Bertram Langford Denis Rae, born 1903

Much of the information I have on Bertie's early years comes from the writing of Major Sam Newland DSO, who was Bertie's schoolfriend. Sam was the son of a Chin noblewoman named Sina and of Surgeon Major Arthur GE Newland, anthropologist, lexicographer and award-winning photographer, who studied the language of the Chin people. Sam kept a diary of his early years which contained many references to his friend Bertie, but unfortunately this diary was lost during the Japanese invasion of Burma in the 1940s. Later he reconstructed it as best he could from memory, although some minor errors crept in with regard to things like place-names. A relative has supplied transcripts of relevant sections of Sam's memoirs, and also recollections by Sam's widow Rene Newland of things which Sam told her about those early years.

EltnegWorldisround

Bertram Langford Denis Rae (Bertie to his friends) was born on 28^th September 1903, the son of Denis Wilmot Rae, a respected British administrator and anthropolgist of Southern Irish origin, and of Ma Kyin (a.k.a. Daw Kyin, May Kym or Machin), the daughter of Lo Sit Pyun. He was most likely born at Bhamo in Burma (now Myanmar), or at least conceived there: we can place his father Denis Wilmot at or near Bhamo in 1897, circa 1900, in January 1903 and in 1905-1907, so he may well have been in that area for the whole period 1897-1907.

Sam Newland recalled Bertie's mother as being a Shan woman of great beauty. British government records described Bertram as Anglo-Karen, but family memory concurs with Sam. The Shan are of Chinese origin, while the Karen are not: an expert on Burma told me that both Ma Kyin's name and that of her father, Lo Sit Pyun, sound more Chinese than Karen, and family information is that Ma Kyin was part Chinese and descended from a noble family in Nanking. Denis Wilmot lived and worked among the ethnic Kachin people in north Burma and was an expert on their customs: but there are Shans and other local peoples living in the Kachin state as well as ethnic Kachins.

Pyin Oo Lwin, Myanmar\'s Highland City of Flowers

Bertie's parents married in Bhamo on 4^th January 1903, round about the time that Bertie was conceived. On the same date the couple's elder children, Robert or Bobbie R Rae (born 1900) and Virginia or Jeannie Monica Rae (born 1902) were christened.

Bertie himself, however, was christened more than five years later on 14^th February 1909 in Maymyo, a.k.a. Pyin Oo Lwin, along with his younger brother Harry Paul Rae (born 1905) [FamilySearch]. Maymyo, called the City of Flowers, was the hill-station for Mandalay: you can read about its various features and facilities in the Imperial gazeteer of India (Volume 17).

Denis was at various times a District Commissioner and a District Superintendent of Police, usually but not always in Bhamo, and also an anthropologist who studied the culture of the Kachin peoples. The fact that two children, one aged three years and the other ten months, were christened and their parents married in Bhamo all on the same day, suggests that prior to this mass ceremony the family were living somewhere out in the sticks, and that consequently, Bertie's parents were in the habit of saving up their registry and ecclesiastical paperwork - including not just christenings but also their own somewhat ex post facto marriage - and then sorting it out in a batch every few years, whenever they happened to visit a town with a Catholic church. Sam Newland refers to himself and Bobby (Bertie's big brother Robert) at fourteen as both having led "the same sort of out-back life" and Sam, we know, grew up in the Chin Hills, many miles from a proper road.

Alternatively Denis Wilmot himself may have been living in Bhamo while Ma Kyin and the children stayed with her family, and then she came down and joined him in Bhamo (and he promptly got her pregnant with Bertie). If the children were actually living in Bhamo - where we know their father was supposed to be based 1903-1907 - it's peculiar that Bertram and Henry weren't christened until Bertie was five and Harry, three, but the long delay makes sense if they lived in the deep countryside with their Shan family. When they were a little older the children all went to boarding school in Maymyo, so this second wave of christenings may have been done in Maymyo while Bobby, just turned nine, was being taken to or visited at school.

Perhaps Ma Kyin was an anthropologist herself, and was off gathering information when Denis could not - although before they were packed off to boarding school, having (eventually) five children probably occupied a lot of her time. That she was probably tribal and, according to Sam, a great beauty does not preclude her from having had academic interests. Although it was common at that time for European officials to take mistresses among the local people, it was an act of courage and independence for a prominent white official legally to marry an ethnic Myanmese woman, and they must have been a remarkable and noteworthy family in the area.

There was another boy Denis Wilmot Rae who was around five years younger than Bertie, and also a substantially older half-sister called Beatrice Eunice Rae, ten years older than Bertie and the product of his father Denis's first marriage. I don't know if she lived with the Raes or with her mother, assuming her mother to be still alive.

The family was not without its strains: Bertie's father Denis died of cancer in either 1919 or 1921; his older brother Robert (Bob or Bobby) was commited to a psychiatric asylum for seven years in his late twenties, after fataly stabbing the husband of his mistress (in fact because the said husband, an old schoolfriend of Bobby's, was trying to beat his brains out with an elephant bone at the time, but for reasons which aren't entirely clear Bobby decided to plead insanity rather than self-defence); and their sister Virginia, Jeannie or Jenny, a year older than Bertie, would in later life become variously a variety artiste (along with her brother Harry), a nun and a drunk. More details of Bertie's siblings can be found on the general Langford Rae page.

Burma-all.com says that "Shan" means "hill-savage" and is what other people in Burma call this tribe, but they call themselves "Thai", meaning "free", are part of the same group as the people of Thailand and are so fiercely independent that many of their villages in Burma have neither chief nor council.

Like his brothers, Bertie initially attended the Maymyo Government High School for Europeans. Despite its name this boarding school was not exclusively for Europeans, nor was it really a High School in the sense in which we now understand the term. It functioned as both a prep school, in that its students started there as young as six and often went on to public school in Britain, and as a public school in its own right, in that many of its students stayed on for the whole fo their schooling, took the Cambridge Certificate and went straight from Maymyo to universities in Britain and India. It was one of the top five high schools in Burma and according to Vivian Rodrigues "only the very privileged were allowed to enroll". Compulsory subjects included two units of maths, one of science, either Latin or Greek plus debating and sports.

Students who went on to other public schools didn't necessarily do so at thirteen. GHS Maymyo took boys who had been living both in the town and right out in the countryside where there was no-one to teach them, and sorted them into classes according to how much prior schooling they had had rather than how old they were, with the result that students ranged from five years old to well into their twenties.

We know about Bertie's schooling from the memoirs of Major Sam Newland. Sam had been living with his mother's people and had had no access to European-style education, other than his father's library of classics, so when he moved to Maymyo he ended up a year below Bertie's brother Bobby, even though they were the same age - and it's not clear whether Bobby was keeping up with his nominal age group or not. Nor was Sam the oldest boy in the class - that dubious honour went to a part Shan boy called Walter Lovett.

In my box-room I had about six boys, including R.R.Rae (Bobbie) who was the first to befriend me and show me the "ropes" in the school. We became fast friends as we discovered we had lead the same sort of out-back life and were mad on shooting. He managed to get another boy to change beds with me so that our beds were side by side and many were the stories we exchanged in bed after lights-out at 9 pm. Bobbie was about my age but one standard ahead of me. He had two other brothers in the school, Harry and Bertie and later a third brother, Denis, joined the school. After Bobbie joined up in 1917 and was sent to India for training, I took Bertie under my wing as he was keen on shooting too and we became life long friends afterwards. Harry was a lady killer and I never had much use for him. Denis was about half my age and I can hardly remember him in school ...

Bertie probably start at Maymyo High in 1910/1911, just before he turned seven - or about eighteen months after his father got round to having him christened. All of the Rae boys went to the same Maymyo High School (and Virginia went to Mamymyo Convent) and Sam, who was there until 1920, knew all of them, although Denis was very much younger than him and so they were not close friends. [Nearly thirty years later, Denis would be Sam's Second in Command during a desperate campaign of guerilla warfare in the jungles of Burma.] Other schoolfriends included Jack Girsham, Peter Bennie, George Fuller, Oscar Piggott, Arthur "Bill" Parry and Fred Lawson.

The boys slept in long dormitories according to age, from five to nine, nine to twelve and twelve up (assuming they moved up at the start of an academic year rather than on their birthday: otherwise five to eight, nine to twelve and thirteen up). The boys in the two older dorms also had box-rooms where groups of boys kept their trunks and which doubled as private sitting-rooms: Sam and Bobby belonged to a crowd who were obsessed with shooting. Sam doesn't mention Bertie in his memoirs as often as Bobby, and although he says Bertie was keen on shooting he doesn't mention him in relation to any hunting epidosdes, as he does repeatedly with Bobby - which gives me hope that my grandfather wasn't quite as keen on killing everything that moved as his brother was. We do glimpse him, taking a trip with Sam and with Walter Lovett, whom Sam describes in some detail.

Walter Lovette a day scholar, who was very keen on shooting [cut] had very little schooling and spoke a mixture of English, Burmese and Shan. He was a regular clown and used to keep us all in roars of laughter at our box-room tea sessions. He had a way of describing events with his mixture of words and gesticulations that was really funny to hear and see. He would, at times when worked up by his own story, jump up and act the whole scene all through. [cut]
During the remainder of the [Michaelmas 1918] holidays, Walter took Bertie Rae and me to Hsipaw where his family had returned for a visit to his father. I took my gun hoping to get some shooting but I think Hsipaw must be the worst place in the Shan States for shooting. Guns are plentiful in the Shan States and all game seems to have been shot out with the exception of a few gyi. Old man Lovett's sawmill was not working either for lack of contracts, so we were glad to get back to Maymyo.

Gokteik viaduct, from Ayerwady

The only thing that makes me remember the trip is that Walter, Bertie and I travelled without tickets on the way up and were petrified with fear when a Railway official travelled with us to some station near the Gok-Teik Viaduct. We breathed a great sigh of relief when he got off, I swore I would never do it again. The Gok-Teik Viaduct which crosses the Myitnge river at the deep Gok-Teik gorge is an engineering feat which should have been put down as the 8th. wonder of the world. The viaduct is built over a natural bridge under which the whole river disappears. From the top of the viaduct to the river level it is some 870 feet and to the natural bridge some 320 feet. The length is 2260 feet or nearly half a mile long. One gets an eerie feeling as the train crosses at a reduced speed. The whole structure seems to sway and if you happen to be looking down at the river some 870 feet below, the sensation is not unlike that experienced in a plane flying over a deep canyon.

So, we know Bertie was still at school in Maymyo in autumn 1918, assuming that Sam got the year right. Sam's memoirs of his schooldays are known to be confused about dates in some cases, because he has remembered the Chin Rebellion of 1917/18 as happening a year later than it in fact did, and he says that Bobby was still at school early in 1917 although army records suggest he was probably already in the army by the end of 1916 (he certainly enlisted in 1916), so when Sam says 1918 it's possible he really means 1917.

Bobby Rae left the school to go into the army, but Bertie was too young to enlist even if, like Bobby, he lied about his age, and we know that at some point he transferred to a school in England. Unlike the position in Britain, where the academic year runs from September to June, the school year at Maymyo High School coincided with the calendar year, plus (at least when Sam did it) the boat from Burma to Britain took a month, so unless Bertie flew to England by plane and started term a few weeks late as well, he cannot have started at school in England until September 1919 at the earliest - or Septemebr 1918 if Sam's memoirs are a year out.

According to Sam, "Bertie left Burma after passing the 7th. standard and went to Bedford Grammar to finish his schooling there, but when his father died about 1920 or so, it was found that the money he left was not sufficent to educate Bertie in the U.K." Bobby Rae was in the 5^th standard in 1914 (although it looks as though he may later have had to repeat a year) and Bertie was three and a half years younger than him and should have been three calendar and academic years behind him, if they were the same number of standards apart as years. That would put Bertie in the 2^nd standard in 1914 and in the 7^th standard in 1919, and starting at school in England in 1920.

It's possible he was more academically able than Bobby and so was only two years behind him, in which case he could have started at school in England in September 1919, when he would have been a few weeks short of sixteen. This fits better with Sam's recollections about the death of Bertie's father: "Old Rae" in fact seems to have died in February 1921 but if Sam thought of him as having died in 1920, and Bertie didn't even start at school in England until autumn 1920, you'd think Sam would have realised he might have got the year wrong.

Quite why he was sent to Britain isn't clear. The High School in Maymyo was at the academic standard of a good British public school and prepared students for university entrance, and so far as I know the Raes had no family in the U.K., nor was Bertie sent to a Catholic school, which would have been understandable - but I suppose it may simply have been felt that an education in mainland Britain was preferable, especially for someone who was planning to become a lawyer.

Sam Newland's memoirs state firmly, twice, that Bertie attended Bedford School (formerly Bedford Grammar School, but it changed its name in 1917) in England. This ancient school officially got its letters patent in 1552, but it certainly dates back to a school founded at nearby Newnham Priory around 1166, and may well be a continuation of a school in the same area which was mentioned in the Domesday Book in 1085. It is one of several schools in and around Bedford organised by the Harpur Trust, a fund set up by a 16^th C local worthy called Sir William Harper to provide food and education for poor children, and it takes both boarders and local day-pupils. It is divided into six houses, each named after a district in the town, into which students were originally sorted by district of origin. Each house includes both day students and boarders and has its own dormitory accommodation: the houses are often known informally by the name of their boarding facility.

I haven't yet found out what Bedford was like in 1917. Nowadays it is considered to be a hidden gem of a school, not very well known but with very high standards of care and teaching. In the 1930s and '40s, however, it had a borderline abusive and Hitlerian regime which sought to control parents as well as children, with day-boys being beaten if their parents took them outside their own houses after 6pm. It has contributed more former students to the armed forces than any British school except for Eton and Harrow, with an unusually high proportion of those recruits going into the medical branches of the services, and has four VC-winners to its name.

The fly in the ointment is that Bedford has looked and not found Bertie on their books. I don't know if this is due to some clerical problem at the time, or whether Sam got the name of the school wrong, or whether Bertie was for some reason using a different name. Bedford Modern School also disclaim all knowledge of a Bertram Rae and so has Bradford Grammar School.

Bertie was evidently regarded as resident in Britain, not just passing through, as his police-force records later describe him as domiciled in the U.K.. He had wanted and intended to be a lawyer, but his father Denis Wilmot Rae's death from cancer left him without the funds to complete his education and he had to follow his late father into the Imperial Police instead. Given that one of Bertie's uncles was the Managing Director of Arbuthnot's bank this lack of money is surprising, but perhaps the family had disowned Bertie's father for marrying a native woman.

The date of death of Denis Wilmot Rae the elder is disputed. There's a family document with a scribbled note on it which says that Denis Wilmot died in 1919, but an extant shipping list shows that on 12^th September 1920 a D.W. Rae, an Inspector of Police aged fifty-five and resident in Burma, arrived in Liverpool having come from Rangoon as a First-Class passenger on a merchant ship called the Martaban. He has a tick in a column for people who intend to be permanently resident in England, but the column has been re-labelled "India" (a term which at that time included Burma). This has to be Denis Wilmot. He was already retired at this point and it would appear that he used his new liberty to visit his son, and perhaps his half-sister Beatrice who was certainly in the U.K. by this point.

