Roderick Denis Edward Langford-Rae, born 1927

Rory's maternal grandfather George Shirran, a Scot of crofting and farm-labouring stock from Auchterless and Monquhitter, was both a career soldier in The Black Watch and a Chief Inspector for the Royal Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, equivalent to a senior social-worker in today's terms; his maternal grandmother Florence Blanche Franklin was three parts English to one part Southern Irish from a mixed family of soldiers, farm-labourers and prison warders.

His paternal grandfather, Denis Wilmot Rae, who had died before he was born, was descended from Southern Irish Catholic gentry in Castlemaine, County Kerry and had been both a senior policeman in Burma and a respected amateur anthropologist who studied the customs of the Kachin people; his paternal grandmother, Ma (later Daw) Kyin, was Shan with a dash of aristocratic Chinese, and said to be a woman of great beauty. "Shan" is the name by which they are generally known by the people around them but they call themselves Tai, "free", and are of Oriental origin, closely related to the people of Thailand and in some areas of China. Rory, therefore, was a quarter Oriental, although he didn't really look mixed-race.

Ethel Maud would later tell her friend Sangharakshita that she had no maternal feelings whatsoever and was completely indifferent to Rory. Other evidence suggests that this was not entirely true and that she at least had great affection for and pride in him as a friend, even if she wasn't very motherly, but Sangharakshita believes Rory was probably handed over to a Burmese ayah almost from birth. Or he may have been left with his Shan paternal grandmother Ma Kyin: certainly Rory would later be fluent in several Chinese dialects, despite growing up mainly in Britain, and I know his father Bertram's youngest brother Denis's oldest daughter Susan spent a lot of time with Ma Kyin as a child. Sam Newland visited Bertie and Ethel in Taunggyi, where Bertie was based at the time, in October 1929 and makes no mention of Rory, while he does mention Ethel making frequent trips to Rangoon - so it's possible that Rory was left with an ayah in Rangoon or with his grandmother when his father was posted away from the city.

For some reason my father's mother nearly always spoke of him as "Roderick", but he was "Rory" to most other people. She never had another child, even though so far as I know she was a Catholic at this point. I do wonder if she had a very difficult time giving birth to my father, and that was why she didn't bond with him: she might have been drugged to the gills and recovering from a Caesarean for several days while he had already been handed over to a wet-nurse.

It was common for British families in the Raj to send their children back to Britain to go to boarding school when they were about seven, but Rory was probably significantly younger than that when Ethel Maud took him to Scotland and left him with his aunt and uncle-by-marriage Lillian and James Currie in Kilmarnock. His half-brother Peter says that Rory "was sent to live with his aunt at a very, very young age as Ethel Maud did not like infants or children; there was always tension between them over this early abandonment", which suggests he was sent to Britain noticeably younger than the usual age.

We know he wasn't actually a babe in arms because he was baptised in Burma when he was fifteen months old. The fact that he would later be fluent in more than one Chinese language suggests that he remained in Burma as a child long enough to be verbally fully developed and to learn Chinese from his grandmother or from his ayah, but Sam Newland's memoirs indicate that Ethel Maud left Burma for Europe in spring or early summer 1930 when Rory was a little over three. I cannot find this jounrey in the shipping records, but come to Britain around that time she certainly did, since she travelled from Britain to Burma in late 1931 and back again in early 1932. In neither case did she appear to have a child with her, so it's reasonable to assume that Sam was right about her travelling to Britain in 1930, and that it was on this trip in 1930 that she took Rory to Scotland. His language skills must have developed quite early, since he wouldn't have had much chance to polish up his Chinese in Kilmarnock.

The Curries lived in an upstairs flat at 11 Barbadoes Road, Kilmarnock. James had been first a steel-smelter, then a soldier, then a butler, and was now an Inspector with the RSSPCC: so at least Rory was reasonably sure of a kind upbringing. Indeed he may have had a lucky escape: a discussion on The South Reports indicated that when his mother was a schoolmistress she was rather free about hitting children, albeit only with a ruler.

The Curries had two children, a daughter Florence born in 1916 and a son Anthony born in 1922. Downstairs lived a girl called Roberta Johnstone, born in 1920, who would later grow up to marry Anthony and who still recalls Rory. She misremembered both his name and his age, thinking that he was called Ronny and was only about two years younger than her, but it clearly is Rory she remembers because she knew that his mother had "gone back to India", and the eventual manner and date of his death. She recalls him as playing with "the other children" - presumably Anthony and Florence, although they were a lot older than him. I take the comment about the mother having "gone back" to the East to mean that Rory's mother brought rather than sent him to Scotland.

Rory would probably also have known his maternal grandfather George Shirran and grandmother Florence Blanche Franklin quite well, since they lived in Edinburgh and therefore within fairly easy visiting distance. George at this time was a Chief Inspector with the RSSPCC.

One wonders how the family got round the religious difficulties, for the Curries were Episcopalian and the Shirrans Presbyterian, and Rory was, or would later be, a Catholic. But Episcopalians (sometimes colloquially called Piskies) are generally much friendlier to Catholics than most Scottish Protestant sects.

Although the evidence suggests that Ethel/Elise brought Rory to Scotland in 1930, the shipping list shows her returning to England from Rangoon in March 1932, disembarking at Plymouth and staying, at least initially, with a friend in South Kensington. The timing suggests that she was on hand to choose a prep school for Rory, who was then five.

I don't know what primary school Rory went to initially - presumably something in Kilmarnock. A peculiarity of the Scottish education system means he might have started school at four and a half, or at five and a half. School records show that when he was six and a half, in autumn 1933, he became a boarder at St Augustine's Abbey School, which was under the aegis of St Augustine's Abbey in Ramsgate and at that time was based in a large house, since demolished, in the grounds of the Abbey. St Augustine's was a prep school, that is, a "preparatory" school which takes students who will later go to a fee-paying independent secondary school, usually when they are thirteen.

It's more common to start at prep school when you are eight, but seven or even six is not unknown. It was unusual for the Abbey School to take children as young as six, though, and since Rory left at the normal age, that is, at thirteen, he must have somehow had to do one of the forms twice. One of many minor mysteries in my family's history is why Rory was sent to do an extra year at a fee-paying school at the far end of Britain at an inconveniently young age, instead of staying gratis with his aunt in Kilmarnock for an extra year and starting at the Abbey School at seven like the other boys. However, his mother seems to have been based in Britain, and probably in London, from 1932 until at least 1936, so it may be that she wanted him in the south of England so she could see him more easily.

It was at St Augustine's that Rory met and became lifelong friends with the actor Charles Hodgson. Charles's mother Frieda Hodgson would later write a reference for Rory on the occasion of his applying to Oxford, in which she would state that she had known him since he was eight. Charlie was more than eleven months younger than Rory and probably wasn't packed off to boarding school at six, either, so it is probable that they didn't meet until Rory's third year at St Augustine's, the academic year in which Charlie turned eight in December and Rory turned nine in January. If he met Frieda when he was still eight that means he met Charlie's mother within a term of first meeting Charlie: they must have really hit it off almost as soon as they met, despite the age difference.

From this point forwards, both at St Augustine's and later, Rory used to spend the short holidays with the Hodgson family, who at the time were living in North Finchley, returning to visit his own family during the long summer holidays. It's unlikely he would have sailed to the Far East, since the trip took a month each way, so presumably he either stayed with his mother, if she was around, or returned to Kilmarnock to live with his aunt.

Whether or not he also took the opportunity to visit his aunt Jeannie Soloman, formerly an actress and now a nun at a convent in Finchley and suffering from a drink problem, is not recorded: but it seems likely that Frieda Hodgson, a devoutly Catholic drama tutor who lived nearby, would have known her.

At some point while he was still at school, Rory's mother went out to India. His army records from when he enlisted in 1944 give his mother's address, and his, as being in Fort Bombay, a posh area of Bombay (now Mumbai). Early in 1942 his father and stepmother had fled the war-zone in Burma and ended up based in Calcutta, and his father was working is special operations from late 1942 on. Whether Rory ever actually visited his mother in Mumbai, especially with a war on, is dubious.

Hpwever, someone would later claim that during the war they had met Rory's mother living on a tea-plantation in Jorhat, Assam, probably with one of Bertram's relatives. Rory would later work in the tea industry in Assam and would show a striking ability to connect with the native tea-pickers. If his mother really was in Jorhat, and if she went there before the war started, it's just about possible that Rory spent a couple of summer holidays there with her.

The first hundred years of the convoluted history of the schools attached to St Augustine's Abbey in Ramsgate have been recorded in detail in the book Scholastic Century: St Augustine's Abbey, Ramsgate 1865-1965 by Abbot David Parry O.S.B.. St Augustine's College, a boarding school for boys aged thirteen to eighteen, first opened in 1865 and closed in 1917 due to pressure of war. It re-opened in 1919 as a preparatory boarding school for boys aged seven to thirteen, called St Augustine's Abbey School. During the Second World War the Abbey School was evacuated to the village of Hemingford Grey in Huntingdonshire, where it remained until 1958 when it returned to the Abbey in Ramsgate - with a lot of complicated reshuffling, because its pre-war buildings were now being used to house a day school.

In 1961 the Abbey School moved to Assumption House, a former convent building about a thousand yards west of the Abbey, and St Augustine's College for boys aged thirteen to eighteen was revived and took over the school buildings at the Abbey. In 1971 both the School and the College relocated from Ramsgate to adjacent premises in nearby Westgate-on-Sea, where they remained until 1995, when the School and College closed and their Westgate buildings became a conference centre. In spring 2011 the parent Abbey in Ramsgate itself closed down and the monks moved to a former Franciscan Friary at Chilworth, Surrey, itself vacated when the friars moved to smaller premises.

Because St Augustine's Abbey School no longer exists, and nearly all of the buildings it inhabited in its ramblings have been pulled down and information on them is hard to find, I have made a separate page with a more detailed history of the school.

One wonders why Rory was sent to a school in east Kent, about as far from his aunt in Kilmarnock as it was possible to get without falling off Britain into the sea, when there were many nearer Catholic prep schools available. But it looks as though his mother was in Britain, and probably in London, from 1932 until at least 1936, so the logic may have been that she preferred life in London to life in Scotland, and she wanted her son to be at a school which was within fairly easy visiting-range of London.

Fr Benedict, who used to be at St Augustine's, has a stack of old school magazines which show Rory's arrival in autumn 1933, and various events from his school life (although I don't understand all of them). They show his progress through the arcane system of different forms which would probably depend not just on age but on performance:

Rory's great-grandmother, his mother's mother's mother Caroline Ellen Franklin, died late in 1938, while he was at St Augustine's. That year, the academic year 1938/39 when he was eleven and twelve, Rory seems to have been especially busy. At Christmas he played one of the Magi in a Nativity Play. In the Easter Term he was Confirmed as a Catholic, was in the rifle club and the hockey 2^nd XI, and was defeated at ping-pong by C St George (who also beat G Galletly at billiards - a very St Trinian's-esque touch). In the summer term he played Stephano in The Merchant of Venice, won a race over 220 yards in athletics and was in the cricket 2^nd XI.

Also during that year, term not specified, he was the form's postman - that is, the boy who couriered the students' letters to the Post Office. He was in the rugby 2^nd XV, he boxed, he played Antonio in The Tempest and went on a pilgrimage to the Marian shrine at Walsingham. A note says "Triduum Dmi chaplain to abbot". Triduum is the extended Easter celebration: Dmi I'm not sure about, although it can be an acronym for "Daughters of Mary Immaculate", but overall it probably means that he acted as the Abbot's assistant, which would presumably be a great honour.

Michael Bridson, a contemporary of Rory's at St Augustine's, vaguely recalls him and still has the Headmaster's Report for July 1939 which shows that during 1938/39 Rory won 2^nd Prize for History and Geography, and "one of two Old Augustinian's prize bats" which suggests that he had managed to break through fron the second to the first level of sporting achievement.

Rory accompanied the Abbey School when it was evacuated in September 1939 after the south coast became a restricted zone. The junior years went straight to a "small country house" at Madeley Court in a village called Hemingford Grey near St Ives in Huntingdonshire, which is a subdivision of Cambridgeshire. The older boys, including Rory, went first to Douai Abbey School, in between Reading and Newbury, where they spent two terms swapping rooms and facilities around with the resident school and survived a fierce winter and a 'flu' epidemic, before joining the younger boys in Hemingford Grey. [obituary for the sculptor and Drawing master John Bunting, who was also a contemporary of Rory's at St Augustine's; personal memory of Charles Hodgson's younger brother Patrick; information from Fr Oliver Holt OSB at Douai; St Augustine's College OA's & Ursuline PP's; Scholastic Century: St Augustine's Abbey, Ramsgate 1865-1965 by David Parry O.S.B.]

A gentleman called Leopold Antelme, a contemporary of Rory's, recalls him at this time as "a pale youth", which may have had something to do with his being mixed-race. The school magazines show that during this year of disruption Rory took part in rugby, hockey, cricket and boxing, was awarded the Cecil Kelly Memorial Prize for a historical essay and for diligence, and wrote a noteworthy essay called The Present Generation: it's not clear whether this was the essay he won the prize for or not. He also gained a scholarship to Ampleforth, the so-called "Catholic Eton".

The main building at Madeley Court was a large three-storey house a few hundred yards from the River Ouse, probably dating from the early to mid 19^th C, with a double-sloped mansard or "Second Empire" roof punctuated by dormer windows. The main door, which faced almost due west, opened onto a wide driveway with an oval of grass in the middle. The south face of the building looked out onto a lawn and had a glass-roofed verandah right across it, and on the north face two long, narrow protruding wings, swept back at an angle from the front elevation, enclosed a smaller lawn.

