[Excerpt from the upcoming 10th-anniversary edition of Lee Jordan’s A People’s History of Magic, published by Obscurus Books, 2024. Shared with permission.]
[. . . ] Hogwarts has long been viewed as a recruiting ground for Ministry of Magic appointments, and the Department of Mysteries is no exception. Many Unspeakables were hired as junior staff immediately upon completing their seventh year. The nature of their employment required a certain removal from society, so early recruitment reduced the amount of connections – and thus the amount of questions – that the average Unspeakable carried into adulthood. The Unspeakable role required advanced magical ability and absolute diligence to procedure; naturally, top N.E.W.T. students were prime targets for recruitment. The N.E.W.T. advisory board, in fact, evolved directly out of the mid-century Ministry’s ballooning need for new hires. It was instituted by the newly established Wizarding Examination Authority in 1953 under the leadership of Griselda Marchbanks for the express purpose of ‘identifying suitable trainees for leadership positions’ in the major MoM departments (Marchbanks’ relationship to the Department of Mysteries orbit are notable: she is sister-in-law to Director Judas Crane, and first cousin to Dumbledore confidante Elphias Doge). As has already been noted, the Hogwarts staff were well acquainted with DoM leadership, so a high-scoring seventh-year student could safely assume that he was being closely inspected throughout his tutelage for his merits as a junior Unspeakable. [. . .]
[. . .] Gilderoy Lockhart was another such recruit. Born in 1964 to a half-blood mother and a muggle father, Lockhart was the youngest of three and the only of his siblings to exhibit magical abilities. He was sorted into Ravenclaw House in 1975 and graduated in 1982 with full N.E.W.T.s. Lockhart’s time at Hogwarts was notable for high marks and an aptitude for rule-breaking – both attractive qualities to the DoM. Recruiters surely noted Lockhart’s seventh-year Charms essay on memory, a theoretical investigation that explored potential improvements to the traditional memory charm and drew conclusions from the work of the DoM’s own Phileus Hooker. Upon graduation, Lockhart expressed an interest in entering the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes; any pursuit of this ambition appears to have evaporated by midsummer. Within three months of graduation he had set out on a solo trip to South America, leaving behind no explanation as to his intent and no clear plans for his return. He remained in South America for the next two years, spending time in Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Brazil, and travelling as far north as Panama and Nicaragua. His adventures there, described in detail in his first published work, Wanderings with Werewolves, were supposedly accompanied by a sympathetic but ultimately dangerous werewolf who had been cast out of Chilean wizarding society. The climax of the memoir, of course, is that Lockhart is forced to hand over his werewolf friend to the Chilean authorities, at whose hand he was ultimately executed. Whether or not ‘El Lobo’ actually existed, at least some of Lockhart’s accounts appear to be true. Their simultaneity with a variety of violent uprising in the wizarding governments of Argentina, Bolivia, and Panama are, per Lockhart’s telling, purely coincidental.
Lockhart returned to England in 1984. He quickly gained a position at the Ministry of Magic on the DRCMC Ghoul Task Force, along with a Flourish and Blotts publishing deal. The memoir, almost certainly ghostwritten by DoM mouthpiece Jacquelyn Grinlow, was a sleeper bestseller. Its accompanying photographs, featuring Lockhart’s signature grin and striking cheekbones, made him an instant celebrity in 1980s wizarding Britain. Flourish and Blotts extended Lockhart’s publishing deal, and Lockhart promptly delivered. He recounted his trials with the Ghoul Task Force in his follow-up memoir, Gadding with Ghouls, released in 1985. His work in the Beast division sent him to a six-month stint in Ireland for the summer and fall of 1985, where his account Break with a Banshee tells the story of his combat with a County Cork banshee against the romantic backdrop of the failed Irish Independence Movement. Lockhart took a leave from the Beast Division to ‘holiday’ in the Soviet Union through 1986 (Holidays with Hags). He resigned from his position entirely in 1987 in supposed protest of the Ministry’s position on the Chinese Question; to demonstrate his bona fides, he proposed a year-long spiritual retreat in the Himalayas, of which Year with the Yeti is the result. The extraordinary success of Year with the Yeti secured Lockhart’s career as an independent researcher. 1989 saw him present for the Transylvanian Revolution under the guise of investigating the Vampire Tolerance movement (Voyages with Vampires). 1990 saw him observing trolls and the burgeoning Ancestral Magic movement in upper Scandinavia (Travels with Trolls). His autobiography, Magical Me, was completed in 1991 to record-breaking success. That same year he went on what would prove to be his final international assignment, an exploration of indigenous parselmouths in West Africa. The story of his time in Burkina Faso, christened with the working title Seducing the Serpent, was never released. Instead, Lockhart returned to Britain to accept a teaching position at Hogwarts. It was there that he suffered an accident, supposedly the result of a backfired memory charm, that led to his premature retirement. He was dismissed from Hogwarts School in June 1993; his publishing deal was terminated, and, as the flamboyant 1980s faded into the wartime 1990s, he disappeared from public life.
What can we make of this remarkable career? From an outside perspective, Lockhart’s obvious role as a DoM operative is all too typical. His arc resembles many of his contemporaries: a trial run in a low-priority territory, the successful completion of which results in a reputable cover and authorized Ministry clearance. This is followed, of course, by a series of excuses that bring him adjacent to a laundry list of the major wizarding political revolutions, failed and otherwise, of the 1980s: Ireland, the Soviet Union, Tibet, Transylvania, Svalbard. With no records available beyond Lockhart’s dubious (and heavily edited) accounts, we have no absolute proof that he was a registered DoM Unspeakable. But his is a story that we will seen time and time again as we peer into the pensieves of Judas Crane’s in-circle. For ten years, he was an indispensable part of the DoM’s control apparatus: colourful, innovative, ruthless, extraordinary, confounding, – and, when the time finally came, disposable.
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