Denis cannot have stayed in Britain for long, for the trip between Burma and Britain took around a month and he must have set off again around New Year. A Denis Rae of the right age died on the 2^nd of February 1921 in Rangoon [FamilySearch]. Sam Newland recalled his friend's father as having died of cancer in "about 1920", and unless it was something really fast-acting he had probably been ill for some months, so logic suggests that he made the trip to the U.K. to visit Bertie because he knew he was dying and wanted to see his second son and his eldest daughter one last time.

Family tradition suggests that Bertie had actually started on a course in Law at Edinburgh University just before his father died, but Bertie does not appear in the records of Edinburgh University, and, Sam Newland who was doing a diploma (not a degree) in Forestry at Edinburgh University, speaks of Bertie turning up there some time in 1922 "from Bedford Grammar School", and says that "Bertie left Burma after passing the 7th standard and went to Bedford Grammar to finish his schooling there, but when his father died about 1920 or so, it was found that the money he left was not sufficient to educate Bertie in the U.K.. The latter therefore decided to have a shot a the I.P. [Imperial Police] examination, failing which he was going to migrate to Australia."

If Bertie stayed at Bedford to eighteen, which is normal for an English public school, he would have left school in June 1922, which fits with Sam's recollection and is definitely after even the latest possible date for his father's death, so it seems certain that Bertie never even got to start at university.

Sam Newland and his father Arthur arrived in Edinburgh early in 1921. After a year at a low-grade student flat in what sounds like Marchmont, they took a far superior lodging at 23 Melville Terrace, on the edge of The Meadows in between the turnings to Gladstone Terrace and Livingston Place. Here for £3 a week they had a large lounge, a main and a side bedroom and were provided with home comforts and plenty of good food by a pleasant landlady called Mrs Russell. Sam and his father shared a bedroom.

In his memoirs, Sam wrote: "Bertie Rae turned up during this year [1922] from Bedford Grammar School in England and as we had a spare room he occupied it free but had to pay for his meals." If Bertie had completed his studies at Bedford then this cannot have been earlier than June 1922, and Sam's account is fairly clear that it was indeed after the end of the academic year 1921/22. "He stayed here the best part of 1922 but took up residence at his girl's place soon after meeting her. She was a Miss Ethel Sherran, the daughter of a retired sergeant major of some Scottish regiment which had been stationed for a long period in India. Ethel was born out in India but been sent to a cheap school in Brittany in France and knew French like a native."

This was of course my grandmother, Ethel Maud Shirran, already beginning to embroider her life history: her siblings had been born in Gibraltar, Mauritius, Sitapur and Benares but she herself was born in Doune in Perthshire, and her father was a Regimental Quartermaster Sergeant. If Ethel was already bilingual in French at eighteen, however, and was claiming to have been sent to a cheap school on the continent, i.e. not using the story to big herself up, that part of her life story was probably true. In later life she would claim to have been educated in Belgium: it's not clear whether she changed her story or whether Sam misunderstood or misremembered where she had said she had been; but since Sam's memory for minor details is often confused I'm inclined to think that Ethel was telling the truth and that she went to school in Belgium for a year or two after the end of the war.

Ethel's family lived at 2 Boroughloch Square, at one end of a two-hundred-yard path the other end of which came out very close to 23 Melville Terrace: indeed if Sam's flat faced front and hers faced the back of her building, Bertie will have been able to see her window from his. The couple probably first met while strolling across The Meadows: Bertie was handsome in a long, boney way and Ethel was a sparkly little thing with honey-blonde hair, an established habit of flirting presents out of the foreign students and, as would later become apparent, a marked preference for Asian men.

Sam goes on to say: "As Bertie was studying to pass the Imperial Police examination and French being one of his subjects, Ethel took on the job of teaching him. This was one reason why he went and took up lodgings at her place. Ethel's best friend was May Maculloch, to whom I was eventually introduced and in time I got engaged to her [in the event Sam and May didn't marry].

Sam's chronology is obscure, and jsut by reading Sam's notes alone it is hard to make out when Sam moved in with Ethel or whether the tennis-playing summer was 1922 or 1923. The story is complicated by the fact that Bertie and Ethel actually married on 31^st May 1923 at the Sherriff Court House, Edinburgh [GROS Statutory Marriages 1923 685/04 0464], the marriage being witnessed by Ethel's mother Florence and sister Lillian, yet they seem never to have informed Sam of this important fact. You have to wonder why Bertie didn't tell his great friend Sam that he was now a married man - but perhaps if they'd decided to hold a quiet, family-only Registry Office marriage, he didn't want Sam to be upset that he hadn't been invited; or he was afraid that Sam, who was an ardent Baptist, would nag him about his having had a secular wedding. Or they enjoyed winding prim-and-proper Sam up by pretending to be "living in sin" - that would probably have appealed to Ethel's sense of humour.

At any rate, at the time of his wedding to Ethel Bertie is listed as living at 23 Melville Terrace, and Ethel as living at 2 Boroughloch Square. When he sailed for Burma in November 1924 [Ancestry.co.uk, shipping list for HMS Yorkshire of the Bibby Line, sailing from Liverpool in November 1924], Bertie gave his contact address as care of a Mrs Wallace of 28 Sciennes Road. 28 Sciennes Road and 23 Melville Terrace are on the south and north sides, respectively, of the same block.

It looks, therefore, as though the sequence of events was probably that Bertie finished his schooling at eighteen in the usual manner and then joined Sam in the summer of 1922. He met Ethel in late 1922 or early 1923 and married her in May 1923 - without telling Sam. Ethel then took lodgings in Sciennes Road and Bertie (her husband, although Sam didn't know it) then moved in with her. When Sam says that Bertie stayed at Melville Terrace for "the best part of 1922" before moving in with Ethel, he means he stayed there from May or June until the end of the year and into the next one. Alternatively, he may mean that Bertie left before the end of 1922 and went to live, initially, at Boroughloch Square along with Ethel, Ethel's parents George and Florence, Ethel's sister Lillian, Ethel's sister Lillian's husband James and Ethel's sister Lillian's six-year-old daughter Florence (born seven months after her parents' marriage) and infant son Anthony, but Bertie was too embarrassed to admit this to the Registrar.

I am about 85% certain that when I first investigated Ethel Maud, in the early 1990s, I found a reference to her living with Bertie as his common-law wife, which if true must have pre-dated their marriage. I thought she had appeared under that description as a witness on the wedding of one of her sisters, but this proved to be wrong. Depending on exactly when Bertie arrived in Edinburgh and how old the child was when and if he was baptised, the occasion might have been the christening of young Anthony, who was born in April 1922, but post 1855 baptisms aren't available on-line and I don't have the money to go into Edinburgh to look for it right now, so I couldn't swear to that.

"Bertie", Sam said, "had to study pretty hard too. The Imperial Police did not require a special training and anyone who could pass the entrance examination was accepted and posted to India or Burma straight away and got their training from actually doing police work." He was wrong about this last point. What Bertie would get by passing his exams wasn't direct entry to the Imperial Police, but entry to the Provincial Police Training School in Mandalay. I don't think it can be that Bertie served as a rank-and-file policeman before going to college to learn to be an officer, because his actual date of joining the police is recorded and it was at the time he started at the college.

One important thing I haven't been able to find out is where Bertie was studying at this point. He isn't on the lists for the University of Edinburgh but that may just mean he didn't matriculate and do a degree, which indeed we know he didn't - it doesn't necessarily rule out his doing a diploma at Edinburgh University, as Sam did. Or he might have scraped together enough money to attend Heriot-Watt College, which at that time was in the centre of Edinburgh and accessible from Melville Terrace. Heriot-Watt famously always had a high proportion of overseas students. It wasn't a soft or second-rate option, because it taught to the same level as a university: the reason it was considered a college rather than a "proper" university at that time was that it only covered a very limited range of subjects, mainly engineering and modern languages, and we know that French was one of Bertie's subjects.

Another possibility is that he attended Skerry's Civil Service College on Nicolson Street (now the Royal Bank of Scotland building, opposite Nicolson Square). We know that Ethel Maud did a course in shorthand-typing and/or general secretarial work at Skerry's: in August 1922 a newspaper advert for Skerry's listed Ethel Shirran as an alumna who had recently found paid employment (there was no other Ethel Shirran in Scotland at this time), and she would later be listed as a shorthand-typist on the registry entry for their marriage.

EdinPhoto

One of the courses offered by Skerry's was a primer for candidates intending to sit entrance exams for the civil service, such as Bertie would have had to take before becoming a serving police officer. It's even conceivable that Skerry's was where the couple met, although in that case Ethel would have been finishing her course as Bertie was beginning his.

There is a slight presumption in favour of Bertie having attended Heriot-Watt, based on the recruitment practices of the Imperial Indian Police. We know Bertie lived in Edinburgh yet didn't complete a degree at Edinburgh University (who have a complete archive of degree students). Normal recruitment practice favoured candidates with at least five years'-worth of education in Britain, whereas Bertie only had three or four, and also with a university level of education, viz:.

"Europeans of mixed descent and Indians of unmixed Asiatic descent, who have been educated in the United Kingdom for a period of five years, should be allowed to appear for the open competitive examination in London" [Royal Commission into the Public Services in India 1912, p. 281]

"Where possible all direct recruits should have taken the degree of a university or have passed an examination of a corresponding standard prescribed by Government for the European schools. Where this is not possible the local Governments should fix a minimum number who should possess this qualification" [Royal Commission into the Public Services in India 1912, p. 283]

A "direct recruit" was somebody who was taken straight in at a high-ranking officer level, as Bertie was. As for the university-level qualification, Bertie may have had one if he studied at Heriot-Watt (which doesn't have a student-archive one can check), or alternatively the Indian Police may have waived a point because he was the son of a District Superintendent, and only lack of funds had prevented him from getting a Law degree.

Ethel Maud would later display a great knowledge of the law which she probably got from Bertie, which suggests that he kept his passion for legal matters.

Be that as it may, Sam Newland, looking back from a distance of thirty years or more and trying to reconstruct the diaries which he had lost during the Japanese invasion of Burma, says that "Bertie managed to pass the examination in 1923 [in London, presumably] and was sent out to Burma in the same year. Ethel followed the next year to marry him and I had to lend them £100 to pay for her passage."

In fact, of course, Bertie and Ethel were already married, and had been for a year or more, ever since 31^st May 1923 [GROS Statutory Marriages 1923 685/04 0464].

On his marriage certificate Bertram is described as "Student (Indian Police)", so in May 1923 he was already a policeman, or thought of himself as one, yet was still a student. This tends to suggest that he married after passing the I.P. entrance exam and before going to the Provincial Police Training School in Mandalay. Yet, confusingly, his records show him as not joining the police until 12^th December 1924 - and that wasn't when he graduated from the Training School, because he was still listed as being at the school in summer 1925. Also, the tennis summer pretty well has to have been 1923, and Sam speaks of Bertie still studying hard at that point - and the shippinbg records show that Bertie and Ethel both travelled to Burma late in 1924, only a few days apart. It looks as though Sam must have lost a year somewhere and Bertie sat his exams in 1924.

The 1923 marriage lines are noteworthy for another reason. Bertie's birth name was Bertram Langford Denis Rae, and in later life he would be referred to in official documents as BLD Rae, but on the register entry for his marriage he has given his name as Bertram Langford Rae and his signature as Bertram L Rae. This may mark the beginning of an attempt to pass "Langford-Rae" off as a double-barrelled name, as both his wife and his son would later do. We don't know whether this was Bertie's idea, or Ethel's - but if it was Bertie's he wouldn't be the first member of his family to do so. His cousin Langford Frank Allen Rae, Chief Inspector of Police in Calcutta, ended up calling himself Frank Langford Rae and some of his descendants also treated Langford as part of their surname.

There were two other incidents which happened at some point during Bertie's stay in Edinburgh. Some years later, back in Burma, Sam was to fall, briefly but disastrously, for a girl called Issabelle Bacon, resulting in the end of his engagement to May. He had not met Issabelle before, but Bertie evidently had.

One of [Mogok's] keenest shikaris was old Arthur Bacon, probably one of the best shikaris in Upper Burma in those days. The Burma Game Laws were not in force in his time, and he took advantage of it to hunt for ivory. According to him he had a very fine collection of tusks, which he eventually had to sell when he took his family to the U.K for a long holiday, just about the time I was studying at Edinburgh University. In fact, I remember Bertie Rae wanting to go and see Issabelle Bacon at a convent there where she had been left to study. Mrs Bacon was a social climber with very extravagant ideas without the means to back her tastes, as her husband was only an inspector of the Ruby Mines Ltd. with a small pay. Old Bacon belonged to the local branch of the Indian Defence Force (a voluntary unpaid force) and had reached the honorary rank of Lt. Colonel on the ground of long service in it. This was put to great use by Mrs Bacon, who saw to it that her husband was introduced to all and sundry white visitors, including tourists, as "The Colonel". [cut]
The Bacon family consisted of the old man and his wife and two daughters [cut] The eldest daughter, Madge [cut] was a replica of her old mother in aims, taste and extravagance, though, like her mother also, good natured when all is going well. [cut]
Issabelle was different to "Mrs B" (as she was always referred to) and Madge [cut]. When I first met her she must have been only about 16 or so. [cut] Issabelle had no education and her only attributes were her attractiveness and good nature ...

Issabelle must have been about twelve in 1922 and Bertie was eighteen or nineteen, so it's unlikely that his interest in her was romantic. Rather, this suggests that the Bacons were family friends for whom Bertie had some affection: the Ruby Mines District was close to Bhamo where Bertie's father had been based. Interestingly, "Mrs B" sounds rather like Ethel Maud as she would eventually turn out, although with rather less panache. If Mrs Bacon was a family friend of whom Bertie was fond, that might have contributed to his liking for my gran.

Another incident, recalled by Bertie's son Francis, may have happened while Bertie was a student at Edinburgh or possibly during his final year at school. "There was one little story when he was a student in England. A friend of his asked him to ride his huge motorbike to somewhere and Dad had never ridden one before (may have been a Harley) and it was a true nightmare for him trying to keep the thing under control."

One curious point is that if Sam's memory is correct Ethel had already told Bertie at least one lie - that she was born in India - before they married, yet Bertie must have known her parents and sister who would be able to tell him the truth.

Sam Newland's widow Rene (not May, from whom he split up) knows Ethel only by the name Elise or Elisa, which suggests that she changed her name as soon as she arrived in Burma, and she was certainly calling herself Elise by the 1940s: but before she even left Scotland she was already showing signs of headstrong behaviour, although quite what kind is impossible to tell from this remove. Rene recalls Sam as saying that after Bertie had left for Burma Ethel tried to get Sam to elope with her, which shocked him to the core.

We cannot know, now, exactly what words were used, and Sam evidently didn't know that Ethel and Bertie were already married, so he may have misunderstood her precise intentions. If she just wanted to have an affair with him, well, according to Sam she would later have a considerable reputation as a flirt, although it's not clear whether she ever had sex with any of her flirtations. She did seem to have a marked preference for non-white men and Sam was more Asian-looking than Bertie, plus Sam was there and Bertie now wasn't.

But if she herself used the word "elope" - that is, "run away together and get married" - it puts a different complexion on things. Slightly manic though she seems to have been, still she probably wasn't mad enough to think she could get away with committing bigamy - especially as her current husband was a policeman with an interest in the law, and her family knew she was married to him. If she herself used the word "elope" then it was probably either a flight of fantasy or a wind-up. Her stepson/godson Peter feels that a lot of her fantasising was done mainly because she liked to mess with journalists' minds, so she might have been practising on Sam - and if it was a wind-up then the more shocked he was, the funnier she would find it.

