Robert R Rae, born 1900

Robert "Bobby" Rae was born on born 2^nd February 1900 the son of Denis Wilmot Rae the elder, a District Superintendent of Police and a respected amateur anthropologist, and of Ma or Daw Kyin, a Shan woman of great beauty, and was baptised as a Catholic on 4^th January 1903 in Bhamo - the same day his parents married. [FamilySearch; FamilySearch] He had an elder half sister Beatrice, and a full sister Jeannie and three full brothers Bertie, Harry and Denis who were all younger than him.

Along with his brothers, he attended the Government High School in Maymyo, a very high-powered boarding school which took in and streamed boys according to how much schooling they had already received, rather than their age. In the case of some boys from outlying areas who had started schooling very late, they could be well into their twenties before they left, while at the other extreme some of the students were as little as five years old. Bobby was close friends at school with a half Chin boy named Sam Newland, later Major Sam Newland D.S.O., who remembered his first meeting with him, in January 1914, thus:

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, but I chose him as my second in command during my long-penetration patrolls [sic] behind the enemy lines in World II. We also became firm friends. Bobbie had a sister, Jenny, who was in the Maymyo Convent. She and Harry became variety entertainers in Paris in later years, after Jenny's marriage with a wealthy Jew (Soloman) in Rangoon turned out a failure. Bobbie's father was a District Superintendent of Police who had married a Shan woman of great beauty. Old Rae died of cancer like my Dad, but Mrs Rae was still alive after the last war and Denis went to live with her.

Sam's account is not always very clear but it seems that these box-rooms, as well as providing storage areas for the trunks belonging to a particular group of the older boys, also doubled as private sitting-rooms for the boys whose trunks were kept in them, whilst all but a few of the oldest boys slept communally in one of three long dormitories, according to their age. Sam and Bobby, who slept in the senior dormitory (for boys aged thirteen and up), gathered around themselves several like-minded boys who were all keen on hunting, which they did mainly to supplement their diet but also to some extent just for sport. Other schoolfriends mentioned by Sam Newland included Jack Girsham, Peter Bennie, George Fuller, Oscar Piggott, Arthur "Bill" Parry and Fred Lawson.

We glimpse Bobby, and the lifestyle of the crowd he hung out with, several times in Sam's memoirs. Maymyo High School's academic year followed the calendar year and began in January. In his first year there, 1914, Sam was in the 4^th standard, so Bobby was in the 5^th. Speaking of that first year, Sam writes:

I did not make many friends in the first year as I was rather home-sick and spent most of my time studying. Bobbie introduced me to some of the other boys who were keen on shooting like Jack Girsham, Peter Bennie and Pigot. Jack Girsham was a day scholar and Bobbie and I usually spent Saturday forenoon at his place. Bobbie was then in the cadets of the Indian Defence Force [elsewhere Sam describes this as "a voluntary unpaid force"] and being friendly with the I.D.F sergeant-in-charge, borrowed a gun and rifle (.405 Winchester) from him during our ten-days Michaelmas holidays for one day. We went to Nyaungni, about 5 miles from Maymyo, in an enclave in the Maymyo Reserved Forest. Bobbie had been here before and knew the two best trackers and illicit beat organizers in the village - U Tha Htun, a large fat half Shan and U Po Yin, a thin wiry Burman. We got to the village fairly early and put up in U Tha Htun's house, which was in the middle of the village.

Muntjac buck in South India, cropped from a photo' by Dineshkannambadi at Wikipedia: Biligiriranga Hills

He cooked us some Burmese curry and rice and after we had eaten this in Burmese fashin [sic], with our fingers, we started out for a gyi [barking deer or muntjac, probably the Common Muntjac Muntiacus muntjak, a.k.a. Cervulus vaginalis] beat in the reserved forest. As we had no license to shoot in a reserve we could be fined if caught, but Tha Htun assured us the foresters would shut their eyes to such a petty offence. We beat all the best cover where gyi were known to spend their siesta period during the heat of the day. Quite a number of animals were flushed from the patches of bush but all but one came out where a gun was posted. It was Bobbie's luck, and his good shooting with the rifle which provided the beaters and us with venison. Our share was a back leg and when we got back the cook roasted it for us and we shared it with our box-room crowd. When others heard of our luck, they also went for shoots but no more gyi were shot that year by the boarders.

My holidays soon came to an end and I had to retrun [sic] to school which I reached in good time. Bobbie was there already and had been on several shoots to Nyaungni and Yegoungu. He had moved into a better box-room under our dormitory, where later we were joined by Peter Bennie another boy from Bhamo who was very keen on shooting. [cut]
Bobbie, Jack, Peter and I went out shooting quite a lot during my second year in school [1915] and sometimes Pat Johannes, one of the senior boys, joined us. He had his own gun and rifles in school, being a very keen and experienced sportsman. Later in 1918 I was also allowed to bring and keep my gun in school to the great envy of my other shooting companions. Our main shooting grounds in 1915 were Nyaungni and Yegyan-U. The latter was only about two miles from school and was therefore not only more convenient than the more distant Nyaungni but just as good for gyi, pig and even panther which took cover in the dense lantana bushes which covered square miles of country near the village. The only disadvantage of Yegyan-U was that it was too close to the Forest Deppartment [sic] officials and their subordinates. The reserved forest around Maymyo was divided into blocks by wide fire-breaks or "rides" as they were called, which were much used for riding by the European population at Maymyo, including Forest officers and their wives. Once some of our boys were caught coming back with a gyi slung on a pole, by a Forest officer, and of course a complaint was sent to Mr Ainslet [typo, sic - the Headmaster's name was Ainsley] at once. The offenders, however, turned out to be day-scholars, over whose actions out of school hours, the principal had no control. Our gang was therefore not affected by the complaint and old Sells continued to allow us to go out on our usual hunting trips, provided we kept to the unclassed forests and avoided reserves.

As I wanted to get to school early [in January 1916] so as to beable [sic] to pick a good box-room and collect all the shooting gang together, I left for Maymyo a week earlier than usual and got to Maymyo a week before school opened and picked the same box-room I was in the previous year. Bobbie, Peter, George Fuller, Oscar Pigott, the Stephen brothers and shared the room. The Stephen brothers were not fond of shooting and so did not belong to our gang. George Fuller was not keen on shooting but as he was a good "scout" and friendly with the gang we included him. He always came out with us and enjoyed the outings just as much as the shooters did. He was the son of a Burma Railways official at Mandalay Station, in charge of the goods and freight department. George was very short and almost rotund, but always full of good humour and fun and ready to do anything for anyone. After study at nights we used to gather and go across the road to the Kaka's shop for a cup of tea and buttered toast or rusks and more often than not George would "stand" the rest and on top of it take all the chaff with a good natured "go on you bugger or man" and a laugh. One of the tricks we played on him at break-up time, was to put the school 16lb. putting shot into his trunk when left for home. He only found out when he unpacked his trunk or rather his mother did. He brought it back next year and thought it a great joke. I do not know what our box-room would have done without George. Jack Girsham who was always full of fun and pranks and used to come to our box-room regularly except when he was out shooting, was George's greatest teaser and fun-baiter. They would keep us in roars of laughter at our after-study-sessions in the box-room, where I organised tea and rusks for all. We had found the Kaka's Shop inconvenient and expensive, so when I returned to school I brought with me one of Dad's discarded primus kerosene stoves and a kettle. All the Primus needed was a new burner which was soon rectified. I had got used to drinking Nilgiri tea at home and sent for a dozen packets from Bailey Brock & Co., as soon as I got to school. Condensed milk and sugar were cheap and for about 3 (i.e 3 rupees = 6 shillings Australian) a a month the gang was able to enjoy a mug of tea every night plus small rusks from the bazaar. Rusks are eaten a lot in Burma and India and are just small bread rolls baked crisp and are usually eaten "dunked" or dipped into the tea. [cut]
As far as the activities of our shooting gang were concerned, we carried on without let or hindrance, making excursions to new grounds in different directions and beyond the reserved forests where there was no chance of being had up for shooting without proper authority. Two of the good spots we discovered were Kontha, about 6 miles east of Mamyo [sic] and Behlin, about 8 miles, south of Maymyo. These two villages became well known to us for gyi and sambur. Pig and bear were to be found also

