James Robert "Jamie" Bruce Lockhart (14 March 1941 – 27 October 2018) was a British diplomat, intelligence officer, author, and artist. The son of diplomat J. M. Bruce Lockhart and grandson of Scottish rugby international John Bruce Lockhart, he gained a modern languages degree from the University of Cambridge before beginning a career with the Foreign Office. However, this work was in fact a cover for his real work with the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). In later years, Lockhart became a published author, with works including a biography of Hugh Clapperton and a book about life in an English preparatory school. He was the father of actor Dugald Bruce Lockhart.
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Early life
Born in March 1941 at Sedbergh, which was then in the West Riding of Yorkshire, Lockhart was the son of J. M. Bruce Lockhart (1914–1995), by his marriage in 1939 to Margaret Hone, a daughter of Campbell Hone, Bishop of Wakefield. His grandfather was John Bruce Lockhart, a Scottish rugby international who was then a schoolmaster at Rugby School and later became head of Sedbergh School. James was educated at the Dragon School, Oxford, Sedbergh School, and St John's College, Cambridge, where he read modern languages. He was able to maintain a flair for languages all through his life.
His father was a schoolmaster, headmaster at Sedbergh, and then a wartime intelligence officer who became deputy director of MI6, and was a brother of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, British diplomat and intelligence officer, who had been closely connected with Sidney Reilly at the time of the February Revolution in Russia and had written the best-selling Memoirs of a British Agent (1932). With a long history of espionage in his family, it was natural for the young Lockhart to have the ambition of following in his father's and uncle's footsteps, and he did.