If Sam was havering about lending her the fare to Burma, I wouldn't put it past her deliberately to make an embarrassing nuisance of herself until he paid her to go away.

Bertie set sail from Liverpool to Burma on the Bibby Line ship Yorkshire in early November 1924: the exact day has been written and then written over again, with the result that whilst it probably says the 11^th it could also possibly be the 4^th or 7^th. Ancestry.co.uk has it down as the 24^th but it doesn't look like that to me, and it seems most unlikely as Bertie was in Mandalay by 12^th December and the trip usually took a month. Ethel sailed from Liverpool on the Henderson Line ship Kemmendine on 15^th November 1924, under her maiden name and falsely described as a spinster - meaning that if Bertie really sailed on the 24^th he actually left Liverpool nine days after Ethel did, and he certainly sailed no more than eleven days before her. I have no idea why they didn't travel together, unless it was to bolster the pretence that they weren't already married, but both of them were in Mandalay by December 1924.

Ethel gave her address as care of Thomas Cook and Sons, the travel agency, probably because when Bertie sailed, Ethel still had their rooms in Edinburgh, but when she sailed after him the rooms ceased to be theirs.

Later government records would say that Bertram was appointed as an Assistant District Superintendent of the Indian Police on 12^th December 1924, but this was an over-simplification, as initially he was a trainee. [India Office and Burma Office List, 1947 supplement: (OIR 354.5)] When he was appointed he was classed as "of British domicile". [ J. Barrington, Foreign Office, Rangoon, to GE Crombie, Counsellor, British Embassy, 21 May 1948, M/4/2294]

On 23^rd December 1924 Bertie and Ethel Maud married for a second time, in Mandalay, probably about a week after her arrival in Rangoon. They may just have wanted one wedding for her family in Scotland to attend and one for his in Burma, but also Ethel Maud was, at least initially a Presbyterian and Bertie was a Catholic, so it may be that they held a registry office wedding in Scotland followed by a church wedding in Burma. [FamilySearch]

As It Ought To Be

The Combined Civil List for India, later called The Combined Civil List for India & Burma, lists the postings of all Class 1 Officers of the Raj, by the quarter year. The postings are evidently given as at the beginning of the quarter, because issue #110, which would normally be expected to be labeled "October-December 1934", instead says "Corrected up to September 30^th 1934".

The Digital Library of India has about two-thirds of the Civil Lists for the period 1925-1947 online, and through them we can trace Bertie's postings. In some places one has to guess that in between two identical postings lay more of the same, rather than e.g. a period of leave, but there's enough there to get a fair idea of what he was doing.

During 1925 Bertie was on probation, undergoing training at the Provincial Police Training School in Mandalay, which explains what he was doing there. He was paid 350 rupees a month, plus 60r "Bachelor's Allowance", which was intended to pay the wages of a servant or servants to handle domestic matters such as cooking and laundry. Since Bertie was a married man - twice married, and to the same woman - this raises the question of why he was receiving an allowance for unmarried men. Evidently Ethel/Elise was elsewhere (possibly working as a journalist, as she would later claim), or she didn't believe in laundry. Or maybe Bertie was granted the allowance before his wife joined him in Burma, and it was never withdrawn.

Or perhaps it was some kind of a fiddle. If the police authorities in Burma weren't told that Ethel and Bertie had married in a registry office in Edinburgh the previous year, then as far as they were concerned Bertie was a bachelor when he joined the police force, whether or not Ethel was in Burma at the time, and he then married twelve days later. If his allowance while at the Training School was fixed at the outset this might result in his being paid as a bachelor for the whole year or so that he was there.

Eric Blair, alias George Orwell, spent a little over a year at the Training School (I know because this came up in a conversation about Orwell with the Orwellian scholar Michael Shelden), so Bertie probably did likewise, and finished his time at the school early in 1926. By April 1926 he was still listed as on probation and in training but by now he was based at a place called Pegu (now Bago), about forty-five miles north-east of Rangoon (now Yangon). Pegu was the place where, in 1920, Bertie's brother Bobby had been serving as magistrate and had ended up trying a case in which he himself had loaned a gun to a native aide who had no firearms licence, who subsequently shot a domestic pig belonging to an enemy of his and then told Bobby it was wild boar, and Bobby unwittingly helped to dispose of the evidence by currying and eating it.

There is a gap here where I haven't been able to get hold of the relevant Civil Lists, but by the New Year of 1927 Bertie was still on probation but he was now a Headquarters Assistant Superintendent of Police based at Insein, a suburb on the nor' nor' west side of Rangoon/Yangon: Rangoon itself being about three hundred and fifty miles south of Mandalay. It is likely that Bertie was moved on from Pegu quite rapidly (perhaps because his brother had been in trouble there) and that he in fact started at Insein in April 1926. Ethel/Elise would later tell her friend Sangharakshita that Bertie and Eric Blair had met when they were handing over a post, one to the other, and a comparison of their intineraries suggests that the only opportunity for this to have happened was if Bertie was the officer who took over from Blair at Insein in April 1926.

Eric Blair was at Insein from 26^th September 1925 to 18^th April 1926, under Superintendent U Ba (listed in the Civil List as U Ba (2)). In their book The Unknown Orwell, published in 1972, Peter Štanský and William Abrahams write:

... in September 1925, [Blair] was posted to Insein, ten miles north of Rangoon, as Assistant Superintendent at Headquarters. The advantage of Insein over his previous postings was its more agreeable climate [cut]. The disadvantage of Insein proved to be his Superintendent, who, we are told, was something of a bully and "may well have played dirty tricks on him." But a Superintendent's duties kept him on tour through the District much of the time, and he would have been no more than an intermittently annoying presence. For a good part of each month Blair was in charge of Headquarters, caught up in a routine that by now he had pretty well mastered. Socially too he had, to all outward appearances, mastered the routine. Since Insein was a District Headquarters, life centred on the Club, where each night he made his obligatory appearance—there is no reason to think he enjoyed it—just as he had paid the obligatory formal calls and left cards on the married couples at the Station when he first arrived. He had also made his official calls on the senior civil officers—by tradition, these calls were made in full uniform, at noon, the hottest time of the day. [cut]

Some years later, and after Blair had left Burma, Beadon heard that "it was the fact of being posted under a bullying D.S.P., who treated him and the men under him very unfairly, and was not the type of whom the police could have been proud, that turned him against Government Service." Another officer who knew Blair at the time, Cecil Bruce Orr, remarks, "I noticed that he did not seem happy but did not know what the trouble was," and he too advances the possibility that Blair had suffered from unfair treatment by his superior.

C.B. Orr, who according to the Civil List was at this point Superintendent (Order), Western Division, Rangoon Town, was to be a significant character in Bertie's life as well as Blair's. Štanský and Abrahams believe that Blair would eventually have become disaffected even if he had been treated well at Insein, but the bullying U Ba can't have helped. Since there are two Civil Lists missing I don't know if U Ba was still Superintendent at Insein when Bertie started work there - by January 1927 U Ba was at Pakokku, and the Superintendent at Insein was a Henry Raymond Alexander. Whether or not Bertie had to suffer under a bullying overseer, the description of Blair's duties must also apply to Bertie.

Bertie and Ethel/Elise's son Roderick Denis Edward Langford-Rae, known as Rory, was born in Rangoon on 28^th January 1927. If he really was born in Rangoon itself, not in in Insein, he was probably born in a hospital. A year later, that is, by New Year 1928, Bertie was still at Insein but evidently no longer on probation, and was described as an Extra District Assistant. That means that he had been assigned to the current District Superintendent of Police for Insein as a trainee, and that (because he was "extra") he wasn't the only trainee attached to that official. Rory was christened in Rangoon on 25^th April 1928: by this point Ethel Maud was possibly already calling herself Elise Langford-Rae (she certainly was by 1932), and her son would go through life with "Langford-Rae" as a double-barrelled name.

An essay at NEOEnglish System summarises Orwell/Blair's duties as an Assistant District Superintendent thus: "He worked as assistant to the District Superintendent of Police in the capital of Upper Burma, where he was expected to run the office, supervise the stores of clothing and ammunition, look after the training school for locally recruited constables, and so on. He had also to check the night patrols in the city, and he had to assume general charge when the Superintendent was away." Bertie's duties would presumably have been similar.

Blair/Orwell, who held the same rank as Bertie, was in the general area of Rangoon from late May 1924 to mid April 1926, and specifically in Insein from 26^th September 1925 to 18^th April 1926, thereafter being posted to Moulmein, about a hundred miles east of Rangoon, until late December 1926. Ethel Maud would later tell her friend and mentor Sangharakshita that Bertie and Blair were colleagues and she and Bertie "every now and then ... would find themselves handing over to him, or taking over from him, as they were posted to different towns around the country" [Precious Teachers by Sangharakshita].

She also wrote to someone who had had an article about Orwell published in Blackwell's Magazine, and told them that she and Orwell/Blair had been close friends when he was based in Insein and then later in Moulmein: since she never mentioned anything of the kind to Sangharakshita this must be taken with a pinch of salt, but her letter did display a level of familiarity with Orwell/Blair's postings which tends to at least confirm that he was a close colleague of her husband's, and that Bertie probably did change places with him at least once. That tends to suggest that Bertie went to Pegu straight from training school early in 1926, or even in late 1925, and left Pegu in mid April 1926 to take over from Blair in Insein. Orwell in Insein had been working under or with a Superintendent U Ba, so presumably Bertie would have done so as well.

Orwell/Blair later wrote about his time in Moulmein, and about how as an Imperial policeman he was hated, harrassed and despised by the general population. I don't know whether the fact that Bertram was half native himself would have made him more or less popular with the local people - but Orwell/Blair's popularity can't have been helped by the fact that he was apparently given to slapping his native servants around, and there's no reason to think that Bertie did so. And Orwell, for all his attempts to wrestle with the morality of Empire, saw the Empire's Burmese subjects as essentially alien, a sea of hostile, uniform yellow faces - whereas to Bertie they must have been just his country cousins or, at the worst, rival nations with whom his mother's people had a history, but certainly not blank ciphers.

According to the Orwellian scholar Michael Shelden, some surviving former colleagues of Orwell/Blair's whom he interviewed remembered Orwell/Blair to have been in love with an un-named white woman during his time in Burma, and Shelden believes that Ethel Maud - who was already calling herself Elise - was the woman he was in love with. This is based in part on the fact that the love-interest in Orwell's novel Burmese Days is a blonde woman called Elizabeth Lackersteen and Ethel/Elise was blonde.

Whether or not Ethel/Elise was the model for Lackersteen, and whether or not she was the woman Orwell was in love with, the two characters resemble each other only in the similarities of the names Elise and Elizabeth and in hair-colour: they are quite unalike in other respects. But Bertie's family may have informed the novel in other ways. One of the main themes in Burmese Days concerns an Asian man who wishes to join a local club for Europeans only, and it is well-remembered in the family, and resented, that half-Asian Bertie wasn't permitted to join the European Clubs in Burma or India even though he was also half Irish, was English public school and Scottish college educated and would eventually be both a very senior police officer and a war-hero. As his police colleague, Orwell/Blair was probably well aware of this. Additionally, one of the characters in the book is a Burmese woman called Ma Kin, married to a man named U Po Kyin: Ma Kyin was the name of Bertie's mother.

At some point during their marriage, Elise was to be awarded a silver plaque for her bravery in helping to catch a bandit. This presumably had something to do with Bertie's work.

Bertie remained at Insein until summer or autumn 1929, and during this time Elise, as we shall see, often travelled the twenty miles into Rangoon to frequent the Gymkhana Club, where she acquired a formidable reputation as a flirt. It was also during this period, in summer and autumn 1928, that Bertie's elder brother Bobby fatally stabbed his mistress's husband (who was attempting to beat his brains out with an elephant bone at the time), decided for unknown reasons to plead insanity rather than self-defence, was able to provide plenty of support for the theory that he suffered from bouts of temporary insanity, was tried in Rangoon and was convicted of murder and sentenced to seven years in a psychiatric asylum. Since they were living only eight miles apart it seems likely that Bertie would have visited Bobby, both in Rangoon Central Gaol and later at the asylum, where Bobby settled in quite happily. You would have thought this might have put a blight on Bertie's career prospects: however, round about New Year 1929 he became a Sub-Divisional Police Officer. This was the lowest rank of Class 1 Police Officer that wasn't a trainee.

Burma for You

In late summer or early autumn 1929 Bertie, who was half Shan himself, was sent to Taunggyi in the Southern Shan States. The Civil List says that he was "In Charge of Civil Police" but doesn't give a rank, so he was probably still an S.D.P.O.. The Shan States are a collection of numerous mini-countries ruled by local lairds called Sawbwas, and they were and are divided into two "administrative divisions", the Northern and Southern Shan States, each containing several districts. Taunggyi, the capital of the Southern Shan States, is a substantial town high in the Sintaung Hills and inhabited by a mixed population of Shans, Inthas and Pa-Os, and was a "notified area" administered directly by the British rather than by the local Sawbwa.

Soon after the move to Taunggyi, Bertie's friend Sam visited the couple there, with results which cast a light on the state of their marriage.

After handing over duty to my new relief I went on to Mogok and went on 4 months' leave from the 4th. October 1929, thus terminating my long official association with Mogok Forest Dvn [Division].
       [cut] I stayed for about 10 days in Mogok, and then left for Taunggyi in the Southern Shan States to pay my old friends Bertie and Ethell [sic] Rae a visit. Bertie was by then a D.S.P and a man of some importance and terribly busy with his police work. I stayed in Taunggyi about a week, during which time I drove out to Loilem to pay a surprise visit to old Rundle of Chin Hills days and spent a very happy day with him. At the end of my stay Bertie said he had some work to do at Kalaw so I went along with them and shared the I.B [Inspection Bungalow]. Hamilton of the Forest Department, an Anglo-Indian, promoted to the I.F.S, had just completed his wonderful house at Kalaw and I was very keen to see it. [cut]
       We stayed in Kalaw for about a week and played tennis at the club every day. Thom, the famous hunter or shikari of the pioneering days in Burma, was still going strong, and challenged evry [sic] male visitor to Kalaw to a singles in tennis. I was never a match player, so I refrained from taking him on. He was great on his game shooting stories and Bertie and I used to listen to him by the hour. All that was necessary to set him going was to stand him a couple of double whiskies and sodas. [cut]
       One day towards the end of our stay in Kalaw, Bertie had to go out on work and left Ethell and me to occupy our time the best way we could. After lunch we sat talking of my leave and I told her why I had cancelled the 8 months I was to have spent in the U.K. She suddenly became erotic and wanted me to take my full leave and that she would come with me. She said we could go to Europe and have a good time together as she was sick of Bertie and if I did not take her, she would go with the Taunggyi Civil Surgeon, who was proceeding on a year's leave very soon. I got the shock of my life when she made this most improper suggestion. I had always looked upon her as an old friend like Bertie but I realised now that all I had heard of her carryings-on with many of the Rangoon Gymkhana Club males - both married and single - must be true. She had a platinum wrist watch studded with diamonds, which she said she had got as a present from the manager of the Burma Railways, in whose private carriage she often travelled on her way to and from Rangoon. I could have wept for Bertie, knowing all he must have had to endure with her as his wife. I told her in very plain language that I had no intention of going off with my best friend's wife and I did not think she had descended so low as to suggest such a thing. I then went off to the Kalaw Club and played billiards till Bertie and Ethell turned up in the evening for tennis and we all went home for dinner together. Ethell must have had a "kink" of sorts, for even in my Edinburgh days when she was in love with Bertie, she tried to get off with me but I would have nothing to do with her. Before Bertie turned up in Edinburgh, I was told about her carryings-on with the foreign students who had money to blow on her.
       About 6 months or so later [i.e. April or May 1930] I heard she had gone off with the C.S, Taunggyi, as she said she would, to Europe to live a life of sin and fast living. The doctor could not have married her as she never returned to Burma again and I have not heard anything further about her since. She probably ended up like Rebecca Sharp of Thackerey's Vanity Fair.