Waterfall at Anisaken, from picek at Virtual Tourist

but our gang never had the luck to bag one during my time. [shooting story follows]
Another spot we used to visit was Annisaken at the 7th. mile on the Maymyo-Mandalay road. There was plenty of game round the forests but the jungles were too thick for beating or stalking and we soon gave up trying to shoot here. It was here I met the Parry family first, Mrs Parry, Arthur, Sylvester, Florence ("Flo"), Dolly (Dorothy) and Fred. Flo was the eldest, then came Arthur, Dolly and Fred. Arthur or "Bill" as he was popularly known, and I became great friends and remained so all our lives. He was as keen on shooting as Bobbie and I and when he became a boarder in the school, he joined our shooting gang.

The boys seem to have enjoyed considerable freedom at Maymyo and to have been treated with respect by the masters - perhaps not surprisingly, since some of them were well into their twenties - but this independence didn't always work out well. Referring to an indefinite date some years into his time at the school, Sam recounts a regrettable incident in which one of the school bullies beat up a rather limp teacher with very little provocation and the boys in the senior dormitory, understandably incensed by this, forced the bully to run the gauntlet, knocking him out several times and forcing him to recover and stagger on, for which they narrowly escaped prosecution. Sam's account isn't entirely clear and it's just about possible Bobby had already left the school at this point, but it looks more likely that both Sam and Bobby took part in this Lord of the Flies episode. In 1917 Sam was to beat up one of the school servants although on that occasion it was generally agreed that the man was very obnoxious and nearly everybody, including the staff, wanted to beat him up. It may well be that Bobby led Sam astray and encouraged this violent behaviour, for Sam seems to have been very keen to do whatever Bobby was doing and Bobby was to prove himself to be something of a rough-neck.

His brother Bertie would later be sent to finish his schooling in England, after the end of World War One, but Bobby grew up during the war and he left school to go straight into the army. The date on which he did so is somewhat unclear. Some of the records, of which more anon., suggest that he joined up in 1916 but Sam seems definite that he didn't leave the school until some time in 1917, and even recounts a hunting trip he took with Bobby that year.

       Being early in school we [Sam and George Fuller] were able to pick our old box-room again and reserve places for the old hunting gang. This year (1917) we were able to add Bill Parry and Fred Lawson to the gang as both these boys were keen shikaris. [cut]
       1917 was an important year for me as I had reched [sic] the 7th. standard and would have to sit for the Government exam at the end of the year. The 7th. is the equivalent to the Junior high school in Australia. As in the latter country, many boys in Burma left from this standard to take up jobs as clerks or start commercial courses. Bobbie left from this grade to join the Army and was posted for war service in India and became the youngest sergeant in the British Army in India. I remember the night how he and I offered to join up after a recruiting meeting at the town hall, when we gave false ages and our names to the officer taking down details of recruits joining up. Bobbie being a big made lad was eventually accepted for service out of Burma while I was just put on the I.D.F reserve list. I cannot forget my disappointment when Bobbie left for India. He however, was not sent further than India and returned to Burma after the war as a 2nd. Lieutenant. On the strength of this his father got him into the Burma Civil Service as Extra-Assistant Commissioner and before I left for Edinburgh in 1920, I went and spent a holiday with him at Pegu where he was stationed. Bobbie was however, too irresponsible to keep this job long, and was out of the B.C.S before I returned to Burma in 1925. [cut]
       The activities of the shooting gang were rather limited that year as most of the gang were in the 7th. standard. We did make quite a number of trips to Yegyanu and Nyaungni all the same, at one of which I shot a huge boar and the whole school had a treat of pork curry and roast pork. The next Saturday, even some of the school masters went out to try and shoot a pig but they came back very foot-sore, tired and disillusioned that pig shooting must be easy sport. This is the story. It was on a Sunday that Bobbie, Jack, Arthur and I decided to clear the cobwebs from our brains by having a day's outing in the Nyaungni jungles. We left early as usual and were given jungle fowl curry and rice by the village moksoe, U Po Yin. The jungle fowl we had shot en route to the village through the Maymyo Reserved Forest. We had long ago discovered that U Po Yin's old wife was a splendid cook and so had given up going to U Tha Htun's house. The latter felt piqued at our desertion of his hospitality, but boys were boys, and he had to live down the loss of face among his village colleagues. Well, after our breakfast, Po Yin and Tha Htun got together and held the usual council of war and decided they would take us to the unclassed forests (i.e not reserved) east of the village where the game had not been disturbed for some time and where there was a better chance of success. We beat all the forenoon but no one got a shot as the gyi were breaking back through the beaters. We rested at noon and ate some cucumbers which were plentiful in the taungyas or hill-cultivations and then continued beating up a grass covered valley with numerous ant-mounds on which grew a kind of tough tall grass. A small stream ran down the valley on the western edge so that the beat lay on the east of this stream. I was posted about the middle of the beat beside a large oak tree on the west of the stream. There were a couple of ant-mounds east of me about 100 yards or more from the stream. As the beaters came up some gyi broke out in the wrong places followed by curses from Po Yin and Tha Htun who were directing the beat from each end of the line. Just as they came up near the ant-mounds, there was a terrible commotion from the beaters who all started to yell "Wet", "Wet". I could hear a heavy body pushing its way through the grass in my direction.

Wild boar in Myanmar, from All Things Burmese . com

I waited with my borrowed gun on the ready, my nerves at breaking point with the excitement and suspense. Presently out came a huge boar from the thicket bordering the stream and made for the hills behind me. He had to pass me within 20 feet and as he came level with me I fired the right barrel, loaded with a solid ball, and followed up with the left which had S.G slugs. The brute took no notice of the two shots and went on up the valley. I thought I had missed him in my excitement and was feeling too miserable even to run after the animal to try to get in another shot. Bobbie, who had been posted below me, then came up and started to track the pig. He had not gone far when he shouted back to say there was plenty of blood. This cheered me no end and I snapped out of my gloom and started to follow after Bobbie. The latter had disappeared round a bend of the stream by now and presently I heard a shot. When I caught up, Bobbie was examining the great bulk on the ground. The boar had collapsed and died after running about 150 yards and Bobbie fired to make quite sure it was safe to approach him. The brute had huge tushes and must have weighed about 400 pounds. When the beaters came up, nearly every man claimed he knew the boar well and many were the stories they told about him. Beating stopped after this and one man was sent to bring a cart as it was not possible for the beaters to carry the meat to the village. Nearly the whole village turned up with the cart to see the boar, but by then he had been cleaned and cut up for transport. There was a great rejoicing at the village as every one got a share of the meat and I was proclaimed a hunter with great merit. I have forgotten the Burmese equivalent of this term. We, the sportsmen, each had an ordinary share plus a back leg for me. This was far more than we could carry so we had to borrow Tha Htun's cart and arrived back in school feeling tired out but happy. The boys were already in their dormitories, but got out to see the huge leg of the boar and to hear the story of the hunt.

