Фрэнк Лоуренс Лукас: Жизнь и творчество британского ученого и писателя

British writer and classical scholar (1894–1967)

Frank Laurence Lucas (28 December 1894 – 1 June 1967) was an English classical scholar, literary critic, poet, novelist, playwright, political polemicist, Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, and intelligence officer at Bletchley Park during World War II. He is now best remembered for his scathing 1923 review of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and for his book Style (1955; revised 1962), an acclaimed guide to recognising and writing good prose. His Tragedy in Relation to Aristotle's 'Poetics' (1927, substantially revised 1957) was for over fifty years a standard introduction. His most important contribution to scholarship was his four volume old spelling Complete Works of John Webster (1927), the first collected edition of the Jacobean dramatist since that of Hazlitt the Younger (1857), itself an inferior copy of Dyce (1830). Eliot called Lucas "the perfect annotator", and subsequent Webster scholars have been indebted to him, notably the editors of the new Cambridge Webster (1995–2007). Lucas is also remembered for his anti fascist campaign in the 1930s, and for his wartime work at Bletchley Park, for which he was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE).

F. L. ("Peter") Lucas grew up in Blackheath and was educated at Colfe's (1902–1909), where his father F. W. Lucas (1860–1931) was headmaster, and from 1910 at Rugby, where he was tutored by the Sophocles scholar Robert Whitelaw (1843–1917) in his last year before retirement. He won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1913 to read for the Classical Tripos, adding the Pitt Scholarship and Porson Prize in 1914. In January 1914 he was elected Apostle – the last Apostle elected before the War – coming under the influence of G. E. Moore. Believing Cambridge threatened with the fate of Louvain, he volunteered, aged 19, in October 1914 serving from 1915 as second lieutenant in the 7th Battalion The Royal West Kent Regiment in France. From August 1915 he was in the Somme trenches opposite Fricourt and Mametz; he was wounded by shrapnel in May 1916. "One simply gapes at the gigantic capriciousness of things," he wrote to John Maynard Keynes in October of that year, "waiting our own turn to disappear in the Cyclops' maw." He returned to the front as lieutenant in January 1917, went into battle near Grandcourt on 17 February in the Ancre Offensive, was mentioned in despatches on 22 February, and was gassed on 4 March. In all he spent seventeen months in war hospitals. By September 1917 he felt that the cause of honour and justice had been lost in the lust of Victory ("We were too ready to go on fighting without offering terms"). Passed fit for garrison duty at Chatham (3rd Battalion Royal West Kent HQ), he sought the help of fellow Apostle Keynes to return to France, He returned to Cambridge in January 1919. Fell walking in the Lake District "on Easter morning [1919] on Kidsty Pike, between Hawes Water and Hayes Water, a blinding spring sun on snowy ridge beyond ridge, from Fairfield to Blucathra, brought a moment of such ecstatic intoxication that, were I a mystic, I should have called it a mystical experience."