In fact, it's doubtful whether Elise ever slept with any of the men she flirted with. She talked up a very good houri but she was more respectable than she wanted people to think she was and she was heading, at least in the first instance, for her sister Lillian's flat in Kilmarnock - for it was almost certainly at this point that she took my father, who was then a little over three years old, to live with his aunt and uncle Lillian and James Currie in Scotland. A young neighbor called Roberta Johnstone who lived downstairs from the Curries, and who would later grow up to marry Lillian Currie's son Anthony, still remembers Rory playing with the other children in the house as a child (she misremembered his name as "Ronny" but it's clearly Rory she's referring to, because she knew he was killed in a car crash in 1965).

Subsequent events would show that Bertie, a Catholic, was very much a family person but Elise was not - indeed she would later tell her friend Sangharakshita that she was totally lacking in maternal feelings, although other evidence suggests that this was not entirely true. It was actually common for children who were born in the Raj to British parents to be sent to boarding schools in Britain when they were about seven, because it was felt that the climate was healthier for them (which was probably true) and that they would get a better education (which was not necessarily true): so Elise's action in leaving her small son behind on the other side of the world was not as abnormal then as it seems now. But even then, taking a three-year-old away from his family and country and everything he had known was abnormal, and it was a sore point with Rory forever after.

I have no record of what Bertie thought about this arrangement, or whether he was given any choice about it or simply found that Elise had left and taken their child with her. Later on in the late 1940s, when he had married again and had three sons by his second wife and another on the way, he would plan on sending them all to England to be educated, even though the youngest was about eighteen months old at the time and the eldest five or six: but that was at a point when he himself was in a precarious position and was planning to leave Burma in the near future.

I can't imagine Bertie was too happy about sending his (at that time) only son to the other side of the world so young, especially as the couple had no more children despite his being a Catholic. [Rory also was a Catholic and Elise may have been, by this point: my mother certainly had the impression that she was, from what was said by friends of my father's.] But he may have agreed to it, even so, to protect Rory from the growing unrest in the Shan States. We do not know whether Sam was right about Ethel/Elsie leaving Bertie at this time, or whether she was just using what she hoped was a good chat-up line to try to get the wealthy Sam to pay for her and Rory's passage again. Having left Rory with her sister she actually returned to Burma in autumn 1931 and stayed for four months, so it may have been at this point that she split from Bertie - or they may even have split up in the mid 1930s while she was living in England. All we know for certain is that they were to divorce in 1940.

At any rate, Elise was away from Burma for most of the 1930s, and Rory was probably safer in Scotland. The Saya San rebellion began in December 1930 and washed through the Shan States in 1931. It didn't approach very close to Taunggyi itself but Bertie, now semi-single again, must have been at least to some extent involved in keeping order during the uprising, since it seems from Sam's reminiscences that Bertie's remit covered quite a wide area: Kalaw is about thirty miles from Taunggyi. There had been rising unrest in the area for a couple of years before tension overboiled into outright revolt, so it is possible that Elise removed Rory, and indeed herself, from Burma because she felt that he would be a lot safer in Kilmarnock. If that was her reasoning then it may be that Bertie concurred with her decision, even though it meant having contact with his son only by letter. But he would probably have been planning to send him to boarding school at seven in any case.

Bertie remained at Taunggyi until some time between October 1931 and March 1932, when he became an S.D.P.O. at Meiktila, a riverside town in central Burma. He remained at Meiktila until the autumn of 1934, but in May 1933 he ceased to be an S.D.P.O. and instead became an Officiating (or Acting) District Superintendent.

Vivian Rodrigues of Rootsweb, who lived in Burma from the 1940s to the 1960s and who has made a study of the military and police forces in mid 20^th C Burma, says that a District Superintendent would have been in charge of three thousand-plus personnel and overseen a catchment area of between five and ten percent of the country and from two million to five million-plus citizens, and he would have reported daily to high-ranking government officials and followed their directives. That makes him roughly equivalent to a Chief Constable - but also with overtones of Chief Superintendent, since he would have been directly "active in the field" as well as in administration.

The Civil List for Burma for 1938 lists two Inspectors-General of Police, eight Deputy Inspectors-General, one Assistant Inspector-General and seventy-four District Superintendents and Assistant District Superintendents, lumped together. According to the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies' paper The Myanmar Labour Force: Growth and Change, 1973-83, p. 9 the population of Burma was approximately 15 million in 1931, or about a quarter of the current (2011) population of Britain, so in terms of percentage of the population covered, to be in the top 85 police officers in Burma at that time was like being in the top 340 officers in Britain today. To be a District Superintendent was to be in the top 45 or so in Burma, or equivalent to about the top 180 out of the roughly 157,000 police officers in modern Britain.

Bertie's actual remit would have been somewhat different from that of a senior British police officer, however. Solving small-scale, individual crimes had a low priority, as the police in Burma were mainly concerned with protecting important government institutions, monies and personnel; suppressing "dacoits" i.e. organised gangs of bandits; and dealing with "sedition" which included not just political unrest against British rule, but also violence between the different ethnic groups in Burma, usually motivated by religious or commercial disputes.

The cryptic notes in the India Office and Burma Office List, 1947 supplement say: "offg. dist. supt., May, 1933 ; confd., Feb., 1939", meaning that Bertie became an Officiating District Superintendent in May 1933, and a full District Superintendent in February 1939. He would probably have received a pay increase at this point in 1933, rather than when his new rank was confirmed in 1939: either way, it must have been a welcome contribution to my father's school fees, which must have been considerable since he went to prestigious schools - St Augustine's Abbey prep school from 1933-1940, and Ampleforth from 1940-1944. Elise probably chose them, but I doubt she paid for them.

Bertie, and indeed Elise, may also have raised funds by doing a bit of trading, as I'm told many colonial officials did. Many years later, in the 1970s, Elise would claim that she had left a quantity of silver in a deposit box at Harrods and that Harrods had lost it: since her family were not very well off the most likely explanation for this mystery silver is that it was Indian silver which the family had bought cheaply in the East and then imported into Britain with a view to selling it.

According to Vivian Rodrigues pay for a Burmese servant at that time was about 25 rupees a month, but that was just spending money with food and accommodation all found, and probably quite minimal, so a rupee was probably worth about £4 in today's (2011) British money (confirmed by Vivian, who says that in 1939 there were 13½ rupees to the pound, making a rupee about 18 old pence, and Measuring Worth which makes the purchasing power of 18d in 1939 equivalent to about £3.45 in 2009, so a bit under £4 now). As at 1912 the pay for Assistant Superintendents was 300r per month for the first year, with an automatic increase of 50r a year for years two and three up to a limit of 400r a year. Thereafter pay could increase by 50r per six months of service up to a maximum of 600r per month, but only on the recommendation of a superior if the officer was felt to be performing efficiently. If a rupee was around £4 in today's money that would make the maximum salary of an Assistant District Superintendent about £28,800p.a..

For District Superintendents, there was one "selection grade" who were on 1,200r a month but I don't know who or what decided whether you were in that grade. For other District Superintendents, probably including Bertie, the pay was 700r per month for the first year, thereafter automatically increasing by 60r a month every six months, to a maximum of 1,000r a month, or about £48,000p.a.. If Bertie received increased pay from the point at which he became an Officiating District Superintendent, he would have been on 1,000r by November 1935. There's a scrambled snippet of the Civil List for 1941 on Google Books which suggests that he was on 1,000r at that point, so he evidently wasn't in the grade who got 1,200r. [Royal Commission into the Public Services in India 1912, p. 232]

Some time in the final quarter of 1934 Bertie went on leave, and stayed on leave for about a year. His son Rory was already a boarder at a prep school (one which prepares students who will later attend an independent, fee-paying secondary school) in Kent. A shipping list shows Bertie leaving Liverpool for Rangoon as a First Class passenger aboard the Bibby Line Merchant Vessel Worcestershire (the same ship on which Elise had sailed into Britain in 1932) on 27^th September 1935, the day before his thirty-second birthday: his address is c/o the overseas bank Grindlay & Co Ltd. He must have come to visit his son, and perhaps also his half-sister Beatrice. Also, it was probably during this year that his brother Bobby was released from psychiatric care, so Bertie may have used some of his leave to help his brother get back into independent life - although in the event it looks as though Bobby probably stayed on at the psychiatric unit just outside Rangoon as a physical instructor.

By New Year 1936 Bertie was back in Burma, and working as the P.A. to the Deputy Inspector-General for Railways and Criminal Investigations in Rangoon. That sounds as though it must have involved what we now think of as normal police work - actually solving crimes, as opposed to maintaining public order. This interlude in Rangoon, however, was short-lived.

Three months later, by April 1^st, Bertie was the Officiating District Superintendent for Salween. The Salween is a very long river which cuts right through Burma from north to south, but probably the Salween River Basin is meant, at the river's southerm seaward end, because Bertie was based at Papun, a town on the Yunzalin River, a tributary of the Salween, in the Karen area in the south of Burma.

Bertie was to remain at Papun until some time on or after July 1938. It wasn't until September 1940 that his son Rory started boarding at Ampleforth College, an upmarket Catholic public school, but he had already been boarding at St Augustine's prep school since September 1933. Most of Elise's relatives were dirt-poor and I've found no evidence that she had a job at this point, so presumably what must have been Rory's considerable school-fees were paid by Bertie out of his 1,000r-per-month salary. This is a fairly good salary, equivalent to about £48,000 in today's (2011) terms, but one out of which Rory's boarding-school fees must have cut a substantial slice. Rory did win a scholarship to Ampleforth, which may have helped deffray his costs, but I haven't established whether this came with any financial award or not. Nowadays scholarships to Ampleforth convey automatic high status, but whether they convey financial help as well is entirely at the discretion of the school.

There's a gap in the records where two Civil Lists are missing, but by or before April 1939 Bertie was on leave again - perhaps making the arrangements for Rory to start at Ampleforth the following year. The extant shipping lists confirm that he did come to Britain, for he departed from Birkenhead for Rangoon again on the Henderson Line ship Amarapoora on 9^th June 1939. Again, his address is c/o Grindlay & Co Ltd, London.

We know from the India Office and Burma Office List, 1947 supplement that Bertie lost the "Officiating" bit and became a full District Superintendent in February 1939, so it was probably at that point that he went on leave. On his return, in late summer 1939, he became District Superintendent at Insein.

In 1940 a divorce between Bertram and Elise was declared final

Bertram and Herta in Burma in 1941 - presumably they'd been in the process of separation since 1930/31, hampered by Bertie's Catholicism. We don't really know why they split up in the first place, but I would guess that Elise's lack of maternal feeling and Bertie's desire for hordes of kids at least came into it. After a somewhat chequered career, Elise would go on to become the Kazini Elisa Maria Dorgi Khangsarpa of Sikkim. Bertie and Rory obviously remained on good terms after the divorce, because all the images I have of my father come from his stepmother, Bertie's second wife, who must have inherited them from Bertie. All of them were taken after the divorce, and they include "Hi dad, this is me on the rugby team"-type school photographs.

On 8^th July 1941 Bertie married Herta Helene Josephine Margarethe Schmid, a Viennese glove-maker who was born on 17^th July 1913 and who is still very much alive at time of writing this: in fact she is the source of some of the family recollections I have referred to. The couple went on to have six sons in rapid succession, although one of them sadly died at birth. The living sons were:

Peter Bertram Rae, born 5^th July 1942
Richard Wilmot Rae, born 28^th October 1944
Francis Charles Rae, born 5^th October 1946
Timothy Ernest Rae, born 14^th May 1949
Michael Bernard Rae, born 22^nd December 1950

Bertie was still based in Insein at least to July 1940. A small, scrambled snippet from the Civil List for some time in 1941, which I turned up on Google Books, appears to say that at that point Bertie was based at Shwebo, the former mid 18^th C capital of Burma, from 29^th August 1941 (that is, starting from about six weeks after his marriage to Herta). Japan invaded Burma on 11^th December 1941. According to Vivian Rodrigues Bertie's job at this time would probably have consisted of his regular police duties plus assisting the army with transport, facilitating the movement of refugees and supressing looting.

Moulmein was taken by the Japanese early in 1942, and on 7^th March Rangoon was evacuated. The British Army regrouped in north Burma and attempted to make a stand alongside Chinese reinforcements, but were defeated and forced to fall back to Shwebo in April (see History Learning Site: The Retreat in Burma 1941 to 1942), and thence to retreat to India alongside many refugees. A ragged, half-starved army of soldiers and refugees arrived in India in May, without shelter, just in time to be caught by the monsoon, and the front line between the British and the Japanese followed them as far as the border of Assam in the north, although further south they stopped at the Burmese foothills of the Chin Hills. At the same time Japan's Thai allies also advanced into Burma.

Herta was lucky enough to get out of Burma on the last plane, not on foot, and the family moved to Darjeeling. She must be the Mrs P.L.D. Rae [sic] who appears on The Anglo-Burmese Library's List of Evacuees as being evacuated on 3^rd April 1942 from Shwebo to 6 Stephen Mansions, Darjeeling (D.H.Ry.).

We do not know whether this confirms that Bertie was indeed now based in Shwebo, or whether Herta had fallen back to Schwebo along with the British army. Either way, Bertie and Herta became separated at this point. I'm not sure whether they were evacuated together and then went different ways, or whether they actually left Burma separately, although the fact that Bertie isn't on the list of evacuees suggests it was the latter. Vivian suggests that Bertie might have followed the same route as his own parents, that is, from Shwebo to Ye U or Monywa by road, then by Irrawaddy Flotilla boat up the Chindwin River to Kelewa or Kelemyo, thence by truck to Tamu, Palel, Imphal, Kohima and Dimapore, and then on from Dimapore to Calcutta by train. Alternatively he might have been one of those who walked the whole way to India.

Either way, in late May or early June 1942, when Herta was eight months pregnant, she was told that Bertie had been killed, probably because he had been lost contact with during the evacuation. But she refused to believe it and shortly afterwards received a telegram from him asking her to meet him at the station. Their son Peter was born a few weeks later in Darjeeling.

In February/March 1942 the Governor of Burma, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, was evacuated by air from Myitkyina just before it fell to the advancing Japanese Army, and set up a Burma Government in Exile in Simla. This included a Defence Department headed by senior members of the Burma Frontier Force and Burma Police. Bertie would probably have been given three months' leave to recover from the evacuation and then been co-opted to serve in some senior capacity in Simla. The evidence suggests, however, that by the following year, if not before, he was working in an Intelligence capacity.