About twenty-five yards north of the main house was an old stable-block and coach-house which had been converted into classrooms and a library. The space between them was designated as the school quadrangle, and around the edges of the quad, and also north of the stable block, there were a series of small outbuildings - including a lavatory block which was partly open to the sky. A temporary wooden chapel had been erected at the back or east side of the main house.

Stephen McKayGeograph

The accommodation was rather grand, with the boys sleeping either in proper bedrooms or in a dormitory converted out of what seemed to be a ballroom, at the head of a great stair. However, it was all rather run down, cold and damp and over-run with mice - the last probably because of the boys' habit of posting any food they found inedible through a gap into the boarded-up grate in the ballroom. Food was sparse and of poor quality.

Being transplanted to one of the most picturesque villages in England had its compensations, and the boys made good use of the fields and the trees and the riverbanks. The Hodgson boys seem to have enjoyed themselves well enough there. John Pope recalls Frieda Hodgson sending her sons (and presumably Rory as well) "the most splendidly illustrated letters worthy of Beatrix Potter".

But the school also had its problems - quite apart from the poor food and cold damp accommodation. When my father was there the headmaster was the benign David Parry, author of the book Scholastic Century and later Abbot of St Augustine's: but in 1946 Parry was reassigned and replaced by a much harsher head, Fr Edward Hull, who was much given to e.g. beating boys for wetting the bed. [Following his retirement, Fr Hull and his housekeeper Ethel Maud Lelean, a former matron at the school, were to be murdered in May 1980 by a criminally insane escaped prisoner named Henry Gallagher.]

John Pope, who was at Madelely Court in the mid to late '40s, speaks of individuality being discouraged; of the students being cut off from any news from outside the school and having to resort to subterfuge to send letters to their families (except for Peter Hodgson who was now school "postman" and could presumably send and receive letters as he pleased); of an unreasonably early bedtime which left them awake in the dormitories for hours with nothing to do except gossip and make mischief. Patrick Hodgson recalls some of the students being publicly caned to discourage the dangerous practice of alleviating their boredom by climbing out of a dormer window and edging along the almost vertical roof to the next window, above a glass-roofed verandah which would have cut them to ribbons if they had fallen through it.

Caning the boys to save their lives from their own recklessness may be understandable, but many of the staff were overfond of the cane generally, and viciously enthusiastic. On the St Augustine's College OA's & Ursuline PP's page, former students of St Augustine's from Fr Hull's day, and even some from Parry's, refer to themselves as "Madeley Court survivors".

At the same time, this was a school with a long history of rewarding good behaviour with holidays and outings, and many of the staff were good fun and really tried to keep the boys amused and inspired as well as disciplined.

Arms of St Augustine's at Ramsgate The school kept tabs on old boys for years, recording their doings in the school magazine, which suggests interest and affection on both sides.

Either way I don't suppose that my father suffered too badly from the regime, since he was a prize-winning pupil and his subsequent career would show that he was very good at charming people and getting them to see his point of view. He seems to have been an acknowledged school "character": eight years after he left St Augustine's he was still storing a trunk with them which he would sometimes turn up and rummage through, somewhat to the staff's bemusement.

He ought to have been pathetic, having been dumped on his aunt at such a young age, and then sent away even from his aunt to live in a rather harsh boarding school from the age of six: but he seems to have sailed through life in the serene and largely justified conviction that if he smiled nicely and was polite and reasonable people would do whatever he wanted (which pretty-much explains how he got my mother into bed). If he ever felt the need to misbehave at school, he was probably winningly devious about it, and got away with it.

Also, being at St Augustine's meant being with Charlie, who would grow into a man who was famously good company, and since he won the prize bat my father was obviously Good at Games which is a guarantee of status at British schools. On the whole he probably had a reasonably good time at prep school.

Rory's application papers for Oxford show that he left St Augustine's for Ampleforth in summer 1940 when he was thirteen, a year after the school was first evacuated to Douai and a term after it arrived at Madeley Court.

Some time in 1940, the year he moved up to senior school, Rory's parents were divorced - which can't have played too well at a Catholic boarding school.

Charlie Hodgson's obituary shows that after St Augustine's he went to Blackfriars School at Laxton Hall near Corby, another Catholic boarding school, but Rory did not: a pity as Blackfriars by all accounts was a most interesting, original and friendly little school. But Ethel Maud, it would seem, wanted something more orthodoxly prestigious to be a feather in her cap, and Rory instead was sent to Ampleforth College, an extremely upmarket Catholic public school attached to a Benedictine abbey in Yorkshire. In any case he had won a scholarship to Ampleforth, although presumably his parents had influenced the choice of schools he applied for a scholarship to in the first place.

Nowadays a scholarship at Ampleforth confers high status and an expectation of high performance and academic and social responsibility, but no automatic remission of fees, although a bursary may be granted to poorer scholars at the school's discretion. This actually is very reasonable: there's no law which says that only the poor can be brilliant and it wouldn't be fair either to exclude the children of the rich from applying for and winning the academic status associated with a scholarship, or to automatically waive the fees of a bright kid whose parents might be millionaires. I haven't found out yet what the situation was in the 1940s but we know that as far as the staff were concerned Rory would have arrived already with his name in lights, although whether the other students were impressed by scholarship boys or not I don't know.

Ampleforth College, sometimes called the Catholic Eton but known to its students as "Shac" (Senior House Ampleforth College), is a very large, very prestigious and very expensive Catholic public school built around a Benedictine abbey, and the college and abbey together sit in - and occupy a substantial proportion of - a remote valley on the edge of the North York Moors National Park, about nine miles east-south-east of Thirsk. It resembles a village in its own right, with its own woods and lakes (fish ponds, anyway, one of them with trout, but they get called lakes), its own swimming pool, its own golf club, not one but two cricket pavillions, three squash courts - even in the Victorian era it was unusually thoughtful enough to provide an indoor playground, so the boys could still amuse themselves in wet weather.

Many of the buildings have been substantially remodelled over the years, but Ampleforth monastery's own archive has a good selection of photographs and engravings of the school as it originally appeared, including some of the interiors. The original buildings had a strange aesthetic, all long, super-wide corridors the size of indoor streets, like some incredibly up-market shopping mall: it was one of these internal thoroughfares which served as a playground.

In recent years the school's reputation has been marred by stories of sexual abuse which took place there from the 1960s to the 1990s, but abusive teachers were a very small minority and even during this period we find, for example, a student (now banker) Edward Kirwan who left Ampleforth in 1985 speaking of the monks' "deep wisdom" and understanding of human nature, and of being taught personal responsibility "through thoughtfulness, not the cane". The Good Schools Guide called Ampleforth "unfailingly civilised and understanding" with a "long liberal tradition".

Ampleforth College is divided into several houses, all named after British saints. Nowadays there are ten houses, three of them for girls. In 1940 there seem to have been five houses, all for boys: St Cuthbert's and St Oswald's, founded in 1926; St Wilfrid's, founded some time prior to 1930; St Edward's, founded in 1933 and recently amalgamated with St Wilfrid's; and St Dunstan's, founded in 1935.

Ampleforth monastery archive

School records show that Rory was in St Dunstan's House. I have a photo' which shows Rory on St Dunstan's house rugby team of 1943, wearing their brown and white strip and sitting in front of a distinctive bit of architecture: a doorway which has a single row of decoration in a contrasting colour on the left side, and a double row on the right. Confusingly, the architecture matches a photograph of the St Oswald's team of 1955 which is on the Old Amplefordians' website. It looks as though it is probably part of the Victorian abbey chapel which was built to a design by Charles Hansom in 1856/57. A block designed by Giles Gilbert Scott and consisting of a retrochoir and High Altar over a crypt was added at the west end of the Hansom chapel in 1922, and in 1957 the Hansom building was pulled down and replaced by a blocky Art Deco-ish design also by Gilbert Scott.

St Oswald's and St Dunstan's were using this same doorway in the Hansom church as a backdrop yet other houses didn't seem to do so: it wasn't a school-wide practice. The Ampleforth College website records that St Oswald's used to be in a building called Old House, pulled down in the 1970s: the central block of Old House was the original Ampleforth Lodge, built by Lady Anne Fairfax in 1783 as a residence for her chaplain Fr Anselm Bolton, and later donated by him to the monastic community of St Laurence when they were forced out of Revolutionary France. Old House was next door to the Hansom Church which might explain why St Oswald's used the church as a convenient backdrop: nowadays St Oswald's and St Dunstan's share a modern building, Nevill House, so perhaps they shared one in the '40s too.

Patrick Hodgson pointed out that the boys in the rugby photo' have clean knees but dirty kit: the photo' must have been taken after a bath and before playing, but they've put their kit on still muddy from last time.

In 1941, during Rory's first or second year at Ampleforth, his father re-married to an Austrian lady called Herta. The divorced-and-re-married thing can't have played too well at a Catholic public school, but Herta proved to be a much better Catholic than her predecessor. In fact I'm not sure whether Rory's mother Ethel Maud ever was a Catholic: my mother understood that she was, but Ethel Maud was a Presbyterian when Bertram married her for the first time (they married twice, once in Edinburgh in May 1923, once in Mandalay in December 1924), and she finished her life as a Buddhist. On the other hand, she did teach French at a Catholic school in the 1950s.

I haven't managed to find any accounts of life at Ampleforth in the 1940s, although there are a few from the 1950s. For some reason, there seem to be few accounts of Ampleforth on the net at all, except in the school's own journal. I don't know whether that means people weren't happy enough there to want to reminisce about it, or that they weren't miserable enough there to want to complain about it. Perhaps Ampleforth students just don't "do" online forums.

There seem to be no suggestions of sexual abuse happening at Ampleforth prior to the 1960s, but even so I imagine that a boys' boarding school the size of a village could be a scary place, and food and accommodation were probably pretty sparse in wartime, as they had been at St Augustine's. Even an affectionate, celebratory reminiscense of Ampleforth in the late '50s by David Skidmore OBE in The Ampleforth Journal of July 2010 refers to "the harsher realities of the Upper School".

Nor can Rory have been very happy about being parted from his best friend Charlie. Nevertheless, he arrived already with the extra status of being a scholarship winner, and if the liberal tradition referred to by the Good Schools Guide was already in place by the early '40s, it must have been a considerable improvement on the restrictive regime at Madeley Court. The closest I could get to my father's time in an account of Ampleforth was a commentator called Christian on The Far Sight blog recalling their grandfather, who started at Ampleforth the year after my father left it, saying that all the altar boys at Ampleforth wanted to be the one who carried the Abbot's cappa magna train, because the boy who did so would be dressed in full "Spanish Dress" like the chamberlains at the Vatican. This suggests a generally cheerful school culture and an enjoyment of the theatrical aspects of religion. Charlie Hodgson's brother Patrick, who started there in 1950, enjoyed his time there and did not experience any oppressive behaviour by either staff or fellow students.

David Skidmore, who was at Ampleforth's associated prep schools of Gilling and then Junior House (now combined as St Martin's Prep School), before moving on to Ampleforth proper in 1957, speaks of a thrilling theatrical society and of amiably eccentric schoolmasters, both monks and lay staff, all of whom he seems to remember with fondness. Of course, if there were any staff he hated or feared he probably wouldn't say so in the school's own journal - but at the least, it's clear that a high proportion of the staff were very likeable, whether or not all of them were.

Above all Skidmore speaks of a willingness by the staff to treat the boys as persons, to discuss all topics including religion freely with them and to take their views seriously and share their own opinions on an equal footing, rather than simply dictating to them; and of a general willingness to spend the sort of "quality time" with the boys that you might expect from an interested godfather or uncle. Even if the school in my father's day was rather more spartan - as it is almost bound to have been, in wartime - this kind of culture was probably already in place, and it sounds like a good environment for an articulate boy whose parents were on the other side of the world.

[Skidmore also speaks of other enjoyable aspects of school life such as regular school screenings of films and the keeping of eccentric pets, but it's not clear whether these extended to the boys in the upper school or not.]

The school showed, and encouraged, generosity and public spiritedness in Rory's day by setting up a wartime hostel for Polish boys in exile, and it was probably from them that Rory first acquired an interest in Polish politics which would later see him decorated by the Polish army in exile. One of these Polish refugee boys was the writer and dealer in antiquities George Lambor, who must have been in the same year as my father. While Lambor was at Ampleforth news reached him that his father, a resistance fighter against the Nazis, had been executed: this probably made a memorable impression on his classmates, especially as most of their fathers would have been in the armed forces and also in danger of death.

There are some criticisms of Ampleforth College on the net, but generally they seem to be ones which could equally be made about most schools. A recent (female) student for example complains that Ampleforth had nearly wrecked her career with a humorous but dismissive reference which suggests that a teacher had been led astray by the love of their own wit: but sarcastic school reports are regarded as an art form in some circles.

On James Holland's Second World War Forum Tom Neill, a former Battle of Britain pilot, reminisces about a dear and sweet-natured friend who had been at Ampleforth during the 1930s but had had to leave after his father went bankrupt and "they made his life hell at Ampleforth, the shits" - but it's not clear whether he means his friend was mocked by other boys because he was suddenly poor, which would show the internal culture of the school in a very poor light, or simply that the staff had handled his situation badly. If the latter it's not very surprising.

Neill's friend was a poor soul in need of help, rejected by his father and suffering from what sounds like Tourette's Syndrome which caused him to swear almost continuously, but nobody, not just monks, really understood how to deal with these problems at the time and the boy also had never read a book in his life - probably due to dyslexia, since dyslexia and Tourette's are both "autistic spectrum disorders" which often go together. If he was bullied by the other boys it presumably wasn't just for being poor but for odd behaviour which, at the time, wasn't understood to be involuntary, and obviously, given the general lack of understanding of these conditions in this period, the staff at Ampleforth were going to feel that an expensive and fairly academically rigorous faith school wasn't the place for a boy who swore constantly, couldn't (or at any rate didn't) read and couldn't afford the fees anyway. Again, the complaint is one which could probably have been made about 95% of schools of the period.