Resuming his undergraduate studies, Lucas won a Chancellor's Medal for Classics and the Browne Medal (1920), and revived meetings of the Apostles, suspended since 1914, becoming Society Secretary and contributing nineteen papers. He was elected to a Fellowship at King's College in 1920 before he had completed his degree, He took a starred first and began his career as a Classics lecturer in October 1920. In the spring of 1921 he spent three months in Greece as a student of the British School at Athens, locating the site of the Battle of Pharsalus in Thessaly (see Pharsalus below). Back in Cambridge he switched that year to teaching for the English Tripos (instituted in 1919). He was a member of the Cambridge University English Faculty from 1921 to 1939 and from 1945 to 1962, and a university Reader in English from 1947 to 1962. At the invitation of Desmond MacCarthy, literary editor of the New Statesman, Lucas reviewed poetry and criticism for that journal from 1922 to 1926, having begun his career as reviewer with the Athenaeum in 1920–21, its last year. Early reviews and essays were collected in his Authors Dead and Living (1926). Among them was a review of Housman's Last Poems (1922) that, unusually, met with the approval of the poet himself. His move from Classics to English and his edition of Webster (1927) were inspired in large part by J. T. Sheppard's March 1920 Marlowe Society production of The White Devil, which made a powerful impression on him: "What could make the Cambridge production of The White Devil in 1920 seem, to at least two who saw it then without preconceptions, the most staggering performance they had ever known?" he asked in the New Statesman. (The production had been swift moving, in the Elizabethan manner, with minimal scenery and with emphasis on "beautiful poetry beautifully spoken".) "[Lucas] has been lucky in finding a writer [Webster] who takes his standpoint," T. E. Lawrence remarked, "and sums up life rather in his fashion." Lucas' preference, however, lay with Comparative Literature, and after Webster he turned to his Studies French and English (1934; revised 1950) (he was Membre Correspondant Honoraire de L'Institut Littéraire et Artistique de France ), and later to studies of Scandinavian literature. He served as committee member for the Cambridge Greek Play (1921–33) and continued to write on Greek and Latin literature. As part time Librarian at King's (1922–36) he accessioned the donated papers of Rupert Brooke. His students at King's included George Rylands, John Hayward, F. E. Halliday, H. C. A. "Tom" Gaunt, Alan Clutton Brock, Julian Bell, Winton Dean and Desmond Flower. By Cambridge English students in general he was known as "F. L.". Following the publication of his Webster, scholars turned to him for editorial advice: he helped in the preparation of Hayward's Nonesuch Donne (1929), Housman's More Poems (1936), Theodore Redpath's Songs and Sonets of John Donne (1956), and Ingram and Redpath's Shakespeare's Sonnets (1964). He also performed an editorial and advisory role for Christopher Sandford at the Golden Cockerel Press, where he introduced Victor Scholderer's New Hellenic typeface (1937). Four of his verse translations from Greek and Latin, with engravings by John Buckland Wright, were published in collectors' editions by the Golden Cockerel Press and Folio Society. In the middle years of his career he was in demand as an invitation lecturer, giving seven BBC wireless talks in 1930, on Dorothy Osborne and on the Victorian Poets, delivering the 1933 Warton Lecture on English Poetry to the British Academy, lecturing at the Royal Institution on Classicism and Romanticism (1935) and at the Royal Society of Literature on travel writing (1937), and, as part of a British Council drive to counter Soviet propaganda, lecturing in German on European literature to packed halls at the British Information Centre in West Berlin in October 1948 during the Berlin Blockade. In later years Lucas won acclaim for his translations from the classics (see Verse translation below) and for his book Style (1955). He also turned encyclopedist, contributing articles on 'Poetry', 'Epic', 'Lyric', 'Ode', 'Elegy' and 'Pastoral' to the 15 volume 1950 Chambers's Encyclopaedia, among others, and serving on the editorial board of the Encyclopædia Britannica's Great Books of the Western World series (1952). As he told Nikos Kazantzakis, who visited him in Cambridge after the War, Je ne lis plus; je relis [:I no longer read; I reread]. For Lucas's anti fascist campaign in the Thirties and his wartime service in Intelligence, see Appeasement and Bletchley Park below.