So, it's not clear whether the day that they went to enlist was in 1916 or 1917 but Bobby was still present for a hunt at some point in 1917, according to Sam. It's possible that like his nephew, my father Rory, who signed up for the army in summer 1944 but did not actually enter training until January 1945, Bobby was not called up immediately on enlistment, and remained at school in the interim: Sam does say that Bobby was accepted for service outside Burma "eventually".

Another notable oddity is that Sam says that Bobby was in the 5^th standard in 1914, and left school and went into the army from the 7^th standard, and left in 1917. Either Sam is wrong about one of these figures, or Bobby had to repeat a year. There is, however, independent evidence that in his memoirs Sam got his school years confused. He refers to the Chin uprising on 1918-1919 in the Hakha area, but although in some parts of the Chin Hills the rising continued into 1919, other sources strongly indicate that in the Hakha area the uprising was in 1917-18 only. So it is very likely that the hunt which Sam says happened in 1917 was really in 1916, and Bobby both enlisted and entered training in 1916.

The fact that Bobby became the youngest Sergeant in the British Army in India, despite still being only eighteen when the war ended (although the Army thought he was rather older), and was a 2^nd Lieutenant before he left the army some time prior to summer 1919, suggests either a powerful and competant personality or that everybody more senior had been killed. His later history during World War Two actually suggests it was the former. Sam says that Bobby never went further than India but there is conflicting evidence, of which more anon, that he may have been posted to Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and surrounding areas) where there was an active battlefront.

We glimpse Bobby again round about July or August 1919, while Sam was confined to hospital with smallpox. By this point he had already been an Extra Assistant Commissioner (and, as we shall later learn, a magistrate) in Pegu long enough to apply for leave.

One day Bobbie Rae, who had returned from India, and come up to Maymyo on ten days' casual leave from Pegu, appeared in my room in defiance of all hospital rules. He stayed with me till late that night and next day came again with a pile of tinned pears and peaches. He had been demobbed as a second-lieut. and on the strength of this his father had been able to push him into the Burma Civil Service as an E.A.C (Extra Assistant Commissioner) and was now stationed at Pegu. He meant to have a good shoot round our old haunts before he returned to duty. Oh! how I envied him. He came to see me again before he left and gave me a standing invitation to come and stay with him whenever I liked. [cut]

Shwemawdaw Pagoda at Pegu/Bago, from picek at Che Trung Mieu at Pan'ramio and at Google Earth

I may mention here that before I decided finally to go to Edinburgh [to study Forestry], I thought I would have a shot at entering the B.C.S as I was keen on being in the same service as my old friend Bobbie. In those days entry to the B.C.S was by selection. There was such a selection being held in Rangoon early in 1920, so I went down to appear before it. Needless to say, my appearance was against me, especially after my bad attack of small-pox, and I was turned down. On the way back, I stopped at Pegu and stayed with Bobbie for five days. The first thing we did was to go on a shoot. Bobbie had some investigations to make in his subdivision and this was a good opportunity to carry it out - a shoot at Government expense. We saw nothing as we could not really get to the good game country. The only thing that happened was that Bobbie's village moksoe shot a pig belonging to an enemy of his with Bob's gun, and resulted in a court case which Bobbie had to try. This was the first black mark against him as the Firearms Act does not permit a gun holder to lend his weapon to a person not holding a firearms license. The incident happened on the last day of our shoot, when the moksoe came and requested to go out stalking with Bob's gun. Bob gave him the gun without thinking any harm could come of it. The moksoe turned up later in a cart with the best part of a pig already cleaned and cut up, saying he had come across a pig (wild) and shot it. We were all pleased at the prospect of good wild boar curry and roast, but it struck me at the time how the moksoe could have shot a pig so easily, when we had been hunting the country side for the last two days or so and found no traces of wild pig in that much cultivated and thickly populated area of Pegu. Even gyi were rather scarce. It was months later that I learned of the true facts of the case from Bertie Snedden from Pegu, a young Burma Police officer.

Of the later events of Bobby's life, dramatic as those were to prove to be, Sam says nothing. Sam remembers him as a good companion who was kind to a new boy - but who was also strikingly obsessed with shooting - and who went into the army straight from school in 1917. Family memory is that he spent some time in an asylum when young, following an incident in which he shot and killed the husband of a native woman with whom he was in love, and that it was at some point after he came out of psychiatric care that he joined the army, so I initially expected to find that this shooting incident happened when Bobby was a teenager: but following the publication of The Autobiography of a Wanderer in England & Burma by Charles Haswell Campagnac, edited by his granddaughter Sandra Campagnac-Carney, it became clear that Bobby was in the army twice and it was the Second rather than the First World War which followed soon after his spell in psychiatric care.

Among many other noteworthy cases which are detailed in this memoir, Campagnac, who went on to become Mayor of Rangoon, was the barrister who acted for a client he refers to as "Robby Ray", but contemporary newspaper reports of the court-case give the name as Robert R. Rae, and it is clear from the nature of the case that this is Bobby. "Robby Ray", according to Campagnac, joined the army at age sixteen by pretending to be eighteen, and fought in Mesopotamia. This could fit with Sam's date of 1917 if Bobby joined up in January of that year, but army records suggest he really did join up in 1916 - so either Sam is confused about which events happened in which school year, or Bobby joined in 1916 but wasn't called up until 1917. 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, so he may well have confused 1916 and 1917.

A more serious discrepancy is that Campagnac says that Bobby fought in Mesopotamia during World War One, while Sam says that Bobby never got further than India - which would mean he never saw action. It's difficult to know which of them to believe. It isn't a thing either of them would be likely to misremember so drastically, so one of them must presumably have been wrong at the time. Sam knew Bobby much better than Campagnac did overall, yet it appears from his memoirs that he only saw Bobby a couple of times after his return from the army (albeit one of those times was for a visit of several days), whereas Campagnac saw a lot of him at the time of his trial, and visited him later, so he might well know more about his post-school career than Sam did. On the other hand Bobby had been a cadet in the Indian Defence Force and his father was a senior official, so it's quite likely that the army would have found out his real age and that he was too young to go into combat, and would have kept him back from the front.

Mesopotamia ("the place between the rivers") is the area in and around what is now Iraq, where Allied forces derived mainly from the Raj fought Central Powers troops derived mainly from the Ottoman Empire. In 1916 the Allies had lost control of the town of Kut-al-Amarna with over thirteen thousand troops captured by the Turks, but by mid March 1917 the Allies had pushed forwards and re-taken Kut, and then Baghdad. The situation then remained static until the following February.

If Campagnac is right about Bobby serving in Mesopotamia, it is possible that he arrived there early enough to take part in this March 1917 advance. However, according to Sam he remained at school in Maymyo long enough to go on at least one memorable hunting trip in 1917 (if Sam's dating is accurate), and when he was called up he went first to India for training, so it's more likely that he didn't arrive in the area until after the fall of Baghdad if, indeed, he arived at all.

Assuming that Bobby was in Mesopotamia at all his initial stay, then, was probably fairly quiet, but from February 1918 until the end of the war the Allied forces around Baghdad pushed forwards again in modern-day Iraq, with a final fierce advance in October and November, and also sent troops to Persia, Palestine and Sinai. If Bobby did take part in this campaign, the fact that he was promoted so far so fast suggests that he played a full part in this last, intense push on the Mesopotamian Front; despite the fact that he turned eighteen just as it was starting, and boys weren't supposed to go into battle on foreign soil until they were nineteen.