The situation in Burma was complicated by the fact that many (although by no means all) native Burmese, including many Buddhist monks, favoured the Japanese, seeing them as the lesser of two evils when compared with British rule. The Japanese had refrained from treating the Burmese population the way they treated the people in occupied areas of China, and some Burmese saw them as a way of levering out the British and gaining their own independence, rather than as swapping one foreign ruler for another, substantially more brutal one.

After the 1942 monsoon the Japanese established a nominally independent puppet regime in occupied Burma under Ba Maw, and a strictly controlled Burmese army under General Aung San, the father of Aung San Suu Kyi (although she was not even born until June 1945). The British continued to make small sorties into Japan, including a campaign of sabotage by the Chindits under Orde Wingate, who took his men behind Japanese lines, and from 1944 onwards the balance tilted and the Allied forces began to push the Japanese back.

Family recollection, mainly from Herta and her son Richard Rae, is that "Bertram worked in 'no man's land' between India and Burma collecting information from Burmese spies and translating the messages. Sometimes the Burmese fed him gruesome information from the Japanese like 'we are going to kill you and pull out your insides'. One day the Gurkhas knocked on his door and told him to leave. When he went back to the house it was destroyed."

His son Peter remembers him as having been behind Japanese enemy lines "throughout the war". This cannot have been literally true - apart from anything else Bertie was evidently in direct physical touch with his family in January or February 1944, since he had a child born in October 1944. Whether he was behind enemy lines the rest of the time or not is probably in part a matter of definition, but he was certainly working in some kind of special operations - in fact special ops seem to have been something of a cottage industry in the Rae family.

Bertie's older brother Bobby was seconded to the allied U.S. forces as an Intelligence officer, and ended up based in Assam as an instructor, teaching jungle survival skills to the men of Detachment 101, a U.S. Office of Strategic Services group which was the forerunner of the C.I.A., and whose agents were parachuted into Kachin territory behind Japanese lines where they funded and coordinated Kachin resistance groups. These groups aided by their Detachment 101 officers carried out ambushes, retrieved downed pilots, set up small secret landing strips and "also screened the advances of larger allied forces, including Merrill's Marauders", and Bobby was later to say that he had indeed been involved in some way with Merill's Marauders, a.k.a. Unit Galahad.

Their little brother Denis and Bertie's best mate from school Sam Newland were teamed together in a branch of Z Force known as "The British Officer Johnnies", an Allied reconnaissance unit which operated along the fringes of enemy territory and occasionally right inside it. Sam, now a Major, had selected Denis as his Second in Command. Sam was eventually to be awarded the Distinguished Service Order and Denis the Military Cross, and both their citations refer to them as having spent a long time behind enemy lines, even though strictly speaking they only went right into Japanese-held territory once, and the rest of the time it would be more accurate to say that they were operating in the same area as the advance parties of the enemy front line.

If Bertie was working close enough to the Japanese front line for them to be aware of him and sending him threats (or, possibly, for one of his informants to kid him that they were), then he might well have been considered to be "behind enemy lines" according to the army's definition, even if, like Denis, technically he was "just in front of and sometimes overlapping with" rather than really behind the Japanese line. If anything, to be just in front of the Japanese line might be more dangerous than being behind it, since it meant he was standing where the Japanese were looking. Whatever Bertie did required him to have his own personal radio operator, because his son Peter once met someone at a philatelists' dinner in London who turned out to have been his father's signaller, and whatever he did or witnessed was stressful and traumatic - Peter says of him that "almost until the day he died he would often wake up, groaning, even crying out in anguish, as he relived the years that nobody ever talks about".

There's no doubt that Bertie was involved in special ops. Sam Newland's diary shows that in autumn 1943 Bertie met up with him and Denis at Hakha, Sam's home town high in the Chin Hills which straddle the border between the far north-west of Burma and north-east India, and at that time very close to the Japanese front and very far from any regular Allied forces. Sam - who tends to be quite food-fixated - states:

29/9/43. Haka. We heard that Bertie Rae was just about to leave for Shumgen side so D[enis] and I went up and saw him. He stayed on for breaker and left at 1.30 pm for Thimit.

21/10/43. Haka. Had a letter from Lt. Col. Oates re James so I went up to see him in the evening and while chatting with him Bertie turned up and I asked him down to dinner.

22/10/43. Haka. Bertie came down at 11 and stayed to breakfast. [and later the same day] Bertie had dinner with us.

23/10/43. Haka. Bertie dined with us again.

Thimit or Timit is the name of a valley halfway between Hakha and Thantlang (or Tlangtlang or Klangklang), lying about a mile south of the road between the two towns and around six miles west-north-west of Hakha. According to The New Light of Myanmar (9^th December 2011, page 16) there is now an "integrated farm" there, and if it was a staging post on Bertie's journey there may have been a farm there in 1943, as well. It's also the name of a river in the Chin Hills, a tributary of the Kaladan, which rises as a series of "chaungs" or creeks to the north-west of the Timit valley, becomes a single identifiable flow, named Timit Va, as it passes through the valley and then flows south past the Boipa mountains, changes its name to the Boinu and then joins with the Kaladan. It is likely however that Sam meant that Bertie was heading for the valley, not just the river, because of the valley's proximity to the road.

Shumgen must be Sumgen, which is about thirty miles south of Thantlang and on a direct path from it along the top of a ridge: to get from Hakha to Sumgen you would indeed head for Thantlang first, passing to the north side of the Timit Valley. So on 29^th September 1943 my grandfather had a late breakfast with his friend Sam and his brother Denis, set out at 1:30pm to walk the five miles to the valley called Thimit, probably stayed the night at a farm there and then continued to Thantlang the following morning, before turning south along the ridge.

That Sam speaks of him heading for "Shumgen side", that is, the ridge south-west of Hakha, suggests that Bertie had previously been operating east or north of Hakha, i.e. nearer the Japanese, and had stopped off in Hakha while passing through from one side to the other. Or Sam may mean that Bertie was heading for the Shumgen side of the Thimit river (presumably the far or west side). The really odd thing is that at least for the first part of the journey in September it would probably have still been the monsoon season, when sensible people stay at home.

Whatever he was doing on Shumgen side, twenty-two days later, if not before, Bertie was back in Hakha, where he stayed for a week. It was probably at this point (it was certainly at Hakha during the war) that Bertie repaid some, but not all, of the money which he and Ethel had borrowed off Sam in order to get Ethel out to Burma. By this point it must have been rather galling to have to pay for having transported the first wife from whom he was now divorced, but at least he had got a beautiful son out of it.

In a report written some time in 1944, Sam speaks of "Other Intelligence Organisations in the South Chin Hills" who had been operating the previous year, to whit:

I.S.L.D. (G.S.I.(x)). Two officers of this organisation came to Haka during the rains of 1943 and were there till October 1943 when they were recalled and left on the 21st.

G.S.I.(K). Two officers of this organisation were in the Chin Hills during the rains of 1943 and one came to Haka in October 1943 and was withdrawn in November the same year.

Civil Intelligence Bureau. Three officers of this bureau were operating from the Chin Hills with HQ at Falam and were in the Hills till the Jap occupation of Falam, when I heard they pulled out. Their activities as last year were mainly concerned with information of political value and propaganda.

If Sam's memory of the dates was accurate - always a very big "if" with Sam - then Bertie cannot have been one of the I.S.L.D. men, because Sam's own diary shows that Bertie was in Hakha until 26^th October and then went to Falam. He could have been in one of the other two groups Sam mentions. Or Bertie may not be in any of these categories, either because like The Johnnies he was working for G.S.I.(z), and therefore didn't come under "Other Intelligence Organisations", or because he wasn't based in the South Chin Hills but was merely passing through them.

I.S.L.D. is the Inter-Services Liaison Department, an anodyne cover name for M.I.6, also known at the time as S.I.S., the Secret Intelligence Service, and as G.S.I.(x). G.S.I. stands for General Staff Intelligence. G.S.I.(K) was another name for SOE in the Far East, the Special Operations Executive, which in March 1944 was re-named Force 136. Sam himself came under G.S.I.(z), or Z Force. The identity of the Civil Intelligence Bureau is unknown.

According to the Zomi Re-Unification Organisation, who campaign for a unified Chin state incorporating areas of the Chin Hills which are currently split between India and Myanmar, after British forces withdrew from the Chin Hills in late 1942 the local fighting units - the various Chin Levies, the Chin Hills Battalion, the Chin Forces and the Chinwags (whose name was surely some English-speaking officer's idea of a joke) - held out against the Japanese advance until near the end of 1943, although from May 1943 on the Japanese army forced a way through Khuikul (south of Kennedy Peak and north of Fort White) to Imphal. This means they must initially have passed quite close to but somewhat north and east of Hakha, which itself did not fall to the Japanese army until 11^th November 1943. From late 1942 to early November 1943, therefore, the area around Hakha answered perfectly to Herta's description - in advance of the British line, which had retreated north-west to India, but remaining slightly on the British side of the Japanese line.

However, there were no Gurkhas in the Hakha area, and although there are records indicating that there were multiple units operating in the Chin Hills, if Bertie had been based in that area Sam would probably have run into him, and mentioned him in his diary, more often. Nor do we know whether Bertie spoke Chin, although he might well have learned to do so from Sam. He will almost certainly have spoken Kachin, given his father's interest in Kachin culture and long residence in Bhamo, so he might well have been based in the Kachin Hills, where the area between the two lines was narrow and subject to rapid change, and where his position as the son of "the great Ri duwa" would presumably have been an asset.

Under "Remarks" the Civil List entry for Bertram for April-June 1943 (issue 144, page 403) says "S.O.D.D.". Comparison with later records, when he had joined the Civil Affairs Service and the Remarks column says "C.A.S. (B)", suggests that the Remarks column contains the name of the service he was currently attached to, so S.O.D.D. must relate to whatever unit he was with in 1943, when he was working in no-man's-land. As at 1^st April 1943 the Civil List shows only one other person in the Burmese police force listed as S.O.D.D.: Cecil Bruce Orr, who was then another District Superintendent of Police but was later head of C.I.D. Burma. Orr wrote an unpublished memoir of his time in the Burma police, entitled A Burma Patchwork, but unfortunately he says very little about his own wartime activities, only that for at least part of the time he was in Arakan and that things got a bit difficult, "but that is another story", and that he wore a badge which said "Police" on one side and "Army" on the other - which seems to be meant literally.

Nobody is now sure what S.O.D.D. stood for. There's a crack U.S. anti-terrorist squad called Special Operations Detachment Delta, but they don't seem to have existed prior to 1977. The 1943 S.O.D.D. could be something like "Staff Officer, Defence Department" or "Special Operations Department, Delhi", but the most likely translation is "Seconded on Detached Duty". This is a general military and civil service term for somebody who has been temporarily re-assigned to a new job, but is expected to return to their old job at a later date. However, all the people who are listed as S.O.D.D. in the Civil List and for whom I have been able to find details seem to have been engaged in some form of clandestine work, or were experts on local culture and languages, or both, and several have O.B.E.s or M.B.E.s which suggest a high-powered group. This in turn suggests that S.O.D.D. was being used as a safely bland term for people many of whose actual new assignments were too sensitive for the Civil List to specify.

As at 1^st April 1943 the Civil List shows only two people in the Burmese police force listed as S.O.D.D., Bertie and Orr, but by the following year there were at least twenty members. As at 1^st January 1944 (The Combined Civil List for India & Burma issue 147, pages 402-405a) the men listed as S.O.D.D. include:

Cecil Bruce Orr
Bertram Langford Denis Rae
Thomas Edward Lecky-Thompson
John Ashworth Edwards
Theobald Philip Featherstone-Haugh Fforde

all in the section on District and Assistant Superintendents. In his book Dan to Bersheeba, Theo Fforde's friend Archibald Ross Colquhoun described Theo as "a police officer whom I met at Moulmein, and with whom I became great chums. He was deeply interested in the people and spoke their language very well. He had the gift of intuition and sympathy so frequently found in Irishmen and so often lacking in the stiffer Englishmen. He had, moreover, the Irish buoyancy and elasticity of spirit and keen sense of humour — qualities which find close parallels in the Burmese themselves." Theo and Bertie were later to join A.B.R.O. (Army in Burma Reserve of Officers) on the same day, which suggests that they may well have been friends.

In addition about two-thirds of the men in the "Inferior Appointments" category of the Burma Frontier Service were listed as S.O.D.D., to whit:

Joshua Poo Nyo
Henry Noel Cochran Stevenson, FRAI
U Tun Aung
Norman Wilson Kelly, OBE
John Walter Leedham
Lionel Roy Ogden, OBE
Roland Frank Leitch, MBE
Gilbert Edward Turnbull
John Ford Franklin
Roy Aubrey Sayer
Stanley Claude Pollard
Robert Graham Wilson
Philip Treherne Barton
David William Simpson
Richard Tuang Hmung

H.N.C. Stevenson was an anthropologist who was still having his scholarly books published even in the midst of whatever he was doing in 1943. He was Assistant Superintendent at Kutkai in the Northern Shan States, an expert on Chin and Karen culture, sympathetic to the rights of native people and engaged during the war in organising Karen and Kachin levies. Bertie would almost certainly have already known Stevenson since before the war.

In his memoirs C.B. Orr himself is singularly uninformative about what he was getting up to in Arakan, but there are references to him in other works which show that he was not only very much engaged in intelligence work but seemed to change what he was doing every few months, which adds weight to the idea that S.O.D.D. was a generic term for being on secondment to posts the Civil List didn't want to be too specific about, rather than being a specific rôle in itself. [Thanks to Phil Tomaselli and Richard Duckett of the Special Operations Executive list for sourcing most of these documents.]

In British Military Administration in the Far East by FSV Donnison, with reference to summer 1942, we find:

The most curious case of all was that of the civilian intelligence officer sent by the Government of Burma into Arakan. This officer, Mr C.B. Orr of the Burma police, was sent in the same way as police intelligence officers were sent to other parts of the frontier fringe, as part of the scheme of administration proposed by the Governemnt of Burma for that area which will be discussed in the next chapter. Elsewhere such officers were expected to carry on or re-establish at least a rudimentary police administration. In Arakan this could not be done merely by sending a Burma Police officer as the army had already assumed responsibility and set up an Administration - the Civil Government having left the area unprovided with any for the four months that had elapsed since the evacuation of 30^th March. Later, a second police officer was sent and this time placed at the disposal of the Military Administrator by the Government of Burma to take charge of the re-establishment of police administration. The civil intelligence officer's relations with the military administrator and other military authorities were meanwhile completely undefined: his main task was to furnish to the Government of Burma information regarding developments in the Arakan; and it was well known that this was to include information regarding the activities of the military forces. For the military administrator was forbidden, as we shall see, from communicating with the Government of Burma.

The "second police officer" mentioned may have been George Clift, who appears in the Civil List for the second quarter of 1943 as an Additional Superintendent of Police in Chittagong. Here we see Orr apparently spying on the British Army for the British Government! By the following spring, the book The Raiders of Arakan (pub. 1971) by C.E. Lucas Philips describes how in late May or early June 1943 (the exact date isn't specified) a young army officer named Denis Holmes was interviewed with regard to his joining V Force, an intelligence-gathering unit which criss-crossed the Japanese lines, with controlling officers based just on the British side of the line liaising with - and often going to visit - local agents a few miles into Japanese-held territory.