The only criticism - indeed, the only free-range comment about Ampleforth I could find at all - which is more than just a passing remark comes from a former student who was at St Wilfrid's College at Ampleforth from 1958 to 1963, writing as onwardoverland. He presents a negative image of sparse food and "tatty and run down" accommodation; of students being summoned from their beds to the St Wilfrid's housemaster's office to be caned in the middle of the night or, alternatively, to be given lessons in sexual purity in which the housemaster was rather too hung up on interrogating the students about whether they'd had any dreams about bare nekkid wimmin lately (onwardoverland found this embarrassing and unnerving, but a tougher boy would probably have thought "No I haven't, but thanks for some great ideas"); of sad monks who, while not actually abusive, developed embarrassing crushes on some of the boys and had to be sent away.

Onwardoverland attributes these oddities to the fact that at that time much of the teaching was done by celibate monks, but apart from the use of the cane, which was banned by my day but still common in the '50s, they don't sound much more worrying than some of the staff at my (academically high-powered and very enjoyable) all-girls' secular state grammar school in the 1970s: less so, if anything, since one of ours was a serial groper who once managed to strip down to his Y-fronts and one sock in front of most of the school during a Christmas show, and another actually eloped with one of the sixth form girls. Any large school is bound to end up with a few nutters on the staff, and again onwardoverland's complaint seems to be mainly about human imperfection in general, rather than Ampleforth in particular: he happens to have experienced it at Ampleforth because Ampleforth was where he was, but he would probably have encountered similar situations at any all-male boarding school.

Bill GriffithsGeograph

The sculptor Antony Gormley, creator of the iconic Angel of the North and nowadays an agnostic, was at Ampleforth in the 1960s: he must have arrived just after onwardoverland left. In an interview with the BBC he recalls that he took a full part in the religious life of the school and says that he had a wonderful time there, that the school awakened his love of art and eased him out of "the rigours of home life" and on his way to personal liberation, and that he is "immensely grateful for having been to that school". Vast numbers of people have passed through Ampleforth and a high proportion have done very well. The surroundings and facilities are gorgeous; it clearly provides a good education and has a very highly-regarded boys' choir, the Schola Cantorum; and the number of former students complaining about it seems to be low for such a populous school. Probably onwardoverland was just unlucky and caught it at a bad patch, or in a bad house.

The only criticism which really is worrying and something out of the ordinary is when onwardoverland writes that "The thick thugs were always put in positions of authority like dormitory monitors where they could create a hell for their victims. They were usually bigger and more violent. That was considered good medicine for the intellectual types.//There was a fashion for ball bashing in which an unsuspecting victim was hit in the balls. This was considered very funny." and that he himself had required reconstructive surgery as a result, and it was probably the cause of his lifelong inability to have children. It's not clear whether this sort of thing was general to all houses or only St Wilfrid's, but a photograph of St Dunstan's monitors in 1958 shows them looking as if they are trying to look like Teddy Boys (although one of them has only succeeded in looking remarkably like Private Pike trying to look like Al Capone).

It seems fair to say that with the exception of a few bad apples most of the staff at Ampleforth over the years were likeable and supportive and were - and were willing to be - very good company: indeed, it was probably that very culture of openness and friendliness, that assumption of trustworthiness and of a family-like relationship between staff and students, which would later enable a small group of abusers to take root in the school. At the same time, there were at least some periods and houses where the boys themselves were decidedly rough and had a culture of bullying. Even David Skidmore, in an article praising the school, still mentions the way the boys ganged together and jeered at anybody, even staff members or adults from outside the school, who admitted to voting Labour, and speaks of cruel older boys mocking any new boy who cried; and onwardoverland recalls serious, organised physical violence.

However, this cultivated thuggishness may have been a spin-off of the Teddy Boy movement of the 1950s, when it began to seem cool for boys to be violent. Skidmore started at Ampleforth senior school in 1957 and onwardoverland in 1958, but Patrick Hodgson, who started there in 1950, did not encounter any bullying and had a very pleasant time at Ampleforth.

Either way, I can't really see my dad being either a bully or significantly bullied. On the one hand he was famously so fair-minded, even-handed, tolerant, articulate and persuasive that he would be decorated at twenty-one for his skill as a negotiator, and he was Good at Games which is worth a lot of social Brownie points. On the other, he had a nice line in sarcasm, was on his house's second rugby team, had done at least some boxing and although as an adult he wasn't very tall, only 5'9", judging from his team photograph he appears to have hit 5'9" while most of his contemporaries were still 5'6". He was probably a vigorous participant in scrums, to judge from the amount and distribution of mud on his kit which suggests a sliding, shoulder-first tackle; he looks, or at least is trying to look, like trouble you wouldn't want to get into; and I doubt if he encountered much opposition that he couldn't either win over or flatten, verbally or physically.

While Rory was at Ampleforth his half-brother Peter was born in July 1942. Rory obviously remained on good terms with his father, even after his parents' divorce: all the photographs I have of him come from Herta, Rory's father's second wife, who must have inherited them from Bertram, and they show that Rory was sending his father photographs of his progress at school. His relationship with his mother was to some extent coloured by resentment at her abandoning him so young: even Rory's much younger half-brother Peter, who was very fond of Ethel Maud, says that she sent Rory to a posh boarding school because she "insisted on the best ... to make up for her neglect and to have something to show off over", though it must have been his father Bertram who actually footed the bill - whatever bill was left to foot after Rory won a scholarship.

To me, as a Harry Potter fan and specifically a Snape fan, the fact that my father died when he was thirty-eight; that he probably was, if not precisely a spy, at least the sort of person who did the sort of things the government doesn't let you talk about for thirty years; and that he was probably killed on a mission (of which more anon) was already fairly disturbing. The discovery that he went to Ampleforth, a huge, sprawling boarding school with its own woods and lakes at the edge of a forest at the edge of the Yorkshire moors; that Ampleforth is suspected of being a component in the inspiration for Hogwarts (apparently Rowling's cousin went there); and that in my father's day Ampleforth had its own special private steam train which collected students from King's Cross and term began when you got on the train is all just too, too creepy for words. My father rode the Hogwarts Express, for real....

It was whilst he was at St Augustine's that Rory first became friends with Charles (usually known as Charlie) Hodgson, who was nearly a year younger than Rory and would later be known as an actor, printer and publisher; with Charles's siblings Anna, Peter, Patrick and David and with their mother Frieda, the well-known drama teacher, and her husband Tommy. This relationship was one of the defining ones of Rory's life.

The arrangement whereby he would stay with the Hodgsons at their house at 30 Windermere Avenue in Finchley during the Christmas and Easter holidays was kept up all the way through his schooldays, even after he and Charlie were no longer schoolmates, and the Hodgsons continued to act as his second family (somewhat less racketty, despite their bohemian lifestyle, than his own) throughout his life. Sixty years later Charlie's younger siblings remember Rory as almost another brother, "a very special person and dearly loved within our family". In fact, nobody who ever met Rory seems to have had a bad word to say about him.

Patrick remembers Rory sleeping in Charlie's room above the front door; playing bicycle polo in the garden as a child and taking it in good part when Patrick accidentally hit him in the eye with a golf club; and sneaking back into the house late from the pub as an adult without putting the light on, being mistaken for a burglar and getting punched on the chin by Peter.

An obituary for Frieda Hodgson, written by her son Charles and printed in The Independent on 9^th October 1992, speaks of her as a dramatic figure in black cloak and wide hat; a liberal Catholic who trusted that the Lord would provide, even in the matter of buses; a trained physotherapist and expert on the beneficial effects of a good "bedside manner"; raising a large family with warmth and care and yet managing to keep open house to welcome young actors to Sunday evening sessions at her house, or to "her ramshackle seaside cottage at Dymchurch, where 25 at mealtimes were a regular feature in August". Charles's own obituary characterised the Sunday night sessions as "the Hodgson house ... filled with earnest young actors who danced, drank and celebrated the theatre". There were so many people coming and going at all hours that the family left the side door unlocked - and, almost inevitably, got burgled, despite Frieda's confidence that the Lord would look after the house. I suppose He did, in a sense, since the burglars were moderate and only took the fridge and the telly.

Frieda seems to have been warm, supportive and robust. Jane Moxey recalls preparing for the LAMDA (London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art) examinations in speech and drama and "remember[s] with gratefulness the amazing Miss Norah Ball, our beloved drama teacher, and the excitement of performing in front of the famous LAMDA adjudicator and teacher, Frieda Hodgson. Those two dear women believed that the confidence gained by learning to act could help students in their approach to interviews for jobs, public speaking and business meetings. [cut] They encouraged my talents and rewarded me with their praise and constructive criticism for which I shall always be grateful." Michael Freedland, writing in The Guardian on 23^rd October 1999, calls her "an eccentric old bird" and reports that her reaction to his Jewishness was "Wonderful. 5,000 years of suffering - use it darling."

As for Charles, after Laxton Hall he spent three years in the Navy, as Rory did in the Army, before going to Lincoln College Oxford. The theatrical scene at Oxford at that time was very lively. As an actor Charlie seems to have been almost constantly in work, yet never a big star - except once. When he was a student he played Ariel in a 1949 Oxford University production of The Tempest at Worcester College. The production was staged by the college lake, and slats were laid just under the surface, enabling Ariel to sprint apparently right across the water, before shinning up a tree to wave farewell to Prospero. His obituary from The Times of 18^th January 2007, some weeks after his death, says that no-one who saw his Ariel has ever forgotten it: almost certainly, those who saw it would have included Charlie's friend Rory, who was at Oxford in 1949.

Charlie was also a poet, a publisher, a keen cricket and rugby player, an entrepreneur and a loving father, and a Catholic of the buoyant rather than the guilt-ridden persuasion. The Times says that he was an active member of the Savile and Garrick Clubs and secretary of the Omar Khayyam Club ("which meets for boisterous dinners and copious amounts of wine in the chichi ballroom of the Savile Club", according to an obituary for the poet John Heath-Stubbs which appeared in The Guardian on 29^th December 2006) and calls him a man born two whiskies over par; infectiously convivial without the need for alcohol; who had elevated friendship to an art-form and whose habitual greeting on meeting an old friend was "Rejoice beyond a common joy".

My father's army service is quite complex, and his records consist of nearly twenty pages of cryptic symbols some of which I'm still trying to make sense of. When he went up to Oxford the then headmaster of Ampleforth wrote him a reference stating that he had been at Ampleforth from September 1940 to December 1944, but he had attempted to enlist considerably earlier than that.

Rory turned seventeen in January 1944 and on 30^th March he was examined by the Army and passed as A1. He is described as a Roman Catholic whose appearance matched his age and who was 5'9", with a 35½" chest with an expansion of 4", a fresh complexion, brown hair and eyes and a linear scar on or near his left eyebrow. On the 6^th of April, at York, he enlisted in the Grenadier Guards with the Army N° 2627026 and was then released to Class W/TA Reserve by authority of Part II orders serial 9 of 1945: that is, his "services [were] deemed to be more valuable to the country in civil rather than military employment". Presumably this was because he wasn't old enough to be sent overseas, so the army considered his time could best be spent in continuing his schooling until he turned eighteen. Soldiers on Class W Reserve were effectively civilians - they received no army pay, wore no uniform and were not subject to military discipline - but they could be recalled to the colours at any time. His home address at this point was said to be Fort Bombay, India and his next of kin was his mother, Mrs Elise Langford-Rae, c/o Lloyds Bank, also in Fort Bombay. Fort Bombay is a posh commercial area of Mumbai, where a fort used to be but no longer is.

The next day, 7^th April, he was released to the Class W/TA Reserves where he was to remain until 4^th January 1945. His "service towards limited engagement", however, was reckoned from 28^th July 1944 - the day he was exactly seventeen and a half. Confusingly, however, the records at Wellington Barracks say that he enlisted with the Grenadiers on 18^th July 1944.

Eighteen was the age at which you could be conscripted, and January 1945 was when Rory turned eighteen, but students were meant to be exempt from conscription. My father need not have joined the army at all, but instead, he enlisted as a schoolboy when he was still too young even to go into battle. Even so he was still in training when the war ended - but he joined in time to make his maternal grandfather George Shirran proud. Indeed, it was a year after Rory signed up with the Grenadiers, on 14^th July 1945, that his grandfather George died.

[His maternal grandmother Florence Blanche Shirran was to outlive him. His paternal grandfather Denis Wilmot Rae had died before he was born, but his paternal, Burmese grandmother Ma Kyin must have survived at least into the early to mid 1950s.]

In October 1944 a second half-brother, Richard, was born. On 5^th January 1945 Rory was passed as medically A1 again and became a proper soldier, based at "Home" i.e. in the U.K., and assigned as a Guardsman to a Training Battalion of the Welsh Guards. Various bits of unintelligible paperwork followed, and by 18^th February he seems to have been at the army training centre at Pirbright near Woking in Surrey, about thirty-five miles south-west of London - or he was, at the least, officially earmarked to be sent there. He was to be in the "pre OCTU" wing - that is, a preparatory unit which taught an eight-week (usually) course in basic skills common to all services, prior to the trainee joining an Officer Cadet Training Unit associated with their intended service and specialism. You can read about pre-OCTU training at the History of Vigo Village site.

While Rory was at Pirbright, on 8^th May 1945, the war in Europe came to an end. The dates on his documents are very confusing but on 17^th May Rory seems still to have been in pre-OCTU training but he was shifted on that date to "A" (Testing & Special Training) Wing 8^th Battalion The Sherwood Foresters) 148 Training Brigade for more pre-OCTU work. On 1^st June he finished pre-OCTU and was posted to 161 OCTU, who were based at the Mons Officer Cadet School at Aldershot. The next day he was officially enrolled as a cadet at Sandhurst (which included Mons) under the curious initials O.R.D.E. Langford-Rae. I can only think that the clerk asked him for his initials and he replied "Oh, R.D.E. ..." His mother's address was still care of Lloyd's Bank in Fort Bombay at this point.