However, even if Sam Newland is right that Bobby stayed in India and never saw combat, later events would show that he had great organisational and command ability: and whether he was in India or Iraq it may have been this which won him promotion.

According to Campagnac, after the war, and on account of his war service, Bobby was appointed as a Magistrate in the politically disturbed Arakan (now Rakhine) District on the north-west coast of Burma. This is a long way north-west of Pegu (now Bago) where we know he was first assigned, which means he must have been moved on from one post to another - perhaps after trying the pig case in which he himself had been an unwitting accessory both before and after the fact, and had curried the evidence.

I can't find Bobby in the Civil List, so he never made it to Class One status and must have remained a relatively minor local functionary; but even so it was a job for which he had neither training nor aptitude. The fact that his father was a renowned administrator may have encouraged the authorities to think he could handle it, but instead when a Hpoongyi, a yellow-robed monk, was uncooperative about giving evidence at Arakan Bobby called him from the witness box in front of the whole court, took him outside and beat him up, then sent him back into the box again. Soon afterwards another Hpoongyi rushed him with a knife: Bobby sidestepped and knocked the man down, which was a reasonable and moderate response under the circumstances, but unfortunately the monk had a very thin skull and the fall killed him. Although Bobby was cleared of blame the incident caused such local protest that he was asked to resign: we know from Sam that this happened some time between 1920 and 1925.

In fairness to Bobby, if he did indeed fight in Mesopotamia then he had just been through a terrible war he was too young to have legally joined in with; whether he had been in battle or not he suffered, or would later suffer, from malaria; and his father was either currently dying or recently dead of cancer (accounts are confused, but "Old Rae" as Sam calls him seems to have died in February 1921), none of which would have done much for his disposition. His subsequent history during World War Two shows that by 1943 he was suffering from a very bad case of what was then called shell-shock and is now called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and assuming him to have been in combat it seems unlikely he would have sailed through World War One in his teens with no ill effects at all, only to have a severe breakdown as a result of becoming a refugee in his forties.

It is quite possible, therefore, that by the time that he was trying to function as a magistrate his nerves were already badly shredded. Nevertheless, the incident where he beat up a witness makes me wonder whether, like his sister Jeany, Bobby was a drunk. Possibly he was self-medicating for an incipient nervous breakdown.

At some point after losing his job as an Extra Assistant Commissioner, Bobby went to live in Upper Burma where, regrettably, he made a killing of sorts as a big game hunter or shikari. According to Campagnac "He was reputed to be a crack shot and to be able to bring down a tiger wandering in long grass jungle and out of the sight of the hunter". He lived with a couple called Piggott - very likely that Oscar Piggott with whom Bobby and Sam had been at school - and he subsidised Mr Piggott financially: but this was less generous than it seems, for he was carrying on with Mrs Piggott. This infernal triangle, or at least the male part of it, ended up based in a hut with matting walls outside Momeik, a town on the Shweli River in the Ruby Mines district of the Northern Shan State, and therefore home ground to an Anglo-Shan who had been born, or at least baptised, in nearby Bhamo.

That Bobby was cuckolding a (probable) schoolmate while sharing a roof with him and buying his compliance by supporting him financially casts him in a very poor light, especially as events would later show that his and Mrs Piggott's was not exactly an overmastering union of true lovers: at any rate, she turned against him when the going got sticky. But events would also show that Piggott was a violent, dangerous man who was willing to murder a sick friend as he slept, so Bobby may well have felt that Piggott's wife was in need of a little t.l.c. and that Piggott was a man who didn't deserve consideration. If this was indeed the Piggott Bobby was at school with, they may even have been rivals for Mrs Piggott's changeable affections since they were in short trousers.

One day when they were some miles into the jungle Piggott fired a shot which just missed Bobby. Bobby, feeling feverish due to a recurring bout of malaria, returned to the base-camp, leaving his rifle with a Burmese hunter and telling him to keep an eye on Piggott - ostensibly because Piggott wasn't used to being in the jungle on his own. Back at the hut Bobby tried to stay conscious, walking up and down with a wet towel round his head, but eventually he fell into deep sleep sitting on the floor of the hut, with a rifle at his back and a knife at his side. These precautions suggest that Bobby already suspected that Piggott had deliberately taken a pot-shot at him.

Although Campagnac does not give a date, this must have occurred some weeks or months prior to 7^th August 1928 when the affair was reported to the press (although it wasn't published for some weeks thereafter), by which point Campagnac was already involved. They probably wouldn't have been hunting during the monsoon season, which runs from May to October, so these events probably took place round about March or April 1928.

Returning to base that evening, Piggott and the hunter found Bobby unconscious and Piggott told the hunter to go to the village a couple of miles away and fetch aspirin. The hunter was uneasy about Piggott's intentions and tried to stall but Piggott threatened him with a gun if he didn't go - which only inflamed his suspicions. The hunter pretended to be leaving but in fact crept to the back of the hut and peered in, and saw Piggott strike the still-sleeping Bobby on the head with an elephant bone and then haul off for another blow, and Bobby jerk awake in fear for his life, seize the dagger and stab Piggott in self-defence, after which Piggott fled.

Bobby tried to get Piggott to come back and fired a warning shot over his head, but Piggott staggered into the darkening jungle, dagger and all, and died there. Bobby knew that a trunk which he had left back at Piggott's house contained love-letters from Piggott's wife to himself and so he feared a jury would assume he had killed Piggott to remove a love-rival - and the fact that he had been involved in violent incidents before would probably have counted against him, even though he had been exonerated in the matter of the dead monk.

He may well not have known that the Burmese hunter had witnessed Piggott's assault on him, and he was right to fear that people would assume that he had cynically removed a love-rival - for that is precisely what the 21^st C Rae family and others who had heard that Bobby had killed his mistress's husband did later assume. I seem to be the only person who immediately thought "Or perhaps he was defending himself against an attack by a jealous husband".

Accordingly, Bobby decided to claim madness rather then self defence - at least, Campagnac believed him to have been only feigning madness at this point, but I'm not sure how certain it is that he was right, given that Bobby had a raging fever, was probably concussed on top of that and hadn't been exactly Mr Stability to begin with. If he really was feigning as Campagnac believed, and not genuinely crazed, it's possible that part of his motive was that he felt bad about having provoked Piggott to the point of murder, especially if they had been schoolfriends, and so chose a defence which would paint Piggott as an innocent victim rather than as the would-be assassin of an unconscious malaria patient.

Regardless of his exact motive, in order to "lend verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative" Bobby then spent two days wandering around in the jungle stark naked, eating mud. The Burmese hunter told the local police that Bobby was mad and dangerous, and they came and arrested him.

Bobby's mother and uncle hired Campagnac to defend him (this was after the death of Bobby's father, which occurred in either 1919 or 1921) but Campagnac was unable to get to Momeik, so as a stopgap they also hired a young advocate called Leo Robertson who made the curious decision to stick with Bobby's idea of basing his plea on insanity rather than self-defence, claiming that in his malarial delirium he had mistaken Piggott for a black panther.

It is not clear whether Bobby was entirely making this up or not. Campagnac, who took over the case once Bobby was moved to Rangoon Central Gaol, says he would have advised a plea of self-defence, but he also says that "there was a great deal of evidence in support of the case that Ray had lost his sanity". Bobby is known to have been obsessed with tigers, so it's very likely that if he fell asleep whilst feeling that Piggott might be dangerous, he would dream about being threatened by a big cat, then wake from his malarial sleep to find himself being attacked and briefly imagine that his attacker was the creature which had been stalking him in his dreams.