Accordingly he [Denis Holmes] got permission to go forward to Bawli Bazar for an interview with the V Force commander [cut] He found himself at the tin-roofed school, which now housed two officials of the Burma civilian administration, who had been given military rank to protect their statuses in an area dominated by soldiers.

The first of these was a very live wire with a most infectious laugh, named Denis Phelips. He was Deputy Commissioner for the District of Burma that included the Mayu Peninsula and had the acting rank of Brigadier. The other was Lieutenant-Colonel Archie Donald, known as "Rockbound" Donald for some reason, a senior officer of the Burma police, a man of massive frame, hard living, jovial, and renowned for his "good, mouth-filling oaths". He was the one directly in charge of V Force on the Arakan Front, under the general direction of Brigadier Marindin at Army Headquarters.

We will meet Brigadier Phelips, who had been Secretary of the Defence Department Burma in 1940 and was to be "a very big fellow" in post-war Burma, at a later date. It was "Rockbound" (whose name according to the Civil List was really Arthur/Artie, not Archie) who informed Holmes that:

"There are two other types that you would have to know about if you are rash enough to sign up with us. One is an outfit of rather special, long-range wallahs, deep in the country, run by Colonel Orr; most of them are known double agents and they are not your concern but you may be required to help them on occasions. The other is the Burma Intelligence Corps, a uniformed, army crowd, all Burmese, useful chaps, especially as interpreters, working on our side of the line..."

The index to the book confirms that this was C.B. Orr. Rockbound had previously described V Force's local informants thus:

"... odds and sods of all kinds. Humble types, you know. Most of them pretty decent blokes, with plenty of guts. Others have police records and would cut your throat for five bob, but they know we have the edge on them.

"Then, usually much further in behind the Jap lines, we have a number of 'agents', acting individually. They are men of higher intelligence and more responsible status. Their information can be important and we pay them well, butthey have to be bloody careful, otherwise the Jap'll pin them to the ground with bayonets and skin them alive. We suspect some of them of being double agents."

The National Archives file AIR 23/5157 includes a document dated 24^th August 1942 which lists "various organisations and authorities engaged either directly or indirectly in the collection of intelligence in and beyond the Eastern Army area". These include:

6) Post occupational Intelligence Staff responsible under local control of GS Eastern Army and under general direction of Director, Int Bureau, Govt of India and DMI GHQ for arrangements to ensure that, in the event of enemy occupation of part of India Command some intelligence will be collected from important strategic points behind enemy lines. This organisation is also responsible for extending post occupational arrangements forward into Burma for a depth of fifty or sixty miles and for supplementing the efforts of forward troops and V Force to obtain information by means of secret agents, employment of specially selected officers etc. Administered by G.S.I.(z).

7) Secret Intelligence Service - responsible for deep penetration by means of secret agents beyond the fifty to sixty mile limit.

G.S.I.(z) is Z Force, which at this point was a very ad hoc organisation. The Secret Intelligence Service was S.I.S., that is, M.I.6 under an assumed name. Either of these groups would fit what we know about what Cecil Bruce Orr was doing the following year.

On 10^th October 1943 a general with an illegible signature, described as GOC-in-C, 14^th Army, wrote to the Chief of the General Staff in New Delhi:

Subject:- C.A.S. - RELIEF FOR LT. COL 0RR.

Until recently Lt. Col. ORR has been working in the ARAKAN in the CHITTAGONG District as a rear link to Brig. Phelips. Recently, when the Burma Government found themselves unable to release Mr CLIFT for an appointment with G.S.I.(z) owing to the fact that he is D.C. Designate for AKYAB, Lt. Col. ORR was seconded from his C.A.S. appointment for service with G.S.I.(z). I understand that Brig. PHELIPS was not consulted in the matter.

2. Brig. PHELIPS now represents that he will be considerably handicapped in his work if Lt. Col. ORR is not replaced by another officer. Lt. Col. ORR had been carrying out preliminary interrogation of suspects on their evacuation to the rear, the compilation of black lists and the general duties connected with administration, as the rear link to Brig. PHELIPS. It was also assumed by Brig. PHELIPS that Lt. Col. ORR would be available to move forward behind him as the BRITISH advance into the ARAKAN progressed. Brig. PHELIPS is now left with nobody who can follow him up.

3. I understand that Brig. PHELIPS is representing this case to the Burma Government through C.A.S. channels and I must recommend that the matter be given urgent consideration and a suitable relief posted without delay as I consider the presence of an officer to fulfil the erstwhile duties of Lt. Col. ORR an operational neccessity.

Akyab is an island just off the southern end of Arakan. It's not clear whether this letter means that Orr was working in Chittagong itself, a town in what is now Bangladesh some fifty miles north of Arakan, or whether he was in the north of Arakan in the region mainly occupied by Moslem settlers from the north known as Chittagonians. C.A.S. was the Civil Affairs Service, an administrative cum intelligence unit made up of high-ranking police and civil servants who would later follow just behind the advancing British army, once the British army actually got to do any advancing, restoring law, order and infrastructure, rooting out subversives and arranging emergency care for refugees. The Civil Intelligence Bureau which Sam refers to could be another name for C.A.S., or could relate to what Orr had been doing in 1942 when he was spying on the British army for the British government.

If Bertie passed through Hakha in September 1943 heading broadly west or south-west then he was heading in the general direction of Chittagong, about a hundred and fifty miles away, or of northern Arakan, and the dates of his going out and returning neatly bracket the 10^th of October when Brigadier Phelips was complaining about Lt. Col. Orr being reassigned. It looks as though it may have been Bertie who carried the message summoning Orr to Z Force.

Later events would certainly show that Bertie and Orr knew each other fairly well, if not intimately: well enough for Orr to know what Bertie's plans were for his children's education, but not well enough for him to get Bertie's ethnic origins right (he called him an Anglo-Karen). It may very well be that Bertie worked with Orr in Z Force, and if he came under the aegis of G.S.I.(z), like The Johnnies, it would explain why Sam doesn't comment on what unit Bertie is working for.

On the other hand, the description in The Raiders of Arakan of Denis Holmes's dangerous liaisons with native agents a few miles behind the enemy lines, and the way that he had a house assigned to him while he was doing it, right on the edge of British-held territory, sounds so like what Herta remembers Bertie as doing that it raises a very strong possibility that he was with V force - possibly somewhere to the north of Hakha, since he passed through it heading broadly south and then back again, and if so then very probably in the Kachin Hills.

Although Orr had been working with or for C.A.S. in autumn 1943, C.A.S. and the personnel marked as S.O.D.D. were not synonymous, for the Civil List for the first quarter of 1944, correct as at 1^st January, lists George Clift (alone) as C.A.S. at the same time that twenty other men are S.O.D.D.. However, the following issue of the Civil List, as at 1^st April 1944 (issue 148, pages 402-405a), now describes all the men previously marked S.O.D.D. as being members of C.A.S.(B) - that is, Civil Affairs Service (Burma) - with the exception of Cecil Bruce Orr who is now described as "Intelligence Officer (Burma)", and a few others who have gone on leave. George Clift is now also C.A.S.(B).

In addition there are five men who are now listed as C.A.S.(B) and who had been on leave in the previous quarter: their names when on leave were listed mixed in with the members of S.O.D.D., so they too were probably S.O.D.D. during 1943 when not on leave. They are:

Norman Arthur John Mullen
U Bo (C)

in the District and Assistant Superintendents, and the following "Inferior Appointments":

Stephen De Glanville
John William McGuiness
Cornelius William North, MBE

Walter Gerald Londer
Norman Arthur Bisquiere

- who are on leave in both quarters but whose position on the list suggests they too were probably S.O.D.D.. As at April 1^st a handful of other men had also joined C.A.S.(B) who had been in other posts in the previous quarter, and so were probably never marked S.O.D.D., but in general it seems clear that at some time in the first three months of 1944 the men who had been marked S.O.D.D. became en masse C.A.S.(B).

The India Office and Burma Office List, 1947 supplement says that Bertie was attached to the Civil Affairs Service "to October 1945". The London Gazette of 22^nd June 1945 carries what seems to be an ex post facto list of commissions handed out during the war but only now being noted, and it says that Bertram Langford Denis Rae was appointed as a 2^nd Lieutenant on 3^rd February 1944, and that he was in the Army in Burma Reserve of Officers, his service n° being A.B.R.O. 1370. [According to Murphy's Laws of Combat Operations, "The most dangerous thing in the world is a Second Lieutenant with a map and a compass."] Theo Fforde joined A.B.R.O. on the same day.

A.B.R.O. was an ad hoc officers' corp on which little information is available, and which was probably founded in 1937 when the administrations of India and Burma were separated: there was a pre-existing Army in India Reserve of Officers. Some time around or soon after the beginning of the war A.B.R.O. began an emergency recruitment drive, eventually numbering around twenty-two hundred men. Vivian Rodrigues, who has done extensive research on A.B.R.O. because his father was in it, told me that initially A.B.R.O. recruited only from civil servants, medical and police officers of senior rank seconded to paramilitary forces such as the Burma Military Police, the Frontier Force and their reserve units. As a Class One Officer Bertie would have been senior enough to be in this first wave of recruits, but he evidently remained with the police for the time being.

Following the Japanese invasion in 1941, A.B.R.O. began to appoint less senior police officers, doctors and surgeons, academics and workers from Public Service, Forestry, the railway and telegraph services, the Public Works Department and from private import and export businesses. Many of these later recruits were Asian or, like Bertie, mixed-race. Vivian suggests that this was done "to bolster the regular units with local knowledge and military intelligence. Also to command irregular fighting units like the Chin Levees, and Kachin Levées", and says that many A.B.R.O.s saw very active service as officers attached to regular British and Indian units, the SOE and the Levées, particularly in 1943–1944. Nearly two hundred of the A.B.R.O.s, or 8.6%, went on to win awards for gallantry. In 1942/43, however, Bertie evidently had other and more obscure fish to fry.

When Bertie joined A.B.R.O., in February 1944, there was still heavy fighting at the Indo-Burmese border near Imphal but by March the two armies were really to-to-toe, and by late in the year the front had advanced well into Burma and working "in 'no-man's land' between India and Burma" ceased to be possible. According to the Civil List, by April 1944, if not before, he was attached to the Civil Affairs Service (Burma).

According to Vivian Rodrigues the Civil Affairs Service started up in February 1943. On 1^st January 1944 the Supreme Allied Commander, South-East Asia Command, delegated to the Civil Affairs Service the responsibility for the military administration of the civilian population in areas of Burma which were or might soon be occupied by the Allied army.

CAS(B) - Civil Affairs Service (Burma) - was a military administrative group whose job involved mopping up leftover Japanese outposts; making sure the civilian population was fed; freeing and caring for former prisoners of the Japanese; providing housing and transport; what Hackstaple on Rootsweb called "upcountry liaison possibly with some magistrate duties"; and working with and around Allied special ops. groups such as Force 136, and with local resistance groups who were often as anti-British as they were anti-Japanese, in a country where a hand-over to local Burmese government in the near future was an established plan, but the exact timescale was in dispute. After the joint Sino-American Northern Combat Area Command was disssolved in April 1944, C.A.S.(B) took over many of its administrative functions and moved into Burma to maintain order and a functioning infrastructure.

It seems therefore that Bertie operated as an intelligence agent with either V Force or Z Force 1942-1943, returned to Darjeeling and Herta late in 1943, joined A.B.R.O. in February 1944 and then was almost immediately sent back into Burma to help repair his war-torn native country, by now somewhat behind the fighting troops. Given his experience and membership of A.B.R.O., he may also have been used as a guide at the advancing edge of the Allied forces.

It was in February 1944 that the Inspector General of Police, Burma, joined the Civil Affairs Service as Chief of Police, bringing much of his organisation-in-exile with him. The coincidence of dates suggests that for Bertie joining the Civil Affairs Service and joining A.B.R.O. may have been one and the same, especially as he must have been in them simultaneously, and C.A.S.(B) was a military organisation.

While Bertie was doing whatever it was he was doing, his son Richard Wilmot Rae was born on 28^th October 1944: Richard's son Roger would later provide much of the information used in this account.

The London Gazette of 9^th August 1946 records that 2^nd Lieutenant Bertram Langford Denis Rae has relinquished his emergency commission (along with many others - A.B.R.O. was obviously being de-commissioned en masse) and has been granted the honorary rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.

Whatever the details of his service, Bertie certainly acquitted himself well. Page 4727 of The London Gazette of 17^th September 1946, (issue #37730, the Third Supplement to The London Gazette of Tuesday, the 17^th of September, 1946 which was actually published on the 19^th; the header which describes what the list is about is on page 4691), records that Lt.-Col. (temp.) B. L. D. Rae (A.B.R.O. 1370) was one of those "Mentioned in recognition of gallant and distinguished services in Burma" - that is, he was "mentioned in despatches".

The Civil List shows that Bertie resumed working as a District Superintendent of Police at Insein in late 1945 or early 1946 (issues 154 and 156, page 403). He relinquished his A.B.R.O. commission in August of that year, just in time for the police pay-strike in September 1946, promoted by the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League (A.F.P.F.L.). On 5^th October 1946 Herta was delivered of twin boys, one of whom was born feet first, and suffocated. The other was Francis Charles Rae, who would later provide some of the family information used in this account. Four months later Bertie's career was to go pear-shaped.

BlogGang

In January 1947 General Aung San, leader of the AFPFL, was in London negotiating Burma's transition to independence, due to take place in a year's time. He and his party came as peaceful negotiators but let it be known that if they didn't get their way, and weren't recognised as the incoming new government, they could get quite un-peaceful very fast and there would be a general strike. Strikes by prisoners had already begun in December 1946, and from mid-January onwards mass anti-British demonstrations and open, general unrest spread through Rangoon.

One of the groups of striking prisoners was at Insein Central Gaol. This large prison complex at Insein was not then the brutal, long-term political prison it was to become in later years: nearly all the prisoners there were genuine criminals, many of them petty thieves whose sentences were measured in months, and the few who were there as political dissidents were usually also only serving six-month sentences. Nevertheless it was a rough, chaotic place, and the prisoners were restive and wanted their say in a new, free Burma - plus there were rumours that the new government would release them as an act of celebration.

BBC news channel

On 4^th February 1947 Major HB MacEvoy IMS, the inspector-general of prisons, wrote to the secretary of the judicial department and said that at Insein the prisoners were effectively in charge of the gaol: the staff had lost control and there were frequent threats and rumours of an imminent break-out. [He would later say that the prison staff had been actively afraid of the prisoners - but he had a vested interest which will become apparent.] He said that in his opinion armed force, or the threat of it, would probably be necessary to regain control, and added that Lieutenant-Colonel R Round MC, the superintendent of the prison, agreed with him. On 7^th February MacEvoy was instructed to warn the prisoners that regulations were to be strictly applied and, among other things, that if they continued to flout the authority of prison staff then discipline would be restored by the use of force. The judicial department must have been aware that by "armed force" MacEvoy meant guns, and that they were tacitly agreeing to at least the threat of using those guns, because the prison warders were equipped with staves already.