From February 1921 to 1929 Lucas was married to the novelist E. B. C. Jones (1893–1966), known as "Topsy" to her friends. She was the sister in law of his former supervisor at Trinity, Donald Robertson; he got to know her after reading and admiring her first novel, Quiet Interior (1920). Jones dedicated two novels to Lucas and based two characters on him – Hugh Sexton, gassed in the War, in The Singing Captives (1922), and Oliver in The Wedgwood Medallion (1923), a Cambridge classics graduate now studying the Elizabethan drama. Lucas based the character Margaret Osborne in The River Flows (1926) on her – a semi autobiographical first novel that shifts some of his experiences of 1919–1920 to 1913–1915. The character Hugh Fawcett ("the best brain in the Foreign Office" but not much use as a matchmaker) was based on Keynes. Through the Apostles Lucas was associated with the Bloomsbury Group, Virginia Woolf describing him to Ottoline Morrell as "pure Cambridge: clean as a breadknife, and as sharp". To Lucas, interviewed in 1958, Bloomsbury had seemed "a jungle":
+Book dedications Euripides and his Influence 1923 E. B. C. Jones The River Flows 1926 Sebastian Sprott Works of John Webster 1927 John Maynard Keynes Tragedy in Relation to Aristotle's 'Poetics' 1927 Clive Bell Time and Memory 1929 E. M. Forster Cécile 1930 T. E. Lawrence Marionettes 1930 Desmond MacCarthy Eight Victorian Poets 1930 John Hayward The Art of Dying 1930 Virginia Woolf The Wild Tulip 1932 Julian Bell Alfred, Lord Tennyson 1932 Anne Barnes Thomas Lovell Beddoes 1932 George Barnes George Crabbe 1933 Roger Fry The Bear Dances 1933 Leon M. Lion Studies French and English 1934 Marie Mauron The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal 1936 Gordon Bottomley The Delights of Dictatorship 1938 Henry Nevinson The Iliad. Verse translation in selection 1950 D. W. Lucas Literature and Psychology 1951 Hilda Stekel Greek Poetry for Everyman 1951 George Boas Greek Drama for Everyman 1954 Herbert Grierson Style 1955 Charles Tennyson The Search for Good Sense 1958 Harry Hinsley
The society of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Duncan Grant, Clive and Vanessa Bell, and Lytton Strachey was far from being in the ordinary sense a happy family. They were intensely and rudely critical of each other. They were the sort of people who would read letters addressed to others. They tormented each other with endless love affairs. In real crises they could be generous, but in ordinary affairs of life they were anything but kind Dickinson and Forster were not really Bloomsbury. They were soft hearted and kind. Bloomsbury was certainly not that. Jones's admiration for George Rylands undermined the marriage by 1927. After affairs with Dora Carrington (d. 1932) in December 1932 Lucas married the 21 year old Girton Classics graduate and sculptor Prudence Wilkinson (1911–1944). His travel writings, accounts of their long walks through landscapes with literary associations, date from the years of his second marriage (1932–1939): From Olympus to the Styx (1934), a book on their 1933 walking tour of Greece (one of five journeys he made to that country); 'Iceland', a travelogue on their 1934 journey to the saga sites, included in the original edition of his The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal (1936); and journal entries on their visits to Norway, Ireland, Scotland and France. In these years they were frequent visitors to the home in Saint Rémy de Provence of Marie Mauron, whose Provençal stories Lucas translated. From Olympus to the Styx argues for the return of the Elgin Marbles:
Considering what was to come, the much abused 'theft' of the sculptures from the Acropolis by Lord Elgin was an undoubted blessing, though it was carelessly carried out, especially in removing the Caryatid from the Erechtheum; it would none the less be a graceful act for England to return them now to Athens. Prudence Lucas, as well as sharing these interests, designed the costumes and sets for the first production (1938) of his Icelandic tragedy The Lovers of Gudrun (1935). Her nervous breakdown in 1938 is touched on in Lucas's Journal Under the Terror, 1938 (1939); Lucas sought help from, among others, Wilhelm Stekel, whom he met in London in 1939, The Art of Living (1959), the essay on 'Happiness' in The Greatest Problem (1960), The Drama of Ibsen and Strindberg (1962) – reflects an interest shared with his third wife (1940–1967), the Swedish psychologist Elna Kallenberg (1906–2003), whom he married in 1940 – "the stranger who came to me from beyond the sea when I most needed her" (Elna Kallenberg, a friend of Hilda Stekel, had flown from Sweden, with special permission from the Home Office, to join him in late 1939). They had two children, Signe and Sigurd. Lucas returned time and again in his books to the theme of happiness, and in 1960 summed up his thoughts on happiness thus:Vitality of mind and body; the activity to employ and maintain them; the zest and curiosity that they can animate; freedom to travel widely in nature and art, in countries of the world and countries of the mind; human affections; and the gift of gaiety – these seem to me, then, the main causes of happiness. I am surprised to find how few and simple they are. Lucas lived at 7 Camden Place, Cambridge, from 1921 to 1925; at 20 West Road, Cambridge from 1925 to 1939; at High Mead, Great Brickhill from 1939 to 1945; and again at 20 West Road, Cambridge, from 1945 until his death in 1967. The dissident Czech academic Otakar Vočadlo (1895–1974), Lucas's Prague correspondent in 1938–39 (see Appeasement below) and a concentration camp survivor, celebrated his restoration, during the Prague Spring of 1968, to his Chair of English at Prague, by giving a course of lectures on Webster in memory of Lucas, whose support for the Czech cause in 1938–39 had not been forgotten. and examined the views of earlier critics, whose dogmatism he was swift to rebut. He increasingly linked his studies to developments in psychology, notably in Literature and Psychology (1951). "The real 'unwritten laws'," he observed, "seem to me those of human psychology." Centrally, he discussed the writer's psychology as revealed through style. "Even science," he noted, "has invented no pickle for embalming a man like style." The poets to whom he returned most often in publications were Tennyson (1930, 1932, 1947, 1957) and Housman (1926, 1933, 1936, 1960), but he ranged widely over Classical, European and English literature. Conscious that books can influence for good or ill, he admired authors he saw as defenders of sanity and good sense – men like Montaigne and Montesquieu – or as compassionate realists, like Homer in the Iliad, Euripides, Hardy, Ibsen and Chekhov. "Life is 'indivisible'," he wrote. "A public tends to get the literature it deserves: a literature, to get the public it deserves. The values men pursue in each, affect the other. They turn in a vicious, or a virtuous, circle. Only a fine society could have bred Homer: and he left it finer for hearing him." His criticism, while acknowledging that morality is historically relative, was thus values based. "Writers can make men feel, not merely see, the values that endure." Believing that too many modern writers encouraged men and women to flee to unreason, decadence and barbarism, he condemned the trahisons des clercs of the twentieth century, and used his lectures and writing to campaign for a responsible use of intellectual freedom. "One may question whether real civilisation is so safely afloat," he wrote in his last published letter (1966), "that we can afford to use our pens for boring holes in the bottom of it." The writer or artist serving up "slapdash nightmares out of his Unconscious", "in an age morbidly avid of uncivilised irreticence", not only exhibited his own neuroses, but fed neurosis in others. Literary critics, too, had to take more responsibility. "Much cant gets talked," he noted of the Structuralists, "by critics who care more for the form and organisation of a work than for its spirit, its content, its supreme moments." The serious note in his criticism was counterbalanced by wit and urbanity, by lively anecdote and quotation, and by a gift for startling imagery and epigram. What Lucas wrote about Housman's Name and Nature of Poetry in 1933 (though he contested some of its ideas) sums up what he himself aspired to as a literary critic: " the kind of critical writing that best justifies itself before the brevity of life; that itself adds new data to our experience as well as arguing about the old; that happily combines, in a word, philosophy with autobiography, psychology with a touch of poetry – of the 'poetic' imagination. It can make acceptable even common sense. There are sentences here which recall the clear cut Doric strength of the Lives of the Poets "