EUROPEAN'S DEATH IN JUNGLE.
============
British Companion's Delusions About A Tiger.
=========

Rangoon, Aug. 7.

       Interest in the sensational Momeik case from the Shan States, in which one European named Robert R. Rae is alleged to have murdered another European named Piggott, has now been transferred to Rangoon. Before Mr Justice Darwood at the High Court recently, Mr. Campagnac, who with Mr. Leo Robertson is appearing for the accused Rae, applied for the transfer of the case to Rangoon.
       Mr. Campagnac said that Rae was at a place named Weban with his friend Piggott. They were out to shoot elephants and went to sleep under curtains for the night. In the night Piggott was stabbed. Rae's defence was that he, Rae, was suffering from hallucinations and thought he saw a tiger, which he stabbed and tried to shoot.
       There was evidence, said Mr. Campagnac, that accused had previously had delusions about tigers. The only medical man who saw Rae, continued counsel, was the Sub-Assistant Surgeon of Momeik, who said he knew nothing about mentality. The case had been transferred to Lashio, but there was no mental expert there. This was therefore one of the grounds for transfer.
       Counsel proceeded to give details of other grounds for transfer. He said the witnesses could only get to Momeik on horseback and there was insufficient accommodation for the large number of European and Anglo-Indian witnesses which would be called at Lashio.
       Counsel also mentioned that the accused had applied to the Sawbwa (ruler) of the State to be tried as a European British subject.
       Mr. Grant, Government Prosecutor, said the application seemed a reasonable one and he would not opppose it.
       Mr. Justice Darwood said the application would be granted.

Page 11 of The Straits Times of 1^st September 1928 repeats the same story, all but the penultimate paragraph, under the heading "SHIKAR TRAGEDY//European's Death In Jungle". I have to wonder how Bobby managed to get away with claiming special treatment as a British subject when he was half Shan with a dash of Chinese and half Southern Irish, but I suppose he could justly claim that Eire had still been part of the United Kingdom when he was born. Also, it is curious that the press reporter clearly differentiates between Europeans and Anglo-Indians as separate classes of persons, yet defines Bobby - an Anglo-Burmese - as European. At any rate, the case was transferred to Rangoon.

One also has to wonder how the family paid for not one but two lawyers. It is unlikely that Ma Kyin had come into much money, for only a few years previously Bertie had had to give up his hopes of becoming a lawyer because his father's early death from cancer meant that there was now no money to put him through university. Bertie was now a police officer, but still a trainee with a wife and baby son to support, and Bobby's own career doesn't sound like one which would have brought him great riches. It is not recorded whether the uncle who helped Ma Kyin to organise Bobby's defence was one of her brothers or one of her late husband's: one of Denis Senior's brothers had indeed been a wealthy businessman, but both his brothers that I know about were already long dead. This "uncle" might have been another Rae brother I don't know about; or Bobby's much older cousin Frank Langford Rae, Chief Inspector of Police in Calcutta, who could be termed an uncle in the loose sense of an older male relative; or one of Ma Kyin's brothers, assuming her to have had brothers. Either way, he probably paid the lion's share of the legal fees.

Piggott's wife for some reason appeared for the prosecution, and claimed that on the first occasion when they had had sex, Bobby had raped her. This seems doubtful, since she apparently continued to have consensual sex with him many times thereafter, and she wrote him passionate letters describing herself as "one who yearns with great longing". It's possible that the letters were written before their first sexual encounter and she wasn't as keen as she was making herself out to be, and she then resigned herself to an affair with Bobby because he was insistent and she wasn't sure how to refuse (although in that case she would have to take some of the blame for having misled him about her intentions); but if she wrote any of them after that first sexual encounter then it clearly wasn't of a character which she found off-putting at the time. Having seen her letters Campagnac certainly felt that she had invented the rape story, presumably to save face and cast herself in a more sympathetic light - or perhaps she never knew that her husband had tried to murder Bobby, so she saw her former lover as the murderer who was now trying to get away with it, and reinterpreted her memories of him in that light.

Campagnac summed up for the defence for a whole afternoon and an hour the next morning, so that the judge's own summation extended until after lunch: Campagnac therefore invited Bobby to lunch in his chambers, under the supervision of a police sergeant named Quinn (a former private in the Manchester Regiment and a champion boxer). After lunch Bobby wandered into Campagnac's bedroom and was discovered brushing his hair in front of the mirror. Campagnac says "He was not in any way upset, or nervous, at the fact that the Judge appeared to be against him. He said to me, 'If I am to hang, no one will be able to say that I was a coward. While I have been in the Rangoon Central Gaol, I have had a good look at the gallows and I am quite prepared to walk up the steps to the platform without flinching.'"

This lack of fear, combined with his quite openly beating up a witness when he was a magistrate, without even bothering to conceal what he had done, the suggestion (almost certainly false) that he might have committed rape and the wild theatricality of his feigned madness could be evidence that Bobby was psychopathic. However, his kindness and generosity to Sam both as a new boy at school and when he was in hospital with smallpox argues against his being devoid of human sympathy - though he does seem to have been a person with limited brakes. The jury found him "Guilty, but insane at the time the crime was committed" and he was sentenced to seven years in a psychiatric hospital.

This would almost certainly have been the "prison for the insane" (nowadays a proper teaching hospital called the People's Psychiatric Hospital) which was opened in the village of Tadagalay or Tadagale, just outside Rangoon, in 1926. According to Psychiatric services in Myanmar A historical perspective by Khin-Maung-Zaw, Psychiatric Bulletin 1997, 21:506-509, the asylum itself became known as Tadagalay, and "Tadagalay became the local equivalent of 'Bedlam', not only in its function but also in its fame with the laity. The translated saying of 'you need to go to Tadagalay' means that one's head needs examining!" The hospital complex consisted of "many formidable brick buildings and high walls. There were three sections: female (acute and chronic), male acute and male chronic. Male chronic also accommodated within its wings the 'criminally insane'. Some patients slept in large dormitories, whereas others occupied locked cells."

Campagnac, a kind-hearted man who seems to have taken a shine to Bobby, visited him several times in hospital and said that he was cheerful, played football and cricket and had been appointed as a physical instructor to the other patients and that "He had also gained the affection of one of the nurses in the hospital, and I gathered that he was allowed to visit her and that she treated him with great kindness". Campagnac doesn't say so, but given Bobby's previous form I imagine that they were having an affair.

While the trial was going on, Bobby's younger brother Bertie, then a rookie police officer, was based in Insein, eight or nine miles from central Rangoon, so it is likely that he visited Bobby. He was relocated elsewhere in mid 1929 but in 1935 - the year Bobby was released, assuming he served his full term and no more or less - Bertie was on leave apparently for the whole year. It may be that the two things were linked, and that he took time off in order to help his brother to adjust to liberty and make a new life for himself.

There is evidence, however, that Bobby was still at Tadagalay in 1942, although by this point he was probably on the staff. He'd made a hash of being a civil servant and nobody was likely, now, to want to partner him as a big game hunter, and at Tadagalay he had a job as a P.E. teacher which suited his interests and abilities, plus he was carrying on with one of the nurses, so there seems no reason why he should want to leave. Round about late 1935 and early 1936 his brother Bertie did a few months in Rangoon as P.A. to the Deputy Inspector General for Railways and Criminal Investigation, and Bertie was later a District Superintendent of Police in Insein from autumn 1939 until probably summer 1941, so if Bobby had stayed at Tadagalay, in whatever capacity, his brother probably visited him there.

