fear God! Fear Naught!" Their anthem, "March On", with words written by Locker-Lampson, music originally from the film High Treason, was sold as sheet music and as a 78-rpm record. A phonograph record of the anthem was sent to Mussolini, along with silver and blue-enamelled cufflinks and badge, as a gift from the Blue Shirts.

Despite Locker-Lampson claim that the organisation had 100,000 members, the Blue Shirts were short-lived and appeared to make little impact. Nevertheless, they did attract the praise of the Nazi philosopher Alfred Rosenberg, who in 1931 had lunch with Locker-Lampson at the Savoy during a visit to London.

The Proto-Fascist changed course in 1933 onwards and redirected his political ire against fascism both in Britain and in continental Europe. In July 1933 he introduced a Private member's bill to extend British citizenship to Jewish refugees from Nazi persecution, though it failed to become law. In September, he provided Albert Einstein with refuge at a camp on Roughton Heath near his home in Cromer in north Norfolk, after Einstein had received death threats while living in Belgium. 

In 1934 he introduced a Ten Minute Rule Bill to ban the wearing of political uniforms - aimed at Oswald Mosley's Black Shirts (British Union of Fascists). The Bill did not become law, but a similar bill sponsored by the government did become law in 1936. In 1935 he was a founding member of Focus, a cross-party group opposed to the prevailing policy of appeasement of German and Italian aggression.

In his 60s and suffering from poor health, Locker-Lampson played a reduced role in the Second World War.  tHe joined the Home Guard and continued supported the government from the back benches.  He retired from politics at the 1945 General Election.

Oliver Locker-Lampson is died in 1954 and was buried in Worth churchyard near Crawley, Sussex.