It was later claimed that "on a number of occasions" during January and early February both MacEvoy and Round had separately been overheard to say that what was needed was a full-blown riot in which some prisoners would be shot dead, as this would shock the survivors back into line. On 9^th January, following a four-day rebellion, Round had brought a detachment of Ghurkha Rifles to Insein Gaol and told the chief gaoler that he was going to shoot all the prisoners, and wanted as many graves as possible dug in the prison burial ground. This was probably a joke, albeit a black one, but on the night of the 8^th of February MacEvoy was reported to have gone to the house of Thakin Mya, a member of the Executive Council, in what Mya called "an angry mood" and said that "If we go on treating the prisoners leniently, we will not be able to manage the jail; and that if two or three prisoners are shot, he will be able to control the prisoners". This was probably not a joke.

The following afternoon, on 9^th February 1947, two Burmese officials, U Hla Maung, political secretary to governor of Burma’s AFPFL-dominated Executive Council, and U Ba Swe, acting general secretary of the AFPFL, came to Insein prison to present the government's latest response to the prisoners' demands. At the prison, overseeing the contact, were Major MacEvoy and Lieutenant-Colonel Round. MacEvoy anticipated, or perhaps hoped for, trouble and for this reason Bertie, as District Superintendent of Police covering the Insein area, was stationed outside the prison with a mixed batch of civil and armed police.

MailOnline

The two Burmese officials entered the prison just after 4:15pm, accompanied by the deputy superintendent of the prison. The actual meeting, which was being held in the admissions shed, was delayed while the prisoners had their dinner - I suspect the prisoners were intentionally dicking the officials around, just to show that they could. Nevertheless U Hla Maung would later say that the negotiations had gone well and that he had persuaded the prisoners to moderate their demands, but the long delay caused MacEvoy and Round to become impatient. Their later comments showed that they thought the government was showing weakness by listening to the prisoners at all, and that actually talking to them was unconscionable. At 5pm they entered the main prison and located the Burmese officials, and MacEvoy told U Hla Maung to end the meeting, because it couldn't possibly take more than half an hour to deliver a simple message.

MacEvoy then recognized one of the prisoners' leaders, Myo Khin, as somebody who had a history of troublemaking, and although he doesn't seem to have been doing anything specifically wrong on this occasion, MacEvoy and two or three warders marched Myo Khin away towards the main gate, while Round headed for the kitchens. The prisoners by now were whistling and cat-calling.

For disciplinary reasons the prisoners were not supposed to wear badges of rank which indicate positions of power amongst themselves, and when Round saw a prisoner in or near the kitchens wearing a blue and white sash he decided to make an issue of it, in the face of an already high level of unrest. The prisoner became abusive and refused to remove the sash, a warder tried to take it by force and the situation degenerated into a violent scuffle. One of the warders blew his whistle and the prison alarm was set off - guns firing from the top of the perimeter wall, and the beating of a large gong.

MacEvoy, Bertram and two subordinate white police officers hurried to the kitchen where they found a full-scale riot now in progress, with prisoners in two wards hurling bricks, stones and plates at the prison staff. Bertram summoned the armed police he had left waiting outside the prison, and under his orders (and by his own account) they fired twenty-four rifle and four pistol shots into the two wards. The warders also began beating some of the prisoners with lathis (wooden or bamboo staffs used for crowd-control) and the rioters fell back to their dormitories. Four prisoners were fatally shot, three were wounded by gunshot and seventeen by lathis, and one prisoner suffered a fatal heart-attack.

Some of the prisoners injured by lathis were injured after the riot was over, for the warders continued to beat them. After the riot the prisoners' leaders were locked in their cells, and some were beaten there the following morning - which was strictly illegal.

This was at a time in Burma when the idea of police shooting at unarmed or semi-armed rioters was not unique, but MacEvoy and Round were roundly condemned at an AFPFL-led protest rally and at a meeting of the AFPFL-dominated Executive Council, and were suspended on 24^th February, pending the outcome of an enquiry by the judicial department, headed initially by Sir Ba U, judge of the high court of Rangoon, and two AFPFL officials. MacEvoy and Round objected to the AFPFL members as potentially biased and they were replaced by two barristers, Dr U Thein and CC Khoo.

Bertie, meanwhile, was described in the Civil List for April-June 1947 (volume 159, page 403) as "On leave" - which is presumably a polite euphemism.

Beginning on All Fools' Day, the judicial committee held twenty-nine sittings over two months and interviewed fifty-three witnesses. The government advocate presented the evidence that MacEvoy and Round had stated that a shooting incident would be beneficial, but the committee dismissed the suggestion that they had actively sought to provoke one. It agreed that their actions in removing Myo Khin and tearing off the sash had directly provoked the riot, but considered them to be clumsy rather than malicious and felt that these actions were partly justified by the instructions from the government, only a few days beforehand, to restore order by strictly enforcing prison regulations. Statements by inmates to the effect that gaolers had fired on the prisoners on direct instructions from MacEvoy were dismissed as fabrications.

MacEvoy and Round were criticized for not having taken disciplinary action against those warders who had illegally beaten the prisoners after the riot was over. MacEvoy claimed that he could not do so because nearly a third of the warders had been involved - as if that made a difference - and Round claimed that he had been "contemplating" disciplinary action when he was suspended.

As for Bertie, he argued that he had had to give the order to fire for three reasons: to re-establish discipline; to protect the gaol staff from death or serious injury and to prevent a mass break-out. The committee felt, however, that firing on the prisoners to restore discipline was unjustified and illegal, and said that the claim that it even might be justified took their breath away - this despite the fact that two days before the riot, the judicial department had instructed MacEvoy to threaten the prisoners with force if discipline were not restored, and they must have known that guns were what MacEvoy had in mind.

They must also have known - or if they didn't they were soon to learn - that a month before the riot, Round had quelled a previous rebellion by bringing a unit of Gurkha Rifles to the prison, and if they weren't there to shoot they were certainly there to look as if they might shoot. Even if the committe felt that actually firing on the prisoners had been a step too far, and even if they as individuals genuinely felt that even threatening the prisoners with armed force was unjustified, it was dishonest in the extreme for the committee to behave as if Bertie's action was sui generis.

The committee also held that the prisoners hadn't been close enough to the prison staff to hit them hard enough with their missiles to endanger them, and that the structure of the prison made a break-out impossible, and stated that Bertie had not warned the prisoners that he would give the order to fire if the riot continued, nor had he fired any warning shots. Bertie, still denied his day in court, was not given any chance to defend himself or to call witnesses in his own defence.

The committee's conclusion was that Bertie had acted without consulting the other officials, and was therefore solely to blame. It recommended that MacEvoy and Round should be reinstated, and their period of suspension counted as a period of duty.

On 12^th July 1947 the findings of the committee of enquiry were put before a meeting of the Executive Council chaired by Aung San (who was to be assassinated, along with six colleagues, exactly a week later). The Council rejected the findings of the committee as regards MacEvoy and Round, instead severely criticizing their combative and arrogant behavior, MacEvoy's high-handed treatment of U Hla Maung and the fact that neither official had attempted to stop the police from firing on the prisoners nor the warders from thrashing them, nor disciplined the warders who had done so. It considered that they had acted maliciously and had deliberately provoked both the riot and the shooting, and decided that both should be sacked and their period of suspension should not be counted (or paid) as a period of duty. As for Bertie, who was still also held to be jointly responsible, his case was to be "taken up by the Home Department for such action as that Department may deem fit".

In the event, the final outcome for MacEvoy and Round was a compromise. Neither was reinstated but both were cleared and allowed to count their period of suspension as duty. This may have been because of the nature of their posts. Official British documents relating to the case show that the point was raised that MacEvoy was an officer of the Indian Medical Service, appointments to which were made by the Secretary of State. He could be removed only by the direct personal decision of the governor and only if there had first been a full formal enquiry with specific charges laid and investigated, and even so MacEvoy would then have the right to appeal to the Secretary of State. The London view was that as a matter of political expediency MacEvoy should be reinstated, then removed from Burma and palmed off on the Indian Medical Service before that body ceased to exist on 15^th August 1947 - not because he wasn't guilty as semi-officially-charged, but because he was too expensive and fiddly to get rid of. Similar considerations applied to Round, who was in the employ of the British Army, not of the government of Burma.

EltnegWorldisround

Bertie too was a Secretary of State's appointee who could not be simply dismissed, which explains why he was passed back to the Home Department like a hot potato. What the Home Department deemed fit was to suspend him on half pay as from 27^th August 1947, pending a formal enquiry, and Bertie, Herta and their young sons Peter, Richard and Francis went to live, initially quite happily, at Kalaw, a hill station in the Shan states. Since Bertie was half Shan himself, they may have been staying in a family property. [Extract from letter from GS Whitehead, H.B.M. Embassy, Rangoon, 11 February 1948(?), M/4/2294; A. Dibdin, Commonwealth Relations Office, Whitehall, to GE Crombie, H.B.M. Embassy, Rangoon, 13 April 1948, M/4/2294] You can read here the childhood reminiscences of a woman who was born in Kalaw a few years later, in which it sounds and looks beautiful, if worryingly leopard-haunted.

Unfortunately, by this point the two most important witnesses, MacEvoy and Round, had left Burma and could not be (or at any rate weren't) recalled to give evidence, and the enquiry ground to a puzzled halt. The results of the investigation into Bertie's actions, such as they were, were passed to the government of Burma for orders early in October 1947, but no action was taken. On 4^th January 1948 Burma became independent, the force from which Bertie had been suspended ceased to exist and he found himself, as the British Ambassador James Bowker was later to put it, "in the anomalous position of being suspended from a post in a service which no longer exists, or, alternatively, of being suspended from the present Burma Police, in which he has not agreed to serve, and to which he has not been officially appointed". [James Bowker, British Embassy, Rangoon, to Sao Hkun Hkio, Acting Minister for Foreign Affairs, 1 September 1948, M/4/2294]

I have mixed feelings about the Insein affair. When they were younger, Bertie's brother Bobby and best friend Sam had both occasionally shown themselves willing to beat up civilians who annoyed them, but there's no reason to think either of them would have intentionally killed anyone who wasn't a serious threat to them, and I know of no evidence that Bertie himself had ever seen interpersonal violence as anything other than a last resort. Even the prosecutors who were trying to pin the blame on him never seem to have suggested that Bertie acted out of malice, and one can hardly think that racial prejudice was an issue either, since he was half Shan/Chinese and so far as I've been able to ascertain, the Shan don't seem to have any particular hatreds going with the other ethnic groups in Myanmar.

Nor is it at all likely that he was an aggressively hardline, unthinking son of Empire, since that part of him which was not Asian was Southern Irish Catholic, and he was the son of an anthropologist. If he acted improperly, he presumably did so because he had misread the situation, or out of panic, and he had every reason to think that MacEvoy and Round were in favour of firing on the rioters.

On the other hand, he was an experienced officer, and one of the things we pay our police and soldiers to do is to not lose their heads and start shooting at civilians who are armed only with half-bricks and plates.

On what a friend of mine calls "the third or Sellafield hand", Bertie was not long out of a war in which he had spent long periods in the lethal territory close to the Japanese lines, and had been mentioned in despatches - meaning that he had conducted himself very bravely and had been in the thick of the action. He suffered all his life from dark, distressing nightmares about his war service, suggesting that he had quite severe Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: so it's understandable that on being suddenly confronted with an angry, out-of-control mob, with a gong blaring and gunshot sounding from the perimeter wall and in an atmosphere of city-wide simmering rage and violence which had been building for months, he might react to the rioters as if they were enemy soldiers.

But in any case, it's not clear whether or not he really did act improperly, especially as he was never given the chance to explain his actions to the court. He probably acted incorrectly, as things turned out, and by doing so he caused the death of four civilians (I don't put the fifth one on my grandfather's account, because there's nothing to say whether the heart attack which killed him was brought on by the shooting or by the riot itself). But his position was analogous to that of a doctor who makes a mistake which kills a patient: if the mistake was an obvious one which a careful practitioner would not have made, then it's negligence and a criminal matter; but if the doctor made a reasonable judgement based on information which later turned out to have been misleading then it's just one of the unavoidable imperfections of life. People have to act on the information which is available to them at the time, and it's not clear that Bertie could have known that his action was incorrect.

For example, the court found that the prison officials had never been in serious danger from the mob, because they were too far apart for the missiles to do them much damage, and that the structure of the prison meant that a mass breakout was impossible: but no evidence was offered that this would have been apparent from where Bertie was standing. The prisoners had been threatening to break out for weeks, and if it looked from Bertie's angle as if the officials were about to be killed and/or as if the riot was about to spill out into the streets, he had to make a fast decision based on what he could see. Even if, in the event, what he could see turned out to have been misleading.

All this is assuming, of course, that it really was Bertie who gave the initial order to fire, and not MacEvoy. Bertie seems not to have denied the assumption that he himself ordered his men to fire, but since some of the prisoners claimed to have heard MacEvoy give the order it may be that he did in fact instruct Bertie to issue the command.

Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma)

In any case, looking at the plan of Insein prison and the location of its watch towers I would have said, myself, that while a mass break-out onto the streets was unlikely - not without many prisoners being gunned down in the process, at any rate - an internal break-out, resulting in the rioters leaving their wards and directly attacking the prison staff, was possible and likely. Such a break-out could have been suppressed only with heavy fire from the central tower, which would probably have killed many more than four prisoners.

Then, Bertie was said by the court to have acted improperly because no warning was given and no warning shots fired. But twenty-eight shots were fired at fairly close range, resulting in four deaths and three injuries. Either multiple bullets were fired into the same few targets, or the Insein police were rotten shots, or warning shots were fired. There was also the fact that some of the prisoners apparently stated that some of the shots came from the warders, and that MacEvoy himself had ordered them to fire.

Vivian Rodrigues states that so far as he knows, Bertie wouldn't legally have been able to order the discharge of weapons against civilians unless a magistrate was present and authorised him to do so. I don't know whether either MacEvoy or Round was a magistrate, but given their ranks and rôles it's very likely.

Of course, the case against Bertie rested on the claim that he had ordered his men to fire without authorisation, but what the prisoners heard may well have been MacEvoy confirming the order to shoot. Certainly it is virtually certain that Bertie, as District Superintendent, would have been aware that the judicial department had instructed MacEvoy to threaten the prisoners with force two days beforehand, despite the fact that at that point the prisoners were merely striking, not rioting and chucking missiles; and it is also extremely likely that Bertie knew that MacEvoy and Round favoured firing on the prisoners as a means to restore order. He was entitled to think that they wanted him to give the order to fire - as they undoubtedly did want him to do - unless they intervened and told him not to: and both the Executive Council and the judicial department agreed that MacEvoy and Round had made no attempt to prevent or halt the shooting.

Seen from that point of view, Bertie's legal offence was to assume, without being instructed to do so, that his superior officers wanted him to do something which they in fact did want him to do, and would have instructed him to do had he not already done it. In an ideal world he should probably have refused to do it anyway - but then there were other factors involved, such as the threat of an imminent fatal attack on the prison staff, and the background of rage and hysteria infecting both the prison and the city.

Professor Ian Brown, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, has been kind enough to let me see his notes on his findings about the case, including a series of back-and-forth British government notes about Bertie's fate.