Bobby may well have ended up marrying his kind nurse, or at any rate marrying somebody: the Anglo-Burmese Library's List of Evacuees records a Mrs RR Rae who was evacuated from Namtu (a village in the Northern Shan States, fifty miles east of Momteik) by air via Dinjan and was now contactable care of Nikhera, 23 C.I.R., New Colony, Dehra Dun. There was at least one other RR Rae of similar age to Bobby, a Lieutenant in the Royal Scots Fusiliers who seems to have been a career soldier during the 1920s and therefore not Bobby himself - but I've no reason to think that that Lieutenant RR Rae was in Burma, or that there was any RR Rae in Burma at that time other than Bobby.

During World War Two, according to Campagnac, Bobby was an Intelligence Officer with the American Army in Burma and was decorated by the Americans for gallantry. Being a war hero was something of a cottage industry for the Rae boys. I don't know what the third brother, Harry, did during the war but the youngest boy, Denis, was one of the ten Z-Force British Officer Johnnies in the Chin Hills and was both mentioned in despatches and awarded the Military Cross, and my grandfather Bertie, the second brother, was a courier and information-gatherer for some similar operation further north, most likely an outfit called the Civil Intelligence Bureau who were based in Falam in the Chin Hills, and he was likewise mentioned in despatches.

Years later Campagnac's son Major Charles Campagnac ran into Bobby in Calcutta and reported Bobby as saying that he had fought with Merrill's Marauders, an American long-range special operations unit also known as Unit Galahad which had carried out raids deep into Japanese-occupied Burma. It's unlikely that he was actually enlisted in Merrill's Marauders, as they were U.S. Regulars. It's true that they were guided through North Burma to Myitkyina by "Burma Jack" Girsham, another of the "old shooting gang" from the High School in Maymyo, but he doesn't seem ever to have joined the U.S. forces - he was just on secondment to them.

Bobby was probably one of the British Intelligence officers who were loaned to the Office of Strategic Services Detachment 101, a U.S. unit which was the forerunner of the C.I.A.. The men of 101 were parachuted into Kachin territory behind Japanese lines where they funded and coordinated Kachin resistance groups. Bobby's father, after all, had been an expert on Kachin customs and the family had grown up in a Kachin area, so the children probably all spoke Kachin fluently. These resistance 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".

The book Behind the Burma Road by William R Peers and Dean Brelis, published in 1964, describes the origins and activities of Detachment 101 in Burma. In it, we read of a character nicknamed "Rocky" - Rocky being apparently a common American pet name for people named Robert. Colonel, later General William Peers commanded Detachment 101 in Northern Burma during 1942-1945 and so knew "Rocky" well.

THE YEAR 1943 was drawing to a close and we had reason to be grateful. In Northern Burma nearly every operation was successful and was developing according to plan. All told, we had four operations in existence and two more on the drawing board ready to be put into effect. However, the situation in Central and Southern Burma was not so bright. We had tried four group operations and had failed in all four. [cut]
       The fellow who gave the survival course for 101 was an Anglo-Burmese of better than average size, six feet one and about a hundred and eighty pounds, whom we called Rocky. His ability with guns, rifle or shotgun, was uncanny. I have considered myself a reasonably good shot, particularly with the shotgun, but I always enjoyed hunting with Rocky just to see him shoot. I was with him on several jungle drives for green pigeons, jungle fowl, pheasants and wild boar and I don't recall ever seeing him miss a shot.
       Rocky was well-known throughout Burma for his knowledge of the jungle and his use of firearms. All of his life had been spent in the jungle, and he looked upon it as home. He had killed so many tigers, leopards and other wild game that his ability was legendary. On one unfortunate occasion, however, when he was out shooting with an old, dear friend, for no apparent reason Rocky's mind went blank. He looked at his friend and saw some horrible, frightening apparition—a sort of werewolf—Rocky opened up with his gun and shot his friend between the eyes. He was arrested, and it seemed best that he be committed to a mental institution in Rangoon. During the Second World War, he was still in the institution at the time extensive rioting and pillaging spread in Rangoon, prior to Japanese entry into the city. It was easy for the inmates to break down the doors of the institution. Rocky went with them. He headed north and joined the retreating, panic-stricken population. He mingled with the British units and eventually, when he reached Myitkyina and the Triangle area, he posed as a Burma Army captain and did a commendable job of organizing parts of the Kachin Levies.
       When the Indian Army Headquarters in New Delhi and the governor of Burma made available to 101 the military personnel for the initial "A" Group, they also sent us Rocky. However, before he reached us the British had discovered who he was and withdrew his commission. But since he was already at Nazira and seemed a decent sort of chap, we decided to keep him for what he was worth. Captain Maddox had known him before the war and told us his entire story including his good points as well as his weaknesses. For obvious reasons, they did not want him on the "A" Group operation, but suggested that if we ever wanted to teach people about the jungle, Rocky was without a peer. At the time he had only one weakness, and that was his fear of the Japs. He must have picked this up during his flight from them in Burma, because it was a form of manic phobia. At the slightest mention of Japs he would become nervous and almost frantic. I tried everything I knew to reassure him and at times he seemed to lose his fears. He did an outstanding job of organizing and running our survival course, perhaps a better job than anyone else could have done, and he was the subject of numerous letters of appreciation and commendation. He was an expert on tigers and could spot its spoor with uncanny sense. My own hope was some day to bag a tiger, so I listened avidly to all of Rocky's tales. Such luck I was never granted.
       But there wasn't too much time for thoughts of tigers, especially the day three prominent people were to be gotten out of the Naga Hills ...

This just has to be Bobby. The chances of there being two "big made" Anglo-Burmese tiger-hunting crack shots named Robert, both competent P.E. instructors and officers, both seconded from the British Army to the U.S. Army in an Intelligence rôle, both of whom had their commissions taken away in 1943 (as confirmed by the London Gazette in Bobby's case) and both having spent time in a psychiatric hospital after killing a friend whom they had supposedly hallucinated was an attacking predator, are extremely slim.

Of course, if this is Bobby then there was nothing fictional about his claim to be a Burma Army officer: he had been granted his commission during or just after WWI and army records show that someone who was almost certainly he was a member of A.B.R.O.,the Army in Burma Reserve of Officers. It was only his rank which involved a certain amount of artistic licence - for the records show that he was a lowly 2^nd Lieutenant.

That Rocky and Bobby were one and the same is confirmed beyond reasonable doubt by the existence of a contemporary twenty-minute documentary about the training of O.S.S. Detachment 101 in Assam, which names the group's tutor in weapons and jungle-craft as a Captain Rae. Whether they still thought he really was a Captain, or were politely (or nervously) allowing him the rank he had claimed for himself, or whether by this point he had been given an honorary rank of Captain in the U.S. forces is not known.

The mini-documentary, which is silent but narrated using a series of hand-written notices, appears to say that it is dated the "2^th" of May 1944. Captain Rae appears in the section from 12:40 to 16:60 on the film, and bears a strong resemblance to the boy identified as Bobby in the Maymyo football-team photograph. The first notice relating to him says: "Jungle-craft // Our jungle-craft course, taught by Capt. Rae, was recently made available to five officers of the A.T.C. [Air Transport Command] and later to six n.c.o's. This course teaches construction of snares and traps, jungle fruits and vegetables, game and the many uses of bamboo. In short, how to live in and off the jungle."