It was while Rory was at 161 OCTU that his grandfather George Shirran died. On the 27^th of July Rory was transferred to A Company. On 4^th August, ten days before the end of the war in the East, he was rejected for officer training in the Guards, for reasons I have not yet been able to ascertain. It certainly wasn't because he didn't have what it took to be an officer, because he would later make full Lieutenant at the unusually early age of twenty. Possibly his height was a factor, since the Guards have a minimum height requirement. At 5'9" he had been fairly tall for a schoolboy, but by this point the regiment may have realised that he had hit his full growth unusually early, and that 5'9" was all they were going to get: not to mention my mother's stated opinion that my father in a Guardsman's bearskin helmet would have looked like a rabbit peeping out from underneath a hedge. Whatever the reason, Rory was tranferred to the Grenadier Guards' own Training Battalion as a regular Guardsman.

The Grenadier Guards are the third-oldest regiment in the British army (after the Life Guards and the Coldstream Guards) and most senior-ranking infantry regiment. However, on the 6^th of September, with the war now officially over, Rory transferred to the South Staffordshire Regiment, and was posted to 23 Infantry Training Centre as a Private. This would have been at Norton Barracks, Worcester. He was admitted to a Reception Station at Worcester on 12^th September and discharged from it on the 18^th, although he remained at 23ITC.

Two months later, on 18^th November, he was marked "Proceeded on draft Serial R.P.M.P.P." (the precise meaning of which I don't yet know) and on the 25^th of November he was posted to India. He was marked as having embarked for India that day but it's not clear whether he really did: no ship is mentioned and in fact he seems to have gone by plane six days later. On 1^st December he "deplaned" in Mauritius and then apparently caught another plane immediately, for he also deplaned on the same day at Mauripur (now Masroor Airbase, near Karachi) and then travelled to L.B.P.B.D. Ramgarh. It must have taken some days to get there, unless he caught another plane, as the distance is about eight hundred miles.

A week later, on 8^th December 1945, Rory was sentenced to fourteen days Confined to Barracks for "Insolence to a Warrant Officer and Adopting a slovenly and unsoldierlike manner", an offence which had apparently occurred that very day. When I described this to a young male friend of mine his immediate comment was "hangover". On 22^nd December - the very day his fortnight's CB came to an end - Rory was posted to the 1^st Battalion, presumably of the South Staffs.

On 21^st February 1946 my father was promoted to Unpaid Acting Lance Corporal - the lowest rank that wasn't actually a Private. On the 14^th of March he was made a Paid Acting Lance Corporal, and on the 15^th of May he was posted to the Officer Training School in Bangalore. You can read a first-hand account of this school and its exciting rodent population here.

A third half-brother, Francis, was born in October 1946. On 14^th December 1946 Rory was "discharged ... having been appointed to a commission". His rank was Officer Cadet in the South Staffordshires on the 14^th and 2^nd Lieutenant in the Oxford & Bucks Light Infantry on the 15^th. He was immediately "posted to M.E.L.F. via GHQ B.B.R.C. Kalyan". M.E.L.F. stood for Middle East Land Forces. He now had the new regimental number 377967 and it was probably at this point that his mother's new address was listed as care of Lloyd's Bank, New Delhi.

From 15^th to 26^th January 1947 he was travelling to the Middle East: his arrival is noted as "Disemb M.E. to B.T.D.", so he evidently travelled by ship. Two weeks later, his father Bertram Rae got himself into terrible difficulties.

During the war, Bertram had spent at least a year collecting political intelligence in the no-man's land between the Japanese and the Allies in the Chin Hills, followed by eighteen months trailing behind the advancing Allies, trying to restore civil order, and had been "mentioned in despatches", but the experience had left him with a degree of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Early in 1947, Burma was about to gain its independence and Bertram, who was District Superintendent of Police in Insein, just north of Rangoon, was doing a little light spying, reporting on the incoming administration to the British secret services. The prison in Insein was not the death-trap it was to become under the military regime, and nearly all the prisoners there were authentic petty crooks, not political prisoners, but it was still pretty rough and the prisoners were restive and wanted to have their say in the new regime. A couple of high-ranking British officials in the area had been heard to express the opinion that what was needed was a riot in which some of the prisoners were shot, as that would sober the prisoners up and restore order.

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On 9^th February a group of Burmese officials from the incoming new regime went to the prison to hold talks with the prisoners, and these two heavy-handed British officials, plus Bertram and a small group of local policemen, went with them to guard them. The prisoners invited the Burmese officials in and then started dicking them around, saying "Oh, you'll have to wait, we haven't had our dinner yet", thus keeping them hanging around for almost an hour.

When the Burmese officials didn't return in the expected time-frame the British officials feared a conspiracy, went in to find them and then started throwing their weight around in a needlessly heavy-handed and provoking way - quite possibly, intentionally provoking. This led to a riot in which the British officials were attacked, and Bertram - who had spent the war in constant military danger - ordered the police to open fire, killing four civilians.

There was a partial enquiry into this, but no formal charges were laid and the two officials who were found to have provoked the riot were allowed to slope off, leaving Bertram to carry the can for it. The new Burmese authorities considered that he had acted improperly because the design of the prison was such that a mass break-out was impossible and the officials were never in much danger - but it was never established whether Bertram could have known that they weren't in danger from where he was standing, and he was never given the opportunity to present any evidence in his own defence. Along with his wife and three small children (plus another on the way) he was sent to house arrest in the countryside and kept in limbo - in part, because the new Burmese authorities knew he was a part-time British government spy and they both resented him and wanted to keep him away from the action.

Meanwhile, on 6^th March 1947 Rory embarked from the Middle East for the U.K. under a system called "Leave in Addition to Python". Python was a wartime scheme whereby any man who had served overseas for four years was repatriated; "Leave in Addition to Python" was a new scheme whereby anybody who would have served overseas for three years as at their demobilisation was granted a short home leave. Its application to Rory is curious, since when he was later demobbed he had spent just two and a half years posted abroad, including two lots of leave during which he was in fact in the U.K.. He returned to the Middle East and to B.T.D., whatever B.T.D. was, on 8^th May.

The records of the Grenadier Guards say that Rory wasn't commissioned into the Ox & Bucks until 16^th May 1947, but this is clearly wrong. St Augustine's magazine for 1947 states that "After an already varied military career RDE Langford-Rae (1933-40) was commissioned in the Oxford & Bucks Light Infantry before Christmas. He was then in India but was expecting to proceed to Palestine. Returned to England and visited Hemingford." That confirms that he became a Second Lieutenant in the Ox & Bucks in December 1946, and returned to the U.K. a few months later. For some reason the Guards have got the date of his promotion wrong by six months.

The South Staffordshires seem to have been in India in 1946/47, which explains why Rory was. The fact that he was expected to go to Palestine on joining the Ox & Bucks means he must have been in 2^nd Battallion The Oxford & Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, a.k.a. the 52nd Regiment of Foot [Wikipedia: Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry; British Armed Forces and National Service].

On the 16^th of August 1947 he was moved from B.T.D. to H.Q. 26 B.L.U. MELF. On the 15^th of December he was promoted to full Lieutenant at the unusually early age of twenty: this promotion was later announced in the London Gazette. His brother Peter later recalled him to have been the youngest Captain in the British Army, and this was incorrect, for he never rose to that rank: but he may well have been the youngest full Lieutenant at that time, and would certainly have been one of the youngest.

Soon after his promotion he was sent back to the U.K. on "release leave", disembarking on 29^th January 1948, the day after his twenty-first birthday. The location of his leave was to be the Hodgsons' house at 30 Windermere Avenue. He was released from the service on 22^nd April, although he must have gone into the Reserves for four years. The Supplement to the London Gazette, 14^th March 1952, page 1456 records that "Lt. R. D. E. Langford-Rae (377967) of the Oxf. Bucks reliquishes his commn., and is granted the hon. rank of Lt."

St Augustine's magazine records that in 1948 "RDE Langford-Rae paid us one of his flying visits during the holidays, once more to delve into a mysterious trunk which has in some uncanny way lived on intact ever since he was a schoolboy here. He left the army two months ago and hopes to go to Oxford." Rory arrived in the U.K. after quitting the army in late January so the writer of this note must have been writing in late March or early April, and referring to the Easter holidays at the end of March. The school was still at Hemingford Grey at that point. They may have asked him to remove his belongings when they eventually moved back to Westgate, for a black metal trunk with Rory's name on it, perhaps the same one, ended up as a store for dressing-up clothes at the Hodgsons' house. It was probably to rummage in this trunk that Rory had visited the school during his leave in 1947, as well.

This trunk is still a mystery over sixty years later. It was probably too heavy to move easily, or somehow too secret to be seen with, or it was inconveniently huge and contained things he knew in advance he would only need access to very occasionally, otherwise why not take it with him to Ampleforth, or to the Hodgsons' place? It can't have contained things he might need urgently, such as his toothbrush or his passport, otherwise why leave it behind? Yet, whatever was in it was worth travelling to Huntingdon for, apparently several times, over a period of many years. And he was only thirteen when he left St Augustine's, so it probably didn't contain a stash of porn and whisky.

Many years later, in the 1970s long after Rory had died, his mother would complain that she had left a strongbox full of silver at Harrods and Harrods had lost it. It's difficult to see where anybody in her ancestry would have had the money for silver or why - given how many siblings and cousins she had - a significant proportion of any family silver would have come to her, but I know from Vivian Rodrigues, who grew up in pre-independence Burma, that British families in the Raj sometimes made money on the side by trading in eastern goods, including buying comparatively inexpensive Indian silver and importing it into Britain. Perhaps Rory's parents had funded him at school, and cheated Customs, by sending him to Britain with a trunk-load of Indian silver which they had bought on the cheap and which he would periodically turn into cash.

On the other hand the Buddhist theologian Sangharakshita, who was a friend of Rory's mother's, has suggested that the trunk might have contained precious stones, not silver. Burma is famous for its gemstones, expecially rubies and sapphires, and a pocket full of rubies would be much more portable and easier to hide than a silver teapot. Furthermore, these stones are found at the northern end of the Shan Plateau, and Rory's grandmother was a Shan.

If it really was silver, not stones, the residue might have been deposited at Harrods when St Augustine's finally got fed up with being used as a free bank - and far from Harrods losing it, Rory probably gradually emptied it out to help his father Bertram. Throughout 1948 Bertram was unable to find or even look for work, because he was still technically employed even though the job he'd been employed at ceased to exist in January 1948 when Burma became independent. His status was unclear - he'd been suspended from a police force which didn't even exist any more, and he'd been criticised by a court of enquiry but couldn't be said to have been found guilty of anything, because he'd never been allowed to defend himself and the two principal witnesses had left the country. Initially he was on half pay, but then out of spite the Burmese authorities not only cut his pay back to a quarter but did so retroactively, leaving him with a pregnant wife and three small children, and no income at all for three months. He was left broken financially and professionally. It wasn't until February 1949 that his contract was formally terminated, releasing him to seek other work, and it was March 1950 before he was able to claw back what little money the Burmese government admitted to owing him.

A newspaper report, clipped (probably by Bertram) from an unknown newspaper or magazine which used a slightly italicised Garamond type-face, shows Rory in profile looking solemn and dreamy, wearing a dark suit and displaying his odd, completely lobeless ears (not just attached lobes, but no lobe at all, without even a slight bump to show where a lobe might be). The text underneath says: "Mr. Roderick Langford-Rae, formerly of the Grenadier Guards and now studying at Oxford, was decorated by the General Commanding the Polish Forces in Egypt for work there at the early age of twenty-one."

Rory turned twenty-one in January 1948 and he was at university by October 1948, so the work he was doing in Egypt took place in spring or summer 1948, while his father was kicking his heels on half pay. He left the army to go on his final leave in January 1948 and formally left it in April, so it's unclear whether he was still technically a soldier or already a civilian when he did whatever he did in Egypt.

We know that he was in England at the end of January, and that he visited St Augustine's at Hemingford Grey in order to rummage through his mysterious trunk during the Easter school holidays, round about late March 1948. Given that there were only two months between his leaving the army and visiting St Augustine's, and then six months between visiting St Augustine's and going up to Oxford, you would have thought it more likely that whatever he did for the Polish army, he did after this visit to Hemingford Grey.

At any rate, he had presumably got his interest in Polish politics from talking to the Polish refugee students at Ampleforth. For what was Rory decorated? Peter Rae says "He won his Polish award for being a brilliant liaison officer with the Polish Army in Egypt - when flat-hunting in London in the 1960s I met a Polish landlord who know him from then. He was very much liked." This was at a time when there was a dispute over whether the Free Poles who had fought with the British Army would go home to a now Communist Poland, or stay in Britain, and how much help Britain would give them (at the risk of offending the new Communist regime) if they chose to stay. That Rory was decorated by the Poles, rather than the British, suggests that he won them some concessions. A gentleman at the Sikorski Museum in London told me that the General Commanding the Polish Forces in the Middle East at that time was Major-General Józef Wiatr, that the free Polish army in the west was indeed disbanded in 1948 and that the decoration which my father received was probably the Silver Cross of Merit.

It's easy to see why several of the people who knew my father suspected he was a part-time Intelligence agent of some kind (although he wasn't actually an employee of MI5 or MI6, at least prior to 1960 - I checked). He was first commissioned in (according to the Guards' records) May 1947, promoted to full Lieutenant just seven months later, left the army only six weeks after being promoted and then suddenly bobbed up acting as a civilian liason between the British government and the Polish Forces in Exile, when he was just turned twenty-one. A few months later, he went to Oxford to study Modern History - a perfect degree for somebody who was expected to be, in one sense or another, involved in politics.