His Cambridge colleague T. R. Henn noted that Lucas's approach and style were influenced by the Strachey of Books and Characters (1922).

Lucas's impatience with the "obscurantism" and coterie appeal of much modern poetry made him in the interwar years one of the foremost opponents of the new schools. "As for 'profundity'," he wrote, "it is not uncommonly found also in dry wells; which may likewise contain little but obscurity and rubbish." He opposed also what he saw as the narrow dogmatism of the New Critics, those "tight lipped Calvins of art", and in Chapter 4 of his Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal (1936), and of Eliot's in the 1929 essay 'Modern Criticism', reprinted in his Studies French and English (1934). An anonymous New Statesman review (29 December 1928) of Eliot's criticism, however, to which F. R. Leavis replied apparently believing it was by Lucas, and which Leavis's biographer says "was certainly by Lucas", was in fact by Richard Ellis Roberts. Lucas had stopped reviewing for the New Statesman in 1926 and never reviewed anonymously. His critique of Q. D. Leavis's Fiction and the Reading Public (1932) in University Studies: Cambridge 1933 was described by F. R. Leavis's biographer as "improper": "senior academics do not use quasi official publications to attack graduate students". (The volume, though printed by the University Press, was not published there; its editor stressed that the contributions were "unofficial" glimpses into the "intense mental activity" of each Cambridge department; and published theses are not normally considered exempt from criticism.)