Later we see that "Capt. Rae constructs a bamboo bow to be used with hard mud pellets with which to obtain small game." This shows Bobby making a pellet-bow, a Chin weapon much favoured by Sam Newland, who had presumably taught it to Bobby. This is foillowed by group scenes labelled "Making bamboo strips to be used as ties in construction." and "Eating a meal of rice and jungle vegetables cooked in bamboo pots."

Peers and Brelis describe the course which Rocky (presumably) was teaching thus:

We performed two other services for the ATC, in order to take some of the pressure off the aircrews. The first thing was a course in jungle survival training. The crew members had little knowledge, strange as it may seem, of woods. Many of them could not read a hand compass, though familiar of course with the compass in their aircraft. They lived a military life removed from jungle warfare, and they had to be taught from the start. For example, one of the first rules for a person who is lost is to follow a stream downhill. In Northern Burma, however, going downhill meant entering the lowlands occupied by Shans and Burmans who, in most instances, would turn them over to the Japs. So they had to be taught to do the reverse, that is, walk upstream into the hills, the habitat of the Kachins, where they were most likely to get assistance. We set up several such courses. They lived in the jungle for a period of two weeks with nothing but rations, survival tools and a blanket. This gave them a tremendous amount of confidence and undoubtedly saved hundreds of lives. We trained the leaders first and they in turn set up their own survival courses within their units, so that in a relatively short time this training was extended to aircrews flying the Hump.

A slightly condensed version of this passage about Rocky appeared in an article by Peers and Brelis entitled Battling Madmen of Burma which was printed in the May 1964 issue of Ex-CBI Roundup, an American post-war newspaper dealing with the China-Burma-India Theatre of World War II (and following on from CBI Roundup, which had been produced during the war itself). The "Battling Madmen" Peers refers to were Major Jack Barnard MM, Captain (later Major and then Lietenant-Colonel) Patrick "Red" Maddox, Lieutenant Patrick Quinn, Lieutenant Dennis Francis, Lieutenant William Douglas D'Silva and Lieutenant John Beamish. All but the last of these were in ABRO, the Army in Burma Reserve of Officers - as apparently was Bobby himself, up until October 1943. Page 3417 of The London Gazette of 21^st July 1944 records that 2^nd Lieutenant Robert Rae relinquishes his commission in ABRO as from 1^st October 1943.

Exactly how Red Maddox knew Bobby is not recorded, although it's clear he either didn't know him well enough to know the true story of what had happened with Piggott, or he did know and was deliberately playing the story in the way Bobby had chosen. According to Peers, Maddox was an English officer seconded to work with the Americans and was very level-headed, calm and brave. If he was English in the sense of actually being from England he probably wasn't at school with Bobby, nor probably did he know him when he was at Tadagalay - unless he had a relative there. If Peers understood him right and he really did think Bobby had spent his whole life in the jungle he probably didn't know him as a magistrate or during World War One either, so perhaps he somehow knew him as a big game hunter.

You can read more about Detachment 101 and the training camp at Nazira here. Nazira was a tea plantation in Assam, close to the Naga Hills, which had been left with only a minimal administrative staff, presumably because most of the Europeans there had been either evacuated or enlisted. 101 set up a covert base which occupied a tennis club and vacant housing at the plantation, which was in the midst of a wide flat country which made it possible to see any enemy coming from a very long way away. Unable to conceal their presence totally they pretended to be an army-run research station, rather than the guerilla base-camp they actually were. "A" Group was a unit of educated, native-looking Burmese and Anglo-Burmese recruits who learned guerilla warfare techniques from the Americans whilst teaching the Americans about Burmese society and terrain, and who were being prepared to carry out sabotage operations deep behind enemy lines: Maddox was the Deputy Group Leader of "A" Group.

If Rocky is indeed Bobby - as he surely must be - his tale seems to have grown in the telling. You would never guess from "all of his life had been spent in the jungle" that he was a Catholic public school boy from the Irish gentry, an army officer, civil servant and magistrate who had lived in the jungle when he was a small boy and for around five or six years during his twenties, and had otherwise just visited it for hunting trips with his boarding school mates, or for relaxation from the pressures of his administrative work.

There may be an element of self-pimpage here - maybe he'd decided that he rather enjoyed being seen as a hairy hillbilly. But he was by all accounts an excellent teacher, and a lot of teaching is showmanship: he probably didn't correct Maddox's somewhat over-coloured account because he felt the troops were more likely to listen to him if they thought he was some kind of authentic, bullet-chewing wildman than if they knew he was the public-school-educated son of an upper class Irish anthropologist and a Shan aristocrat.

Evidently he was still sticking to the "delusion" story rather than "I was shagging my old friend's wife so he tried to brain me with an elephant bone and I stabbed him in self-defence", although the panther had by now morphed into a werewolf. Perhaps he felt so bad about what had happened with his friend Piggott that he had actually become deluded that he had been deluded - perhaps he had actually started to believe "I killed him by accident while having a fever dream" rather than "I hurt him so much he tried to kill me, and then I killed him", because it was less painful that way. Either way, it's clear that he was suffering from very severe PTSD at this point.

As regards the rather charming and picaresque story that Bobby had escaped from a psychiatric hospital in 1942 and promptly re-joined the army, despite his original sentence having supposedly ended in 1935, it's true that Khin-Maung-Zaw writing in the paper Psychiatric services in Myanmar A historical perspective, Psychiatric Bulletin 1997, 21:506-509 does say of Tadagalay that "It appears that its purpose was merely for containment for life". It was certainly true that the inmates escaped: on pages 81 and 92 of Wartime in Burma: A Diary, January to June 1942 by Theippan Maung Wa, L. E. Bagshawe and Anna Allott we find the following passages.

He told us [cut] that lunatics from the Tada-galay asylum were wandering around the city naked. [cut] Why weren't the lunatics from Tada-galay sent off to some place far away from the enemy in good time?

He [a different "he"] left Rangoon on the night of February 22, 1942 after government servants were ordered to get out within forty-eight hours. [cut] As he had left just before the final time set by the government for quitting, I asked him about the state of affairs in Rangoon. He said that the opening of the Tadagalay lunatic asylum meant that many of the insane were wandering around the city;

However, it seems fairly unlikely that Bobby was still an inmate at this time. His original sentence would have seen him released in 1935 and whilst it's possible that he was deemed too unstable or too institutionalised to release, you would think that if so Campagnac would have known about it and mentioned it. Also, he seems to have had a Mrs Rae and there's no suggestion in either Sam Newland's or Campagnac's writing that Bobby was married prior to the fatal incident with Piggott. It seems unlikely he would have married while an inmate so either he was released, married, then had a breakdown later and had to go back in again, or in fact he was at the asylum in 1942 not as a patient but as a paid fitness instructor, on the staff, and went with the patients to shepherd them to safety.

Indeed, since Bobby had his bed and board at Tadagalay, a useful job which suited both his interests and his skills and he was carrying on with one of the nurses, there seems no reason why he would ever have left it voluntarily.

The army doesn't have to have believed he was actually an escaped lunatic in order to not want him armed and in a position of authority. It was enough for them to believe that he had been a homicidal lunatic who was still probably suffering from bouts of hallucination in which he might, so far as they knew, suddenly imagine that a brother officer's staff car was a Japanese tank and start taking pot-shots at it. In fact, even though Bobby was, perhaps, a wee bit differently sane and could be a bit of a thug at times, he had never killed a civilian except in clear self-defence, and was almost certainly just a bit feckless and ill with stress and, intermittently, with malaria rather than actually psychotic. But the army didn't know that, and the fact that he seems to have unilaterally promoted himself from 2^nd Lieutenant to Captain might in itself have been enough to get him slung out on his ear.