I know from the records of the Degree Conferrals department at Oxford that Rory matriculated at Oxford University on 19^th October 1948, which I suppose would have been some weeks after he physically arrived there. According to Wiki (and assuming it's accurate) he would have been entered into the university's registry at a formal ceremony at which he would have been required to wear an academic gown over sub fusc. Around about the same time that he matriculated, he would have sat an entrance exam called Responsions.

[Sub fusc, from the Latin for "beneath black", may be applied to any very sober, drab outfit but properly refers to the clothing traditionally worn by Oxford University students on formal occasions, beneath their black gowns. For men it consists of a white shirt, black shoes, dark suit and white bow-tie; for women a white blouse, black shoes, black skirt worn with tights and a black ribbon around the neck.]

Rory studied Modern History at Oxford but he was not actually a member of a college. Instead, he came to the university through St Catherine's Society (see also St Catherine's College Oxford). This organisation aimed to provide "an Oxford education as full and many-sided as possible for poor men who cannot afford the expenses of a college life", although it was also much used by post-graduate students.

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St Catherine's students, known as "the Unattached", attended lectures and sat exams at the university but lived in private digs. Lodgings were usually off the Cowley and Iffley Roads or in Jericho, and were vetted and approved by a university official called a Censor, who also saw to the students' well-being and conduct. The Society had its own library, tutors, junior common room and dining hall in a purpose-built 1930s building in St Aldate's south of Christ Church, its own playing fields by the river and its own rowers and other athletes (its boating colours, chosen in the 1870s, were a very William Morris-ey French grey, maroon and chocolate). It is likely, however, that Rory also frequented Lincoln College, an intimate small ivy-covered quadrangle in the centre of the city, where his friend Charlie Hodgson was studying.

[In 1962 St Catherine's became a college in its own right, which seems to rather defeat the object of the exercise.]

Rory's half-brothers Timothy and Michael were born in May 1949 and December 1950 respectively: Michael was born three days before Christmas. Bertram, a pregnant Herta and their sons Peter, Richard, Francis and Timothy were in England during the summer of 1950 but were unable to secure a house, and had moved to Austria by the time Michael was born.

Wikipedia: Lamb & Flag (Oxford)

At some point while Rory was at university he was knocked over - by a vehicle, presumably - while leaving the Lamb & Flag pub and ended up spending time in the Radcliffe Hospital. While there he developed a relationship with a nurse called (ironically enough) Claire and they became engaged. He was all set to marry, with Charlie as his best man, but his fiancée more or less literally jilted him at the altar and Charlie had to explain to the guests, already arrived or arriving, that the wedding was off.

Rory was awarded a B.A. with third-class honours in Modern History in the Trinity (summer) Term of 1951 - if the accident and the failed romance were towards the end of his time at university, which I don't know, they probably affected his exam performance. He did not actually collect his degree until years later: this may have been because he was called abroad with the army before he had time to graduate, or he may have owed the university money.

Under a heading "Emergency Commissions", a supplement to The London Gazette of 11^th March 1952 (p. 1456), itself published on 14^th March, records that Lieutenant R. D. E. Langford-Rae of the Oxford & Bucks is to relinquish his commission on the 15^th of March 1952, and is granted the honorary rank of Lieutenant.

The timing is such that you would have expected him to have been called up from the Reserves to serve during the Suez Crisis. On 8^th October 1951 Egypt had renounced its 1936 treaty with Britain and on 19^th October the British took command of the Zone, leading to fighting in the area and unrest in Cairo (see 1956 Suez Canal Crisis): the two battalions of the Ox & Bucks, who by now had been amalgamated into one, were sent to the Suez Canal Zone in October 1951 to carry out internal security duties. However, there is no sign in his surviving Army Records that Rory served during this crisis.

When my mother first met him, early in 1958, my father was still wearing an army uniform with a wide "Sam Brown" officer's belt, and he told her he was just in the process of leaving the army. However, there is no sign on the records that he was still in the Reserves after 1952, and it may be that he was wearing his Army coat because he didn't have another - or because he knew it suited him.

By 1954, if not before, Rory was in Malaysia. Malaysia is a federation of thirteen states and three federal territories, and is divided into two major sections with a wide stretch of ocean between them: one part occupying the bulbous southern end of a long thin peninsula which extends south from Thailand, and the other part forming a strip along the northern margin of Borneo. It had been first loosely incorporated into the British Empire and governed by British Residents, then occupied by the Japanese, then briefly administered by the British military before being handed over to a new, local civilian government - initially to a Malayan Union in March 1946, and then, after further consultation, to a re-vamped Federation of Malaya in February 1948. Nevertheless, as at 1948 the great majority of Malayan Civil Service posts were still held by non-Malays, and the British Residents, now merely British Advisors, remained in place - although initially they had little to do because the new Malayan administration was so efficient. [Perkhidmatan Tadbir Dan Diplomatik (The Malaysian Civil Service) – In Service of the Nation]

Meanwhile, the Malayan Communist Party (M.C.P.) would have preferred to establish a People's Democratic Republic of Malaya. It had got a taste for armed struggle during the Japanese Occupation, and in May 1948 it began on an energetic campaign of sabotage, territorial encroachment and terrorism, including murdering non-Malays (Asian as well as white). Farmers and miners living at the edge of the jungle areas supplied goods to the terrorists, some willingly, others through extortion.

A State of Emergency was declared in July 1948, and the country was placed on a war footing, although it was termed an "emergency" for insurance reasons. At the top was a Federal War Council presided over by the High Commissioner, and below that were War Executive Committees responsible for strategic planning and execution of the government's response to the insurgency: first a State War Executive Committee (S.W.E.C.) for each state, presided over by the Resident Commissioner or equivalent, then below that a series of District War Executive Committees (D.W.E.C.) presided over by District Officers. These committees combined military, administrative and policing aspects: each State War Executive Committee included The British Advisor (who suddenly found himself with something to do again); the Chief Police Officer; the senior military commander; the state home guard, financial and information officers; an executive secretary and up to six community leaders. At the height of the Emergency the District War Executive Committees would meet every morning, so that this became known as Morning Prayers. [Perkhidmatan Tadbir Dan Diplomatik (The Malaysian Civil Service) – In Service of the Nation; Wikipedia: Malayan emergency]

This was not simply a matter of opposing the Communist insurgents because of their politics, for they could be seriously vicious. On August 12^th 2011, during a discussion of the supposed Chinese "death by a thousand cuts", The Daily Mail carried a letter from a JT Rohelin, a retired Major in the RAMC, in which he recalls: "...while in Malaya in the Fifties, I came across what I hope was the last case of execution by this method. We were fighting the Communists, the Orang Tiga Bintangs, who were mainly Chinese. They were a rotten lot and well worth fighting.//I was surgeon to the 21^st field surgical team, mainly dealing with gunshot wounds. At 4am, a girl of 16 was brought in. She was just alive. Her limbs and torso were covered with small incisions, 3in to 4in long and about 1in deep. There was a parang (Malay equivalent of the machete) wound in her right chest penetrating the right lung, diaphragm and liver.//A similar wound in the front of the abdomen passed through both walls of the stomach.//She failed to respond to resuscitation, was operated on at 7am and the intra-abdominal bleeding was controlled, but she died at lOam.//We later learned she had offended the Communists and that this was the method chosen to execute her."

The Emergency lasted for twelve years, with government forces actively hunting the terrorists, and carrying out a "food denial" campaign to cut off their food and arms supplies, in part by relocating settlers from the edge of the jungle to purpose-built New Villages. These New Villages could be seen as enforced refugee camps, but sincere efforts were made to provide sports facilities etc. to give the villagers a good standard of living. By the time the Emergency was declared over, in July 1960, there had been over ten thousand deaths, including some prominent government officials - two thousand four hundred civilians, two thousand members of the government security forces and six thousand Communist would-be insurgents.

Page 7 of The Straits Times of 19^th December 1952 reports that on the previous day, in Ipoh, Malaysia, a cadet officer in the Malaysian Civil Service (M.C.S.) named E. Langford-Rae had successfully appealed against a conviction and $45 fine for alleged negligent driving. I don't know of any E. Langford-Rae except for Rory's mother, who was elsewhere at the time. It's possible that one of Rory's Calcutta cousins had taken to calling themselves Langford-Rae instead of Rae, and joined the M.C.S.: but since Rory was working for or with the M.C.S. two years later, it seems more likely that "E. Langford-Rae" is a mistake for R. D. E. Langford-Rae. That would mean that Rory went out to Malaysia and joined the M.C.S. within a matter of months of quitting the army for the second time.

Rory's friend and colleague Rufus Cole understands Rory to have been on contract to the M.C.S. rather than employed by them, and says that he didn't drive and had no interest in owning a car. I'm not sure whether it's possible to be both on contract and a cadet civil servant, but it seems to be the case that my father could drive, but not well: he borrowed the Hodgsons' Hillman at one point and nearly had an accident. It seems that the reason my father didn't drive when Rufus knew him was because, like me, he had tried it and turned out to be very bad at it. In his case this may have something to do with having first learned to drive by driving a tank.

By 1954 Rory was Executive Secretary to the S.W.E.C. for the state of Negeri Sembilan, in the peninsular part of Malaysia. From April 1954 Rufus Cole, formerly with the Malayan Police, became an Assistant Protector of Aborigines in the Federal Department of Aborigines. He was working with the Orang Asli, the indigenous jungle people of Malaysia, in the area south of the Pahang river. Many of the Orang Asli had been resettled during 1952/53 to prevent the Communist forces from exploiting their crops and businesses as a resource, but by 1954 the Communists had been pushed back from the area and it was Rufus's job to help the indigenous jungle communities get back to their homes and become self-supporting again.

In his Patrol Diary, posted on the Malaya/Borneo Veterans, 1948-66 site, Rufus records that on 29^th July 1954 he was staying at a Rest House in Kuala Pilah and "Afternoon Rory Langford-Rae, Executive Sec., SWEC turned up, discussed general situation over a few beers."

Later, Rufus and Rory both lived in the Government Officers' Mess in Seremban and became close friends. Rufus remembers: "Rory didn't drive and had no interest in owning a car so we mostly went around in mine. Rory's position was Personal Secretary to the British Adviser (B.A.), Negri Sembilan and as such also acted as Secretary, State War Executive Committee (SWEC) which was chaired by the B.A. SWEC comprised Police, Army and Govt. Officers concerned with anti communist operations during the Malayan Emergency. Rory could not be described as your usual Govt. Officer of the British Empire but neither was I so we got on well together ... He stood about 5'9", well proportioned, of a quiet disposition but with an air of authority and good breeding about him. One of the least judgmental persons I have met; he had no fixed opinions but was tolerant of those who did."

According to the historian John Gullick, who had held the same position as Rory in the late '40s, the B.A. for whom Rory was working would initially have been Mervyn (Mubin) Sheppard, who later wrote a book about his experiences in Malaysia called Taman Budiman - Memoirs of an Unorthodox Civil Servant, and who became a convert to Islam.

Seremban is the state capital of Negeri Sembilan. Negeri Sembilan in general and Sembalan in particular have a strong Minangkabau presence. The Minangkabau, Minang or Padang are an ethnic group native to the highlands of western Sumatra but prominent also in Malaya, who combine Islamic belief with pre-Islamic animism and have a society in which religion and politics are primarily conducted by men, but inheritance passes through and to women. Their name is derived from the Malay menang kerbau, "winning buffalo", and their architecture with its distinctively curved and pointed, buffalo-horn-like gabled roofs is prominent in Seremban.

In October 1954 we can glimpse Rory in action. A gentleman called Mr Ryves, who seems from his numerous letters-to-the-editor to have been a serial complainer, wrote to The Straits Times about what he felt was the ineffectiveness of the Negeri Sembilan S.W.E.C.. In a letter printed on p.6 of The Straits Times of 28^th October 1954, in a section headed "MAN IN THE STREET", Rory replies with a letter so smug and sarcy I could have written it myself:

Food denial succeeding

IN Mr. Ryves' letter, published in your issue of Oct. 26, he offered some suggestions and some criticisms in connection with the food denial operation which is in progress around Seremban.
       The former are welcome, though it is not clear why he did not send them direct to the chairman of the State War Executive Committee instead of addressing the press with a copy to the chairman for information.
       His criticisms of the Seremban scheme are based on ignorance of facts which could have been supplied to him confidentially had he chosen to speak or write to the chairman of the S.W.E.C. or the chairman of the Seremban District W.E.C. which is, in fact, responsible for the scheme and its implementation.
       The community leaders and prominent unofficials in Seremban have acquainted themselves with the measures which have been applied since Oct. 18 but which, for obvious reasons, cannot be broadcast, and it is believed that they are well satisfied.
       An advisory committee is working in close co-operation with the Government with the object of making the measures still more effective.
       Members of this committee have all volunteered to do duty on the road checks, not because they "like holding up cars," as stated by Mr. Ryves, but to give public expression to their support for the operation.
       This operation has also been applied since Oct. 18 to all the new villages in the Semeban area mentioned in Mr. Ryves' letter.
       It is surprising that Mr. Ryves did not take the trouble to check his facts.
       But for the fact that we should regret to have another casualty amongst planters, we would be glad to see Mr. Ryves testing the value of the Security Forces at night along any of the "paths and byways" leading out of the town of Seremban.
       For his information, the operation which he misnames "Operation Futility" resulted in 19 kills and one surrender and Seremban D.W.E.C. and its numerous active supporters hope and expect that the present operation will be even more successful.

R.D.E. LANGFORD-RAE
Executive Secretary, S.W.E.C.

Peter believes that it may have been in Malaysia that Rory started on what would later be a career as a negotiatior between tea-planters and their work-force. Certainly his fluency in "a number of Chinese dialects" made him very effective as a member of the S.W.E.C., and Peter's understanding is that Rory's linguistic skills meant that he was often used as a negotiator in "tricky political situations", sometimes under-cover.