Lucas's 1923 review of The Waste Land, much reprinted in the decades since his death, was omitted from his Authors Dead and Living (1926), a collection of New Statesman pieces, probably because he had ended by saying the poem should be left to sink. Remarks elsewhere confirm that he had not changed his opinion. Described by F. W. Bateson as "brilliantly wrong headed", the review is better known today than it was during Lucas's lifetime. His only other comment on the poem occurs in his essay 'English Literature' in the volume University Studies: Cambridge 1933, where he contested I. A. Richards' view of it in Science and Poetry (1926): "The Waste Land is praised [by Richards] for its 'complete severence' from all beliefs, when it is really a yearning cry for them, and at its close some sort of faith is so clearly impending that it has been praised by others as a great religious poem (such are the triumphs of obscurity)." The Letters of T. S. Eliot includes correspondence between Eliot and Lucas from the mid 1920s but no reference to the review. Historians of The New Statesman have regretted that Desmond MacCarthy invited Lucas to review modern poetry, one of them declaring Lucas "a disastrous choice" for a Waste Land review. (Disastrous, that is, for the journal's avant garde image.) After 1923, though attacking obscurantism in general terms, Lucas largely ignored Eliot's poetry, aside from a retrospective dig in 1942 at 'The Hollow Men' ("hollow men whimpering under prickly pear trees, conceited still amid their grovellings because a prickly pear remains an exotic and highly intellectual plant" ) and at 'Sweeney among the Nightingales' ("the nightingales of Aeschylus now exhibit to a ravished public their 'droppings'; for to the sewer all things are sewer" He replied vigorously in the same journal, only to find Eliot extending his criticisms in another review in The Criterion. Lucas counter attacked in his 1929 essay 'Modern Criticism', ridiculing Eliot's literary critical obiter dicta and oracular tone. In later impressions of his essays, Eliot made minor changes or added clarifications to sentences Lucas had ridiculed, and praised the textual and historical scholarship of the 1927 Webster. Lucas left the Introduction out of his 1958 revised editions of the two major plays, but demand for the unabridged 1927 Webster continued, and it was reprinted on both sides of the Atlantic in 1966.

Lucas's standing as a literary critic was probably at its highest in the 1930s. "In three respects," wrote the Times Literary Supplement in 1934, "Lucas rises pre eminent from the crowd of contemporary critics: in his care for style, for dignity and grace in his method of presentment: in his learning in the literature of several languages: and in the balance, the sanity of his judgment." Post war, reviewers were often more hostile. Many post war reviews amounted to reprisals by the Leavisite camp: "There is an air of breezy Bloomsbury superficiality and cultural omniscience about this book that is distressing," wrote one. "His is the type of over cultivated fuddy duddy mind that has done – and is doing – great damage to our whole culture in general and to literary appreciation in particular." Probably because, psychoanalytic literary criticism aside, Lucas scorned most new trends – he described the critical theory of the 1950s as "largely pseudo scientific bubble blowing" – his criticism has long been out of fashion and is mostly out of print. "His criticism is the table talk of a man of the world of fine taste and faultless memory. And he has to an exceptional degree the gift of creating and communicating an enjoyment of literature. It is impossible to put his books down without a grateful determination to reread those masterpieces of literature he describes and illustrates so engagingly." ― F. W. Bateson, Review of English Studies, 1938
"The literary world has passed on," wrote L. P. Wilkinson, "but that does not mean that what supervened was better; and just because of his uncompromising brilliance the whirligig of time may bring in his criticism again. His Style (1955) has a permanent value in any case, unaffected by trends." His two earliest books, Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy (1922) (his Fellowship dissertation) and Euripides and His Influence (1923), not yet superseded in similar concise form, continue to be reprinted. The editors of the new Cambridge Webster (1995–2007) praise "his customary accuracy and astuteness" in matters of dating, authorship, and textual scholarship. "With its voluminous and marvellously wide ranging notes," writes D. C. Gunby, "Lucas's four volume, old spelling edition remains essential reading for those who love scholarship and, more, love the plays of John Webster".

Of Lucas's novels the best received was Cécile (1930), a tale of love, society and politics in the France of 1775–1776. Lucas dedicated the book to T. E. Lawrence, a friend and admirer. He wrote two further historical novels, Doctor Dido (1938), set in Cambridge in 1792–1812, and The English Agent: A Tale of the Peninsular War (1969), set in Spain in 1808; and a novella, The Woman Clothed with the Sun (1937), on the Buchanites of the 1780s–90s. The three novels focus on a love affair between an Englishman and a Frenchwoman (Lucas was a self confessed gallomane); the Scots novella takes the form of an account, written by a Scottish minister in middle age, of his youthful bewitchment by Elspeth Buchan and of his curious sojourn among the Buchanites. A theme common to all four is the tension between fragile 18th century rationalism and, in varying forms, Romantic "enthusiasm" and unreason. For his semi autobiographical first novel, The River Flows (1926), see Personal Life above.