In February and March 1948, GS Whitehead of the British Embassy in Rangoon commented that any decisions about Bertie's conduct related to a period when he had enjoyed certain rights under the Burma Act of 1935, in that he was a Secretary of State appointee who could not be censured or punished except on the individual judgement of the governor, and that he was eligible for compensation for termination of employment, which he had not submitted a claim for. As I understand it this referred to compensation for the fact that his job ceased to exist when the British administration in Burma did: Whitehead commented that as from 4^th January 1948, when Burma became independent, Bertie "would normally then have been granted leave pending retirement on proportionate pension and compensation for premature termination of career". [GS Whitehead, British Embassy, Rangoon, to Ah Kway, Secretary, Ministry of Home Affairs, 27 February 1948, M/4/2294; GS Whitehead to J. Barrington, Secretary, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Government of the Union of Burma, Rangoon, 31 March 1948, M/4/2294]

Several British officials took a sincere interest in Bertie's fate, but were uncertain what to do for the best. In May 1948 the Commonwealth Relations Office commented that the case was coloured by political feeling, that "it is far from clear whether he really was to blame" and they weren't sure whether the Burmese authorities were stalling in order to quietly drop the case, in which case it wouldn't be a good idea to press for a decision, or conversely whether they were delaying on order to make it easier to "take vindictive action". [Commonwealth Relations Office to British Embassy, Rangoon, 13 May 1948, Telegram, M/4/2294]

U Tin Tut, who became Burma's Minister for Foreign Affairs in October 1947, privately wanted to let the case against Bertie quietly lapse, [George Crombie, British Embassy, Rangoon, to A. Dibdin, Commonwealth Relations Office, London, 2 July 1948, M/4/2294], but by September 1948 he had evidently been replaced, Sao Hkun Hkio was Acting Minister for Foreign Affairs and the British Ambassador was writing to him to emphasise the hardship in which Bertie found himself, since half pay was "no longer sufficient to meet his family commitments". Since Peter was now six, family commitments would have included schooling: and in fact by this point Herta must have been pregnant with the couple's fourth son Timothy, although the pregnancy was so new she probably didn't know it yet. One wonders whether Bertie was also having to pay alimony to his first wife. The ambassador pointed out that the fact that Bertie's situation hadn't been sorted out before Burma became independent had deprived him of his right to appeal to the Secretary of State, and yet he was still technically a Government servant and as such unable either to apply for another government post or to engage in private business. [James Bowker, British Embassy, Rangoon, to Sao Hkun Hkio, Acting Minister for Foreign Affairs, 1 September 1948, M/4/2294]

It was around this time that Bertie's oldest son Rory was serving as a negotiator for the Polish Forces in Egypt, with such skill and charm that he would be decorated for work done at the tender age of twenty-one. Shooting incident or no shooting incident, Bertie must have been basically a good man, because nobody who ever met Rory seems to have had a bad word to say about him - and he didn't get that from his mother.

On 18^th September 1948 PC Bamford, the Honorary Secretary of the Indian Police (UK) Association, wrote to A Dibdin, the Commonwealth Relations Officer, saying that he thought Bertie was being kept on suspension as a result of political spite on the part of the new Burmese government, and should not be unduly punished for "the somewhat technical offence of entering a jail to quell a riot without a formal invitation". This is actually worryingly flippant, considering that four people died as a result - but it serves to show that Bertie was working for an organization in which his action was not seen as out of the ordinary. [PC Bamford, Hon. Sec., Indian Police (U.K.) Association, to A Dibdin, Commonwealth Relations Office, 18 September 1948, M/4/2294]

Even more interestingly, Bamford quoted an off-the-record letter which he had received from a Mr C.B. Orr, former Deputy Inspector-General of the Criminal Investigations Department (DIG CID) for Burma (shown as such in the Civil List for October-December 1946). Despite the word "Deputy" the DIG is actually the head of the local CID.

This presumably is Cecil Bruce Orr, who in 1943 was a District Superintendent alongside Bertie and seems to be the only other person in the Civil List whose unit is given as S.O.D.D. at that time, and who later wrote a memoir about his time in the police called ^{A Burma Patchwork}. The Supplement to The London Gazette of 12^th June 1947, page 2605, shows Orr as the Officiating Deputy Inspector-General of Police, Burma - presumably a step up from being the DI of a mere department, even if it was the CID - being awarded the King's Police and Fire Services Medal for Distinguished Conduct.

Mr Orr had written that in January 1947 Aung San had been planning an uprising if the talks in London didn't go the way he wanted. He made no secret of the fact, but at the same time he tried unsuccessfully to keep the details of his plans hidden, and Bertie had been Mr Orr's best source for this detailed information.

Although the information being received concerned members of the Burmese transitional government, that government was kept informed about the intelligence which was coming in, including the intelligence about itself, and as a result Acting Home Secretary Pyawbwe U Mya had been aware that Bertie was providing information about Aung San's plans to the CID. Orr considered that Bertie's information had actually contributed considerably to the British government's decision to give Aung San what he wanted, but felt that nevertheless the new Burmese government bore Bertie a grudge. As evidence of this grudge, Orr stated that "Mr Prescott" (RG Prescott, Inspector General of Police) had suggested Bertram as a possible replacement for Orr himself as DIG CID, after his first candidate, a Mr Clift, had been rejected (for having dealt "rigorously" with a rebellion he knew to be government-sponsored). The Burmese government had replied that they could not promote Bertie owing to the Insein affair, and had instead chosen a more junior Burmese candidate. This comment is interesting because, among other things, it shows that Bertie was regarded by his police superiors as a high-flyer who was suitable for promotion to DIG CID.

Orr went on to say that "Mr Rae is an Anglo-Karen [which is wrong - he was Anglo-Shan], but he told me that he did not intend to stay in Burma. He has twice been married. Both wives are European. He was educated in England [sort of - he was at school in England before he was at college in Scotland]. His son by his first wife was educated in Europe. He has three young children by his second wife. I know he intended to send them to England, but I hear they are still in Burma. At the beginning of 1948 Mr Rae had about 24 years service. During the war he was mentioned in despatches. I feel sure that had Mr Rae been willing to keep quiet about what information he received in 1947 he would not have been in any way worried over the Jail affair." The significance of the comment about Bertie having about twenty-four years' service as at 3^rd January 1948 (which is slightly off - he had twenty-three years and three weeks' service) is that after twenty-five years' service he would have been entitled to take voluntary early retirement on a reduced pension. As it was, he presumably lost his pension rights. [Royal Commission into the Public Services in India 1912, p. 262]

I have to say I think it quite understandable, and not necessarily any indication of spite, that the Burmese government, knowing that Bertie was in effect a British government spy, would not want to see him in a position of considerable power which would give him access to almost every piece of intelligence in the country, and would want to mothball him somewhere out in the sticks where he wasn't likely to find out anything they didn't want the British to know about.

However, evidence of spite was soon to come. In January 1949 the British Ambassador wrote to Thakin Nu, the Home Minister, to say that Bertie "was until recently permitted to draw half his pay and allowances but has recently been reduced to quarter pay with retrospective effect with the result that he will draw no pay at all for three months [cut] as a result Mr Rae and his family are now reduced to a state of destitution." To make matters worse, Herta was now heavily pregnant. [Aide Memoire left with Thakin Nu, in his capacity as Home Minister, by British Ambassador, 7 January 1949, M/4/2294]

On 15^th February 1949 Chan Tha, Secretary to the Union Government of Burma's Ministry of Home Affairs, stated that it had been impossible to come to a definite finding regarding Bertie's guilt in respect of the charges against him, because the original enquiry had been incomplete and Bertie had never been given the chance to defend himself. Nor was it possible to hold a fuller enquiry which would clear the matter up, because the main witnesses (MacEvoy and Round) were unavailable. Although Bertie's guilt had not been definitely established, since the evidence had never been fully examined, the result of the original judicial department enquiry meant that it was also not possible to say that he had been honourably acquitted. In fact, although they didn't put it that way they basically ended up with the Scottish verdict Not Proven - but did so without ever allowing Bertie a chance to produce evidence in his own favour.

Bertie's suspension, and his employment, were retroactively ended as at 4^th January 1948; the period of his suspension, from 28^th August 1947 to 3^rd January 1948, was counted as a period of duty on half pay; and he was to be granted the standard concessions paid to European officers whose posts ceased to exist when Burma became independent. Bertie was given six months in which to appeal to the Government of the Union of Burma. [Union of Burma, Ministry of Home Affairs, Order, 15 February 1949, M/4/2294]

In March 1949 CC Clemens at the British Embassy in Rangoon wrote to the Commonwealth Relations Office, acknowledging that the Burmese government had conceded over Bertie, however grudgingly, but expressing concern over two points. which he hoped to raise with the Burmese. One was that if Bertie was considered as having been on duty only to January 1948, rather than up until February 1949 when his suspension was actually ended, then the intervening period would count as leave-time which he would then have used-up and lost, instead of having leave still to come in which he could go job-hunting. The other point was that "the terms of the order might be read as insinuating that Rae was guilty of dishonourable conduct. This, I think, is nonsense. Judging by the Enquiry Commission’s Report he may have committed an error of judgement but there can be no question whatever of dishonourable conduct." There is no record that either protest brought any positive result. [CC Clemens, British Embassy, Rangoon, to A McCracken, Commonwealth Relations Office, 9 March 1949, M/4/2294]

A few days later, on 14^th March, Clemens added the rider that "we have now heard from Rae that he is [cut] proposing to stay in Kalaw for about another year if he is allowed to do so." This probably had a lot to do with the fact that Herta was now seven months pregnant. Their son Timothy was born in May 1949, and by March 1950 Herta was pregnant again.

On 3^rd June 1950, with another baby well on the way (this was the couple's youngest son, Michael, who would eventually be born three days before Christmas, with four older brothers at home aged eight years or less - which must have been just peachy for all concerned), Bertie himself wrote to the Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations: a long, irate letter, fluent and technical, as you might expect from somebody who had once nearly been a lawyer. In it he states that he had not appealed directly to the Government of the Union of Burma against the decision of February 1949, because it was apparent that the order had come from the President and "any appeal made might have resulted in a much less favourable outcome". After great delay, the Accountant-General's office in Burma had finally paid his arrears of leave pay in March 1950, enabling him to leave Burma and come to the UK, where he had arrived on 24^th May "to seek redress from the Secretary of State". [BLD Rae to H.M.’s Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, 3 June 1950, M/4/2294]

He argues that the then government of Burma were at fault for not processing his case between October 1947 and January 1948, instead handing it and him on to the new government and depriving him of his right of appeal to the Secretary of State in the event of an adverse order being passed, as it eventually had been. He stated that "The departmental enquiry held into my conduct was an abortive one as two of the main witnesses [MacEvoy and Round] were permitted to leave Burma for New Zealand and the United Kingdom respectively, before the order placing me under suspension was issued and before the departmental enquiry into my conduct was started. It was evident at the time that any departmental enquiry proposed to be held could not possibly be a fair one if these two witnesses could not be cited and subjected to examination or cross-examination by me as respondent."

This is interesting in a number of ways. It shows his desire to appear in court and his intention of being his own legal team, and the comments about MacEvoy and Round "being permitted" to leave and about his desire to cross-examine them sound vaguely hostile. I have the distinct impression that he didn't just want MacEvoy and Round to be his character witnesses and confirm his version of events, but rather he felt that they had been the ones mainly at fault and he had hoped to prove it.

He argues, reasonably enough, that since the new government in Burma admitted that he had never been given a chance to defend himself to the Committee of Enquiry, the finding of that enquiry shouldn't have been allowed to influence the findings of "the subsequent abortive departmental enquiry". Since his principal witnesses had been allowed by the previous government to leave the country, and no proper enquiry could therefore be held, "through no fault of my own I was prevented from producing evidence to secure an honourable acquittal" and it was unfair therefore for the new government to declare that he had not been honourable acquitted, when the matter had not actually been examined. Again, clearly, he felt that if he had been able to cross-examine MacEvoy and Round he could have proved that he had acted honourably: and since he was a legally-educated man who had been considered for the post of DIG CID, he probably knew what he was talking about.

Since the new government of Burma had taken sixteen months to process the results of the abortive enquiry, which had been submitted in October 1947 under a previous administration, he maintained that they actually had no jurisdiction to pass the order of February 1949.

Once more, however, he was denied his day in court. The Commonwealth Relations Office replied tersely that "The Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations has no longer any control over the affairs of the Burmese Government and has no power to alter any order which the Government may have passed." [G Iddon [Commonwealth Relations Office] to BLD Rae, 20 June 1950, M/4/2294]

"They decided a European education would be better for the children so they sailed to London but could not find anywhere to live. They then went to stay with Herta’s mother in Austria [probably in Wels, which is where Herta's family came from] in a small flat with an outside toilet.

"Bertram bought a plot of land in Thalheim [probably Thalheim bei Wels in upper Austria] and they built their house in three weeks just as the winter set in. There was ice on the walls as the bricks were still damp. The house was finished on 20^th December 1950 and Mickey [Michael Bernard Rae] was born two days later on 22^nd December 1950.

"Bertram never settled in Austria and didn’t learnt to speak German, he insisted that all of the family speak English at home.

"At first his main hobby was growing orchids and he built a greenhouse in the garden to grow the orchids that he had brought back from Burma. However the extreme Austrian climate meant that they did not grow well and he ended up donating them to the botanical gardens in Austria.

"He worked as a sales rep for a company that manufactured wood and concrete blocks for building and tried to sell them to British companies but this didn’t succeed.

"He worked on a mathematical technique to win at roulette and thought he had solved this just before he died"

It seems a sad end for somebody who had once flown so high, doubly exiled from Burma and from Britain, from Insein and from Edinburgh, scrabbling with sales figures and gamblers' sure-fire tricks, but his life in Austria wasn't as grey as it sounds. His son Francis recalls that he spoke very little about the past but that he remained "a perpetual student", full of intellectual liveliness and curiosity and always busy, and enjoyed a very interesting retirement. Having been denied the chance to study what he wanted when he was young, he now passed exams in gemology (possibly with a view to trading in Burmese precious stones), draughtmanship and engineering, and invented a new form of steam turbine. Trying to beat the roulette wheel sounds like an act of desperation, but in fact he was endeavouring to raise the money to put his invention into production. Francis also recalls him reading a historic copy of Boccaccio's Decameron in the original French - the French which he learned from Ethel Maud - "with great delight!" [For anybody who doesn't know it, The Decameron is a 14^th C collection of short stories and allegories, many of which are erotic.]

On 25^th March 1965 Bertie suffered the loss of his first son Rory, killed in an incident in Assam. The telegram was received in grim-faced, deadly silence: his son Francis recalls that Bertie told his younger sons "probably no more than was written in the telegram" - but in truth, the circumstances of my father's death were so obscure that Bertie himself probably knew no more than was in the telegram.

Also during the 1960s, and marginally more cheerfully, his first wife Ethel/Elise took on a sort of godmotherly responsibility for the wellbeing of his and Herta's son Peter, and used her extensive contacts to help advance his career.

I know that Bertie continued to have dark dreams about the war almost all his life. He died on 18^th March 1972, aged just sixty-eight, presumably at Thalheim. Roger says "He had suffered from blood clots in his legs in the years before he died and Herta believed it was one of these clots that led to the stroke that killed him at home".

His surviving sons and their children and grandchildren are scattered, some in Burma, some in Australia and some in Britain, but he is still remembered fondly by his wife and sons.

Bertram (Bertie) Langford Denis Rae, born 1903