Mubin Sheppard seems to have left the post of B.A. in 1956. Around this time Rory evidently went back to Britain on leave, because his [other sort of] B.A. from Oxford was finally conferred at a graduation ceremony on 25^th February 1956, when he was twenty-nine.

Rufus recalls that during the time he knew Rory, 1954-1957, "China was making warlike gestures on the border with India", and Rory was quite worried about the safety of his mother, who was living with a holy man near the Indo-Chinese border. Rufus assumed that this must have been just before Rory's mother married the future First Minister of Sikkim and that she must have been staying at an ashram, but in fact before she married Kazi Lhendup she was a school-teacher in Delhi. I imagine that the "holy man" Rory was referring to was Kazi Lhendup himself, a former Buddhist abbot, who married Rory's mother some time in 1957 - although she did not in fact move from Delhi to Kalimpong, near the border with China, until quite late in the year. Despite her professed lack of maternal feeling, she evidently did keep Rory abreast of her affairs - in one sense or another. It was at this point that she took on the final rôle she would live and die under - that of the Kazini Elisa Maria Dorgi Khangsarpa of Chakhung.

It was also some time in 1957 that Rufus went back to the U.K. on leave, and while he was there Malaysia became fully independent on 31^st August 1957, and the post of British Advisor was abolished. When he returned to Malaysia he was posted away from Negeri Sembilan, and he and Rory lost touch. He understands Rory to have been on contract, however, not a member of the M.C.S., so he would have been made redundant when the post of B.A. ceased to exist.

It must have been some time in late 1957 that Rory returned to the British Isles, although not necessarily immediately to Britain. It was probably round about this time that he visited his father, stepmother and half-brothers in Austria: all of them including his stepmother seem to have been very fond of him. He also took a trip to Eire in order to do some research into his family history, in which he was as interested as I am, but without benefit of internet. [Alternatively the trip to Austria, and/or the trip to Eire, may have taken place during the same period of leave in early 1956 during which he graduated at Oxford.]

Rory was very close to his half-brother Peter, who remembers various snippets from the results of Rory's research, but I suspect they aren't all accurate. Not only is there the issue of whether Rory's discoveries were correct or not, but of whether Peter has accurately recalled conversations held over fifty years ago when he himself was a teenager.

Peter recalls Rory as finding a number of Langford Raes in County Waterford in Eire, and going to Ireland and visiting graves in or around Waterford. However, Rory was Southern Irish on both sides of his family, a Rae on his father's side and a Walsh on his mother's, and historically the Walshes were a very big family in Waterford, whereas the Langford Raes seem to have originated in County Kerry: so I am fairly sure it was actually the Walshes whom he was investigating.

Rory also apparently said that he had found a suggestion that the first Langford Raes went to India a year before the founding of the East India Company in 1599. I haven't myself found any evidence of Langford Raes any earlier than the late 18^th Century, but the Langford Raes were only Raes who had Langford as a recurring first or middle name, and they were a well-to-do family: it's entirely possible that their Rae or Macrae ancestors were trading with India over two centuries beforehand. Or perhaps that story too referred to a Walsh. Either way, the Southern Irish tend to have very long memories for pedigrees and it's very likely that Rory did indeed manage to trace a clear, definite family line back to the 16^th Century.

Nanking Night Life

Rory also traced the Chinese side of the family, one strand of his grandmother Ma Kyin's people, to an aristocratic line in Nanking: not an entirely happy discovery, for it means that there must have been relatives of ours massacred during the Rape of Nanking in 1937. He also came up with a strange origin-myth for the Macraes, of whom the Raes are an offshoot or alternative spelling. This seems to have been a story Rory told more than once, so it is very likely Peter is remembering it accurately - though where Rory got it from he doesn't know and nor do I. Rory's story was "that in 901 the clan was wiped out, except for a MacRae who was a monk and stepped forth to propagate the Scottish MacRaes, who then in part sided with Cromwell and were rewarded with land in Ireland".

The monk part is perfectly feasible. Most sources believe the Macraes originated in Ireland and didn't arrive in Scotland till about 1300AD, so in 901AD they would have been still in Ireland, where there were probably still remnants of the Celtic Christian tradition in which monks and nuns were allowed to marry. It wouldn't have involved apostasy, just an alterration of priorities, and it's perfectly possible that the party who went to Scotland three centuries later were the descendants of a single man who had chosen reproduction over vocation, and so saved his clan.

On the other hand, I haven't managed to find any other reference to Rory's story about the ancestral monk. I don't know whether it was something he heard or read, or even a piece of clairvoyance or putative past-life memory: he certainly either had, or was soon to develop, an interest in psychic/psychological techniques such as meditation.

I'm not sure about the Cromwell bit. All but one of the Langford Raes that I could find were Catholics and I would assume therefore that the Catholic Raes arrived in Ireland as Jacobite refugees: although the existence of at least one Protestant one does make it possible that they had started as a Protestant family and then become Catholic by conversion or intermarriage, perhaps with Jacobite refugees who arrived later. Clan is a more powerful bond than sectarianism is a divider. A friend called Ken Campbell tells a wonderful story of how, during one of the Jacobite Risings in Scotland, a unit of pro-Hanoverian Campbells and a unit of Jacobite Campbells met on the road, and their leaders went into a huddle and agreed - in order, they said, "to prevent unneccesary shedding of Campbell blood" - to pass by on opposite sides of the road and pretend they hadn't seen each other. If there were already Protestant, Cromwellian Macraes in the area they would probably have made their Catholic, Jacobite cousins welcome.

Bing Maps

By about February 1958, Rory was living with the Hodgsons at their house in North Finchley, and frequenting a pub called The Refectory in nearby Golders Green where my mother, Kathleen Veronica Jordan, was working as a barmaid: a strange, skewed building, with a short back wall, long blank brown-brick side-walls which diverge slightly away from each other and then a Queen Anne-style white front which slices across at a sharp angle. Rory's usual pub, where he used to hang out with Tommy Hodgson, was The Queen's Head in Ballards Lane and The Refectory looks like a bit of a dive, sticking up next to the railway line like a solitary tooth now that the building next to it has been pulled down, so presumably my mother was the attraction.

She was London Irish, just four and a half weeks older than Rory, ex-A.T.S. and hadn't much formal education but was intelligent, literate and literary with a figure to die for and a sparky, independent personality, if a bit daft in some ways. He was still wearing an army uniform and a wide, polished leather "Sam Brown" officer's belt although the evidence suggests that he had already left even the Reserves and was probably wearing his uniform because it included the only smart overcoat he owned: a quiet young man who used to lean on the bar nursing a whisky and watching Kathleen walk up and down. She had very good legs.

Not long after they met, Rory told Kathleen that he had left the army. They got into the habit of talking, and Rory took her to a party, then on a later occasion to the Hodgsons' where she slept on a guest-bed under the stairs. Then Rory went with the Hodgsons to stay at their summer cottage in the country, presumably the place at Dymchurch although my mother doesn't remember the location, and she went to visit him there (she recalls that he liked mussels, and this was probably where they got them from). She herself was staying in a bed-sit in Finchley at the time.

Although they knew each other for over a year, my mother actually found out very little about Rory: not even the fact that he was a crossword-fanatic and got David Hodgson into crosswords. Although he had beautiful and expressive hazel eyes, he was verbally reserved and very quiet, and never talked about his family or his work - indeed he didn't talk to her very much at all, although he encouraged her to talk, and to sing, and seem to enjoy listening. He liked music and was particularly fond of the Drum Carol (later known as The Little Drummer Boy) and of "When I fall in love, it will be forever..." but my mother doesn't recall ever hearing him sing himself. He also seems to have been somewhat camera-shy. The photographs I have of him come courtesy of his stepmother Herta, and all of them are formal images he probably couldn't get out of appearing in: there seem to be no casual snapshots of him.

Knowing what I know now, I'm not surprised by his reticence. His work in Malaysia wasn't really the sort of thing you talk about to outsiders and might have sounded like bragging if he had, and as for his parents, talking about his father would have been difficult without long embarrassing explanations about the Insein incident, and his mother had left him in a hopeless position.

He probably knew by now that she was lying about her origins - the mere fact that she had called both him and herself "Langford-Rae" as if it were a double-barrelled name was a clue, and by now she was not only claiming to be a Belgian aristocrat but had probably already started telling people that she was the daughter of Field-Marshal Mannerheim of Finland - the former for practical reasons, and the latter probably just for fun, since it amused her to see what she could get people to believe. Rory of course must have known that she, and he, sprang from a long line of teuchters because he'd been raised at least for a while by his aunt Lillian in Kilmarnock, so he had a choice between either buying into his mother's lies and so becoming a liar himself; telling the truth about his origins and thereby outing his mother as a fabulist; or not talking about his background at all. Consequently, the little my mother did find out about his background came either from the Hodgsons or from their Italian au pair Maria.

It was Frieda Hodgson who said that Rory's mother was "a very silly woman and best avoided", and Maria who said that she had "run off with a Tibetan".

He was quiet anyway, even about things he didn't need to be quiet about. Patrick Hodgson, who went to Ampleforth 1950-1955, never knew that Rory had been there too, yet it wasn't any great secret: my mother knew Rory had been to a public school "beginning with 'M'", and Patrick vaguely remembers Rory referring to the school by its in-house nickname "Shac" (Senior House Ampleforth College), which he wouldn't have done if he'd wanted to conceal his connection with it. I don't know if he was really being secretive, or just vaguely assumed that people already knew these things, or had discovered that if he created a conversational vacuum people would tell him things in order to fill it....

Rory seems to have been involved in some way with the Save the Children Fund, although evidently not in a salaried capacity, as he was definitely unemployed at this point - officially, anyway. Both the Hodgsons and his half-brother Peter suspect that Rory might have been at least loosely attached to British Intelligence. He wasn't with MI5 or MI6, but I don't suppose his father Bertram was either, yet it's on record that Bertram was spying on the incoming Burmese government in Burma, for the outgoing British government. Charlie's widow Constance "Blue" Hodgson, who never met Rory because she only joined the family after he had died, commented that she had formed the impression that "there were huge areas of Rory's life about which Charlie knew nothing", and Charlie's brother Patrick remembers Rory as "very good looking and always had a slight air of mystery about him ... we all loved him".

I was born on 8^th March 1959, a few weeks premature, so my mother must have fallen pregnant towards the end of June 1958 - only a few days before the death of James Bragg Currie, Rory's uncle-by-marriage who had helped to raise him [GROS Statutory Deaths 1958 597/00 0111]. Rory may have suspected Kathleen was pregnant before she told him she was, for he suddenly apologised to her as a non sequiter in the middle of a conversation. When she herself realised she was pregnant she moved house, out of a vague sense of not wanting to have to explain the pregnancy to neighbours who knew her, and ended up renting a bed-sit from a family called Muckerjee in or near Kensington, leaving Rory not knowing where she'd gone. She was working as a typist at a foreign embassy by this point but was desperately poor - when she gave birth to me she hadn't eaten for two or three days.

When my mother's brother (the actor Patrick Jordan) found out that she was pregnant, he apparently told his wife (the illustrator Margery Gill) "My bloody sister's in the pudding club".

Britmovie

I, Claire Margaret Jordan, was born in St Mary Abbot's Hospital, South Kensington, the accidental result of a contraception failure. Despite the stigma attached to illegitimate births at that time my mother never considered not having me, but took the line that if God or fate had decreed that she should be pregnant it was her duty to get on with it and do the best she could to play the hand she'd been given.

After I was born my mother contacted Rory and he came to see us, but I was asleep at the time and she wouldn't let him wake me up: so I never saw him living. They were divided by religious differences - Rory wanted to bring me up as a Catholic and my mother didn't - but Kathleen could probably have won him round if she'd tried a bit. Unfortunately, she was so wrapped up in having a real live baby that she didn't have much attention to spare for him, and his silence, his lack of communication about himself, had weakened the connection between them.

Myself, Claire, on my first Christmas, with my mother Kathleen (I can't make out what's happening with my legs there)

He did tentatively say that he wouldn't mind making another baby, but when my mother asked what she was going to use to support it he didn't answer. I take this to have been an oblique proposal of marriage, but my mother didn't register it as such at the time and I suppose that Rory couldn't bring himself to be more definite about it, after his first engagement had ended so disastrously. He must have found her choice of name for me especially inauspicious, for Claire was the name of the girl who had jilted him at the altar.

Myself, Rory's daughter Claire Margaret Jordan, about 18 months old, with favourite grey poodle stuffed toy

In any case, he explained apologetically that he had to go to India to start a job and it was something he couldn't get out of, but he gave her his contact address in India so she could write to him. Unfortunately my mother, in one of her irrational tempers, threw it out, and so he never heard from her again or had any news of me. She was angry with him for leaving us with no money, but in fact he had no way of knowing how poor she was - she always wore the smartest, most fashionable clothes and didn't let on that she'd either made them herself or bought them at jumble-sales - and subsequent events would show that Rory had hardly any more money than we did.

He'd been made redundant from his post in Malaysia; he was no longer getting his stipend as a Reservist; whatever his involvement with the Save the Children Fund was it evidently wasn't in a salaried capacity; and his father by this point was an unsuccessful building-supplies salesman, so if Rory ever had any spare cash I imagine he used it to help his father pay school fees for five sons aged between eight and sixteen. The fact that he was living with the Hodgsons, and went off to spend the summer in Dymchurch with them, confirms their memory that he had no job in Britain at that time: unless he took the post in India, he probably had no funds to offer. But my mother didn't know enough about Rory's background to know that, or that he really did need to go to India and it wasn't a sign of lack of interest on his part, because he was just as good at appearing both posher and richer than he really was as she was. Nor did he ever tell her that as a British Overseas Citizen he was not entitled to remain in the U.K. if he didn't have a job there.