Lucas's most successful play was the thriller Land's End (1935), set in Cornwall in the mid 1930s (Westminster Theatre, February–March 1938, 29 performances, with Cathleen Nesbitt, Cecil Trouncer and Alan Napier among the cast). One of Paul Scofield's earliest roles was in the Birmingham Rep's revival of the play in March–April 1945. Lucas's radio play The Siren was first broadcast on the BBC Third Programme in 1948, with Catherine Lacey, Frith Banbury and Deryck Guyler in the cast; a second production followed on the Home Service in 1949, with Cathleen Nesbitt and Hugh Burden. The play dramatises George Sand's amorous escapades in Paris and Italy with Alfred de Musset and Dr. Pietro Pagello – the subject of the 1999 film Les Enfants du Siècle. His political drama The Bear Dances: A Play in Three Acts was the first dramatisation of the Soviets on London's West end stage (Garrick Theatre, 1932, with Elena Miramova, Abraham Sofaer and Olga Lindo). This play, though it closed early in London, was revived by various repertory theatres in the North of England in the later 1930s. It was an attempt at ideological disinfectant, written at a time when Cambridge University (in Lucas's words) "grew full of very green young men going very Red". on the location of the Battle of Pharsalus (48 B. C.), based on his 1921 solo field trip to Thessaly and on a re examination of the sources, dismissed a dozen previous theories and is now widely accepted by historians. John D. Morgan in his definitive 'Palae pharsalus – the Battle and the Town' writes: "My reconstruction is similar to Lucas's, and in fact I borrow one of his alternatives for the line of the Pompeian retreat. Lucas's theory has been subjected to many criticisms, but has remained essentially unshaken."

A brilliant linguist with infantry and Intelligence Corps experience from 1914 to 1918, proven anti fascist credentials and a scepticism about the Soviet Union, Lucas was one of the first academics recruited by the Foreign Office – on 3 September 1939 – to Bletchley Park. He was one of the original four members of Hut 3, whose organisation he set up, and from March to July 1942, when the Hut was run by committee, acting head. He remained a central figure there, working throughout the war on the Enigma decodes as translator, intelligence analyst and (from July 1942) head of the Research Section, 3G [:Hut 3 General Intelligence], on the busy 4 p. m. to 1 a. m. shift. His main activities in 3G were cracking Axis covernames and covernumbers in decodes, analysing German "proformas" (supplies and ammunition returns), and writing general intelligence papers. Among the intelligence reports he produced was a study of Hitler's intentions in the east in May 1941, which contrasted with the Foreign Office view that the Germans were just "building up pressure [on the U. S. S. R.] to extract more raw materials". "It becomes harder than ever to doubt," Lucas wrote,
"that the object of these large movements of the German Army and Air Force is Russia. From rail movements towards Moldavia in the south to ship movements towards Varanger fjord in the far north there is everywhere the same eastward trend. Either the purpose is blackmail or it is war. No doubt Hitler would prefer a bloodless surrender. But the quiet move, for instance, of a prisoner of war cage to Tarnow looks more like business than bluff." Other Lucas papers ranged from practical suggestions, such as the proposal that the Salonica Athens railway be cut in the Oeta gorges viaducts (carried out in Operation Harling), to psychological overviews later in the war, like 'Hitler as seen by Source' [:through decodes] and 'German Morale as seen by Source' (his old special subject from 1918 Intelligence Corps days). For its part, Hut 3 had grown "shy of going beyond its job of amending and explaining German messages", believing that "drawing broad conclusions was for the intelligence staff at SHAEF, who had information from all sources", including aerial reconnaissance. E. J. N. Rose, head Air Adviser in Hut 3, read the paper at the time and described it in 1998 as "an extremely good report" that "showed the failure of intelligence at SHAEF and at the Air Ministry". The report is not known to have survived. It was probably the "Top Secret [intelligence] digest", a post mortem on that failure, referred to by General Strong (1968), "both record copies of which were destroyed". (A report by "C", the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, On indications of German December 1944 counter offensive in Ardennes, derived from ULTRA material, submitted to DMI by C, issued 28 December 1944, is held in the UK National Archives as file HW 13/45; Calvocoressi, however, who knew Bennett's 1979 book and General Strong's claim, stated in 2001 that the Lucas Calvocoressi report was not. The high standards of accuracy and clarity that prevailed in Hut 3, his chief maintained, were "largely due to [Lucas's] being such a stickler" for them. In out of hut hours Major Lucas was Officer Commanding the Bletchley Park Home Guard, a "rabble of egg heads" that he turned, contrary to stereotype, into an efficient unit that outwitted the local regular forces in military exercises. From June 1945 to the end of the War he was head of the Hut 3 History Section, compiling a 'History of Hut 3', now documents HW3/119 and HW3/120 in the National Archives.