In reality, the fact that he was an expert shot meant that he was probably safer to be around than most soldiers, as being less likely to hit the wrong target. In suggesting that Rocky's abilities with a gun were "uncanny" Peers and Brelis may have spoken more literally than they knew: family tradition has it that there's a strong streak of psychic ability in the Raes.

I suppose incidentally that Peers and Brelis deliberately ommitted Bobby's real name because he was still alive and working in 1964, and they didn't want to be the cause of his potential customers saying "Aren't you the Bobby Rae who's an escaped lunatic?"

Years later when Campagnac's son Major Charles Campagnac ran into the now sixty-year-old Bobby in Calcutta, he reported that he was still upright and agile and looked about forty-five. He was, very regrettably, still a big game hunter and organising tiger shoots for rich Americans. That he was in Calcutta may mean that Bobby was on close terms with some of the Calcutta Raes, his first cousins and their children and grandchildren, and possibly that it was they who had financed his legal defence.

Bobby seems to have been very competent and able, if rather highly strung. Sam Newland described him as irresponsible, but he seems to have been very hard-working and I think rather that he was not so much irresponsible as headstrong and impulsive - and not all his impulses were wise ones. My initial thought was that his decision to plead insanity was a good example of an unwise choice, but actually he got a girlfriend and possibly a wife out of it, and it doesn't seem to have hampered his wartime career in any way other than to keep him out of the actual combat activities of "A" Group which, had he been allowed to go into combat, might well have got him killed: so his instinct, as peculiar as it appeared at the time, seems to have been a sound one.

Tracing Bobby's army career in official records is difficult, because "Robert Rae" or "R. R. Rae" is such a common name. There are several references to military R. Raes in The London Gazette and similar publications any, all or none of which might be our boy, and it's clear there were at least two and possibly as many as five R. Raes in operation at around the right time.

First off, there is one who seems unlikely to be Bobby. An R. R. Rae of the Royal Scots Fusiliers appears on page 9170 of The London Gazette of 29^th December 1922 being promoted from 2^nd Lieutenant to Lieutenant as from 24^th December 1922, and on page 6447 of The London Gazette of 11^th December 1951 Lt. R. R. Rae (18130) of the Royal Scots Fusiliers ceases to belong to the Reserve of Officers as from 12^th December, owing to his "having exceeded the age limit of liability to recall".

That the Royal Scots Fusiliers do not seem to have been in Mesopotamia during WWI does not rule out this being Bobby: if Sam was right, and Bobby in fact spent WWI in India, he could have been in the 1^st Garrison Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers, who "Went to India in February 1916 and remained there throughout the war under command of Jhansi Brigade in 5th (Mhow) Division". Also, although the age limit for liability to recall was usually fifty-five, which makes this one four years too old to be "our" R. R. Rae, we know that the army thought Bobby was older than he in fact was, and if Campagnac got it slightly wrong and Bobby claimed to be twenty when he enlisted, not eighteen, then it's just about possible this could be he. But we know that Bobby was in the Burma Civil Service by some time early in 1919, was still a civil servant for a significant period after 1920, and had been working as a big game hunter for a significant period of time as at early 1928. For this to be him he would have had to have left the civil service in 1921 or early 1922, immediately re-enlisted, been promoted rapidly but only served for probably five years: whilst not impossible, the timing is a bit tight for this to be true.

Also, the National Archives at Kew record the existence of medal cards for a Robert Rae of the Royal Scots Fusiliers who was a private during World War One, and a Corporal, and a Lieutenant (if they are all the same bloke), and presumably at least one of these is the same as the one in the Gazette, so he was in the Royal Scots Fusiliers throughout the war: he didn't transfer to them at a later date. Since the Royal Scots Fusiliers were not in Mesopotamia during WWI, then if Campagnac was right about Bobby being in Mesopotamia, this cannot be he. Also, this one was in the Reserve of Officers until 1951 and we know Bobby was deprived of at least his ABRO commission in 1943.

More promisingly, the Rolls of N° 2 Company, The Anglo-Indian Infantry include a Sergeant R. Rae who enlisted in Burma (other than Rangoon) on 26^th June 1916. Bobby was born on 2^nd February 1900 so if he joined the army at sixteen that would have to have been between February 1916 and January 1917, so the date of enlistment fits, and N° 2 Company were in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and neighbouring bits of Syria, Turkey and Iran) from 1915-1918. If this is he, though, and yet Sam Newland is right about having gone on a hunting trip with Bobby from school in 1917, it means that Bobby wasn't actually called up for at least seven months after joining the army.

Page 9786 of The London Gazette of 2^nd December 1921 says that R. R. Rae of the Indian Army Reserve of Officers is a 2^nd Lieutenant who is being permitted to retain that rank, as part of a group who are reliquishing temporary commissions with the Indian Army effective from 1^st September 1921. Since we know from Sam that Bobby did go from Sergeant to 2^nd Lieutenant this is probably the same R. Rae of N° 2 Company, The Anglo-Indian Infantry, although if so his relinquishing of his commission lagged a couple of years behind his joing the Burma Civil Service, which we know occurred some time prior to late summer 1919.

When we get to the Second World War, under the heading "Spec.-List" of Qr.-Mrs. (I.A.)., page 6043 of The London Gazette of 17^th October 1941 states that A/R.S.M. Robert Rae of the Indian Army is to be a Lieutenant from 15^th May 1941. The two men grouped with him are an R.Q.M.S. and a C.Q.M.S., so "Qr.-Mrs." must be "Quartermasters", and this Robert Rae must have been an R.Q.M.S. acting as an R.S.M.. If this is Bobby, it may be that he was commissioned from the ranks in WWI, but because it was a temporary commission (even though he was permitted to retain it) he had to be put back to N.C.O. and then re-promoted for some administrative reason. If this is "our" Robert getting a commission in May 1941, this is well before the Japanese invasion and tends to confirm that he was a member of staff at the asylum prior to the invasion, not an inmate.

Page 3417 of The London Gazette of 21^st July 1944 records that 2^nd Lieutenant Robert Rae relinquishes his commission in the Army of Burma Reserve of Officers as from 1^st October 1943. This is presumably Bobby being de-commissioned from ABRO because the Army had caught up with his psychiatric and criminal history. If he is the same as the full Lieutenant Robert Rae who was listed as having been promoted from acting R.S.M. in 1941, then either one of these entries is in error or some time between May 1941 and September 1943 he was demoted from full Lieutenant to 2^nd Lieutenant. If so, chagrin may have contributed to his decision to join Detachment 101 and become an instructor for the American troops.

It seems more likely, however, that RR Rae of the Royal Scots Fusiliers; Acting RSM and later Lieutenant Robert Rae of the Indian Army; and Sergeant, later 2^nd Lieutenant Robert Rae of the Indian Army, AIRO and ABRO were three different people. "Our" Bobby Rae is the young Sergeant enlisted in 1916, the 2^nd Lieutenant who relinquished his command in 1921 and the 2^nd Lieutenant who relinquished his commission in 1943.

Robert R Rae, born 1900

EUROPEAN'S DEATH IN JUNGLE.============British Companion's Delusions About A Tiger.=========

EUROPEAN'S DEATH IN JUNGLE.
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British Companion's Delusions About A Tiger.
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