Not only did Rory go to India but we went on to move house several times ourselves, so if he ever tried to contact my mother he wouldn't have been able to. Between poverty and child-rearing and dotting about from job to job, it wasn't until I was sixteen that she got back in touch with the Hodgsons to see if they could give her Rory's current address - only to learn that he had died just after my sixth birthday.

My father went out to Assam circa summer 1959, to work in the tea trade. Langford Frank Denis Rae, who was almost certainly Rory's father Bertram's first cousin, was a tea-planter in Assam. It's not clear whether he was still out there at this point - we only know he made his will in Cachor (now Cachar) province, Assam in 1947 and died in Worthing in Sussex in 1970 - but either way he was probably the contact through whom Rory got this job.

Assam is a beautiful, lush and extremely soggy area of North-West India, the home of the Indian rhinoceros, a beast whose skin-folds give it a strangely mechanical appearance, like a Victorian circus puppet, the legs clearly made from a different piece from the body. It is also one of the world's great tea-producing areas and it is to the tea-trade, at least on the face of it, that Rory had been called.

In March 1961 Rory's mother's sister Lillian Currie, the aunt in Kilmarnock who had raised him, died aged only sixty-five. [GROS Statutory Deaths 1961 597/00 0170]

mitali kalita bardoloi a.k.a. FreeJPG

Dibrugarh Excursions

Diocese of Dibrugarh, Assam

By 1965 Rory would be (according to his death certificate) the Acting Secretary of the Indian Tea Association, based at Dikom (or Dikam or Dikon), a large tea-estate and small village on the Assam Trunk (AT) Road about ten miles north-east of the town of Dibrugarh, midway between Dibrugarh and Chabua in the flood-plain of the Brahmaputra river. Dikom is renowned for the sweetness of its water, and the name itself is said to mean "water". Dibrugarh means "fort at the mouth of the river Dibaru" [bharatonline.com; FlightsKolkata.in], a tributary of the Brahmaputra.

Abhijit Gupta at Outlook traveller describes a pleasant holiday spent on the Jalan tea estate near Dibrugarh, so within a few miles of Dikom. He speaks of staying in a mid 19^th Century bungalow supported on stilts, which seems to float on an endless green sea of tea-bushes which are shaded from the sun by regularly-spaced acacia and black pepper trees planted for that purpose. This shade must presumably be a boon to the pickers, as well as to the plants.

A letter written by Rory's mother to a friend in Australia describes him as "Labour Advisor in the powerful Indian Tea Association". According to Rory's brother Peter, Rory's main job in Assam was as the principal negotiator between the bosses and the workforce, between the planters and the trades unions: and even though he was technically the bosses' man he was so friendly and fair-minded that he was "enormously trusted, liked and respected by the tea workers' unions of both Assam and Malaysia". But my father was only two generations from the fields himself.

It is likely that Rory was doing more or less this job from the outset, but there seems to have been a brief interlude in 1963 during which he was working as an Administrative Officer at the Tocklai Experimental Station of the Tea Research Association at Jorhat. Jorhat is about sixty miles south-west of Dibrugarh, so he probably wasn't doing both jobs at once: possibly he was on secondment, or perhaps he just moved around the area, doing whatever needed to be done.

The Buddhist theologian Sangharakshita, who was a friend of Rory's mother, recalls that Rory visited his mother (by this point the Kazini Elisa Maria) in Kalimpong in Sikkim some months before he died and also before Sangharakshita himself left Kalimpong, so probably in mid 1964 [this information comes both from Sangharakshita's book Precious Teachers and from private correspondence with him]. This visit may well have been slotted into a gap between leaving Jorhat and starting, or resuming, work at Dikom.

Rory's mother, however, showed little interest in him and apparently didn't invite him to stay with her - very possibly because she didn't want him to notice, and comment on, the prominently displayed, silver-framed photograph which she had been telling everybody was both Field Marshal Mannerheim of Finland and her natural father. I've never been able to figure out whether this was a real photograph of Mannerheim whom she was falsely claiming as her father, or a real photograph of her father whom she was falsely claiming to be Mannerheim, since the two men looked very alike and both had fancy uniforms and a chestful of medals: but either way, Rory would have known.

Whatever the reason, Rory ended up staying at the Himalayan Hotel in Kalimpong, where - to what must surely have been his mother's profound alarm - he made friends with a local character called Joe Cann who often drank at the hotel's bar. Cann was of British army origin but raised in Canada and more American-seeming than British, even though he hated Americans: a strange, bitter man with a taste for scandal, who had fallen out with the Kazini after retailing gossip about the relationship she had had with Lha Tsering, the "much feared" head of the Indian intelligence network for North-East India, some years before her marriage to her present husband the Kazi. The Kazini claimed the relationship had been platonic: Joe Cann claimed it was very much the reverse, complete with lurid details which may or may not have been invented. The Buddhist theologian Sangharakshita, who knew Cann well, writes about him extensively in his book Facing Mount Kanchenjunga, and it seems to me likely from Sangharakshita's description of his behaviour that Cann was both gay and mildly autistic, so he may not have been the best judge of what was going on in someone else's heterosexual flirtation, and his opinion on Elise's relationship with Lha Tsering can be taken with a pinch of salt.

Quite why Rory took up with Cann is unknown. He might have done it deliberately to annoy his mother, or to find out what she'd been up to, since he already resented the alacrity with which she had dumped him on her sister as a child and her current offhand attitude can only have made things worse. There might have been something clandestine about it, since Cann was widely believed to be an Indian Intelligence operative. Or it could just be that Cann, a bitter, unhappy man, latched on to Rory in the hopes of gathering some more gossip about his mother, and then found my father's quiet and accepting charm soothing.

However remote the Kazini was to her son, her husband Kazi Lhendup Dorgi was friendly and welcoming to him. Rory's half-brother Peter, who knew the Kazi well, recalls that "Kazi-Saheb was an incredibly well trained Buddhist able to achieve feats few in the West even to this day understand. [cut] Rory was given much training and was able to achieve many astonishing feats himself". Whether he learned these feats from the Kazi himself, perhaps on a previous visit, or from other people I don't know, but it would certainly give them something other than my grandmother to talk about, assuming they could get past the language barrier.

According to his death certificate, which my mother obtained in April 1981, my father died on 25^th March 1965 at Dibrugarh, aged thirty-eight. He was at the time of his death the Acting Secretary of the Indian Tea Association, and his claim to British nationality was under Section 12(4) of the British Nationality Act, 1948. This means that he was born in India (or rather, in Burma) but did not have Indian/Burmese nationality, and he had become a British Overseas Citizen in 1948 when India and Burma became independent. According to Wiki "British Overseas Citizens [are] unique in that their nationality status is not associated with the right of residence anywhere in the world".

His residence at time of death was c/o the Assam Branch of the Indian Tea Association, Dikom P.O., Assam. The informant was his employer, given as D.A. Sprigge, Secretary of the Indian Tea Association, of 6 Netaji Subhas Road, Calcutta - a note at the bottom of this column says "Local death certificate produced." Death was registered on 15^th July 1965: almost four months after the event, although probably the "local death certificate" was somewhat more prompt. His much younger brother Peter was summoned to the board room of a major tea-grower in the city (? Delhi, probably, or Calcutta) to be informed of his beloved half-brother's demise.

Surprisingly, no cause of death is given on the certificate. This isn't particularly sinister - there actually isn't a column for it on the form - and we know from other sources that his death was attributed to a car accident.

His mother Ethel Maud/Elisa Maria, that strange woman, told Sangharakshita (who was no longer living in Kalimpong by that point) that she was totally indifferent to and unmoved by her son's death, yet she wrote the prominent journalist Sunanda K Datta-Ray a most touching letter thanking him for his condolences, praising both him and my father in the highest terms (although she still managed to shoehorn a little politics into it) and referring to her son by his pet-name although in life she had always called him "Roderick":

THE KAZINI OF CHAKHUNG
Chakhung House
Kalimpong
W. Bengal
(Tel: KPG-89)

19.4.65

My dear Sunandaji,

       How wonderful of you, and just what I expected from you, to write me such a beautiful letter about the tragic death of “Rory.” I am only sorry that you and he did not meet, for you would have liked each other tremendously … he was so like you, frank, humorous, brilliant, and honest.
       I have received such a vast amount of letters from the various labour Unions with which he was associated that everyone is quite astonished. Let us say he was a man, like yourself, who could walk with beggars and kings.
       Oh, my dear Sunandaji, how right you are about the turgid politics of Sikkim …. Even now more turgid! The Coronation … oh ! oh ! And the awful blurbs in “The Statesman”!! And the reality !
       Do, oh! Do come and see us when you are next here. There is so much I should like to discuss with you, for, in so many ways, you remind me of Rory, his forthrightness, his intolerance of humbug, and his broad vision.
       From our hearts, dear Sunanda, we thank you, and we hope so much to have the great pleasure of meeting you again some day in the not too distant future.
       Bless you for your lovely thought in writing to me.

Yours affectionately
Sd. Kazini

The labour unions referred to, of course, were those of the tea-pickers who had adored him.

Sunanda, who also wasn't in Kalimpong at the time and had to go on third-party reports, writes in his book Smash and Grab: Annexation of Sikkim about the Kazini attending a palace ceremony soon after Rory's death: he describes it as the wedding of the Chogyal (the hereditary ruler of Sikkim) but in fact the Chogyal married in 1963, and the event referred to must have been his coronation on 4^th April 1965. Other attendees, he says, later described the Kazini with "tears of mascara streaming down her heavily powdered face, hysterically pouring out her inconsolable grief to anyone she managed to buttonhole", and yet at the same time taking the opportunity to distribute copies of a poem lampooning the Chogyal's American wife.

One never knows which of my grandmother's fronts was the real one if, in fact, any of them still was. She wept hysterically and inconsolably at the coronation a few days after Rory's death (at least according to Sunanda's informants) and wrote movingly to Sunanda extolling her son's many virtues; yet she never gave Sangharakshita any reason to doubt her claim that Rory's death had left her totally unmoved; yet to her stepson Peter she expressed concern about his brother's death, or at least about the true cause of it, which she was reluctant to accept was an accident. Of course, although she shared his humour and brilliance the other virtues which she praised in her son - frankness, honesty, forthrightness, intolerance of humbug, egalitarianism and broadness of vision - might have proved uncomfortable, since she herself had made a career out of lying about her peasant origins.

In a letter to her Australian friend Bernadette, Elise speaks of Rory's death in a way which is calm and steady but obviously bitter.

       My son, Roderick, was killed about one month ago in Assam. He had had a brilliant career at Oxford, later joined the Malayan Civil Service, and then became Labour Adviser in the powerful Indian Teas Association.
       He had a new car, and was returning to his house after shopping when his left rear tyre got punctured and the car skidded in trying to right the skid, his car capsized; a six ton lorry, fully laden, was hurtling along the road at breakneck speed, and crashed into the car and made matchwood of car and man.
       St. Augustine's Fathers held a beautiful Requiem Mass, and so did the Convent. It has left me so much more alone and rather withdrawn.
       I had to go to the Coronation, as Kazi said I should present a scarf at the religious ceremony to the Maharaja and Maharani ...

That, I think, is perhaps the key to her complex relationship with her son: that even if she had, as she told Sangharakshita, no maternal feelings as such, she did genuinely admire him and value him as a friend, as a companion she could talk to, and his death was a significant loss to her. Only a few weeks before Rory's unexpected death she had written to Bernadette about a death in her, Bernadette's family, saying, prophetically, "these sudden deaths always leave one very much bewildered and bereft". A few months later, on 12^th August 1965, she wrote "Even my poor son's body cannot rest in peace, for the cemetery in which my son was buried has been completely washed away by the overflowing of the river Brahamaputra."

Sunanda recalls that some people at the time felt that Elisa Maria pursued her inheritance from her son with indecent haste, yet the probate report is dated more than a year after Rory's death, and if she was hoping to inherit a significant sum she must have been sorely disappointed.

The probate report for Rory's death is dated the 19^th May 1966, extracted by Nichlas Williams and Co., 88/90 Chancery Lane, London WC2 (this reference to Nicholas Williams may relate to when the copy I have was provided, which was in the late 1970s or early '80s). It states that Roderick Denis Edward Langford-Rae of the Indian Tea Association, Dikom P.O. Assam (but described as domiciled in England) died intestate and a bachelor at Dikom on 25^th March 1965, and refers to "Elisa Maria Dorgi Khangsarpa the lawful mother and only person entitled to the estate of said intestate".

Letters of Administration of all the Estate had been granted by the High Court to Elisa Maria's lawful attorneys, William Henry Broughton and Colin Shapcott Hoad, solicitors, both of 88/90 Chancery Lane, London WC2. The value of Rory's estate was £212 15/- gross or £205 5/- net, which even in 1965 was not a vast sum to be someone's total financial worth - about £3,000 in today's terms. Even I would probably be worth more than that, if all my books and other possessions were sold wisely. That £205 5/- does seem to refer only to whatever property and monies Rory may have had in the U.K., and it's possible that he had a little in India also: but the fact that he died intestate tends to suggest that he knew he had very little to leave.

It was this probate report, combined with her son's birth certificate, which connected Ethel Maud Shirran, Sergeant's daughter and scion of a long line of farm labourers, with Elisa Maria Dorgi Khangsarpa, Kazini of Chakhung.

In a letter postmarked 2^nd September 1975, Frieda Hodgson wrote: "Dear Kathleen // I opened your letter very sadly - - - since Rory died about Seven Years ago - - in Assam - we shall never know if this was just an accident - - or if perhaps the death in a Car had political implications. We all miss him more than I can tell you, and send you all our sympathy and wishes - - and I hate to have to write you this letter - - - but you will understand - God bless - With Love Frieda".

