Frank Laurence Lucas OBE (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.

[3] 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).

[20] Believing Cambridge threatened with the fate of Louvain,[21] he volunteered, aged 19, in October 1914[20] and was commissioned in November,[22] serving from 1915 as second lieutenant in the 7th Battalion The Royal West Kent Regiment in France.

"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 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).

[51] 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.

[53] Through the Apostles Lucas was associated with the Bloomsbury Group,[54][note 5] Virginia Woolf describing him to Ottoline Morrell as "pure Cambridge: clean as a breadknife, and as sharp".

[55] To Lucas, interviewed in 1958, Bloomsbury had seemed "a jungle": 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.

The emphasis on psychology in his post-war books – Literature and Psychology (1951), Style (1955), The Search for Good Sense (1958),[64] 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),[65] whom he married in 1940 – "the stranger who came to me from beyond the sea when I most needed her"[66] (Elna Kallenberg, a friend of Hilda Stekel,[67] had flown from Sweden, with special permission from the Home Office, to join him in late 1939).

"[78] 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,[79] and used his lectures and writing to campaign for a responsible use of intellectual freedom.

There are sentences here which recall the clear-cut Doric strength of the Lives of the Poets ..."[84] 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 1923 review of The Waste Land, much reprinted in the decades since his death,[95] 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.

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"[100]) 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"[100]).

In later editions 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.

"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.

The three novels focus on a love-affair between an Englishman and a Frenchwoman (Lucas was a self-confessed gallomane[126]); 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.

[128] Others that have gained currency through anthologies include 'The Destined Hour' (1953), a re-telling in verse of the old 'appointment in Samarra' fable,[129] and 'Spain 1809', the story of a village woman's courage during the French occupation in the Peninsular War.

[133] Lucas's most successful play was the thriller Land's End (1935),[134] 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).

[135] 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;[136][137] a second production followed on the Home Service in 1949, with Cathleen Nesbitt and Hugh Burden.

[138] The play dramatises George Sand's amorous escapades in Paris and Italy with Alfred de Musset and Dr. Pietro Pagello[139] – 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).

Of Chamberlain at Munich he wrote (30 September): The outcome he feared was an Anglo-German peace agreement – an accord between Nazis and the British Establishment: "One day a little note from Berchtesgaden will appoint Lord Londonderry to 10 Downing Street.

A brilliant linguist[29] 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.

[160] 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.

[161][162] 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.

[163][164] 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".

[167][168] 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.

[176] 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.

[187] His only science-fiction story, 'Last Act' (1937), set in a not-too-distant future, had depicted the beginning of the end for "the desolator, Man", in an overpopulated, over-technological, and rapidly overheating biosphere.

If a small, poor and barren state like Greece could absorb between one and two million refugees it is absurd to pretend that a great country like Germany, which Hitler has set flowing with milk and honey, could not do as much and more.