Reginald Teague-Jones, OBE (1889-1988), who from 1922 assumed the alias ‘Major Ronald Sinclair’, was a remarkable character whose adventurous life to this day remains rather shadowy. Born in Lancashire, Teague-Jones spent almost his entire life abroad. His travels began in 1902 with a four-year sojourn in Russia, during which time he witnessed the Bloody Sunday Massacre and the revolution of 1905, before returning to the UK to study at King’s College, London. By 1910 he was…

Reginald Teague-Jones, OBE (1889-1988), who from 1922 assumed the alias ‘Major Ronald Sinclair’, was a remarkable character whose adventurous life to this day remains rather shadowy. Born in Lancashire, Teague-Jones spent almost his entire life abroad. His travels began in 1902 with a four-year sojourn in Russia, during which time he witnessed the Bloody Sunday Massacre and the revolution of 1905, before returning to the UK to study at King’s College, London. By 1910 he was employed as a civilian in India, and just a few years later it seems he was involved in ‘efforts to prevent gun smuggling and slavery’ in various places along the Arabian and Persian coasts of the Indian Ocean, before being moved to the North-West Frontier as part of the para-military Frontier Constabulary (Wooller, 1989).

Fluent in German, French, Russian, Persian and Urdu, and evidently unafraid of adventure and risk, Teague-Jones became involved in more complex intelligence and espionage operations after the outbreak of the First World War. Work of this kind led to his being involved in an ugly incident in Transcaspia (now Turkmenistan) during 1918, an event that he is indelibly (though perhaps unjustly) tarred with, and which necessitated the change of name shortly afterward.

After the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917, the collapse of Russia into civil war plunged the Caucasus and the southern, central Asian flanks of the country into chaos. With White Russians and various other anti-Bolshevik forces occupied fighting the Red Army, the British became concerned about the security of supply lines to the Mesopotamian front and about German activities in Central Asia. More alarmingly, it seemed possible that a clear route through to British India was opening up for the Germans and their Ottoman allies, who were advancing on the Caspian oil port of Baku. Numerous British intelligence missions were launched throughout Central Asia to counter the threat (Leach, 2003, 24)

Teague-Jones, possessed of all the necessary linguistic and operational skills, was despatched – alone but for one companion, and in disguise as a Persian merchant – to Baku. His mission was to assess the Turkish advance on the Azerbaijani capital, and to stymie German attempts to obtain cotton supplies from Transcaspia. In August 1918, having succeeded in these aims, he was withdrawn to Krasnodovsk in Transcaspian Turkestan, where he was authorised to negotiate with the Government, principally to ensure mutual cooperation in the event of Bolshevik or Turkish attack.

It was here that Teague-Jones became embroiled in the incident leading to his change of identity. The Transcaspian Government, headed by Fyodor Funtikov of the anti-Bolshevik Socialist Revolutionaries, was at this time holding captive a number of Bolshevik commissars. Teague-Jones seems to have been tasked with attempting to have them transferred to British custody in India, in order that they could be used in prisoner exchanges with the Bolsheviks. The official who would have been responsible for moving the prisoners to India was Major-General Wilfred Malleson, Teague-Jones’ immediate superior, who appears either not to have been very keen on the idea (Teague-Jones’ diary records that Malleson ‘suggested that the Trans-Caspian authorities find some other way of disposing of them’; Teague-Jones, 1990, 120) or maybe to have worded his instruction poorly (perhaps that the authorities ‘dispose of the Commissars as they thought fit’; Leach, op.cit., 26-7). A discussion of the issue attended by Teague-Jones was without definite conclusion, although shooting the prisoners was evidently discussed, with Funtikov in favour of this option (Teague-Jones, op.cit.). Teague-Jones, despite qualifying his account by saying he had ‘rather a hazy recollection of what was actually said’ (ibid., 120), records that he ‘remained strictly neutral and took no active part in the discussion, except to repeat Malleson’s message’ (ibid., 121). In any case, whatever the true British position, at some point during the following day Funtikov – or possibly Kuhn, another anti-Bolshevik commandant – seems to have decided to kill the prisoners, and 26 of them were taken out into the desert and summarily executed.

Teague-Jones maintained, both at the time and later in his life, that he had no prior knowledge of the executions, less still any hand in them; however, he was later blamed for them by both Funtikov and the Bolsheviks. By 1922, most likely in fear of Soviet reprisals, he had retired from the Indian Army Reserve and took the name Major Ronald Sinclair. He would live as Sinclair for the rest of his life.

From this point, 1922, until his appointment to the British Consulate in New York in 1941, there is something of a lacuna. What precise line of work he was in during these years is not conclusively known; he continued to travel widely in Asia and the Near East, ostensibly investigating prospects for commerce under the auspices of the Royal Geographical Society, although it seems probable that at least some of this work, if not all, was for the Secret Service. He was not completely invisible during this period – during the late 1920s and 1930s he published numerous travel articles in the British and particularly in the Indian press, and at one point had an American agent for his travel photography and writing (see Sinclair Papers, IOR Eur Mss, 313/24). However, as Hopkirk points out in the epilogue to Teague-Jones’ memoir, his ‘exceptional skills and experience were too valuable to lose at a time when Bolshevism was seen as a grave threat, especially to British India’ (ibid., 213). He would have been ideally suited to covert activities in strategically crucial areas of central Asia, and it seems he kept up contacts with figures known to be in the intelligence services (Hopkirk, 1994, 401-6). His continual travels through the Empire and adjacent areas – East Africa, Central Asia, South America and the Caribbean – would perhaps accord with this hypothesis. Teague-Jones kept his counsel while he lived, though a solitary, empty envelope marked with the legend ‘Major Sinclair, M.I.5.’, found after his death amongst his personal effects, certainly appears to back up the theory that there was more to his inter-war activities than travel writing, photography and prospecting for trade.