On 14^th November 1975 my mother wrote to The Inspector General of Births & Deaths, Secretariat Hill, Shillong, Assam and to The Registrar of Births & Deaths, Dibrugarh, Lakimpur District, Assam, asking for information about Rory's death which she had been unable to find recorded in the Registry of Births, Marriages & Deaths for England and Wales (even though the life-events of British citizens working abroad often do make it into the British Registries, at least here in Scotland), and enclosing a cheque for £1 - around £10 in 2011 money - to cover costs.

On 3^rd November 1980 she wrote to them again, enclosing a copy of the previous letter and saying that since she had since moved house - which had occurred at the end of 1977, more than two years after the original letter was written - perhaps a reply from them had gone astray.

The following spring my mother received a letter dated 24^th March 1981 from Shri G.C. Rajkonwar, A.C.S., Additional Deputy Commissioner for the Dibrugarh District; Reference D.O. N° LSG 33/78-81/142; which states "Reference your letter dated the 3rd November, 1980 addressed to the Deputy Commissioner, Dibrugarh regarding the death of Mr. Rory Langford Rae, I am enclosing a letter from the Indian Tea Association under which he served at the time of his death, which will speak for itself. I am to apologise for this unavoidable delay in furnishing the details since certain enquiries had to be made to ascertain the facts."

The accompanying document says "Copy of letter No. Z.1/145/443 dated 26th February 1981 from the Secretary, Zone 1, Assam Branch Indian Tea Association, P.O. Lahoar, Pin 786010 to The Additional Deputy Commissioner, Dibrugarh District, Dibrugarh. Sub :- Mr. Rory Langford-Rae (Deceased) Dear Sir, Kindly refer to your letter No. LSG.33/78/80-81/110 dated 23rd February, 1981. 2. Mr. R. Langford-Rae, a British National, was an officer of this Association and was posted in our Assam Branch Headquarters at Dikom. He died in a motor accident near Dikom on the 25th of March, 1965. 3. This is for your information please. Yours faithfully, Sd/- R. Das SECRETARY ZONE 1."

Acting on this information my mother was able to obtain a copy of Rory's death certificate, which stated that he had died in Dibrugarh. So far, so normal. Dikom is about ten miles from Dibrugarh so a death near Dikom could easily be considered to be, at least loosely, "in Dibrugarh" - especially if he died on the Dibrugarh side of Dikom.

However, almost two years later my mother received a letter dated 6^th January 1983 from Dr. J.N.Gohain, M.B.B.S., (Cal) D.C.H.(Glasgow), Director of Health Services, Assam : Dispur: Gauhati - 781006; Reference D.O. N° 20/HSS/B & D/433/82; viz.: "Reference your letter dt. 3.11.80 with a copy of your letter dated 14.11.75 relating to death of Mr Rory Longford-Rae , a British man , I am to inform you that Mr. Rory Longford-Rae died in a Car accident in the year 1965 at Deemdeema in the State of Assam ( India ) according to a report received here from the Additional Superintendent of Police , Dibrugarh District , Dibrugarh. // The delay in reply which is unintentional is very much regratted."

This is the point at which the official version of my father's death starts to look a bit odd. Nowadays the term "Dibrugarh" is used to refer not just to the town of Dibrugarh but to the countryside for miles around it, known as the Dibrugarh District (see map at Indianetzone). Up until some time after 1969 [Socio-Cultural Ethos in Economic Development of Assam by H.N. Das], however, the area was considered to be part of the Lakhimpur District and "Dibrugarh" was reserved for the town. The changeover seems to have occurred in October 1971 as this is the starting-point from which the Dibrugarh District website counts its District Commissioners. My father's death certificate relates to 1965 and says that he died in "Dibrugarh, Lakhimpur District, Assam", so it is clearly the town which is meant.

There seems to be no place in India which is nowadays spelled Deemdeema. There are several places with similar names - the Dimdima tea garden at Birpara in West Bengal, the Deemdima River in North Bengal, the Dumduma Lake near Delhi etc. - but there seems to be only one which is even in Assam, let alone anywhere even vaguely close to Dibrugarh, and that's a small town called Dum Duma or Doom-Dooma, about fifty miles east-nor'-east of Dibrugarh and supposedly named after the sound made by the running feet of the elephants who used to frequent the area when it was a clearing in a jungle. On maps, Dum Duma seems to be the name of the town and Doom-Dooma the name of the area immediately north and east of the town.

Dum Duma is around fifteen miles north-east of Tinsukia, and even if you use the modern post-1971 district names it's well outside the Dibrugarh District. So we have a death certificate which states unequivocally that my father died in, or at least close to, the town of Dibrugarh, and a police report (or at least a second-hand account of the contents of a police report) which says he died fifty miles away at Dum Duma, which can in no way be said to count as "in Dibrugarh" - and Peter Rae's understanding is that the Assam police never closed the file on his brother's death. And why did the (presumably) same Additional District Commissioner who had written to my mother enclosing a letter from the India Tea Association saying Rory died at Dikom, then write to this Dr Gohain - who was not one of the people my mother had contacted - tell him that my father had died at Dum Duma and then, presumably, ask him to contact her?

It doesn't seem a likely clerical error. "Dikom" and "Deemdeema" contain some similar sounds but I would have thought it would be hard to mistake one for the other, in any script or language, and why - if Dikom was what he meant - would the Additional District Commissioner write to my mother enclosing a letter telling her my father died at Dikom, and then write to Dr Gohain asking him to tell my mother my father died at Dum Duma? Had Dr Gohain been sitting on a letter from the Additional District Commissioner for two years? Even if he had, why was he involved at all, and why would the Commissioner ask Dr Gohain to write to my mother, and then write to her himself? It sounds more as though the Additional District Commissioner had come on some new information after he wrote to my mother, and then had for some reason passed the news on via Dr Gohain rather than his own secretary.

It's just about possible that there is some innocent confusion here, and that what happened was that Rory was in an accident at Dum Duma, was taken to a hospital in Dibrugarh, the nearest major town, and died there. According to Sunanda, Assam is notorious for sudden fogs, and there are two right-angled kinks in the roads near Dum Duma so the lorry, speeding in fog, might well not have seen him - assuming that the lorry driver was stupid enough to speed on a kinked road, in fog. But then you have to ask what he would have been doing at Dum Duma in the first place, assuming that was genuine.

Dum Duma is described as "a beautiful tea town", so he could have been there on some work-related mission: perhaps there was some problem severe enough to require the Acting Secretary to be sent all that way. There also is, and already was by 1965, a Catholic mission and school about a mile and a half from Doom-Dooma. It's possible that as a Catholic Rory had some business there - although he died on a Thursday, and even if he had been going to mass every day, he would probably have gone to a church in Dibrugarh, ten miles from Dikom, rather than one in Doom-Dooma, forty miles from Dikom.

But if he was killed in Dum Duma (assuming the police report to be accurate) on Tea Association business, why the fifty-mile discrepancy in the different accounts of his death? Tea and churches not withstanding, apart from the elephants Dum Duma's main claim to fame is the presence just outside the village of a military airstrip used by the Indian airforce as a base for surveillance and reconnaissance flights. Dum Duma is the base from which India monitors its border with China, which at that time was extremely lively.

In 1962 the Sino-Indian War had been fought over the province of Arunachal Pradesh, at that time considered to be a tribal area of Assam, and China had won the war and then conceded the land to India anyway. China had carried out her first nuclear weapon test in October 1964. The Indo-Pakistani War, in which China sided with Pakistan, officially ran from August-September 1965 but actually began with skirmishes between India and Pakistan over the area called the Rann of Kutch, a vast seasonal salt marsh which crosses the Indo-Pakistani border from Gujerat to Sindh, on 20^th March 1965 and again in April - that is, a few days either side of my father's death - and Ayub Khan, President of Pakistan, visited China in March 1965. The airbase at Dum Duma must have been kept pretty busy, and one can certainly see that Rory, with his expertise in Chinese dialects, might have been at the airbase helping Indian Intelligence out by translating some Chinese communications.

If, on the other hand, the reference to Deemdeema is some kind of strange error and he really did die near Dikom, he would have been on the AT (Assam Transport) Road, on which Dikom sits in the middle of a flat and dead-straight stretch of road nearly four miles long. The likelihood therefore is that if he did die close to Dikom the lorry driver would have been able to see him from a long way away - even in fog, unless it was extremely thick.

Peter Rae has always understood that Rory was sometimes used as a semi-unofficial translator in difficult political situations out East. I don't know for sure whether this was genuine, or whether it was his mother's dramatic spin on her son's work in Malaysia: but his father Bertram certainly had done a little light spying on the Burmese government, for the British government, and the Hodgsons too felt that there were quite large areas of Rory's life they didn't know about and probably weren't supposed to know about.

You can certainly see that he would be an ideal candidate for that sort of thing: the Burmese-born yet Scottish-raised, public-school-and-Oxford-educated, mixed-race son of a Class One police officer and war hero and grandson of a career soldier in the Black Watch on one side and an anthropologist on the other, a Guardsman, a Lieutenant in the British Army and a senior civil servant in Malaysia, fluent in several Chinese languages, wildly popular with the local Assamese and decorated at twenty-one for his skill as a negotiator, charming, fluent, intelligent, emollient - apart from possible potential concerns about the "Southern Irish Catholic ancestry" and "eccentric, political-activist mother" aspects, you couldn't ask for a more promising recruit, and this was during a quiet patch in between bouts of unrest in Ulster, so the "Southern Irish" bit wouldn't have been of as much concern as it would have been ten years later.

Some time after Rory died, Peter Hodgson visited a psychic called Gwen Redrup, the wife of a colleague. According to Peter Rae, who heard about it at the time, Peter Hodgson was told that Gwen had a message for the brother (that would be, for Peter Rae) of somebody who had apparently been killed in an accident in Assam. Her contact's message for his brother and mother was, she said, "that he had been caught in an ambush when returning from a mission to a country in the North, [and] his death had been painless and instantaneous".

Mediumship is both subjective and fairly easy to fake, so it has to be treated with caution: but this message is certainly not a "Barnum statement". It's not like saying "You sometimes feel misunderstood" or "You feel you don't have time to achieve all that you want": you can't walk up to some random passerby and say "A friend of yours was killed while on a secret mission somewhere north of Assam and his death faked-up to look like a car accident, and now he wants you to take a message to his brother" and have a very high expectation that they'll say "Gosh, yes, that's right".

Since this medium was the wife of someone who knew Peter Hodgson, she may have heard a little about Rory through the grapevine and known that Peter knew him: but it's not likely she would have known that he was the sort of person who very well might have been killed in an ambush whilst on a clandestine mission to the north. And according to Peter Hodgson according to Patrick, she had never met Rory but she correctly described his characteristic posture, "sitting in an armchair with his hands on the arms of the chair in a Buddha-like pose." This sort of detail makes the message quite "evidential" and so more likely to be true.

So what lies north of Assam? First Arunachal Pradesh, which was not a "country" in the full political sense but could be loosely so described because it's a distinct tribal area; and then the eastern end of Tibet; and then China.

Arunachal Pradesh is probably the most likely candidate. At the time it was one of the areas governed by N.E.F.A., The North East Frontier Agency, but according to The Arunachal Times, "Realising the fact that India’s defeat in 1962 war was due to lack of road communication and other facilities in the Frontier State, the necessity was felt for urgent development of the area", and a four-member group called the Dying Ering Committee was appointed "to consider the expansion and development of modern local self-government in NEFA". Arunachal Pradesh at a Glance says that "the responsibility of the NEFA Administration was transferred to the Ministry of Home Affairs in 1965 as per the recommendations of the Dying Ering Commission (1965)".

The Dying Ering Committee was founded on 19^th May 1964 (see Panchayati Raj by Pratap Chandra Swain) and submited its report in January 1965. The administration of the N.E.F.A. area was transferred from the Ministry of External Affairs to the Ministry of Home Affairs on 1^st August 1965, and the findings of the Dying Ering Committee weren't implemented until 1967 and when they were it was with some changes. There must have been a great deal of local consultation and adjustment going on, in which Rory may have been involved - especially as many people in Arunachal Pradesh are Tai, the same people as the Shan, and speak a language similar to the one Rory would have learned at his Shan grandmother's knee.

If, indeed, he really had been doing any secret work in the north, the airbase at Dum Duma is exactly where he would have come and gone from. It would certainly make a lot of sense to think that my father was killed - whether by random bandits or by Chinese agents - while serving as a translator in Arunachal Pradesh or in some kind of clandestine activity on the Chinese border, and his body was brought back to Assam via Dum Duma, and a car accident mocked up by Indian Intelligence to explain his death without giving away the fact that a British agent had been involved in one of their operations. Or, alternatively, he might have successfully returned from the north via Dum Duma - or never left it, but was working at the airbase itself translating Chinese radio signals - and then either been hit by a lorry accidentally, or had his tyre shot and then been deliberately run down, and the apparent site of his death was moved to conceal his link with the military airbase. It would explain the fifty-mile discrepancy between where his death certificate says he died and where the Assam police say he died, and why (from what his brother Peter heard) the police were reluctant to close the case.

Peter says that even though Elisa Maria was not given to believing in mediumship or in the afterlife, she "accepted this explanation with relief as she never believed it could have been a car accident", and that given Rory's skill with meditation techniques etc., "sending a message from the beyond would have been simple".

My mother, who is given to psychic dreams, reports that at some point probably about a year before I began researching the family in summer 2010, and therefore well before she had any idea that Rory had any connections with Buddhism or any interest in meditation, my father appeared to her in a dream for the first time, smiling broadly and dressed "like a little Buddha". He had, according to Patrick, a memorable smile.

Roderick (Rory) Denis Edward Langford-Rae, born 1927

Food denial succeeding